Israel hits Palestinian PM's Gaza office

Israel "should understand that it is not easy for the Palestinian people to say, 'OK, we can release him,' ... without a price," said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Cabinet.

I agree 100%. So, here's the deal I'd offer: give back Gilad Shalit unharmed and we won't turn your pathetic country into landfill. Take it or leave it.

Probably why no one's ever invited me into the diplomatic corps.

"Inspecting his burning office, Haniyeh called the attack senseless."

I partly agree. A sensible approach would have been another missile, while Haniyeh was there, blathering away.

Israel "should understand that it is not easy for the Palestinian people to say, 'OK, we can release him,' ... without a price," said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Cabinet.

so what he is saying is that the muslims need to save face, or else the leadership looks bad. Oh well. I suppose Israel can play along with this and give a sack of rice or something. I'm sure Bush has some Rice for them.

A little ready,but here is a condensed version of what may have lead to the impetus that pushed the buttons of the Israelis'to conduct this campaign that is being called OPERATION SUMMER RAINS. from the Jeruselem Post.

In October 2000, a mere six months after Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon, prime minister Ehud Barak was faced with a quandary: Should he order the IDF back into Lebanon following the abduction of three soldiers, or focus on diplomatic efforts to retrieve the captives? His decision was to exercise military restraint and allow the diplomats to try and do the job instead. The end result: The soldiers' corpses were returned to Israel in a prisoner-exchange deal with Hizbullah four years later. Ehud Olmert finds himself facing a similar dilemma involving a soldier kidnapped to a recently evacuated territory. This time, however, the prime minister chose IDF action. Operation Summer Rains was launched to retrieve kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Shalit, taken captive during a deadly attack on his outpost inside the southern Israeli border with Gaza on Sunday, during which two soldiers were also killed. But the operation has already progressed beyond a hostage retrieval mission. It has turned - officers admitted Thursday - into a war on all fronts. Following months of incessant Kassam fire, Shalit's kidnapping provided Israel with the symbol and the excuse they needed to invade Gaza. Even now, troops and armored vehicles are amassed near Kibbutz Mifalsim, awaiting orders to take control of Kassam launch sites in the northern Gaza Strip in order to try and stop the rocket attacks on the western Negev once and for all. The retrieval campaign has expanded to the following: stopping the Kassam fire, sending threatening messages to Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Damascus and, possibly, working to topple the Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority, with the 64 political arrests of Hamas figures in the West Bank. Taking control of the Dahaniyeh airport in southern Gaza was the first step of the campaign. The next step is an invasion of northern Gaza which will be led by the Givati Brigade. The incursion into the north will not only completely seal off Gaza and split it into three sections, but will also give the army the chance to try and curb the incessant anti-Israel rocket attacks. To do so, the IDF is once again shelling in Gaza, three weeks after Defense Minister Amir Peretz suspended artillery fire there following an explosion that killed seven Palestinians on a Gaza beach (IDF findings indicate Israeli fire was not responsible).The idea is to cut off northern Gaza from the rest of the strip and to prevent the transfer of Shalit within or out of Gaza. Late Wednesday night, the military distributed flyers over Beit Hanoun in the north, calling on residents to evacuate their homes in advance of massive military operations. The warning is meant to turn the neighborhood into a ghost town, as the IDF claims it is prepared to fire missiles and artillery shells into urban areas, a move it had not taken during the past 10 months of Kassam rocket attacks.The military operation in Gaza, officers stressed this week, was being carried out with the utmost sensitivity, since there was a possibility that a wrong move or a stray missile could push Shalit's kidnappers too far and lead them to kill the believed-to-be-alive soldier.But the IAF has already destroyed three bridges that connected northern Gaza with the south and Navy warships are patrolling off the Gaza coast employing their cannons for precise targeting of Kassam launch sites. The bottom line: Gaza is sealed.

Hamas must be wiped out and Hizbullah must be dealt a blow..Islam is the Enemy of humanaty..God Bless those with the Honesty and the guts to say so.

"They have targeted a symbol for the Palestinian people," he said....

+++Yes indeed and that symbol says the Pals are idiots. Harken to the howls of the dogs of war.

maybe Israel is not so ready to play the dhimmi this time.

Okay, I have a big problem with the assumption inherent in that statement.

Throughout the decades of Palestinian militancy, the PLO has mostly run things, and their military arm, Fatah, has held the whip-hand. The PLO and its adjuncts aren't Islamic-based entities. Oh, they'll use Islamism where possible to whip up the "Arab street" or what-have-you, but they are avowedly Marxist at the core.

Hamas, on the other hand, IS an Islamist organization, but they have been a radical minority faction through all those years. Much of the Palestinian government is NOT affiliated with Hamas; the PLO is so entrenched that the bureaucrats most certainly are not.

This is one reason there has been such internal strife since Hamas won the last election, but their majority isn't bullet-proof, and they have a lot of opposition among the PLO-connected factions who are, again, NOT religiously-based.

Too many who watch the stuff going on between the Palestinians and Israelis assume it is a "religious" war when it is not. It is ethnic. It's tribal. The Islamists use this to their advantage in their anti-Western jihad, of course, but it's WAY simplistic to assume that's what everything's about.

It's like Saddam Hussein, when he was in power. His Ba'ath party is NOT a religious party at all. In fact, Saddam made public statement years and years ago, saying that he himself abjured all religion and that he wanted to throw off the yoke of Islam from his people because it had kept Arabs down for so long. He was a pan-Arabist, not an Islamist by any stretch.

But when it suited him to do so, he'd play the "Allah card" to gin up support among the ignorant masses among the Arabs. He distrusted the Shi'ite majority in his own country, but mostly because he saw them as sympathetic to Shi'ite Iran, and thus he put the minority Sunnis in positions of power in his government to counter that.

But it is simple-minded to think that Saddam was about "Islamofascism." Plain old race-based fascism was more his style.

I doubt the rank-and-file Palis care one whit about "dhimmitude". Many of them are NOT Sunni Muslims anyway--some are Christians (Hanan Ashrawi comes to mind) and some are other religions like Druze. I'm sure there are religious stresses brought on by the rise of Hamas, but that's an internal problem for the Palis.

From article:...just hours after a Palestinian official said the soldier whose abduction sent Israeli troops into Gaza 'is alive and in stable condition'

Stable condition? What doofus is trying to tell us is that Shalit has been beaten and tortured to the extent that we need to be reassured that his condition is now stable. He did not say Shalit was alive and 'well'. He may not be alive long. It's about time Israel got tough. Real tough. When the tough guys activate, jihadists like Haniyeh go into hiding...

"operation Summer Rains" huh?

Let it pour, let it pour, let it pour.

I'm glad to see this reaction. Has the world yet tired of the "Palestinians'" little monkey charades?

"Too many who watch the stuff going on between the Palestinians and Israelis assume it is a "religious" war when it is not. It is ethnic. It's tribal. The Islamists use this to their advantage in their anti-Western jihad, of course, but it's WAY simplistic to assume that's what everything's about."
-- from a posting above

For the entire history of the Lesser Jihad against Israel the promptings of that war from Islam itself have been largely obscured, obscured most of all from the Israelis themselves.

The original opposition of the Arabs to Jews buying land from landowners was naturally muted as long as the Arabs needed Western power to help them against the Turks. But as the earliest leader of the local Arabs -- they were not then, not until after the Six-Day War, renamed the "Palestinians" -- the mufti El Husseini -- made clear, it was Muslims who opposed them, and it should be a common Muslim cause. It took quite a while. Arabs under French rule in North Africa, or miserably poor, and certainly distant from, whatever happenened in Mandatory Palestine, would hardly have been in a position to participate in the Lesser Jihad, much less something wider in scope. The Dutch ruled in the East Indies; the British controlled India -- the Muslims in neither place did the Muslims possess the wherewithal to dream more dangerous dreams. Jihad never went away -- how could it? -- but the wherewithal to conduct Jihad was lacking.

In 1947, the Bishop of Beirut, Moubarac, understood clearly the Muslim basis of the Arab assault on Israel. His speech can be found in Bat Ye'or's "Islam and Dhimmitude." The Jews of Israel, however, saw the conflict as one of Arabs who were opposed to the Jews. They knew very little, almost nothing, about Islam. They also knew that many of the local Arab Christians were echoing the sentiments of local Arab Muslims, and assumed, wrongly, that this meant that it was the "Arabs" who were hostile to them. They failed to realize that many of the local Arab Christians were classic dhimmis, who had accepted and internalized Muslim attitudes. That this phenomenon was observable in many communities of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, was simply not understood.

The rhetoric of the 1948 attack contained all kinds of allusions to Islam. Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League 9and great-uncle to Ayman al-Zawahiri) promised a massacre like that of the Mongols when they conquered the Arabs. The still-weak Arabs, however, needed outside help, diplomatic and economic. They were in no position to start muttering darkly about a Jihad against the West.

Pan-Arabism, with which one associates the name of Nasser, and then later of Saddam Hussein, who also saw himself as the Arab champion, the Saladin of our age (it didn't matter that Saladin, another native of Tikrit, was a Kurd), was merely a realistic (for its day) subset of pan-Islamism. It was the Arabs who needed to be unified first, and no one could think beyond that goal. Nasser was hardly a Marxist. He was a local despot, with great appeal to Arab youths (this is one of the themes, played on a little too insistently and a little too plangently, by Fouad Ajami in his "predicament" of the Arabs, his "dream palace" of the Arabs, shtick that very carefully avoids the subject of Islam).

The "secularists" were never that secular. If Nasser, and then Sadat, treated the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, as a menace, it is because they were a menace to them -- a political rival. But this did not make Sadat, in particular, a "secularist" (he actually favored, at times, the Muslim Brotherhood). Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist because it allowed him to continue to pretend to have a regime open to all, Kurds as well as Arabs, Christians as well as Muslims, Shi'a Muslims as well as Sunni Muslims. And some of them were part of the government. But the real power remained that of Sunnis, and modern Iraq was essentially a Sunni despotism, mild under the monarchy, harsh from Qassem through to Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein knew perfectly well that the Shi'a far outnumbered the Sunnis, and that the opposition to him was most dangerous in the Shi'a mosques. It was to his advantage to minimize the political role of Islam, therefore, but whenever it suited him, he invoked Islam and Muslim history. The battles he spoke of when attacking Iran were the old battles against the Persians by the Islam-bearing Arabs. He was building the largest mosque in the world. He commissioned a Qur'an calligraphed using his blood for ink. He put a Qur'anic phrase on the flag of Iraq. Whether or not he was a deep Believer (he is now apparently reading the Qur'an with great intensity), he was certainly a Believer.

Against Israel, the rhetoric, the attitudes, the entire refusal to contemplate the permanence of an Infidel sovereign state, can all without difficulty be ascribed to Islam. The local dhimmis, such islamochristians as Hanan Ashrawi and Naim Ateek and others, promote the Muslim view and Muslim demands, and that may confuse a few, but it should not confuse anyone familiar with the phenomenon.

The war against Israel is not an "ethnic" nor a "tribal" war by Arabs against Jews. When rants against Israel are repeated in Pakistan, or by Mahathir Mohamed in Malaysia, or by the assorted Islamic groups in Indonesia, one sees clearly that what is going on is prompted by the belief-system of Islam. It is a war against a non-Muslim state, by as many Muslims as care to participate. Some may have in the past been held in check by their own dislike of the Arabs. The Iranians and the Turks both make insistently clear that "we are not Arabs" and then go on to speak contemptuously of the Arabs. For a while, the national interests of Iran, as defined by the Shah and his advanced if corrupt coterie, included fair treatment of non-Muslims, and a reasonabel attitude toward, even a kind of quasi-alliance, with Israel. Something of the sort seems to have developed, later on, between not Turkey but rather between the keepers-of-the-Kemalist-flame in the Turkish army, and some of its secularists, and Israel.

The poster above makes this remarkable statement: "Too many who watch the stuff going on between the Palestinians and Israelis assume it is a "religious" war when it is not. It is ethnic. It's tribal." But this is nonsense, for it ignores the rhetoric, the appeals, the views of Muslims as expressed through time and space. It ignores the simplest and most obvious truth: the entire world in the end belongs to Allah and his people, the best of people. And Israel, a sovereign state run by Jews, is a particular affront, not only for where it is situated (seeming to break up the continuity of one uninterrupted Arab Muslim landmass, as Arab Muslims see it -- for them the Maronites, the Copts, the Berbers, the Kurds, have no rights, hardly exist in what Arabs, with a little help from ARAMCO, began decades ago calling "the Arab World" -- a phrase that misleads, but stuck, so that it keeps on misleading), but becuase the traditionally despised Jews, despised because they had no power (unlike the local Christians, who at least could look to powerful co-religionists in Western Christendom), were in charge of that sliver of land.

The war of the Arabs against Israel is a "religious" war if we cosider Islam to be a religion. It is promoted by, it springs from, the tenets, and attitudes, and atmospherics, of Islam. The Muslim Arabs know this. Other Muslims know this. Islamochristian Arabs pretend that it is not so. And the Israelis, of course, prefer not to recognize that it is so, because such recognition would also lead them to conclude, inexorably, that there is no end to this war, and that negotiations are merely occasions for Arab duplicity, as Muhammad ("War is deception") demonstrated in his own treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya which he made with the Meccans in 628 A.D., and broke 18 months later, when his side had increased its power. That, as Majid Khadduri notes, is the basis of Muslim treaty-making with Infidels. It always has been; it will remain such.

And the Muslims are not taught to permit Infidels to remain with some sliver of land where their rule will prevail -- especially not on land once held by Muslims. So the recognition by the Israelis of the true nature of the war against them would also force them to conclude that not only are treaties largely pointless, but that there is no end to this, for the size of Israel is irrelevant to its acceptance by the Arab Muslims. (If it further shrinks, however, it may tempt an attack, and the only way the peace can be kept if the Arabs have an excuse not to attack, and that excuse can be found in the idea of "Darura" or "necessity," which can be invoked to justify inaction by Arab regimes)

Muslim Arabs, local ("Palestinians") and non-local, understand perfectly why Israel will never be accepted and must in the end disappear. They differ on the instruments through which this may best be achieved. They differ on the amount of time it will take -- there are the Rapid Jihaidsts of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Slow Jihadists, of Abbas's PLO. But the understanding of what the end result must be, at some point, is shared by all of them.

It is the Israelis, or many of them in the ruling elites, who refuse to see what is staring them in the face. It's too upsetting. It would require seeing control of the "West Bank" as indispensable -- control of the marches, of the invasion route, of the aquifers necessary for Israel to live. It would require ending the participation in the farce of this "Palestinain" people that the Israelis themselves refer to without any seeming understanding of the way that they thereby promote the "two-tiny-peoples" business, that which since the 1967 War began with the careful creation of the "Palestinian people" and has been so relentlessly used to present as a matter of competing nationalisms what is, in fact, a classic Jihad. Classic in aim, that is, but not classic in its instruments, for as with Western Europe, outright miiltary conquest is unlikely, and other methods are being employed.

Why isn't any deadline set to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit, unharmed?

How many Dutch, French, Norwegians, British, Swedes, Danes, within the confines of their own homes are secretly hoping for the Israelis to rout the savages, just this once?

"Inspecting his burning office, Haniyeh called the attack senseless."

True, it doesn't make much sense. Especially when the inevitable result is that WE have to pay for the re-construction. Sorry Hugh, but that is what our governments do for appeasement...

Hitting Haniyeh would have at least given us what LGF calls "Car-swarm" and I must admit that I am not above Schadenfreude....

Message to the Palestinian crybabies:

Grow up or blow up.

bpolhemus [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 1, 2006 11:27 PM

bpolhemus,

"but they are avowedly Marxist at the core"

The key element of Marxism is economic. Are you telling me that the PLO et al actually cared to implement this key element of Marxism? It seems to me the livelihood of such groups is classic jihadist on the pattern of Mohammad: Terrorism and extortion, "jizya" (in the form of foreign aid) from the infidels, tactical use of deception, and so on.

Islam contains political, tribal, ethnic elements, and so cannot be demarcated clearly from those elements. Seizing, holding, and controlling land/territory is central to the Islamic enterprise. Engineering a division between tribe and other is a central element of Islam (much more so than in other ideologies). A compromised or even cosmetic Marxism is not necessarily incompatible with Islam (Marxism is associated with atheism but is not wedded to it. My point is that Marxism and Islam do not necessarily occur, in reality, in "pure" form. They are not mutually exclusive categories). You will not find anything in original Marxist doctrine calling for the expulsion or extermination of the Jews. Other than Nazism, to my knowledge, Islam is the only ideology that calls for perpetual conflict with the Jews, with the goal of expelling and eventually exterminating the Jews. Marxism doesn't explain the conflict; the Islam factor explains it very well.

I'm not convinced by your attempt to portray Hamas as somehow a marginal group. They were voted in by the majority of Palestinians, who know full well Hamas' Islamic supremacist agenda and it's explicitly stated (and proven) intention to provoke conflict.

Some interesting comments from an Israeli academic and ex-intelligence officer in a recent interview:

I thought that this [Oslo] might lead to some kind of modus vivendi between the peoples of this land. Neither Jews nor Arabs were going to grow wings and fly away, and my military intelligence background had made me a realist: the two sides don’t like each other too much, and since neither can hope to achieve its maximalist goals, it would be better for all to have two separate entities living side by side, peacefully as much as possible. This is what I saw as the goal, this is how I understood the measures taken during the Oslo process, and this is what I assumed was the intention on both sides. ...

By the late nineties—I would say around 1998 and 99—I started having doubts as to what the Palestinians were really intending in the long term. In spite of the fact that they were talking of the two-state solution, I did not see this notion coming down from the leadership, from the leading elite of their society, into the discourse of the community, to the lower echelons of the society. ...

Furthermore, at that time the Palestinian media, notably their radio, started to deny any historical connection between Jerusalem and the Jewish religion, while making extravagant claims of their own—claims that were based on the fictitious “night journey” to heaven that Muhammad allegedly made from the Rock on the Temple Mount while he was still in Mecca. ...

The religious authorities look at the land as a waqf, and endowment that belongs to the whole Islamic community. Caliph Umar declared this land to be a waqf when he conquered it in the 7th century, and nobody is allowed to give it, sell it, or in any other way transfer it to the possession of a non-Islamic entity. How could Arafat, or one of his successors, sign on a document that would give Israel the title to this holy land in perpetuity? They may accept that the Jews are living here, but only under the terms of al-dhimma, under Islamic sovereignty.

When you look at the Israeli-Palestinian problem from the religious, Islamic point of view, it appears insoluble. Jerusalem, the waqf, and the compensation are all non-negotiable. These issues could be dealt with by nationalists, by people who think in terms of costs and benefits. With them this could be solved in a technical way, in terms of give-and-take ... some kind of solution under which both sides would be getting something ...

This same problem of mindset and culture concerns the refugees. After the Second World War Europe was full of refugees—tens upon tens of millions of refugees, Germans from Poland, from the Sudettenland, East Europeans, refugees all over. After ten years there was not one refugee left in Europe! Some returned to where they lived, most went somewhere else, and they started a new life. In the Sudetten today they come to visit their old homes in the Czech Republic and nobody makes a problem out of it. But in the Arab world they eternalize the problem of refugees. People who left their villages in the northern part of Israel and who are living in Lebanon only a few miles away near Tyre, are looked upon as foreigners. Foreigners—although they speak the same language, share the same faith and culture. But since they were expelled by the Jews they must be “refugees” for ever. The Lebanese law lists 73 professions in which no Palestinian refugee can work. He cannot be an architect, an engineer, a doctor, a professor, an accountant or a lawyer, and he cannot purchase land or own rental property… He can only be a laborer, until this very day. Where else in the world do you encounter such an attitude? And to the people of the same religion, language and culture at that? The story is the same for those who left Lake Tiberias for Syria, an hour’s drive away. The story is the same with te refugees in the West Bank itself, within Palestine! They are still “refugees”—and their children, and their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren . . . for all eternity. Where in else the world is there such a culture, that treats and utilizes people in this way? ...

Add to this the attitude to death and life, how you manage your struggle. If you are capable of sending a 16 year old girl to explode herself in a crowded supermarket, a 17 year old boy to explode himself on a bus, you are set apart from all cultures that treasure life. We therefore have to be divided, not by agreement because agreement is impossible, but by what is possible and necessary.

“Compromise” is not part of the possibilities in the Islamic world, as becomes apparent whenever Muslims are involved in a dispute with non-Muslims. You cannot compare what has happened between us and Palestinians with what had happened between France and Germany, or Britain and Germany.

A man who started off assuming and ended up realizing that the assumption was false - because "'Compromise' is not part of the possibilities in the Islamic world". He assumed a solution was possible, drawing on what his own culture had taught him, but experience taught him that it wasn't, because of the content of another one.

bpolhemus-

I consider a believing Mohammedan to be essentially like that uncanny little reptile the chameleon.

In the "Palestinian" variety, as you mention, they take on the coloration of "Marxist", "non-religious", "tribal", etc.

But you are thinking that, because the chameleon (Mohammedan) has turned green ("Marxist"), simply because it sits on a leaf, it is a leaf. And no longer a chameleon (Mohammedan).

The Ummah underlies all reality to the believing Muslim.

The superficial marks of "nation", "politics", etc., wash away when the Great Tribe of Islam is "threatened".

They may kill one another in the short-term, for local gains (Shi'ites versus Sunnis in Iraq, etc.), but they're coming after ALL infidels, together, once they sort out their neighborhood squabbles.

You need to focus out.

profitsbeard,
They did their jobs on infidels well even with these 'divisons'.

http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/03/3571.shtml

They shall kill infidels and each other. You need not follow my link. The last 10 years are enough.

Re: Israel "should understand that it is not easy for the Palestinian people to say, 'OK, we can release him,' ... without a price," said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Cabinet.

It is not easy to release Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped in Israel, because Israel should not exist and because Gilad Shalit is a dhimmi-Jew in Dar-al-Islam. It is not easy for Palestinian Muslims to accept the existance of the anti-dhimmi state (Israel) in Dar-al-Islam and for the Palestinian people to say, 'OK, we can release him,' ... without a price".

It is not easy for Muslims to use logic because of the Koran. It is not easy for Muslims to accept the reality that a belief is not a fact "without a price". It is not easy for Muslims to let go of lethal delusions. It is not easy for the "Palestinian" people to pay the price.

Inspecting his burning office, Haniyeh called the attack senseless...

Judgeing from the trash can afire in said office of Haniyeh, I'd say the howels from the dogs of war sound more like whimpers.

Allow me to introduce you to Heidi. She's a 70 year old cleaning lady who hails from Sweden.

She started a fire in a trash can while cleaning out the office a few years ago; seems she placed her cigarette in a bad place while she set about to do her work.

The office was gutted much worse than Haniyeh's appears to be. I didn't fire her, but we had a little chat about the hazards of smoking.

Shall I see if she is interested in going to Gaza?

Israel "should understand that it is not easy for the Palestinian people to say, 'OK, we can release him,' ... without a price,"
said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Cabinet.

GHAZI HAMAD
Interesting name Ghazi

Ghazw (Arabic: غزو)
is an Arabic word meaning an armed incursion for the purposes of conquest, plunder, or the capture of slaves and is cognate with the terms ghāziya and maghāzī.

Ghazi (Arabic: غازى)
is an originally Arabic word, from ghazd, 'to fight', also adopted by such languages as Turkish for Muslims vowed to combat non-believers. As such it is essentially equivalent to Mujahideen: waging jiad bin-saif, i.e. holy war.

For the ghāzīs in the marches, it was a religious duty to ravage the countries of the infidels who resisted Islam, and to force them into subjection.

After the conquests had come to an end, the legal specialists laid down that the Caliph had to raid enemy territory at least once a year in order to keep the idea of jihad alive.

Ghāzī warriors depended upon plunder for their livelihood, and were prone to brigandage and sedition in times of peace.

The gangs/armies into which they organized themselves attracted adventurers, zealots, and religious and political dissidents of all ethnicities.

In time, though, soldiers of Turkic ethnicity predominated, mirroring the Turkic rise to military and later political dominance throughout the Muslim world.

Re: ************QUOTE*************
But maybe Israel is not so ready to play the dhimmi this time.
**************END QUOTE************
But they are. They are just waiting for the right opportunity. Why do you think they might not?
After all 50% voted present nincompoops in.

Shiva,
Right said. The word 'gazi' is a word that is considered to be one of the highest honours in islam. Almost all of the early conquerers of islam were called as 'gazis' by muslim historians who wrote praises on the tortures these gazis inflicted on the infidel cultures and people, and the loot that they brought home. The word is still used today to describe major terrorists. bin laden was called as a 'gazi' by ummah in several countries.

yojimbo, thanx for the quote from one our "low intelligence" officers. I say that because even in 1993 when the Oslo deal was made, many people both inside and outside the academic world understood that it was a mistake and would not lead anywhere good. Of coures, Rabin, Peres, Beilin, and the Meretz party instead on plowing ahead with what was a bad deal.
ag1,
the present govt is a coalition of several parties, some of which [ie, Shas] opposed the retreat from Gaza, not strongly enough of course. Even in Olmert's party, Qadimah, some oppose any future retreat. Further, Qadimah got less than one-quarter of the vote which gave it 29 seats in the Knesset out of 120. Many people, especially young people, were fed up with the political parties altogether and did not vote. Some, young and old, voted for the pensioners' party, thinking that that would send a message, and that the party itself would be innocuous.

arjun.sevak-

Chilling link.

It shows the true face of the Islamic honeyed-lie "There is no compulsion in relgion."

The unspoken truth behind it is:

You are free... to die.

For the Muslim legal-theological mind the offer of "convert or die" is a 'free' choice for the prisoner.

(I.E.- you are not 'compelled' to choose to stay alive.)

Just as the people in the WTC Twin Towers were also 'free' ...to either be roasted alive by the incandescent cauldron of melting aluminum and burning jet fuel or to leap 100 stories to the concrete below.

Muslim 'freedom' is like Muslim 'honor'.

From the Devil's Dictionary.

004.101 When ye travel - through the earth, there is no blame on you if ye shorten your prayers, for fear '''the unbelievers''' May attack you: For '''the Unbelievers''' are unto you open enemies.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/009.qmt.html#009.123
009.123 O ye who believe! fight '''the unbelievers''' who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/008.qmt.html#008.067
008.067 It is not fitting for a prophet that he should have prisoners of war [slay them first] until he hath thoroughly subdued the land.

{Treason in all non-Muslim nations

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/033.qmt.html#033.061
033.061 They shall have a curse on them: whenever they are found, they shall be seized and slain without mercy.

{Genocide

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/002.qmt.html#002.216
002.216 Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing [war] which is good for you and that ye love a thing [peace] which is bad for you?

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/004.qmt.html#004.104
004.104 And slacken not in following up the enemy: If ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/005.qmt.html#005.051
005.051 O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them for friendship is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/047.qmt.html#047.004
047.004 Therefore, when ye meet '''the Unbelievers''' in fight, smite at their necks.
Behead them! and the Muslims are commanded to initiate the fight} 002.216 009.039 throughout the earth} 004.101 004.100

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/005.qmt.html#005.033
005.033 THE PUNISHMENT of those who '''wage war''' against Allah and His Messenger IS: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet.
the Muslims are commanded to initiate the fight} 002.216 009.039

khalid - Those teachings are were taken directly from the the Koran online - and they teach violence! on a level that a child can understand.
unless you don't see any thing wrong with beheading non-Muslims
As for Christianity being no better? - NO New Covenant Scripture exists that promotes violence between humans - Not one.

Question for the 'moderate' Muslims who have no control - none whatsoever - over those who will read those commands and then carry them out:

What's the punishment for calling your own 'Allah' a liar at the Judgment?

Also...

Jam 3:11 Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?

It is either Peace - or it is War. It can not be both.

In 1350 years, the world has yet to find a 'moderate' muslim. There are either muslims, or there are apostate muslims who pretend to be muslims, but who dare not critisize islam, and those who do have a price on their heads (salman rushdie, ali sina).