Posted on 11/04/2023 11:36:27 AM PDT by ConservativeInPA
She’s probably not even all that well grounded in the history of her own people and the Jewish people in the ME...
“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance.”
Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur Harris.
embarrEsses?
It is inarguable to me that the “bombs” in Japan saved lives. It is also inarguable that the Russians heading towards Japan had a major impact on Japanese thinking. The Russian Army was a juggernaut at the end of WWII - possibly the biggest hammer in human history and it smashed everything in its path regardless of casualties. The Japanese military was a shell of its former self by that point with major logistical short-comings.
The end result of continuing the war would have resulted in much of Eastern Asia being in the USSR possibly including much of Japan. Stalin cared little about how many he lost - the UK/US populations were different.
The “bombs” were singular events that produced real horror, but people forget that the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities produced similar casualties and destruction minus the radiation sickness. Had we not decimated two cities we would have decimated them all with incendiaries and the subsequent starvation of Japan would have been the most horrendous thing of all. Japan, as we know it today, would not exist.
At the time, some argued that the bomb(s) should have been dropped on Tokyo killing the emperor or the Imperial Palace should have been bombed. The only man who could stop the war might have been killed and the likely reaction of Japan would have been horrific if that happened.
The argument about the “bombs” is always interesting but as it is also drowning in simplicity or singularity when it really must be weighed against many facts and likely outcomes.
“Civilian” families, mommies and daddies, will and do happily send their children out to be suicide bombers. The number of civilians in Gaza who are not active supporters of the intended New Holocaust is miniscule. The children who are not given as martyrs will grow up to kill Jews. Total control of the population and especially in the schools is required for several generations before the population, if allowed to continue to live in Gaza, can be somewhat pacified.
I don’t disagree at all, especially with your statement “The number of civilians in Gaza who are not active supporters of the intended New Holocaust is miniscule.”
One of the most revealing books about this mindset in the Middle East is “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America” by Brigitte Gabriel.
She is a remarkable woman. She gave a talk at a Portuguese Club in my home town, an extremely small venue with probably 50 people, and even there, she had a great big armed body guard who stood an arms length away from her the entire time.
There is no doubt they would love someone to murder her. No doubt. She is stylish, good looking, extremely outspoken, and knows them intimately. Which they hate.
Her book “Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America” is impactful, and a great read if you haven’t read it. It is remarkable that, as a Maronite Christian, she was fully immersed in the venomous hate of Jews and Israel that the Lebanese population she lived in...including the Christians indoctrinated everyone in.
She was a Christian, and had all of those terrible slanders indoctrinated in her as a young girl leading up to the 1975 civil war in Lebanon. The believed them, and was terrified of the Israelis.
She lived as a young girl with her parents in a bombed out wreck of a cellar for seven years when her mother was severely injured by a muslim artillery shell. Her only recourse was to take her mother over the border to Israel for help...the bloodthirsty, evil Jew Israelis that she hated.
What she found was people who took her in, cared for her mother, gave her food and clothes, and treated her as well as they treated each other. She was astonished to find that everything she had heard about them were lies.
It is quite a story. So, she understands them all too well.
So your statement is, I think spot on. Sadly.
What happened last month tells us that “Never Again” has been overridden by “Death to The Jews” and there seems to be a lot of people in this world who are just fine with that.
I have never understood anti-semitism. I just do not get it. All I can guess is that weak-minded people are susceptible to it.
“ is it moral to completely defeat Hamas even if it requires massive civilian casualties?”
Yes.
Next question.
L
“”is it moral to completely defeat Hamas even if it requires massive civilian casualties?””
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc would gladly kill a huge percentage of the civilians within their own countries and blame it on the Jews.
They, and the democRATS, are The Party of Death, The Party of Hate.
They’re as bad, and possibly worse, than the Nazis. Their entire ideology needs to be stamped from the face of the earth forever.
L
I have not read the book but I have read an extensive discussion of it and of the memoirs of some others. I lived in Istanbul for my primary school years and though When I was there I was but a bairn, as I grew older I studied much about Turkiye and Ataturk and the Ottomans and, of course, the Armenian and Greek massacres. I remember well the anti Greek riots of the mid fifties and the departing of the last of the Greek merchants in Istanbul. I have as part of my interest in things Turkish read Turkish and Saudi translations of the Koran. I reached the conclusion by the time I was in college that there is no making peace with Moslems no matter how westernized they have become. There will be no peace in countries that allow them to immigrate once they reach a significant ratio in the population, say 9 or 10% which is inevitable once there are communities of Moslems. They outbreed host populations by 3 or 4 to one.
When societies begin to unravel the people look increasingly desperately for a scapegoat and the Jews are the traditional one. They and the Han Chinese are higher IQ on average than the rest of us and unlike the Chinese the Jews are innovative and the upper reaches of industry and finance tends# to have a larger proportion of Jews than other ethnicities, thus all sorts nefarious activities are imputed to them by people whose livelihoods and sureties are slipping away in developing chaos.
For later.
Interesting-I was just on another thread saying I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what things are like in Turkey, but I had heard from people stationed over there during the Cold War that it was an interesting place, and the people were more “urbane” and modern than many muslim countries.
But I believe things have changed since then...you would know better than I would.
My grandfather was Armenian, and when we were little kids, I remember him saying things like “You act like that and I’ll let the Turks get you!” (usually said with wide protruding eyes!)
I didn’t understand the reference to the Turks at the time.
I know exactly what you mean, it sounds like you have read Dr. Peter Hammond’s book “Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat”.
OTOH, with your life experiences, you probably thought that out on your own.
Indeed. Much the same way Armenians were scapegoated in Turkey-I read Thomas Sowell’s works, and he references the necessary “middleman” in societies that have any kind of prosperous societies, as you said, it was Jews in many countries.
Middlemen are essential to prosperity, yet when things go bad and economies crash, middlemen are often one of first groups that are demonized, thought of as blood-suckers and leeches, contributing nothing to the product except making it more expensive (this in the minds of people who are likely to persecute them)
We kids could go wandering and if we got too far from where taxi drivers and soldiers(in their roles as police then) knew the American family lived we would get a ride home in a taxi or a jeep, sometimes with a bakery en passant and we would get a pastry.
I met a woman where I worked 19 years ago who was Turkish on a long visa and working as night clerk at a very large condo complex on the beach where I was a security guard. When I talked to her she asked me how much Turkish I remembered and I had a couple of phrases and a few names of things and she began too pull at my memory until after three months or so I was actually speaking with her in Turkish. She knew my old neighborhood in Nis(h)antas(h) and told me Yeni Yol street was now a part of the grounds of the American Hospital which was on the other side of the back wall two meters from our house.
When the riots hit, an Armenian woman my mother knew took refuge in our house until the army decided their end had been accomplished and the riots got turned off. The riots were specifically anti Greek but memories are long.
P.S. I used to write stuff on Xanga before it got its lunch eaten by the vastly inferior Facebook and once someone put up an old picture of a street car on a street with tall old buildings lining it and labeled as an old San Francisco scene. I looked at it and recognized it as an Istanbul scene from the 50s and had, in fact seen that scene from the same angle more than once. I could even visualize my father driving the jeep assigned to him at the consulate on that street just as it is in the that picture.
Sorry to make a travelogue of this but good memories return.
Not a problem with the travelogue...I very much appreciate it!
Growing up as a kid in a foreign country is a unique and life changing experience.
I grew up as a military dependent, and while it was painful to me as a kid to lose my friends every few years, I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China!
I enjoyed hearing the reminiscences of someone who had similar experiences as I did.
Jews got to their position of “middlemen of society” because in the Middle Ages Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest but Jews were while not allowed to own land. In Finance they got the jump on everybody else by centuries.
That makes sense.
book:
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Fight-Survive-Shaun-Pinner/dp/0241668077
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PS Brigitte Gabriel bttt
Good story and info; tx.
Recently met some college age kids from Turkey. They mentioned the U.S.A. and “did not want to go home to Turkey.”
Re Incirlik, the place is a trap, an outpost: “North Khartoum” if Erdogan and Obama get their way. IMHO
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