[Malcolm Armsteen]

It does seem as though Iran is forcing the formation of a coalition against them. An over-reach?

[Oboogie]

It does seem as though Iran is forcing the formation of a coalition against them. An over-reach?

It's a face-saving exercise by Iran, if their objective was lots of death and destruction, they wouldn't have given Israel the heads up days ago.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Very expensive face-saving.
Putin wanted those drones...

[Bones McCoy]

I wish they'd come up with a better name than "suicide drone".

Guided or homing missile was perfectly adequate before everything that flew was a drone, and everything that rolled was a tank.

Suicide sounds all dramatic and kamikaze, so I can see why Journos love it.
But it's extremely misleading about how these weapons work.

[Oboogie]

Very expensive face-saving.
Putin wanted those drones...

Putin also wants the world looking at the Middle East instead of Ukraine, this helps him enormously as has everything which has happened since the 7th of October.

[Crabcakes]

It may backfire though (for Putin) - the aid to Israel from the US is bundled together with the aid to Ukraine. The GOP blocked it in the House, but their position there is weak as hell right now, and they can’t pass their own bills. This may now get through as they can’t risk being the ones to be seen blocking aid.

[Andy McDandy]

Suicide sounds all dramatic and kamikaze, so I can see why Journos love it.
But it's extremely misleading about how these weapons work.

Goes back to WW2 and the Japanese. Something unnatural about suicide attacks. Not Christian, not decent. Not playing by the rules.

[Oboogie]

Suicide sounds all dramatic and kamikaze, so I can see why Journos love it.
But it's extremely misleading about how these weapons work.

Goes back to WW2 and the Japanese. Something unnatural about suicide attacks. Not Christian, not decent. Not playing by the rules.

The glaring difference is that the Kamikaze pilots did actually commit suicide in the course of their attacks, drones are pilotless so no suicide needed. The nearer WW2 comparison would be the V1s, I don't recall anyone calling them suicide weapons.

[MisterMuncher]

They call them UAVs when the "good guys" use them.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Not cricket.

[Bones McCoy]

Suicide sounds all dramatic and kamikaze, so I can see why Journos love it.
But it's extremely misleading about how these weapons work.

Goes back to WW2 and the Japanese. Something unnatural about suicide attacks. Not Christian, not decent. Not playing by the rules.

The glaring difference is that the Kamikaze pilots did actually commit suicide in the course of their attacks, drones are pilotless so no suicide needed. The nearer WW2 comparison would be the V1s, I don't recall anyone calling them suicide weapons.

V1s, are accurately described as "cruise missiles".

By the end of the second world war there were various air-dropped "remote guided missiles".
Enything from a big bomb with steering fins attached, to a 4 engine bomber loaded with explosives - each steered from a control aircraft.

There were also a few genuine suicide aircraft (and boats and submarines).
These had people in.

[Philip Marlow]

What gets me about this little exchange is Hassan-Nahoum’s almost weary, casual chuckle when Burley asks her follow up question, before the eventual suggestion that the ‘terrorists’ could have ‘fought back’ (presumably like Monty Python’s black knight). It’s the attitude of someone who knows that there’s barely a requirement to pretend to give a shit anymore, because there will be no meaningful consequences for any of it:

[Philip Marlow]

Naomi Klein for Passover.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... aza-israel

We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.

That is the false idol.

And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.

Upon first reading I thought it too lugubriously, sententiously expressed all told (and still do, to a point), but have since read Simon Schama on the socials describing it as, ‘a raft of Stalinist-Hamas cant’ and decided that it justifies its existence entirely for provoking that hilarity of a response.

[Oboogie]

Goes back to WW2 and the Japanese. Something unnatural about suicide attacks. Not Christian, not decent. Not playing by the rules.

The glaring difference is that the Kamikaze pilots did actually commit suicide in the course of their attacks, drones are pilotless so no suicide needed. The nearer WW2 comparison would be the V1s, I don't recall anyone calling them suicide weapons.

V1s, are accurately described as "cruise missiles".

By the end of the second world war there were various air-dropped "remote guided missiles".
Enything from a big bomb with steering fins attached, to a 4 engine bomber loaded with explosives - each steered from a control aircraft.

There were also a few genuine suicide aircraft (and boats and submarines).
These had people in.

Exactly - although V2s are the more obvious ancestor of Cruise missiles.

[The Weeping Angel]

Very good article from Jonathan Freedland.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ist-allies

But when those people see activists praising Hamas – the men who killed, tortured and raped so many on 7 October and still hold dozens hostage – or carrying the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that does the bidding of the theocrats in Tehran; or saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; or chanting in sinister unison for the expulsion of a “Zionist” who has been detected in the camp; or lamenting the Jewish role in American feminism, they want nothing to do with such a movement. Because they know that movement wants nothing to do with them. And that feeling is not reduced when they hear a big-name speaker suggest to a New York crowd that any Jew who believes, after two millennia of persecution, that Jews need a home of their own is a worshipper of “a false idol”, a “profane” god.

Though, to be clear, the most striking condemnation of this hardening of supposedly pro-Palestinian rhetoric has come not from Jews, but from Palestinians. The protesters have taken “an extremist, maximalist, inflammatory, unreasonable, and totally illogical approach which is harmful to the pro-Palestinian cause,” wrote Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-born Palestinian analyst who has lost a staggering 31 members of his own family in recent months. Via social media, Alkhatib urges the demonstrators to stop “wasting time with slogan-driven and maximalist activism that does nothing”, and instead to “use your western privilege to actually help the Palestinian people and promote a pragmatic path forward by engaging Israeli and Jewish audiences”.

[Bones McCoy]

Exactly - although V2s are the more obvious ancestor of Cruise missiles.

Off topic and quite boring "ACTUALLY" intervention - just in case you're trapped in a lift with Stephen Fry.

The V1 flew mostly horizontally - that's a cruise missile.

The V2 went up a long way, then came down - that's a ballistic missile.
Thankfully the Nazis didn't manage the Intercontinental bit.