Slashdot Mirror
Israelis Sue Government For Laser Cannons
An anonymous reader writes "Residents of a southern Israeli town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Palestinian rocket attacks. And they're suing the national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense.
The U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser project was widely considered to be the most successful energy weapon ever built. But the toxic chemicals needed to generate THEL's megawatts of power made the thing a logistical nightmare. It was scrapped. Now, the residents of Sderot want it back. And they're taking Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to court to make it happen."
If it was just a little scratch, some Bond-O and polish oughtta do the trick.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Did they sue for the sharks, tanks, and related expenses too? How else can they operate the lasers effectively? Lazer cats?
Besides the cool factor, they deserve better protection from the savages they face.
"Oy, for you, only the best lasers will do. You don't want this one, it's scraped. Let me get you one with a fresh paint job, good as new, I'll have my brother Manny bring it around Tuesday."
John
Can we all please make an effort to keep the comments on track, and not diverge into a "Israelis/Jews are evil" fest?
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them and if the government is refusing to take any preventative action, while over 7,000 rockets have fallen on the town, then suing the government seems a very reasonable action.
Please note that they're not strapping bombs to themselves and running into cafes or government buildings - they're taking a legal action in a desperate request for help.
To pre-empt the comments that will follow, it's not relevant to point out Israeli action in Gaza and get into a debate over whether it's justified or not - this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region.
If only everyone in the region sought such a solution, instead of violence meets violence.
The town that is. It would be cheaper for the Israeli gov't to bulldoze the town. The technology is proven, they have the means, and the results guaranteed.
Just keep this thing out of Charlie Johnson's hands, or practically anyone who's part of that Pajama Media network.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Actually, it was scrapped becase the frickin goggles did nothing for the shark's remaining eye.
I read Usenet for the articles.
How about a peace settlement? You stay on your side of the fence drawn in 1967, we'll stay on our side. Sounds fair to me.
One could substitute
LL
AA
WW
YY
EE
RR
SS,
but that would be stereo typing.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
...is it a viable country?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
i come from a family that is jewish and this is nothing new. my grandma sued her brother becuase the mother (my great grandma) gave them both equal amounts of money in the will and my grandma wanted more money
im not a racist person, but jews who have money are suing to get a toxic mega-weapon while the palistians are treated like shit seems all to similar
The town in question is Sderot, where most inhabitants are of North African (especially Moroccan) origins. Those tend to be not so hell-bent on Zionism as European Jews because they weren't persecuted as much. I like to think that the government of a country founded on Zionism and so proud of it, would be slightly biased towards the inhabitants of Sderot.
Also, has anyone of you ever seen the damage katyushas make? Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous.
Res publica non dominetur
Toxic chemicals? Don't they know that it's possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, its an excimer, frozen in its excited state.
It's a chemical laser but in solid, not gaseous, form. Put simply, in deference to you, Slashdot, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite. As soon as we apply a field we couple to a state, it is radiatively coupled to the ground state.
I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.
The tit-for-tat Palestinian/Israeli thing is really getting old. I see this behavior in my 10 year-old students. One kid says something nasty, another one says something more nasty and eventually somebody gets shoved and then fists are flying. If the villagers get a death ray and start toasting Palestinians like ants, I can assure you that the Palestinians are going to fight back.
They're not going to just cry and go running home after a FREAKING laser attack. Oh no. You can bet that handfuls of Qassam missiles will rain down on a pretty regular basis. What Israel needs is a good read of Dr. Suse's Butter Battle Book and have a sudden outbreak of common sense. Palestine needs to grow the hell up and stop acting like an angry child too.
Escalating weapons and violence rarely solve anything unless EVERYBODY is just charcoal in the bottom of a big-ass crater. Then the problem pretty much solves its self.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Does it actually work or does it only operate in the sort of tests that Mr Geller did to get his government funding?
Now it looks like a setup for "we could have saved you if it wasn't for those Communist Greenies". Waste management is not a show stopper in a place with an active nuclear weapons program.
there are more sikhs in the world than jews, but no one argues about them
personally, i don't like jews, i don't hate jews. i just don't care about jews, for or against
and that makes me a small minority in the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have some sharks for sale.
How about a much cheaper solution that detects the number of incoming missiles and immediately launches an equal number and equally randomly targeted missiles in return. So that the point may sink in that firing such a missile is equivalent to firing on your own people.
Jews in Space without lasers would be mighty boring.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
For about a year on the mobile version that was supposed to go on a series of containers on trucks. The cost was going into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and so the army cut the program. One reason was that insurgents in iraq weren't using mortars very often anymore, so there wasn't much use for such a system.
A few months later, hezbollah in Lebanon started firing katyushas again, oh well.
It was the most awesome project I've worked on so far. I actually got to see it take out mortars in flight on monitors while sitting in command and control 5 km away. (The system in new mexico doesn't have very good output scrubbers, so to avoid NF3 poisoning, humans have to be 5km away while it is firing.)
There's also more problems with it than just chemicals. For instance, the glass window in the front that the beam exits from costs 1 million dollars and takes a year to make (got to withstand a vacuum and a very powerful laser).
And the biggest problem is, they overwhelm it by sending lots of rockets, and then send several directly at the device itself. One rocket gets through, and there goes years of work and millions of dollars.
Anyway, thought the slashdot crowd might find some of that interesting.
Sharks cant survive long in a desert thus the toxic wast problem.
The U.S. has a system that works pretty well in this kind of situation: The Phalanx CIWS, or the C-RAM system (very similar).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-RAM
I won't say anything about its specifics, but I can tell you that it DOES work. It IS loud and you WILL crap your pants every time it goes off without warning, but that's a small price to pay for a WORKING product that shoots mortars and rockets out of the sky. This would be the perfect solution to their problem and frankly I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about it. Ah, I just answered my own question from my wiki link- it looks like they are in fact looking into these. Good for them.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1196847389509&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
I don't know what the retail is on these things, but I'm sure we could squeeze a few into the multi-billion-dollar defense support that we give to Israel every year.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I wonder if a lower tech weapon system wouldn't do. Something like a grid of Phalanx point defense systems. They can shoot down mortar rounds so the low tech stuff the Palestinian are firing should be even easier to hit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsnhyTiTqk4
A little more digging with Google indicates the system has already been fielded for that purpose. Just set up a perimeter and be careful about where the misses come down.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
a whole house full ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
These centuries old disputes about whose pretend friend is actually real are definitely worth spending all these countless millions of dollars on and losing all these lives over.
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
But the toxic chemicals needed to generate THEL's megawatts of power made the thing a logistical nightmare. Well i suppose the environment can just take one for the team... Futhermore PEWPEW LASERZ!
Palestinians Sue Government For Laser Cannons "Residents of a southern Palestinian town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Israeli bomb, gun, mortar, physical settler attacks. And they're suing the Israeli national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense. The U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser project was widely considered to be the most successful energy weapon ever built. But the toxic chemicals needed to generate THEL's megawatts of power made the thing a logistical nightmare. It was scrapped. Now, the residents of Palestinian camps it back. And they're taking Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to court to make it happen." In other news: "The recent upsurge in violence saw at least 120 Palestinians killed in Israeli military strikes on Gaza. Five Israelis have also been killed, including a civilian in a barrage of rocket fire from Gaza." -http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7292676.stm Statistically speaking, I say the Palestinians may need the magic laser a tad more.
What about loansharks with lasers on their heads?
This just goes to show that everyone over there is idiotic. Laser cannons that'll turn the whole place into a toxic wasteland to protect youreself from rocketfire...what'll they think of next?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Now, don't get cocky...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
but i'll burn some karma to reply.
Your otherwise eloquent pre-emptive post leaves out one inconvenient fact. It seems main reason so many rockets fall on that particular city is the illegally built settlement present there.
It is a fine spin to call building settlements on a landgrab "non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region", but that ain't make it reality.
I am curious if trying some non-violent legal action in accordance with some UN resolutions may help.
Instead of treating the symptom, why don't the Israelis solve the cause? The cause is that in Gaza live two groups of people. One group simply wants to live, work, go to school, live in peace, and mind their own business. The other group wants to blow stuff up. To solve the cause, the group that wants to blow stuff up needs to be blown up first.
Here's the trouble with this simple statement:
- Trouble number 1: This isn't a conventional war, where the army of one state fights the army of another. This is a state, which has to abide by laws and wants to avoid killing innocent bystanders, fighting bands of rebels, who abide by no law, target children, and hope to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible. When a terrorist shoots rockets at children and dreams of blowing himself up, does he have morals or care about the consequences of breaking laws? No way!
- Trouble number 2: The enemy knows that Israelis value life and want to avoid killing the bystanders I just mentioned, so they use that to their advantage by deliberately firing their rockets from the vicinity of homes or schools. This has two advantages for the terrorists: First, Israel will hesitate to strike back for fear of killing innocents; second, if Israel strikes back and innocents get killed, it makes for great anti-Israel PR for the terrorists. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So the trouble is that you really must kill the terrorists because they pose a danger to both sides of the Gaza border. How do you do that? You have to enlist the help of the innocent people who live in their midst. Israel has to send a few elite battalions into Gaza to stamp out this problem once and for all, and must provide a means for the innocent residents of Gaza to join forces with Israel against the terrorist elements that surround them. Only then will the tens of thousands of terrorists in Gaza be overpowered. And stamp them out one-by-one, destroy their bomb factories, blow up their underground tunnels, and put an end to the problem of terrorism in Gaza once and for all.This is the solution. This is a painful solution. It will require a tremendous effort, a fight that will last a very long time, and many lives will unfortunately be lost in the process, from all three sides. But this is the only way to end the daily barrage of rocket fire from Gaza onto several Israeli towns, and the terror that the residents of both areas feel on a daily basis.
Building ray guns and all kinds of weird stuff will NOT solve the problem.
I wonder what the Hebrew translation is for "frickin' lasers"?
Anybody want my mod points?
What a load of grandstanding dreck. Qassams are low-yeild, and low accuracy. They land in empty fields more often than not. This is just more Israeli victim-mongering.
Well I don't know about all those kilojoule a ccm but...
I wonder if this thing emits toxic chemicals.. maybe they could get a free one from Hamas or Hizbullah !
There are a number of games that you can play where the optimal result requires perfect cooperation between the different teams/players, but where individual greediness can lead to a significant individual gain. That individual gain of course comes at the expense of all other players.
There is a variant of this type of game that disallows communication between teams. It's been shown that with that setup, there is exactly one way to play:
1st round: no information is available, so assume maximal cooperation from all other teams, and play your turn accordingly.
2nd round: Reciprocate the other teams' play: if they played greedy, play greedy. If they played nice, play nice.
3rd round: repeat approach from round 2 until the end.
The logic behind this is that greedy players will only play nice when they see the exact consequences of their actions imposed on themselves, and when they see that playing nice is rewarded.
Applied to the Israel/Palestine conflict, it could mean that the appropriate response to random rocket launches is an immediate retaliatory strike with equal destructive power, aimed at the source of the rockets. On the other hand, the appropriate response to suicide bombers is a little more fuzzy. Send in robot-bombers? Drop a bomb in a random place? Also, it is unclear what the positive feedback for no rocket launches or suicide bombers would be. Resume normal conditions? Stay put? Unlock frozen support funds for hamas?
I definitely think though that Palestinians in general have to understand that rockets being launched from their territory means that rockets will be launched against them in general as well. It'd be difficult to implement, as it's a completely different approach to dealing with rocket attacks and suicide bombers: personal responsibility and punishment is out, collective punishment is in. Not to mention that a lot of the current preventive measures would have to go out the window as well.
I doubt that anybody in Israel has the courage to experiment with that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
burning ur karma
Mutant sea bass.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
CWIS systems can knock down incoming threats at ranges similar to those of a katiusha, capable of controlled flight, and coming in at higher speeds.
Goalkeeper, Phalanx, even Israel's own Typhoon (Karma whores are welcome to add the wikipedia links, they're all there).
Yes, it would cost this and that much money putting a turret every 1km or so along 10km or relevant borders.
That said, consider:
Hitting an actively-burning missile that depends on locomotion and guidance to get to its target (what CWIS is designed and deployed to do) is easier (If you hit along the body you're likely to incapacitate propulsion/steering and possibly blow it up)
Hitting a Katyusha - a spent hollow metal tube (the rocket only burns at the very start) that has no guidance, is not flying towards any particular target (insanely low accuracy) - and is just , does not rely on aerial stability (tumbles in the air like a thrown pen) - unless you plug it right in the (tiny) warhead, it'll be just as happy and do same damage after getting torn in half, getting knocked off course or getting swiss-cheezed to hell and back.
Still, A specialized version of a tried-and-tested existing tech like CWIS sounds more promising than sharks with laser beams.
-
If you were born in Gaza, what kind of future lies ahead of you? Look at the pictures on TV or in the magazines. Economic conditions there are quite grim.
It's easy to understand why such a child might become a suicide bomber someday. With nothing to live for, one makes a difference the only way one can.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
1) Abandon further settlement development. Right now, Abbas won't even negotiate with them because they are taking more land from Palestinains for settlements.
..., get elected PM of Israel. Yes, the world has gone mad.
2) Begin negotiating with Haniya. Like it or not, he is the fairly elected representative of the Palestinian Authority. The problem is that, as you point out, Hamas sees its goal as the destruction of Israel, but Haniya has shown that he is more moderate than that, and negotiation is the only way to change the propaganda. Note that good thing can grow in questionable ground-- Shamir was an old wannabe Nazi* and yet he contributed greatly to the peace process. Sharon was a convicted war criminal** and yet his administration began the abandonment of large sections of settlement blocks, paving a possible road to peace. If we judged everyone by the past, Israel's leadership would be disqualified for past affiliations/war crimes/etc.
* This is not meant to invoke Godwin's law. Shamir was a top leader during WWII of a group which was fighting for Israeli independance against the UK. This group (ELHI, aka the Stern Gang) was a terrorist organization which openly idolized the Nazis, celebrated Nazi field victories praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis (on the basis that this way at least they were effectively self-governing), and even in 1942 attempted to form a military alliance with Hitler. Funny-- celebrate Nazi victories, try to enter into an alliance with Hitler,
** Sharon was convicted of an Israeli military tribunal of being in part responsible for the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebannon in the 1980's.
My own suspicion is that we are going to see yet another "Operation Defensive Shield" which will force the government to once again consider abandoning settlement blocks. No, Israeli politics is far from rational. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. In the end, though, the civilians on both sides are the losers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Tiptoeing around Godwin's Law, are we?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hamas had an oportunity to lay a real foundation for peace and we took that away. Hamas was elected on a promise to get rid of corruption. Had they been able to deliver on that, perhaps there would be a real negotiating partner. Instead our government has sought to undermine Palestinian democracy every step of the way, enhancing the problems which prevent serious negotiations. Sad, really.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not sure what whoever submitted this thought would happen, but I saw it coming even before I clicked on the link. While this is really old ground and full of potholes that can easily break your ankle I think its important enough to go over it with everyone else who are as insane as I am. First of all, the Israelis did not take the Palestinians land, it was given to them.....Hey!!! Wait until I'm done!! It was given to them by the Allied forces in recompense for what was done to them. And yes, the Allies took it away from the Palestinians, but that's the price you pay for being on the losing side of a war as big as World War II. Not only that, but the Palestinians still had their own country at the time, if slightly reduced. They chose to attack Israel and they lost. So, now that the history lesson is done lets do some current events. Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries in the Middle East. Why aren't they helping their poor Arab brothers the Palestinians? Because, while suffering the Palestinians can be held up as examples of how "badly" they are treated by the Israelis. They are nothing but the stalking horse for Arab grandstanding.
Lawyers with frickin' lasers attached to their heads?
That would be very scary.
Israelis sue government! Bring out! Dangerous weapon! They call. It. The short sentence. For effect. Profit. The. Win.
One thing I've wondered about is how these systems work when it is cloudy. Does the LASER operate at wavelengths that aren't affected much, is it simply powerful enough to create its own path through, or can you simply not use it when it is cloudy ? I guess I'm not sure what altitude the rockets in question get to, it may be possible to shoot them down before / after they go above the cloud cover...
If what you said was true Israelis wouldn't be sitting on their hands as Palestinians shell their civilians. They'd arm their civilians with rockets and have them right back at the Palestinians.
The undeniable fact is that Palestinian terrorists launch attacks from civilian centers and target civilians exclusively. The Israeli military is not located anywhere close to civilian centers. There is absolutely no excuse for attacking Israeli civilians this way and no way you could claim it was done by accident. Israeli troops have one of the lowest rate of collateral damage in the world. When Palestinian civilians are killed in the cross-fire it is by mistake, not because they were targeting them.
If Israel wanted to wipe out the Palestinians, it could do so in a day but it does not. If the tables were turned the Palestinians would not hesitate for a minute, as they have already demonstrated.
Some paint, a couple of magnets, maybe a bit of duct tape and it will all be good.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
When we stole Texas from the Mexicans, we did it hard and fast and we held it on our own. The residents evicted from the land Israel now occupies seem to be a bit more determined than the Mexicans!
Blar.
Moving the parts to Israel for reassembly is out of the question. Without the THEL to protect Area 51, there would be a huge invasion of UFOs. How else are we supposed to hold off the alien invaders?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you refer to people evicted from that land, it's not who you think. No Arabs were required to leave in 1948. Who do you think Israeli Arabs are? The ones who stayed. The "Palestinians" are one of three groups of people:
No, in fact the only people to be evicted from the land were the Jewish residents of Gush Katif (the settlements in Gaza that Sharon's government evicted in 2005).
Besides, comparing the situation to Texas and the Mexicans is inaccurate; both Jews and Arabs have been living in the land for centuries.
Thank God for evolution.
Can I sue for my flying car?
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them and if the government is refusing to take any preventative action, while over 7,000 rockets have fallen on the town, then suing the government seems a very reasonable action.
This I will have to agree on. If you are attacked you have the right to defend yourself, but the the overall situation is not simply one side attacking another. Despite having agreed to completely pull out from territory which has been designated as Palestinian, there are in fact still Israeli colonies there. Granted this move to expand has been prompted by pressure from the radical right, put this is not likely to ease the situation.
Whether Hamas will ever accept Israel as a nation is also another question, but there is so much tension on both sides that these issues might last a while.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
When we stole Texas from the Mexicans
You have a funny definition of "stole". By your definition, the Americans "stole" the thirteen colonies from Britain.
Otherwise, how's that self-hatred working out for you?
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I remember reading something from Feynman's writings that the Orthodox Jews are concerned about prohibitions against making fire on the Sabbath. Nevermind that there's no flame, you're combusting something *and* aiming the laser heavenward. I don't think the rabbis would let them use it one day out of the week. The palestinians would only need to alter their schedule. Unless they had the same prohibition from the Koran.
Don't cloud the issue with facts. We only speak in zealousness here. Facts get in the way of easy to follow flame wars.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There is more proof that Israel assasinated Haniya than Bin Laden planned 9/11. That didnt prevent USA from invading two countries (now 3 with Somalia invaded by US proxy Ethiopia). Compared to the hundreds of thousands of deaths in these three wars whats a few Israeli civilians (who are anyway reservists out of uniform waiting for callup) See an argument can be made that the rocket attacks are justified. Hell just about anything could be justified. Hitler probably justified locking up the Jews in camps because they were considered a fifth column sympathetic to the allies. Similarly Israel justifies locking up the Palestinians in Gaza which is just a ghetto and not a very big one at that. Justifications, Justifications. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself would I like somebody to do this to me or my family and if the answer is no dont do it even if you think the other guy is a suicide bomber/ Jewish capitalist/ Zionist Land grabber or whatever else is your pet peeve.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Do you really think that Israel just targets civilians when it strikes back? Wow. I feel sorry for you because you are seriously misinformed.
You're cute. The people who lived in that area were given an offer they couldn't refuse by the western nations who had conquered those lands. Now these same people are 'bad' because they are trying to re-conquer what was taken from them and turned into Israel?
Moral relativism...
My Texas/Mexico analogy isn't perfect, I realize that.
Blar.
Zealousness. Except, the zealots are the ones who are dwelling on their 'holy land' and stealing land from other nations. 1967, Israel wouldn't return the land they took because "Egypt couldn't hold it." Cute huh? Especially when many cultures over thousands of years had run the Hebrews right out of their 'holy land'.
Sorry, they don't deserve the handout in the form of a nation. They certainly don't deserve 4 Billion American Dollars a year.
Blar.
Actually, I think the grandparent was referring to "Lawyer Cannons". Sort of like a Laser Cannon, except instead of throwing out a high-power laser into the path of an oncoming missile, it throws out a lawyer.
Right into the path of an oncoming missile.
It sounds inaccurate, as if you might have to expend several lawyers to get it just right.
I like it already.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
That's so an initial miss can still be appealed.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Excuse me? Why would Israel return any lands after the 1967 war, in which it was attacked by those nations who lost that said land?
...fine enough. Last thing we need is a bunch of lunatics behind the laser. They've done more to increase the vitriol more than anything.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Only problem is... in 10 years.... Arabs would outnumber Jews in Israel.....
Of course even within the Green Line, that is happening but it will take 50 years at current rates, not 10....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
you mean the land Egypt lost to israel after Egypt attacked israel? why the hell should they give it back?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Just give the stuff they didn't earn back to the existing residents. That would be, the land gifted by the west.
Blar.
I'd be some kind of hypocritical retard if I didn't also believe that Jordan, Syria, Iraq, etc... should not have been created either. I mean, look how well Iraq has hung together once the dictatorship is gone. All those nations poorly cobbled together don't work without a very strong authoritarian government. Take that away and they revert to their traditional social groupings.
Blar.
Because they'd already been kicked out by then. The problem starts with the UK's Balfour Doctrine back in 1917, and the British Mandate of Palestine essentially kicking Arabs off the land to make way for Jewish settlers. 1948 was the end, not the beginning; and the ones mostly to blame were neither the Arabs nor the Jews, but the conniving British Empire who doublecrossed them both.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So, who should have been given sovereignty over those vast lands — after the Ottoman Empire collapsed thanks in no small part to the (British-assisted) Arab Revolt? And, back to the previous subject, why was it particularly wrong to give sovereignty over a particular patch of the land (under 1% of the total) to the Jews?..
The answer is, it was not. The whole problem is artificial from the beginning to these days. First the Arab nations tried to vanquish Israel by the brute force in several "conventional" wars. Now, they are continuing with terrorism on one hand and propaganda whining on the other.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why not just let the peoples fight it out for dominance? I mean, that's what is happening in Iraq right now. Seems to be the only way to get a stable government in a region. Arrogant Westerners thought they had to 'civilize' these regions and force their own systems upon those regions. Doesn't seem to have worked well. We don't have to remake all cultures in our own image. When you conquer a people as the Western nations did in the middle-east, and then give some of that conquered land to a group that the majority in the region dislike, what did they think was going to happen?
Why couldn't the US just give the Jews a chunk of Utah? Our own Native American reservations are on the shittiest land, certainly not the fertile and beautiful land that those peoples had been dwelling on when we forced them out. Utah is pretty similar in climate, and the US isn't full of people of a religion that hates Jews. Back then the animosity between the religions was well known. Seems like they were asking for trouble setting that country up right on the fairy tale spot. Well, they got the trouble they asked for.
I see the formation of Israel as a foolish and arrogant plan executed with ignorance of the regions being manipulated. Now it has caused so many problems, I just can't care about anyone in that region, but I feel guilt for it because my peoples put that mess into place. Even out the aid, and let them duke it out. Seems to be the way authority is gotten in that region.
Blar.
This is not a collection of opinions. This is a collection of propaganda pieces that are being broadcast in Palestinian media - to all Palestinians!
It is not "representative" of this section of the population or another, its what Hamas is broadcasting on its newspapers, TV and radio networks.
You will not find similar propaganda about Iranians in America, or about Palestinians in Israel.
Ummm. I'm sorry. Have you looked at a map lately?
Sinai was returned to Egypt decades ago, Rip van Winkle.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
As Jews and Arabs do?..
The alternatives — such as Rwanda — were far worse.
It could've, it did, and it still does: it was and remains perfectly legal for Jews to buy land in Utah. They preferred to do so in Palestine, however, for some reason... Their dramatic successes in farming and the ability to buy more and more land resulted in the negative reaction by the local Arabs. So much so, it remains de-facto illegal to this day for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew — Hamas and friends will hunt such a seller down. Selling to Christians is Ok, and there is a small industry in Europe specializing in middlemenship...
Unlike those you accuse, you are ignorant of history — the Jews fought their way to dominance in the region, defeating armies of several (earlier-formed) Arab nations — just as is, apparently, required by you, right after seeking — and obtaining — legal international recognition. If ever a new nation was born "properly" — satisfying both the "might is right" people like yourself and the peaceful consensus-seekers — it was Israel in 1948. Had the Arabs done the same — instead of conspiring for decades to destroy Israel — they would've lived pretty good by now.
Not that they live badly now — Gazans' are fairing better than those of Egyptians right across the border:
You are not just ignorant, but also racist — implying, that certain peoples "just aren't" capable of democracy and that "a strong hand" is the best for them...
Also your blaming of "the West" for the world's ills is such a (disproved) cliche, that I'll probably stop responding here... My hands already hurt from beating you up with all these heavy facts, sorry.
You have nothing to be ashamed of as a "westerner" — your shortcomings are ignorance and racism, but those are your own...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm a racist for pointing out the non-PC reality of that region. Come on! I don't think these people are any less than myself, they just do things differently. You're the one trying to tell me that fighting for dominance is a bad thing. I'm just saying, let them do it their own way.
Would a communist who pointed out the anger and wasted funds generated by US presidential campaigns was a waste of resources be considered a racist?
Blar.