JayFromPA wrote: I simply think that the Israelis don't care about citizen or not, they care about Jew or not, and treat non-jews as non-persons.

Those are very strong words. Have you ever been to Israel? How many Israelis and Palestinians do you know personally?

I no longer hold an opinion on Israel. It seems to me at this point that if the Arabs would allow palestinian repatriation the tention would drop and things would even out.

The 'our only friend in the Middle East' arguement is crap. Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, etc are pretty darned friendly to us. Turkey was, until we sent a turkey over to them to force us to use their airbases. "Mission Accomplished" there...lol!

stickman wrote:
Those are very strong words. Have you ever been to Israel? How many Israelis and Palestinians do you know personally?

I know several Israelis and a few Palestinians. One of my son's close friends is a Palestinian. His family could trace their property inside Israel back 2,000 years. His brother was "suspected" of having ties to Hamas or Hezbollah so the goddamned Israelis bulldozed his parents' and grandparents' homes and confiscated their land. They fled to Europe. I've been to the M.E. but never to Israel. I won't go to Israel. A friend of mine in the U.S. State Dept has warned me against travel to Israel. He says it's more oppressive than the old Soviet Union. He is a Republican. I've known a lot of people who have been there and they say the same thing unless you are Jewish. If you want to know something about the Israeli mindset, study what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon should have been hanged for that and an Israeli Commission recommended that he never be allowed to hold office or power in the military again. Nevertheless, the goddamned Israelis elected him prime minister.

Black Eagle wrote: I know several Israelis and a few Palestinians. One of my son's close friends is a Palestinian. His family could trace their property inside Israel back 2,000 years. His brother was "suspected" of having ties to Hamas or Hezbollah so the goddamned Israelis bulldozed his parents' and grandparents' homes and confiscated their land. They fled to Europe. I've been to the M.E. but never to Israel. I won't go to Israel. A friend of mine in the U.S. State Dept has warned me against travel to Israel. He says it's more oppressive than the old Soviet Union. He is a Republican. I've known a lot of people who have been there and they say the same thing unless you are Jewish. If you want to know something about the Israeli mindset, study what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon should have been hanged for that and an Israeli Commission recommended that he never be allowed to hold office or power in the military again. Nevertheless, the goddamned Israelis elected him prime minister.

Strange, if I ever said the "goddamned Palestinians" murdered about 20 people down the street from me in 2002 (when I was in Israel) I'd be labelled a bigot.

I work directly with a lot of Israelis, and I've counted a handful of Palestinians as friends and acquaintances over the years. On the Palestinian side there is anger at losing their land. On the Israeli side, there's the estimated 800,000-1,000,000 Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab countries between the 1940's and 1970's, more than half ending up in Israel. It ain't as easy a narrative as everyone thinks.

20 murdered people is a shootout. Happens every now and then here in US! Sabra and Shatila was a massacre!

stickman wrote:It ain't as easy a narrative as everyone thinks.

While I personally believe all the way to my bones in the concept of rough justice, the operative word is "justice".

The sins of the father are not rightly levied upon the son. Also, it is not right to respond to a wrongful act with another wrongful act - a concept more succinctly taught to the children as "Two wrongs do not make a right".

The narrative does not truly mean jack shit at this point, where one party has such dominating control over the other that the smaller weaker party is unable to sustain itself on the insufficient arable land it has and is powerless to open a way out of bondage to sustain itself by trade. That is a slow suffocating choke death of misery, and that is the current status quo. How we have arrived at this point is immaterial beyond historical study, the direction we choose to take to exit this situation of slow crippling human suffering is of great import.

We Americans have a love affair with super heroes, we love to watch powerful people doing good things for the small and weak. Most of us teach our children that using an advantage of size to overpower the smaller kids is a wrongful act of bullying, and that we should not engage in such wrongful acts and should not consider it okay to stand by while other large people bully the small and weak.

That's the thing about morals and values. They aren't worth shit if they aren't followed. There's an anti-drunk driving slogan "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." Well, if Israel and America are friends, I propose "Friends don't let friends become inhumane monsters."

The thing about sharon is he just wont die. The guy was a nazi responsible for atrocities since the early 50s and ordered the attack on the USS Liberty in international waters because he was worried about the intel they were gathering on Israels illegal move into the Golan heights. The Liberty had a crew of 298 and the Israelis "accidently" cost our government the price of 205 purple hearts. Maybe the Israelis were justified for their war of aggression then, maybe the syrians and egyptans had it coming but the USS Liberty didn't.

This is what sums it up for me:

Since 1967 the number of Palestinian "avoidable mortalities" is in excess of 300,000. In comparison there have been about 2500 Israeli deaths due to Palestinian aggression.

As of February 2nd 2011, 1452 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29th 2000, compared to 124 Israeli children killed by Palestinians.

Since 1967 Israel has demolished nearly 25000 Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli settlements.

In fiscal year 2009 the U.S. Gave Israel at $8.2 million a day in military aid vs. $0 to the Palestinians.

The Nazi's killed nearly 6 million Jews during WW2, they also exterminated 10.5 million Slavic people, 2 million Roma and 2.5 million other people including political dissidents and gays (this does not include soldiers and civilians killed during military operations) yet no other group has used Nazi democide/genocide as an excuse to disenfranchise and oppress millions of other people.

I hold no ill will against the Jewish people, but the Israeli government and there fanatically religious right wing are a criminal entity and we, The United States, are just as guilty as they are. We have to stop enabling their murderous behavior.

Reductio ad Hitlerum. I thought we were better than this.

Just to follow up on my earlier post, I was wrong, only 11 people were killed in the bombing down the street from me ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Moment_bombing ). There were 42 suicide bombings that year (not counting any other type of attacks), of which nearly 30 occurred while I was in the country. The Cafe Moment bombing just happened to be the only one I was near enough to feel the shock-wave and hear the explosion.

Since it is obvious that no one here is going to let anything challenge their deeply held faith in their own version of the narrative I'm going to leave this thread after calling Godwin's Law.

stickman wrote:Reductio ad Hitlerum. I thought we were better than this.

Just to follow up on my earlier post, I was wrong, only 11 people were killed in the bombing down the street from me ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Moment_bombing ). There were 42 suicide bombings that year (not counting any other type of attacks), of which nearly 30 occurred while I was in the country. The Cafe Moment bombing just happened to be the only one I was near enough to feel the shock-wave and hear the explosion.

Since it is obvious that no one here is going to let anything challenge their deeply held faith in their own version of the narrative I'm going to leave this thread after calling Godwin's Law.

Couple things I'd like to point out:

1. I wasn't comparing Israel to the Nazi's, that would be inappropriate and I don't see the Israelis systematically throwing Palestinians into gas chambers and ovens, I said they've used Nazi atrocities as an excuse for their own bad behavior so Godwin's law doesn't apply.

2. My paternal great grandfather was a Prussian Jew, though he was very secular and married a Catholic girl, genetically I'm part Jew. I'm atheist by the way.

3. My mothers family has considerable Native American origins, which I'm much more connected to, so my sympathies lie with the disenfranchised native populace over their European interlopers, because let's face it, well over half of the Israeli population is of European origin and much of the rest came from other parts of the mid east.

There is no excuse for Israel's behavior and the theft of Palestinian lands post 1967. Roughly 100 Palestinians have died for every Israeli that has died in this conflict. Now tell me again who the terrorists are?

People use the tactic of suicide bombing when the are under the yoke of an occupying army, especially when they have no access to air power and mobile armor. No more comparisons to nazis and hitler, I think sharon was more like bin laden, bin laden attacked the USS Cole and Sharon ordered the attack on the Liberty.

TBH, Sharon showed his leadership in Lebannon. Take that as you will.

Though Netanyahu doesn't have carte blanche from us to pursue any action, it's still scary to think what next we might get sucked into in the Middle East.

"A Former Spy Chief Questions the Judgment of Israeli Leaders"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/world ... ossad.html