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New Mega-Leak Reveals Middle East Peace Process
An anonymous reader writes "There's been yet another mega-leak, this time of 1,600 papers describing the Israeli/Palestinian peace process negotiations. It's independent of Wikileaks and came to light via al-Jazeera, showing perhaps that the mega-leak meme is here to stay whatever happens to Assange. The papers show a weak Palestinian side offering ever greater concessions to Israel, which flatly rejected this as being insufficient: 'We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands,' Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians, 'and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it.'"
A whole new game, ain't it now?
NO SIG
...conveniently omitting any mention of Qatar.
How can the following script be repeated for 1600 pages:
"You started it!"
"No, you started it!"
"No, you started it!"
Nuke them all. Their respective God will provide his true chosen people with the ability to live in the radioactive wasteland.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Why in the fuck is this article on slashdot? The Middle East situation is not a nerd story, its not something that matters here. Tagging this story under security and internet makes no sense whatsoever. You can find this news anywhere else, not on an ostensibly tech oriented blog.
Slashdot, you are jumping the shark with this. BTW, before you mod this down -1 consider its an ontopic meta comment.
The person who leaked this has raped me.
Please arrest him immediately. Thanks.
I wonder if there will be the calls for treason and terrorism arising from this, with the Big Media not coming to their aid. al-Jazeera is even closer to our American media than Assange is by their own standards they gave when not defending him. Eventually, those who do not like free press will come for Big Media too.
How long before the world's secret services adapt to the "megaleak" phenomenon, and start using it as a tool to spread propaganda? Wikileaks might be an independent arbiter, but will other start-ups be so? In time, the space will become so polluted with lies, that the real leaks will be treated as lies, along with the rest of it.
You dun accidentally in my base goofed and consequences will never gonna give you up be the same!
"'We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands,' Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians"
Things like right to exist probably aren't in it yet.
"we are the the most psychopath right wing coalition that can ever come into being in a country through a democratic process", Tzipi Livni should have said.
no really, its beyond fathoming, the nature and formation of this ungodly coalition is. my israeli friend (colleague too) says that the exterior minister of this coalition, liebermann, is known as outright mafia in israel. not in a manner of speaking, but, literally. he says the entire coalition is filled with similar right wing zealots and psychos, came to being as a coalition government only through an unholy alliance they have set up among each other after the scattered elections. they, naturally, dont even reflect the true will of the majority of israeli people.
its no surprise to me to hear these leaks, after being told about the situation in israel and nature of these people by my friend, tho it may be worthy of news to some people.
Read radical news here
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/297544-1
Worth watching in its entirety to get a good idea what Israel is up against.
LOL, "End Of Days":
Please take your sorry, shitty, flawed, religion and kindly go fuck off and die.
Internet = the true voice of the people > your corrupt culture that rules by fear, ignorance, and submission.
Those assholes are the ones who left their land in the first place. Then they come back, get upset that they don't have it, so they start taking it over. When the Palestinians are all like, "hey, we have a right to be here too", the Israeli's tell them to eat shit and die. This conflict has gone on far longer than it should have.
You realize the term "meme" predates its modern usage of describing "LOL cats", and other internet ephemera, right? The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, coined it to explain much larger phenomena, like the evolution of society as a whole, and pretty much all evolving intellectual and sociological phenomena that is not immediately traceable to genetics.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
...but not the right to expand by force.
Yeah, except they were willing to give up parts of their own land, and you didn't bother to read the story since it doesn't fit your moronic prejudices.
Internet = astroturf, banner ads, malware, lots of porn, more malware, torrents, lolcats and the true voice of the people.
and memes. lots of them.
Everything is a meme, and everybody is an avatar.
Of course you are my bright little star,
I've miles and miles of files
Pretty files of your forefather's fruit
and now to suit
our great computer,
You're magnetic ink.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
RTFA you Fucking Moron. Seriously, get your head out of your ass and fucking READ IT. The Palestinians are the ones doing all the giving here, Israel is still WAY outside it's fucking borders, but stupid fucking racist retarded cunts like you are the reason it can get away with it.
One day in the future we'll all be saddened that Israel was the child of ethnic cleansing and racism, and chose instead of becoming a beacon to inflict misery upon a new set of innocents.
You were willing and happy at the time.
both sides = crazy weirdos
The US should NOT be helping Israel in this mess.
It seems it does not negotiate at all.
al-Jazeera, your source for objective leak cherry-picking.
RTFA you Fucking Moron. Seriously, get your head out of your ass and fucking READ IT. The Palestinians are the ones doing all the giving here, Israel is still WAY outside it's fucking borders, but stupid fucking racist retarded cunts like you are the reason it can get away with it. One day in the future we'll all be saddened that Israel was the child of ethnic cleansing and racism, and chose instead of becoming a beacon to inflict misery upon a new set of innocents.
Isn't it just amazing how the elegance, persuasiveness and logical soundness of an argument grows exponentially every time the author works another vulgar expletive into it?
If the the internet is really the voice of the people, then perhaps extinction isn't such a bad thing. The internet is a sewer.
Are you talking about Palestine or Israel? Because, you know, apart from the specific years you quoted, your discourse would totally apply to the other side of the conflict.
Score: i, Imaginary
It's independent of Wikileaks and came to light via al-Jazeera, showing perhaps that the mega-leak meme is here to stay whatever happens to Assange.
I think history will find that Wikileaks and by association Julian Assanges greatest contribution to the world, will not necessarily be the Wikileaks service, but helping to cultivate a greater culture of leaking, by showing that it can be done effectively, and that your message will be heard.
Now that, is something extremely valuable, that's almost impossible to be taken away.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is an invitation to all to check out www.merlinslibrary.com, a wiki site where you can upload all your favorite links to help each other find good sites. All you need to do is just find the appropriate topic or create a new article and upload the link. It's that easy! So check out www.merlinslibrary.com
Give yourself a peanut for being a jeenyus. You've just defined it to be so broad as to have no meaning.
Right now it doea not matter that they lost the war and it does not matter that they were in the right to defend their own land. Israel will just wipe them and in a few decades we will start to see that his was just another mindless massacre. Maybe we can give the survivors some other land chosen at random on a map. Some african country where they do not have civil war yet.
The only thing in that which is even the slightest bit shocking is that the Israelis know Lieberman to be full of it.
I think most Israelis know that building settlements in the disputed territories isn't helping the cause of piece and is certainly provoking further attacks. I think they also realize that unnecessary provocation isn't going to serve their interests in the long term. Whether they're more aware of that or scared of the FUD is not something I have any clue about.
my friend told me that actually even that psycho coalition is trying to get rid of liebermann, because he is way 'far out' in his radicalness. but, so far have not been able to.
Read radical news here
is that it would be a carte blanche to expel all immigrants from Europe.
If a lifetime in an area is insufficient to get such an attachment that you cannot be removed from it, then spending 5-6 years as an asylum seeker on the run is a laughably short time to get any short of attachment.
Hell fuckin' yea!!!
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Not that hard at all. Get the documents. Make important but small changes. Publish. Call the next guy to publish a liar. Really - how hard is that. remember that changing just one word changes, "that's not easy." to "that's easy." I cannot find the reference, but I believe a war was either fought or almost fought because of a missing comma.
It doesn't matter because no one in the palestinian side has enough authority to make any concession. It would be irrational to sign a peace agreement with someone who cannot speak in the name of the whole palestinian people. Even if the Hamas also signed these agreement, new movements would be created and start denouncing the agreements. We could discuss what is the moral thing to do but the rational thing to do for Israel is to sign no agreement with the palestinians as the palestinian leaders party to the agreement would just get replaced by hardliners in a matter of weeks.
As if a left/right=Rebublican/Democrat flame war wasn't enough.
Let's drag in one of the most vicious, long running and intractable disputes in the world.
This should be good for a few hundred highly polarized replies. ;)
Yeah, and my sister's friend's hairdresser says that Jews drink the blood of children!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Lets just separate them for 100s of years until they cool down... 2 nations with a big wall.... that will work! We just have to get them to agree where to put the wall ;-) How about along the legal borders? oh...wait...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
lol what? Truth hurts? Is Kleenix still made in America?
You realize the term "meme" predates its modern usage of describing "LOL cats", and other internet ephemera, right? The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, coined it to explain much larger phenomena, like the evolution of society as a whole, and pretty much all evolving intellectual and sociological phenomena that is not immediately traceable to genetics.
Actually, you are both wrong. The English word "meme" has its roots in the French word "même".
Lock the Palestinians and the Israels in a room with some bricks. The winner (the ones who come out of the room on their own) get to stay there, the losers have to move to Utah. You're welcome! Nobel Prize, please!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ask yourself who benefits from these allegations. How can these papers claim that the PLO offered most of Jerusalem to Israel when no less than a year earlier Olmert offered *them* most of Jerusalem? What these papers claim is completely illogical.
Hamas and their supporters leaked these fabricated papers in other to simultaneously smear the Palestinian Authority and Israel. What better way to kill two birds with one stone?
All this talk about settlements, territorial concessions and refugees are all a distraction. The real conflict is about religion and oil. You won't see peace in the middle-east until *those* topics are discussed.
Ask yourself why Muslims were slaughtering Jews in Israel as far back as 1929: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre
It's there because as long as the islamists are busy bombing israel, they're not bombing us. In the current situation, Israel is the ennemy of our ennemies so we support them.
Al Jazeera
New York Times
Any question on why Americans and Arabs have completely different perceptions of the same conflict?
I am officially gone from
Actually, he didn't offer any kind of definition.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Isn't it just amazing how the elegance, persuasiveness and logical soundness of an argument grows exponentially every time the author works another vulgar expletive into it?
Yep. Look at how his argument weakens when you substitute more genteel phrasing:
RTFA my good friend. Seriously, get your glasses out and carefully READ IT. The Palestinians are the ones doing all the giving here, Israel is still WAY outside it's original borders, but tragically misinformed and deceived observers like you are the reason it can get away with it.
One day in the future we'll all be saddened that Israel was the child of ethnic cleansing and racism, and chose instead of becoming a beacon to inflict misery upon a new set of innocents.
nice AC post...coward. And I guess Hitler killing millions of Jews was their fault too, eh?
I read the story, and I didn't see Palestine offer the one thing that will force Israel to compromise: a credible commitment to peace.
There are a lot of different groups in Israel who want a lot of different things; some want to keep or expand the settlements, but the vast majority want safety in their country. As long as the Palestinians can't promise to leave them alone, Israel will not let them go. Once Palestine commits to peace, Israel will not be able to keep them.
The quotes in the article really did make the Palestinians look weak. Hillary Clinton says the Palestinians are "always in a chapter of a Greek tragedy." The fact is they really don't have any power in the situation, which is why we feel sorry for them, but as soon as they gain a little power, they use it to attack Israel. Not good. We've seen this in the Gaza strip. It's a miserable situation, but it is part of a pattern seen throughout the middle east.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Try replacing "Jews" with any group. Most social groups are incapable of seeing their own shortcomings.
And I guess Hitler killing millions of Jews was their fault too, eh?
If you ask an ultra orthodox Jew, you might even get a Yes as answer. A minority opinion among them is that European Jews were punished by god for not living orthodox.
(Just to be clear: I don't agree with that. I merely wanted to answer your question.)
Israeli politics has its share of problems, of that I have no doubt.
What I *do* doubt is the word of your Israeli friend. Let me put it this way: there is a strong left-wing leaning in Israeli culture. The Israeli courts are pretty much all left of center. The government itself swings from left-wing to right-wing over the years, as do governments of many countries around the world. What I dislike very much is how left-wing people (by the sound of it, your friend being one of them) categorize anyone to the right of their political views as "zealots and psychos" and right-wing people categorize anyone to the left of their political views as "traitors". Neither accusation holds water.
If Lieberman really had mafia connections, as you allege, evidence of it would have come out by now and he'd be out of the government. The left-wing courts would be more than happy to oblige. It might interest you to know that every single political party (whether on the left or right) had similar accusations leveled at them. Most of it is just political mudslinging.
I wish people would stop treating foreign countries as 3rd-world countries. Every single country in the world has its share of problems. What matters is that we act in good faith and do our best to make the world a better place.
Um, there were no Jews 3,700 years ago. A monotheistic religion that would later become Judaism was just getting started. Even the first "proto Jews" weren't strictly monotheistic (the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament contains fragments of polytheism, eg. Psalm 82) which -- at least by today's standards -- would not qualify them as Jews...
As for your Pharaoh comment: There is not a single piece of archeological evidence that hundreds of thousands of people migrated away from Egypt and wandered through the desert for 40 years.
So either the Exodus never happened and the story is just made up or the ancient people of Israel were the cleanest people ever by not leaving any pottery, weapons, etc. behind....
Quick word of advice to anyone who may be reading this and has reached the point at which the injustice is more important than their life.
Suicide bombings are a very poor way to attempt to gain a measure of justice. They only give Israel further justification for their action and provides distraction for the rest of the world (and that doesn't take much) from the continual strangulation of the Palestinian people.
A much more effective approach would be public self-immolation recorded on video for broadcasting along with an explanatory note of the no-hope situation underlying the act. The unimaginableness of this makes it something that cannot be ignored. It leaves people no distracting details like they killed all these people, and instead forces them to confront the depth of despair and hopelessness that necessarily exists behind such an act.
I would also give the same advice to any Israel whose life has become meaningless suffering under the continual oppression by the Palestinian people, except I really don't believe their would be any of them that desperate, and I believe that says something about the situation.
He didn't offer a definition because Wikipedia is not a dictionary!
Hey, quit forcing your education on others! That's not cool man!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I can't read your post because your lack of capitalization makes me angry.
It's hard to describe, but I get the feeling that someday somebody is going to write another illiterate post like yours and I'm going to snap, find out where they live, and gouge their eyes out.
Anyway, whatever you said, I'm sure it made sense.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
But they aren't willing to give up the parts that Israel wanted. Israel doesn't care about the rest of it. Of course, the Palestinians aren't willing to give up that particular bit of land either, for the exact same reasons as the Israelis.
They are both doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons, but Israel is in the stronger position so they naturally look like the bad guy. The truth is if the Israelis were less civil they would have driven the Palestinians out by force a long time ago. Instead they have been adamant but patient about getting what they want, occasionally fighting skirmishes with them instead of just blowing them all to hell and back, like they are completely capable of.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's actually a lot more complicated than that. My advice when people ask me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that if you think either side is right, it's because you don't know anything. Spend any time really studying the issues and you realize that there's nothing but shades of grey in this conflict.
, I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality,
They have complete freedom of religion
Riiiight. Pay no attention to the fact that TWO THIRDS of ultra-orthodox men live on welfare and don't work (and amongst the women, 50% don't work, whereas 25% in general Israeli population don't.) If you elect to go into such studies, the government gives you automatic welfare AND excuses you from military service (where it is ordinarily compulsory) AND gives you a complete tax break.
Did I mention that these ultra-orthodox freeloaders are causing most of the upheaval and supporting hard-line policies? And multiplying like rabbits, marrying young and having huge families?
If that's "Secular", then I guess you'd be OK with the federal government giving welfare to people who decide to become ultra-right-wing Christians?
Please help metamoderate.
As for your Pharaoh comment: There is not a single piece of archeological evidence that hundreds of thousands of people migrated away from Egypt and wandered through the desert for 40 years.
So either the Exodus never happened and the story is just made up or the ancient people of Israel were the cleanest people ever by not leaving any pottery, weapons, etc. behind....
Or perhaps their culture (nomadic shepherds) did not have much to leave behind? Seriously, we have stuff on the scythians because of their burial mounds which we wouldn't have found if they didn't build giant kurgans as markers. Without the graves and military accounts of them we'd have nothing on them either, of course, the old accounts also describe Amazon warriors.
Also, there was significant trade throughout the area and the egyptian styles were pervasive for instance, there were egyptian outposts near the Dead Sea. Trade moved both ways and in order to prove the presence or absence of group A there would have to be a definable style different from the trade. The proto Jews came from an Egyptian context which means that their material culture would be diverging from egyptian and 40 years is not a long time for divergence.
And yes, the hundreds of thousands is hyperbole, but you knew that already.
"The conduct of neither [party], if strictly examined, will be irreproachable." -Elizabeth Bennet
Is this the only Israeli friend you have? If you talk to another Israeli you are likely to get a diametrically opposite opinion. There are over 30 political parties in Israel, a country of 7 million people. Also, you really should see what Lieberman has to say before calling him "psycho".
A much more effective approach would be public self-immolation recorded on video for broadcasting along with an explanatory note of the no-hope situation underlying the act. The unimaginableness of this makes it something that cannot be ignored.
Oh, I don't know...the "hard right" has devolved. Our right - America's, that is, for the international viewer - would never have dared to lie us into a war once upon a time. Now I fear they would think something like "Another Muslim devil gone..." after glancing at a picture similar to the Buddhist priest of lore in Vietnam and turn to the funny pages.
And Israel's hard right? They have devolved even faster.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
vi users? *Ducks*
The "correcting people who think 'meme' is some kind of internet slang" is clearly alive and well. Keep it strong, it may someday save us all (from devolution into /b/tards).
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
The "correcting people who think 'meme' is some kind of internet slang" meme is clearly alive and well. Keep it strong, it may someday save us all (from devolution into /b/tards).
(my other post clearly shows I'm part of the devolution)
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Please, Internet, stop trying to force your sorry culture on the real world. This has nothing to do with memes.
Yeah, one person leaking some stuff and then inspiring another person to leak some stuff has nothing to do with "ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another" and "spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts." Nothing whatsoever. Totally different things.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
You realize the term "meme" predates its modern usage of describing "LOL cats", and other internet ephemera, right? The guy who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, coined it to explain much larger phenomena, like the evolution of society as a whole, and pretty much all evolving intellectual and sociological phenomena that is not immediately traceable to genetics.
Actually, you are both wrong. The English word "meme" has its roots in the French word "même".
But it was Dawkins who made it an English word. Yes, he partly based it on the French word même, but that doesn't make it wrong to say he "coined" it, because it wasn't an English word prior to him making it so.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Ducks and Beavers have their little tiffs, why do you think the yearly game between them is referred to as the 'civil war'.
I read the story, and I didn't see Palestine offer the one thing that will force Israel to compromise: a credible commitment to peace.
What exactly would they have to offer that you would find a "credible commitment"?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I suspect any jewish Israelis who would take you up on your offer would be doing because of the oppression of their own government. Living in Israel isn't fun for anyone.
Jews are not the problem in Israel, neither are the Palestinians. The largest problem is governing bodies on both sides with short-sighted goals and a desire for power that eclipses any compassion for the people they are ruling over.
The other problem is meddling from outside rulers who think they know the right solution for a complex situation after spending mere hours being briefed on it.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
greatly reduced number of suicide bombings by palestinians in Israeli cities.
--
sorry- too lazy to create an account.
It is most interesting that I find this Jews:3700 thread to be most interesting by the two extremists ...
If we were to put together a metaphysical based Hollywood style story of battling gods and surviving heroes you could easily imagine the super-race of Jews. Put on this world to enlighten the world with their discoveries, superior mental facilities, wit and focus - only to be thwarted in life's game of survival by lacking the strategic understanding that cooperative and harmonic relations with neighbors and competitors alike is necessary for survival. Otherwise banished to wander the globe or battle for one little corner of the earth to call home.
But that's just Hollywood, it couldn't have any real value...
rm -rf ms/*
The truth wants to be free. When the old media is full of lies and propaganda, the truth finds other outlets. This is not something that can be stopped or controlled. It will just happen, as it has just happened in previous generations.
By trying to stop it, the government and the old media (newspapers, radio, and TV) are merely contributing to the problem. By attacking wikileaks with silly trumped-up charges, they have not stopped anything. They have only guaranteed that the new media will develop diversity of paths.
Individuals who have knowledge, even documents, that they believe should be made public, will always find a way to do so. Before the "news" media became consolidated and controlled, they would just send it to the Washington Post or some other newspaper. Now, they will publish it themselves.
I tended to see WWI as a stalemate that the Americans helped the Allies tip the balance of; it may have ground down in the Germans' favor in an alternate timeline.
I can also see a isolationist US continuing to be that way sans a Pearl Harbor; WWII in Europe would depend on whether Britain can hold out like they did in reality, who breaks Molotov-Ribbentrop and how, and whether & how Japan actually wants to tangle with the USSR or vice versa.
Yeah yeah, too many variables.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
chill, most people think 'leet' and txt slang was invented for the net or cell phones. In actuality both are just more modern dialects of the old code-speak.
Code-speak was used by programmers and other hackers to imbed messages in programming and media. It usually wasn't viewable unless you used a hexeditor to look at the actual code. Most of the 'wierdness' of it's spelling was because of the massive memory limitations of the day. (Your program or computer memory might have been measured in bytes. Just bytes, no gig, no meg, no k, just bytes.) And this was the early 80s when I encountered it, and it probably goes back to the days of big iron.
And that's the useless history lesson for today, living languages aren't static things, everything about them change.
Learn it, accept it, live it, or die stupid and ignorant, your choice.
"of course, the old accounts also describe Amazon warriors."
You do realize that there is significant evidence that at least part of the Amazon myth is based on reality right ? Genetic evidence at that. Based on the oldest writings about them - they had entered Europe and Greece from the Russian Steppes to which they later returned. In the steppes are Burial Mounds in which were found the bodies of woman with the adornments of warriors. That's already a big hint.
It gets better, we know for a fact that the people who lived in those parts of the steppes later migrated from Russia toward Asia - and were the ancestors of Genghis Kahn's hordes. To this day their descendants expect women to fight as well as men - and here it gets really interesting. A small minority of Mongol children are born as blonds, and as far as we know - it's only EVER daughters. Apparently suggesting a female-only gene that causes blondness in a small minority. Genetic testing of some of them found a clear mitochondrial DNA link (that is maternal only) with the bodies found in the Steppes.
It's not absolute, nothing in science ever really is - and less so in archeology because evidence is *always* incredibly sparse, but right now the evidence we do have, suggests that at least part of the amazon legend as written by the first Greek historians was, in fact, true.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I know. They should realize how much better Vim is.
More media leaking documents. Seems like vi need to cancel al-Jazeera and the Guardians Visa and Mastercard accounts.
When Israeli declared statehood, the Palestinians did not, and their land was absorbed by Egypt and Jordan. The '67 war, in which Israel actually annexed the disputed territory, was started by these (and other) countries. The Palestinians has no voice in this, since they were basically second class citizens.
(In fact, even this is not strictly true, since _Israel_ actually started the '67 war--but with good justification, since all intelligence confirmed that Israel's neighbors were about to attack, and there was a massive Arab troop buildup on Israel's borders.)
I'm Israeli. I'm glad you are on "our" team, but comments like yours are ignorant, and only aggravate the situation.
vi users? *Ducks*
vi users are not ducks, you insensitive clod!
If you go back and read the same Bible most of the West does, you'd see the Jews are constantly their own worst enemy.... they rise to the occasion under extreme suffering, only to wallow in the gutter when everything goes their way. It's like a micro cell of humanity... it's happened before, it will happen again... 60 years ago somebody tried to exterminate one part of their ethnic group, yet they can't have any kind of grace or honor with people lesser than them. It's straight out of Dickenson where somebody with everything claims injury because they had to clean a little poor kids guts off their carriage and it ruined their day.
The problem is that most of the "Jews" that ended up in Israel after WW2 would best be termed "carpet baggers". Most of them were from other well-to do places. It was founded as a "fairy tale" religious state... like if Pat Robertson and Dick Cheney had their own country. I think part of why Americans are starting to find it so vulgar is that it mirrors what the Americans did to the Indians not that long ago... and they're starting to realize it was a mistake.
From a purely "biblical" point of view, the land being squabbled over is the same land Israel failed to take back in the time of King David and the Philistines. There is a prophesy that it would NEVER be their land... and 4000 years later it's still the case. They are trying to take land their OWN religious text says they won't ever get.... They're trying to starve them out, to cheat on their peace treaties, etc, etc. when 60 years ago those people were just "folks" of the land. In ANY western country (like Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, etc) we'd call out Israel for "Ethnic Purges" which is exactly what they're doing. It's high time they stop getting a free pass to randomly execute residents of their country... we overthrew Saddam for the same kind of crap.
Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Crusaders.... all gave the jewish people a chance to participate in their cultures, then wiped them out... then the next guy gave them another chance, rinse n repeat. The UK/USA is another in a long line of big world players that felt the Jewish people earned great respect.... watch them squander it all just as fast!!!
My opinion is that in the next 5-10 years Israel is going to step over the line with Iran and the US will have to put them down for their own good (and to save our own face with the UN), wipe out all the stuff we've sold them... or 8 other countries will try to wipe them out. Iran is playing a game of talking big, but being careful not to actually violate any international laws, while at the same time stepping up response to minor violations on their own borders. It's a clever game to talk smack, but make sure the other guy throws the first punch. Russia and China have too much invested in Iran to let the US knock it over too... I think those two would hit the veto button on any military action against them.
Well, lets see what Avigdor Lieberman has had to say.
Hmm, mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Sounds pretty psycho to me.
I think you're crazy -- it seems pretty clear to me that at this point Israel's government has gone off in a direction that has no interest in coexisting in two separate states with Palestine than China has in the same arrangement with Tibet. They want to stall for time, build settlements, and ultimately end up with everything contested.
Frankly, if America was a good friend to Israel, at this point it'd stage an alcoholic-style intervention -- Israel's current actions just can't get it what it wants. With the course it's currently on, at some point it either needs to give up on the idea of being a Jewish state (which I think most pro-Israel people would call a loss) or it becomes a true apartheid state (which I don't think ultimately serves its interests, either.)
Self-immolation is not all that uncommon, it just rarely makes the world news. I do not think self-immolation by Palestinians would make anything significant happen, unless it happened in large numbers.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
They are both doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons, but Israel is in the stronger position so they naturally look like the bad guy.
Well... yeah. If you and I hate each other but I'm stabbing you because I have a knife and you don't, that probably doesn't just make me look like the bad guy, it actually makes me the bad guy.
It's true that Israel is in a rough position and it's surrounded by a lot of people that mean it harm; it's also true that that rough position doesn't make right all manner of ills they inflict in a misguided attempt to be safe.
The truth is if the Israelis were less civil they would have driven the Palestinians out by force a long time ago. Instead they have been adamant but patient about getting what they want, occasionally fighting skirmishes with them instead of just blowing them all to hell and back, like they are completely capable of.
Another angle might be that committing relatively blatant genocide might not be worth the price in intellectual political capital. Especially when you're a country that was originally created by largely external powers in response to someone else trying to commit genocide against you.
You should duck... calling vi users "social" is a bit risky.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
More like if you think _neither_ side is right then you don't know anything.
This is a tragedy of malicious external and internal forces conspiring against two sides who truly want peace.
Do YOUR due diligence and read up a bit on Feyman's opinion of your position.
He felt that making a distinction of the Jewish people on technological achievements, and making a distinction of the Jewish people on perceived (however insane the idea) global domination starts with the same erroneous (and frankly bigoted) stance of making an arbitrary distinction of the Jewish people.
The next time you want to go around proclaiming that the Jews are 'separate' / 'different' / 'special' or 'unusual', just remember some other f*cking lunatics that did the exact same thing.
There are lots of sources of alternative media, on the Internet especially.
Beyond that, many people in the US have personal ties to people elsewhere in the world. Many of my co-workers and fellow students have friends and relatives elsewhere in the world, and those friends and relatives pass on both first-hand accounts and news from their parts of the world. The grapevine is not reliable, but it does shake up complacency with mainstream US media from time to time.
1600 papers you say, then it is a kilo leak. ;P
Reporting works so much better without hyperbole.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I think you're crazy -
Why thank you, I always do enjoy being insulted.
it seems pretty clear to me that at this point Israel's government has gone off in a direction that has no interest in coexisting in two separate states with Palestine than China has in the same arrangement with Tibet.
You are right, they have no interest in coexisting. Would you? Imagine you had neighbors who wanted to kill you. How anxious would you be for them to gain the power to do so? it's not surprising at all that Israel doesn't want the Palestinians around; and frankly, from a historical perspective, Israel has shown remarkable restraint. Other civilizations would have killed every one of the Palestinians by now. Hopefully we are more enlightened in our day, but it is still not an easy problem: how to deal with people who want to kill you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Bury their weapons and take an oath never to raise them again, except in self-defense.
Seriously, it's a hard problem. There has to be a change in Palestinian culture. There probably isn't anything the negotiators themselves can do; a big change like that is hard.
But it's important. Until the Palestinians can be willing to not kill their neighbors, there will never be peace.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they were willing to give up parts of their own land
Excuse me, but was there ever a "Palestinian" country?
There was Israel but there was no-such-thing as "Palestine".
NO-SUCH-THING
Not then, not now, not ever !
People all over the internet are so fond of pointing out that you would be uninformed if you only watch MSM. I've gotten so tired of this; because I wonder how many people still exist that are MSM-only viewers.
I'm not saying that there's *nobody* who just watches NBC Nightly News and considers themselves informed. It just seems that it's rapidly diminishing number of people. I don't have statistics to back it up though. I suppose ratings would be a good place to start; but you need some kind of rating that's not just a "TV rating", which is obviously out of date for such a study.
At any rate, the very fact that so many people no longer consider primetime news a serious source, kindof makes the "MSM-only viewer" a bit of a strawman.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Wrong. Israel demanded a totally demilitarised Palestine, with no exception for self-defence.
Also, Israel's culture is in just as much a need of a change. It's militaristic and racist, with a sense of entitlement for ever expanding Lebensraum. You can't expect their occupied territories to just bend over.
He said -social- groups *Ducks*
Sounds like your Israeli friend is a typical Israeli leftist -- when the left is in power, dissent is dismissed as "against the rule of law", but when the right is in power, it's all about "they're destroying our democracy", "they don't reflect the will of the average voter", etc. In fact, look at the results of the last Israeli election, and you'll see that the current government definitely reflects the will of the Israeli citizen. A recognizable majority of Israelis are right, and the right's numbers are only growing as more Israelis realize the failure of the peace-at-any-cost philosophy. cf. the recent complete breakdown of the Labor party.
May I suggest another first-hand perspective?
Livni should not have said your version of the sentence, because it is not true - the current government that came to power shortly the aforementioned negotiations was markedly more right-wing than the one in which Livni served.
Look, I don't like the current government. I didn't like the Olmert and Livni government either. But to claim that it was not democratically elected, or that it does not reflect the will of the people, would be misleading. A small majority of the Knesset seats is held by parties clearly identified as the "right wing" - Likud, Yisrael Beytenu, Shas, etc. Many, and possibly most of the voters of these parties outright object to the creation of a Palestinian state in the west bank. The rest of these voters want a government that is "tough", and do not care much if the Palestinian state is created or not - they're not sufficiently interested in it to vote to any party that is seriously committed to a 2-state solution.
It's true that Yisrael Beytenu ostensibly claims to support some form of a 2-state solution - as does parts of the Likud - but you can see from the lack of willingness to negotiate just how uncommitted they really are. From decades of experience of living in this country, I can assure you that almost no right-wing voter is going to protest the lack of peace talks.
Now, if you claimed that the elections do not represent the will of the people because the west-bank Palestinians don't get to vote, then you'd be somewhat correct (some of the Palestinians do have their own government now, of a sort). But as long as you're talking about Israeli citizens, the current government has very firm implicit support for its line of no-serious-negotiations. The main pressure they feel from the electorate is not to cede any territory.
A final note - none of them is a psycopath. It's just that these governments and their voters do not care much about democracy. The way some of them see it, the Arabs were pretty much ready to murder every Jew in this land back in 1948, and to repay those Arabs with anything less than genocide is being "generous". I don't agree with that point of view, but I can see where they're coming from.
> "We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands"
We hold the knife by the handle.
There's English Al Jazeera which you can buy at least in Finland as a part of pay tv packages. Apparently they're by far more balanced with their reporting than the Arabian version is. Not too surprising, perhaps, considering their target audience.
Oh my God, I already speak German! (not an ethnic German)
So long as Israel continues to function as a US military colony there will be no resolution of this issue - except by the extermination of the Palestians, which the Israelis are gradually working towards.
Just to pick a few points from the guardian article..
"How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state." - yes indeed, lieberman and his ilk have long said this.. nothing private about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberman_Plan
"The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority." - security cooperation has long been part of the deal with the PA, nothing new about that.. it collapsed during the intifadas but otherwise has continued at various levels. It is also mentioned in the 2001 Tenet plan.. http://www.mideastweb.org/tenet.htm
"How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza." - huh? Were they not watching TV? Or looking out the window? It was not exactly a surprise. Anyway again it is public knowledge and a matter of record that there is security cooperation between israel and the PA.
It also suggests the pals were basically handing over all the land israel wanted except for a handful of settlements yet still the nasty israelis rejected it. Actually those few "settlements" included cities such as Ariel which has a University and 10,000 students, jewish and arab.. It's no surprise the israelis were not going to just abandon it.. they abandoned all of gaza already and that didnt exactly help the peace process. Of course some would say it shouldn't be there in the first place but anyway..
So that way you don't get anywhere ever.
The truth is if the Israelis were less civil they would have driven the Palestinians out by force a long time ago.
You mean like how the nazis did it with the Jews?
Fuck Israel and fuck you americans how support them. To bad the jews survived WW2, they now use it as a pretext todo the same to others (Palestinians). I look forward to Iran throwing the bomb. Nope Im not a muslim, Im a european atheist.
"The next time you want to go around proclaiming that the Jews are 'separate' / 'different' / 'special' or 'unusual', just remember some other f*cking lunatics that did the exact same thing."
Like, uh, those governing Israel?
From where I stand, it's all shades of black instead, not too much grey around.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Try replacing "Jews" with any group. Most social groups are incapable of seeing their own shortcomings.
I'm pretty sure emacs has a macro for that...
The Hitler excuse is starting to wear pretty thin. Some of my relatives died in the death camps (my mother's family were German Jews who left the country in the '30s, but not all of them got out in time), so I'm not exactly unbiased on this issue, but every time someone calls Israel to task for their behaviour the reply is always 'but... Hitler killed loads of Jews'. He also killed loads or homosexuals and gypsies, but these groups don't seem to get to use him as an excuse for behaving like asshats several generations later.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Though you gotta give them credit for impetus; a really well done, thorough job. Consider: while some local mythologies used largely also as a justification for atrocities are by no means an unusual phenomena, particularly during ages in question - theirs didn't stop there, it now forms the outwardly apparent core of faiths and "we're the best" morality for ... what, 2/3 of the world? Funnily enough, also among descendants of populations against which it was originally targeted :p
(and they didn't exactly have problems everywhere - of course there often was an unfortunate clash of cautious approach to assimilation vs. generally much more xenophobic times, but where the latter was true it didn't really bother itself much with the question if somebody was a Jew or some different "other"; some places were reasonably favorable to multiculturalism, for practical reasons)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I won't bother responding to your semi-racist blather, but:
Who's this Dickenson chappie?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Except that the leak is about the previous government...
I can't believe you were modded interesting (and not off-topic), but of course, it's /..
*Throws stapler*
Fuckwit.
Why is it so wrong and bigoted to see and accept differences in races? We are different, some for better some for worse - having our advantages and disadvantages. There is nothing frankly bigoted about seeing differences ... lighten up Francis! To deny the achievements of .3% of the human population because of your hypersensitivity and need for some dream-like "world order" of perfect racial balance is just naive.
rm -rf ms/*
Parent is racist garbage, I have no idea how it's modded insightful.
It was never palestinian land either. That area has been "owned" by the other larger tribes in the area, neither the Jews nor the Palestinians ever owned it except as the chattel of others.
Add to that most of "Palestine" is under Sudan and Sudan (and Jordan) treat the Palestinians no better than the Jews treat them and you have a lot of "so what" going on.
If the leaks are correct, though, here the Jews are being arseholes. That's nothing to do with what right either side has with the ground.
And now my question is - why it wasn't leaked by Assanage? I worry that Assanage might be not so honest as he is being protrait to be - he might have some agenda and leak only things people behind him want to leak. Its just these little things I base my judgments on but its exactly this kind of news I was expecting not to see on wikileaks.
A famous Englishman, he's the saviour of the fake tan industry. And he probably drives a carriage. Most people in England do.
Hamas is pissed off and is claiming this shows that the Palestinian authority is in bed with Israel. So what side was exactly willing to make more concessions? It would be like the democrats agreeing to do X knowing full well the republicans can and will block it anyway.
Diplomacy, it is a lot more complex then people think. There are rarely just two sides to deal with.
For instance, one of the simplest solutions to all this would be to build a wall around Israel and make the occupied bits the problem of the Arab nations on whose ground they are. Yeah, because Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon want that... NOT!
How many Palestinians want to have Israel become arab land BUT with Jewish wealth. We could relocate all the jews to a safe place. But then Israel would be the poor dustbowl it has always been. Not many Palestinians keen on that. Why do you think blockades that stop them going into Israel hurt their economy so much?
Diplomacy doesn't just deal with a dozen parties with different needs but parties that themselves have different and often conflicting needs and wants.
These leaks show very little of that. Because they are still the public musings of career diplomats who have made it their trade to hide the truth.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
He also killed loads or homosexuals and gypsies, but these groups don't seem to get to use him as an excuse for behaving like asshats several generations later.
Don't forget communists - entire towns worth of people killed because they dared to hold a different opinion.
If you read a little more closely, you might have noticed that "Hitler killed a lot of Jews" was in response to "Jews have had problems with their neighbors for 3700 years" -- it was challenging the strong element of one-sided blame in the latter.
If the critics of Israel being asshats spent a little more time criticizing Israel's neighbors when the neighbors were being asshats, instead of coming across as stereotypical haters (technically, anti-Semitism isn't quite accurate here), then perhaps both Israel and its neighbors would have a better sense of when their behavior was outrageous.
These 'leaks' are just the usual carefully crafted agitprop that we have come used to in the mainstream media. Anyone who wants to be informed about the details of the many power struggles in the Middle-East reads academic journals, follows the statements by the foreign ministries closely, and corresponds with the negotiators, which is surprisingly easy and informative. The fact that the mainstream media fails to inform the public well is caused by human inability to grasp the consequences of other societies (America, Europe, Middle-East) being different in structure. Both the inability of journalists as well as readers/watchers. The only real problem upholding an agreement between Israel and the Arab population in the former British mandate of Palestine are neighboring countries of which the leadership cannot tolerate a democratic flourishing Arab state, because it would undermine the stability of their own rule. We once had a semi democratic Arab state that did well, which was Lebanon. We all know how that was finished by rulers like al-Assad. Once the price of oil gets below $25 a barrel for a sustained period of time, countries like Iran will no longer be able to spend billions of dollars per year in destabilizing Gaza and the West Bank and other territories. It is horrible to see that the governments in Europe and the US fail to address their opponents in the Middle-East, while a few dictators find our weak spots consistently and exploit them to the fullest.
he doesnt have any 'leaning' whatsoever other than night clubs and playing music in them as dj.
Read radical news here
yeah, he sounds like a leftist alright. and how did you come up with that half assed conclusion ? pulled out of your butt ?
he doesnt have any leanings politically.
and heres avigdor liebermann for you.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963090&cid=34978892
Read radical news here
that's pretty much psychopath for me :
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963090&cid=34978892
Read radical news here
a noticeable amount of the previous government is in this government. livni was in the earlier coalition too.
Read radical news here
Even the first "proto Jews" weren't strictly monotheistic (the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament contains fragments of polytheism, eg. Psalm 82) which -- at least by today's standards -- would not qualify them as Jews...
Psalm 82:1, 5 and 6 are the main verses in question starting with
...and then with God quoted as saying...
82:1 God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgement among the 'gods':
82:5 The 'gods' know nothing, they understand nothing...
82:6 I said, 'You are "gods"; you are all sons of the Most High.'
There is debate on this verse over is who exactly is being referred to by 'You'. Is it a) Israel's rulers - normal people, b) angels, c) some other 'Gods'?
Psalm 82 is about chiding these sons of the Most High for being corrupt and not defending the oppressed. This in the greater context (ie all the Psalms / Prophets and the rest of scripture) would generally be construed to be the people of Israel and/or their rulers (as a reoccurring theme of their behaviour), the O.T. sometimes closely ties rulers/judges with the term God (check a literal translation of Ex 21:6, 22:8), and also note that Hebrew Scripture generally doesn't spend time chiding disaffected angelic beings through prose. (BTW on that last point note that I'm of the view that Isaiah's 'morning star' reference is prose directed to a pompous human king - not some angelic being named 'Lucifer' - whose claims of existence are probably owed more to the questionable King James translation (or lack of rather) of the latin term for 'morning star'.)
So while I see you prefaced your polytheistic claim with the word 'strictly', I think it might be a little pre-emptive to attempt to make a such a 'strict' claim based on a Psalm that is probably within context, referring to the rulers of Israel as 'gods' in a somewhat figurative (but not novel) sense, without further evidence to support the claim.
In any case this verse in no way sanctions 'worship' of these 'gods'.
In fact in Psalm 81 (by the same author Asaph), repeats the 1st commandment saying
81:9 You shall have no foreign god among you; you shall not worship any god other than me
So perhaps I should refine my comment a little. Judaism (particularly from Moses onwards - but also from Abraham) was about monotheistic worship, and the 'host of heaven' - angels, cherubs etc, were all created by God and not to be worshiped as such, despite there being among them (by human standards) powerful beings. I'm not aware that Judaism presents a clear definition of a what/who constitutes a (lower case) god, nor does it have clear presentation upon the make up of the host of heaven. Such information is not what the Hebrew Scriptures were about. So to argue a strict claim of polytheism depends on your definition of what constitutes a 'theos', and even then - I don't think the scriptures are concerned with attempting to answer the question as to what beings would qualify bar One.
Generally I expect that when people refer to Judaism as monotheistic, they tend to mean 'monotheistic worship', along with the worshiped God being the 'omni-everything' one.
If interested I used: Tyndale O.T. Commentaries Vol 16; TNIV; Youngs Literal Translation
If anybody knows the academic research behind this (without the politicking) that would be really useful.
Summary and citations.
So your first example of Jews "not living cooperatively" is when they objected to the Pharoah's slavery? Really?
(The main purpose of my post was obviously to debunk the AC who posted antisemitic claims. One can't accuse the Jews to be troublemakers for 3,700 years if there were no Jews for that long.)
The currently known scientific evidence points to the conclusion that monotheism developed gradually.
I'm abbreviating now because I don't want to get into a mile-long discussion that is only partially related to TFA:
Monotheism probably started in Egypt when at some point only one of their ancient gods was praised. That probably later transformed into the commandment that only one god must be praised (while not claiming that there are no other gods but just forbidding to pray to them). However, some early proto Jew sects also believed that YHWH had a goddess as wife (a branch of that later developed in to the gnostic "pantheon" belief with Sophia as higher goddess and an evil lower god, the demiurge, as the one described in the Old Testament).
The early orthodox movement then worked to purge any traces of polytheism and transformed the system to the belief that there is only one god.
Personally, I feel it's save to say that it's that point were actual Judaism begins.
Excellent post except this:
Russia and China have too much invested in Iran to let the US knock it over too... I think those two would hit the veto button on any military action against them
- what pray have Russia and China against the will of the USA?
USA can kick Russian and Chinese asses altogether while wiping the Iran off the map as well.
Nothing can stop USA, communist and islamist pig-dogs included
Given that there are more Muslims in the Israeli Parliament than there are in the US Congress
Statistics fail : Israel has a greater percentage of Muslim citizens than the U.S. (about 10 times more) i.e. you are comparing values without accounting for population demographics.
I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality
Do you really think that a system of government that includes state religious schools is more secular than the U.S., where the Constitution explicitly prohibits that kind of thing?
Pfft. Emacs users WOULD need a macro for a simple global replace...
Triple-jointed, twelve fingered barbarians, the lot of them.
Livni was in the previous coalition, she is now the head of the opposition.
when did that happen ?
Read radical news here
And now for the politically incorrect addendum : muslims agree with that too.
After all, islam states the following in it's "holy" text (this is part of sharia law) :
"Judgment Day will come only when the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind the tree and the stone, and the tree and the stone say: ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah , there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’"
Just so you know, judgement day is supposed to be good - the beginning of eternal heaven on earth - so this is a most desirable prospect. And while it may be a stretch to interpret this as saying that when muslims "complete the holocaust" (to quote the palestinian parliament), allah will create heaven on earth - that is exactly how sunni islam interprets this (according to the authorities on the subject - ie. al Azhar)
Do you agree with this ? Can one allow a religion that commands genocide ? What matters more ? Facts, as in written down history, or whatever one thinks currently adherents actually do ? (and how does one deal with "unwritten" religions, like, say, communism or various forms of atheism ? Or worse, how does one deal with "inevitable consequences" of things that, in and of themselves, don't seem all that objectionable ... e.g. the obvious link between "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and what this represents - slavery)
Except that Livni was the foreign minister in the previous government, and is currently in the opposition...
The whole art of negotiation is changing due to these leaks. You would think that a greater transparency would be a byproduct, but there is also the result of increased security and cloak and dagger type of behavior. Then you have leaks that were controlled to either provoke a response or pass on misinformation. All this leads to a level of complexity that surely will hamper any negotiation process. Until we get to a point where the politicians and diplomats can no longer hide anything, (good luck with that) I think these leaks just muddy up the process.
Except you have, at the very least, a chicken and the egg problem here.
Look at it from the Palestinian side for a moment. Do you think that, for example, colonial Americans were right to have a revolutionary war and win freedom from England? There's absolutely no question that Israel is treating Palestine a lot worse than England ever treated colonial America. How much does a nation need to oppress you before you're willing to do something about it?
Israel's in a shitty position, no question of that -- but a shitty position does not justify all wrongs.
Darling, I'm gay. I don't need an excuse to behave like an asshat.
(and, yes, I really am, so I'm allowed to make fun. nuh. *sticks out tongue*)
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Everyone is right in from their own viewpoint. Until people in the area try to understand each others viewpoint and just agree to disagree and move forward peacefully, there will continue to be violent conflict... This post sounds extremely ignorant of the complex conditions that exist in the region, but this it really comes down to this issue. Two theocracies will never get along.
The election were held in 10th Feb 2009, the current government was established in 31th of March. So, about 2 years ago.
Well... in the city you're correct - they all ride carriages and wear swell top hats. But they don't drive carriages when they're hunting foxes, and that's pretty much all they do when they're not working or living a live-action Jane Austen piece.
Oh, but surely that was just a difference of opinion. The Pharaoh wanted slaves, the Jews didn't want to be slaves. They could have compromised and sold HALF of their family into slavery, while the other half remained free. After all, it's not like being sold into slavery to the ancient Egyptians was a *bad* thing. But the Jews, they lacked the essential spirit of compromise, you see.
(/tongue firmly in cheek, before I have to come back and "woosh" someone.)
Being the victim of a crime does not give you the right to commit crimes.
Just in case you hadn't realised - the bible is full of shit and there's no evidence whatsoever that the jews were ever slaves in Egypt, spent 40 years wandering the Sinai, etc.
And I guess the Jews performing genocide on the Canaanites was somehow different from Hilter's genocide?
Samuel 15:2-3
"This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.' "
Israel has been moving to the right quite dramatically over the past decade or so, with every point of friction being exploited perfectly by nationalists like Netanyahu and Lieberman both to extend the conflict and build support for it within Israel. Left and right are always very fluid terms, but on the Palestinian issue Israelis have been adopting the views of it's right wing, with some polling now indicating that a majority of Israelis oppose a two-state solution.
As for Lieberman, he has repeatedly been the subject of corruption investigations by the Israeli police resulting in recommendations for indictment. His influence peddling, bribery, fraud, money laundering, and ties to shady Russian business organizations are all by now very well documented.
I feel this is an oversimplification. There are certainly elements in both societies that want peace. Then there are elements who want peace in the sense of getting rid of the other side by whatever means they deem appropriate. This isn't so much a results of forces conspiring to do anything as the result of significant stupidity and lack of effective leadership on both sides.
I can't read your post because your lack of capitalization makes me angry.
Seriously, what is it about some people that can't stand informality in an informal forum? You are really incapable of considering someone's opinion or facts simply because of the informal method they use to describe it? Should /. reject all submissions that have sentence fragments, poor punctuation or flawed grammar as well? I am simply sick of all the grammar spelling nazis whose only contribution to the conversation is to nitpick about the way someone else presented their ideas. Leave if it is that difficult to comprehend, or at least stfu about it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The western media is all biased in favour of Israel! Fortunately we are all so smart that we realised this, and that's why we all hate Israel so much.
/facepalm...
I think the day after judgment day is supposed to be good. The day itself, and those leading up to it, are supposed to suck.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
This. Exactly what I was getting at. Said it even better than I did.
I've studied I/P for a decade. I first saw it in shades of gray, but its become only starker the more I learned.
In terms of International Law wise its not complicated what should happen. You can't keep land you win in war and refugees have a right to return after the war. This is the law. If it were any other people, we'd all reconize the law...but Israel is rich/powerful and they tell us we arent going to concede to law so we find ways to bend the Palestenians to give up their rights.. .generations of people have lived and died in refugee camps...you think this would be tolerated if it was another group of people? Come on...thats the other thing..its only complicated because we refuse to see the Arabs as having the same rights as we'd give another group of people.
None of the great thinkers of the 20th century, from Ghandi, to Einstein, to Orwell and Russell saw I/P in shades of gray either. Its terms of morality, its was clear cut to them as well. A group of people used the shadow of British guns to go in an establish their own nation in someone elses land, using the Bible as a deed.
mondoweiss.net
[from what I can tell] ALL the U.S. media outlets skim over or completely ignore world issues (esp like what happened in Tunisia last week). This weekend, Wikileaks tweeted about the NYTimes being a shill for the US government (because NYT didn't ask pressing questions about Quantico treatment of prisoners), and my initial reaction was an eyeroll (there's a difference between incompetence and "shilling"), but I imagine that's how most of the world sees US press.
Problem w/ that is, Americans [voters] are being left somewhat unawares of how we're being represented and handling diplomatic issues (or even what the issues are!). We're being fed [alarmist] stories about the economy and politicians, celebrities, and other crap that the media outlets believe drive up ad revenues, but if we don't have some kind of real world news, so we can hold our reps accountable, the idea of representative democracy fails.
I have a higher opinion of Americans than the news outlets, and wish the mass media would toss in some mid-east stories throughout their "2012 will it be the end" reports. Not every viewer would be interested, sure, and I guess freedom of the press means the press doesn't have to report anything of real value, but the press OUGHT to feel it's somewhat their job to keep Americans informed of worldwide issues.
Bury their weapons and take an oath never to raise them again, except in self-defense.
See, there's a problem already even in the first sentence. Given how the Israelis are treating the Palestinians (choking off inflow of critical supplies, bombing civilian architecture such as power plants and claiming it's in "self-defense", retaliating against every attack by killing more civilians than the attack killed, et cetera) how is the Palestinian use of weapons not already in self-defense? It's a community using weapons to defend itself against outside aggression and violence. Even if the Palestinians do concede that what they're using weapons for now is not self-defense, how do you handle it when Israel acts aggressively again, and you and the Palestinians have a different definition of where the "self-defense" line lies?
Note that I don't take the Palestinian side in this. I think both sides need to make changes. But I see Palestine held to a literally impossible standard by Israel apologists, and I have a problem with that.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Oh please don't forget that gypsies, homosexuals, etc. were more of an ideological "by-catch". Though the Nazi ideology hit them, too, the main theme was "Kill the jews! And do it thoroughly!". That's kind of a difference.
I will start reading on the Al-Jazeera leaks soon enough, though I don't see the point in there. Why would Israel want to give up land to neighbors that are not of the "rational kind"? They were attacked first, their neighbors (official propaganda) are - plainly spoken - the closest to "nazi" you can get these days, and there's not much of a guarantee for Israel's security in what these failing states have to offer. Israel has to keep certain areas for strategic reasons alone, if they don't want to be run over.
That is, unless some of their neighbours develop a civic society that know more than just burning flags and keeping their neighborhoods "judenrein"!
The "peace process" is a joke unless not Israel, but their neighbors refrain from violence. Israel will have to do so the minute they are no longer threatened, because they ARE held accountable through public opinion. Their neighbors? They don't f****** care.
I believe the description is a bit biased.
On what basis does it claim the Palestinian side weak ?
In my humble opinion years of government sponsored terrorism has made them quite a guerrilla force.
The Palestinians would easily take down many European countries and Canada as well.
The Israelis have been fighting for 50 years so they aren't as easy that's all,
but the Palestinians aren't weak at all.
Note that I don't take the Palestinian side in this.
And there's your problem. You have trouble thinking of it except in terms of sides.
But I see Palestine held to a literally impossible standard
I don't think it's impossible. 99% of the countries on the earth live next to each other without trying to kill each other.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is why they say negotiating for your state while Israel is building settlments is like negotiating for a pizza pie while the other person is eating the pizza.
"The Palestinians affirmed their position that negotiations are based on UNSCR 242 and 338, while the Israelis continued to assert their claims to land within the 1967 line and stressed they are not "giving" anything back. The Israelis backtracked on swaps and would not discuss swaps unless Ma'ale Adumim, Givat ze'ev and Ariel are discussed."
The Israelis are making a mockery of justice and the Palestenians have no one with enough power to stand up for them. I hope the Boycott movement catches on and does what the governements of the world have not done.
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/israel-rejects-the-biggest-yerushalayim-while-palestinian-negotiators-plead-what-more-can-i-give.html#more-34124
Except you have, at the very least, a chicken and the egg problem here.
Indeed. It's not an easy situation.
There's absolutely no question that Israel is treating Palestine a lot worse than England ever treated colonial America.
True. And Israel treated the refugees much better than Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon did.
Israel's in a shitty position, no question of that -- but a shitty position does not justify all wrongs.
It doesn't justify anything. This isn't a moral argument I'm making here, it's practical. I'm saying Israel would be insane to give Palestine their freedom when so many Palestinians have the goal of destroying Israel. I'll go further and say that if an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank ends up like the withdrawal from the Gaza strip, then the Palestinians are better off with Israel in charge than Hamas. The Palestinians on the Gaza strip don't know how to take care of themselves.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As an Israeli I tell that there's a growing right wing majority in Israel.
Israelis have had enough of peace talks. Most Israelis think that Israel should exploits is military superiority to achieve it's political goals even if that means harming the Palstinian assperatiotion for independance.
A large majority of the social elite, media academe etc are left wing though. Meaning they are willing to give up land for the sake of peace and betterment of Palestinian lives.
You can't expect their occupied territories to just bend over.
I don't, I expect them to stop trying to kill their neighbors. Israel would be foolish to give freedom to a group of people who wants to kill them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice reassured Israel that the US military presence in Iraq should calm any Israeli security concerns "from the east," minutes from a 2008 trilateral meeting between Rice and the Israeli and Palestinian negotiation teams reveal.
Discussing the needs of Israel regarding Palestinian security forces in a future-Palestinian state, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed concern over a third-party military force protecting a Palestinian state's external borders. Secretary Rice inserted, "At this time there is no threat from the east because our forces are in Iraq and will stay there for a long time." Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat added, "For a very, very long time."
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=204986
Will this be on CNN? Fox? Will the leaders of our government respond this?
No. Cause thats the type of democracy/freedom we have...we only learn what our government is doing when government documents are leaked on the internet....
I'm saying Israel would be insane to give Palestine their freedom when so many Palestinians have the goal of destroying Israel.
And Palestinians would be insane to stop hating Israel as long as Israel is oppressing the shit out of them.
At some point, your choices either are genocide, or somebody has to be the bigger man -- and it has to be the somebody who has all the power.
I'll go further and say that if an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank ends up like the withdrawal from the Gaza strip, then the Palestinians are better off with Israel in charge than Hamas. The Palestinians on the Gaza strip don't know how to take care of themselves.
You might also ask why a Hamas is in power in Gaza in the first place. That doesn't happen in a vacuum either. Talking doesn't seem to be getting them anywhere with Israel, so people get frustrated and back violent solutions.
People in Gaza also might be able to take better care of themselves if they weren't severely blockaded.
It's strange to me that so frequently in history we see one country decide that some enemy group or country will crumble if hit hard enough or oppressed long enough, even though the first country believes it wouldn't give up under the same conditions. I mean, we have (in America) movies like Red Dawn that are fantasies about fighting an invading power at any cost, and yet we're somehow surprised when we invade an Afghanistan and the same thing happens to us? Similarly I bet if you polled Israelis about whether they'd give up if they were living under the shitty conditions in Gaza, nine out of ten of them would tell you it would only make them more stubborn about giving up -- and yet somehow they think what they're doing to Gaza will force a regime change rather than put ever more violent people into power? I don't get it.
There is a prophesy that it would NEVER be their land--citation please
You really can't compare the bronze age to what we have now. Iran may only be talking but I would be sure to find out for sure.
Oh please don't forget that gypsies, homosexuals, etc. were more of an ideological "by-catch". Though the Nazi ideology hit them, too, the main theme was "Kill the jews! And do it thoroughly!". That's kind of a difference.
Nope, not really a by-catch at all. Nazism had a particularly nasty, but otherwise fairly typical, eugenics-based ideology. All of the killings - of the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the disabled, etc - were aimed at one goal: purifying the population.
At some point, your choices either are genocide, or somebody has to be the bigger man
Or just as likely, they'll just keep doing what they're doing for the next 30 years.
and it has to be the somebody who has all the power.
Seems you have a plan for how Israel should do this. What is it? Should they sit around and just take it when the Palestinians lob missiles at them? Do you really believe that if Israel just left Palestine alone, the Palestinians would do the same?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Looks like al-jazeera has launched a portal for leaking documents...something called the "Al-jazeera transparency unit"
http://www.ajtransparency.com/
http://www.ajtransparency.com/how-submit
In order to protect the identity of the submitters they recommend
-encrypting files to be uploaded using PGP with their public key
-using the Tor network to protect the identity of the submitter....
-also the submission forms are ssl secured..
Well they certainly seemed to have covered their bases
Note that I don't take the Palestinian side in this.
And there's your problem. You have trouble thinking of it except in terms of sides.
You're right, I have the problem that I think of a conflict between two groups of people who are trying to kill each other in terms of the two sides. Never mind that I take a position which is obviously neither of the two; I used the word "side", so it must be impossible for me to think of it as a continuum!
But I see Palestine held to a literally impossible standard
I don't think it's impossible. 99% of the countries on the earth live next to each other without trying to kill each other.
That wasn't your standard. Your standard was never to raise weapons except in "self-defense", where the definition of "self-defense" is likely to be strategically re-defined as necessary to exclude whatever action Palestine takes and include whatever action Israel takes.
Also, your statistic is clearly false. There are 193 internationally-recognized sovereign countries in the world of which more than ten are currently involved in civil wars and more than forty have been experienced civil wars in the last 20 years, and many others involved in foreign wars. Even the United States found it tough to live on the opposite side of the world from Iraq without invading and killing Iraqis. And that's not even giving counting Europe's two world wars last century. So the true measure is probably closer to 50%. Yet you're somehow willing to hold the Palestinians to a more stringent standard than the rest of the world gets held to. Hmm.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
lol well you sure proved me wrong. Good job. If you ever want to stop attacking strawmen, let me know.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
lol well you sure proved me wrong. Good job. If you ever want to stop attacking strawmen, let me know.
How is what you literally said a strawman? You said "99% of the countries on earth live next to each other without trying to kill each other." I attacked that premise. If you didn't actually believe it, why did you say it to justify your position?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I heard that somewhere
If I remember right Hitler was elected at first.
There's not much to be an expert about. Arabs are stupid assholes and they'll sell each other out at the first opportunity. Jews are smart assholes and they'll sell anyone who isn't a Jew out at the first opportunity.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Israel is more than capable of defending itself. Pretending this is "self defence" is utterly ridiculous.
Do you really believe that if Israel just left Palestine alone, the Palestinians would do the same?
Maybe, maybe not.
What's certain is that if Israel keeps doing what it's doing, it's going to keep getting what it's been getting in the form of suicide bombers and rockets and what not.
I don't know if a workable two-state peaceful solution is possible; I do know that it's really the only way Israel can survive as a democratic-ish Jewish state, which it seems to want to do. Their other options are: genocide/ethnic cleansing, ceasing to be a Jewish state (if they have all the land, such as all of Jerusalem, they're essentially wanting to claim as part of Israel, they no longer have a Jewish majority), or ceasing to be at least nominally a democracy (and becoming an explicitly Apartheid state.)
I don't think any of those other options is ultimately good for Israel, and I don't think at this point the ruling/majority forces in Israeli politics are able to see or admit to it, so I think it falls to ally nations like America to tell Israel it can't have what it wants, because what it wants right now is not good for it. Just as you don't give a heroin addict more heroin even though it's what they really want (if you're a good friend to them), America shouldn't support Israeli policy that's ultimately going to be self-destructive to it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that the political will for that exists yet in America, either.
It was Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the pipe.
I will only comment on one other point. What exactly is wrong with the offer to transfer parts of Israeli territory with predominantly Arab population to the Palestinian Authority? Your "source" refers to "Israeli territory with Palestinian populations". If these people are Palestinians, then is it not reasonable for them to live in the Palestinian state? And if they absolutely must remain Israeli citizens, then why are the called "Palestinians"?
Here are some actual quotes from Lieberman's inaugural speech: http://www.danielpipes.org/6258/avigdor-liebermans-brilliant-debut Does not sound like a psycho to me. Sounds like someone who is actually seeing the reality of the situation.
Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons.
That's even worse than the original Israeli proposal (3 sections, Israeli army controls travel between them, external borders, ports and airspace, and can shut them at will).
Your "quotes" are from electronicintifada.com, hardly an unbiased source. Actual quotations, together with context would be much more helpful.
Don't be so lazy, go look for yourself. Every one of those was quite thoroughly covered by mainstream media within Israel at the time. For example, try searching the Haaretz website.
The point is that in his capacity as the foreign minister Lieberman has been making statements that make sense, even though his manners can use a lot of work. http://www.danielpipes.org/6258/avigdor-liebermans-brilliant-debut
[citation needed]
yes
Read radical news here
That's not the only result... Suicide bombing and deadly terror attacks emanating from the West Bank have dropped dramatically since the wall went up. The wall is not a long term solution...but it certainly helps to reduce violence in the near term.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
So, where's the evidence? :)
A single state solution is what Lebanon has. It didn't work out very well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War).
-- Support a free market in the field of government
The problem is that most of the "Jews" that ended up in Israel after WW2 would best be termed "carpet baggers". Most of them were from other well-to do places. It was founded as a "fairy tale" religious state... like if Pat Robertson and Dick Cheney had their own country. I think part of why Americans are starting to find it so vulgar is that it mirrors what the Americans did to the Indians not that long ago... and they're starting to realize it was a mistake.
From a purely "biblical" point of view, the land being squabbled over is the same land Israel failed to take back in the time of King David and the Philistines. There is a prophesy that it would NEVER be their land... and 4000 years later it's still the case. They are trying to take land their OWN religious text says they won't ever get.... They're trying to starve them out, to cheat on their peace treaties, etc, etc. when 60 years ago those people were just "folks" of the land. In ANY western country (like Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, etc) we'd call out Israel for "Ethnic Purges" which is exactly what they're doing. It's high time they stop getting a free pass to randomly execute residents of their country... we overthrew Saddam for the same kind of crap.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about. All you wrote doesn't make even the tiniest sense. On the other hand, since when an outright propaganda should make any sense or be based on any facts?
For the record I absolutely agree with ethos re opposing antisemitism.
And I understand if you dont want to continue the discussion. Having said that...
Do you have any evidence for this 'orthodox revisionist' movement? Because I'm struggling to see how it worked. Such a movement would have spawned a culture of scriptural revisionism - and as far as I'm aware - the Jews were far from revisionist. Even their duplicating practices (of scripture) were extremely strict - to the point of implementing a rudimentary 'checksum' to ensure the scribes copied the scriptures correctly. And there is also quite a bit of obscure scripture/theology that a revisionist would naturally want to 'clarify'. The fact there is obscure text and errors to some extent, points to the authenticity rather than away from it.
Then there is the content of the scriptures which itself argues against a revisionist practice. The O.T. *really* does not paint a good picture of the Jews - any of them. Even Moses and David have their (sometimes dire) failings recorded. Even starting from as early as the leaving of Egypt - the hewbrews immediately start worshipping other gods. If you wanted to enshrine monotheism in your fictional national foundations document - you'd want the evidence for a singular powerful God to be convincing - not have the people turn back to those weak Egyptian gods as soon as Moses' back was turned!.
And then there are external documents such as the Mishnah which recorded debate and rulings based on the Torah. This document would be a natural first port of call for (later) revisionism - in that it leaves the original untouched. I would expect to see some evidence of either revisionism there - or even references of the transformation from revisionism to non-revisionism.
Try replacing "Jews" with any group. Most social groups are incapable of seeing their own shortcomings.
Slashdot readers. Definitely.
(And yes, I include myself in that.)
The Hebrew Bible as complete book is relatively new. The some of canonization even took place at the same time as the canonization of the New Testament. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Jewish_Bible_canon and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon
Before the canonization (and then unaltered copying) texts were likely in some cases heavily modified: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis
When I was talking about polytheistic proto Jews, I meant the time before the canonization. Strong monotheism was likely developed during the Babylonian captivity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism#Hebrew_Bible
That development was likely a measure to counter the growing cult about YHWH heaving a wife (Asherah): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah#In_Israel_and_Judah
(I don't originally have my info from Wikipedia but I honestly cannot recall where I got it from -- some mixture of books, articles, and TV documentaries. So I did quick searches on Wikipedia to get at least a few links.)
When you say that Muslims (in general) agree then it's the same racist bullshit as the other AC's antisemitic claim that Jews are troublemakers since 3,700 years.
The nutjobs of a religion are not representative of the whole religious community.
Pardon for posting AC in a controversial topic -- I lost my account a decade ago.
There were lots of ruckus regarding the peace talks within the leaked embassy cables, if you happened to read them.
The major pet-peeve was with Egypt being the arbiter between the players; an incompetent arbiter while at that. This notion was repeated several times by different diplomats and politicians, whom claimed in unison that the continuous Israeli conflict was most notable destabilizing force within the Middle East. Suggestions were made regarding potential alternatives whom could actually get the process moving. However these complaints have been largely ignored.
Now, going all conspiracy theorist here..
But at the End of the Six Day War, Israel (with United States diplomatic "assistance") made a pact with Egypt. Egypt avoided the complete slaughter of their cornered army divisions, and Israel got something in return.
This event is a major turning point in Egyptian foreign politics. I claim it has a major effect to the situation at hand. Is this unthinkable?
Ps.
Whomever claims the situation is nothing but shades of grey, with both sides standing on equal footing -- wake up. Even a ten year old could tell its not quite like that when presented with undisputable facts (such as treaties, events, maps, numbers -- irrefutable evidence). Propaganda is a strong tool, blessed are those not corrupted by it.
I have to call you out on your reference to Pslam 82. This is not in fact at all a reference to polytheism any more than the use of multiple names of God in the Hebrew texts are. Please be aware that this type of theory comes from Christian athorities who wish to "prove" that they, not the Jews, had the one and only contract with God. Rather than trust Wikipedia on this, please consult with your local Orthodox Rabbi, he will most likely be more than happy to explain this matter.
Wow, just wow. Did you copypasta this from stormfront or come up with it all on your own?
I took some time to read up and that's exactly what's going on though. Over half of of the Prime Ministers weren't even born in Israel. Waves of Jews immigrated, sometimes illegally, and they did it with an agenda dating back to at least the 1920's long before "Palestinians" had any say in the matter. It's much like how the USA handled native peoples, signing treaty after treaty, then sending in the next wave of settlers illegally anyway.... According to Wikipedia, during the independence wars Jews displaced 750k Palestinians... and IMMIGRATED 700k NEW JEWS from other parts of the world in the next 20 years while not letting the displaced people return to their homes or property.
I'm not racist, I think the Jews should be in that spot of the world... but historical fact is just getting worse and worse the more I educate myself. Like I keep saying.. spoiled children.. most of the world has no problem.. but the Jews can't seem to treat their OWN NEIGHBORS with any kind of dignity when they have the upper hand. These aren't the "native" Jews.. they're returnees from the Europe and America that expect to be at the top of the food chain with no "natives" to share with.
As a side note, this effect is also what's wrong with Arizona right now also. it's full of upper middle class folks that cashed out their pensions for "midwest suburbs" built for "trailer park" prices... (on top of socialist cheap water and power too) and now that money is getting tight, they're starting to realize they moved to "Mexico-lite" not to "mini-Vagas".
This is the same "science" that talks about how the Ashkenazi are really Khazars.
Citations provided by myself and others in the follow up posts of the discussion - numerous citations in fact.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What's certain is that if Israel keeps doing what it's doing, it's going to keep getting what it's been getting in the form of suicide bombers and rockets and what not.
What is also certain is that if Palestine keeps doing what they are doing, sending suicide bombers and rockets, it will end up worse than them than for Israel. The best option for them is to decide to live in peace. In fact it may be the only thing that can be done.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm sorry you have trouble seeing other viewpoints than your own. Lack of empathy is a serious disability.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Do you seriously think "not trying to destroy your neighbor" is too high a standard to hold anyone to? Please. Get serious.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How does the conditions of the Charedi refute c6gunner's point?
At one time the USSR was more than happy to arm its Arab proxy client states and their Arab non state actor proxies. We all know how well that worked out. Also as far as "barely enough food to eat": first that is propagandist non fact, secondly, how would arming people give them more food?
Humans started writing 5000 years ago.
http://goo.gl/eSqS
Hence no religion is older than 5000 years.
Govt must constitute a panel to rewrite US Constitution and Quran
Evidently you use a different definition of "accurate" than others.
My grandad died in a concentration camp. He fell of his guard tower :(
Do you seriously think "not trying to destroy your neighbor" is too high a standard to hold anyone to? Please. Get serious.
No. That wasn't your standard. Your standard was that they bury their weapons and not use them again except when it meets your arbitrary definition of "self-defense". I think that is too high a standard, and I don't know any country in the world that would meet it. Would Israel meet that standard that you conspicuously don't hold them too? Let's see...Israel has been conducting massacres (yes, documented and proven military operations killing thousands of proven-unarmed civilians) for several decades now. So no. You only hold Palestine to your one-sided standard. Let me know when you've decided to expect Israel to make a "credible commitment to peace". Also, let me know when you're tired of attacking straw men.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
My standard was 'Make a credible commitment to peace.' Burying their weapons was one way they could accomplish it.
You suggest that I hold Israel to the standard of "make a credible commitment to peace" as well. That is fine, but it wouldn't really solve anything because it is not what the Palestinians want.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Middle East peace" will be an oxymoron until radical Islamic Jihadists are exterminated. At the rate they're blowing themselves up, hopefully it will be sooner than later.
Whoa. That is a pretty big write off ... "There is not a single piece of archeological evidence" ?
There are a number of pieces of evidence. http://considertheevidence.wordpress.com/
I realize the nature of archaeological evidence is that it has to be contextualized and analyzed in light of all other evidence. But what you have just done is a pretty dramatic brush off of all the stuff that does exist.
I appreciate that you have your own opinion and you are obviously very passionate about your beliefs. Take care that the passion doesn't lead you to blindness by ignoring things that are really there.
What is also certain is that if Palestine keeps doing what they are doing, sending suicide bombers and rockets, it will end up worse than them than for Israel. The best option for them is to decide to live in peace. In fact it may be the only thing that can be done.
The problem is that the country of Israel can decide it's not going to be South Africa for the new millenium, but that even, say, Hamas can't decide that no one in the Gaza Strip is going to get sick of being treated like shit and do something violent.
The problem is that the country of Israel can decide it's not going to be South Africa for the new millenium,
You are trying to use a propaganda technique by framing Israel as 'the South Africa for the new millenium.' There is a huge difference between Israel and South Africa, in that apartheid was based entirely on race. The isolation of the Palestinians is not based on race (for either side: the Palestinians were ejected from Jordan, for example, after trying to overthrow the government there).
It is true Israel has most of the power in the situation, which is why we feel sorry for Palestine. Using that power to resolve the situation is not easy, though. They aren't going to leave a hostile Palestinian country free to do as it wishes.
Hamas can't decide that no one in the Gaza Strip is going to get sick of being treated like shit and do something violent.
Nor do they desire to do that. Exactly opposite, actually.
PS. This new Slashdot layout is awful.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You suggest that I hold Israel to the standard of "make a credible commitment to peace" as well. That is fine, but it wouldn't really solve anything because it is not what the Palestinians want.
Well, all the Palestinians I know want that. Maybe if we hold both sides to that standard, it will happen. As it is, Israel has never been held to that standard, at least by the US, which sycophantically supports every move Israel makes. It doesn't really matter how many other countries criticize Israel as long as their closest ally is the world's only military superpower; they can do whatever they want.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Well, all the Palestinians I know want that.
I think I see one of your problems. Try to get a better source of information than your circle of friends and acquaintances.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Slight problem with your comparison: Israels neighbors aren't given BILLIONS in military and economic aid from the U.S. each and every year. Israel's neighbors don't have their atrocities automatically shielded with a Security Council veto pen, each and every year. Israel's neighbors are either invaded or threatened with military strikes for even a hint of wanting nuclear weapons while it's an open secret that Israel is in the possession of at least 200 nuclear warheads.
Feel free to pull your head out of your ass at any time. Israel has at least 200 nuclear warheads. Hamas has gunpowder rockets with no guidance systems that even the IDF admits are more of a psychological threat than a military one. Israel receives billions in military aid from the U.S. each and every year for the latest and greatest toys. The people in Gaza are blocked from having so much as concrete or wheelchairs.
Well, all the Palestinians I know want that.
I think I see one of your problems. Try to get a better source of information than your circle of friends and acquaintances.
I'll work on that. Meanwhile, you might try to get a better source of information than your own feeling of hatred for an entire nationality.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I don't hate anyone. Not sure why you would think that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not sure what your point is. But you have accurately characterized the power differential between Israel and Palestine. No one doubts that Israel would win if they tried an all-out fight.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't hate anyone. Not sure why you would think that.
Well, some of us are calling for Israel and Palestine to both lay down their arms. You, on the other hand, are calling for Palestinians to unilaterally lay down their arms and allow themselves to be gradually wiped out. You claim that peace "is not what the Palestinians want," which is one of the most bigoted generalizations I have ever seen. You might as well say that there's a race gap in America because success is not what blacks want, or that rape occurs because it's what women want. So maybe 'hate' is too strong a word, and maybe 'utter disrespect' or 'irrational distrust' would be a better fit.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I didn't call on Palestine to lay down their arms. I called on them to make a credible commitment to peace. If they want to do that by laying down their arms, that is fine. If they want to do it some other way, that is fine with me too. If they want to start, they can desist from making this kind of cartoon. (uh, if that link doesn't work, you might have to copy and paste it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/03/jon-stewart-takes-aim-at_n_447296.html )
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There are a number of pieces of evidence. http://considertheevidence.wordpress.com/
Yeah, because some random religious blog certainly contains facts...
Next thing you try to convince me is that the already disproved "intelligent design" hypothesis is fact and that evolution is not the best tested scientific theory of all (in fact evolution is actually understood while gravity is not and no religious nutjob actually tries to convince everyone that "intelligent falling" is the true attractive force of planetary bodies....)
Just be happy that I counter antisemitic rantings and spare me of your religious hokum.
I the unlikely case that there is an actual god, he can punish me after death and deny me the eternal life promised in the bible for my non-religious strong stance against antisemitism and other forms of racism...