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

The Hez attacks are very common knowledge. Look it up. Israel dropped leaflets for civilians to leave targeted areas. King David was the Brit MILITARY HQs.

Israel doesn't target civilians.

Israel pushes to establish Pal state.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/890318.html

Really? Hum. Let's see how Advocate would answer that statement:



So. There. I'm sorry, but I have to agree. Please back up your claims that there were "thousands" of Hezbollah attacks on Israel before the IDF started bombing Lebanon.




Oh. Right. That makes it okay, I guess. Somebody tell the Palestinians that they should get some leaflets, too, before they start bombing Israeli civilians.




Are you saying that terrorist attacks on military targets are permissible? Then you're probably okay with Hezbollah kidnapping IDF soldiers, aren't you?





Well, then the IDF are damn bad at shooting. After all, they managed to kill more Palestinian civilians without targeting them than the Palestinians killed Israeli citizens while explicitly targeting them.

Abbas hopes for peace 'in a year'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6918518.stm

Advocate's brain is so convoluted, I wonder how he sees straight! LOL

Another excellent question!

No! Legitimate claim to land by any people is established by conquering that land, purchasing that land, and/or by a treaty.

I am saying there is no "international law" basis for dividing Palestines into an Arab state and into a Jewish state, because there is no such thing as international law. There is only international consensus. However, there are such things as treaties. Treaties among two or more states constitute law because they are agreed to by the legal governments of those states. The UN charter is such a treaty. I am unaware of any statements in the UN charter that require member states, under penalty of law, to obey resolutions adopted by the UN. Consequently, it is not unusual for member states to ignore UN resolutions.

The British asked the UN to recommend a solution to the Palestinian problem. The UN did that in 1947.

Members of the UN, are granted by its Charter's Article 51 the right to defend themselves against armed attacks. Israel in Palestine is a member of the UN. I don't know whether there is an Arab state in Palestine that is a member of the UN.



What is required to solve the Palestinian problem is an agreement/treaty between Non-Israeli Palestinian Arabs and Israel to grant each other a right to exist, and grant each other equal civil rights.

What is required of us observers is to hold both parties to the same standard of civil conduct.

The Jews in Israel as well as the Arabs in Israel are denied the same freedom to move around in Israel because of the threat of Arab terrorist attacks on Israeli inhabitants.

If I were an Arab or Jew in Israel I would fear and detest this situation, and probably blame the government of Israel for not coming up with a better way to control the Arab terrorists.

The Brits were combatting Arab terrorists, Jew terrorists, Arab retaliators, and Jew retaliators.

RELEVANT TO BRITAIN AND RELEVANT TO AMERICA

Why I Admire Israel
by Farid Ghadry, www.reformsyria.org/blog, May 5, 2007

As a Syrian and a Muslim, I have always had this affinity for the State of Israel. As a businessman and an advocate of the free economic system of governance, Israel to me represents an astounding economic success in the midst of so many Arab failures. I measure achievement not in terms of trade or dollars going in or out (Saudi Arabia is best at that) but in terms of scientific prowess that ultimately churns the economic engine of success.

While many Arabs view Israel as a sore implant, I view it as a blessing. I should provide an example of what I mean.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, we learned that friends of ours lost a daughter. Some ten days later, we visited them at their house with some other friends. Conversation surrounding the tragedy ensued and one of my dearest friends whom I have a lot of respect for objected to the story he heard about how the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, through connections, was able to have the body of Liviu Librescu delivered to his family, for religious reasons, before anyone else could have any access to their loved ones. He was fuming against the Ambassador more than against the authorities' unwillingness to deliver simultaneously the bodies of Muslims who also perished, in particular the Egyptian student Waleed Shaalan. I asked him "Did the Egyptian Ambassador call to have Shaalan's body delivered early to his family in accordance with our religious traditions?" He did not know the answer to the question but nonetheless kept fuming against the Israeli Ambassador. It was as if the Israeli Embassy did it to spite him or any other Arab. For me, it confirmed the admiration I have for a country that respects their own.

After some heated argument, almost all agreed that Arabs do not have any measure of respect for their own people (due mostly to lack of accountability) and that Arabs must embrace self-empowerment by learning how rather than why Israel begets results.

Israel's democracy and its economic prosperity are all needed in our midst in the hope that we can learn self-empowerment. It is not hard to imagine our young people learning about empowerment when they watch Israeli democracy on their television sets, but it is hard to imagine they will be able to apply it living under an authoritarian system of government. That is the reason why Arabs send their own young people as suicide bombers instead of nurturing them to grow and become citizens of the world so that one day they can use their connections to help their people like the Israeli Ambassador to Washington helped the Librescu family. How could they nurture them in an environment void of hope for their future?

Israel has, in less than 60 years, built an economy ten times that of Syria with one-fifth the population. How does one explain this fact? It is very simple: Israel is a vibrant democracy. For no fault of our own, Syria has suffered from one occupation after occupation, the latest being organically grown represented by the Assad family. One would think that a Syrian family occupying Syria is less harmful than the French occupying Syria. The truth is, it is much worse. The not-so-civilized Assad family uses much worse despotic techniques. The result is that not only Syrians suffer from lack of opportunities and stifling liberties but they also suffer from lack of hope, dignity, and pride as well; a good formula to create suicide bombers.

When the renowned Berkshire Hathaway of Omaha fancied to invest in the Middle East, it bought shares in Israeli industrial companies on the basis of merit. I do not know of any western investment company who has bought shares in Arab public companies except for the lucrative cellular business, which are unmanageable without western know-how and equipment. That does not mean it won't happen one day, but it will certainly not happen to any of the countries surrounding Israel any time soon (with maybe the exception of Jordan) as long as self-empowerment is absent.

It is said that approximately one third of all scientific Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. The ratio is mind boggling. One third comes from a universe of 15 millions Jews and the remainder two-thirds from the much larger pool of 6 billion-plus people. Arabs (mostly Egyptians) have two or three Nobel Peace and Literature Prizes (From a pool of 350 million people) but no Arab has ever won a Nobel in sciences be it chemistry, physics, or medicine. Any argument here as to why Israel is so important to the region?

The assertion made today by the likes of the ignorant Ahmadinajead, who aspires to wipe Israel off the map, and the violent Hamas, some members of which covet throwing the Jews to the sea, reminds me of the story of two factories built side-by-side. One is very successful and its employees take a good paycheck and the other is not so successful and its employees are economically deprived. The manager of the not-so-successful factory spends all his time striving to destroy the successful factory when he in fact should be spending his time learning and imitating the successful factory for his people to luxuriate in similar prosperity. If some of the Palestinians are not willing to learn (Many do want to imitate the success of the factory next door but are not given the chance to express their views or to be elevated to positions of power), we Syrians want to learn and imitate.

James A. Baldwin said: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." To me, any dispute over shared lands is secondary to bringing prosperity to my people.

This guy's a pawn of the neo-cons who advocates "regime change" in Syria along the lines of that which the US perpetrated in Iraq.

In all of his fawning praise of Israel, not once does he mention Israel's abject oppression of the Palestinian people, an oppression upon which the Zionist state's very existance is necessarily predicated upon.

Do you REALL know him and his background that well?

I believe he is largely accurate in his praise of the economic and social achievements of the Israeli government, and in noting the contrasts with most Arab governments. For its citizens, Israel truly is a responsive, responsible democracy. Its economic achievements are significant and impressive relative to those of its neighbors. Israel has of course received huge subsidies over the years from the United States, and, as well from Jews in other countries. However, it is also true that these large sums have been generally used wisely and with a minimum of corruption - something that can't be said of some of Israel's antagonists.

I believe his central thesis, namely that neighboring Arab governments would do well to imitate these aspects of Israel's behavior, is undeniably true.

I agree with you that Israel has been guilty of foolish, illegal and often immoral oppression of the Palestinian people. Moreover the tortured rationalizations that Israelis and their Zionist supporters make to justify all this, must inevitably make them either base cynics or hoplessly muddle-headed (if they truly believe it). Worse still this has, in my view, seriously jeapordized the strategic future for Israel.

However, recognizing the serious errors and evil that Israel has inflicted on their neighbors does not require that the observer become blind to Israel's real achievements. Indeed the juxtaposition of these achievements with the shortsighted and oppressive policies of Israel with respect to its neighbors since 1967, makes the present situation all the more tragic.

In the same vein, sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians should not blind the sympathetic observer to the deficiencies in the deficiencies of their organizations.

I agree about Israel's economic achievements, but I do not agree about what you describe as its social achievements. The state which on the one hand is the national homeland for Jews, and on the other claims to be at the same time a democratic state has had a schizoid approach to it's societal issues as concerns its citizens that are not Jewish. Ultimately, its "democraticness" is secondary to its ethnocentric nationalism.

And sure, the ethnocentric state accommodates its secondary citizens reasonably well given these diametrically opposed determinations. But in the end it still discriminates against its non-prefered citizens. Kinder, gentler discrimination is still discrimination.

But this is not a good social model upon which its neighbors can find inspiration. The best societal model for a nation with mixed ethnicities is an ethnically neutral one, not an ethnocentric one with certain concessions made for the disfavored ethnicities.

The problem of Israel and the people it discriminates against and oppresses began long before the Six-Day War. It began with the British making a foolish and immoral promise to the Zionist Federation at the beginning of the last century to help them create a Jewish state in Palestine where the majority of its inhabitants were not Jewish.

All of this, however, does not negate the fact that Israel's existance is necessarily predicated on the discrimination against and the oppression of the Palestinian people, a fact which Ghadry blatantly ignores. I guess he sees it--like most Westerners do--as something that is par for the course, as it were.

It is just so evil how Israel defends itself. BTW, Palestine is a homeland for Pals wherever they live (provided, however, they are not Jews, Christians, Sikhs, or other minorities). They would most likely be murdered forthwith should they return to Palestine.

Advocate, I don't think anybody here has argued that Israel has no right to defend itself. But there is a difference between self-defence, targeted bombing of terror suspects, indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighbourhoods and, finally, terror attacks (not by Israel, but by Zionists, I should add).

The fact that you completely and utterly fail to differentiate between those acts and are absolutely willing to excuse just about any of those as long as Israel or even Zionist terror organisations are the perpetrator doesn't make you a very good advocate for Israel's right to self-defence. In my humble opinion.

A state whose very existence in necessarily predicated on the discrimination and oppression of a people does not have a moral right to defend itself. Discrimination and oppression in this situation--in any situation for that matter--is indefensible let alone moral or legitimate.

What would be moral is if such a state were to forfeit its very existence in favor of the establishment of a more egalitarian and pluralistic one to replace it.

Your post is so far out that it is humorous.

Israel targeting terrorists is self-defense, which is what any other self-respecting country would do, if able. It is similar to the USA targeting Osama.

There is no indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighborhoods, and I defy you to prove otherwise. Sometimes, insurgents shoot missiles from civilian areas, which make the areas fair targets. Again, it is self-defense.

There are no Jewish terror organizations. You may be thinking of those that existed before Israel became a state.

Israel is like an oasis in the middle of a desert, and has every right and reason to survive and defend itself.

Nobody has siad Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. How many times will you misrepresent what is being said? Show us any post where anyone said Israel doesn't have a right to defend themselves?

It certainly doesn't make civilian neighbourhoods "fair targets". Not according to the Geneva Conventions.

Israel has signed the Geneva Conventions, and is therefore expected to play by those rules. Are other fractions not following the rules? Yes. And you have been condemning those other fractions for not following the rules.

So why do you want to give Israel a free pass? Either both the Palestinians and the Israelis are expected to follow those rules, or neither side is. In that case, Israel would be free to continue it indiscriminate bombing, and the Palestinians would be free to shoot missiles into Israel and send suicide bombers.




Oh yes. I may be thinking of those. Very well. And just maybe, that's why I said



But I'm not one to judge your reading comprehension...

CI, tell me you are joking! You and others are constantly condemning Israel when it mounts attacks following Arab invasions, missile attacks, etc. A good example is the condemnation of Israel for its invasion of Lebanon.