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

I will agree that George 'appears to be' unduly biased against Israel despite his no doubt heartfelt statements that he holds no such prejudice.

I won't agree that he is making 'outrageous slurs against Israel'. There are two points of view in the discussion and it is fair game to fully discuss both points of view.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-wall20apr20,0,5085656.story?coll=la-home-headlines

So, to enumerate, you've gotcher Great Wall in China, then you've gotcher Berlin Wall, then there's that wall in Israel, that one south to keep the damned Mexicans out, and now the Baghdad Wall.

And I'm wonderin when fox will shift her victim-friendly interpretation of Frost over to the more aggressive and resolute
'Good fences make good neighbors'.

Good friendly fences with barbed wire and electricity to boot.

Perhaps that's the idea behind the Israelian wall?

Isn't it surprising? The Israelis appear to be far more paranoid/fearful about the several million Arabs that live in Palestine outside of Israel, than they are about the 1 to 2 million Arabs living inside Israel.

Could it possibly be due to the fact that the Arabs outside kill far more Israelis than do the Arabs inside?

I wager that the Israeli Pals are scared to death that their country might fold. They realize very well that they are better off than Arabs in any other Muslim country.

Advocate wrote: I wager that the Israeli Pals are scared to death that their country might fold. They realize very well that they are better off than Arabs in any other Muslim country.

Most of us understand better than ever that Advocate has no idea how the Pals are treated in Israel. It's a good thing there are Jews who understand the realities of Israel; much better than Advocate will ever realize.

Here is an interesting piece from The New Republic Magazine, on Israel ceding to the Palestinian Authority the Israeli land in which many Israeli Arabs live.


04.26.07


CHANGING CITIZENSHIP:
A son of Ariel Sharon--not Omri, the one who's waiting to go to jail after his father dies, but Gilad--has written a brave piece in Thursday's Ha'aretz. In it he presents the demographic problem Israel faces. And it is not just a question of numbers. It is a question of loyalty...or, rather, disloyalty, the disloyalty to the State of Israel of the Israeli Arabs. It is called "Let Taibeh go to Palestine." Uzi Arad, a strategy academic at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlia, wrote a longish piece for us about why (and how) Israel should cede much of the territory on which its Arabs now live to the Palestinian Authority. The land and its people. These Arabs do not want to be Israelis. Let them, then, be Palestinians, bringing with them their pensions, other social benefits and also the habits of an open society that some of them may have learned. Sharon rightly calls this, "a change of citizenship without a change of residence...The inhabitants will live securely in their hones and will not lose a single dunam of land."

He points out that the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine envisioned a "Jewish State" and an "Arab State," not, by the way, a Palestinian state. (No one thought in those terms then, no one.) Such a ceding of territory with its people would add to Palestine an economically and educationally advanced populace, with fertile land and factories, too. These people do not want to be Israelis. Then, they'll have to be Palestinians, bringing their homes and land with them. Let them live under the Palestinian flag. Maybe they'll even help Palestine become a more democratic society.

This piece illustrates the human crud whom Israel is forced to face.

Hezbollah taunts Israel with giant picby Jihad Siqlawi in Lebanon


SHIITE militants of Hezbollah have erected a large photograph of two Israeli soldiers it is holding on Lebanon's border with the Jewish state.

A crowd of the group's supporters chanted slogans as the three-metre by five-metre photograph was put up by unarmed Hezbollah militants in this border district near where the soldiers were seized.

The photograph was a montage of old pictures already circulated in Israel of the two men in civilian clothes before their capture in the deadly July 12, 2006, raid that triggered a 34-day Israeli war on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Mounted on a huge black placard draped in a Hezbollah flag, the photograph showed Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in profile facing each other.

Between them was the legend in English and Arabic - "For the sake of our detainees", a reference to Hezbollah's demands to exchange them for prisoners held by Israel.

The dozen or so Hezbollah militants who erected the photograph were unarmed.

Chants in support of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah rang out from the crowd of local villagers who gathered to watch them put it up.

"We will sacrifice ourselves for you, Nasrallah," they shouted.

A patrol from the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL monitored the event, as did an Israeli patrol on the other side of the border.

A military source in northern Israel dismissed the action as a "propaganda operation."

"It is a classic move on the part of Hezbollah, which has previously done the same," the source said on condition of anonymity.

In the last few months, Hezbollah has raised flags, banners and pictures of its "martyrs" in an apparent show of defiance along the border with Israel.

One placard showed an Israeli helicopter in flames near the village of Qawzah where the group claims to have downed a gunship which crashed in the area during the war last year.

"If you come back (to Lebanon), we will combat you again," read a nearby picture showing Hezbollah fighters.

Near the coastal town of Naqura - where the UN peacekeeping force maintains its headquarters - Hezbollah put up a large mural portraying one of the Israeli warships struck by the guerrilla groups during last year's war.

A beefed-up UN peacekeeping force is patrolling the volatile border area along with Lebanese soldiers under the terms of a UN-brokered truce that ended the war last year and was meant to keep Hezbollah away from the frontier.

Lebanese authorities say that Hezbollah continues to have a presence in the area, but no arms or military equipment are visible.

And since February, witnesses have reported seen apparently unarmed Hezbollah militants staging patrols on motorbikes along the border area which had been under Hezbollah control for years.

Then do you believe that the 'Pals", as you call them, are a lesser form of humanity than Israelis? Interesting.

Not meaning to diminish your point, george, because dehumanization is a fundamental feature of the mental/emotional structures we build when we exclude others or when we act with immense cruelty towards others...

it is also the case that Americans are intimately familiar with the number of americans who have died in Iraq but have, almost universally, not the foggiest notion of how many Iraqis have been blown to pieces. That is not merely a function of group identification. It is also a function of a determined effort to propagandize the citizens of america. Pat Tillman/Jessica Lynch/bravery and sacrifice on the one hand and IED weilding primitives not really deserving of life (and we just know that those creatures have dirty fingernails) on the other hand.

George, is it your belief that members of Hezbollah are Palestinians?

Blatham, Muslims are schooled to believe that Jews are subhumans. Thus, they have no trouble killing Jewish children, women, and the elderly, who are typically the victims of their suicide bombs, missiles, etc. On the other hand, Israel goes to some lengths to avoid hurting noncombatants.

It is interesting to note that, despite the supposed schooling of Moslems to wantonly kill Jewish women, children and the elderly and the great lengths to which Israel goes to avoid hurting non-combatants, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in this struggle is about ten Palestinians to every Israeli killed.

That crap was rebutted before. An organized army is composed of much more efficient fighters.

Oh, I see it now. The Israelis have better intentions than do the Palestinians, but, because they are so much more efficient as killers, they just kill ten times more Palestinians than do their ill-intentioned enemies - evidently without intending to do so.

Tell me, are there any innocent women, children and old folks among those ten Palestinians killed for every Israeli?

Israel kills very few innocents. Most important, unlike the Pals, it doesn't target innocents.

Some people just have their head up their arse; all one needs to do is look at last summer's war in Lebanon. No innocents were killed by Israeli's bombing to people still in the dark.

Yes there were innocents killed. But at least be honest and admit that the reason innocents were killed was mostly because the Pals put their rocket launchers in the midst of populated civilian neighborhoods so that the return fire would go there. They didn't have to put their rocket launchers there. You have to believe that it was intentional. Then when the inevitable happens the press is brought in to show the visciousness of the Israelis even if they have to drag a few extra bodies into the scene to make it look as bad a possible. (There is ample evidence of that posted earlier on this thread.)

If the Israelis cannot go after their attackers wherever their attackers are, the Pals or anybody else can attack and kill and make life miserable for Israelis with absolute impunity simply by making sure they are surrounded by women and children.

The Israelis don't put their weapons in the middle of women and children. This could explain quite a bit of why more Palestinians are killed in these conflicts than are Israelis.
_________________
--Foxfyre

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I?-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Israel frequently dropped leaflets in Lebanon, requesting that civilians leave the area before bombs dropped. It would be laughable to expect Arabs to do this before their rocketing and other attacks on Israel?

No warnings or leaflets accompany the helicopter attacks on vehicles and homes, or most of the airborne and artillery attacks Israel launches on Palestinians.

This has been a 50 year war between the two sides, each of which uses the weapons available to it as they deem necessary. Israel has been consistently 10 times as effective in killing Palestinians as have they been in killing Israelis. However history strongly suggests the war will not necessarily be won by the side that can inflict the most injury, but rather by the one that can endure the most and persevere.