Reply #51: Then I suppose I've been wasting my time as well?

[Chulanowa]

I don't feel I have. Maybe this is because I do have an irrational streak, and honestly believe that, as Gandhi taught, The truth is the truth. eventually it will soak through the skull of even those who perpetuate in untruths; even if not, what is true will last far longer than that which is not. This, along with a compulsion to confront those I regard as bigots, is what leads me to keep confronting you, Shira.

Whether you are wasting your time or not depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you are wanting to win me over to your position, you are first going to need a coherent and defensible position. And then you're going to need to find a better way to argue your point. What you've got now is mostly a slurry of emotional rhetoric, mythology, and cognitive dissonance. I don't know how effective this is against others, but I can tell you (and I'm sure you can see) it doesn't work too well on me.

1) Your position is that 27 civilians killed in Jenin is not a massacre. Okay. Here are some details about some of those 27 people killed. Hani Rumeleh, a 19 year old civilian had been shot while looking out his front door. Two nurses, the sisters Fadwa and Rufaida Damaj heard his screaming, and tried to get to his aid. While speaking to some "guys from the resistance" to allow them to pass, the Israeli snipers opened fire again, injuring Rufaida in the leg and Fadwa in the abdomen. The women yelled for help, the "resistance guys" scattered, and the Israelis opened fire again. A bullet traveled through Fadwa's leg and into her chest, opening her heart, killing her in minutes. Jamal Feyed, a wheelchair-bound and mentally handicapped man of 37, was crushed by the rubble of his own home when Israeli bulldozers demolished it, even as his uncle Saeb was pleading for the driver to stop. Kemal Zughayer, 58, had been wounded in the first intifada and could not walk. He was shot dead while trying to wheel himself to his home. His wheelchair was found across the road from the two halves of his body, which had been run over by the tank. A white flag had been tied to the back of the wheelchair.

Arie Caspi, an Israeli journalist for Ha'aretz wrote the following of these deaths.

"Okay, so there wasn't a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn't get out in time, used locals as human shields against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That's really not a massacre, and there's really no need for a commission of inquiry... whether run by ourselves or the goyim.
The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals ... many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells "Holocaust!," we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?"

Not long after, on April 27, Palestinian gunmen attacked the illegal settlement of Adora in the West bank. Danielle Shefi, age five was shot in her bedroom, along with her mother and two brothers; the mother survived, Danielle did not. Up the road, Katya and Vladimir Greenburg were sprayed with bullets as they lay in bed. All told, the casualties at Adora amounted to four dead, including two armed settlers who returned fire, and eight wounded.

Major Avner Foxman, the spokesman for the Israeli Army, had this to say about the killings at Adora;
"For me, now I know what is a massacre. This is a massacre."

You'd have to be a cold-blooded fucker to not consider what happened to Danielle Shefi and her family to be a "massacre," if you're going to use the term at all (more on that in a second.) But can you then deny the same term when it is Jamal Feyed who while older than Danielle's 5 years, was likely about her equal mentally and physically, and as much a threat to Israel as she was to the Palestinians? Can you deny it to the Damaj sisters, who's crime was to step out and try to help a young man shot in his own home? If four Israeli civilians dead and eight wounded because they had the misfortune to live in a place militants wanted to attack is a "massacre" (and I won't argue it's not) then what disqualifies 27 Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded and homeless due to having the same misfortune of being in a place someone wanted to attack?

So then, what is the accepted standard for a massacre? How many people have to die, under what conditions, for the term to be valid? It seems very evident that the ethnicity, nationality, or religion of the victims is also a very important consideration. Vladimir Greenburg was "massacred"; Kemal Zughayer was "killed."

Speaking personally, the history of my own people disinclines me to use of the word "massacre." I used it in this instance because it's the common parlance, and it seems applicable. However, across the breadth of the United States, you will find placards commemorating the history of Manifest Destiny and the "Indian Wars." with the exception of a few recently-edited memorials, you'll note a trend. every fight that the Europeans won was a "battle" or a "triumph." On the other hand, fights the Indians won are "massacres" or "slaughters." In South Dakota, you had two monuments. One commemorated the "Massacre of the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn," where General Armstrong Custer led the Cavalry against a sleeping encampment of Lakota and Cheyenne... and lost. In the same state you could find another memorial, commemorating the "Battle of Wounded Knee Creek," where the cavalry "pacified" the Lakota; by killing every man, woman, and child in Big Foot's band after disarming them. Thankfully these two monuments have been changed by the Bureau of Park Services after large outcry, but thousands like them remain around the country.

Only the "good guys" can get massacred, it seems. Little Danielle had the (tragically posthumous) fortune to be of the right race and the right nationality to be considered one such "good guy," while Fadwa Damaj, because of her own ethnicity and nationality (or lack thereof) is "the enemy" and thus is immune to the tragedy of being massacred.

Would you like me to address your second point, Shira?