Netanyahu: Hitler didn't want to kill any Jews, the Holocaust was all the Palestinians fault.

Which borders in the 1970s?

 

Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. But the EU says the new border is an "internal matter".

 

No country except for Turkey recognises Northern Cyprus; so as far as the rest of the world is concerned the border hasn't changed.

 

I can't speak for the EU, but NATO was never a democracies only club. At various points in NATO history, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were all dictatorships.

 

I guess that's why it's okay for the EU to have products from there labeled "Made in Cyprus", as if Turkey wasn't occupying the northern part of the island.

 

IIRC Spain joined after Franco died and King Juan Carlos returned the country to a democratic one. Though in fairness Spain was pretty friendly to the U.S. in military affairs during the Cold War even while Franco was in power. IIRC we had bases for our bombers and refueling facilities there.

But yeah Portugal, Greece after the "colonels" took over. Some would even argue that France at different points in de Gaulle's rule wasn't a democracy.

 

Presumably it's because Cyprus, an EU member, wants to maintain the legal fiction of united island and resists any and all moves to give Northern Cyprus any legitimacy.

 

And the EU is perfectly okay with that because Cyprus isn't full of evil Jews.

 

Human Rights Watch: Israel "indiscriminate and disproportionate", uses "collective punishment".

Amnesty International: Israel "commited war crimes, carried out "unlawful killings".

UN fact finding mission: Israel targetted "people of Gaza as a whole", carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot "while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags", bombed a mosque with 350 people in it, bombed a UN refuge, used human shields.

B'Tselem (Israeli human rights group): Israel whitewashes war crimes claims, harm to civilians unaccaptable, definition of what constitutes a military target unjustifiably broad.

Among many others.

All demonstrably false, according to @Dinner , reeking of anti-semitism, especially those anti-semitic Jews themselves.

 

Amnesty International is hardly a credible source. They bitch and moan whenever the United States executes a multiple murderer.

B'Tsalem is an advocacy group with a stated purpose of opposing Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

Bitching and moaning about human rights abuses, and advocating for human rights is what human rights groups do, strangely.

You don't get to decide who is credible.

 

As it notes in the opening:

Palestinian armed groups carried out indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli population centers, and sometimes fired from or near civilian areas, endangering the civilian population. ​

That's quite an admission for a Human Rights organization, as they tend to be staffed by people who would be happy working at Auschwitz. That's because almost all of them are leftists who are steeped in the hatred of greedy Jewish capitalists who oppress innocent brown people.

And that would be a case in point. In WW-II they'd have been screaming about Jewish atrocities against Germans. In their entire report about 2014, they only mention three Israelis getting attacked by Palestinians, and barely noted that some rockets were fired at Israel. It has an entire section on the horror of Israel briefly sending six conscientious objectors to jail before dismissing them from the military, but doesn't say a thing about Hamas carrying out massive summary executions of Palestinians it accused of being traitors. Hamas even posted pictures of its executions and it still can't get any press coverage from "human rights" groups.

 

Why not?

 

Because you are not an objective judge. As I explained to you earlier (and as you ignored) you will label any organisation that is critical of Israel as being biased merely by the fact of their having made such criticism.

 

When The Economist criticizes Israel I take it seriously.

 

When you start comparing Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the Nazis you know you've lost the argument.

 

The Economist is not a human rights group.

 

Posting a picture of yourself, eh?

 

Post 429; response; chop, chop.

 

That is my point. You should not trust an advocacy group regarding the issue they advocate.

It is called having an agenda, Rick.

 

Your "point" is retarded, and entirely self-serving.
Insisting that we not trust human rights groups on the subject of human rights, is like insisting that we not trust scientists about science, economists about economics or plumbers about plumbing. It's their damn job to know what they're talking about in that area. Anyone else is less qualified.

 

Read the crap they're producing. You would never even guess that rockets were being fired from Gaza into Israeli towns for months and months before Israel reacted. They fired rockets in January, and no response. They kept it up in February, and no response. They stepped it up in March, firing 65 rockets, and Israel killed one 25-year old Palestinian with Islamic Jihad who was about to fire a rocket. But that didn't stop the attacks. They continued in April and May with no response. In June the Palestinians fired over 60 rockets and injured 7 Israelis. Every now and then there would be a rare day when Israel wasn't getting hit with rockets. And every time one is launched, warning sirens go off and Israelis have to run for shelter. Children in school have to duck and cover.

How many days would any European country put up with it? About one, and then they'd unleash holy hell. Israel put up with it for half a year. In July the Palestinians really stepped it up, launching dozens of rockets a day. On July 7th they launched 80 rockets and finally Israel launched a response. But that didn't immediately stop the attacks. That month the Palestinians fired almost 3,000 rockets into Israel, as Israel tried to take out all the launch sites and weapons depots while moving in to destroy all the tunnels the Palestinians had dug under the Israeli border so they could slip in and kill random Jews.

None of that made it into any of the human rights reports. Why is that?

 

There is copious criticism of Hamas and their activities, as ten-seconds spent browsing their websites would reveal. Liar.

 

I would prefer someone "less" qualified, who also has less obvious bias and doesn't have an agenda to push.

One thing I learned as a football coach, you never go to a knee surgeon if you want an honest opinion regarding whether surgery is the best option. Because guess what? They will ALWAYS recommend surgery (unless the economy is great and they have plenty of money anyway).

 

And we're back to you not getting to decide that they're biased or are pushing an agenda, since you're based that entirely on how much they agree with you in the first place.

 

No, there's not. Go back and read the Amnesty International report. The ratio of noting Israeli "crimes" versus Palestinian is at least 100 to 1. Only a couple of sentences even mention that Hamas was firing rockets at Israel at some point that year, and one of those is:

Israeli authorities sought publicly to shift the blame for the large loss of life and wholesale destruction caused by the Israeli offensive in Gaza onto Hamas and Palestinian armed groups on the grounds that they fired rockets and other weapons from within or near civilian residential areas and concealed munitions in civilian buildings.​

As I said, if they were covering WW-II their report would go on for pages about how Jews are continuing to illegally occupy people's attics and cellars and only have a couple of sentences where a reader could even infer that they might have been hiding from German soldiers for some reason.

 

What makes you think that is how I determine bias?

I determine bias by measuring how much of a personal stake someone or some group has in taking a certain position.

 

Yet, as I pointed out, the ratio of civilian deaths is around 250:1. Clearly they're biased in favour of Israel.

 

So let's parse the latest lie.

On being called on this lie, @gturner cites the absence of criticism of Palestine in a section of an Amnesty International Report, specifically dealing with (as it's heading shows) the "State of Israel".

If he looks elsewhere in the same report (to say nothing of any report) he would find another section, titled "Palestine (state of)", which harshly condemns Hamas, their rocket fire, their repression, their torture and other offenses against the human race, at length.

@gturner will now proceed to pretend that this doesn't matter, and will defend another unrelated point on unrelated grounds in a long and meandering post.
He will hope that we forget what he originally said.