ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Negotiations with IT controlled countries would cause those granted rights to be canceled in all those listed countries, thereby causing us to lose those granted rights in countries not controlled by IT, if we were to negotiate with IT controlled countries.

How do you propose we do this?

You don't have a serious proposal for doing this, or at least, you haven't shown how such a plan could be carried out.

With special comando forces, defeat IT in one nation at a time.

And the idea that attacking these folks would only lead to an average of 1,000 casualties per month is simply ridiculous. We are beating that average right now, and that doesn't count any other confrontations whatsoever.

Choose whatever number you like for my Suppose. You like 10,000 per month better? OK!

Then in 5 years of completely defeating IT, 600,000 non-combatants would be killed.

Then, using the same number, in 20 years of negotiating with IT controlled countries, 2,400,000 non-combatants would be killed.

The point is that a long time negotiation will result in a very much larger number of non-combatants being killed than a shorter time complete defeat of IT.

Cycloptichorn

The point is that a long time negotiation will result in a very much larger number of non-combatants being killed than a shorter time complete defeat of IT.

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China negotiates with NK, Europe negotiates with Iran, and I don't see anyone removing their rights around the globe, do you?

Cycloptichorn

Quote:

The point is that a long time negotiation will result in a very much larger number of non-combatants being killed than a shorter time complete defeat of IT.

Assertion, backed up by no evidence. There haven't been a total of a million people killed by terrorism (real terrorism, not your practice of using it to describe all aggressive actions by countries we don't like) in the last century combined.

Cycloptichorn

Israel's Foes as Beasts and Insects
"But They're Not Human Beings, They are Not People, They are Arabs!"

By PUNYAPRIYA DASGUPTA

08/23/06 "Counterpunch" -- -- Israel's ambassador in New Delhi, David Danieli, sees Hezbollah as something akin to a scorpion (Times of India, 28 July). His is not much of a new invention. Other Israelis in responsible positions have made similar statements before. A few days earlier, Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative at UN, regretted Kofi Annan's failure to mention that the Hezbollah was a bunch of "ruthless, indiscriminate animals". During its First Lebanon War in 1982 Israel's chief of staff Rafael Eitan was gleeful that he had shoved the Palestinian " drugged cockroaches" into a bottle. To Menahem Begin, chief author of the Deir Yassin massacre, who went on to become Israel's prime minister and get a Nobel peace prize, the Palestinians were "two-legged beasts". Immediately after the 1967 war Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, a British Conservative, recounted in the House of Commons a conversation he had with David Hacohen, one-time Israeli ambassador to Burma. As related by Maxwell-Hyslop, Hacohen "spoke with great intemperance and at great length about the Arabs. When he drew breath I was constrained to say: "Dr Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius Streicher [notorious Nazi propagandist] spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing?" I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said: "But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs"." One of the many things Israeli spokesmen seem incapable of realizing is that abuse is no substitute for reason. Israel has amassed much military prowess but remains very poor in logic.

Facts cry out against Israel. The root cause of the present war in Lebanon is, according to the Israelis and Americans, in the capture of one Israeli soldier by Hamas and two by Hezbollah. Not true. It is in the original sin of the partition of Palestine by UN against all moral, historical, demographic, legal reasons. The General Assembly's non-binding Resolution 181 envisaged an astonishingly intricate carving of Palestine into seven pieces to make 608,000 (half of them illegal immigrants) of a total population of 1,935,000 the majority in the biggest possible area. This was the warrant the Israelis needed to begin their relentless drive to restoration of their "historical frontiers" i.e., from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river through the instrumentality of calculated massacres and wars and incredible mendacity.

Had Israel stopped even at the pre-June 1967 lines there would have been no 1973 war, no Lebanon wars, no Hezbollah, no intifadas. Hezbollah was born of the need for an effective resistance to the Israeli juggernaut after the Arab armies had repeatedly failed. Hezbollah ran the Israelis off from Lebanon, excepting Shaaba Farms, a tiny patch Israel treats as a part of the Syrian Golan Heights it conquered and annexed. To the people in the Arab world Hezbollah is their David confronting the Israeli Goliath. Hezbollah's standing firm and inflicting substantial losses on the world's fourth mightiest force this time has heightened Arab expectations.

Mr Danieli's many accusations against Hezbollah include "inventing" the Israeli enemy. The wrong end of the stick. Political invention is an Israeli art. Remember Golda Meir's statement that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people ­ "they did not exist"? Hezbollah was reckoning with unceasing Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty Israel's peace activists say they had watched with alarm the deliberateness behind the Israel's latest war and soldiers admit they had rehearsed the offensives .

Mr Danieli stigmatizes Hezbollah as terrorists. How does he explain the proud confession of Yitzhak Shamir, one-time terrorist and twice prime minister of Israel: "Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat"? Mr Danieli's claim about his government's "calculated restraint" sounds terribly ironic with the current proportion of eight Lebanese dying for each Israeli.

Punyapriya Dasgupta is a journalist. Email: [email protected]

Witness: Taliban dead may be civilians
Wednesday 23 August 2006 3:17 PM GMT

Karzai's credibility among Afghans is damaged by civilian deaths

Nato's claims to have killed 11 Taliban who were preparing an ambush in Afghanistan have been disputed by local people who have said that the dead were civilian grape-pickers.

The Nato-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan said its troops spotted 15 Taliban near a main road in Kandahar late on Tuesday.

After realising they had been detected, the men then moved to a nearby compound which Nato aircraft then bombed, said Major Scott Lundy, a Nato spokesman.

Lundy said: "11 Taliban were killed in the air strike, while two insurgents were later seen leaving the compound."

But civilians in the Zhari area to the west of Kandahar city, said the dead were farmers who had been working in their grape fields in the cool of the evening.

"Those people who died in the bombing were civilians," Ahmad Shapour, a resident of the area, said by telephone.

The killing of Afghan civilians by Nato troops threatens to weaken popular support for the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, in his war against the Taliban.

Nato also said that one of four Canadian soldiers wounded in an attack on Tuesday had died of his wounds, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

Lundy also said that a teenager had been shot dead and another wounded by Nato soldiers after the pair, who were riding a motorbike, had ignored soldiers' orders to stop near the scene of the suicide car-bomb attack.

Afghanistan urges caution
Karzai has urged foreign forces to exercise extreme caution while conducting military operations.

"I have repeatedly asked the coalition forces to take maximum caution while carrying out operations," he said in a statement after a US air strike killed 10 Afghan police on August 17.

On Wednesday, three other civilians were killed in two blasts on a road near Kandahar air base, the main base for foreign troops in southern Afghanistan, a provincial official said.

Afghanistan is going through its bloodiest phase of violence since the Northern Alliance, US-led Afghan rebel faction, overthrew a Taliban government in 2001.

About 2,000 people, including more than 90 foreign troops and scores of Afghan soldiers, police and civilians, have been killed this year.

The report is produced by the Middle East Program with significant contributions from other regional and thematic programs at Chatham House. The following questions are examined:
• How strong is Iran's position and how is it shaped?
• What factors are motivating the alliances and positioning taking place between Iran and its neighbors in the Middle East and Asia?
• How do Iran's neighbors view its pursuit of nuclear technology?
• What reactions can be expected within the region if the US uses military force in attempting to control Iran's nuclear and regional ambitions?

There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East. The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures. The outbreak of conflict on two fronts in June-July 2006 between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon has added to the regional dimensions of this instability.

Iran feels surrounded by crises unleashed or aggravated through Western military interventions. The US not only deploys forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, it also has access to bases in Turkey, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. To the north-west of Iran, there is also instability in the Caucasus. A weakening of central government or a change of regime in Pakistan could pose a threat to Iran. Even though Iran is frequently depicted as a manipulator and instigator of violence in the broader Middle East, most recently through its military and financial support for Hizbullah and Hamas in their struggles against Israel, the Iranian regime is wary of provoking generalized chaos in the region because it is essentially conservative and seeks to maintain the status quo

For his opponents, many of whom are part of the traditional and largely conservative elite, Ahmadinejad's election was the worst of all possible worlds. Not only has he threatened their political and economic interests, but his ideological convictions and lack of flexibility have made him difficult to bend to their views, and well-nigh impossible to accommodate. His rhetoric has tended to inflame tensions and unsettle the domestic economy and private sector, while the wide-reaching changes he has introduced to official and ministerial appointments have upset the continuity of the public administration, even where - as in appointing a new oil minister the autumn of 2005 - he failed to gain acceptance for his preferred candidates. Far more serious in terms of Iran's external status has been Ahmadinejad's attitude towards the international community, and the West in particular. In contrast to the broadly accommodating tone of Khatami, Ahmadinejad's whole philosophy has favored and promoted confrontation. His rationale is that there is nothing to be gained through any form of compromise that the West would exploit as weakness. Many of his opponents have grown concerned that this policy of confrontation is bereft of any underlying strategy other than being an end in itself.

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Funny the similarity we see between the Nazis view of the Jews and the Jews view of the Arabs.

The Arabs are fed up with Zionists discriminating against, and oppressing them in Palestine in the name of the ethnocentric state "for Jews, of Jews and by Jews" imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine with the abetment of the West.

The Arabs are fed up with Zionists discriminating and oppressing them in Palestine in the name of the ethnocentric state "for Jews, of Jews and by Jews" imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine with the abetment of the West.

InfraBlue wrote:

The Arabs are fed up with Zionists discriminating against, and oppressing them in Palestine in the name of the ethnocentric state "for Jews, of Jews and by Jews" imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine with the abetment of the West.

Then why have the Arabs not accepted offers to provide a separate homeland for the Palestinians where they wouldn't have to deal with the Jews at all?

Of course the Jews discriminate against those Arabs killing and trying to kill them. Why in the world the Jews permit the Arabs living within Israel to vote, run for office and engage in free market commerce is beyond me. They exhibit far more patience with the Arabs' pernicious envy than I do.

Foxfyre wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:

The Arabs are fed up with Zionists discriminating against, and oppressing them in Palestine in the name of the ethnocentric state "for Jews, of Jews and by Jews" imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine with the abetment of the West.

Then why have the Arabs not accepted offers to provide a separate homeland for the Palestinians where they wouldn't have to deal with the Jews at all?

The Palestinian Arabs' right to live in the lands where they're from trumps the right of the Zionists to maintain an ethnocentrically motivated majority in those lands.

I don't know for sure, but I would bet a steak dinner that on average, the Jews now living in Israel have been there longer than the Arabs/Palestinians now living in Israel.

Foxfyre wrote:

I don't know for sure, but I would bet a steak dinner that on average, the Jews now living in Israel have been there longer than the Arabs/Palestinians now living in Israel.

There were Arabs in Palestine before the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, started to immigrate there beginning in the late nineteenth century. Most of the Jews in Palestine are immigrants, or descendants of immigrants who arrived there in the twentieth century. Arabs started to immigrate to Palestine in more and more numbers at about the same time.

The question of who was there longer is a red herring.The question of who was there longer does not give the Zionists the right to discriminate and oppress the Arabs there for ethnocentric ends, or otherwise.

But you don't see the Jews firebombing school busses or blowing up market places.

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The Palestinian Arabs' right to live in the lands where they're from trumps the right of the Zionists to maintain an ethnocentrically motivated majority in those lands.

2000 BC:First Canaanite Culture.
1400 BC:Eqypt conquers Palestine
1300 BC:First Israelite Culture.
1100 BC:First Philistine Culture (Philistra, evolved to the name Palestine).
1000 BC:Saul King of Israel (all Palestine except Philistra and Phoenicia).
950 BC:Solomon King of Israel.
721 BC:Israel Destroyed, but Judaea Continued.
516 BC:2nd Temple in Judaea.
333 BC:The Greek, Alexander the Great Conquers Palestine.
161 BC:Maccabaen Maximum Expansion of Judaea to All Palestine.
135 BC:Maccabaen Maximum Expansion Ends.
40 BC:The Roman, Herod Conquers Palestine.
73 AD:Fall of Jerusalem and all resistance ceases.
638 AD:Arabs take Jerusalem.
1099 AD:Crusaders take Palestine.
1187 AD:Saladin Takes Palestine.
1229 AD:Saladin/Crusader Treaty.
1244 AD:Turks Take Palestine.
1516 AD:Ottoman Empire Begins Governing Palestine.
1831 AD:Egypt Conquers Palestine.
1841 AD:Ottoman Empire Again Conquers Palestine.
1915 AD:British Ambassador to Egypt Promises Palestine to Arabs.
1917 AD:British Foreign Minister Balfour Promises Palestine to Zionists.
1918 AD:Ottoman Empire Ends Control of Palestine.
-----------British Protectorate of Palestine Begins.
1920 AD:5 Jews killed, 200 wounded in anti-zionist riots in Palestine.
1921 AD:46 Jews killed, 146 wounded in anti-zionist riots in Palestine.
1929 AD:133 Jews killed, 339 wounded
-----------116 Arabs killed, 232 wounded.
1936-39 AD: 329 Jews killed, 857 wounded
-----------------3,112 Arabs killed, 1,775 wounded
--------------------135 Brits killed, 386 wounded.
--------------------110 Arabs hanged, 5,679 jailed.
1947 AD:UN resolution partitions Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab State.
1948 AD:Civil war breaks out between Jews and Arabs after Jews declare their State of Israel.
1948 AD:State of Israel conquers more of Palestine.
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