@georgeob1,
georgebob said,
'However, if that appeases your guilt and shame after the lasting effects of the mischief your country has done in the past 100 years in pursuit of empire to create precisely the problems you were citing in the Middle East for which you were so hypocritically chastizing the United States, then I am pleased for you ... contemptous, but pleased.'
It's not easy coming to terms with your colonial past. We've had the Bloody Sunday inquiry in which British paratroopers were found to have gunned down unarmed Nationalist protesters. David Cameron probably didn't expect one of his first acts as prime minister to apologise about our colonial past. You seem to think reconciliation, and coming to terms with the wrongs your country did is hypocrisy.
The only reason you are going on about this, is because Isreal's treatment of the Palestinians is indefensible, so you change the subject. America will not be the most powerful country on Earth for much longer, and you too will have to come to terms with your own country's shameful past. At the moment you seem to be quite proud of what you did to your own indiginous population, shifting all the blame onto others. If anyone is deserving of contempt it is you. Anyway if you're so concerned with hypocrisy you may find the following to be of interest.
When the South African prime minister John Vorster made a state visit to Israel in April 1976, it began with a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel's major Holocaust memorial, where the late Yitzhak Rabin invited the onetime Nazi collaborator, unabashed racist and white supremacist to pay homage to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Compared, say, to routine outcries from organized Jewry over often even mild whiffs of Holocaust controversy, no less remarkable was the bland equanimity both Israeli and diaspora Jews also displayed toward the Vorster visit.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi recalls [The Israeli Connection, Random House: Toronto, 1987, p.x]:
"For most Israelis, the Vorster visit was just another state visit by a foreign leader. It did not draw much attention. Most Israelis did not even remember his name, and did not see anything unusual, much less surreal in the scene [an old Nazi diehard invited to 'mourn' the victims at a Holocaust memorial]: Vorster was just another visiting dignitary being treated to the usual routine."
The old Nazi collaborator was graciously welcomed by his hosts. The South African leader left Israel four days later -- after signing a number of friendship treaties between the Jewish state and South Africa's racist, apartheid regime. A denouement Leslie and Andrew Cockburn describe in Dangerous Liaison [Stoddart Publishing: Toronto, 1991, pp. 299 - 300]:
"The old Nazi sympathizer came away with bilateral agreements for commercial, military, and nuclear cooperation that would become the basis for future relations between the two countries."
Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".
