re: Israel being attacked

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…would they smuggle them into other countries?

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And, how on earth would you get anything at all out of Gaza at this time?

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It hurts my stomach anytime I think about those poor hostages….I just can’t even imagine.

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Agreed, I can’t imagine anything more terrifying. For all of them, but especially the foreigners such as the Americans young people who were there having fun at a dance party and completely not used to Palestinians and the continuous threat of violence from them. Dancing on your vacation and then all of a sudden everyone around them are being killed by what looks to you to be masked terrorists who then haul you off, heart pounding for sure, to who knows where. Led down relatively dark/ damp / rough cut tunnel after tunnel by several guys carrying AK's speaking a language you can’t understand but yelling at you the whole time you later find out you’re somewhere in Gaza and don’t know if you’re going to live or die, or worse be tortured then die. They throw you in some dark barren hole in the wall of a room and leave you for hours upon hours to sit and live inside the worst of your thoughts and paranoias until someone comes and interrogates you. You tell them you aren’t military or even Israeli over and over while they keep yelling at you. Down the hall you hear someone screaming in Hebrew you imagine for what must be something akin to "Help me" followed by two gunshots and then silence. A girl is led past with a badly beaten face and blood soaked pants around her crotch where she had obviously been savagely gang raped. And this goes on for days and days while you have no news of the outside world or what’s going on or if anyone is ever going to come help you. And honestly you’re thinking death is preferable than continuing on any further.


I can’t imagine being those poor people and I hope they’re rescued soon and the people responsible killed, preferably as painfully as possible.

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It doesn't make them bad people, just foolish.

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I disagree. Lionizing the people who murdered your savior because of a belief in Scofield heresy makes you more than foolish.

Are you really doubling down on a different account?

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I used to think my Orthodox friends were being too harsh when they said Baptists and Evangelicals aren't Christians.

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Based

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Lionizing the people who murdered your savior

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If they hadn't, He wouldn't be our Savior. I thank them and let God handle any punishment he sees fit. We got bigger fish to fry. Like dealing with moslims that hate both of us, and will proudly die if it meant they took any of us out.

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I can’t imagine being those poor people

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It seems you imagined it quite well.

The problem you run into is that Israel also kills women and children, and at a much higher rate. They inflict a lopsided death toll on the Palestinians. And most die in collective punishment strikes, like we see in Gaza now. This does not excuse the Palestinians, but from a Christian perspective, this is a problem, because it violates our rules about proportionality. The stronger power is held to a higher standard and its expected to act with restraint.

The calls for ethnic cleansing are also a moral problem (although it’s something that we participated in after WW2 - and shame on us for doing so.) The how is also something that people don’t think through. Are you going to kill and terrorize them till they flee? Like the Croats did. Or will you forcibly imprison them, and transport them somewhere else? May I suggest cattle cars?

Expecting either side to behave in a Christian fashion is unrealistic though, unless we’re talking about the Palestinian Christians, which is a small and unfortunately ever dwindling population. That’s partly do to the decline of the faith as a whole, and the rise of Islam in the region, but it also has a lot to do with the nasty repression that Israel subjected them to. Many left.

In the last war of survival (WW2), the US did whatever it took to crush the Germans and the Japanese. Why shouldn’t Israel do any different?

Sure you don’t set out to kill civilians needlessly, but if the bad guys are hiding amongst the civilians and the civilians are supporting them then what else can you do?