A graphic and video that reveal the terrible Gaza toll

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The Washington Post has a casualty counter for the Gaza conflict

It’s a sobering, to say the least, graphic that is updated daily. The latest death toll stands at 1046, and rising. And children are paying a terrible price.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/gaza-counter/

And here ITN journalist Jon Snow returns from Gaza and tells the heartbreaking story about the vulnerable children

43 thoughts on “A graphic and video that reveal the terrible Gaza toll”

  2. Israel faces an energy crisis of biblical proportion and Gaza’s untapped and unexploited billions of dollars represent a fortune and a lifeline which Tel Aviv will not tolerate to go to waste.
    https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/12971-the-truth-about-israels-new-war-on-gaza–the-energy-rush

    And now Israel has admitted that Hamas was not responsible for the deaths of three Israeli youths after all, saying they were the work of a “lone cell.” An Israeli police spokesman admits Hamas not behind kidnapping that provided original pretext for Gaza assault

    Other Israeli officials told Sheera Frenkel the same last month: http://bzfd.it/1nC3Lbd

    ……………………………………………………………………………………..
    Holocaust Victims Accuse

    Published in 1977 by
    Bnei Yeshivos
    161 East Houston St., Suite 10
    New York, NY 10013

    At a national conference of Tzirei Agudas Yisroel, which took place during the establishment of the “State of Israel,” the delegates came to one decision which aroused a furor even am factions of Agudas Yisroel, and “Hamodia” refused to publish it, as a matter of principle. The controversial resolution stated: “We declare that, at this time of the establishment of the state, our belief of the past remain the same: Zionism constitutes a danger, spiritual and physical, to the existence of our people.”

    Ha Kivshbnim Maashimim” (“The Holocaust Victims Accuse”), serves as an attempt to show, by means of testimonies., documents and reports, how Zionism and its high-level organizations brought a catastrophe upon our people during the era of the Nazi holocaust.

    The essays printed in the booklet include just a small part of a serious accusation, which exposes the leaders of Zionism as war criminals, who contributed their share to the destruction of six million of our people.

    http://israelversusjudaism.org/holocaust/victims.cfm

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    • I brought all that up last year…and the year before…and the year before that…. and on each occasion was not posted or accused of being ‘antisemitic’.
      ….or both.
      Funny how what goes around comes around.

      And none of it’s a secret ~ ’twas reported in all the history books.

      It was also reported in many history books that the (german) nazis originally wanted to DEPORT europe’s jews, but no other country in the wide world world would take them.(eg the authoritative ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ by William L. Shirer.). I never did figure out why….

      ……but it’s fairly clear that’s why the other option for the Final Solution was adopted.

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      • Simply makes the point that the outlawing of RELIGION (and Nationalism) would probably eradicate 90% of the bastardries perpetrated across the world.
        …and another big hole could be punched in the total by pulling the news-media into line. It’s a hotbed of hypocrisy ~ which breeds it’s offspring in its own image.

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      • This all goes to prove once again that there is wrong on both sides of the conflict.
        UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today said both sides had behaved in an irresponsible, “morally wrong” fashion.
        Hamas had fired missiles into civilian areas of Israel, while Israeli forces had used high-explosive weapons in the crowded Gaza Strip.
        Mr Ban said the people of Gaza had nowhere to run to, and he emphasised that participants in conflicts had a responsibility to protect civilians.
        “It’s a matter of their political will. They have to show their humanity as leaders, both Israeli and Palestinian,” he said..

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      • Since YOU raise the question:-
        Indeed. “And where’s the media coverage of this Palestinian indoctrination of hatred?”
        What’s not to hate?
        And it stands to reason that the press was invited (what better way of getting out the word?) but declined because it didn’t want to tell the palestinian side of the story.

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      • What’s not to hate? Do you really defend little Palestinian children being taught violence and hatred?
        A recent massive survey of global attitudes towards Jews (not Israelis, not Zionists) found that anti-Semitism was rampant in the Middle East but also shockingly common in other parts of the world. Respondents were asked did they agree with statements such as “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”, “Jews think they are better than other people”, and “Jews still talk too much about what happened in the Holocaust”.

        Older males were among the worst anti-semites on the planet. .

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      • How do you make that out Barry??
        “This all goes to prove once again that there is wrong on both sides of the conflict.”
        All international law declares legal and moral any resistance to invaders/occupiers ~ “by any means”:
        …..and apart from that (and the disproportionately massive ‘wrongs’) you should consider whether two wrongs ever make a right.
        It’s an invalid (if popular) argument.

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      • Well said Barry. Hate crime, to give it its official label, is rarely unconnected with hate speech, hate mindset and … well … just plain, old hate. Politics is irrelevant when it comes to hatred.

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      • Well gee whiz!…”Respondents were asked did they agree with statements such as “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”,

        I wonder how all those millions ~ or billions ~ of people from all over, over a period of 3000 years could ALL have gotten it so wrong.
        Obviously it not the jews’ fault: ask Bryan. He’ll be able to explain why the poor old jews have NEVER, in all of recorded history, been able to get on with their neighbours and hosts ~ and how that’s forced them to become an exclusive and conscientiously-inbred racist enclave which contributes nothing much to the host-society.
        But that’s no reason to ‘hate’ (= “intensly dislike” -> Shorter Oxford) them
        as an entity, is it?
        Never mind! PC and/or censorship will set all those many millions of people right, won’t it?
        Yeah. Right!

        ps. Teaching palestinian kids to hate is entirely legitimate in the circumstances.
        ‘Hate’ is a perfectly natural and legitimate human emotion closely linked to survival.
        And as such trying to link it to PC, politics or any other ‘socially-desirable construct’ is a nonsense. It’s exactly like putting a dollar-value on ‘love’.

        Moreover:- on that basis, had I done something deserving of death (and there are such cases: as your gods) then I’d much rather be killed by some impassioned shooter than (eg crucified) some cold-blooded religious/legal ‘Process’.
        We forget or ignore the Nature of the Beast to our eternal peril.

        ps. Shaw got other things wrong to.

        pps I dunno why I bother. S o I won’t.

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      • Hate’ is a perfectly natural and legitimate human emotion closely linked to survival
        Maybe for you. But not for most people. Hatred is never justified.

        Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred it the coward’s revenge for being intimidated — Hosea Ballou

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      • Just for some balance. As you say Bryan it is on both side

        The children need to grow up fast on the Palestinian side though because the Israeli army are hunting them down.

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      • In case you do know what they are chanting. They are chanting

        There’s no school tomorrow,there’s no children left in Gaza! Oleh!

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      • I am old enough to remember the propaganda, the indoctrination, the hate that was encouraged against the enemy, in WWll. What is happening now with the children on both sides is to be expected.

        Remembering too that Palestine was not a country, but an area of more or less no-man’s land. Most of the areas claimed for the State of Palestine have been occupied by Israel since 1967 in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, with the Palestinian Authority exercising socio-political administration since 1993 in limited areas, and Hamas ruling over others. After 1967, a number of legal arguments were advanced which dismissed the right of Palestinians to self-determination and statehood. They generally proposed that Palestine was a land void of a legitimate sovereign and supported Israeli claims to the remaining territory of the Palestine Mandate

        Many nations don’t recognise the legitimacy of Palestine as a State. The view of the European states, which did not extend full recognition was expressed by French President François Mitterrand who stated: “Many European countries are not ready to recognize a Palestine state. Others think that between recognition and non-recognition there are significant degrees; I am among these.” But, after the PLO recognized the state of Israel, Mitterrand welcomed the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, in Paris, in May 1989.

        There are a wide variety of views regarding Palestine’s status as a state, both among the states of the international community and among legal scholars. Israel does not, and calls it ‘occupied territory’. The existence of a state of Palestine, although controversial, is a reality in the opinions of the states that have established bilateral diplomatic relations.

        The State of Palestine is now a sovereign state that is recognized by the United Nations. Its independence was declared on 15 November 1988 by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its government-in-exile in Algiers. It claims sovereignty over the Palestinian territories, and has designated Jerusalem as its capital.In 2012, it was granted observer status by the United Nations .

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      • Opinions of officials and legal scholars

        Jacob Robinson was a legal advisor to the United Nations delegation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine during the special session of the General Assembly in 1947.[199] He advised the Zionist Executive that the provisional states had come into existence as a result of the resolution of 29 November 1947.[75]:279

        L.C. Green explained that “recognition of statehood is a matter of discretion, it is open to any existing state to accept as a state any entity it wishes, regardless of the existence of territory or an established government.”[200]

        Alex Takkenberg writes that while “there is no doubt that the entity ‘Palestine’ should be considered a state in statu nascendi and although it is increasingly likely that the ongoing peace process will eventually culminate in the establishment of a Palestinian state, it is premature to conclude that statehood, as defined by international law, is at present (spring 1997) firmly established.”[201] Referring to the four criteria of statehood, as outlined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention – that is, a permanent population, a defined territory, government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states – Takkenberg states that the entity known as Palestine does not fully satisfy these criteria.[201]

        Conversely John V. Whitbeck, who served as an advisor to the Palestinian negotiation team during negotiations with Israel, writes that “the State of Palestine already exists,” and that when, “Judged by these customary criteria [those of the Montevideo Convention], the State of Palestine is on at least as firm a legal footing as the State of Israel.” He continues: “The weak link in Palestine’s claim to already exist as a state was, until recently, the fourth criterion, “effective control… Yet a Palestinian executive and legislature, democratically elected with the enthusiastic approval of the international community, now exercises ‘effective control’ over a portion of Palestinian territory in which the great majority of the state’s population lives. It can no longer be seriously argued that Palestine’s claim to exist falls at the fourth and final hurdle.”[202]

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      • Paul De Waart says that the Quartet, particularly the United States, as well as western states, do not consider Palestine to be a state as yet. In their view the statehood of Palestine will be the result of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian people. He says they have overlooked that under international law it is not anymore a question of creating but of recognizing the State of Palestine.[218]

        Israeli legal expert Ruth Lapidoth said the Palestinians have already unilaterally declared statehood, and they did not need to do it again. “Recognition of statehood is a political act, and every state has the right to decide for itself whether to recognize another state.”[219]

        President Abbas said that the State of Palestine was already in existence and that the current battle is to have the state’s border recognized.[220]

        Jerome Segal wrote about Salam Fayyad’s plan for Palestinian statehood. He said lest anyone believe that the 1988 declaration is ancient history, they should read the new Fayyad plan with more care. It cites the 1988 declaration four times, identifying it as having articulated “the foundations of the Palestinian state.”[221]

        In September 2010, the World Bank released a report which found the Palestinian Authority “well-positioned to establish a state” at any point in the near future. The report highlighted, however, that unless private-sector growth in the Palestinian economy was stimulated, a Palestinian state would remain donor dependent.[222]

        In April 2011, the UN’s co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process issued a report lauding the Palestinian Authority, describing “aspects of its administration as sufficient for an independent state.”[223][224] It echoed similar assessments published the week prior by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.[224]

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Palestine#Government

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      • Sez who?? “Maybe for you. But not for most people. Hatred is never justified.”

        Oh ~ I forgot! YOU sez so; you who obviously never looked into the evolutionary or chemical bases for ‘hatred’.

        Ardrey has half-a-chapter on the value of hatred (including the conscience and patriotism, etc,) and also the value of inventing a god who justifies our hatred. (One of which has his hateful say in Deuteronomy and elsewhere….or doesn’t the WOG count if it disagrees with your New-Age PC opinions?
        *(supported in various ways by both Skinner and Lorenz. ~ probably among others)

        elsewhere:-

        “In fact, recent research on the “theory of mind” shows some rather startling results with regards to human evolution and consciousness. Researchers have located several areas in the brain, including the amygdala, which are involved in emotions that are responsible for our human ability to read the intentionality of others. This faculty is involved in memories about other people to predict their intentions, interprets body language, and generally reads the minds of potential enemies. “It just happens that the best way to predict what people are going to do next is understanding [their] mental state.” And as it turns out, this faculty evolved prior to human consciousness or self-reflection. This may seem odd, but as we evolved it was more important for our survival to react to danger than to understand why we had feelings or what they meant. Our primitive brains are attuned to danger from other humans, and this mechanism of hate and fear preempts our need to “understand” our innate hatred and disgust of others – it kept us out of harms way.”

        NB……..DO note the last sentence.

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      • Absolute pop-science balderdash Dabs. What a stupid argument. Hatred is a powerful force often linked with a feeling of frustration, powerlessness and the desire for revenge.
        Just about everything proposed in that Ardrey’s book has by now been proven either false or irrelevant, and its main thesis, that humans are descended from an unusually murderous line of apes, has been discredited for decades. Richard Leakey wrote a book, Origins, 30 years ago that included a great deal of evidence of the falsity of Ardrey’s speculation. But we don’t just know Ardrey was wrong; the evidence of falsity means we know more about the society that shaped the human lineage because Leakey went to the trouble of establishing that our ancestors were much more recognisable than Ardrey suggested.

        I’m with Fiona…..burn that phony pedestal you keep dragging around everywhere

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      • It is true that Ardrey has read a great deal about animal behavior, but he never seems to grasp what it all means, and his biases prevent him from seeing what is really there. For example, he gives the impression that he is constantly exploring Africa, watching lions with George Schaller, or chatting with the world’s greatest experts about elephants. He tells us that he “made a general survey of predatory communities” in Africa in 1968, but his ignorance of lions is so great that he misunderstands most of what he sees, reads, or is told. For example, one afternoon, Ardrey and his wife roused a lioness “a few hundred yards” from a herd of browsing impala. Two of the impala came over to see the lioness as it sought another sleeping place, while the others “never for a moment stopped eating.” Ardrey was amazed at this, but decided that he could not say that the impala were “suicidal” since the lioness was so sleepy. Then he adds, “Nevertheless, one can state in very nearly mathematical terms the survival value of approaching or fleeing the presence of a lion of unknown antagonism if you are an impala.”

        This is typical of the ponderous way Ardrey covers his ignorance. Despite his claims of intimacy with Schaller, who studied lions in Africa over three years, 1966-1969, Ardrey apparently does not know that killing by a lion (1) is not motivated by “antagonism”; (2) almost never takes place in the middle of the day; (3) is never directed at an animal which is looking at the lion; and (4) the attack never is made from a distance of over 40 to 50 yards. Ardrey will find these rules stated by R. D. Estes in Natural History for February and March 1967 or by Schaller in National Geographic for April 1969. The latter says, “The lion must stalk to within a few feet of a potential victim before its rush has much chance of success. Prey animals are fully aware of the lion’s limitations. They have learned how near to a lion they may wander without danger of attack—usually to within about 120 feet. This leads to ludicrous situations . . . A visible lion is a safe lion.” Need I add that Ardrey’s “suicidal” impala were about 500 feet from danger.

        Ardrey tells us that he watched elephants for years and could not discover what was their alarm call: “The problem, I found, had bothered others less innocent than I, and Irven Buss had solved it in a European zoo. . . . The elephant’s alarm call is silence.” This is typical of Ardrey’s great contemporary scientific discovery. Buss “solved” nothing; the zoo keeper told him that the elephant, when alarmed, simply stops his regular, internal physiological noises. Any elephant keeper or circus trainer or elephant hunter in history could have told them this fact. I, who am younger than Ardrey, learned it in 1925 from elephant watchers like Carl Akeley and Martin Johnson. It is recorded, with the additional fact that the elephant does have a very audible alarm call, in Akeley’s “In Brightest Africa.”

        On the basis of this rather shaky understanding of animal behavior, Ardrey tries to tell us what man is like. He insists that man is simply an animal (which implies that animals are simply men). This is, of course, contrary to general scientific belief, which holds that man evolved from an animal when his survival shifted from dependence upon inherited behavior to dependence upon learned behavior. Of course Ardrey does not accept this, although almost all students of men do, which is convenient for him because it means that he can write on human society and human behavior without making any effort to examine what serious students of man have written on the subject. For example, Ardrey has a very unenlightening discussion here on the role of play in human development, a subject on which there is an extensive literature headed by J. Huizinga ‘s “Homo Ludens” (1949), which is still available in paperback; but all Ardrey has to say is based on Carpenter’s studies of the howler monkeys.

        Similarly, when Ardrey wants to define human society he comes up with three definitions (one his own), all from animal behaviorists. One of these is from Wynne-Edwards, another of Ardrey’s infatuations, whose book on animal dispersion is “revolutionary” (Ardrey’s life is full of “revolutionary books written by quiet little men), “a slim, softly speaking man of utmost distinction, as unlikely a bomb-thrower as ever showed up at an anarchists’ drinking party.” This great man’s definition is “a society can be defined as a group of individuals competing for conventional prizes by conventional means.” The lack of merit in that definition will be seen if we merely replace the word “society” by any other collective term, such as “high school” or “football game.” Then, a football game is a society — obvious nonsense.

        Just as Ardrey insists that man is an animal and nothing more, so he insists that human society is exactly the same as animal societies and nothing more. He justifies this on the ground that both have need for their fellows (gregarious). But, he ignores that the needs are very different because most of animal actions are genetic, while almost all of human actions are learned. Thus human society has artifacts, symbols, speech, and organizational structures which often take on life and drives of their own, outside of and beyond the drives and needs of the individuals who make them up.

        Moreover, this slovenly thinking, which ignores the distinction between animal societies and human societies, also ignores the distinction between social acts and biological actions. Thus he says that “the social life” of a leopard is “limited to a few occasional hours of copulation;” copulation is biological, not social, just as parturition is. The whole book is filled with his confusions of quite distinct things in this way. Thus he confuses needs with desires and both with drives, and by continuous confusions of this kind, says that the drive to live by developing our potentialities is “aggression,” that war is the same as games or seeking higher grades, and that gregarious need is the same thing as xenophobia. He does not go so far as to say that love is the same thing as hatred, but it is implied throughout the book.

        Fundamentally, Ardrey is a racist, devoted to a belief in human inequality and unfreedom, an enemy of social “disorder” which must be suppressed by authority because man is a predatory, violent, aggressive creature, compelled by irresistible hereditary compulsion to war over territory. These are fascist ideas, and, in this book, Ardrey is doing for America what Treitschke, H. S. Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, and others did for Germany: preparing an intellectual basis for fascist political action. .
        http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/Robert_Ardrey_Current_Scheherazade.htm

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      • Strange, Dom, that your video on indoctrination of Israeli children is now not viewable.

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  5. Is the Tanakh true or false.
    Is the New Testament true or false.
    Is the Talmud true or false.
    Is the Koran true or false.

    Wide spread acceptance of Darwinism lead to moral and cultural relativism lead to cognitive dissonance about mutually exclusive documents and evidence.

    dabbles, you know I think you are dumb [stupefied by relativism], but here are sheer statistics to refute your assumption that most wars are religious:
    http://voxday.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/atheists-abandon-religion-causes-war.html

    no doubt it will do you no good. [so it really wasn’t to you at all] 3,2,1, the vituperative, ad hominem vacuous rhetoric….

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    • Self-righteous people are the ones most likely to view others as self-righteous.
      A self-righteous person enthusiastically oozes the following attributes:

      His opinions are correct, just because he is the source.

      Others’ opinions are suspect – especially when those perspectives are well informed, because the self-righteous one is not the source.

      Self-righteous people are most interested in themselves and only interested in others to the degree that others support their image of rightness.

      When a self-righteous person is truly out ranked, out smarted, or out classed, he usually shuts down and doesn’t know what to do.

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      • well then, shut me down Jazman, what point are you specifically making?

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      • “Dumb”, Bryan, in exactly the same sense a quadriplegics legs give him or her no information. “Dumb”, in exactly the same sense, “there are none so blind as those who will not see”. Dumb in the same sense that Google says it prefers to hire people who can a, admit they are wrong, b, quickly repent of it c, self correct and be taught. “Dumb” in precisely the same sense that there are a lot of highly educated, highly qualified ‘idiots’ who merely make fewer mistakes in their individual centers of expertise.

        “Dumb” in exactly that same sense as the bible has published with it the definition of ‘fool’ as in they, who say in themselves, that there is no God.

        dabbles, rapidly posted most of his ‘life’s’ conclusions when first he came here. Recalcitrant and intractable, do you expect him to be buried, in any a different condition from the posture he now assumes.

        We all love the dabbles and feel empathy for him, but does, that describe his condition any differently.

        I’d renounce Christianity in the blink of an eye if there were cast iron irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, isn’t the only begotten Son of God, loved of the Father, and, risen from the literal, physical, dead – wouldn’t you?

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      • “I’d renounce Christianity in the blink of an eye if there were cast iron irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, isn’t the only begotten Son of God, loved of the Father, and, risen from the literal, physical, dead – wouldn’t you?”

        No.

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  6. Truth beyond all cost
    “I was standing atop the minaret of Islamic life when Jesus called out to me,” Nabeel Qureshi says

    Raised by a devout American Muslim family, Nabeel Qureshi could recite the entire Qur’an in Arabic and had memorised the last seven chapters by the age of five. As he grew older Nabeel loved Islam with all his heart, saying his “genes carried their zeal” as he learned to challenge other religions, particularly Christianity.

    “Bolstered by every conversation I had with Christians, I felt confident in the truth of Islam. I boldly issued the call of Islam to anyone and everyone who would listen, proclaiming that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger.”

    Then, as a freshman at Old Dominion University in Virginia, he befriended a sophomore named David Wood and was surprised to find him reading a Bible one night.

    “Incredulous that someone as clearly intelligent as he would actually read Christians’ sacred text,” Nabeel explains, “I launched a barrage of apologetic attacks, from questioning the reliability of Scripture to denying Jesus’ crucifixion to, of course, challenging the Trinity and the deity of Christ.”

    David stood unwavering in his witness and his friendship with Nabeel and the two grew closer as they spent more time discussing the historical foundations of Christianity amidst classes, events and study sessions together.

    “After three years of investigating the origins of Christianity, I concluded that the case for Christianity was strong – that the Bible could be trusted and that Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, and claimed to be God,” Nabeel confesses.

    Then David challenged Nabeel to study Islam as critically as he had studied Christianity from the historical sources themselves.

    Nabeel says he was disappointed when he read early biographies of a revered prophet and explored the accuracy of key texts. “Overwhelmed and confused by the evidence for Christianity and the weakness of the Islamic case, I began seeking Allah for help. Or was he Jesus? I didn’t know any longer,” he says.

    Nabeel cried out to God to reveal himself so that he would know beyond any doubt whom to trust in. He believes God responded to him with one vision and three dreams, the second of which was most powerful.

    In his second dream, Nabeel recounts he was standing at a narrow door watching people take their seats at a wedding feast but he could not enter because he had not yet accepted David Wood’s invitation to the wedding.

    “When I awoke, I knew what God was telling me but I sought further verification. It was then that I found the parable of the narrow door in the Bible (Luke 13:22-30). God was showing me where I stood,” he explains.

    Nabeel began mourning the impact of his inescapable decision, knowing that if he committed his life to Jesus he would betray his entire family and lose honour and all connection to his Muslim community. “My decision would not only destroy me, it would also destroy my family, the ones who loved me most and sacrificed so much for me,” he says.

    He wanted to further verify his conclusions and travelled to Washington D.C., Canada, and England in search of knowledgeable Muslims to answer his questions but none could satisfy his concerns. Then, on his first day of second year in medical school, things became too much to bear and he skipped class to retreat back to his apartment.

    He opened up the New Testament of the Bible and began reading fervently, reaching Matthew chapter 10, verse 37, which says that people must love God more than their mother and father.
    Nabeel pleaded with God, knowing that he would have to give up everything. “The next verses spoke to me, saying, ‘He who does not take his cross and follow after me [Jesus] is not worthy of me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for my sake will find it’.

    “Jesus was being very blunt: For Muslims, following the gospel [about Jesus] is more than a call to prayer. It is a call to die.”

    In that moment Nabeel not only understood, he acted. “I said to God, ‘I submit. I submit that Jesus Christ is Lord of Heaven and Earth, and that He came to this world to die for my sins. I am a sinner, and I need Him for redemption. Christ, I accept You into my life’,” he recalls.

    Then came the gut-wrenching conversation with his parents who reacted as expected, feeling utterly betrayed and devastated. “To this day my family is broken by the decision I made, and it is excruciating every time I see the cost I had to pay,” Nabeel says sadly.

    “But Jesus redeemed my suffering by making me rely upon Him for my every moment, bending my heart toward Him. It was there in my pain that I knew Him intimately. He reached me through investigations, dreams, and visions, and called me to prayer in my suffering. It was there that I found Jesus. To follow Him is worth giving up everything.”

    ■
    Nabeel Qureshi is an itinerant speaker with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and author of ‘Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim’s Journey to Christ’ (Zondervan). More of Nabeel’s testimony can also be found at www. answering-islam.org

    CHALLENGE —The Good News Paper—August 2014 issue

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  7. PS. I’ve just had two hours sleep after a hard day, and need to be on the road again by 8am. And tomorrow will be the same.
    But when I can make time I’ll respond to the (strawman) bullshit you and Fiona are prattling on about. You know, (MIS)-quoting other dills about issues you’ve never bothered to look at yourselves, and which ‘they’ apparently haven’t either.
    …..and ignoring other material that you can’t conveniently misquote.

    eg:-
    I STILL can’t shake off the fact that, on this single page, you’ve attributed the same quote to two different people ~ and have added your own weight to it ~ and thus suggest ‘common knowledge’.
    ….yet still you persist in spreading (quite inaccurate rumours about Ardrey) my citation of whom was only mentioned in passing anyway.

    Credibility sags. But you may be able to qualify for a job with some arm of the Murdoch press.

    Gotta go. Long day looming.

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  8. Meanwhile you self-righteous apologists can sit back and watch another schoolful of kids, another hospital, another UN ‘safe haven’ crowded with already-bombed refugees, shredded with shrapnel and tut-tut your barely-discernible disapproval in a typical christian manner.

    I wonder what Jesus would say?? Assuming he’d even talk to you…
    ….and wasn’t censored for antisemitism.

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    • The son of the founding leader of Hamas has spoken out against Hamas’ killing of innocent civilians in the conflict with Israel.

      Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of Hamas’ leaders in the West Bank, says the Palestinian group is using the targeting of civilians as a tool of war.

      Speaking to CNN, Mr Yousef says Hamas doesn’t care about the lives of the Palestinians.

      “They don’t care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology, a way of worship,” he said.

      “Hamas is not seeking co-existence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and the taking over of Israel,” he went on to say.

      Mr Youself, who fled from Gaza to seek asylum in the US after he left Hamas, says Hamas’ ultimate goal is to not only see the destruction of Israel but to form an Islamic state.

      “It’s almost impossible for anybody to break through and see the truth and real face of Hamas and leave at some point,” he says.

      “As you see in my case I had to leave everything just to say no to Hamas.”

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      • Amnesty International, which has a number of people on the ground in Gaza and consistently condemns Israeli and Palestinian abuses alike, announced recently on its site that it does not see proof of Hamas using human shield — but they added an important asterisk.

        “Palestinian armed groups have stored munitions in and fired indiscriminate rockets from residential areas in the Gaza Strip,” an Amnesty report noted recently. The groups have also “reportedly urged residents in some areas of the Gaza Strip not to leave their homes” after Israel had warned it would attack the area, all of which have the effect of putting Palestinians at risk in the fighting.

        An important secondary question, though, is whether they do this out of a deliberate desire to hide behind (or even provoke the bombing of) Palestinian civilians, or out of simple disregard for putting those civilians at risk.

        Some observers argue that Hamas is more than just indifferent to civilian deaths, and may be doing something even worse than hiding behind them: that the group actively wants Israel to kill Palestinian civilians so that Hamas can rally world opinion against Israel.

        Some of these observers have met and interviewed Hamas leaders, some have not. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who has interviewed Hamas members, wrote that the group “is trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible” because “dead Palestinians represent a crucial propaganda victory for the nihilists of Hamas.” While that is not exactly akin to using unwilling human shields, if true, the effect would be in many ways similar.

        The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote, “Hamas openly encourages civilians to act as human shields,” pointing out that a Hamas spokesman had encouraged Gazans to “defend their rights and their homes with their bare chests and their blood.” While again this is not actually the same as human shields, it is another form of culpability.

        While it is within the realm of possibility that Hamas at some level desires the deaths of Palestinian civilians, proving that the group is acting on this requires a lot of extrapolation and supposition about the internal motivations of Hamas officials. Speaking for myself, I will not pretend to possess special insight into the minds of Hamas leaders.

        What can be proven is that Hamas makes tactical choices, particularly firing from dense civilian areas, that increase the odds that Palestinian civilians will be killed. Hamas could save lives by firing rockets from less crowded areas of Gaza City or storing those rockets in a building that is not a school. But it doesn’t. Even if this is “only” coldblooded indifference, which is the most generous possible reading, this is surely a form of culpability.

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  9. “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”

    The people who gave Jews this reputation, seen exampled by Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”, stemmed from only one branch of Judaism, most of the ‘Jews’ who were left in Europe after the holocaust.

    “The incident in Khazar history which most intrigues their contemporaries, being much commented upon, is the conversion of the Khazar ruler in about 740 to the Jewish faith. The ruling class of the Khazars follows his lead, in history’s only known example of a mass conversion to Judaism. Henceforth this is in effect a Jewish kingdom – dealing on equal terms with Byzantium to the southwest and the Arab caliphate to the south.”

    Read more: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=174#ixzz391ZftgSo

    A huge number of Jews are in reality not ‘the seed of Abraham’. Those who are live by the biblical tenets of Abraham, not avarice.

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    • The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a historian.

      The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that book, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages, Sand argued that the “Jewish people” is an invention, forged out of myths and fictitious “history” to justify Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel.

      Now, another Israeli historian has challenged one of the foundations of Sand’s argument: his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the people of the Khazar kingdom, who in the eighth century converted en masse on the instruction of their king. In an article published this month in the journal “Jewish Social Studies,” Prof. Shaul Stampfer concluded that there is no evidence to support this assertion.

      “Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened,” Stampfer said.

      Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”

      The research ended up taking him four years. “I thought I’d finish in two months, but I discovered that there was a huge amount of work. I had to check sources that aren’t in my field, and I consulted and got help from many people.”

      Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught.

      “It’s a really interesting historical question, but it has political implications,” he said. “As a historian, I’m naturally worried by the misuse of history. I think history should be removed from political discussions, but anyone who nevertheless wants to use history must at least present the correct facts. In this case, the facts are that the Khazars didn’t convert, the Jews aren’t descendants of the Khazars and the contemporary political problems between Israelis and Palestinians must be dealt with on the basis of current reality, not on the basis of a fictitious past.”

      Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms.

      “Those who believed this story – and they are many – usually didn’t do so for malicious reasons,” he says. “I tell my students that the only thing I want them to remember from my classes is the need to investigate and ask – to investigate whether the arguments they hear are credible, reasonable and well-founded.”

      Read more: http://forward.com/articles/200825/why-ashkenazi-jews-are-not-descended-from-khazars/#ixzz391p39Sp6

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      • That is an article from The Jewish Daily Forward. I know nothing about their bias or non-bias. I see there are many sensationalist reports about this, so it could easily be dismissed as another conspiracy theory. But I also see there are many others which seem to be well researched.

        Of course the time elapsed between 740 AD and now would make most of these families unaware that they were of convert families rather than blood lines.

        Perhaps there is another reason that so many Jews today are peace-loving and reject the Zionist thinking and actions. I don’t know but I’m keeping an open mind.

        With regard to Hamas using children as human shields, that wouldn’t surprise me – there is a belief that the end justifies the means. But I think it is unlikely that they could fire their rockets from an area free from population in so densely populated an area, especially as Israel has closed the borders so people can’t leave. Nothing explains the Israel sniper fire killings either, nor the UN shelters being targeted.

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