They Just Don’t Get It…Or Do They?

Netanyahu: “Provocative”? That’s a feature not a bug.

Perhaps someone in the State Department needs to send them all a collective “sternly-worded letter”.
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That always seems to work miracles….

I am so glad this is being brought up.
Like any normal human being, I oppose terrorism vehemently, of course.
However, this is one of many situations in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where Israel is asking for trouble.
Unreasonable people including terrorists nearly always have some type of reasonable complaint to justify what they do.
Want to save Israeli, and, after the reaction by Israeli Army, Palestinian lives? Good! Do not provoke Palestinians like this.

Both Muslims and Israelis greet a person with a word meaning “peace”. Why can’t these people, at the moment the Ultra Orthodox Jews, make peace their ideology?

I like peace. It’s too bad many super religious people don’t.

“This is an act of arrogance and annexation.”

Wonder what the current count on acts of arrogance and annexation is. Glad that someone is still calling them out.

Is it necessary that a commission to develop and study the sites be religious? Maybe it would be a better idea for a bilateral secular government commission of anthropologists to do the work.

Anthropologists and archeologists have my vote, too. Religious zealots, all three kinds, will see a reason to rebuild what they want to see rather than what is there.

I guess Netanyahu is looking for Intefada III…

Israeli’s discovered the site and have been excavating it. They have also proven to be the most competent managers of such sites. They’re not going to turn it over to anyone just on those grounds.

There’s also the soverign issue as those lands are controlled by Israel and very possibly will remain as part of Israel as part of any peace argeement. It doesn’t make sense for Israel to want to provoke a Palestinians response. What’s the point? Netanyahu is a force behind the economic resurgence to give them a reason not to commit suicide.

Oh my. Did you just invoke the premise of sovereignty in respect to illegally occupied lands? So, your position is that once a power, any power, militarily takes control of lands, it is henceforth bestowed sovereignty over those lands? Doesn’t sovereignty imply ownership or legitimate authority as opposed to mere tangible possession? This is not the first time you have proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty over occupied lands because she physically oversees those lands. It’s sheer insanity. So, were Canada to militarily occupy the Great Lakes region of the US, you would be defending Canadian sovereignty over those lands as she physically has control there? Really?

rdw56~
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Oh my. Did you just invoke the premise of sovereignty in respect to illegally occupied lands? So, your position is that once a power, any power, militarily takes control of lands, it is henceforth bestowed sovereignty over those lands? Doesn’t sovereignty imply ownership or legitimate authority as opposed to mere tangible possession? This is not the first time you have proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty over occupied lands because she physically oversees those lands. It’s sheer insanity. So, were Canada to militarily occupy the Great Lakes region of the US, you would be defending Canadian sovereignty over those lands as she physically has control there? Really?

Does the United States have sovereignty in Iraq because our military is there? Afghanistan?

Netanyahu is a force behind the economic resurgence to give them a reason not to commit suicide.
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That doesn’t appear to be the case in Gaza (link):
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The UN mine action team… (reported) the remains of a 500-pound Mk82 aircraft-dropped bomb were found in the ruins of the (Gaza al-Badr flour) mill last January…
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(B)ecause it was a civilian building producing food – the only operational mill in Gaza – the incident received particular criticism from (judge Richard) Goldstone, who concluded that the building was hit by an air strike, the attacks were “intentional and precise”, and they were “carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population”. He added that the attacks violated the fourth Geneva convention and customary international law and may constitute a war crime.
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The al-Badr flour mill was the largest mill in the strip… Gaza’s largest concrete factory, at a different site a few miles away, was also destroyed, as were several large food processing plants.
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Goldstone said the nature of the attack on the flour mill “suggests that the intention was to disable its productive capacity” and said there was no plausible justification for the extensive damage. “It thus appears that the only purpose was to put an end to the production of flour in the Gaza Strip”.

should be attached to #8.

What I am assuming is a negotiation process whereby the exact borders of 67 are not an option but the net square land area remains constant. I don’t know where the land swaps will be. I don’t even know where these sites are. If these sites are not part of the lands Israel gains obviously a part of the settlement will be guarranteed access and shared control as Joe has suggested. Joe is just way ahead of the game. His suggestion that Israel fund his idea now is preposterous and he well knows, a non-starter. MY undertanding has been a key part of any settlement will be some 3rd party management system whereby Jerusalem and many of the disputed holy sites will be controlled either by a joint committee of Jews and Arabs or some independent group.

Comparisons to the USA and Canada are not relevent. Israel gained control of these lands in a just war. It is not an illegal occupation I don’t think the Jews have been perfect in their dealings but until the Arabs rebuke terrorism I side with the Jews.

The USA does not have sovereignity in iraq nor did we seek it. We took control on a temporary basis to remove Saddam and allow the Iraq’s to establish a democracy. If that meets the definition of sovereignity it’s only from a techincal perspective. At no time was there ever a suggestion the USA had any ambitions to stay in Iraq a day longer than necessary.

So, one only obtains sovereignty over land through military force if there is an intent to remain there forever. So, essentially, the more sinister and self-serving one’s occupation is, the more sovereignty and legitimacy one gains. Ok, now I understand the rules according to the neoconservative/zionist perspective. Thanks for clearing that up for me, rdw.

There really is no such thing as a legal occupation, rdw. Anytime you use your military to conquer land, the inhabitants of the land have the moral, legal high ground. You can argue the merits of the just war all you like, but just wars do not legitimize land acquisitions, only defense.

Israel is trying to crush Hamas. They absolutely are not trying to rebuild that economy. They wish to establish a clearly different trajectory for the Palestinians in Gaza for voted for terrorism and the Palestinains in the WB who have rejected terrorism. The most promising aspect is the total cooperation of the arab world. In this they have been decisive. Not only is the economic trajectory decisively different but Hamas is far more religiously fundamentalist. The life of a Gazan is much dfferent than the left of someone living in Ramallah. There will be a point in the not too distant future when these polulations are culturally incompatable. Hamas and Fatah have been incredibly barbaric towards each other such that it’s doubtful they can co-exist in a sovereign nation. Clearly the Arab world is at war with Hamas. I don’t see any scenario how this ends well for Hamas. The end game is they make a mistake, start a war with Israel, suffer severe losses, Fatah comes in and finished them. This works so well politically because the American right will support Israel and Fatah because they’re eliminating terrorists. The American left will protest anything Israel does, and be ignored as usual, and then go silent as Fatah moves in. Joe will always do the politically correct thing.

You tell me how Palestine gets to a single state? Everyone seems to accept some version of the Clinton plan will serve as the basic framework for any final agrreement. Nothing can happen until the Palestinians can negotiate as a single voice. If I am wrong and that voice is Hamas nothing can happen until Hamas renounces terror.

The only alterantive to this is Iran gets the bomb and either threatens to use it or uses it. Israel has at least 5 nuclear armed subs as well as land based missles. I cannot imagine why anyone would goad Israel into using them but if they do it’ll dwarf the killing in WWII. Iran might kill 4M jews but Iran w/b wiped out and anyone perceived as helping them. I’m a little bit surprised people like you don’t oppose a nuclear armed Iran. There’s no upside. My nightmare scenario is Iran gets the bomb and then some enemy of Iran gets a suitcase nuke and attacks Israel. They won’t not react. What if some deranged sunni like a KSM decides to start a war between Israel and Iran?

At no time was there ever a suggestion the USA had any ambitions to stay in Iraq a day longer than necessary
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How long is necessary? I think you misunderstand the Long War (link):
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The concept of the “Long War” is attributed to former CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid, speaking in 2004. Leading counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, an Iraq combat veteran and now the head of the Center for a New American Security, writes that “there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an ‘Arc of Instability’ that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia.” The Pentagon’s official Quadrennial Defense Review (2005) commits the United States to a greater emphasis on fighting terrorism and insurgencies in this “arc of instability.”

rdw~
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I know this really thwarts your narrative, but I am not a leftists or a liberal. I am a paleoconservative libertarian. And, some of the most senior Republicans, and foreign policy wonks, in recent years oppose Israeli intransigence, including Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, John Warner, and many others.

“When it comes to Israel and the Jewish community, the hypocrisy of Republicans in Congress is just overwhelming. How is it that Republicans in the Senate can claim to be supporters of Israel when almost 20 percent of their caucus — including their top two Members on the Foreign Relations Committee and top Republican on the Armed Services Committee — apparently does not think that Hezbollah should be on the E.U. list of terrorist organizations. While Democrats are out there trying to punish Israel’s enemies and ensure that she has a right to defend herself, these ten Republican senators have no problem with the international community treating Hezbollah as a legitimate organization Shame on them.” ~NJDC Executive Director Ira Forman
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Shame on them, right rdw? In my opinion, they exhibited a brave sense of clarity on this matter. You must be outraged at these Republicans “betraying” Israel, right? Or, perhaps, you are proud of the Democratic Party for standing up against Israel’s enemies?

exiled,

How did Islam get sovereigity over Jerusalem? Mohammad was a warrier wasn’t he? Israel does not want sovereignity over the Palestinians. Israel wants Palestinians to rule Palestinians. There are contentious legal issues such as holy sites that must be negotiated and I think if either of these two sites are on lands clearly owned by arabs Israel has no right of ownership. I also think the role for the USA to play is in ensuring the land swaps are equivalent value not just in acreage but in quality of the property. The problem with these sites is Muslims have never displayed respect for any other religion. Quite the opposite. One of the things the taliban did before 9/11 to destroy their support within the USA was to destroy two huge ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. A PR disaster. If you are not going to respect Christian sites Christians are not going to respect you. Until the Islamic world learns to play nice Netanyahu is right to take steps to protect sites holy to Islam.

Exile, you really do not appreciate the disaster of terrorism. The American right was never going to accept it and christians were never going to turn the other cheek. IMO muslims confused Europe with America. Liberals have been thoroughly cowed by 9/11. Joe no doubt thinks he’s courageously talking truth to power here writing against Israel. He is correct his position is deeply unpopular. I don’t want to get into the weeds with you on Israel. The Palestinians have a list of authentic beefs. Israel is far from perfect. But until Islam has it’s reformation and ends it’s embrace of terrorism Palestine is going to suffer. There will never be support for the Palestinians because Americans have made their judgement on their support of terrorism. All other facts are incidental. A fatwa is a medieval concept. It has no place in this age. Reform or pay the consequences.

Exile, I have no problem with dissent and I’m not concerned about 10 republicans getting out of line. I’m not interested. The sense of the post is democrats are more supportive of Israel and that’s preposterous. and if it were true, GREAT. As far as these 10 at some point they’ll stand for re-election and the voters can decide if they were right on the issue. I highly doubt they’ll be re-elected. there is a GOP primary for the Senate in CA and Carly Fiorina is running against two other strong candidates. The one gent, Tom C (can’t remember his name) has supported Palestinain causes in the past. I can’t say too much I forget the details. It’s an issue now and might very well cost him the race. That’s how it works. I know in my district if I find out my guy suppoted Hezbollah I vote against him.

paleoconservative libertarian.

I have no idea what that is. I consider myself a Reagan republican but among contemporary politicians I like Cheney. I dislike the moniker neocon because it suggests Cheney and I are new to our conservatism. That may be my ignorance. If neocon means aggressive in the defense of the USA versus a GHWB type of ‘realist’ conservatism then I am a neocon. I did not like what GHWB did in Iraq in 1991. Saddam had to be removed. At least denied all military power. I think GWB did a stellar job going into Afghanistan and IraQ and am pleasantly shocked at Obama in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He dithered on Afghanistan but got it right and his assassination program in Pakistan is shocking. I have reservations about that one. These people didn’t want to waterboard KSM knowing he’d come out fine yet he’s approved these drone wolfpacks to do some pretty large assassinations. One ‘raid’ included 5 drones and they took out over 20. I love it when they get the bad guys but I can’t understand the rationale. I am aware a few generals are not supportive because it’s too easy to get the wrong 20.

Exile, you really do not appreciate the disaster of terrorism.
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To the contrary, rdw, I am quite familiar with both the pain and anxiety terrorism inflicts on society and the conditions in which it thrives. I have two uncles who worked at the WTC, one in ’93 and another in 2001. Both survived, thank God, but the uncertainty of their fates was a traumatic experience. On the other hand, I have relatives in Lebanon, and from them I have learned much of what life is like under Isaeli -and Syrian- occupation. I have traveled to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, so my personal contact with both Palestinians and Israelis is concrete. Most revealing, perhaps, is my fellowship with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a DC-based think tank with overt neoconservative/zionist leanings. Through FDD, I traveled to Israel and met with members of Mossad, Shin Bet, the IDF, academics, laywers, and Knesset members. I also spoke with members of Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad. I was thoroughly exposed to the ills of terrorism, and the mindset of the Israelis exposed to these threats. I learned quite a lot of about the effects of terrorism. However, incidentally, I was also unintentionally exposed to the unthoughtful approach to fighting terrorism, and the blatant one-sided caricatures drawn by Israelis. Israelis soldiers, for example, were constantly driving into our heads this constant fear they live in under the duress of Palestinian terrorism. Yet, while patrolling the border of West Bank outside of Bethlehem, they joked about how much they were superior to Palestinians, and how unimposing the Palestinians are, given they can’t even shoot straight. Another example, we visited an Israeli jail, where we given access to members of Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad. The Hamas representative seemed genuinely motivated by a sense of hopelessness. The Islamic Jihad member, on the other hand, was blatantly driven by a sense of Muslim superiority, even mentioning his global ambitions of jihad and the establishment of a world-wide caliphate. I repudiate that. Then, there was a guy from Fatah, serving two life sentences for shooting two Israeli soldiers within the borders of Gaza. The Israelis call him a terrorist, I see him as a soldier. He renounced the killing or targeting of civilians, and defended his own actions as legitimate form of defense solely against an occupying military. At the end of the day, I shook hands with the guy from Fatah. When back on the bus heading to Jerusalem, my colleagues asked if I was going to wash my hands after having touched a “terrorist.” These remarks have sat with me for years, as a constant reminder of how people’s emotions can cloud their judgment. It’s a sentiment that continues to cloud the judgment of Israeli policy makers, who reflexively and emotionally respond to terrorism with broad aggression against an entire populace. That’s not only wrong, but counterproductive. Believe me, rdw, I understand the “disaster of terrorism.” I repudiate the tactic, and I can relate to the hostility of those who have been affected by terrorism. But, in this complex world, there is more than simply good versus bad. There are very real, tangible, and dire circumstances that play a role in one’s willingness to engage in such immoral actions. There is also a response to terrorism that seems to dominate policies of societies around the world. Unfortunately, the standard response to terrorism seems to do little more than breed more radicalization, and with that, more terrorism.

I assume you know what a libertarian is, so I will skip over that. Paleoconservatives are those who reject the nation-building, spread-democracy-through-military-might advocacy of neoconservatives, which began some time in the late 1980s. Paleoconservatives also tend to question the logic behind the fallacy of Israeli-American strategic unity. No two countries will ever have the same interests, much less the same strategic imperatives. What is good for Israel, i.e. a weakened Lebanon, Syria, toppled regimes in Iraq, Iran, is not necessarily positive for the United States, especially if you factor in the catalyzing effect such actions have on anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Paleoconservatives, you could argue, lean more towards isolationism, while not wholly rejecting the use of military force when required for America’s national security.

rdw, after all of your pro-Israel posts, it is a shock that you seem to be ignorant of what a neocon is. It has nothing to do with new conservatives. It applies to Zionists who evolved from being Trotskyites after the holocaust. If you’re going to be this defender of Israeli war aggressions and violations, you really should look up this history.

exile.

this is where arrogant people go wrong. You cannot accept disagreement yet understand you can’t win an honst debate and thus misstate the oppositions position. It’s shallow and silly. Neocons do not favor building democracy thru conquest. IN fact the starkest difference between Obama and bush isn’t Iraq but lebanon versus Iran. Bush aggressively supported the democrats in Lebanon during their ‘revolution’. He gave both voal support and US agencies were doing what they could. Obama in this green revolution in Iran openly and aggressivelly supported the mullahs. He made it a point to always call it the Islamic Republic of Iran and made other gestures and acts to sigmal he was NOT going to upset the status quo.

Your definition at the end fits neocons as well as paleocons but to add a clarification is neocons fight to defeat the enemy. GHWB in 1991 fought to win objectives short of victory. Neocons think if you go to war you go to war to kick the crap out of the enemy and crush them.

If you compare GWB versus GHWB, GWB started his invasion looking to kill Saddam. This was no gentlemans war. GWB went after the top thugs not the donkeys.

There is a fair argument GHWB was far less expensive and it solved the immediate problem but left a festering problem. There’s an honest and authentic disagreement there but state it honestly.

rdw and Exiled, in matters of international war aggression conservatism is not really the proper term. That would be right wing, or fascist. Conservatism has to do with fiscal restraint.

RDW~
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I did not misstate anything, nor was I being dishonest. Neoconservatives believe that the United States can impose democracy. This is an exercise in futility. It’s antithetical to the principles of democracy. Most non-neoconservatives agree with this assessment of the neocon agenda. This includes regular conservatives and libertarians, as well, who have this perception of neoconservatism.
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As for this:
You cannot accept disagreement yet understand you can’t win an honest debate and thus misstate the oppositions position.
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Me telling you what a paleoconservative represents is not a debate, and therefore there was neither reason or opportunity for me to sink to dishonesty to win this non-existent debate.

formerlyjames~
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That’s a good point. Conservatism is an ideology which speaks largely to political, social, fiscal matters in the domestic sphere. Foreign policy is not really enshrined by either liberalism or conservatism. However, I do think we could agree, that neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, libertarians, liberals, and progressives all have their own respective foreign policy outlooks, which are only loosely associated with their domestic ideologies, yet encapsulated by the movements as a whole.

So, rdw, you LIKE Cheney?
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Revealing… VERY revealing…

Exiled has it right about foreign policy. I studied International Relations during the fall of the Soviet Union and have paid attention to international events since then. 1992: Clinton is critical of GHWB being close to China. 1996 and 2000: First Dole and, later, GWB are critical of Clinton (Gore) being so close to China. 2004 and 2008: Kerry followed by Obama were critical of GWB being so close to China.
Democrats and Republicans rarely have different foreign policy.
Israel is the largest recipient of humanitarian aid (meaning not weapons, not humanitarian relief like Haiti is in desperate need of) from the United States and one of the largest single recipients of military aid from the United States under multiple administrations.
Israel is fallible. It is very fallible.

As far as the history of Islam goes, for centuries Muslims had peaceful coexistence with Jews and Christians and Al Andalus, a Muslim country of the middle ages in what is now Spain is where a majority of modern Jews first came into Europe from the Middle East.

Muslims can be peaceful, of course just as Christians and Jews can be peaceful.

Just do not insight the Palestinians and they will not look for excuses from the Koran to blow people up. They will look for messages of peace, if that is what they want to justify that day in the Koran.

Exiled’s personal experiences blow me out of the water. I am not at all a conservative and find his experiences to be very relevant.

Patrick~
Thank you for your insights. It is very true that official US foreign policy is rarely upset by elections, even when the incumbent and president-elect are of opposing perspectives, or from different parties. However, within each party, there are blocs which adhere to very different foreign policy outlooks. Within the GOP, one can find hard-line neoconservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney, or paleoconservative noninterventionalists such as Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, or Colin Powell. Within the Democratic Party, one can find centrist/liberals who support a rigorous American hegemony, such as Ann Lewis, Stephen Solarz, and Kenneth Pollack. But one can also find progressives who emphatically reject the brash use of military force such as Barney Frank. The point is, and most especially in regard to Israel, that the party affiliation cannot always be emblematic of policy positions. Both the GOP and the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, with tacit approval of its ongoing policies with the exception of an occasional tepidly sheepish criticism. However, individuals, such as former GOP Representative Paul Findley adhere to their own convictions on these matters, even if it does not affect US policy. For rdw to paint a narrative of the GOP as a friend of Israel, and the Democratic Party subsequently an obstructionist to this special relationship, is patently false. Both parties stumble over one another in their attempt to be seen as pro-Israel. Just as it is equally disingenuous for rdw to assume that the GOP is neoconservative and the Democratic Party is progressive on foreign policy matters. Again, they are largely the same when it comes to executive implementation of foreign policy, yet the GOP has paleoconservative noninterventionalists, and the Democratic Party has pro-war centrists. The rank-and-file are all over the map. It’s the foreign policy structure once in the White House that remains static, as it has for decades.

patrick, I completely agree. American foreign policy has not changed a bit under any so called liberal or conservative administration in the entire post WW2 era. The only seriously progressive note was by Nixon, and I have to admit that I am not familiar with what exactly brought that on. The rest is all belligerence, threats, sword rattling, bullying, interference, and generally destructive posturing, overt and covert activity.

When I meet people from other countries, sometimes I will get asked about what our country is doing in their country or their region. I always explain it like this: this is a geographically huge country, a country where one can go for one thousand miles from it’s center and not reach a border nor an ocean. We, also, are very new and, before World War II, an extremely reluctant superpower and, in our day-to-day lives have no urgent need to know any detail about other countries.
So, unfortunately, foreign policy of all kinds puts most Americans to sleep faster than Ambien and is not something which makes or breaks a presidency unless we, ourselves, have sent many of our soldiers into combat.
Except Nixon opening up relations with China and a few less obvious exceptions, the Defense Department, State Department and the CIA together write our foreign policy since few Americans understand.
I once ran across a woman from Alabama who made the comment about 9/11 “Well we don’t go to other countries and interfere with them, so, why should they do this to us?”
Nobody should have done to us what they did on 9/11 but we, obviously, are very, very involved in almost every country on the globe. Apparently some Americans do not even know what foreign policy is.

Well we don’t go to other countries and interfere with them, so, why should they do this to us?
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Ha! I put that one right up there with these words of wisdom by a former co-worker: “I don’t really have a problem with universal health-care, except why should we be paying for our enemies in Iraq to go to the doctor?” Apparently, my co-worker is a strict literalist. Universal, indeed!

Exiled,
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Did your co-worker once play a news commentator on “Saturday Night Live”?
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If not, Gilda Radner would be proud.
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That’s TOO funny…

And sad, too, actually, that we have members of the electorate THAT badly informed about legislative proposals.
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I ALMOST find it hard to believe that someone could be THAT clueless… but I trust you.

I sh*t you not, afguy, I’m still in therapy over that comment. Maybe one day I can come to terms with it and move on with my life. But right now, I’m a mere shell of what I was prior to that fateful day…

Dude man, do, like, aliens from other planets get health care too! I mean are we going to insure the entire universe, man? Those three headed guys,too?

Actually, with death panels coming into that conversation, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sarah Palin didn’t say something like that. (Okay, maybe Tina Fey PLAYING Sarah Palin would say that).

Beddy-bye time, guys,
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It’s been a real pleasure. Keep the faith. C U tomorrow.

Indeed, goodnight.

“Unfortunately, the standard response to terrorism seems to do little more than breed more radicalization, and with that, more terrorism.”

you make many good and valid points. Until this nonsense. You have too many liberal instincts to be a conservative. The only remotely intelligent response to terrorism is an immediate violent response. Terrorism is a political tactic. If it is successful you will get more of it. If it is is disaster you will get less of it. Arafat lost any chance at American support for at least a generation. 9/11 compounded that into 3 generation. Joe feels this. He understands Gaza isn’t a debateable issue among the American people. It’s not on their list of 100 concerns. Neither is Southern Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations, end of story. I’m not interested in debatng details of jewish-palestine diplomacy and history because I don’t trust but because it is poinltess. The thing I find so interestng about Joe and all liberals is they’re not stupid and they genuinely care about the situation in Gaza. Also they know it’s a dead issue. Yet that cannot or will not acknowledge this disconnect, which they know to be deep and authentic, is the result of american abhorrance of terrorism. Add to that an intense hatred for islamic fundamentalism combined with a sense of bafflement the so-called moderates don’t shut doown these morons issuing Fatwa’s. You condone murder by your silence. There is a reason the borders of Islam are bloody. Christians in America are very different than Europeans. Europeans if attacked will ask what they did to cause it. Christians in America when attacked will count bodies and return the favor 100x’s over if possible. If Islam wishes war with America they absolutety, positively will run out of people 1st. Joe Klein and his liberal friend debating root causes and what turns people into terrorist is an example of a useful idiots debating club. Osama and arafat assumed Joe was America. Each made mind-numbingly stupid mistakes as a result. Osama actually believed American’s would cower. The world has been treated to watching Osama cower in a cave somewhere fully aware the moment he sticks his head out a missle will fly up his arse. Where once the skies were clear Al Qaeda is ducking wolfpacks of drones overhead. America is so technologically advanced it took less than a decade to turn killing Taliban and Al Qaeda into a video game. The people pulling the triggers are sitting in California or Colorado. So decisive is American resolve on ensuring total victory the man ordering the mass assassinations is the most liberal President in US history and ideological twin of Joe Klein. Still he pulls the trigger.

No one with an influence in the USA is asking why the terrorists are upset. Joe Klein might be. What has happened is the 400B a year defense budget has been rededicated with job#1 being to kill terrorist as quickly and safely as possible. The 150-1 kill ratio in Gaza is the direct result. Since Capitalism never sleeps that 150-1 will go to 200-1. Abbas bought a clue. Hamas will or will go extinct. Then Israel and Palestine wil talk real peace and Americans will absolutely want both sides to get a fair peace for the common sense reason it can’t work unless it is fair. If these two sites are clearly in Palestinain lands then they won’t support Israeli annexation. they will support some guarrantee the sites are protected and accessible. I mentioned the taliban blowing up the giant Buddha’s. Islam has not earned the confidence of the American people in terms of respecting other religions. Words will not do. Abbas will not have control of any Jewish or Chrtistian religious sites until such time Islam has proven with deeds they will protect them.

You got it half right.

Robert Kagan is a fairly well known thinker and writer about foreign policy. He happened to be in Europe when 9/11 happened becauseI think his wife had to be there and he, being a writer, could be anywhere. He told of a great story of having been invited to a seminar in front of an audience, may have been in London and may have been televised on the BBC. While on a stage with a few other ‘experts’ he realized he was going to be asked what the American people thought of European public opinion. How did it influence us? He was in a bit of a panic. He did not know how to explain to the audience the American people do not consider the opinions of Europeans. Not because they think Europeans are ignorant, because it’s just not in their nature. Kagan’s challenge was in explaining America well enough so the audience could appreciate this wasn’t a case of American elitism but of self-reliance. Europeans are entitled to their opinions and God Bless them. But they don’t get a vote in American foreign policy which will be based on American, not European values. Kagan understood sitting on that stage it was going to be hard getting the Europeans to understand and accept self-reliance and arrogance are two different things. That there’s no intent to insult the Europeans nor any reason to apologize. This was after 9/11 but before invading Iraq. Events proved him correct. Most of Europe bitterly opposed the US invasion. They had zero impact on US public opinion and in the end the US closed most of their military facilities in Western Europe. Germany housed 100,000 combat and support troops is now just a transport site with a major hospital and airport facilities. The suggestion Americans are unaware of or unable to grasp foreign policy is goofy. Bush had carte blance on US policy in the Middle East and in Europe because he had their support. Joe and the American left opposed virtually everything, in communion with Europe, without effect. This was possible because the Americans DID understand the policy and rejected liberalism. Consider just the surge. The left had control of congress yet was utterly powerless to block Bush.

America is a christian, center right nation. We are very well educated and very well informed. We are also independent. Americans, and Americans alone, will set US Foreign Policy.

As you can guess, most of my distant, not recent, ancestors were from a country plagued by terrorism where religion was used as a vehicle for political unrest and actions I would never condone against a country which, like Israel, proclaims itself to be a democracy and fair minded in all ways.
I, myself, have never pretended nor wished to pretend that I am conservative.
It seems as though the biggest failure of reason during wartime or a fight against terrorism is the simple acknowledgment that all non combatants, regardless of what side of any conflict they are on have exactly the same reaction to death of their loved ones: vindictive rage.
So, if an Israeli response includes deaths of Palestinian non combatants, those non combatants will feel exactly the same way about the Israeli
government as Israeli non combatants who lost a loved one to terrorism: vindictive rage.
If extreme care and caution can be taken to prevent any non combatant death, Israel may gain peace. This is not to say that Israel can not capture or, if unable to do so, assassinate individual terrorists. It just means that one needs to make sure that Palestinians are not killed, forced into humiliating situations or driven to dire poverty as a result of Israeli actions.
As for US policy in Afghanistan, I believe that it was in 1989 through 2001 when we provided no guidance nor aid which made the attacks against the United States possible. That is not to say that we are responsible for what happened to us in 9/11. It is just to say that we could have prevented it by bringing peace, progress and a secular democracy to Afghanistan during those many years when the US abandoned an ally as soon as the communists left.
I, absolutely, believe US foreign policy is, also, flawed.
However, I would be very insulted if one said that I was “anti” American.

“It applies to Zionists who evolved from being Trotskyites after the holocaust. If you’re going to be this defender of Israeli war aggressions and violations, you really should look up this history”

That’s a definition I’ve never heard but you are correct in suggesting it’s often used as a jewish slur. What ever it’s origins, and it doesn’t matter, in practice the term is applied to the entire American right. Not Libertarians but Conservatives. Liberals like Joe use Neocon as a slur.

What I’ve been trying to point out my position is less in support of Israel and more in opposition to radical islam, terrorism and their supporters. I’m pointing out the infatada and 9/11 have so totally poisoned US Pulic opinion against Islam the various ‘facts’ each side likes to point out about the details of, for one example, who did what in Gaza last year during the war, is pure noise. No one in America is listening. Joe’s deep frustration, at times rage, over events in Gaza is exacerbated because he understands he can’t get the attention of the American people. Americans understand Israel is figthing Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah and 5 dozen other islamic terror groups. They’re on the side of the angels. We don’t need another fact. We have everything we need to understand.

As Samuel Huntington pointed out the borders of Islam are bloody. They will remain bloody until Islam reforms. Either Islam will eliminate the terrorists among them or these wars will continue. If they’re going to war against the capitalist west they will run out of people 1st. The American effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan right now is to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda is as decisive a way as possible as the jews just did in Gaza. American Capitalsim is working to make the effort more lethal for Islam and safer for Americans. One of the descriptions I read of a recent firefight was stunning in the description of the sterile nature of the battle. 5 drones stationed over a suspected terror camp destroyed the camp killing 20-25 terrorists. The triggers were pulled in California. For all practical purposes it was a video game. It may be a small special forces team was in the region and had identified the camp and provided the coordinates. Still, it’s a stunning projection of power.

It also seems the strategy in Pakistan is to flood the skies with drones and kill Talibam / Al Qaeda leaders as the sleep. They got to bed each night never knowing if they’ll wake up, never knowing if the family in the next village is selling them out and only knowing when the Americans come to kill them he’ll never actually see them because they’re most likely 13,000 miles away. Osama pissed off a technological powerhouse. He might still be alive but another 200,000 muslims are dead.

I am not defending Israel. I am pointing out Islam has to reform and will suffer greatly until they do.

Days after 9/11 at a workplace where everything remained nearly at a standstill due to lack of work for weeks before my layoff, a coworker suggested that I go online to a chat room far, far, far, less educated than this one.
The big question was: are Afghanistan and Palestine the the same place?
To our collective credit, I do believe a vast majority of the people in the chat room were teenagers or early college students and not at all like people on this blog (this is a collection of people which could rival Mensa).
Americans are woefully uneducated about foreign affairs.
By 2004, it is safe to guess that everybody in that chat room was voting age.
Check statistics on the number of US soldiers who believed that Saddam Husein caused 9/11 (rather than an enemy to our enemy bin Laden) and that we DID find WMD in Iraq.
I’ve never seriously considered migrating and call America my home, but, we are not good at foreign policy as Israel is not good at making peace.

“Neoconservatives believe that the United States can impose democracy. ”

What do you call Iraq?

The 1st goal wasn’t to impose democracy. The 1st goal was to remove Saddam.

If next year Iraqi’s vote to make maliki president for life and nullify the constitution I can promise you we won’t invade. If Maliki then sends a team into the USA to kill Americans we probably still won’t invade. We’ll definitely kill him but try to use drones.

Venezuela has effectively become a dictatorship. We’re not invading. Hugo tries to get the bomb and threatens the USA he’s toast. Americans look at hugo and see a clown. We feel sorry for the Venezuelans but they elected him just as Gazans elected Hamas. You get the govt you deserve. So Venezuela is going to follow Cuba into the depths. Cuba is gone from one of the richest nations in the America’s to one of the poorest. The poor bastards can’t even buy Oil.

If you don’t poke your finger in the American eye you can have any kind of govt you want. Poke your finger in our eye we’ll remove your finger. It’s just simple logic. Osama poked his finger and now 9 years later we still have 80,000 troops in Afpac hunting and killing muslim fundamentalists and getting quite good at it. The 150-1 kill ratio in Gaza would not have happened if 9/11 didn’t happen.

It ‘seems’ Abbas has learned the lesson. Joe is cluess as to why but Joe doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is the front edge of the reformation Islam must do in order to survive in the moidern world.

This is an example of the depth of anti-terror sentiment. Tom Campbell had probably lost his shot at the GOP nomination for the Senate from California because he supported Palestinian causes in 2000.
************

Phil Klein on Tom Campbell’s travails: “So, in 2000, Campbell was raising money from Muslim groups on the basis of his votes against Israel and his views on foreign policy, and now he’s claiming those same positions are being misrepresented. Meanwhile, a month after Sept. 11, he was willing to accept an award from a group that was pushing the view that the root causes of the attacks were poverty in the Muslim world as well as U.S. support for Israel. Either Campbell was misrepresenting himself then, or he’s misrepresenting himself now. It can’t be both.”

“believe that it was in 1989 through 2001 when we provided no guidance nor aid which made the attacks against the United States possible.”

This is bizarre logic. We made the attacks possible because we did not prevent them. That’s absurd. Further, if we did interfere in Afghanistan at the time we would have been pilloried as imperialists. You can’t have it both ways.

There is one group responsible for the attacks and only one group. There are no contributing factors or blame to be placed elsewhere. Liberals lke to focus on root causes. It’s a useful as debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Terrorism isn’t cause by poverty. Terrorism is a political tactic practiced by religious fundamentalists, almost entirely islamic. They only way to end it is to make sure the people who practice it get not gain rather unsustainable losses.

I am sure ther are plenty of muslim radicals who would righ now like to drive a plane into the WH. In 2001 many thought there would be significant gain from doing so and it’s almost certain many if not most muslim govts would have been happy to look the other way. Not so in 2010.

Hamas is sitting there with no good options. They can start another series of rocket attacks but the downside is quite severe. Israel would of course devastate them but the real danger is Fatah. Fatah, given the chance, would exterminate them.

So Hamas is now, one would expect, having some kind of internal debate over embracing diplomacy for survival, or not. They do know the seige being done by Egypt and Israel is going to keep them in a crippled state until they decide. They also know there isn’t a thing the UN or Europe or the American left can do about it.

This is how you defeat terrorism.

“It just means that one needs to make sure that Palestinians are not killed, forced into humiliating situations or driven to dire poverty as a result of Israeli actions.”

but what comes 1st, the chicken or the egg? Are Israel actions the result of Hamas actions?

The single biggest intellectual problem with Gaza is the West Bank. Why is Gaza under Seige and the West Bank enjoying an economic boom?

Because Hamas fired 6,000 rockets into Israel?

Ya think?

Who elected Hamas?

“I’ve never seriously considered migrating and call America my home, but, we are not good at foreign policy as Israel is not good at making peace.”

Really? America is the oldest democracy in the world, the lone superpower and by far largest economic power. We’re not good at Foreign policy? Hmmm, Europe was essentally one big battlefield the last 500 years and the middle east 3,000 years. But America isn’t good at foreign policy.

This is not complicated.

Israel seems to have made peace with Egypt, Jordan and Fatah. The last remaining hold out is radical islam and despite a 1,000 to 1 manpower advantage will eventually defeat the rest of them. Hamas cannot win, Hezbollah cannot win.

Pull the plug on U.S. aid and start telling Beni rather than asking him. No sane reason not to.

Actually, that was a significant part of the ending of the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.
With all government to speak of including schools, law enforcement and so on gone, what was left were tribal leaders, Muslim fundamentalists and warlords with no ethics.
So, for a generation they had internal warfare and Muslim education.
Religious only education, when available, plus gunfights for thirteen years might be much more conducive to terrorism than even radical places like Texas/California and Upstate New York/Oklahoma, who have, somehow, created (McVeigh and Stack).
If we helped rebuild some kind of government after the Soviet withdrawal, there would have been, if nothing else, cops and an equivalent to the National guard to keep these terrorists from plotting for years on end on how to attack us.

Palestinians had been under occupation with varying degrees of humiliation since 1967.
The first Intifada was in 1987.
Israel spent twenty years sitting on that egg until it hatched.

By contrast, when the allies won Japan and Germany were both given huge amounts of humanitarian relief followed by huge loans from the Marshal plan and, after ten years, we were out less a couple of military bases.

RDW~
~
Just a minor request, but could you use the “reply to this comment” tab when responding to specific posts? It is much easier to keep track of the conversation that way. Thanks.

Iceland is the oldest democracy in the world. England is, of countries with a significant population the oldest democracy.
I just finished watching a few hours ago a documentary on FDR. When we first told Hitler to discontinue his expansion, Hitler was making jokes about us.
Foreign policy is about making good deals with other countries.
We became a superpower for two reasons: we were and are the largest Western Country by population, we have the largest military budget in the world $623 billion out of $1100 billion spent worldwide and we have a massive nuclear arsenal.
In other words, we are the hegemonic power because more than six out of every eleven weapons are in the hands of a US serviceman.
This is expensive!
If you want lower taxes, then make more friends abroad so that we will not need to scare the sht out of the world so that we only occasionally get attacked by terrorists.

Even England during their peak of their empire had nowhere near so much spending.

Two things for Egypt, Egyptians and Israelis both hold a LIBERAL responsible for that: Jimmy Carter negotiated that.
If GWB had gotten peace anywhere I would have had something good to say about his foreign policy. Second, they have a huge anti-Israeli insurgent/terroist group known as the Islamic brotherhood.
With tens of millions of dollars of US assistance, the government of Egypt now, for some reason, felt a new warmth in their heart for Israel. The citizens do not.

For Jordan the situation is unusual: a huge portion of it’s people are migrants from the Palestinian territories. They want the Palestinians back in the occupied territories more than anybody else in the world, but, Israel did negotiate that deal with the help of a LIBERAL.

When, like both Germany and Japan, Palestine – and our own wars now, too – Iraq and Afghanistan start making bad rock songs and really, really cool cars which blow the big three out of the water, then I will salute modern American and Israeli foreign policy.
We taught the Germans and the Japanese, make cars, not wars.
As for Japanese and German rock songs….

Patrick,

you are comparing vastly different cultures. Germany and Japan were producing cars long before WWII. They were also devastated after the war. The occupation wasn’t a defensive operation to prevent terror attacks but to completely rebuild two devastated countries who tend peacefully rebuilt themselves. Muslims don’t produce cars because they can’t.

The Germans and Japanese used the loans to invest in their people and industry. Gaza has been a rathole for money for 20 years. That which Arafat and the rest didn’t steal they used to buy arms.

Just as an example of the PR disaster of Gaza one of the recurring themes of the Israeli move to vacate Gaza were the pictures of Palestiains coming in and destroying much of the infrastructure. A 300 employee flower business was intentionally vandalized and many of the employees had to be given sanctuary in Israel for cooperating with Jews. Rather thsn use their expertise to keep the business going they planned on butchering them. Sorry. That’s not the Jews fault. That’s the Palestinians fault.

As long as these example make it on American TV your attempt to blame everyone else for the failures of the Palestinians to form a civilized society will fail.

Also, before you try to pin the current seige on Israel explain why Egypt is part of it. One of the reasons Joe and the MSM in the US speak to a rapidly shrinking choir is he will blame the embargo on Israel without mentioning the border with Egypt. As if no one knows about it but him. When you condescend to your audience they condescend back.

“Two things for Egypt, Egyptians and Israelis both hold a LIBERAL responsible for that: Jimmy Carter negotiated that.”

You don’t want to go too far here. Jimmy was President at the time and did mediate however the two sides made their own breakthroughs and did so before Jimmy got involved. The players here were Anwar Sadat and his trip to Israel the earth-shaking event and then Menancin Begin. Jimmy deserves credit in the same way Bill Clinton and George Mitchell deserve credit for the peace in Ireland. They played an important role but were hardly critical. The real beauty of the example is proof that process is meaningless unless the two sides want peace. As long as Hamas seeks to push Israel into the sea peace talks are a bad joke.

I’ll stand corrected on Iceland but not the UK. The US received it’s independence when King George decided to stop fighting.

I thought GWb has a solid foreign policy much as Reagan did and neither negotiated peace deals so far as I remember. Bill Clinton provided mediator services to Ireland and England so I guess that puts him on top. Except Bills Camp David peace talks led to the infatada he left on the table for GWB. Reagan was without a doubt the key figure in ending the cold war and he did so without firing a shot.

You seem to think as many liberals do, Obama is notorious for this, you can talk people into peace. You can’t unless they’re ready. Hamas has no intention of making peace with Israel. Arafat never intended to make peace.

1) The reference to cars was tongue in cheek. However, during the US occupation of Germany, there was a constant and deserved fear for the first several years that former Nazis could attack American forces. Because they have never been a completely industrialized country, if Palestine made car parts or any reasonably valuable exports I would salute Israeli foreign policy. However, post war Germany and post war Japan have been far, far wealthier than any time in their previous history in part due to a massive growth in the world economy and partially to a well done occupation. Palestine is dramatically poorer than it was in 1967. “Rat hole” is at least as much of an exaggeration as comparing it to Germany if not more so.

2) Although conservatives would hate this documentary as would hard core Israeli cheerleaders (as Noam Chomsky would point out many Israelis are far, far more critical of Israeli policy than any American media is – they slam their own government just as Americans do our own government) Jimmy Carter Man From the Plains does have Israelis and Egyptians saying that he was the single force which made the deal work. Also, right after Israel, Egypt is the second largest recipient of US aid. In addition to Carter being one of the most well intentioned, idealistic and kind people ever to be in the White House (as a house guest I think most Republicans would like having him around even they hate his politics) we, also, had a huge carrot for Sadat and Begin both.

3) Everybody forgets that twenty years when Israel neglected the Palestinian territory. The number one lesson learned from World War One is that when conquering a country (as we needed to do for all of the Axis powers to stop the war) there are two solutions. One is the Soviet approach which fell apart forty four years after the war when the Berlin Wall came down and the American approach bringing the conquered country more domestic peace and prosperity than it had had before the beginning of the war. I have compared the modern Palestinians to the Wiemar Republic. I doubt many Palestinians would be flattered by that.

4) Ask anybody from a former Soviet territory or find long declassified CIA assessments starting in the late 1960s (but ignored when Cheney and Rumsfield were in the Ford Administration) stating that the Soviet command economy was a inherently inept and, therefore, failing. Coincidentally, Reagan, a great performer (and a true believer in what he did, though) made some great speeches not heard at all by the Soviet people years before the collapse when GHWB was in office. I can go on and on about that, but won’t.

5) Once again, when it comes to raving lunatics attacking a flower mill, after forty years of occupation, i can not imagine Israel comparing itself to those lunatics as their equals. Nor does that mean that I consider that action acceptable in the least. However, that does not mean that it is not at all Israels responsibility as an occupier to make more and more efforts and building flower mills.

6) Also, just as one can say the route cause of the rise of the Nazis was the Treaty of Versailles, does not mean that the World War One allies are morally responsible for the actions of the Nazis. It just means that, if the Treaty of Versailles did not contain reparations, Hitler would have been just a babbling village idiot of Munich. If Israel had done and continues to do more to prevent Palestinian deaths and promote prosperity, the lunatics firing rockets would be unable to get hold of fire crackers, have no followers and be locked up by Palestinians without any Israeli deaths at all.

You’re passing by my line of thought by mistaking giving the opportunity to wrong doers with being the wrong doers.
Excessive force by the Israeli Army opens the window of opportunity for sociopaths to gather together, gain acceptance and shoot more rockets as Israel.
That does not mean that Israel is shooting rockets at itself.

Hello. Exiled_
In your recent comment you brought me the idea to make a couple of exercises of the kind to complete missing nouns (required from students in a foreign language course). The template sentence is this:
There was no moral or factual claim that would justify the emigration of … to …, to uproot a people, and carve out a new state through violence.
Your answer:
There was no moral or factual claim that would justify the emigration of the Jewish diaspora to Palestine, to uproot a people, and carve out a new state through violence.
I can suggest no less valid answers (after all I learned several foreign languages in my life including English). For example:
There was no moral or factual claim that would justify the emigration of Puritans to America, to uproot a people, and carve out a new state through violence.
Another solution:
There was no moral or factual claim that would justify the emigration of convicts and outcasts to Australia, to uproot a people, and carve out a new state through violence.
Want another try? Let’s plunge into prehistory and say:
There was no moral or factual claim that would justify the emigration of Cro-Magnon men to Eurasia, to uproot Neanderthals, and carve out their future through violence.
We can go on and on. Of all these examples the 1-st (yours) is the least correct since there was no Palestinian people in the late XIX-th century and the Arab population was very sparse. It might be that this people is in the process of formation. Anyway the Jewish emigration into the land of Israel was the less violent of all, never aimed at genocide (and will never bring one) but cooperation (which was also welcomed by some Arabs) and reached statehood through workings of international law.
As to factual ground: even your country didn’t accept a thousand Jews on board that ship, that was subsequently turned back to Germany with a known fate for those on board. (Here I give you the chance to repel me by saying that I’m playing a victim card, but that’s not my intention, just stating a fact).

“Palestine is dramatically poorer than it was in 1967. “Rat hole” is at least as much of an exaggeration as comparing it to Germany if not more so.”

Rat hole is obviously an exaggeration with the point being money given to hamas is wasted. The difference between just gaza and the WB is much of the investment bypasses the PLO and Fatah. The security forces Joe giving credit to for creating a more civil WB are not under the control of Abbas and Fatah and not funded by them. The difference between Germany and the Islamic world is massive corruption. Germany was devastated by war not a corrupt, backword society.

That many speculated at that time the Nazi’s could have come back to mounted an infatada is meaningless. We now know it was never possible. They didn’t have any kind of command structure or resources or the will. Germany was devastated.

The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza has been entirely self-inflicted and it isn’t like some advanced economy has been set back. Gaza never had a modern economy. Ramallah hasn’t been destroyed. It’s still one of the nicest cities in the Arab world.

Your effort to blame Palestinian misery on anyone but the Palestinians is silly. They’re not miserable because of the jews. They’re miserable because of the decisions they made. The worst thing that happened to them was Oslo. Arafat was just a kleptomaniac he was stupid.

Just step back and take a look at the discussion that evolved here going into intricacies of political philosophy, subtleties of meanings of neocons vs. paleocons, evaluation of historic role of such giant of modern thought as Jimmie Carter, and other profoundly learned stuff – and all that due to the intention of Israel to put some plaster on the walls of and fix the roof above the Me’arat HaMachpela, the cave where supposedly the grave of Rachel is.
I can’t even imagine to what lengths and depths people on this site went when that indefatigable truthseeker JK broke them news about the Palestinians digging into the Temple Mount to arrange another mosque there (a couple of years ago) shoveling out tons of soil bearing enormous archeological/historical value and dumping it somewhere in piles in the most “unscientific” way, to say the least.
To my great distress I must have missed that discussion. But what a marvelous feast of encompassing intellectual analysis and moral indignation it must have been.

Patrick, regarding 4) above I am not sure your point. The US has been rigidly anti-communist forever because we think #1 it’s evil and #2 rotten as an economic system.

One of the reasons Israel was so superior militarily versus the muslims is they were armed by Russia while Israel was suppplied by the West. Russia has never produced anything but junk and that’s even when most of what they have they stole from the West. There are a few exceptions but as a rule arms from socialist countries are trash.

Regarding Reagan and the libs one of the most interesting debates of the 80′s was Reagans constant mocking and belittlin of the Soviet economy. Reagan would start meetings with gorby telling Rusisan jokes mocking their own economy. His contempt was front and center. Reagan was in turn mocked by the leading liberal thinkers of the day such as John Kenneth Galbraith and all of the writers of Time and Newsweek. I am not sure Joe Klein was there then but I can absolutely guarrantee you he was mocking Reagan and supporting socialism as a viable economic system. Free Market capitalist have been mocking socialist as long as there has been socialism.

Here’s a drill for you. Go into any medicine cabinet in any bathroom in the world or in any hospital and count up all of the medicines developed by the west and then by Russia, China, India and the entire muslim world. Chances are for the latter group you won’t get above 3. This was as true in 1985 as it is in 2010.

I believe it was in 1960 when Kruschev visited the US and was excorted by Nixon to several civilain sites he was astonished to visit a supermarket filled with food and no lines. He felt it was a scam.

I’ll be Joe is part of that group of libs still holding out for socialism who in an honest moment would suggest, the problem was poor leadership. with the right people in charge it would work.

In addition to the free market, central market tensions islam is victimized by cultural disadvantages such as massive corruption, tribal biases, sexual biases, etc.

I can’t tell if you are suggesting Cheney and Rummy ignored evidence Russia was failing and that’s a scandal somehow or what? The record could hardly be clearer. Conservatives were totally confident the USSR was doomed as an economic competitor. Reagan’s idea of how to end the cold war was, “we win they lose”.

1)The post War Germans had The Edelweiss Pirates. They were less of a threat than the PLO, but, it was not, at first, a welcome occupation in the least.
2) Under British Rule there were no suicide bombers in Palestine.
3) Under Ottoman Rule there were no suicide bombers.
4) Under Egyptian Rule there were no suicide bombers.

Do you want to go back to the neolithic period to prove that Palestinians have, except under Israeli occupation never had suicide bombers before?

Obviously it takes two to have fight and, although I would say this is more enjoyable than not (and I hope you would say the same) there is no debate of one person.

Clearly Palestine can be ruled without having suicide bombers.

Once more, Palestinians are not inherently anti-Jewish or antisemitic. During the Roman era, there was one Palestinian Jew who became the hero of the modern American right wing: The great JC of biblical fame.

If child has several babysitters and all of them call him a good little boy and then when the last baby sitter takes over he is setting the house on fire, don’t you ever think that the last baby sitter might not be as good as the other ones?
If so,why not question the ten eyes for one eye and ten teeth for one tooth approach in the the Palestinian territory.
The Germans used that tactic in the battle of Brittan and,as the Palestinians do in a disorganized and morally reprehensible way, the British got mad.
If the Germans won the second world war, I bet the Germans would be saying that the British are uncivilized.

First, we agree on a complete command economy: it fails.
Second, not due to the command economy itself, oppression of freedom of speech was something anybody but the most extreme leftists (now in their late nineties and born before 1917) could not agree more with conservatives about.
There was a minor question about if a command economy was stupid of evil and conservatives chose evil.
However, Reagan did nothing to make the Berlin Wall come down.
Gorbachev was not playing catch up with the US since he was bright enough to know that the Economy was already falling apart. The US missile buildup was on our side only as was a waste of billions of dollars on a project nicknamed “star wars”.
The Soviet experiment was falling apart starting when LBJ was president but that was kept secret from the public as much as possible by the Ford and Reagan administrations.
Gorbachev offered in Rajkovic Iceland to bilaterally abolish all nuclear weapons and Reagan said “no”.
Two years later he made speech at the Berlin Wall.
A year after that, East Germany collapsed and the wall came down.
No connection between Reagan and the wall coming down. Had he said, “Keep this wall up!” it still would have come down.
If we had, instead, from 1980 until 1988 exhumed Harry Truman from his grave and made his corpse the president, the Berlin Wall would have come down.
Reagan spent his first two years blaming Cater for the bad Economy getting worse and worse and, spent his last year in office in the beginning of yet another recession, what was then the largest peacetime deficit in history and can claim that he helped cut taxes for the rich.
Not my kind of president.
Not my hero.

To the issue of sovereignty.
The territory between the so called Green Line (Israel’s boarder before the Six Day War) and the Jordan river was occupied by Jordan since the ceasefire of 1949. The so called Palestinian people was not even mentioned by anyone at that period. If Jordan did not attack Israel in that war, this would be the boarder till this day. Since Jordan did attack Israel in 1967 and as a result lost this territory, Israel is a sole authority on this territory. Subsequently the “Palestinian people” emerged on the stage consisting of rather disparate clans of Arabs residing within those domains.
Some of the commentators on this site assume they know what Palestinian territories are. However they are those yielded by Israel to Palestinian Authority under Oslo agreements, and even these are actually delegated to PA ultimate authority still remaining Israel’s. The Palestinian sovereign territory will only be realized when (and if) the Palestinian state is established.

Until then, the Palestinian sovereign territory exists only as a wishful thinking of whoever wishes to spare his time on thinking on this subject rather than some other.

Comparison to occupation of Germany/Japan after the WWII.
First, both Germany and Japan were industrial nations, both had centralized structure of a modern state, and at least Germany had a democratic/liberal tradition before the Nazis. Both fully recognized there defeat in the war, and there appeared leaders who were not only ready but eager to cooperate with the occupying forces. In short, there was a ground on which to build a new society.
Secondly, only after the Western zones of occupation produced German governments acceptable to and cooperative with the occupying forces, were these diminished to token levels and kept actually with the aim to stave off a possible Soviet aggression.
That’s what Israel tried to achieve through Oslo agreements with Arafat. But that gentleman started war after being proposed the actually total Israeli withdrawal. You wouldn’t expect US, British and French to leave Germany if Hitler were left alive and a renewed threat of Nazism were in the horizon.
Again, without comparing Arabs with the Nazis (though there are affinities) one can hardly expect that Israel transfers full responsibility to PA without being sure that those territories won’t serve as a basis for a new war. Especially knowing for sure that that war will be fought by the so called “civilians” on the Arab side and Israel will be castigated for trying to fight back as it automatically is taking place now by good-hearted and well-intentioned people. Which is sure furthers the Arab newly found mode of fighting wars and diminishes Israel’s readiness to take deadly risks.

I knew two buddies always goofing around together at work. One was Palestinian and one was Israeli. (This is in New York – if you want to be segregated, this isn’t your kind of town and, obviously, they both wanted out of that land, not to fight the old battles of their countries). The Israeli referred to Palestinians as “the Philistines” as a proper name and not as a slur.
Goliath was a Philistine or, as far as I can tell, Palestinian.
If anybody has the jump on me with archeological knowledge, let me know.

The comparison is useless on several grounds. 1st the muslim world is not capable of producing cars and it has nothing to do wth Israel or the US. Just one of those reasons is massive corruption. Aid to Palestine doesn’t and has never reached the Palestinians.

Germany and Japan had advanced Western economies BEFORE WWII. Those occupations were after they surrendered after theywere devastated. Israel’s occupation was defensive. They were/are not trying to rebuild Gaza.

Hello, patricksartor.
I reacted to your comment in the last week’s discussion, but that was rather late and I’m not sure if you ever got to read it Let me just reprint it You stated Israel is reckless in injuring civilians.
Not only Israel is not reckless, as you stated, in fighting terrorosts, but, on the contrary, exceedingly scrupulous not to hurt civilians. To the point that she takes risks to her own soldiers, which not once resulted in Israel’s soldiers wounded or killed.
On the other hand, ‘terrorist’ is to a great extent a misnomer to the Arab fighters who are organized in somewhat loose web of units – that is their way of fighting the war. But having learned Western sensibilities, they present their fighters as civilians, and brainwashed 17-year olds with Kalashnikov rifles or explosives as children (sure, after all they are under 18). This is not to say that civilians are never hurt. But one has to know real stuff behind the slogans. Israel’s record is about 30% of civilians compared with much more than 50% in the case of the American forces – and that is with the much more densely populated area and given the enemy that is deliberately fighting from within the civilian population, using hospitals, schools yards and UN installations.
In this ‘terror war’ Israel lost about 1500 civilians exploded in buses and cafes. Multiply by 50 to grasp the American proportions: 75,000 – at least 25% more that the number of American casualties in 15 years in Vietnam (soldiers, not civilians). For 2,600 people killed in the Twin Towers (which is “only” 50-55 people on the Israeli scale – two buses exploded, of which we had dozens. Excuse me for this morbid arithmetic) the US went to two wars and, on the way, killed – how many civilians? Not intentionally, of course.
And, again, I don’t see why you absolve the Arabs from obligation to apply moral judgment to their own behaviour. The shooter in Fort Hood and the Silvester bomber are also exempt? After all they obviously had their resentments.

Philistines were of greek descent.
Dictionary definition:
“the non-Semitic people who inhabited southwestern Palestine during Biblical times”.

These fought with ancient Israelites but also cooperated. Finally disappeared from history as a result of one of the Ancient Egypt pharaos acton.

P-L-SH is a root of “to invade” and related words in Hebrew. In the Bible the territories held by the Philistines are called Erets Pleshet (land of invaders).

After the Bar-Kohba uprising (132-135) was brutally extinguished by the Romans and the Jews were expelled from Judea (not to confuse with the Great Uprising, or the Jewish-Roman war described by Josephus Flavius, which took place in 66-70), the then ruling emperor Hadrianus inquired who were the greatest enemy of that unyielding people in the past. Being told these were Philistines he proclaimed that from that time on Judea would be called Palestine. The truth should be told – he succeeded to plant a serious “bug” into history just by dubbing a new geographical name.

Israel comes in tied for number 32 on the UN corruption index meaning it is the 32nd or 33rd most honest government as our second largest recipient of US aid, Egypt is in a nine way tie for 111th to 119th place out of 180 countries, Egypt was before World War II and now underdeveloped and Israel, of course, did not exist before World War II.
By your reasoning, both countries should not get any US aid.

Hamas is a bizarre organization because it does many acts of charity, but, also, is extremely violent as if Mother Theresa were secretly going out at night as a serial killer.

For now, not giving them the slightest – the slightest – avoidable provocation like the archeological work described above would be wise.
Bring them into the project or leave the work to be done when things get saner.

I don’t believe I have exonerated terrorists in the least.
I have said that when governments are demolished by war as the Palestinian government was in 1967, if the occupying power does not succeed in reinvigorating both the economy and civil society, terrorists gain acceptability and credibility.
Also, these organizations are not government bodies, They are self appointed groups of violent radicals. By not being even being responsible for the lands they are in nor, as in a democratically elected government, they are not the equals to the Israelis in terms of the moral standards one holds them to.
If street gangs take over a city, don’t you say to the mayor that he is incompetent?
If so, why?
In the scenario I gave, the mayor is not a street gang member.
You hold the mayor accountable because he is responsible for policing, imprisoning and, for the rest of the population, caring for the city.
I am, also, critical of ways the US has fought it’s war on terror beginning with not rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviet pull out and, arguably related, that the CIA put Saddam Husein in power and funded him for over fifteen years and giving him the key to the city of Detroit just to start with.
However, the topic is Israel.
When the article comes out about the US war on terror, we can compare who is worse at opening the door to our own enemies by mistreatment the US or Israel.
We may be worse than Israel. I haven’t seen the numbers.

It was the Israeli who used the word “Philistine” not his Palestinian buddy.
The “bug” was either unintentional or, possibly, a misunderstanding on my part.
However, there has been records of Palestinians on that land for many centuries even if a few tribal groups have changed hands over that time.
I wasn’t positive about that and accept that the Philistines were not the Palestinians.

Hello, patricksartor
Please read my comment # 35. There was no Palestinian government in 1967. Jordan ruled in Judea and Samaria (dubbed West Bank) territories and there was no Palestinian problem in the world.
As for the moral issues. You are right: the mayor is not another member of the street gang. You obviously parallel Israel to a mayor and the Palestinians, or let’s say part of them, to a street gang.
As long as Israel ruled over the Judea and Samaria and Gaza, there was little violence, and the Palestinians economy flourished compared to other Arab countries: average income reached 25% of that of Israel (I use data from an economics professor). It’s not a small deal: the Saudi Arabia’s average income is about the same level, with all its oil riches (see CIA world factbook site). Take into account that in 1967 this Arab population had no electricity and no running water.
Now, Israeli instant-peace makers launched the so called Oslo process (1993) and transferred considerable part of those territories to Arafat with his “PLO” (projecting to transfer all within the next 5-8 years), which after all resulted in huge embezzlement of money predestinated to development, and then in a war with Israel. The build up for that war started immediately, and the very grave terror acts followed, e.g. bus explosions occurred in early 1995, followed by a spree of bus and shopping malls explosions in1996. In 2000 it was a total war Until then Israel didn’t react at all absorbing dozens killed. Then there came actual crash of the Palestinian Authority, a break into two as Hamas actually revolted and ousted the PA from Gaza, establishing a separate state propped by Iran and waging a series of rocket attacks on Israel.
Well, you can’t deprive the mayor of the actual rule over the districts of the city, and then still hold him responsible for the safety and wellbeing of the citizens.

Still, I have to insist on the following.

Suppose, the Palestinians decided/were pushed by their leadership/ whatever to war against Israel.
However, there are deeds not to be done in any case, like shooting captured unarmed people, bursting into someone’s house and massacring the mother and her toddlers, stopping a car with a mother and 5 children and cold-bloodedly shooting all of them on the spot. Now, you will never find any of these deeds committed by Israel (it is even preposterous to mention this), but you will find an incessant series of such deeds committed by the Arabs. What is crucial to understand is the following: the Arabs who commit these atrocities are held as heroes and elevated to the degree of sainthood in their society, and small children are indoctrinated to follow their example. One of the first war acts in 2000 was capturing two reservists who lost their way and entered Ramallah, lynching them in the police station over the city’s central square, throwing the dead bodies over the window and demonstrating blooded hands to the crowd which duly gloated – the whole square! That is culture!
There is no discussion at all on this in the Arab world. What is amazing that the West accepts this as a natural condition. Don’t you think that those who accept this actually treat Arabs as retarded idiots not capable of moral judgment?

Is the UN index on corruption as accurate as their climate work? Comparing Israel to Egypt on corruption is preposterous. Did you know Israel has more companies listed on the NASD than any other nation?

I never reasoned anything about corruption and aid. The aid going to Israel and Egypt was part of the treaty negotiated by Jimmy Carter. I have no idea how how well Egypt used it’s aid but Israel uses it to buy US Arms and we know how successful that has been.

Hamas is bizarre but the more relevent characteristic is evil. They have to go. They will go. One of the ironies of Obama and the liberals sitting back and enjoying the fact Iran will go nuclear is the 1st victim won’t be Iran. Israel knows Iran knows if they were to even think about using nuclear weapons Israel will turn Iran into glass. There is a more reasonable expectation a state will take great care to see it doesn’t expose itself to such risk.

But Hamas and Hezbollah are in a much different place. The world assumes they’re fanatics willing to die for anything. They appear far more likely. Just as libs think Bush used WMDs as an excuse to invage Iraq so will Netanyahu to take out not just hamas but hezbollah as well.

Bibi’s advantage is he can do one at a time and he can wait in Hamas until Fatah is ready to assume control of Gaza. Further, Israel can bisect Gaza as it sees fit to allow Fatah to take a segment at a time. The optimum plan might be to bisect Gaxa and allow Fatah to do clearing operations and set up a new govt from the border with Egypt to within site of Gaza city. The idea would be to allow Fatah to gain experience and efficiencies. To learn and collect data on Hamas in that part of Gaza. Think about it. The american left won’t say a word about Fatah’s methods and they would not care. Because they are not limited in any way they will be able to collect a great deal of intelligence, feed it to the Israeli’s and let them use their drones to identify and remove high value targets. Fatah can consolidate gains while Hamas is further weakened for the assault on Gaza city. All perfectly justified because Israel can’t afford to allow Iran to provide WMDs to Hamas.

The tactics for Hezbollah will be very different
but not the logic. Once Iran gets the bomb all client terror groups present a direct and dire existencial threat to Israel and they are justified in removing the threat. The real key is divide, find allies and conquer. In Lebanon Israel must neutralize Syria, not all that difficult, and weaken Hezbollah ot the point the Lebanonese are able to re-exert some level of control. The next time Israel goes into Lebanon rather than tanks it will be with drones and Beruit will not be off limits. Their leaders will almost certainly try to run and hide in Beruit this time but it’ll be far easier to find them and eliminate them. Once the various lebanonese factions realize Israel has neutralized Syria, Hezbollah is toast.

Syria is at risk because the ruling elites comprise only a small segment of the population and they dare not challenge an empowered Israel. Now that Israel has the WB under control and Hamas devastated they merely need to finish off Hamas to focus on their Northern neighbors. It’s matter of patience and discipline. Israel has a booming economy and amazing defense industry. They’ll only get stronger and benefit from all of the USA advances on counter-insurgency and counter-intelligence.

First, Israel expanded settlements in the Occupied territories.
Arafat was, definitely corrupt.
He could not control the rage of his people since it made him like a Jim Crowe era African American cop. (During Jim Crowe, there were some “Negro” as was the respected term at the time, police officers who could only arrest other “negros”).
Many of the settlers were very hostile to the Palestinians and never had any intention of following Palestinian law or becoming citizens of Palestine as one third of Israel are Arabian Muslims and Christians who serve in the Israeli army, vote in elections and call themselves Israeli.
Hamas being bizarre, are wonderful to some people as charitable givers and organizers lacking corruption, but, unfortunately, horribly violent as,like I said, Mother Theresa if at night she was, also a serial killer.
For their own interests, Hamas gained power.
Arafat being, also, ineffective, many of the attacks conducted by Hamas resumed.
Had Israel then or earlier closed down rather than expanded the settlements which the UN had already declared illegal, it is very likely Hamas would not have an enemy outside of Arafat.
So,you have Hamas which never signed the agreement. Israeli settlers antagonizing the Palestinians in their so-called homeland.
Israel jumps in to take over the job Arafat was not doing.
Arafat’s police force had two choices: open fire on the people they claim to represent or open fire on the Israeli soldiers. Fifteen Israeli soldiers and sixty one Palestinian Police were killed.
Had Israel closed the settlements, then there would have been a Palestinian civil war.
Israel’s hands would have been clean and Israeli land would not have been attacked.
The right wing extremist settlers poisoned the Oslo accord.
Arafat was never the right man for the job.

I believe there is one easy way for Israel to win against Hamas: bore them to death.
That is to not instigate them.
Like most perpetrators (as Hamas are perpetrators – I do not defend them) they claim to exclusively be victims. Give Hamas peace and their claim of being victims will fade away along with their power.

One thing I think the West and Israel forget (because I would say that America and most of Europe if very, very pro-Israel) is that it took twenty years of occupation before the first uprising.
What happened then which tied Israel’s hands?

As far as the worship of suicide bombers go, that is sick, of course, but, even Bobby Brady on the Brady Bunch had a fascination with Jessie James and outlaws.
Enough peace and prosperity will make that fade away eventually. It will take time and patience.

Why do you think that going into a place claimed by all three of the world’s most dominant religions without bringing in at least the Muslims would advance Israeli interests rather than give Hamas another excuse to claim to be exclusively the victim of Israel and start more attacks?

BTW rdw, you do not see our climate worldwide as becoming, as predicted by the UN as becoming more chaotic when forty nine states, for the first time in history all have snow, or are you pretending to be too literal about the words “global warming” to exclusively mean less snow?
Please don’t tell me, as bright as you obviously are that you can not understand that the huge national snow fall this year is one of many signs of climate change.

Be Frank, anybody.
Am I writing too much and being overly dominant or am I interesting enough?

“By your reasoning, both countries should not get any US aid”

You are babbling here. I never addresed aid. There’s no reasoning in terms of aid. You are making it up.

hamas can claim all of the victim status it wants. They start sending more rockets into Israel theyll be exterminated and aside from a few libs no one will care. They’re terrorist. They should be dead. Terrosits exist to murder. They can’t murder if they’re dead. Ergo sane people want terrorists dead.

This is not complicated.

patrick.

GW is a scam. For the record weather is NOT more chaotic. The stupid bastards nominated morons like Al Gore to lead the movement while he was running up $20,000 a year electric bills. He was a D student for a reason. The simple ass predicted the arctic ice cap would melt in 5 years. You stupid bastards agreeed and promoted him. As it happens the ice cap had an unusual melt in 2007. As you should have realized in dealing with Al the melt had nothing to do with temps. There was a highly unusual wind pattern which blew ice much further south than normal so it didn’t refreeze as it otherwise would have. So that simple ass declared at the end of 2007 the ice cap was melting.

Perfect timing.

That was obviously the low point. The arctic ice cap is now 40% larger and it will probably be back to normal in 3 years. You can bet the skeptics will be trashing the alarmists for the next 3 years,

Does it get any better?

They’re screwed. Al promised no ice cap. It’s expanding. This is a wet dream for skeptics. The freak show that are the alarmists got EVERYTHING wrong. What is especially cool is it’s all on the internet. ABC and the NYTs can’t block it.

You are fine as a representative of the liberal prespective. Remember this is a liberal website and libs don’t like to have their flaws exposed and these are not good times. Obama isn’t what they expected and the elections isn’t setting up well. So don’t expect a lot of support.

“you can not understand that the huge national snow fall this year is one of many signs of climate change”

The liberal dilemma is they’ve claimed EVERY change is the result of GW. Too warm = GW. Too dry = GW. tooo cold = GW, Too wet = GW, Too many hurricanes = GW, Too few = GW.

The fact you go back and forth between global warming and climate change shows the weakness of your argument. A child understands the climate changes every day.

Your side made a catestrophic error in using Al Gore as a front man. He’s a bufoon. He is your bufoon. He is GW. You have 3 more years to pray the Arctic ice shelf disappears and that is the longest of long
shots.

Do you know the average winter ice temp was something like -22 degrees. Predications were it was going to warm to -21 degrees over 100 years. And THAT was going to cause the ice cap to disappear in 5 years?

How stupid are you?

Seriously. Do you realize just how stupid the concept is?

This ain’t 1998. This is the age of youtube. You are
going to live with that fat prick, he of the $2,000 a MONTH electric bills, telling us the Ice cap is disappearing.

Do you have any idea of just how stupid you look? You have to know the most popular video of 2012 will be of Al Gore promising in 2007 the Ice Cap will be gone by 2012. Except it’lll be 80%5 larger.

You can’t write this stuff.

“give Hamas another excuse to claim to be exclusively the victim of Israel and start more attacks?”

OK Patrick, this is your liberal worst. Let’s think about this for a minute. Israel just completed a war with Gaza a year ago using new tactics adapted from the USA. It’s been over a year. Since then there have been upgrades to virtually EVERY aspect of the Israeli arsenal. They spend about $15B a year on defense of which > $3B is for US arms,

During the war a year ago the kill ratio was 150-1. Since then Israel has invested $15B in defense, Tell me why Israel is going to worry about Hamas starting more attacks?

Are you out of your mind? It’s like a 5-2 guy fighting a 6-2 guy and hoping he hurts his knuckles on your face. This is what is so interesting, Hamas doesn’t fear Israel as their worst enemy. Hamas has to fear Fatah.

Israel can easily bitchslap Hamas and then segment it into easy pieces. The next step is to allow fatah access to Hamas to do some interrogation. Libs wil be paralyzed. Fatah will follow Fatah standards. Meaning the prisoner better have good info and give it up immediately. The fact is once Fatah reenters Gaza Hamas might as well commit suicide because they will suffer a horrific death anyway.

So I don’t see Hamas pushing things. The downside
is horrific. Fatah is quite capable of draging an entire family into the street and pouring gasoline on them.
This is what Hamas has to consider. I actually expect Hamas is looking for way out. The next time they attac Israel is the last time they do anything.

1. For you to justify anything on the grounds that it has happened before, or that others have done it as well in the past is simply a childish response. Surely, if you accept that the Jewish immigrants in Palestine, the Zionists of course, carved out their state in large part through violence, then you must find another argument to justify such actions other than “others have done it, too.” And, to be entirely accurate, when the United States or Australia were formed it was entirely acceptable to conquer by force. This was how the world operated. In 1947, however, the international system had evolved, and the west had just fought an unbelievably bloody war to send the message that conquest, annexation, and imperialism no longer are justified or acceptable. Israel apparently did not understand this concept.
~
2. The Palestine Mandate territory was very much populated prior to Israel’s creation. Over a million Arabs lived there when the UN decided to hand over half of that land to a recently arrived Jewish minority. Beng, I cannot continue this “debate” with you if you insist on falsifying history. Perhaps, you should take a little time to study the so-called “New History” that Israeli scholars have been putting forth. It shatters all those myths concerning Israeli probity, and the land without a people nonsense. And these are Israeli scholars that have been putting this forth.

Approximately 98% of all doctors ten years ago will tell you that smoking is bad for your health. Cigarette companies were paying high amounts of money to find the other 2% to publicize the results. Today 98% of climatologists say global warming is very much real. Energy companies are now paying hug sums to that other 2% and to make it as public as possible.

I was wondering, since you are a good debater, what your mentality/point of view is.

You have told me. You have a world view first and find facts later in the case of global warming.

I have Jewish in-laws who are very good people and I work in a job which is a random Jewish enclave and a vast majority Jewish. They are good people, too.
However, when I see many things which make me believe that the Israeli government is not constantly the moral superiors to non-elected criminal terrorist groups, I will say so.

The case at hand about work on The Temple Mount is an example of the Israeli government instigating a sensitive (yes, overly sensitive) Palestinians, I will say so.

I now realize why debating you has been so difficult.

No, I am not seeking support.
My work is not tied to politics at all and, should you meet me on the job, I will nod and ignore political issues unless I ran across an extremely offensive neo-Nazi or (if they still exist) Stalinist. Republicans I do work with and have no hesitation due to the totally apolitical nature of my job.
I am entertained by this experience.
The general sentiment, however, seems to be far, far closer to your point of view that Israel is never an instigator, terrorists “represent” Palestinians and are always unprovoked instigators.
I think, for this issue, I am, nationally, in the minority.

Foreign aid is a huge share of Israeli GDP.
Being in the United States but for both humanitarian reasons (others would say “Christian Values” as if other religions or atheists like terrible things to happen) I wish the killings to decrease or, better yet, stop. Threatening to decrease or stop aid to Israeli may very likely cause Israel to rethink it’s policies.
Hence, bringing it back to New York, where I am and where you are in the United States, it is possible for our State Department to help create more peace in the Middle East.
Muslims have a perception that America does whatever Israel asks all of the time and this is one of the biggest reasons (not the only) that the terrorists of the Middle East put the US in it’s cross hairs in recent decades despite the huge geographical distance.
Our support for corrupt Arabian governments has, also, made terrorists chose the US as a target.
We do not want to be targets.
With the right policies, we may hear people singling Allah bless America being sung in democratic Muslim countries sometime in my lifetime (about 40 to 60 more years).

I brought up the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement

“International intergovernmental organizations such as the Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention,[8] every major organ of the United Nations,[9] and the European Union have declared that the settlements are a violation of international law. Non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have also characterized the settlements as a violation of international law. In 1978, the Legal Adviser of the Department of State to the United States Congress concluded that “the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.”
I am not referring to the land acknowledged as Israel by international law.
It would be the counterpart to moving onto an Indian reservation (Native American Reservation) in the United States and not acknowledging the local government and, then, being upset that whites (or other non-Native Americans) are having a hard time.

I am, absolutely, not saying that Israel should close down and go back to Europe, the Arabian countries and the US.

Israel is now very established but needs it’s borders fully defined and agreed upon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
This is a reference I made to Arabs who are citizens of Israel and live within the Jewish community in peace including some who are drafted and serve in the Israeli Army.

The aid to Egypt and Israel was contracted by Carter as part of the peace deal. The aid to Israel is in the form of credits to buy US arms. and other defense projects like the fence.

Anything from the UN is garbage. Think of the IPCC reports on Global Warming. It’s all trash. Israel has be far the most advanced economy in the region and considering the size of Europe as well.

Hamas isn’t just bizarre. They are evil. They’ve drug suspected Fatah members out into the street in front of their families and pumped bullets into their legs before putting a few into their faces. This is why Hamas has to think 2x’s before starting another rocket campaign. Think of how wasy it would be for Israel to segment Gaza the next time and allow Fatah in to ‘investigate’ a section at a time until all of Gaza has been cleared of Hamas. Joe will not criticize either side in a Palestinian civil war nor will the EU or the UN.

Israel has every right to protect it’s holy sites and there’s no good reason not to respect them for doing so. Except Islam respects no one.

1)US Aid to Egypt began in 1955 when Carter was only two years out of the US Navy.(Reagan never served in the armed forces, but bravely announced sports during World War II.)
2)I cited many groups including Amnesty International (always an opponent – as they should have been – of Soviet oppression among other human rights violations) and the United States congress.
3)There are, still 98% of climatologists – about 20,000 worldwide – agree on climate change in 2010. I am sure that if there were something to be gained by big business, Fox news could, also, find 2% of geologists to say that the world is flat if they got paid enough to do so.
4) Terrorists kill the way Hamas does. The IRA would take a traitor, drag him out to a field, force him on his knees and put a bullet in the back of his head and made sure to tell anybody who asked that the traitor, literally died on his knees. If they just b-slapped their opposition and walked away then I don’t think anybody would call them “terrorists”.
5) Both Jews and Muslims call that same space “holy”. So, both need to work together. It would be awful if Muslims, without Jews rummaged through that area and did what their religion most wanted to do. If it were a place of no Muslim significance, I would agree with you, but, I promise you that nobody would want Evangelical Christians redecorating the Vatican and even the most mellow old priests would be infuriated if they tried to. So, bring Muslims along for this.

Now, I am not sarcastic when saying that I believe you are a bright man but, you are claiming to know some pretty amazing things:

1) You know for a fact that the Jewish religion is the true religion or the true religion as the basis for Christianity. For this reason, no Muslims need to be taken at all seriously in their desire to maintain their own holy sights.
2) You know more about the climate than at least 19,600 people who spend thier whole careers researching climate or imagine that all of them worldwide are secretly working for Al Gore in a world conspiracy to create more government agencies or something.
3) You know more about international relations than the entire united nations and the United States Congress.

I am sorry, nobody can possibly be half as knowledgeable as you are claiming to be.

When you go beyond a certain point like this, I have to say that this is BS.

Many (and I will not say all) conservatives believe that we live in such a simple world that forget PhDs and people who spend their lives researching these projects, a six year old can understand this world.

I, for one, know that this is a very complex world and am proud that I am able to follow the complex reasoning behind the conclusions of people who put their lives into their work.

If you enjoy this debate, please don’t write off 98% or more of the people who spend their lives on these things.

“For now, not giving them the slightest – the slightest – avoidable provocation like the archeological work described above would be wise.
Bring them into the project or leave the work to be done when things get saner.”

Why even think of bringing Hamas into anything? The last thing you want to do is give them legitimacy. The idea is to eliminate them. They’re terrorists. You want them dead. Israel has a well established track record of restoring holysites and making them accessible to everyone. Islam has NO SUCH RECORD.

This is a wise move. It highlights the fact Islam desperately needs a reformation while displaying the skill and goodness of Israel. How is it this holysite has been there for 2,000 years and muslims never discovered it?

I don’t believe I even vaguely implied and Joe did not suggest a Hamas member archeologist, just a Muslim archeologist. I doubt Hamas members are anywhere near that educated on average.

There have been LIBERAL Israeli archeologists who worked with LIBERAL (not pro-Hamas) Palestinian Muslim archeologists on other projects.

Like American conservatives believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy behind health care and climate change, Hamas believes that there is a conspiracy behind everything Israel does without a Muslim being present, especially if it is on a religious site.

Doing so will DElegitimize Hamas seeing Zionist conspiracies in their cornflakes (or Humus may be more like it) let them know that Israelis respect other people’s beliefs and are not out to destroy Islam.

Hence, Shalom, Salam, peace will at least momentarily result.

Enough things like that would show that Hamas are dangerous lunatics. Hence, Israel and Palestinians would win peace. Win-Win (but lost for the militants wishing to blow people up).

Sounds good to me.

Understand rwd56 that fear is a tool of manipulation used in politics.
I recommend the documentary The Power of Nightmares.
Sure, it very much a liberal type of presentation, but, if you are open minded enough to debate with me, you are probably open minded enough to learn at least a new point of view from that.

I think I need a new hobby, I have killed so much time on this blog just this week.

Honestly, you have been an interesting challenge for me.

“the US abandoned an ally as soon as the communists left. I, absolutely, believe US foreign policy is, also, flawed. However, I would be very insulted if one said that I was “anti” American.”

I don’t get this abandoned thing. We helped them defeat the Rusisans and after the job as done the few people we had near there left. We didn’t abandoned Afghanistan we were never there. It wasn’t our responsibility to setup a new govt it was the Afghans and if we did people like you would have called us imperialists.

Why would you be insulted? Why would you care? You know if you are anti-american or not. I can guarrantee you 95% of conservatives think Obama’s foreign policy is moronic and not a one of us think it’s anti-american to think so or to say so. It’s called democracy.

rdw~
~
You are aware that Obama has pursued the same neoconservative foreign policy that beleaguered the Bush Administration, right? Still in Iraq, a surge in Afghanistan, drone attacks in Pakistan. Obama is hardly some peace-nik when it comes to US foreign policy.

I am a staunch conservative. But, I too, understand the complexities of the world, and reject the thoroughly debunked and simplistic narrative of Israelis as the righteous ally and the Palestinians as the rejectionists and terrorists. It’s far more nuanced than all of that. Yes, some Palestinians have resorted to abhorrent tactics waged against civilian populations. This gets all the media air-time. However, little is ever mentioned that each and every one of these attacks had coincided with an undeniable truth: the Israeli military is opertaing beyond its internationally recognized borders. Rdw and Beng can lament the fact that there is no Palestinian state, and therefore the Palestinians have no sovereignty over those lands. However, the lack of a formal state does not overrule the sovereignty to those lands of the people that inhabit them. The IDF has no moral or strategic justification for its 38 year occupation of Gaza, its continued blockade, and it’s 43 year occupation of the West Bank. To ignore these facts, while highlighting Palestinian aggression is narrow-minded, if not intentionally deceptive.

1) I already said this. “Responsibility” is not a significant term here. Gorbachev warned the United States after withdrawing that the Muslim fundamentalists would cause additional problems worldwide if not reigned in (he was not Nostradamus and did not exactly how but knew that they were a third force both anti-communist and anti-democratic). Pre-invasion Afghanistan had schools, welfare services for the poor, police stations, courts, prisons and the equivalent of a national guard and no fundamentalist Muslims. Post Soviet Afghanistan had none of these. Education, basic social services to prevent absolute starvation and homelessness of the poor (especially after so many homes and businesses were destroyed in the conflict) reduce the chances of radical ideas from catching on. Police, courts and an equivalent to a national guard could hold down fundamentalist Muslims. Notice that Turkey, a secular democracy (although still poorer than the EEC countries with a worse human rights record) has produced very, very few terrorists. They have all of the above. This is why
2) If Obama’s foreign policy is moronic but the same as Bush’s, then Bush’s policy was moronic to conservatives, too, right?
I see a difference in planning withdrawal time tables for Iraq as a public warning amongst allies. Obviously if the Iraqis are not ready as scheduled, we stay longer.
Very, very few to the left disagreed with neutralizing the capacity or Al Qada as much as possible including the capture of Osama bin Laden and the removal of the Taliban.
Bush diverted troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Obama is bringing troops back into Afghanistan and reducing the number in Iraq due to incremental (but very slow) military and civilian successes.

After World War II, we did not have a “responsibility” to Western Europe to rebuild their countries. We did, however, have a strategic interest in doing so since Communism was a new and, relatively, exciting ideology for uneducated, unemployed, unfed, homeless or near homeless people. Greece actually had a civil war causing more Greek deaths than were caused during World War II against domestic Communists who were not even funded by the Soviet Union.
No, we have no “responsibility” to rebuild any country in many decades. However, it has been in our strategic interest to do so.

Government policy and personal actions are not very similar.

Partrick,

Never get your history from Hollywood. I am not saying we should not have done more just that the critics saying we left too earyl said the opposite at the time. But more important is the people who do terror get ALL of the blame. Every shred. There are no root or contributing causes. There’s no, if you only WE did something different it could have been avoided.

Exiled, Agree Obama has been very good on Afpac. I had to write quickly and would have differenciated between the Bush war policies he is continuing versus his own clear foreign policies if I had time . I’m trying to separate Obama as diplomat verus Obama the warrier. Having campaigned for 8 years touting Afghanistan as the “Good War” he can hardly surrender right away.

The man is naive beyond belief the perfect product of that Harvard elitist bubble where any conflict can be resolved with the right combination of words. Obama’s efforts in Honduras were impossibly inept. He got everything wrong every step of the way until at the very end he just got out and restored full aid. He wrote a letter to the russians to negotiate the end of star wars after having campaigned for two years to do just that. He did not tell the Poles or Czechs this and they found out when Russia released the private letter to embarrass Obama for insulting their intelligence. His speech in Cairo was impossibly stupid having destroyed all shots of credibility with Israel and even Sarko mocked him for living in a dream works after his UN Speech. I think Joe Klein dubbed this series of events his “Rodney King stage”.

Robert Kagan (I hope I got that right, could have been Fred) wrote a fascinating essay a month ago describing Obamas foreign Policy design was trying to shift America as the world lone superpower to one among equals, without alliances that do more to exclude than include, in a process that will require Obama to move away from old allies and nearer old enemies. Obama wishes to have equally close relations with everyone. It’s not for nothing the 1st day in his office he send a bust of Churchill that has been there since Ike back to the UK. He didn’t move it into the hall or someone else’s office he sent it back to the UK. If you’ve been reading any of the European press they are none too happy with The One. You may have seen that bill board of rthe frat boy GWB waving over the highway asking, “Miss me yet?” Sarko misses George.

” rdw56 said on They Just Don’t Get It…Or Do They?
February 26, 2010 at 9:58 am
Partrick,
Never get your history from Hollywood. I am not saying we should not have done more just that the critics saying we left too earyl said the opposite at the time. But more important is the people who do terror get ALL of the blame. Every shred. There are no root or contributing causes. There’s no, if you only WE did something different it could have been avoided.”
I can’t find this remark outside of my inbox and, therefore, pasted it.
Hollywood movies: agreed.
That last scene, however, did depict what Wilson really did: attempt to rebuild civil society in Afghanistan. I know that from other sources which are not from Hollywood including international relations classes I was taking at that time.

Note that I did say that I would love – love – to see bin Laden captured, tried and kept in prison for life.
Why?
Executed people can be martyrs to a cause. bin Laden growing old and going insane in solitary at Supermax would be pathetic and not insight anybody.

For individuals you have people held accountable or responsible.
For countries you have causes and lessons to be learned.

Afghans had dreams of the US rebuilding them but no promises even from Wilson.

The US failed to prevent a breeding ground for terrorists in Afghanistan. That is not to say that one should arrest GHWB, Bill Clinton or even GWB who had the last nine months for that. It means that GHWB and Bill Clinton had an opportunity to make the world safer down the road and failed to utilize it.

Secular, non-partisan public schools are a good way to prevent political or religious terrorism.
However, it is not sexy or cool. You won’t see any action movies about translating history and math books into Afghan. You won’t even be able to tell people what you prevented since, if the terrorists are never converted, we would never have known what good we had done.

If Obama’s foreign policy is moronic but the same as Bush’s, then Bush’s policy was moronic to conservatives, too, right

GWB was far from perfect on foreign policy but his was far superior. Obama trying to negotiate something from the Russians for shutting down the star ward sites in Poland and the Czech republic, without telling the poles or czechs was the worse combination of sleezy, stupid and insulting. Really, did anyone not know he was gonig to sut them down? The Russians were pissed and released the letter to embarrass him.

Two areas where GWB was fabulous were trade and personal diplomacy. Trade is a part of foreign policy He did more trade deals that any other president and for all of the controversy over Iraq he was very well respected by Merkel, Sarko, Blair, Brown, Harper, Maliki, Karzai etc.

More than a month ago Obama promised he’d work to double exports adfter spending the previous three years blocking free trade deals Bush negotiated with Colombia, Panama and South Korea and a number of trade liberalization deals. Obama has done next to nothing on trade. The last 5 years of GWBs term exports grew > 10% adding > 1.5% to GDP.

Those govt’s are real happy with The One, you bet.

“It means that GHWB and Bill Clinton had an opportunity to make the world safer down the road and failed to utilize it.”

You could say that in another 3 dozen countries. We don’t own Afghanistan. It’s not a state. I wasn’t our country to fix. The very people saying we should have gotten involved in Afghanistan are the very same people who had we actually done so way back when would have been screaming “American Imperialists”.

Also if you could, show me one person, just one, who is saying it now and said it back then.

RDW 56,

It is about lessons learned, not fingers to point.
Charley Wilson, who was, you could say, a colorful character and, clearly, a nobody in congress was one of a very small number of people. I have no researched who to point fingers at since this is the first era when we had to protect countries from becoming safe havens for terrorism rather than safe havens for communists.

I put Clinton as one of the two who could have, possibly, had foresight. Doesn’t that please you?

“Star Wars” originally a Democratic slur for missile defense had to go.
It is like shooting a bullet mid air with another bullet – logistically extremely improbable, almost impossible.
It was tested by the Soviets in 1972 and thrown away as a waste of money. (If the Soviets – agreed upon by us as poor economic managers – threw it away, then it must be REALLY bad.)

I did not know of this gaff not paying as much attention to the news as I used to.

So, who got killed by this gaff?
How many dead?
Iraq has thousands dead.

We all know that GWB never had any gaffs of his own.

Hello, patricksartor
Since you demonstrate a wide knowledge of worldly affairs you don’t seem to be one who has been born yesterday. Then how come you suddenly mention Palestinian government that “was devastated in 1967″ and “Palestinian law” that you presume was in existence before that year?
A bit of history, just in highlights. Most of those called Palestinians these days are descendants of the Arabs who flocked into the Land of Israel starting from the end of the XIX-th century in parallel with the Jewish immigration, and especially in the period of the British mandate and the economic development that came with both these factors. They constitute different tribes and are not conglutinated into on nation despite sincere and desperate attempts of Israeli peaceniks with the support of all statecraft stars of the world. Those in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are very different from those of Gaza.
After Israel was established the Arabs insisted the boarder would be defined as ceasefire lines. Judea and Samaria were captured by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. No one talked then about any Palestinian people. It sprang into being on the world stage after the Six Day war – not as a result of a real desire to organize the population of those territories for their benefit, but as a battering ram against Israel. This travesty actually goes on to the present day, and with deadly consequences.
The Jews have perfect right to settle in Judea and Samaria. Rather, that these territories have to be clear of any Jewish presence is a nasty monstrosity. Your statement that the settlers are some ultra right is absolutely erroneous and taken from some irrelevant stereotype. The vast majority is secular or mildly religious middle class moderates who treat Arabs on an equal basis. There is an insignificant number of religious fanatics who sometimes react harshly to the Arab violence, but they never come even closely the.
The problem is that even if the Palestinian people is in some process of emergence, all those who meddled in the issue actually blew it as far as some finalization in the foreseeable future is in view. The peaceniks thinking as usual that they know better tried to pack a historical process into a period of a few years not heeding to the need of checks and balances, just to be in time before the next election and to pick the Nobel Peace Prize. The Arab states with inner pressures of the hatred of the West – of which Israel, being a free society, is in the forefront, – together with Arafat and his mafia pushed the Palestinians to play as the battering ram to prepare the situation for a final drive into the sea.
The problem is that these forces are gaining ground by their propaganda, to the extent that even decent people in the West become inculcated with gross misrepresentations and outright lies.

1) I have not found any verification of the Palestinians being newcomers.I have seen nothing but evidence to the contrary.
2)Newcomers or not, imagine if when the English acknowledged the United States in the 1783 that English then said that in random spots INSIDE of the United States there will be people under English law and not subject to American law. Then, these colonies start expanding instead of shrinking after 1783, would we be happy with that? If not, then how could anybody expect Palestinians to find people held to Israeli law only in the middle of their country tolerable?
3) If they did predate Jews by less than one hundred years as you claim, why does that mean that personal property can be claimed by Israelis? I have only been in this apartment five years. So, does that mean that anybody in the world can make my living room into their bedroom? Does that mean I should find settlers sleeping in my bathtub tomorrow morning?
4) There was no historical concept of the United States until the dawn of the American revolution. Does that mean we are not country? Unlike the historical records I have seen of Palestine, Americans are made up of wandering bands of Germans (largest ethnic group) Irish (second) and Englishmen mostly followed by a large hodge podge of others. What your argument is, assuming the Arabian migration were real, would definitely make the United States a non country.
5) You are now, apparently, claiming that news coverage and documentaries about Jewish settlers (not all probably) are staged by an Arabian or Muslim conspiracy.
6)With the hostilities so infamous, outside of religious fanatics (and I can not say for sure which settlers can be defined this way or not) who would possibly want to move into a neighborhood where the neighbor boy playing with your son may have a bomb strapped to him? (No, don’t bring little Mohamed into the house for milk and cookies, Mica! NOOOOOOOO!)There are so many great deals on foreclosed property in the United States, why not come here and absolutely not be blown to bits? What is obvious is that, religious or political, by moving into the occupied territories the settlers must be trying to prove a point of some kind.

Forgive my levity about foreclosed property and, of course, suicide bombers but please do not settle into living in my bathtub. I am going to need a shower tomorrow morning and really want some privacy.

BTW
If you know any really hot Israeli girls, I might let them settle into my bedroom.
My sister and brother are both happily married to Jewish people, why not?

1. The land was sparsely populated. Look into the Mark Twain’s description of his visit to the Holy Land – he barely saw a living soul. That is in 1860-s.
2. In late 1920-s and the in the 1948 (Israel’s war of Independence) the Jews were expelled from Hebron in the usual Arab practice – by massacre (let’s also mention there were a few cases of Arabs saving some Jewish children). Shouldn’t the Jews abide by that result of ethnic cleansing after 1967 as they reached those places once more?
3. Your parallel with an apartment is hardly applicable. Nothing of the Arabs’ personal property was touched anywhere. Just as the Arabs flowed into the country, so do the Jews have the right to do as long as there is no defined sovereign state with a well-defines national population. That’s why the Arabs in general didn’t need the “Palestinian people” before 1967, and started making use of it after. (Your parallel with the apartment can work more exactly against the English and other settlers in the New World – only, there is hardly any people to claim his property).
4. “Palestinians” could establish their state several times – Jewish settlers notwithstanding. The settlers don’t prevent them – Israel as a state was ready to cede them territory according to Oslo agreements. They are just not set to doing this as it turns out but rather to seek a position from which to batter Israel more successfully. State is about taking responsibility (over budget, roads, education), they are more professional at leading a revolution: playing a victim card, embezzling the money donated to them, etc. That’s why they are bloating the issue of the settlers as preventing them to move to statehood. (By the way, did you find many states in which the Jews prevented the state to exist, rather than to contribute to it? I can think only of Hitler claiming thus. Well, also Ferdinand and Isabella who ousted Jews from Spain in 1492).I wonder that they haven’t started blaming Global Warming blaming that on Israel too.
5. What so awful things did you see on TV about the so called settlers? There are though staged presentations – it’s too late to go into this. And much of the media is just pro-Arab as it is nowadays politically correct.

1) Mark Twain is not a source of statistics. He was an excellent writer, not a statistician and, worldwide, the population was much lower than it is now. Also, it is 1949, not 1840 when one should be concerned with.
2) From the Movie Munich “[The Jewish people] are not holy because [they suffered] but because [they] are righteous.” (I may be one or two words off.) Just because unjustifiable cruelty happened earlier does not mean that the same land should have settlers anymore than Manhattan should be an Indian reservation. It was, I can imagine, cruel and wrong, but, that does not give license for the grandchildren or great grandchildren of that suffering to take back that same land.
3) You have not shown me anything that the influx of Arabs was at all recent. The settlements, I know, were primarily or exclusively on public land, but, public land which, if the government is Palestinian, not Israeli does not belong to settlers as one can not build a settlement in Central Park in Manhattan. You have failed to address the issue brought up in a PBS documentary where settlers were not becoming Palestinian citizens and there have been instances of harassment. Having pockets of people from a different culture in the middle of your country is not a good way to start a new government especially if they are not subject to your laws.
4) Hamas, who did not sign the Oslo agreement (since they were not a political party at that time) began a civil war with Fatah. A secondary issue was corruption. Had the settlements not been there, corruption would have been the only issue at hand and, although there most likely been violence, it would have been Palestinian on Palestinian violence only regarding corruption and incompetence.

You say the Palestinians “Play a victim card”.
So do Israelis and somebody who brings up unrelated atrocities against their people in one message. You didn’t include the Russian Pogroms but, I guess that one is in your response even though the topic is about after 1949 and after 1967 and not further back and not terrible things done to Jews by other people.
If somebody did something terrible to me, is that YOUR problem?
No.
So, Spain and Germany are not Palestinian’s problem.
If your grandfather punched out my grandfather, should I be allowed to punch you out?
No.
If some of the land taken in 1967 was taken from Jews in the 1920s that does not mean that opening up a settlement or expanding a settlement in 1993 is acceptable.Just as what your grandfather might have done my grandfather is not your problem.

You have two sides who both will tell you that they have always been the victim.
Both have been victims of one another.
One side has terrorist groups. The other side has a government. I hold the government to a higher standard.

NO, it had nothing to do with vision. My point about naming someone who said we should stay there, at the time it mattered, is you are not going to find anyone. It’s not like this was a hotly debated issue with a group of smart people advocating we stay and Clinton refusing them.

All you have here is armchair quarterbacking 8 years after the fact. That’s not reasoning and damn sure isn’t wisdom.

The biggest reason why it wasn’t considered then is because todays armchair QBs would have been bitching if we actually went in. So would the rest of thr world.

Germany and Russia both owe the Jewish people a debt which is too great to be repaid.
I do not know of anybody who would say otherwise.
However, this is nowhere near Israel.
Spain, might be slightly less evil as modern DNA tests show that a huge number of Jews (and Moors) were not murdered but forced into insincere conversions.This is, at least in my judgment slightly less evil.

Among many sources a few years ago I watched In Search of Peace: Part 1: 1948-1967.
There were several bands of Palestinians who did massacre Jews and one known band of Jews who massacred Palestinians during the formation according to this documentary.
It certainly does not depict a very newly settled land.

Another source is Noam Chomsky who, making commentary on media coverage of the 1990s onward cited statistics saying that the Israeli government during that time killed many times more Palestinians than Palestinians killed Jews but media coverage in the United States showed almost exactly the opposite ratio.

Are these examples, to you, of anti-Israeli sources?

I’m not arguing the point aobut Star Wars staying or going. I’m pointing out the mans incompetence as a negotiator. You don’t campaign for 3 years promising to pull the plug on Star Wars and then the 1st week in office offer to negotiate with the Russians on pulling out star wars. That’s treating them with contempt. You also don’t write a letter to the Russians offering to negotiate pulling the star wars site out of Poland and the Czech republic without 1st consulting with the Poles and Czechs. He managed to piss off everyone.

This gives us a neat little snap shot of the Harvard elitist, the one we’ve been waiting for, versus the amiable dunce, Ronald Reagan. RR was President of the screen actors guild negotiated two major contracts and then after he left was brought back to negotiate two more. This was before the age of lawyers. Reagan sat face to face with the studios.

It’s not about lessons learned it’s pure 2nd quessing after the fact. It’s blather. At a minimum you need to go back to the period and evaluate why the decision was made at that time with the facts available at the time. Even better is to look at what people like Joe Klein were saying at that time. Hindsight is 20-20 and still often useless.

Hello, patricksartor
1. We can turn the issue over and over. The basic facts are these: the Arabs could have their state in the Land of Israel in 1947. However they chose war. They could still establish a state though on a lesser territory, between 1949-1967. However they chose war again, and as a result they were proposed by Israel to establish their state in 1993 and on (Oslo accords). And again they chose war. Israel is not obliged to keep a certain territory, to which she has rightful claim and in possession of which she came as a result of the Arab aggression, for some Arab groups with a dim prospect of organizing themselves into a nation and moving into statehood. It is not a matter of legalistic debates but rather of practical policies and leadership. History is not made of legalistic stuff. Rather the legalistic stuff comes later to seal what has emerged in reality.
2. However, there is a lot of material on legal aspects much more authoritative than Noam Chomsky. Just find on the web “Legal Rights and Title of Sovereignty of the Jewish People To The Land Of Israel And Palestine Under International Law” by professor Howard Grief. Try also articles on the issue by Eugene Rostow – the US under-secretary of State in late 60-s who elaborated the 242 UN resolution.
Find also “A View from the Target Zone” by Haim Harari, the former president of the Weizmann Institute.
Noam Chomsky is interesting to read as long as he dwells on his field of linguistics. However, when he starts to pronounce his views on the world affairs he is, though provocative and thus stimulating, completely outlandish. Just try to read what he writes about the US, and actually on any side that can be called Western. He is a guy who actually sees everything inside out. Mark Twain is not a source of statistics but he is a witness on the situation on the ground as it was in his period, and thus is much more reliable than a bizarre and eccentric guy like Chomsky.

Let me turn to some details that you mentioned.
I think I know what massacre you mean when you say there was one Jewish group that massacred the Arabs. If you refer to Dir Yasin village then there was a battle in 1948 which for reasons that I won’t go into went into history as massacre though there was nothing of the sort (it’s a rather long story and has to do a lot with the internal Jewish politics and rivalries) . However, there was massacre inflicted at Arabs as late as 1995 by one Dr. Goldstein who mowed some two dozen Arabs with automatic rifle. Again, the crucial point is whether such deeds are a part of the mainstream culture or terrible deviations from it and treated adequately.
As to Gaza, you got it wrongly. The Hamas take-over took place after the Israeli settlers were transferred by the then prime-minister Sharon. So it was as you said “Palestinian on Palestinian violence”. But what would it have to do with the settlements if these were still in place? Absolutely illogical to blame everything on the settlements. Suppose they would strike a deal with Israel and establish a sovereign state. And then they would accept the Jews as a minority and propose them either to stay or to leave. After all Israel established herself as a state with some 20%Arab population. (By the way they don’t serve in the army, only the Bedouins do, and also the Druze community, the latter accept the Jewish state unequivocally and rise to the ranks of colonels and generals).

Technical problems: I am getting email for new posts rdw56 said on They Just Don’t Get It…Or Do They?
February 26, 2010 at 9:58 am

I can’t find that thread nor the post tied to that thread.

Does anybody know why I am getting email alerts for a thread that I can not find two weeks ago and not on the web page?