Advocate you still have a question outstanding in another thread on this subject. Here it is again...just in case you forgot it:
Do you seriously think you're going to get any sense out of someone who starts threads by pasting a Melanie Phillips column from the Daily Mail?
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Frank Apisa
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Wed 13 Feb, 2013 02:47 pm
@Advocate,
Quote:
Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5251944)
I'm sure that you are aware that that there has been a strong surge in the persecution and murder of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East. This is despite the latter living for, perhaps, thousands of years in the ME in relative peace.
Could you tell me what changed to cause this ramp-up of murder and persecution? Maybe that will answer your other questions.
Try answering the other question. The answer to that may very well answer this one as well. Hatred has a tendency to take on a life of its own...to spill over.
I noticed that no one has successfully assailed the accuracy of the pieces that I have posted.
As Contrex has pointed out the pice is by Melanie Phillips, a virulent Islamaphobe. As to David Ward's comments, this is not a story about prejudice, but about the power of the Israel lobby. All Ward did was point out the disgraceful treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. He tried to stick to his guns but was put under immense pressure by the Liberal Party leadership. This is a party headed towards electoral meltdown, and the last thing they want to do is lose part of their demographic.
Israel attempts to label all legitimate criticism of the occupation as anti-Semitic. If you throw enough mud some of it sticks, and nobody likes to be called bigoted. It's worked with the BBC often enough.
If Ward deserves criticism it should be about the timing of his message, so close to Holocaust Memorial Day, and his choice of words. He should have criticised Israelis not Jews, but the broad thrust of what he said was true. Palestinians are suffering persecution on a daily basis.
The Liberals are heading for collapse at the next general election but David Ward should do alright, he's an MP for Bradford with a large Moslem demographic. Their other MP is George Galloway, this is what he has to say about Israel.
Israel has for the first time confirmed it imprisoned an Australian-Israeli man under a false identity for security reasons, and that he died in custody.
The justice ministry did not name the man - previously known as Prisoner X, and recently identified by Australian media as Ben Zygier - but said his family was notified of his detention.
Quote:
The statement published by the Israeli justice ministry on Wednesday evening gave only a few new details about the case.
"For security reasons, the prisoner was held under a pseudonym, but his family was notified of the arrest immediately," it said.
"The prisoner was held in jail under a warrant issued by a court. The proceedings were overseen by senior officials in the justice ministry and he was duly represented in all the proceedings against him."
The statement added that he "was found dead in his cell two years ago" and that a closed-door inquiry into the death was ordered at the time.
The justice ministry said the investigation concluded six weeks ago that the cause of the prisoner's death was suicide, but that the judge recommended that the state "pursue a negligence investigation".
"National security prevents the release of any other details in this case."
So you think it's standard procedure for a man to be found dead in his cell, then to have his identity and the circumstances of his death hushed up by the authorities. What sort of country do you live in?
They want it both ways, they want to be treated like a democracy, but they want to behave like a brutal dictatorship.
The fact of the matter is they are the occupying power, and it's been the longest occupation in recent history.
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Finn dAbuzz
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Fri 15 Feb, 2013 02:10 pm
I don't that Ward's comment was so terribly heinous.
It is outlandish to compare the Holocaust to Israel's treatment of Palestinians though. One can condemn (rightly or wrongly) the latter without equating it to the attempted extermination of an entire people, with all the associated "lesser" crimes of torture, medical experimentation, rape, thievery etc.
There is also a significant aspect of the Israeli/Palestinian experience that was missing in the Nazi program of genocide, the Palestinians have slaughtered Israeli innocents. Now some will say that this slaughter is a natural if not necessary reaction to oppression, but many others disagree, and those others don't happen to be the equivalent of Nazi sympathizers.
One could, I suppose, argue that having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, that it is ironic that Jews ever might deal with a people in any way that could even remotely be compared to their treatment by the Nazis, or one could argue that having suffered one Holocaust they may understandably be guilty of some degree of excess in order to assure they never experience a second.
In any case if the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis is in anyway comparable to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and someone finds fault in Jews for not having learned what they consider to be the lesson of the Holocaust, shouldn't the Palestinians be expected to have learned that lesson as well, and to foreswear violence?
Israelis have never targeted Pal civilians. The Pals have done this continuously, such as in their bombings of public buses, pizza and bingo parlors, etc. If any group acts like beasts, it is the Pals.
In any case if the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis is in anyway comparable to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and someone finds fault in Jews for not having learned what they consider to be the lesson of the Holocaust, shouldn't the Palestinians be expected to have learned that lesson as well, and to foreswear violence?
The lessons are different though.
One is the lesson about having been oppressed and then hypocritically oppressing another people in the name having been oppressed, the other is the response to that oppression, and the miserable failure that the perpetration of violence can or may lead to. There isn't anything necessarily or inherently hypocritical about it, and violence against oppression doesn't always result in failure.
In any case if the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis is in anyway comparable to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and someone finds fault in Jews for not having learned what they consider to be the lesson of the Holocaust, shouldn't the Palestinians be expected to have learned that lesson as well, and to foreswear violence?
From the man who argues that America should be allowed to kill whoever they want (and their children as well) with unmanned drones.
Israelis have never targeted Pal civilians. The Pals have done this continuously, such as in their bombings of public buses, pizza and bingo parlors, etc. If any group acts like beasts, it is the Pals.
One thing about the bombings perpetrated by the militant Palestinians against the Zionists is that, for the most part, they have targeted Israel Defense Forces (IDF) aged Zionists or Zionists that have connections with the IDF or the other Israel security services. IDF service is compulsory in Israel for most Zionists. One IDF aged Zionist in a crowd is a legitimate target to the militants and more often than not groups of these Zionists are found on public buses, pizza and bingo parlors, etc. The collateral damage inflicted by their bombings is rationalized as either being part and parcel of their resistance struggle against their Zionist oppressors, or in the case of underage collateral damage, it's rationalized as a pre-emptive strike seeing as how these Zionists will eventually be recruited to oppress the Palestinian peoples.
