Thread: Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination

Originally Posted by mrbazoun

EDIT: I think it is wrong to dismiss the photos of the suspects as 'preposterous' evidence. That is what this disagreement boils down to. Nobody bothers to consider the impracticality/impossibility of employing a bunch of white assassins to confuse everyone on the origin of the attack. That is some far-fetched bullshit. If you ignore all my points, respond to just this one.

I may be mistaken in the point I am about to make, so do tell me if I am, but: who was it, again, who blew up a bomb in the London underground? What was his ethnicity?

(Even if I am wrong -- I recall that it was a white Londoner -- the point remains that it seems to me to be ludicrously easy to recruit a bunch of foreign assassins who are politically sympathetic to make the hit. Not far-fetched in the slightest. Especially considering how many politically sympathetic foreigners there ARE in the world.)

I think the photos should be dismissed as meaningless until or unless they can be paired with or used to discover the guys' identities. Their look is absolutely not meaningful in any way.

Originally Posted by gwahir

I may be mistaken in the point I am about to make, so do tell me if I am, but: who was it, again, who blew up a bomb in the London underground? What was his ethnicity?

(Even if I am wrong -- I recall that it was a white Londoner -- the point remains that it seems to me to be ludicrously easy to recruit a bunch of foreign assassins who are politically sympathetic to make the hit. Not far-fetched in the slightest. Especially considering how many politically sympathetic foreigners there ARE in the world.)

I think the photos should be dismissed as meaningless until or unless they can be paired with or used to discover the guys' identities. Their look is absolutely not meaningful in any way.

Four Brits, 3 Pakis, and one Jamaican.

I definitely see your point but there just seem to be so many differences between these 2 scenarios. One is an assassination, the other a terrorist attack. One involves 7 people while the other has close to 30. I do believe it to be possible for an Arab group to recruit 30 white people to assassinate someone, I just find it extremely unlikely they would go through the trouble for Hamas (especially considering all those legit fake passports) But yeah, i've made my point.

Originally Posted by mrbazoun

Nobody is saying they have 'Jew faces,' just European/white ones, for the most part.

This is what you said:

Originally Posted by mrbazoun

The alternative is basically that there is some other highly organised, well funded outfit (read: state agency) out there who has a motive for killing Hamas operatives, who has 1 or 2 dozen operatives working for them that all look remarkably Jewish.

Not white, not European, not Caucasian, but "remarkably Jewish".

Originally Posted by mrbazoun

EDIT: I think it is wrong to dismiss the photos of the suspects as 'preposterous' evidence. That is what this disagreement boils down to. Nobody bothers to consider the impracticality/impossibility of employing a bunch of white assassins to confuse everyone on the origin of the attack. That is some far-fetched bullshit. If you ignore all my points, respond to just this one.

I really, seriously don't think the photos in and of themselves have much value as evidence at all (more on that below). But what I'm calling preposterous isn't the idea of using the photos as evidence, it's the idea of looking at the photos and then saying "Oh what a pack of Jews they look like, that's another thing to throw on the pile of evidence pointing to Mossad!" And as I've said before, I do think Mossad is the prime suspect here, so it's not like I'm refusing to accept that possibility and trying to dismiss anything that incriminates them.

Yeah, the hit squad appears to be predominantly Caucasian. Yeah, if VEVAK or an Arab intelligence agency picked 20 people at random from their personnel files, they wouldn't come up with a mix that looks like that. Frankly, though, I don't think you or I or any of us is qualified to comment on how impractical it would be, or how close to "impossible" it would be, or whether it's "far-fetched bullshit", for an intelligence agency to get two dozen white-looking people for an operation like this. I really have no idea whether it's near-impossible or comparatively easy or somewhere in between, and I'm fairly sure you don't either. That's the sort of intelligence tradecraft thing that us ordinary civilians really can't guess at very effectively. The possibility of organized crime involvement (which was mentioned in some early reports on the killing, although I haven't heard much about it recently) makes it even harder to say anything meaningful about the impracticality of it.

Once again, I do think Mossad is the most likely culprit. I just don't think that the fact that the killers are "white-looking" is a point of evidence against Mossad.

Originally Posted by mrbazoun

That is Mr Shrike's quote. I never said that.

Ahh oops sorry about that... somehow I thought you had said it. My mistake.