McGentrix wrote:xingu wrote:Because they steal land and kill innocent women and children.
Because they believe the land was given to them by God and they mean to take it back one way or another.
Other than that I don't understand either.
You must be a bigot.
Of course.
Anyone who criticizes Israel is not only a bigot but a Nazi as well.
That's a given.
Other than the money that is packed into politicians pockets why do you think they're afraid to jump on Israel? Because people like you assign labels to them.
Robert Fisk: Scores dead as Lebanese army battles Islamists
Robert Fisk: Scores dead as Lebanese army battles Islamists in bloodiest day since civil war
Published: 21 May 2007
Independent UK
Butchery was the word that came to mind. Twenty-three Lebanese soldiers and police, 17 Sunni Muslim gunmen. How long can Lebanon endure this? Just before he died, one of the armed men - Palestinians? Lebanese? - we still don't know - shot a soldier right beside me. He fell down on his back, crying with pain, and I thought he had slipped on the road until I saw the blood pumping out of his leg and the Red Cross team dragging him desperately out of the line of fire. Not since the war - yes, the Lebanese civil war that we are all still trying to forget - have I heard this many bullets cracking across the streets of a Lebanese city.
And the dead. Five of the 17 gunmen were killed after paramilitary police stormed an apartment block in 200 Street in the centre of Tripoli. One lay on his back like a child, water from a broken hydrant streaming over his corpse. Another lay crumpled in a doorway amid glass and the Kalashnikov rifle he was still firing when he died. "How young they all were," a woman remarked with a kind of weariness, and I noticed the dead were also bearded, the little stubble beards al-Qaida's men like to wear.
The bloody events in Lebanon yesterday passed so swiftly - and so dangerously for those of us on the streets - that I am still unsure what happened. Clearly, an al-Qaida-type group tried to ambush the Lebanese army - and succeeded all too appallingly; 23 dead soldiers and police is a fearful figure for a tiny country such as Lebanon. But was it really a Syrian plot, as Fouad Siniora's government suggested? Was this the long hand of Syria stretching out once more across Lebanon's green and pleasant land?
So here are a few facts. A group of armed men tried to rob a Tripoli bank on Saturday and got cornered in an apartment block. Others holed up in the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp north of the city. When I arrived yesterday, army tank fire was bursting in the camp and black-hooded policemen were preparing to storm, Iraqi-style, into the city-centre building. But the robbers were said to have stolen only $1,500. Was that worth this massacre? And is "Fatah al-Islaam" - which has existed in the shadows of the camp for months - really a 300-strong armed group?
Certainly the dead gunmen were real. I found two more heaped together in Tripoli, covered in spent ammunition clips, the apartment building on fire - so hot I could not get up the stairs - but families still struggling down. One woman carried a baby. "Only four days old, he is only four," she wailed at me. One family I found huddling in their bathroom, 12 terrified Lebanese who had spent 24 hours in this tiny room as bullets swept the walls of their home. So what in God's name happened in Lebanon yesterday?
Well, Mr Siniora claimed it was an attempt to destabilise Lebanon - a good guess, to put it mildly - and Saad Hariri, son of the former prime minister murdered here more than two years ago, called the armed men "evil-doers who had hijacked Islam". This is the same Saad Hariri whom at least one American reporter - I refer to Seymour Hersh - suggested was indirectly helping to funnel Saudi money to these same gunmen in a recent article in The New Yorker. The Shia Muslim Hizbollah are supposed to be the bad guys in this scenario, not a Sunni group.
But Tripoli is the most powerful Sunni city in Lebanon - so powerful that not a drop of alcohol wets its restaurant tables - and the men and women running in terror across Tripoli's streets yesterday were also Sunnis. So are the Syrians really concocting an "al-Qaida" in Lebanon? And who are its enemies? The Nato army of the UN force in southern Lebanon, perhaps? But surely not the Lebanese army, the very same army which bravely prevented civil war last January? Yet in 2000, an al-Qaida-type group also ambushed the Lebanese army in northern Lebanon. Was this, too, supposed to be a Syrian invention?
Showers of bullets were still tracing their way over Tripoli last night and the army was said to be preparing to move into the camps. Fatah, Yasser Arafat's clapped-out organisation, announced it was on the side of the army, a wise decision after yesterday's bloodbath. "A dangerous attempt to undermine Lebanon's security," was the response of a government whose Shia cabinet ministers abandoned it last year in the hope of bringing the whole Siniora administration down. But where do we go from here?
And who were the dead men I saw yesterday, perforated by bullets, partly torn open by grenades? Silent testimony is all we receive from the dead. One of them had big eyes above his fluffy beard, eyes which stared at us and at the police who jeered at his corpse. I wonder if they will not come to haunt us soon. And if we will discover what lies behind this terrible day in Lebanon
Foxfyre wrote:The only land Israel has taken is Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights all from which they were being attacked without provocation. Most of that land they have relinquished or offered to relinquish in return for concessions from those who would destroy Israel. All their enemies will happily appropriate the land occupied by Israel the first chance they get.
Israel does not target women and children as a matter of policy. Their enemies do.
So tell me again why it is only Israel who is the target for criticism?
On the face of it you do have a point. I have devoted more air time to criticizing Israel than her local enemies, even though the faults involved are shared - sometimes in greater proportion by Israel's foes in the Middle East.
My motivation is to get clarity regarding the illusions that have for so long governed our foreign policy in nthe Middle East. Israel is NOT a 'little America', a shining beacon of western enlightenment planted in the midst of a backward region that desperately needs it. It is, instead a militaristic theocratic and tribal state, somewhat like those of its neighbors. Israel enjoys Western technology, economic development and enterprise, as well as many cultural artifacts of the West, however its political structure is profoundly unlike those of any western democracy. Ultra nationalistic elements of the political spectrum exist in every Western nation, including the United States. Generally they favor restrictions on the immigration of people of unfamiliar cultures or merely different races as well as on "alein" cultural influences. Usually these types (J.M. Le Pen of France is but one example) are considered as local embarassments. However in Israel the opposite is the case: they and their like run the place and the fundamental concepts of the state itself are derived from their narrow, racist, tribal ideas.
The unquestioning U.S. support for Israel is good for no one. It deprives the Israelis of the incentive to work out an accomodation with those among whom they have chosen to live. It prolongues a conflict that shows every indication of lasting for centuries. It is a dangerous and volatile addition to an already difficult confrontation between the Moslem world and the West.
I reject the notion that Jews can be Jews only in Israel, or that they must forever have a state exclusively for themselves. Large numbers of them have managed quite well to be Jews across wide areas of the world. Do we need to carve out special exclusive places on the earth for Catholics or Mormons or Moslems -- or even atheists, or those who are indifferent to religion? Take these other applications of this central Zionist ida to their logical conclusuions and see where that leads you.
I am shocked that Fisk didn't try to include a Bush angle in that report. Assuredly he blames the US somehow.
McGentrix wrote:I am shocked that Fisk didn't try to include a Bush angle in that report. Assuredly he blames the US somehow.
If instead after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the middle east started to be more peaceful, the credit would be given to Bush by the right.
The invasion of Iraq was a catalyst dropped in the middle east; it turned out for the worse instead of better.
georgeob1 wrote:Foxfyre wrote:The only land Israel has taken is Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights all from which they were being attacked without provocation. Most of that land they have relinquished or offered to relinquish in return for concessions from those who would destroy Israel. All their enemies will happily appropriate the land occupied by Israel the first chance they get.
Israel does not target women and children as a matter of policy. Their enemies do.
So tell me again why it is only Israel who is the target for criticism?
On the face of it you do have a point. I have devoted more air time to criticizing Israel than her local enemies, even though the faults involved are shared - sometimes in greater proportion by Israel's foes in the Middle East.
My motivation is to get clarity regarding the illusions that have for so long governed our foreign policy in nthe Middle East. Israel is NOT a 'little America', a shining beacon of western enlightenment planted in the midst of a backward region that desperately needs it. It is, instead a militaristic theocratic and tribal state, somewhat like those of its neighbors. Israel enjoys Western technology, economic development and enterprise, as well as many cultural artifacts of the West, however its political structure is profoundly unlike those of any western democracy. Ultra nationalistic elements of the political spectrum exist in every Western nation, including the United States. Generally they favor restrictions on the immigration of people of unfamiliar cultures or merely different races as well as on "alein" cultural influences. Usually these types (J.M. Le Pen of France is but one example) are considered as local embarassments. However in Israel the opposite is the case: they and their like run the place and the fundamental concepts of the state itself are derived from their narrow, racist, tribal ideas.
The unquestioning U.S. support for Israel is good for no one. It deprives the Israelis of the incentive to work out an accomodation with those among whom they have chosen to live. It prolongues a conflict that shows every indication of lasting for centuries. It is a dangerous and volatile addition to an already difficult confrontation between the Moslem world and the West.
I reject the notion that Jews can be Jews only in Israel, or that they must forever have a state exclusively for themselves. Large numbers of them have managed quite well to be Jews across wide areas of the world. Do we need to carve out special exclusive places on the earth for Catholics or Mormons or Moslems -- or even atheists, or those who are indifferent to religion? Take these other applications of this central Zionist ida to their logical conclusuions and see where that leads you.
I accept that you see no reason for a Jewish state and think that it is harmful for there to be one. I accept that you intend no malice toward Jews (or anybody else) in that point of view though my understanding of thousands of years of Jewish history leads me to a different point of view.
I accept that you think the United States should make its support for Israel more conditional, while others bitterly complain when the USA makes conditions in the support it extends to some other places (but that is a different subject).
I disagree that the USA has provided unquestioning support. I think the US has been quite critical of some of Israeli actions/policies and quite a bit of this criticism has been made public. I also think many if not most Americans understand the precariousness of Israel's existence and understand that is Israel does not preserve its Jewish majority, there will be no more Israel. You can't compare this to other countries who have subjected certain races etc. to inferior status on the same kinds of fears. Israel's enemies have made it quite clear that this is the situation that Israel faces. That makes Israel's circumstances quite different even as Israeli Jews treat their non-Jewish fellow citizens as equals.
The Arab nations have largely already carved out their pieces of the world as havens for Moslems and Moslems most certainly receive all the preferential treatment in those nations. But your suggestion that I (or anybody else) thinks Jews cannot be Jews other than in Israel is a mischaracterization of what anybody has said. I quite clearly acknowledged that the large majority of Jews in the world do not live in Israel and probably will never live in Israel. But few people of the world have receive the religious, political, and social persecution that have been experienced by the Jews through most of their many thousands of years of history and that extends right up to present day. I do not begrudge the Jews having one tiny place in the world that is open to Jews, especially persecuted Jews, as a place where they know they will be accepted and wanted.
If I were to live abroad, I might be wholly enthralled with the place where I resided, but it would be a great comfort to me to know that if things became politically or socially untenable or dangerous for me, that I had a place I could go home to and be safe. A friend of mine who had lived and worked and done social work in Venezuela for 20 years recently returned to the States for that very reason. Otherwise they would probably have lived out the remainder of their years there.
It is not unreasonable for Jews who are so frequently the target of discrimination or hostility to know they have one tiny place in the world where they can go to be safe.
Foxfyre wrote:It is not unreasonable for Jews who are so frequently the target of discrimination or hostility to know they have one tiny place in the world where they can go to be safe.
Safe? in Israel? They are safer back in their home countries. Are you saying they have to escape the discrimination and hostility of Brooklyn and Florida or London and Paris to live in that little island of safety called Israel?
Steve 41oo wrote:Foxfyre wrote:It is not unreasonable for Jews who are so frequently the target of discrimination or hostility to know they have one tiny place in the world where they can go to be safe.
Safe? in Israel? They are safer back in their home countries. Are you saying they have to escape the discrimination and hostility of Brooklyn and Florida or London and Paris to live in that little island of safety called Israel?
No but several thousand had to escape a South American country recently when policies targeted Jews for discrimination and persecution. Most Jews love their home countries and are good citizens of those countries. But as I said in a previous post, governments change, policies change, circumstances change sometimes frequently for many peoples around the world. Jews seem to be a primary target in many of such circumstances.
Why when the Japanese can favor Japanese citizens with impunity, why when Moslem nations gives Moslems intentionally favored treatment, why when virtually every ethnic group in the world can form organizations and movements to favor their own ethnic group and this is lauded as a good thing, is the idea of one tiny plot of ground designated as a haven for displaced Jews viewed as so threatening or objectionable?
cicerone imposter wrote:Steve, The YMCA in Jerusalem was designed by the same architect as the Empire State Building. His design incorporates the three great monotheistic faiths to encourage dialogue and diplomacy. It sits across from the famous Kind David Hotel without any acknowledgement of its message for peace. It's really a shame.
Interesting thanks. It is sad. Its also a great wasted opportunity. If the area formerly known as British mandated Palestine could become a real home for all the people who live there, or who wish to live there, it could be a beacon of hope for the entire world...
But never under any aparthied state.
Quote:Why....is the idea of one tiny plot of ground designated as a haven for displaced Jews viewed as so threatening or objectionable?
Well how would you feel if it was your tiny plot of ground?
Steve 41oo wrote:Quote:Why....is the idea of one tiny plot of ground designated as a haven for displaced Jews viewed as so threatening or objectionable?
Well how would you feel if it was your tiny plot of ground?
If the former owners of the plot of ground on which I reside presumed to take it back now, I would fight for my plot of ground. It was provided to me via legal contract and transaction authorized by a valid authority. I would guess that none of the Palestinian authorities now pledged to destroy Israel ever had any contractual or legal authority to the land they now demand from Israel.
Likewise I can't now go back and demand property that I once occupied just because I want it or because I resent those who now occupy it. In a previous generation my family was cheated out of a fairly large tract of land in Texas, land that is very valuable now. Should I have the right to reclaim it, or do those who bought it more recently in good faith be required to give it up?
There is no land anywhere on Earth in which such issues could not come up. So why is only Israel required to give up land they acquired legally? The occupied territories are a different story and must be dealt with differently, but many of the same principles must apply.
Fox wrote: It was provided to me via legal contract and transaction authorized by a valid authority.
No matter how illegal that authority is in the eyes of the world court.
Fox wrote: It was provided to me via legal contract and transaction authorized by a valid authority.
No matter how illegal that authority is in the eyes of the world court. "Valid" only in the eyes of the tainted.
Fox wrote: It was provided to me via legal contract and transaction authorized by a valid authority.
No matter how illegal that authority is in the eyes of the world court. "Valid" only in the eyes of the tainted.
Fox wrote: It was provided to me via legal contract and transaction authorized by a valid authority.
No matter how illegal that authority is in the eyes of the world court. "Valid" only in the eyes of the tainted.
The U.N. was the closest thing to a world court that existed in the 1940's and it was the U.N. that provided Israel with the land for a State of Israel specifically as a haven for displaced Jews.
Fox wrote: The U.N. was the closest thing to a world court that existed in the 1940's and it was the U.N. that provided Israel with the land for a State of Israel specifically as a haven for displaced Jews.
They didn't approve of the country becoming an aparthied state. Show me where I'm wrong?
Foxfyre wrote:I would guess that none of the Palestinian authorities now pledged to destroy Israel ever had any contractual or legal authority to the land they now demand from Israel.
There are people who still have deeds to homes inside Israel which were taken from them. Why not just compensate those who lost their land?
Quote:So why is only Israel required to give up land they acquired legally?
What makes it legal to take it by force and deny the right of return of refugees while simultaneously inviting those from all over the world who have never laid eyes on the land to have it for free?
Quote:The occupied territories are a different story and must be dealt with differently, but many of the same principles must apply.
What makes it different and what same principles must apply?
Someone asked what is so objectionable about having a small plot of land designated as a home for Jews and to that I say nothing is inherently wrong with it. But there is something wrong with taking that land by force, displacing thousands of people and excluding them from their homes for the simple fact that they are not Jewish. It's quite fundamental.
