"Frankly, I'm Not Satisfied."

So I have received a rebuttal from my friend.  It is pasted below exactly as I received it:

HARE KRISHNA EIAL

THANKS FOR YOUR REPLAY, FRANKLY I'M NOT SATISFIED

WIT THAT FOR MANY REASON FIRST YOU SAID THAT THE ARMY KNOW ABOUT THE HOSTAGE STILL THEY FIRED KILLING 16   NOW THE ARMY REJECT THE NEWS BUT THE U.N.   NOT AGREE 

75% OF THE DEATH ARE CIVILIAN AND THE U.N. ORDER AN INQUIRY FOR CRIME WAR SO HOW COME THAT YOU STILL DEFEND THIS CRIMINAL IN UNIFORM?
YES THE HAMMAS KILL 3 STUDENT AND FOR THAT YOUR ARMY KILL THOUSAND? K MON EIAL GIVE ME A BREAK PLEASE

YES THE BIBLE SAID ABOUT THE PRESENCE OF YOUR PEOPLE THERE BUT IS LIKE  THAT WE GO TO AFGHANISTAN AND TAKE BE CAUSE THE MAHABARATHA SAID THAT, IT DOSE MAKE SENS,

IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE YOUR COUNTRY WAY THE PALESTINIAN CAN NOT HAVE THEY RIGHT TO HAVE THE SAME? YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU HAD ISRAEL THANKS TO  THE BIGGEST DEMON MR HITLER, NOT BE CAUSE YOU WERE THERE ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE.  THE PALESTINIAN FIGHT FOR THEIR RIGHT , 

YOU REMEMBER WEN THE ISRAEL ARMY BROKEN THE ARMS OF HUNDRED OF YOUNG PALESTINIAN GUILTY OF PELTING STONE ?  PLEASE EIAL YOU ARE A INTELLIGENT MAN NOT BE FANATIC, SEE THE REALITY AND BE HONEST ENOUGH TO ACCEPT THE FACT THAT YOUR ARMY ARE DOING MANY WRONG THINGS. HOPE TO HERE GOOD NEWS IN THE FUTURE  JAYA JAGANNATH 

My response follows:

Hare Krishna,

I have found in the past that you can never really judge a person’s English by how well they speak, but only when you observe how well they write.  Speech flows and it is easy to gloss over the many grammatical and lexical errors made when it is enough to get the gist of what a person is saying. Writing, on the other hand, is unforgiving and exposes every dangling modifier, lack of subject/verb agreement, and omitted comma.  The same is true with political discourse. What presents itself for analysis in the media or “polite” society, rarely passes the test of the printed word. For that reason, I am glad that I have this opportunity to show you where your faulty assumptions and ideological blinders lie. To do so, takes time, but I will address your contentions one by one:

WIT THAT FOR MANY REASON FIRST YOU SAID THAT THE ARMY KNOW ABOUT THE HOSTAGE STILL THEY FIRED KILLING 16   NOW THE ARMY REJECT THE NEWS BUT THE U.N.   NOT AGREE 

I did not say anything about “hostages.”  Perhaps you mean to say “refugees”?  In any case, I did not say anything about the Israeli army knowing who exactly was there or how many people were there.  I said that there was firing in the vicinity of the school, that already three days prior the army requested (through various means) that people evacuate, and that on the morning of the alleged attack, the UN was called and asked to immediately evacuate everyone.  I know for a fact that the residents of Beit Hanoun were asked to move away from the border because I, myself, heard the army request this on the radio for three days straight.  It was reported in the press and Hamas even went out of its way to try to convince people to stay and serve as human shields (video available upon request).  I also believe the Israeli army when they say that they called because, in a very similar case, the Palestinians claimed that there was no call and in the end the army released the calls to show that they were made (Al Wafa hospital case).

The army actually completed its investigation of this case and admitted that there was an errant mortar round that hit the school courtyard and showed aerial footage that no one was in the yard at the time. (See Here) On the other hand, the Palestinians presented the media with injured people, but did not release any information about the nature of their injuries.  So far, over 200 Hamas rockets have landed in Gaza and hurt their own people.  There is strong reason to believe that the same thing happened here.  Hamas has made no effort to disprove this in any way.  The UN also has no evidence that Israel did not call in the morning and certainly they knew that the army had called for Beit Hanoun to be evacuated.  Why didn’t the Palestinians in the school evacuate when they were asked to?  For the answer to this, I think you need to ask Hamas and not Israel.  As things stand at the moment, this constitutes a blood libel.

75% OF THE DEATH ARE CIVILIAN

How do you know that 75% of the deaths are civilian?  Where did you get such a statistic?  Only a few days ago, I showed how, based on the names of those who died, 80% were men and most of them were of fighting age.  In past conflicts with Hamas, after the guns went silent, they released full lists of all the “heroes” who died and they turned out to be mostly fighters.  I doubt it will be different this time, but by then, the world will be paying attention to some other titbit of international news and Hamas will have accomplished its goal.  As Bret Stephens of the WSJ rightly pointed out today:

Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in the New York Times as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023 Palestinian lives as against 46 Israelis. How does the Times keep such an accurate count of Palestinian deaths? A footnote discloses “Palestinian death tallies are provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.”

OK. So who runs the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza? Hamas does. As for the U.N., it gets its data mainly from two Palestinian agitprop NGOs, one of which, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, offers the remarkably precise statistic that, as of July 27, exactly 82% of deaths in Gaza have been civilians. Curiously, during the 2008-09 Gaza war, the center also reported an 82% civilian casualty rate.

When minutely exact statistics are provided in chaotic circumstances, it suggests the statistics are garbage. When a news organization relies—without clarification—on data provided by a bureaucratic organ of a terrorist organization, there’s something wrong there, too.

So are you sure that it is only 75% and not 82% like in the past conflict and in this one as well?

THE U.N. ORDER AN INQUIRY FOR CRIME WAR SO HOW COME THAT YOU STILL DEFEND THIS CRIMINAL IN UNIFORM?

The UN Human Rights Council is made up by such countries as Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.  It also has ten majority Muslim countries on the council.  These are countries that know a lot more about Human Rights violations than Israel and certainly should not be throwing stones from their glass houses. Indeed, the UNHRC is such a beacon of morality that Syria is doing its best to become a member this year.

In general, the UNHRC body has a long history of showing bias towards Israel and ignoring all of the rest of the world’s problems to focus only on Israel.  In the normal world, that is called discrimination.  Democracy is not democracy unless it ensures the rights of minorities, unless it is the UN and used as a political weapon by the Arab States against to make Israel look bad.  In fact, last year it was so obvious that the UNHRC was biased against Israel that even one of the translators was caught on a hot mic saying so.  In that session there were nine resolutions against Israel and one against Syria.  One of the anti-Israel resolutions demanded that Israel return the Golan Heights to Assad immediately.  I wonder what that would do to the human rights of the people living there!

By the way, you should be more precise in your language and aware that even with this politically motivated vote, the UNHRC has only requested an inquiry and has not reached any conclusions.  The last time they did this (The Goldstone Report), the author of the report himself denounced his own report in the end. As Goldstone noted in theWashington Post, subsequent investigations by Israel, "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy" while "the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying." 

Lastly, I take offense at you calling those who have put on uniforms to defend me and my family as criminals.  These are both young men and women in regular service and tens of thousands of reservists who have left their loved ones behind to defend their country from a missile assault and numerous violations of our sovereignty (invasion attempts by land, by sea and by air.)  Perhaps you are still suffering from some juvenile 1960s anti-establishment hangover, but these men and women are heroes fighting a just war and your calling them criminals is both uninformed and deplorable. I can tell you already now that the day that my children will don their army uniform will certainly be one of the proudest days of my life.  I know that the world likes to see dead Jews, but we no longer want to be victims in your morality play. 

Which brings me to my next point.

YES THE HAMMAS KILL 3 STUDENT AND FOR THAT YOUR ARMY KILL THOUSAND? K MON EIAL GIVE ME A BREAK PLEASE

As of this moment 56 people have been killed by Hamas. If they have not managed to kill more, it is only because they have failed to do so and not because they have not tried.  Our government has invested over decades in early warning systems and missile defense while Hamas has invested in building attack tunnels and buying missiles to shoot at our people.   So, do some research and give me a break.

 

By the way, the goal in war is to kill your enemy while doing your best to avoid being killed.  I will not apologize for success in battle and this is not some Golf game where you need to give your opponent a handicap.

YES THE BIBLE SAID ABOUT THE PRESENCE OF YOUR PEOPLE THERE BUT IS LIKE  THAT WE GO TO AFGHANISTAN AND TAKE BE CAUSE THE MAHABARATHA SAID THAT, IT DOSE MAKE SENS,

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t seem to recall that the Ganges and Varanasi are in Afghanistan or that Vrindavan is in Herat province.  Your analogy makes absolutely no sense at all! Actually, according to the Bible, historic Israel includes Jordan and, at times, much of Syria.  Even more so, Judea (where the Jews come from) is in the “West Bank” today. I wasn’t arguing that we need to set our borders based on the Bible, rather that clear Biblical and archaeological evidence demonstrates that we are an indigenous people from this land and not some colonists who showed up out of nowhere all of a sudden. For this reason I rejected your characterization of Palestinians as the Native Americans in this story.

 

Also, we did not “take” anything.  Until 1948 all the land that Jews were living on was purchased from the Arab owners or government “wasteland” where they were granted a right to live in order to improve the land.  Even politically, we did not “take” anything.  We were given the right to a country by the League of Nations (Mandate for Palestine) in 1922, which was reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1947. (Please read some history.) 

IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE YOUR COUNTRY WAY THE PALESTINIAN CAN NOT HAVE THEY RIGHT TO HAVE THE SAME?

I think you need to ask the Palestinians this question.  I said above that the Jewish people were “an” indigenous people.  I did not say that we are “the” indigenous people.  Though I think the Palestinians are recent arrivals, I recognize that they also have rights to this land. For my entire life, the Israeli government has been trying to negotiate with Palestinians so that there will be a 2 – State solution, but for some reason they seem uninterested.  Over the years we have even given up our own territorial claims – whether it be the East Bank of the Mandate (1922), our agreement to the Peel Commission (1937), the UN Partition Plan (1947), the Oslo Agreements and the creation of the PNA (1993), and most recently, our unilateral departure from Gaza (2005).  Clearly you know none of this history, or you would not embarrass yourself with saying such things.

   

YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU HAD ISRAEL THANKS TO  THE BIGGEST DEMON MR HITLER, NOT BE CAUSE YOU WERE THERE ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE. 

This is a common fallacy, but completely untrue! It is untrue because, as I noted above, 26 years before Israel was established, the League of Nations voted unanimously to “RE-constitute” the Jewish National Home.  This was not based on the Bible, but on the right to self-determination and the fact that Jewish sovereignty had existed for over a thousand years.  The UN vote in 1947 only affirmed the 1922 League of Nations decision by ending Britain’s Mandate. In fact, modern political Zionism predates the Holocaust by over 60 years and has to do more with the rise of nationalism in Europe. As European countries became independent, Jews were told that they did not belong and so embraced their own nationalism.

It is also untrue because, even though they were only supposed to administer the Mandate temporarily, the British would never have left had the Jews not fought them and forced them to live up to their obligations under the Mandate. This freedom struggle many several years and, eventually, forced the British to surrender.

THE PALESTINIAN FIGHT FOR THEIR RIGHT

The Palestinians have the right to fight, but then they do not have the right to complain when their “resistance” is met with resistance.  We would prefer to sit down and negotiate, but if they want to fight, then we will, regrettably, give them what they want. Just today the head of their military wing said that his fighters are “eager for death.” 

YOU REMEMBER WEN THE ISRAEL ARMY BROKEN THE ARMS OF HUNDRED OF YOUNG PALESTINIAN GUILTY OF PELTING STONE ?

No, I do not remember this because it never happened.  I would like to see the source for this allegation of “hundreds” of young Palestinians having their arms broken.  Please provide it or take back this calumny.

PLEASE EIAL YOU ARE A INTELLIGENT MAN NOT BE FANATIC, SEE THE REALITY AND BE HONEST ENOUGH TO ACCEPT THE FACT THAT YOUR ARMY ARE DOING MANY WRONG THINGS.

I appreciate that you consider me to be an intelligent man and that you think I am not a fanatic.  If you really believe that then maybe you will accept the reality that I know a little bit more about this conflict than you do and have come to my conclusions based on factual knowledge of the subject matter.  Unfortunately, I have found that too many people are either blinded by a knee-jerk leftist ideology (e.g. anti-colonialism and third-worldism) or simplistic media-driven narratives.

*** Earlier today I received another missive from my friend.  Here is what he wrote:

SO YESTERDAY ANOTHER PEACE DAY ONLY 8 CHILDREN DEAD

I HOPE THAT YOUR ARMY SEND A S.M.S BI-FOR KILLING THEM.  

WAT A SHAME

Maybe it has escaped your attention, but we happen to be in a war here.  Yesterday, the Palestinians also killed 10 Israelis, some of them in cold blood. They also shot a missile that hit one of their own hospitals. I wonder how many children they killed in that attack? Personally, I think it really tragic when children die in war.  

You realize, of course, that there are children – Jewish and Arab (we live as neighbours here) – on this side of the border, who are being targeted every single day by missiles that are shot at our homes? Just yesterday two missiles fell about 10-15 kilometers south of my home.  Many children are sleeping in bomb shelters and reinforced concrete rooms right now.  All of our lives have been negatively affected in many ways and you can be sure that my children are terrorized by the fear that the sky will rain death.

None of what is happening here is theoretical. That Hamas is not able to break through our defences, does not change the fact that 2,500 missiles have been fired from Gaza and that they really are trying to kill me and my family. For that reason, I must say that I find it extremely disappointing that, throughout this entire e-mail exchange, you have shown much more interest in the children of terrorists and strangers than in those of someone who considered you a friend.  

PS  So far I have not received even one SMS from Hamas.