Senate Israel/Palestine

Sorry Wocky. I'd like to believe that, given better weapons, Hamas would just precision target IDF compounds. But I live in the real world, and I know that wouldn't be the case.

I would say they're brought up for both reasons. The difference is that I don't think anyone here would dispute that the Western media is biased towards Israel in their coverage. So there's not really a point to bringing up those statistics for that purpose in this discussion. There is, however, a desire on the part of some to paint a lopsided and intellectually dishonest picture of which side has worse tactics.

 

No, you just failed to articulate the argument.

Tactical parity would imply some tactical acumen which cannot exist for anyone dumb enough to take the IDF on in conventional warfare.

 

You talk as if on the last day of the Camp David negotiations Arafat phoned home and ordered an Intifada. Where are you getting your information from? The Second Intifada started because Arial Sharon, who had just been commemorated by the Palestinians as Israel's number one heinous war criminal for his part in the Chabra and Chatila massacres, entered the Temple Mount where the Al Aqsa Mosque sits. This was an intentional provocation by Sharon who is a notorious piece of **** when it comes to provocation and his visit and the timing of it predictably caused outrage. This is why the Second Intifada is known as the 'Al Aqsa Intifada' and not the 'Camp David Intifada'.

In relation to the Camp David talks, there were counter-offers. You should get a copy of Ben-Ami's book and have a good read. It most definetely explodes the myths which revolve around the failure of the Camp David talks. More Israeli propaganda churned out by the gold class proponents of propaganda. Even Clinton agrees.

I already responded to your issue with my sig and avatar in the other thread.

On the subject of Isreal's record of violence in Gaza it is pretty well settled, as a number of human rights organisations who monitor the IDF in the occupied territories (including Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) have literally published dozens of reports which document the intentional targeting of civilians and children by the IDF. Israel regularly drops bombs on residential areas. This is well documented. What Hamas would do if they had the same weapons and training and access is largely hypothetical. I would guess that they would be just as bad as the IDF. However, the reality is that Israel do have the troops, the weapons and the training and they are using it to deliberately target civilians. This is a documented fact.

 

Don't fight, that's what the Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians want!

 

He does? Since when? One of the more memorable passages of his autobiography was when he related an exchange he had with Arafat when he was preparing to leave the White House. Arafat congratulated him on being a "great man", and Clinton replied, "I am not a great man; I am a failure, and you made me one", and elsewhere in the related passage blames Arafat for not bringing himself to be able to accept a peace agreement. I'm open to differing points of view, of course, but has Clinton really done a total about-face on this? And I agree that Israel are the gold-class proponents of propaganda. I mean, after all, the most notorious and vile piece of propaganda of all time still has an alarmingly disconcerting and dedicated following in Israel.

Oh, wait.

The "other thread" where I apparently so egregiously brought this up was in fact, this thread. Raising a question about someone's rationale for having a Palestinian flag as their avatar seems a tad bit relevant to me in a thread about Palestine, but hey, I guess I was wrong and my trying to start a discussion was simply self-aggrandizement.

Hoth, I apologize for not responding the first time around, but your reply to this question seems pretty nonsensical to me.

So, you agree with me that religious extremists would most likely seize control in a sovereign Palestinian polity, and you loath religious extremism, and yet you also desperately want to empower the Palestinians to make this happen. I'm afraid I don't really follow your logic.

It seems to me rather like having, say, "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I am free at last!" as your sig, and then having the Confederate navy jack as your avatar.

I greatly dislike the current regime and have explicitly said so. My point was that its ascendancy is directly linked to the 2000 Camp David refusal. The Saudi Prince Bandar explicitly admonished Arafat that if he didn't take the deal, he'd have to "negotiate with Sharon" the next time around.

 

Are you suggesting that the Palestinians should be denied sovereignty just because of the possibility a religious government may come to power?

Speaking of which, what do you have to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. As I recall, you had all manner of dark predictions about their behavior. Morsi's response to this crisis has been quite conventional, and he's been careful to make clear that he's not going to breach the peace treaty. Nor has he very seriously demagogued the issue. Given Washington's relative appreciation of his actions so far, might you consider that you've grossly over-estimated the "threat" from the Muslim Brotherhood?

 

No, absolutely not. I'm simply saying for someone who apparently holds "blasphemy is a victimless crime" to be a statement of profundity to to also sympathize so passionately with the Palestinians is at the least, eyebrow-raising. I'm genuinely interested in his rationale.

Um, no. I criticized him for his response to the Egyptian riots, and I stand by that criticism. I never, ever made any insinuations about sinister plans he supposedly had regarding Israel. You're going to have to craft your next "gotcha!" move a bit more carefully. When you get off your pedestal, though, you might want to ask these women if they overestimated the "threat" of the Muslim Brotherhood(why are you using quotation marks, by the way? I never, ever, ever used the word threat with regards to the Muslim Brotherhood)

 

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Again? Look, I don't really care if you find my sig and avatar combination nonsensical and comical. Life is too short to argue about it You asked, I responded. Deal with it. You have issues with Islam clearly and seem to believe that theThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the root of all evil. I'm Ok with that. I'm very glad that you support the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

The reference to Bill Clinton comes from the book launch from Ben-Ami's book for which Clinton provides an endorsement for on the inside cover. The comment was aimed at Ben-Ami's specific contention in the book that the deal offered to the Palestinians and the whole "Clinton Paramenters" weren't that attractive to the Palestinian delegation. Ben-Ami subsequently confirmed this in his interview with Dr Norman Finkelstein in 2006. Such comments are not contained in Clinton's book because Ben-Ami's book was published a couple of years later. I don't have any other specific reference or citation.

 

Source

You certainly seemed to be suggesting that you were expecting a number of bad things that extended far beyond denouncing a bigoted video. And given that the article itself attributes the removal to liberal/Salafist compromise, I'm not sure why the Brotherhood would take the blame.

 

This is the sort of willful lack of curiosity I'm talking about. Imagine if Birth of a Nation were systematically shown to Southern schoolchildren, and that Southern adults also tended to be overwhelmingly racist and harbor all sorts of phantasmagorical conspiracy theories about blacks. Hmm, might there be a nexus there worth discussing? And more to the point, would liberals be so flippantly dismissive of this?

And yes, your responded to my post, and I found that it made little sense. If I asked you what 1+1 was, and you said "3", well, you have responded to me, but you still have to explain your response. The fact that you apparently can't do this speaks volumes, especially since your posts in this thread tend to be very substantive and cogent.

That makes no sense. The conversation described in Clinton's autobiography is his his own personal first hand account of the event. Ben-Ami is effectively claiming that Clinton is lying. The burden of proof is on him, then, and subsequently you to substantiate this claim.

I expressed worry that the regime would take an Islamist direction, yes. I still am. I am hopefully, very cautiously, optimistic about the direction the regime takes, but I'm not putting my head in the sand either. That's a far cry from claiming that I said "The Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to Israel".

By the way, the fact that I said this puts me in the company of His Excellency. Just an observation.

 

I have already given you my rationale. Please, move on.

Not all Palestinians are rabid Islamic fundamentalists. There are also atheist Palestinians and Christian Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians who are culturally Muslim but don't really hold any strong religious convictions. The PA and the PLO are both secular and moderate. Hamas is fundamentalist yes, but like you, I don't t support them or want them to continue to have any influence in Palestinian affairs.

 

I don't disagree with any of that. The problem is they do have influence, and an extraordinary amount, at that. Therefore, it is necessary for Israel to behave as if they are surrounded by a cult of religious sociopaths. Yes, they have egregiously misbehaved and overreached at times, but that's an inevitable consequence of the challenge they face. Yet you have declared in this thread that Israel is, in fact, a "rogue state" that "is not interested in peace", which is a rather extraordinary claim to make.

 

Not really that extraordinary. The Jewish fundies have influence on the Israeli side of politics as well. Some of those Orhodox Jewish settlers make the Hamas fundies look tame. In fact, it is the voice of the extremists which is always heard over the voice of the moderates.

 

Israel has nuclear weapons and is not a signatory of the NPT and they don't even acknowledge their status as a nuclear weapons state. I'd say that is pretty rogue even ignoring their defiance of the UN. (Yes, I know Pakistan and India also are not signatories.) And I'd say Bibi's government, if not the Israeli state (not meaning the Israeli people) is interested in peace. It's obvious that much of their foreign aid and the fact that right-wing governments get voted in are very much dependent on the "threat" to the country's existence.

 

This is what Ender highlighted on the other page as the Achilles heel of my peace proposal, the fundies. As long as there are two states, the fundies on both sides will get a lot of traction in elections.

So the solution is: no more elections.
As, like Ghost said, both sides are traumatized, they are incapable of voting the right people into office.

Never before have I seen the West-Berlin model as a solution for anything, but I do now.

 

And - realizing the power of fundamentalism in this conflict - I think it's essential to detach oneself from all religious matter when gauging the conflict. So Hoth's sig is perfectly suitable.

 

Of course they have influence with regards to coalition building and electioneering, but they don't spearhead the direction of Israeli government policy. And even then you're engaging in the fallacy that all "religious extremists" essentially espouse the same thing, just with different aesthetic and cultural trappings, which is demonstrably untrue.

And, really, nothing to say about the Protocols besides a roll of the eyes? Silence is deafening.

 

I am a passionate advocate of full Israeli nuclear disarmament, and said so(or at least implied) in the Biden-Ryan Debate thread. That is clearly, however, not what Hoth was referring to with regards to his calling Israel a "rogue state".

 

I have a new drinking game. Every time you mention "the Protocols" I will down a shot of vodka. Let's see how coherent I can post in the coming weeks and months.

 

Well, I figured it was a 50/50 chance. I just decided to point out that the "rogue state" label isn't necessarily inaccurate in and of itself.

 

What planet am I living on where mentioning that a widely disseminated piece of anti-Semitic propaganda just might be an influence on the widespread anti-Semitic rhetoric radiating from a population is a statement so manifestly absurd that it's a worth topic to make a drinking game out of?

For some perspective, let's shift the geographical setting a bit.

You: I hate white supremacists and long live the South!
Me: I agree that Southerners have the right to self-determination, but I'm a little wary about what would emerge from a populist, sovereign regime there. I mean, many children there are raised on Birth of a Nation. That surely contributes to so much of their adult population being white supremacists, don't you think?
You: Huh? What are you talking about?
Me: Birth of a Nation. It's a vile, racist propaganda film that Southern children watch.
You: But what about the Union occupation?
Me: I agree that's bad, but I mean, if we're going to talk about resentment against blacks, how can we not talk about this?
You: I don't care about Birth of a Nation, I just want the South to be free.
Me: I know, but, free to do what? Spread racist propaganda like Birth of a Nation and raise their children on it?
You: If you mention Birth of a Nation again, I'm gonna slap you. I don't care about Birth of a Nation. Free the South!

 

Whew, it's too late in the evening for me to fully debunk that comparison, but

The CSA/Southern United States wanted to secede specifically so they could continue to enslave African-Americans, and the next 100 or so years of Jim Crow and such were directly related to maintaining that master/slave relationship and economic dominance of whites over blacks. The receptiveness of Arabs to anti-Semitism is because there's a powerful self-declared Jewish state asserting its dominance in the region-- and, before, a Zionist movement supported by the also-anti-Semitic West and especially the British (because really, there isn't much that isn't their fault). This is an unwarranted, overboard reaction, yes, but it isn't at all comparable to Southern racism.

 

Guy, I wasn't trying to claim that the two conflicts are cognate. They clearly aren't. I was merely responding to Hoth's indignant and dismissive reaction. I don't believe for a second that the entire conflict reduces to the Protocols; I just find it absurd to act as if my even bringing them up is risible, especially when you've claimed earlier in the thread that the Israelis represent the "gold standard" of propaganda dissemination.

 

Why is your first post after a long absence from this thread to someone who explicitly says that he does not care? It seems like talking to a wall to me. As a matter of courtesy, I did, however, read your post. And, if I may say so, it seems like you care a little too much. Just saying.