*On yeah, it must be Israel's fault
Posted on 08/15/2006 12:03:13 PM PDT by NYer
You say this:
I believe that Israel and Palestine should co-exist as two states side by side. I believe the Palestinians have just as much a right to live on the land that their ancestors have been living on since time immemorial.
So do I. So do a lot of people. But Hamas and Hezbollah don't see it that way. They want Israel eliminated. They don't want two states. They want one. And they want to run it. That's the reality. While the initial provocation was the kidnap of two soldiers, it was perpetrated by an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. An organization, moreover, which is in possession of thousands of rockets aimed at Israel. Factor in that the primary arms supplier to this organization is a country lead by a man who denies that the Holocaust happened and you have decreased the threshold for some form of military conflict considerably.
Do you believe that? If not, why not. Do you think all the Israelis really want to live in peace with the Palestinians?
Likely not. Almost certainly not. But I'm unaware of any Israeli equivalents of Hamas or Hezbollah dedicated to the destruction of their neighbors. Are there any? Or am I simply an ignorant victim of the American media?
I realize many Israelis probably don't like Palestinians, but how many have actually gone so far as to dedicate their existence to their destruction?
You never see or read anything about the fact that Israel is actually a theocracy. If you happen to be non-Jewish in Israel, you don't have the same rights.
Actually, it's not a full theocracy, if it ever was. The secularization of Israel has been an ongoing phenomenon for some time and the subject of considerable internal dispute. It has accelerated considerably in the past couple of decades. Elements of Israeli secular law are certainly based on Jewish religious law but the same came be said of western countries, I think (although trying as we are to jettison most of it).
Nevertheless, even if Israel is a theocracy, so what? Every country has the right to form it's own laws and standards and Israel is after all, a Jewish state. Provided it is committed to living in peace with its non-theocratic neighbors and its theocracy respects the basic human rights of all its citizens, I have no problem with a theocracy. Allowing the Jewish people to build the laws of their own land in harmony with their own faith seems a perfectly reasonable course of action to me.
Here's the acid test for me, regarding the relative sensibilities of the various protagonists in this region.
Israel has been in possession of weapons of mass destruction for some time now. Despite your assertions that Israel is pushing an agenda formed mainly by radical rabbis who hate the Palestinians and Lebanese, I've seen no signs that these weapons are likely to be used on said Palestinians or Lebanese (or Egyptians etc.,).
If the likes of Hezbollah or Hamas (or Iran or Syria) ever find themselves in possession of such weapons, do you think we (or the Israelis) will be able to make the reciprocal statement with quite the same degree of assurance?
Which would cause you to lose more sleep? A nuclear Israel or a nuclear Hezbollah/Iran?
Answer honestly.
*LMAO Oh, man you gotta see this.
sitetest is being called an historically illiterate dope with his head in his arse....
Sister, I thought you were clueless. This post proves it. You have gone out of your way to slander and attack Christian men like Sitetest and Robby who have forgotten more history than you will ever know.
Sitetest is a dope, robby is a child and you think you have superior knowledge of history...LMAO
I know site and robby won't be insulted. I just hope they get as big as belly-laugh as I have gotten.
This is one of the funniest damn posts I have ever read. And it is only made that much more enjoyable because it illustrates the uncertainity you have in your ideas.
Let your ideas about history be opposed, let them be revealed as unsound, and you go right to name-calling.
What gives? Have you heard rumors about how handsome I am?
I can assure you I am quite in love with my Bride and I have no interest in an annulment, so, if that is holding you back, don't let it.
Come on, sister. I too deserve some rhetorical attention...
There were a lot of non-Athenians in Athens, and they had no rights. There were lots of slaves who had no rights at all. Yes, Israel is a nation-state, but Arabs do have civil rights, and their general standing is higher than that of Christians in Egypt(or Turks in Germany). As for your dream of tolerance, where do the Muslims practice this? Where have they ever practiced this, even in that mythical place known as Muslim Spain? My particular nightmate is that a very large Algeria in their lust to take over all of Israel. More than twenty years, Naipaul's "Among the Believers" explored the psychology of the Iranian revolutionaries. I dismissed it at the time, but the deep-rooted paranoia he describes is a barrier that I do not think can be overcome by discussion. I also think of the example of India, where the Muslims dashed the dreams of Ghandi, and where they still chew on the issue of Pashmir as a dog chews on a bone. Always, where they have the power, it is my way or the highway.
As for Americans who advocate a peace treaty with those who repeatedly violate them, I can only conclude they are one's who's character contains the aggressiveness of Dennis Kucinich, the intellect of Major Owens, the stability of Cynthia McKinney, the integrity of William Jefferson, and the balanced judgement about Israel and Jews shown by former Illinois Rep. Paul Findley.
I don't support a peace treaty with Hizbollah. They butchered Marines. They need to be utterly destroyed.
Reagan failed miserably back them, btw
McCarrick ought to be silenced and cloistered.
McCarrick needs to pray for the people of Israel -- the people who gave us the Catholic faith.
I recognize that many killed and injured and dispossessed Lebanese are your co-religionists and mine. They need to recognize that this is the price of allowing Hezbollah to dig in among their civilian population. They must either expel Hezbollah or get out of there.
We faced this sort of tactic when Ho Chi Minh put antiaircraft guns in the courtyards of hospitals in Hanoi. We recognized that it was Ho Chi Minh and not the US Air Force that had the moral responsibility for the deaths of the innocents when we took out the antiaircraft batteries. To do otherwise is to cave in to terrorist tactics and cowardly enemies who hide among women and children.
We live in a world wherein war is increasingly necessary. It is unfortunate but true. Holding hands with Islamolunatic groups like Hezbollah or Hamas and singing Kumbaya will get otherwise decent people killed. The alternatives are endless rounds of absolutely worthless diployak which only gives enemies more time to catch up technologically and logistically while NEVER producing the desired results or conceding in advance any necessary war lest we might harm civilians negligent enough to tolerate Hezbollah or Hamas in their midst.
If you let your children play on the paved surface of the interstate, you cannot very well complain when they are injured or killed by the speeding autos.
People like McCarrick believe in nothing and will pay any price (particularly in the blood of others) for a temporary modicum of peace and quiet. That is why he thinks that all that nasty divisiveness over abortion ought not interfere with Traitor John receiving the Eucharist and why his foreign policy is that of the usual Euroweenie suspects. Europe is dead. American liberals (or worse) like McCarrick think that Israel is just tooooo much trouble.
The fact is that unless Hezbollah, Hamas, Baath, and Ahmadinejad are destroyed by conventional means, the day will come when the nuclear missile submarines of the US Navy will have to definitively clean up this burgeoning evil and that will cause a LOT more innocent civilian casualties.
I sincerely value everything you do here but strongly disagree with you on this. If I too attended a Maronite Church it would not change my mind one bit. This has nothing to do with our Faith and everything to do with McCarrick being a public policy wannabe in a subject area where he has neither jurisdiction nor competence. If it did have to do with our Faith, McCarrick has long proven to be an enemy of our Faith in his daily depredations.
If it is viewed as arrogant that Israel demand the removal of Hezbollah as the price of piece when the Hezbollah are actively attacking Israel with rocket attacks, what would be modesty? Israeli national suicide????? Various forms of Islamofascisti have been blood enemies of the Roman Catholic Church from the outset. I am not ashamed of the Crusades only of the fact that they did not succeed in slaying the Islamopestilence in its cradle.
God bless you and yours.
*On yeah, it must be Israel's fault
Those posters remind me of the vast pictures put up everywhere of Mao and Stalin/Lenin and Fidel/Che.
Totalitarian worship needs big pictures...all the time in all places.
This is a conservative site not a paleopantywaist site.
Lenin accurately labeled quislings like Yitzhak Laor as "useful idiots." Israel should deport him to Teheran or Damascus.
If there are more Christians in Syria than in Lebanon, then they had better do something about President-for-Life Junior's Baathist regime before it is too late.
By Thomas Sowell (Who, presumably, also has his head up his arse...)
How many cease-fires have there been in the Middle East — or is the number too large to remember? Over the past half century, there must have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than in the rest of the world combined.
What will this latest cease-fire do? It will give Hezbollah a breather from Israeli retaliation and allow them time to get new shipments of military equipment from Iran, rebuild their military infrastructure and prepare for the next round of attacks on Israel.
Why do these phony cease-fire scenarios keep getting repeated? Because there are too many people, including many in the media, who take the corrupt windbags at the U.N. seriously — so our political leaders have to act as if they take the U.N. seriously as well.
This is a costly charade. Among its costs are human lives. U.N. cease-fires are the ultimate in feel-good decisions made by people who pay no price for the repercussions.
No one in his right mind believes that either the Lebanese army or the U.N. "peacekeepers" will disarm Hezbollah. The track record of both is virtually a guarantee that Hezbollah will be able to resume war against Israel at whatever time and place it chooses.
Most people have no idea how small Israel is — and therefore how vulnerable every part of it is to its surrounding enemies.
New Hampshire is considered to be a small state but it is larger than Israel. So are 45 other states. Lake Erie is larger than Israel and Lake Michigan more than twice as large.
The Middle Eastern places we hear about are very close to one another. From Israel's capital in Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the Palestinian territory is only a fraction of the distance from Washington to Baltimore.
Most people are as uninformed about the history of the Middle East as they are about its geography. Supposedly Jews took over the Palestinians' homeland in order to create the state of Israel.
But there was no Palestinian homeland. That whole region belonged to the Ottoman Empire until the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after its defeat in the First World War.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims had all lived in Palestine for centuries. In the course of carving up the Ottoman Empire to create new nations, the British set aside a small part of it for Jews — and after violent objections from the Arabs, stalled for years on letting this bit of land become an independent nation.
Jews lived in Palestine long before there was a state of Israel and even before there was an Ottoman Empire. In 1939, Winston Churchill commented that Jews in Palestine "made the desert bloom." The resulting prosperity of the area attracted both more Jews and more Arabs, including some Arabs whose descendants would later claim that Jews took over their country.
After World War II and the Holocaust, Jews seeking refuge turned to their promised home in the Middle East and battled the British to seize control and proclaim the independence of Israel.
In the face of polarizing hostility and violence in surrounding Arab countries, Jews fled these countries and many were absorbed into Israel. Meanwhile, Arab countries urged Arabs living in Israel to leave before these countries' planned attacks with the aim of destroying the new state.
It was the Arabs, rather than the Israelis, who created a massive Palestinian refugee problem. While Jewish refugees were absorbed into the general population of Israel, Palestinians in Arab countries were kept in refugee camps for generations — promised a right to return after Israel was conquered and the Jews displaced.
After the most complete failure of the many Arab efforts to annihilate Israel in 1967, the Israelis took over lands of strategic value, such as the Golan Heights, in order to prevent them from being used in future military attacks.
In all the years when these lands had been in the hands of Arab states, no one made them a Palestinian homeland. But now it has become a fervent cause to force Israel to create a Palestinian state that the Arabs never created.
None of this matters to those consumed by hate in the Middle East or those in the West wanting feel-good cease-fires, without bothering to think through the actual consequences.
*THIS is the truth about Israel and the Arabs. But, as recapitulated by the likes of gipper gal, sobran, buchanan, rockwell,raimondo, paul craig roberts, fleming, findley, and feminised, deracinated American Prelates, etc etc, it is ISRAEL and the JOOS who are the guilty ones.
Far too often, the opponents of Israel and the Jews in this country are not only the enemies of history, common sense, and reason, they are the enemies of Liberty and their own security.
Iran is coming for us after Israel unless Bush convinces the Legislative Branch to FIRST declare war and attack Iran. NOW
This is 1938-39 and Iran's Hitler has publicly told us what he intends to do - actually, he is just the mouthpiece of the Mullahtocracy.
It is getting late and attacking Israel is attacking the victim. Our enemy has publicly promised to annihilate us. Who is in favor of letting them kill American civilians BEFORE we attack them?
The "paleos" are a sick joke. Let them have their litle magazines and their little conferences but there is not ONE state in America who would elect one of those clowns and have them account for American security.
ONE George Bush is worth 10,000 sobrans, 100,000 buchanans, 1,000,000 rockwells...and, how many angels could dance on the pinhead of paul craig roberts?
But that is the problem then also. By your logic, the moment these nations think they have the advantage, they plan for war.
The entire history of the PLO was that it was an underground army financed by Egypt. Israel is regularly destroying tunnels through which weapons are smuggled into Gaza. Syria, now that it smells a potential military advantage is talking tough again.
Regardless of the hopelessness and troubles of Lebanon, there will be more war. Much more.
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