main
side
curve
  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Senate Israel/Palestine

Discussion in 'Community' started by Obi-Wan McCartney, Jan 4, 2009.

  1. Condition2SQ

    Condition2SQ Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Sep 5, 2012
    Well, clearly the conclusion I am most reasonably to draw therefrom is that you have solid and well-documented arguments to refute my point.
     
  2. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Apr 25, 2004
    Well Arafat's dead now, and Fatah under Abbas has mostly kept the peace. And considering that Palestine was recently granted observer status at the U.N. and is recognized by 68% of U.N. member states, it has plenty of incentive to continue behaving.
     
  3. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Apr 25, 2004
    http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/112119/five-winners-and-five-losers-israels-election

    The part I found interesting was where the author said that if the Arab Israelis had voted in greater numbers, they could have denied Likud and the right-wing parties a majority in the Knesset. That's really too bad...I read somewhere earlier that a lot of the Arabs were disillusioned with Israeli politics and simply decided not to vote, and now it turns out they could've made a difference.
     
    Violent Violet Menace likes this.
  4. Ghost

    Ghost Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Oct 13, 2003
    Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent


    Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

    The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

    One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

    The drug in question is thought to be Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.

    Nearly 100,000 Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but their Jewishness has been questioned by some rabbis. Last year, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the health portfolio, warned that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state”.

    Haaretz published an extract from a letter sent by the Ministry of Health to units administering the drug. Doctors were told “not to renew prescriptions for Depo Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment”.

    Sharona Eliahu Chai, a lawyer for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), said: “Findings from investigations into the use of Depo Provera are extremely worrisome, raising concerns of harmful health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics. The Ministry of Health’s director-general was right to act quickly and put forth new guidelines.”​


    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...opian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html



    Well, isn't that great. Israel using eugenics, to save the "Jewish state" from black people.

    Again, remind me why Israel has to be a Jewish state? We look down on states that favor one ethnicity/race/religion over another, but not with Israel. Why?
     
  5. Fire_Ice_Death

    Fire_Ice_Death Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2001
    Because Muslims. That's all. I also find it very interesting that they did this and the uproar from some of my friends when I said that they're using Nazi-like tactics to keep control of their nation. Seems I wasn't too off the mark. The problem is that the United States has such an erection for Israel that they'd have to start feasting on live Muslim babies before something crosses the line once too much--and maybe not even then.
     
  6. Vaderize03

    Vaderize03 Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Oct 25, 1999
    While I deplore this news, it's a little more complicated than that, FID.
     
  7. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Imagine the uproar if this happened in a Western country. The PM wouldn't last a day longer.

    I agree with V-03. I think the origins of the problem are twofold:
    1. Xenophobia.
    43% of Israeli do not want themselves or their children to marry African Jews, and over 50% don't want to live in the same neighborhood (Jerusalem Post).
    2. Bad refugee absorption and guidance.
    Israel has obliged itself to let any and all Jews settle in the country, but is now getting swamped with African refugees; there are now 130.000 African Jews in Israel. Yet, only 2,000 are in permanent housing (Cultural Survival).

    From The Guardian, last year:

    Yohanan Danino, the Israeli police chief, said migrants should be permitted to work to discourage petty crime. Nearly all are unable to work legally, and live in overcrowded and impoverished conditions. "The community needs to be supported in order to prevent economic and social problems," said Rosenfeld.

    But the interior minister, Eli Yishai, rejected such a move, saying: "Why should we provide them with jobs? I'm sick of the bleeding hearts, including politicians. Jobs would settle them here, they'll make babies, and that offer will only result in hundreds of thousands more coming over here."
     
  8. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    Relax. This will only make the American religious right/Tea Party love Israel more.
     
  9. LostOnHoth

    LostOnHoth Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2000
    Of course. The most radical, extreme and militant Orthodox settlers are speak with American accents. It's like the wild west out there, you get to walk around with a rifle and shoot people, with the IDF looking on. If you really wanted to re-vist the days of the O.K Corral, you just have to move to Hebron.
     
  10. Fire_Ice_Death

    Fire_Ice_Death Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2001
    Seems pretty cut and dry to me: a quasi-fascist Jewish state practiced eugenics when said eugenics were practiced on them by their tormentors in the past. Ta-da. See, the problem with any Israel/US discussion (to me) is that it goes a little like this : Israel does something stupid. Americans 'condemn' such action but only insofar as nothing is done to penalize Israel for the initial stupidity. And, 'It's more complicated than that' gets tossed out a lot. And on we go to the next Israeli atrocity and fake condemnation. Rinse, repeat. Did I miss anything?
     
  11. Ghost

    Ghost Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Oct 13, 2003
    That's not how it works... usually America ignores it and pretends it doesn't exist. Have you heard about this story at all on CNN or FOX or MSNBC?

    And it's not justification, but SuperWatto and Vaderize were correct in showing that it is a little more complicated than that.
     
    Vaderize03 likes this.
  12. Condition2SQ

    Condition2SQ Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Sep 5, 2012
    This is a great point and infuriates me as well. In fact, this is precisely why I so want there to be a resolution to this conflict. Israel is not perfect--this latest development simply appalls me--, but as long as they embroiled in this binary conflict with genocidal religious sociopaths, I can't help but tend to be on their side. Surely LostOnHoth will find this sentiment appalling and proceed to list me a laundry list of ways the Israeli's have prevented the conflict from being resolved, to which I can only respond that this represents a seemingly willful blindness to what extent the discourse of the Palestinians is a pastiche of phantasmagorical theories about an impending Zionist plot for world takeover and theological anti-Semitism. Of course not every Palestinian shares such sentiments, but the point is that many of them do. What is Israel to do but protect itself from religious sociopaths? Palestinian liberals desperately need to be empowered, and that starts with an explicit acknowledgment and denunciation of the very real role vestigial anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda in the region plays. . (And even if he didn't, then acknowledging that Sharon visiting the Temple Mount--an act of, ahem, blasphemy--was an absurd reason to completely destroy the prospect of peace for the forseeable future).

    Oh, right, it's not as if the world's single Jewish state was established as a sanctuary for the one of history's most ruthlessly persecuted minorities after a fascist state had just tried, and with considerable success, to exterminate their entire people. And it's not as if this state was established in their ancestral homeland where a considerable number of them had been emigrating to for decades, and whose geopolitical foes had been proud allies of the Nazi regime. Beause if that were the case, drawing a moral equivalence between it and the world's Muslim polities, whose genesis tends to consist of ruthless conquest of native Hindu, Sikh, and innumerable tribal cultures in Africa would be absurd.

    Oh, wait.
     
  13. Lord Vivec

    Lord Vivec Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Apr 17, 2006
    >but as long as they embroiled in this binary conflict with genocidal religious sociopaths,

    Palestinians are not genocidal religious sociopaths. You can't even be taken seriously when you say stuff like this.
     
  14. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Apr 25, 2004
    Of course the Arabs allied themselves with the Nazis. Of course they're anti-Semitic. You recall how America viewed those ****ing Japs after they bombed Pearl Harbor?

    The Jews had been trying to put "facts on the ground" in Palestine for decades after World War I and this obviously raised tensions with the Palestinians. And the Israeli leaders didn't seem to care at all that they were raising tensions, they just kept pushing the British to allow more Jews to immigrate and when the British didn't let them, the Israelis tried to do it anyway. It's this whole "screw the Arabs, we're going to take this land by force" mentality by the Israelis that's led this conflict to where it is now. I really think the Israelis deserve more blame for this, they're the ones who call themselves a first-world democracy and they ought to know better.
     
    Summer Dreamer likes this.
  15. Condition2SQ

    Condition2SQ Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Sep 5, 2012




    The second video in particular you should find absolutely appalling.

    Of course not all Palestinians are genocidal religious sociopaths. But many of them are--even LostOnHoth admits this--so what sort of posture should Israel, adopt, exactly? As I have said repeatedly, I think all polities have an inherent right to ensure their security and continued fecundity. But when two competing ideologies are inherently incompatible, and one is sincere in his intellectual and ethical convictions, one cannot avoid taking sides. Again, if this entire conflict boiled down to the Palestinians desperately trying to establish a liberal, secular democracy, I would find the actions of the Israeli's over the years absolutely appalling. But that's simply an absurd deconstrucion of the dynamics at play here. In general, it represents an ethnocentric view that when a mass populist movement arises, it must be because that movement wants liberal democracy. But this is beyond absurd. If you want to embrace this moral equivalency wholesale, you should find the actions of the Union during the American Civil War to be an appalling abridgment and imposition of their values on the Southern populist secession movements.

    Oh, okay. The fact that in the grand narrative of things the Israelis/Jews have at times certainly acted egregiously and deserve unequivocal condemnation totally lends credence to the hypothesis established in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other Nazi propaganda.
     
  16. yankee8255

    yankee8255 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    May 31, 2005
    I think Schwarze is the word you're looking for.
     
  17. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Apr 25, 2004
    No, I'm saying that Israeli actions in the past and present have made Arabs angry, sometimes justifiably so...and eventually some of that anger spills over into these sorts of conspiracy theories, or worse, into radicalism.
     
  18. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Condition2SQ, the news is about something between the Israeli government and African Jews - yet in your first sentence in your first reaction you manage to bring Palestinians into it and call them 'genocidal religious sociopaths' collectively.

    This has nothing to do with Palestinians, and for you to drag them into it and to start posting videos of Palestinian fanatics is highly insensitive. It shows a lack of compassion for the people involved and a disregard for honest discourse.

    In this context, it would be more prudent to say that the people who administered the birth-control injections are 'genocidal religious sociopaths'.
     
  19. Condition2SQ

    Condition2SQ Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Sep 5, 2012
    I emphatically agree. You seem to have missed the entire point I was making. I find this development to be appalling and simply indefensible. However, we live in a world where (among generally well intentioned, liberal people, as I consider myself) if you make such a statement about Israel, it's going to be understood as a wholesale condemnation of the whole project of Israel. In other words, I wish we lived in a world where I could simply say, "This is disgusting and indefensible behavior by Israel" without having to worry about people--generally smart and liberal people--construing that as sympathy for movements that are explicitly genocidal in their aspirations. The sooner well-intentioned liberals realize how illiberal a Palestinian polity would be, the better.
     
  20. Alpha-Red

    Alpha-Red Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Apr 25, 2004
    Palestine may be illiberal, but as long as they're not firing rockets into Israel I think most people will agree that's good enough for now. And they'll likely hold their fire for the same reason Egypt has kept the peace treaty with Israel...because it's in their interest to do so.
     
  21. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Then I have good news for you. The Jedi Council Forums Senate =/= the world.
    Nuance is valued over generalizations and dualism here.
     
  22. Condition2SQ

    Condition2SQ Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Sep 5, 2012
    So, what you apparently mean to say is that the sentiments expressed by LostOnHoth are a pathology that should be shunned among liberals.

    I agree.
     
  23. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Please provide citations for the sentiments you take issue with.
     
  24. Violent Violet Menace

    Violent Violet Menace Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 11, 2004
    The first video you posted where the cleric is claiming that God put Hitler on earth to punish Jews is not really that shocking. I mean, I find his opinion disgusting, but if you subscribe to a deterministic view of destiny, where everything that happens, happens because God intended it, and intended it for a reason, then a natural conclusion to draw from such a mindset must be that since WWII happened, the world must have deserved for it to happen. And since the Jews were the hardest hit, they clearly must have deserved it proportionally more. The most conservative believers of all three Abrahamic religions share this deterministic view of destiny. I recall a certain pastor whose name starts with P and ends with At Robertson, who said on national TV that the earthquake that struck Haiti last year (or was it the year before?) was clearly because they as a nation had angered God.
     
  25. Fire_Ice_Death

    Fire_Ice_Death Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2001

    Really? Because I thought it was generally understood that in the real world as it is here if you express any dissent over the goodness and righteousness of Israel that you're no better than an anti-Semite--in fact you are an anti-Semite instead of just say someone who disagrees with Israel. For me I find the whole nation a disgusting place. Politically they're at the mercy of an orthodoxy that I'm assured 'doesn't represent everyone', except...you know, when the electorate elects these fanatics. If the public is that interested in pursuing peace then I think these madmen wouldn't keep getting elected. There are people elsewhere that claim the orthodox Jews do not have a large voice within Israel. If that's true then I can only conclude that the citizenry is lying when they say they want peace or that hardliners have a greater say than is being let on or the elections are rigged. Now, the first one and the last one are the most plausible.

    It would not surprise me that after years of poisoning the political process that the elections were rigged, but again, no large-scale protests among the public--that I've heard of anyway.

    The media blackout skirts too close to, "I blame the Jews for this," for my tastes. I think it's just general apathy. Nobody cares because nobody is surprised.