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Glad it's all straightened out. I love the way everyone ignores that Sharon ignited the flames of a Jihad, toppled any hope for peace, and signed the death certificates of untold Israeli and Palestinian civilians to gain a slight political edge. Sometimes, I'm embarassed to be Jewish.
Don't even bother here: You will be flamed. Nice line; care to enlighten me? No, actually, I'm not rolling over that easily. I'm embarassed by the complete mush the Reform movement has adopted as its cause. I'm embarassed by the hesitant attitude taken towards gender equality by the Conservative movement. I'm embarassed by the self-effacing excessiveness the Orthodoxy bathes in. I'm embarassed that even as people reenter Christianity with renewed vigor, they are leaving Judaism in droves that includes myself, btw.
I'm embarassed by the incrementalism Israel uses against terrorists, trading police stations for tourists, rocket attacks for bus bombs. And finally, I'm embarassed that everyone knew that Sharon's move would be the end of peace, and that no one tried to stop him. Now, please improve my information.
Not here, for the reasons stated above. E-mail me if you like. Israel has been on the brink of an internal power struggle for years. The conservative-orthodox Israel's "religious right" have been on track to assume the political majority and non-religious Israelis are not thrilled about this. Yasser Ararfat's grip on power has also been slipping for years. Other groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad probably have more say in Palestinian affairs than Arafat, despite minimal news coverage.
Hamas' grip on the Palestinian mindset can be seen in every photo of a Palestinian gathering. Those green flags are Hamas, not the Palestinian authority.
David Meir-Levi exposes the ideological DNA of Palestinian nationalism The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. Buy History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression the historical record has been rewritten so thoroughly that Israel is seen as the worst of the oppressive Western occupiers of the Third World . .. This book is excellent; short in pages but extremely full in research and content.
Arafat and Sharon have been at war for their entire adult lives. Both know how to survive, in life and in power. Violence may or may not be the status quo, but violence will preserve the status quo.
Say, Paris, that's some wonderful smugness coming off you! Care to explain why? And no, email won't do: The facts are indisputable. The Palestinians are the aggressor; they started the conflict, and they purposely drive it forward with fresh killing on almost a daily basis. One doesn't need to be a full-tilt anti-Zionist to see that the view of the Middle East Kelly sees is one manufactured by a news media comfortable with its facile narrative story hooks: Turn on your television tonight or read tomorrow's agency reports and we are told of the "cycle of violence" — no side taken there — of "clashes" in which the identities of victim and killer are obscured or of "the fears of Israeli security chiefs".
Note how the word "security" is always linked to the word "Israel". And how "chiefs" has made the grade from Blyth to Palestine. And just as the police chief in Blyth would tip us off on a story, so Israelis — to a much lesser extent Palestinians — tip us off on stories. No one wants to rock the boat, to be controversial. Why write about the Blyth staithes if we're going to carry a Coal Board denial?
Why write about the outrageous nature of Israel's killing of stone-throwing children if we're going to get outraged letters to the editor? Arab "terrorists" threaten Israel. Israeli "security chiefs" warn Arafat.
Can Arafat "control" his own people, we asked when the Israelis asked the same question. Yet when a Jewish settlers' group killed two Palestinian civilian men and a baby, we did not ask if Sharon could "control" his own people. Since the Palestinians had not asked that question, we did not ask it.
We were silent that time round. Over five days in the North-east and on the long drive back to London, I listened to the radio news. Two Israelis had been killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber at Binyamina. The Israelis "struck back" at the Palestinians, killing four guerrillas in a "targeted" killing. In other words, death squads. But that wasn't what the BBC said. When the Israeli settlers murdered the three Palestinians — including the baby — the Israeli police were reported as "narrowing their search" for the killers.
From an excellent Robert Fisk self-examination of his growth as a journalist. The sad thing is I agree more with joemaller's analysis. This is as much about two old men straining to hold political power as it is about the struggle over settlements or holy sites.
I'll gank another link from Jorn to demonstrate the non-military reasons that Israel is in the West Bank: Has the intifada been deadly to Israeli civilians?
Yes, but also to Israeli troops attacks on troops, even, are treated in the Western media as terrorist incidents. But much more so to Palestinians. You won't see that on your op-ed page, very often. ALL of the violence makes me sick but the israeli tendency to claim "bulldozers are not instruments of violence" or, more recently "assassination is not like terrorism" that really irks me. Paris, just to clarify: I'm shocked that such an even, non-biased comment would land you with so many flames. The massive Palestinian lobby has obviously gotten to this otherwise intelligent community I would like in my life time to know that peace is possible between the Palestine Arabs and the Israelites.
What do we as a world need to understand, what lesson are we learning, what do we fail at so that peace is unattainable? I know this is an editorial piece, but is that kind of thing normal in the Washington Post? Is it a guest piece or the standard line?
Is it typical of US coverage? On a separate topic, does anyone have any pointer of where to donate if you want to support Palestinian causes? I'm guessing that there must be, dating from when things shifted to Lebanon in the late 70s, and my hope is that there's an opportunity there, among politicians in their forties, to redefine the terms of the conflict.
Not that any of this changes the media blight. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire's uneasy dissolution continues. Kind of off-topic but interesting I think It is about the Israeli intelligence organizations and the power and influence they hold over the West.
After reading this book I now see newspaper articles and U. It's pretty futile you least for you if you think Kelly's piece is such a distortion of reality. The word is that it would take about a week to erase the PA. Hope Israel goes for it. May I direct you to your Metafilter description? You used the contemporary English language maxim: What precisely does "peace" stand for in talk like this? And as long as the despotic PA promotes terrorism and encorages Palestinian Arabs to hate Jews and disseminate such lies as "there was never a Temple in Jerusalem," there will not be peace.
Sometimes war, or at least military force, is necessary for peace. What y'all don't get is that Arafat is the Palestinian Arabs' worst enemy; the rest of the Arab world doesn't give a shit about Palestinian Arabs; and the rest of the Arab world, run by despotic regimes which keep their citizenry in poverty, uses Israel via the Palestinians as a scapegoat to maintain power. This is what Israel is up against. And so far, Israel has acted with WAY to much restraint. The Palestinians' only hope is to wake up and realize they need Israel; that without Israelis, the land they want to live on will look like the rest of the Arab world--where neither you, nor any of the Palestinian Arabs would want to live.
That's one fine piece of Israeli propaganda. It's wonderful what happens after you invade and subjugate people, then ramp up your PR machine with your friendly, powerful neighbor across the sea. Kelly, the author of the opinion piece, betrays a rather stunning degree of ignorance about the phenomenon of terrorism. He seems to approach it from the layman's point of view which seems to feel that terrorism is sadism and spite and insanity. It's not like that at all. The only correct point that he makes is to claim that the Palestinians consider the current conflict to be a war.
Damned straight they do. But he gets everything else wrong. Terrorism is a completely legitimate form of warfare with a well defined and analyzed overall strategy, and when done well each act of terrorism is carefully tailored to achieve an overall goal, just as in any form of warefare. They are not just random acts of violence. In June I wrote an extended explanation of how terrorism works and why terrorists do what they do, in an article called "The Theory and Practice of Terrorism.
You're supposed to field your team and go against their team and have a fair fight and abide by the results, while the world watches on TV. The only rule in war is: If taking your paltry band of ill-armed infantry against a modern army in the field would get you massacred which seems to be what Kelly thinks the Palestinians really should be doing then you do something else which has a higher chance of success. He concludes that the Palestinians are the aggressors, but that's because he dates the beginning of the conflict to ten months ago. The Palestinians date the beginning of the conflict to when the Israelis moved in and displaced them.
From their point of view, this is just a continuation of a war which has been going on for more than fifty years. I consider Kelly's editorial to be ignorant and biased, and infected with outdated and naive ideas about how wars are supposed to be fought. If he knows better than he's a liar. If he doesn't know better then he's an ignorant fool.
Andrew Cookie - yes, the Post's editorial is standard for how U. Big Media reports the situation. It's not surprising, given that NBC recently ran a story on their nightly news about how nothing newsworthy has been happening in August, so the poor "journalists" have been left to report on shark bites and amazing dog tales. What little Americans hear from Big Media about world events is severely warped by a number of international influences.
Having lived long enough to have seen several waves of this conflict ebb and flo, I think it's interesting that the former mainstream view - "Israel gooooood If one concentrates only on the past 10 months, or the past two years, or since something, it's relatively easy to adopt that mainstream position because, well, it doesn't take much thought. If one bothers at all to consider or Lord Balfour, one cannot come to any conclusion other than that the Palestinian Arabs are a displaced native peoples, fighting for the return of a homeland they've lived in for a dozen centuries, a homeland the occupying military force had no moral authority to "give" to Jews or anyone else, Ottomans be damned.
Personally, I am not in the slightest anti-Semitic, but like a lot of people I know, I have become almost fiercely anti- Zionist in the past year, simply because Israel's position is so completely unsupportable from any reasonable, moral standpoint. Zionists should be the last standing humans to ever complain of an oppositions' desire to eradicate a foe; their ongoing "ethnic cleansing" of the West Bank and other occupied territory has more than demonstrated that they are perfectly capable of those same desires, and with a far larger, Western-supported military to make it happen.
I have become almost fiercely anti-Zionist in the past year, simply because Israel's position is so completely unsupportable from any reasonable, moral standpoint. What should Israel's postion be? Steven Ben Deste wrote: ParisParamus, I'm wondering if you know any Palestinians personally? I have a good friend who is Palestinian and I must say I have observed better behavior and attitude about the situation over there from him someone who has lived it personally--and his family continues to live it personally than I have from a few American Jews who have never had to deal with it except for over the news I'm not lumping all American Jews into this category by any means, just using this as an example.
I do not approve of terrorism. Neither do I approve of whatever you want to call what Israel is doing, which seems to amount to basically the same thing, just with the US government's blessing. I don't cheer when a Palestinian suicide bombs a disco. But neither do I cheer when Israeli soldiers kill a baby. There has been killing on both sides, but if you want to talk body count, more Palestinians have died in the past 10 months than Israelis. I can see why Palestinians are skeptical of American peace talks when the American government consistently gives billions of dollars to Israel every year.
If the US really wants peace in the Middle East and have the credit for making it happen , why don't they cut the purse strings for a little while? Money can be a great motivator And I guess this makes it even clearer for you, semmi? Sharon is a known murderer, having lead killing squads against Arab settlers in the early 80s. He instigated the September violence with his visit to the Temple Mount.
I disagree with his politics, but what's more, I feel he is an evil, racist man. In Israel, apathy has skyrocketed. After decades of attempts at peace, many Israelis have given up hope. The enormous secular and Arab populations do not vote. Conversely, the small ultra-orthodox population turns out in droves to the ballot box, electing whomever their bloc desires. They control Israeli policy, and they are the polar twins of the Palestinian terrorists who put "War with Israel" in the Palestinian constitution.
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Jan 07, Gary rated it it was amazing. Historical revisionism of the worst kind has been so successful that at the United Nations, the world media and university campuses around the globe, Israel under genocidal attack since it's birth has been presented as a "Colonial oppressor", an "Apartheid State", "Racist" , "Fascist" and "Imperialist". Israel, living in the shadow of the Holocaust have in a bizarre and sick twist of rhetoric and propaganda even been frequently branded as "Nazis".
The author "Arab propaganda under Communist tutelage transmuted the unacceptable anti-Semitism into justifiable anti-Zionism, and turned an odious Jew-hatred into a politically correct Israel-hatred". Meir-Levi describes the machinations of of the Mufti Haj Amin Al Husseini, his instigation of and planning of the , , and pogroms in which hundreds of Jews were butchered by Arab terrorists.
The author points out the extensive use of swastikas, portraits of Hitler and Nazi imagery during the "Great Arab Revolt" of He traces Al Husseini's close collaboration with Hitler and Eichmann. Al Husseini was one of the originators of the systematic destruction of European Jewry and was a close associate, confidante and advisor to Eichmann. Eichmann recounted "We have promised him the mufti that no European Jew would enter Palestine anymore. Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini. During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt commented on the astounding degree of anti-Jewish venom and praise for Hitler in the Arab press together with regret that he "did not finish the job".
However we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient". Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said of the Jews after the Lebanon War "If they gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide" and former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani thundering his aims of a second holocaust and final solution declared "The use of nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
The author carefully debunks the Arab hoax that "the Zionists stole our land", and reminds us how many times the Palestinians turned down the opportunity of obtaining a Palestinian State alongside Israel, as they were determined to destroy Israel and replace her with a Judenreihn "Palestine from the river to the sea". In this they have been diabolically supported by the International Left. Meir-Levi also outlines the truth about the much maligned security fence which has saved tens of thousands of Israeli lives and been dubbed by Israel's enemies as 'The Apartheid Wall".
Clearly the opponents of the barrier believe that Israeli lives are far less important than Palestinian inconvenience. They also ignore the fact that many other countries have security barriers, some far more formidable than Israel's provisional fence. The book traces how the evacuation by Israel of ten thousand Jews from Gaza and the handing over of Gaza over to full Palestinian control led to a renewed war by the Arabs of Gaza against Israel's people sending thousands of rockets into Israel with the aim of killing and maiming Israeli men, women and children.
Over Israelis mainly women and children have been killed since Arafat launched a war of terror against Israel's people in , and thousands more maimed and injured. If university departments had any interest in a true representation of the history and facts of the conflict, this would be a prescribed book, but unfortunately on most universities the aim is the opposite- venomous propaganda If university departments had any interest in a true representation of the history and facts of the conflict, this would be a prescribed book, but unfortunately on most universities the aim is the opposite- venomous propaganda.
Aug 22, Harrie rated it did not like it.