Israel and the Guardian innit

[woodrot]

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/11/15/1353018180510/Steve-Bell-16.12.2012-002.jpg

The world is outraged at this cartoon apparently.

Tell me why you think this is Good / Indifferent / meh / Nazi etc

[El Pibe]

The smoke trails are all wrong for your common or garden grad style katyusha, that looks much more like a heavy artillery BM-27.

Bloody Steve Bell, should have done better research, ooooh it makes my blood boil I tell ya.

3/10?

[BrandNewGuy]

Meh - it's uninteresting and unoriginal but probably got the rabid response it wanted from a tiny sliver of opinion to reinforce, in turn, Guardianistas feeling better about their radical "stance". The rest of "the world" is, I suspect, more concerned about horrible and pointless loss of life.

[woodrot]

Its Nazi apparently

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100189995/jews-still-running-the-world-implies-the-guardian/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100190020/guardian-cartoonist-steve-bell-is-a-nazi-says-times-columnist-giles-coren/

[????]

Simple. Israel wear the black cowboy hats in the simplified world of simpletons.

[El Pibe]

I'm not sure Blair actually counts as a 'western politician' any more does he?

[El Pibe]

"Simple. Israel wear the black cowboy hats in the simplified world of simpletons."

Except in the other world of simpletons where the palestinians are wearing the black hats.

Then everyone else tires of the tedious endless argument and decides they're all as bada as each other.

What results? 25 years of statis.

Who suffers? The civilians, as usual.

[woodrot]

hey guys, we dont dont have a fightin' licence

[????]

i don't think EP was fightin' me, I think we share in our despair. Polarised, inflexible, irrational, hatred is winning unfortunately.

[El Pibe]

I hadn't actually read what Hague and Blair had said.

Hague, well he towed a tiresome diplomatic line that blurs the truth.

Blair, well for once he didn't lie, but he did state the bleedin' obvious that escalating wars tend to escalate, thanks Tone.

I'm not sure why this got Bell's goat so much, it's nothing we haven't seen a million times, same shit same shit in this case.

 

[El Pibe]

spot on quids

[Michael Palaeologus]

El Pibe Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> The smoke trails are all wrong for your common or

> garden grad style katyusha, that looks much more

> like a heavy artillery BM-27.

> Bloody Steve Bell, should have done better

> research, ooooh it makes my blood boil I tell ya.

>

> 3/10?

Perhaps, but the missiles would appear to be outgoing. Perhaps a nuclear armed Jericho missile heading for Iran?

According to the Chief Rabbi on Today it is all down to Iran, such insight.

Typical Guardian though, "Nethanyahu" is not spelt "Likud". Tsk.

[maxxi]

I think the subtle message is in the fact that the stripes on the tie come from his right shoulder down (the American way) rather than the left (the British way) - an obvious but subtly calculated insult to GB's waning influence and a wink at Obama.

[uncleglen]

Hague has said he believes that Hamas bears the brunt of the responsibility for the current problems. Personally I take no heed of protestations about Palestinian children dying because Hamas make deliberate use of their civilian buildings, such as schools, to site their rocket launchers.

[El Pibe]

Yeah they deserved to die, I love your muscular liberalism, it turns me on.

[woodrot]

*touches himself inapropriately*

[Huguenot]

There's only a few posts on here, but I can't work out anybody's opinion. Aren't the initial shots supposed to be the easy ones to call?

Bizarre observation from woodrot, who posted a divisive cartoon, talked about Nazis and then exclaimed 'we don't have a fightin' licence'

Really? What else did you think was likely to happen with that incendiary approach?

It's a cartoon FFS. Read into it what you will, that's the idea. It's not a strategy statement from the Foreign Office, it doesn't stand up under scrutiny. He does one a day, and most of the time he's filling in the colours with his tongue sticking out.

The challenge with Israel is not that it's polarised, irrational and hatred is winning. That's a given, we come across these views every day. The challenge is not that it's a corner of the world where tribal allegiances influence political solutions.

The issue is that there's so much oil in the vicinity that all these pillocks get unreasonable attention and get a podium to express their pathetic opinions and guns to exact their frequently moronic solutions.

If they were running for election in Nunhead they wouldn't get a comment at the pub.

[Mick Mac]

I think the whole debate Israeli interesting.

[Huguenot]

You wouldn't get a second glance at my STOP the WAR meeting with jokes like that.

[Atticus]

Totally agreed with huguenot.

[El Pibe]

This has nothing to do with oil.

It has a lateral relevance in that the US gives a shit because of it, but otherwise this is what it says on the tin.

The solution is blindingly obvious, dialogue and compromise, but it is necessary for those with power to make the compromise more so than those without because they have no chips just rhetoric and ultimately violence.

Israel has chosen managed war so that it can pursue its goals, ownership of water and colonial expansion, dead civilians are simply a propaganda win and an acceptable byproduct. It has also learnt the lesson that no one cares about dead innocents, babies or otherwise so its hands are free to act, likewise with extra judicial murder, sadly a lesson the US has learnt well.

All this takes us towards a worse world not a better world and daily mail readers scoffed at the Nobel peace prize award to Europe.

The solutions are simple but so far politically unpalatable. Genuine compromise and subsequent existence in a place where the law courts are where conflicting wills are settled, not by raining whizzing shards of metal cutting through flesh of those just trying to get by day to day.

[steveo]

You were 35 times more likely to suffer violent death in the middle ages than you are now, so despite the horror, perhaps there is progress

[Huguenot]

I don't accept your view on a macro scale EP.

Israel's pugnacious behaviour and the creation of an immense concentration camp in Gaza is entirely a by product of its strategic importance to the US.

Without that support the entire sorry tale of the middle east would have played out differently.

No conversation about Israel is possible without contextualising it within that framework.

[El Pibe]

well no, you're wrong huguenot, the US love affair didn't realise until the mid to late sixties.

This is all about the six day war.

Israel's ridiculous preponderance of power has come about thanks to the US's interest int the region, and its only interest in the region is oil.

Increasingly the US's rhetoric and its applicability to Israel, especially in the light of the urge to self determinate is becoming irrelevant.

I accept that it has been a factor in the facilitation of the conflict but it is nothing to do with the war itself and the concerns of its participants. The US may think its an oil war, but its really a water war.

[????]

Er, I think you're both wrong but as EP says oil is practically an irrelevance. The US supports Israel partly as a legacy of the Cold War but just as much as because of its (the US) significant Jewish population. Still get a sense of evil Isreal from you both, without its US backed military might Israel would have been ceased to exist as a nation both in 1948 when it was attacked by its arab neighbours supporting palestinians in Israel and some threatening to finsih of where the Holocaust left off, and in 1973 when it was attacked that time unprovoked. The intrasigence on both sides is party based on the simple fact that many of its arab neighbours wish that it ceased to exist as do other some local non-arab powers. That creates paranoia and robust defence from Isreal but to make it the only sinner is blindness and taking a naive political line. For a while, a long time ago admittedly Israel did try but its despotic neighboutrs were by and lrge uninterested in true peace and settlement. Anyway, still its Arab citizens have the vote, better infant mortality rates and freedom beyond many of their fellow arabs in neighbouring states. It's a right mess and that's not just because of Israel by a long, long way.