Wednesday 31 December 2008

Woosy juice

According to various uninformed sauces, such as Antony Lowenstein, the Juice are afraid of a few home-made rockets.

Yes, one of the strongest military powers in the world wants everybody to believe it’s scared of a few home-made rockets.

For comparative purposes, I did an image search tonight for the results of rocket attacks over the last few decades. Found these two over here:

Our Operations shack after a near hit by an enemy 122mm rocket attack. Bien Hoa Vietnam.




I have only seen photos of the results of rocket attacks on Israel once, and that was on a blog during the war with Hezbollah a while back. The Israeli's don't publish photos of rocket hits because they don't want to tell their enemies where the rockets are landing. The poms performed an intelligence operation on the jerries during WWII in order to make the jerries believe their V1's were landing in central London, when in fact they were dropping short in the east end. Not so much fun for the East Enders, but sometimes the only way to find out how effective your bombing has been is to listen in to what those that have been bombed are saying about the bombing.

Hence Israel is giving nothing away. But the photos that I did see, which were taken privately by someone taking a risk in going into a town that was under bombardment and had been evacuated of all civilians, showed a lot of damage from the rockets. When the warheads are packed with shrapnel, such as ball bearings, the effect is something like what you see above. A nice big bit of shrapnel like that will either kill you outright or maim you horribly if you are caught in the open when it goes off. By maim, I'm talking about it removing an arm or leg in a rather nasty fashion.

Here's a photo from Confederate Yankee of some of these "home made" rockets being prepared for launch.


When the words "home made rockets" are used, we are meant to think that they are harmless little toys. However, these rockets you see here are in fact bigger than those that you'd find attached to this Hind helicopter gunship.


Similarly, if I showed you this photo of a US Cobra helicopter gunship, with its pods of rockets on each side, the average pinko leftie would automatically go, "Oooh, that's bad. Those things kill people".


But checkout these qassam rockets again. They are significantly larger than the 2.75 inch rockets on the gunships above. So if rockets on a gunship are bad and kill people, how can these even bigger rockets be harmless?


Now you could argue that the US and Israeli militaries manufacture a much better rocket in their military-industrial complex than Hamas can put together in a suburban factory (always called a "workshop" by the way, to make it sound crude and pre-industrial revolution, like they are hand carved out of wood by men perched on stools), and they probably pack them with better explosives than Hamas can lay their hands on.

But I still wouldn't want one of these things landing on my kitchen roof. These things are not packed with sparklers. Hamas are not sending flowers. They are sending packed ball bearings.

It's too late for this. I'm going to bed.

2 comments:

1735099 said...

Hamas use Qassam rockets. They are crude, and can certainly kill, but you'd have to be unlucky, as they're unguided and their flight path is quite random.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket
The 2.75 inch rockets in your pics were used in Vietnam on "Bushrangers" (a cobbled-up UH-1H chopper with roughly the same weaponry as the Cobras). See http://www.hotkey.net.au/~marshalle/raaf/bushranger.htm
I had only one experience of seeing them used when we encountered a bunker system, and they were very effective.
I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of either a Qassam or a 2.75, but would suggest that the 2.75 would be much more lethal.

Anonymous said...

Um Antony is a douche.

The Israeli military are not the ones being targeted by the rockets.

Israel civilians are.

Antony Loewenstein's daddy issues are so powerful that they cloud any semblance of logic or rational thought under the need to criticize the people he claims are his own.

I'd suggest that Antony Loewenstein go to Sderot to write the sequel to "Israel Question" while bravely showing those cowardly Israeli soldiers not to be scared of home-made rockets.