Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It only seems like a new game because we've grown accustomed to the non-critical, non-investigative journalism that's handed to us on the nightly news. The news should be surprising to most people since we're mostly not experts in Middle-East relations, but astute readers of Foreign Policy, The Economist, AJ, or even La Presse should find very little new except for the details of individual human speech and interactions (the same can be said of any close transcript of almost any meeting or discussion).
However, that's not to say that leaked details aren't valuable to somebody. If we were smart about this, we'd ask under what circumstances it's acceptable for professionals in general (who are also accountable to the public) to provide contrasting or conflicting private and public accounts of their professional activities as experts.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
And where did you leave new jersey motherfucker!!??
We tried to leave it in Antartica, but the penguins sent it back.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Oh come on. A good chunk of the US still seems to practically define itself through resentment at the North over the civil war. Forget what Dunbal said about WWI and WWII, lots of Americans seem to be holding a grudge over colonial times and the War of Independence. They also seem to carry a massive grudge against the French for no reason I can figure out.
You go ahead and forge 1,600 documents involving hundreds or thousands of players that intermingles hundreds of verifiable meetings and facts with your fake counter-intelligence. Good luck with that.
The only chance of actually pulling off something like that would be if you actually got your hands on 1,600 real leaked documents and carefully wove a thread of fake edits throughout it. Oh, and hope nobody ELSE can get the same leak of 1,600 documents that contradict yours.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
You mean like the Arabs that lost the west bank and gaza during the six day war and the yom kippur war did?
So we set the marker in the ground only where _YOU_ think we should start over?
It would be difficult to forge those 1,600 documents.
A much easier propaganda use is to go over the documents you do have, and decide selectively which ones to leak - the ones that make your side look good, and the other side look bad.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Pretty close to it, yes. Courts in Israel are civil courts, not based on Jewish religious law. Legislation is passed by a civil legislative body, not a religious one. Religions are considered equal before the law. There is no official state religion, and there is freedom of religion and of worship.
There is one weirdness, which is marriage. There is no "civil" marriage in Israel; there are only religious marriage under the auspices of the various religions practiced by the people being married. This can cause problems for non-Orthodox Jews, for interfaith marriages, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel has details.
Also note that in Israel being Jewish is not necessarily a religious matter; it's an ethnic matter. You can be an atheist and still be considered Jewish ethnically.
This can matter for things like military service, where ethnic minorities are generally exempt from the draft (though accepted as volunteers).
In any case, I suppose it depends on your definition of "separation of religion and state". It's not exactly a black-and-white line; there are gradations. Would you say that religion and state are separated in Germany, say?
The solution is to arm both sides equally. I'm sure negotiations would be much more productive if the Palestinians had helicopter gunships, tanks, jet fighters, and billions in military aid every year instead of barely enough food to eat. It would also stop the suicide bombing, since they would be able to target what they really want to hurt: the IDF.
What a first week
An eclectic mix of superstar guests this week talked with Piers Morgan about love, war and everything in between.
Stern: I don't like Jay Leno Video
Rice: Be ready for 3 a.m. call Video
Oprah: I'm never getting married"
Al-Jazeera, who may be biased and ignore pop culture B.S. on the front page; or CNN and FoxNews who give priority to celebrity diversion. I can't take credit for pointing that out, that comparison was brought to light in 4chan's /b/ years ago...and it still hasn't changed.
Harumph, idiot America.
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.)
The "peace" process has been Israel and the U.S. telling the people of Palestine to, essentially, "relax and enjoy it". No, the Palestinians are not interested in that, but over and over their leadership has shown an interest in sincerely working for peace. It's not surprising that they cannot find a reliable partner for peace and justice in Israel, any more than the Native Americans nations have ever been able to find a reliable partner for peace and justice with the U.S. government.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I don't get this "because it's al-jazeera, it must be biased".
Two things:
1. Al-Jazeera, if you remove your yellow glasses, is actually a very high caliber new organization, unlike most of anything you find in the US. Of course, they belong to a different country, different culture and difference environment, and may not speak your language so to speak, but that does not mean they are not good. Do some research for once for fuck sake. To help you, start with the excellent documentary "Control Room". And don't even try to compare it with CNN.
2. Even if one assumes AJ is bias, if the document they release prove to be correct, how does that take away the truth in any form?
Even wikileaks leaves itself wide open to astroturfing with manufactured 'leaks' to suit someone's agenda. It doesn't even have to go that far if someone somewhere is deciding what to leak and what to bury.
Wikileaks do their best to verify the leaks before publishing them. IIRC, they sent some people to Iraq to confirm the authenticity of the leaked video, before publishing "Collateral Murder", for example. While it's possible that they will make a mistake sooner or later, I don't think that what you're describing is so easy.
He didn't say Al-jazeera stood alone. What he's trying to convey is that they make Fox News looks like men of honor.
Which is only true if you take "Muslims are dishonest" or something similar as one of your premises. For all the talk about "fibs" and "lies" on al Jazeera, they are measurably more accurate and less biased than Fox News. It's just that they're biased in a direction that is politically incorrect in present American society, whereas Fox News is biased in a direction that's politically correct (again, within American society) so they usually get a pass.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
, 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.
vi users? *Ducks*
"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 *
You know what the saddest thing about the whole Middle-East crisis is ? The people fighting are the same people on both sides.
Genetic research has shown that the Palestinians and the Israeli's are the SAME people. More specifically the Palestinians are the descendants of the so-called "ten lost tribes" - it's not even conjecture, it's basic proven science. In the years since the diaspora (and the classic story about why that happened is simply not true: the Romans never displaced any culture, so to think they did it in Israel is silly).
Here's what science says happened: A lot of Jews left Israel during the Roman occupation, settling around Europe in two major groups. The Azkanazi in Eastern Europe and the Sephardi in Spain. These two groups were the two not-lost tribes. What happened to the other ten ? They were not scattered and dispersed or lost, that legend is false. They stayed right there where they were, over time they converted to Islam.
When the other two tribes started coming back they found a largely Arab culture with an Islamic religion living in the area and claiming it as their homeland.
They could not believe that these Muslim Palestinians were fellow Jews (especially since it didn't fit their legends that all the tribes left), and the Palestinians would never have thought that their ancestors were Jewish Israelites.
But the scientific evidence is extremely strong - they share a very direct common ancestry and were one people just about 1700 years ago (in other words, almost exactly when the diaspora started).
An inevitable war between brothers, over a homeland that historically belongs as much to one as the other... and they still can't figure out a way to get along. Now that is human nature at it's worst, in a nutshell.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Exactly as SeanAdams says, if the Isreali side have a counter-leak let us have it. Its total bs to say because it's an AJ leak its invalid and that neither side want peace. The leak shows a flexibility towards peace that we were never made aware of, that the PA are at least willing to make even bigger concessions and the Isrealis just throw it back in their face with a 'thanks but no-thanks attitude. THAT is the news, and as I said if there is an Isreali released and independently verified counter-leak let's see it!
And to compare this to two children and a toy - well I'd like to spend 5 minutes with you in a boxing ring. You can be blindfolded, no shoes, and with both arms tied behind your back ... then give me a baseball bat and maybe a nice selection of body armor to make sure I don't hurt myself too bad. The way the Isreali army has been using the Palestinians like the center stage attraction at a Mexican birthday party makes me disgusted ... and you call these two opposing forces 'children' -- wtf, open your eyes. At best its a college freshman going to the local kindergarten and kicking around some kids.
rm -rf ms/*
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.
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
It should also be pointed out that Al Jazeera did the same thing here, doing their best to validate that these were authentic. While they've been demonized in the US mainstream press (largely for not parroting the US view of the Israel-Palestine Conflict), they're the equivalent of CNN or the BBC in the Middle East. Is it 100% credibility? Heck no. But it's a good 95+% credible.
I am officially gone from
Wars can be won, and enemies can be stamped out.
Tell that to the dead and consider the cost to the "victor". Wars can have first and second losers, and that's all.
England and it's allies "won" WWII... at the cost of British economic supremacy. The United States "won" WWII... at the cost of discarding forever its tradiational isolationist policies, putting it on a slippery slope to empire that is still costing American lives today, to say nothing of progressively bankrupting the American state.
Anyone who thinks wars can be "won" hasn't been paying attention to anything but military-industrial propoganda.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.