Right, so according to you the years 637 AD - 1948 AD are a myth and Muslims never lived in modern day Israel. Haifa, Beersheba, etc. just
conveniently popped out of the ground when Israeli settlers began streaming in. You can live in your fantasy world if you like, but please stop spewing this mentally deficient rhetoric all over this site.
The Koran and the hadiths brim over with hatred for the jews.
Let's see what the Bible has to say about the Jews:
For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake. Titus 1:10-11
Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee. Revelation 3:9
Looks like early Christians weren't to happy about Jews that refused to convert either. Does this mean that the US, France, and UK hate Israel? No, in fact, they supply Israel's armies with state-of-the-art weaponry. While I won't deny that antisemitism is rampant in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, it is not because of what is stated in the Koran. It is because many Muslims were booted from their lands by Jewish settlers in the first half of the 20th century. This doesn't mean that invading the country in 1948 was an appropriate response, or that shooting rockets into Israel now is an appropriate response, but suggesting that the conflict is a result of Islam is xenophobic. And false.
This is what every arab country would do to Israel given the opportunity.
[citation needed] This is 2014, not 1960. After being thoroughly thrashed by Israel in several wars, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, etc. have learned that it is more beneficial for them to cooperate with Israel than to work against it. Why do you think the Muslim Brotherhood government was booted out by General Al-Sisi? Part of the reason was their Islamist rhetoric and fears about what it could lead to. Egypt doesn't want to lose another war with Israel. Instead, it wants to increase trade with Israel so that some Israeli wealth might trickle across the border.
Gaza is such a small area that the Israelis could just grid it out and make it into an artillery exercise
They could. But they could have also allowed the residents of Gaza to evacuate into Egypt before the bombardment. Sure, many Hamas operatives would have slipped into Egypt as well and escaped the carnage, but the states objective of IDF forces is to destroy Hamas's tunnel network and infrastructure. They could do that even if every Hamas operative had evacuated the city. In fact, it would have been much easier for the IDF to destroy the infrastructure if the city was nearly empty. But instead Israel decided to blockade the entire city and attack it while it is full of civilians. Already nearly a thousand civilians are death. So maybe Israel isn't as bad as Sudan and Syria, which would be okay with leveling entire cities, but they are not innocent. It is clear that the Gaza action is 50% about wounding Hamas and 50% about extractive revenge on the Palestinians as a whole for the murder of those three teenagers.
Westerners scrutinize Israel more because they have more ties with Israel. It feels closer and more tangible. I have never met a single Syrian or Sudanese person in my life. I have met many Israeli people. I have had Israeli classmates and collaborated with Israelis on research projects. My university has tens of millions of dollars of it's endowment invested in Israeli corporations. Many major US corporations have significant amounts of staff in Israel and their are plenty of people making business trips in both directions. Nearly every American knows the names Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but how many Americans can name the largest city in the West Bank?
Let me put it to you another way. One day you hear that your next door neighbor embezzled thousands of dollars out of his workplace. The next day you read in the news about some guy on the opposite side of the country who scammed not just thousands, but millions out of his employer. Which story are you more interested in? The one with your neighbor, of course, because it feels much more tangible. It's not just words on a piece of paper.
And if you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Israelis are Jewish
It doesn't. I'll admit that antisemitism is a factor in why many Arabs are so critical of Israel. But for Westerners, the number of Jews in Israel is a point that works in Israel's favor. Most Israelis are white, are fine with drinking a couple of beers from time to time, and are fine swimsuit models on magazine covers. Most Palestinian Arabs aren't any of these things. Their culture and beliefs are alien to the West and Westerners have trouble seeing things from their point of view. While Western antisemitism exists, Westerners are much more comfortable with Judaism than Islam because Jews have been living in the West for thousands of years while Muslims have only been living in the West for a matter of decades. In other words, Islamophobia is more prevalent in antisemitism in the West, so your theory that negative opinions of Israel are the result of antisemitism doesn't hold water. (At least when applied to the West.)
On the contrary, the only reason that public opinion in the West hasn't already swung completely against Israel is the fact that they are mostly white Jews and not brown Muslims. If it were not for this fact, the majority of Westerners would be in agreement that Israel is an apartheid state.
There is a big difference between doing one or two years of compulsory military service (which happens to a lot of people in a lot of countries) and serving as a general or a defense minister.
List A: The actual past five presidents
Barack Obama (no military history whatsoever), George W. Bush (reservist who never saw combat), Bill Clinton (no military history whatsoever), George H.W. Bush (draftee, director of CIA), Ronald Reagan (served in the army 1st Motion Picture Unit and never saw combat).
Wow, three out of five were military men. But if you look more closely, none of them are "military men." When George W. Bush was running for president, did people call him "Lt. Bush"? No, he was known as the son of an oil tycoon and the Governor of Texas. Similarly, Ronald Reagan was known an actor, not "Cpt. Reagan, commander 1st Motion Picture Unit, Army Air Corps." (Yet people called Eisenhower "General Eisenhower" up until the day he died.) The only person on this list with a significant amount of pre-presidential involvement with the defense establishment is Bush Sr, since he was a director of the CIA. So only 1 of 5 people on this list are "military men" even though 3 of 5 served in the army.
List A: Hypothetical alternative sequence of out past five presidents
David Petraeus (general, director of the CIA), Stanley McChrystal (general), Norman Schwarzkopf (general), Donald Rumsfeld (secretary of defense, served in the Navy and naval reserve for over 30 years), and Leon Panetta (director of the CIA and secretary of defense, served in Vietnam).
The people on this list are all people who are defined by their experience in the military. Donald Rumsfeld is known as "Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense." He was also a member of the House of Representatives, a highly successful businessman, ambassador to NATO, and Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford. But no one remembers him for those things. Similarly, Petraeus is "General Petraeus", not Petraeus, the guy who earned a doctorate in international relations from Princeton. The people on this list have so much defense establishment experience that they make Bush Sr. look green. 5 of 5 on this list are military men. If these people were actually our last five presidents, people all over the world would agree that the defense establishment and the US government were blending into one.
List C: Past five Israeli PMs
Netanyahu (former IDF commando), Ehud Olmert (did two or three years compulsory military service), Ehud Barak (former chief of staff of the IDF), Shimon Peres (former defense minister), Ariel Sharon (former IDF general, former minister of defense), Yitzhak Rabin (former chief of staff of the IDF), Yitzhak Shamir (former Mossad agent).
4 of 5 on this list are military men. The exception is Ehud Olmert, who did not volunteer for military service and only served for a few years. He is the George W Bush of this list. So List C looks a lot more similar to List B than to List A, wouldn't you agree?
Why is it that West Bankers have to take one of three "Safe Passages" through Israel to get to Gaza while Israeli citizens can wander the West Bank as they please? Why is it that Israelis are allowed to build settlements in the West Bank while West Bankers are not allowed to build settlements in Israel? Why is it that any Jewish person automatically gets Israeli citizenship (thanks to the "Law of Return") while Arabs have to go through a years long process? What about the "Citizenship and Entry into Israel" law which specifically targets Arabs with Israeli spouses and prevents them from entering Israel to visit their spouses? Are these all strategies for protecting Israelis from the fanatics? All of these restrictions were levied against the West Bank, which the last time I checked, was not the group firing rockets at Israel.
This is how I read your post:
Blah, blah, blah Israel got invaded in 1948 and this gives us the right to claim victim status 70 years later even while we kill over 600 Palestinian civilians in retaliation for three Israeli deaths.
The only PM in the past 40 years who didn't have significant connections to the Israeli defense establishment was Ehud Olmert. (He didn't do anything significant beyond the compulsory military service.)
out of your quote so that it looked like I hadn't already noted the mandatory military service.
If you reread that snippet, you'll see that I said that Ehud Olmert was the only one who limited himself to the mandatory military service. Everyone else on that list was a volunteer and had much deeper ties with the military, serving 10+ years in the military/defense ministry/intelligence agency. The average Israeli does not have anywhere near that much military experience.
Yeah, that's right. Half-facts are a favorite of the apologists. Compare the death count for a three-year conflict with that of a two-week conflict. Makes plenty of since. And while you're at it, completely ignore the two intifadas where thousands of Palestinians were killed.
If you are going to compare casualties inflicted by the IDF with casualties inflicted by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e. wars fought against foreign forces), then you also have to include the 1948 war, the reprisals, the Six-Day War, the Yom-Kippur War, and four invasions of Lebanon, among other conflicts. When you tally up the death tolls, I trust you'll find them to be quite similar. If you are only going to count killings perpetrated by the military against people living within it's own borders, you'll find the numbers to be much clearer. US: zero. IDF: several thousand.
If ever there was a state that was consumed by the military-industrial complex, it was Israel.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, Israel spends 1.5x as much as the US. 2% of Israel's population is active military. If you include reservists, that goes up to 9%. Compare this to 0.2% and 0.4%, respectively, for the US.
Israel is a country that is largely lead by war heros from the 60s and 70s and their acolytes. Let's look at the recent PMs of Israel: Netanyahu (former IDF commando), Ehud Barak (former chief of staff of the IDF), Shimon Peres (former defense minister), Ariel Sharon (former IDF general, former minister of defense), Yitzhak Rabin (former chief of staff of the IDF), Yitzhak Shamir (former Mossad agent). The only PM in the past 40 years who didn't have significant connections to the Israeli defense establishment was Ehud Olmert. (He didn't do anything significant beyond the compulsory military service.) If you look at the financial ties between Israeli government officials and major defense companies, things get even more mixed up.
The fact is that ever since the Camp David Accords and the agreement with Sadat, Israel was never again in danger of being wiped off the map. Sure, there were sporadic threats from groups like Hezbollah, but in these conflicts, Israel was always orders of magnitude more powerful than it's opponent. The Israeli government should have begun massively downsizing it's military, but it did not.
When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When you have a huge military, every problem begins to look like one that should be solved by force. When you're country is led by dozens of ex-military and next to no one that was, say, ex-foreign ministry, macho man diplomacy becomes the rule. When you have a former commando negotiating prisoner swap with Palestinians rather than a former diplomat, you end up with commandos going in and rearresting the released prisoners. This incident is just once symptom of a larger problem. The Israeli government hasn't just fallen victim to the pressures of the military-industrial complex; it is the military-industrial complex.
Sure, these edits were mostly harmless, but @CongressEdits is still a great idea because it dissuades politicians from ordering their staff to make edits that could be misleading. I, for one, would love to see an @HeartlandInstituteEdits.
Maybe he is not a reporter but this guy [nydailynews.com] is an American on al-Qaeda's side.
There is a huge difference between a fundamentalist terrorist nut and two law-abiding respected citizens of a nation that write for a major news outlet. I can't believe I have to explain that. This is your best counterexample? Really?
Sorry but the opinions if two biased people don't make what they say true.
Sure, they are "biased." And in my opinion, you are "biased." You can't just dismiss someone else's opinion as biased; you have to prove why it is wrong. Besides, if there is anyone who is likely to be biased in favor of a nation on the international stage, it would be two people who are residents of said nation.
They have not been told to leave all of the Gaza Strip. They have been told to leave certain areas where operations will be held.
I assume you are referring to knock on the roof warnings? Read this:
"Imagine you are in Gaza and there are airstrikes everywhere, and many families are in the bottom floor of their home," Abu Rahma added. "Families miss the sound of the 'warning' missile because it sounds like just another explosion."
But even in an era of precision targeting, the impact of missiles can't be restricted to one house in such a densely-populated area. Many of those injured in the strike on the al-Batsh compound were hit by shrapnel as they left an adjacent mosque. And the United Nations says some 70% of those killed in the current conflict have been civilians.
On July 8, eight civilians -- all members of the Kaware family -- were killed when their home in Khan Yunis was hit. According to the IDF, the family left the house after a phone warning but had returned home prematurely after a "knock on the roof." Perhaps they mistook it for the explosive missile.
You go to your mosque for daily prayer. No one warns you because the mosque itself is not the target for a bombing, but as you exit the mosque, you are killed by shrapnel from the next building. If you can be killed in this way, it is clear that remaining in Gaza is not safe. You cannot always avoid the places that will be bombed because you do not always know the places that will be bombed. The only safe thing would be to leave the city entirely. If the IDF really cared about minimizing civilian casualties, they would have allowed this. But they did not want to allow Hamas agents to slip into Egypt, so civilians be damned. Strategically, it would be better to strike empty military infrastructure in an abandoned city than what is happening now. Sure, because the IDF did not allow evactuation, 200 Hamas fighters are dead, but 200 is not enough to put a stopper on Hamas or even to inconvenience them very much.
So if Fatah is a sham then any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. You can not have it both ways.
I never said anything about a coalition between Hamas and Fatah, but I agree. Any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. The Palestinians don't have any "real" options on the table. They have a sham government (Fatah) or terrorists (Hamas). Israel allowed Palestinians to have a real option, they wouldn't vote for Hamas.
It is common law that any contract signed under duress is null and void. I would say "Sign or we keep your soldier" would be considered duress.
Then you have a very poor understanding of common law. Duress applies to individuals, not to governments. If the Palestinians has Netanyahu locked in a room with a gun to his head and said "sign this or we will kill you," that would have been null and void over duress. But when two countries are meeting at a civilized dialogue over a prisoner exchange, it is pretty much understood that not signing the agreement means that both sides will keep their prisoners. I mean are kidding me? Threatening to keep hold of a pris
Amira Hass [wikipedia.org] and Gideon Levy [wikipedia.org] are by no means unbiased reporters.
Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda. You won't, because no such reporter exists. That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.
The swap which should never have been done as it rewards kidnappers.
Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding. By rearresting the prisoners, the Israeli government has violated its own laws and has clearly shown that Israeli law do not apply equally to Israelis and West Bankers. This only serves to add fuel to the fires of discontent that Hamas is trying to ignite. Seriously, what was Israel trying to accomplish with the rearrests?
So tunneling can be done without discovery.
You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel that they need to run their power plants and get enough electricity to power their desalinization plants so that they don't all die of thirst? These tunnels were not built for military purposes, and if Israel had not tried to convert Gaza into an "open air prison" with two closed borders no way out, they would have never been built in the first place. Then Hamas would not have pre-existing a tunnel network that it could easily expand into Israeli territory and Israel would have no need to further push the Gazans into destitution by shutting down their farms. First Israel removes Gaza's access to drinking water, and now its access to food. Tell me, who is trying to wipe who off the face of the earth?
Did the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian people do anything to catch the criminals?
Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one. Likud doesn't want the PLA to have a police force capable of controlling the terrorists, because if they did, Israel would no longer have the excuse of occupying the West Bank for "security purposes." Besides, Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza. (It is clear that he was strong armed into saying this, but if Israel could strong arm the PLA into that, they could have easily strong armed the Palestinian Police into searching for the criminals as well.)
According to this [bbc.com] it was Fatah that cut off the funds and not Israel.
Let's be real. For all intents and purposes, Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0. It is a sham. It is nothing but a thin veil over the same IDF-run government that has been in power in the West Bank since the 40s.
All this ignores the fact that Israel, in retaliation for the killings of the Israeli civilians has killed 600 Palestinians. One of the US generals involved in the initial invasion of Afghanistan (I don't remember exactly who -- Dunford maybe) said that the US has achieved the lowest rate of civilian deaths in any war in history. About 15% of people killed by US forces in the initial invasion were civilians. Let's say that the IDF matched this rate and that 85% of the Palestinian deaths are Hamas and 15% are civilians. (Highly unlikely considering the dense urban environment of Gaza, but let's just assume this.) Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three. Gaza is a meat grinder right now. Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go? And the fact that the IDF is undertaking this action so close the the Palestinian General elections.... They are trying to send a message to West Bankers: This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?
I challenge you to find a "left wing" US news outlet that asks Americans to reconsider if the war on Al-Qaeda is just. Hint: There is none. The fact that there are Israelis who are against the military action in Gaza shows that there are a lot more shades of gray in Israel attacking Gaza than there were in the US attacking Afghanistan.
Okay, let me spell it out for you. First, it is clear that you did not read the page that I linked to because there are separate scores for "physical harm" and "social harm." The heroin related crime that you describe would fall under social harm, not physical harm, which is a measure of the deleterious medical effects only.
Second, even if we do look at the social harm scores, the fact that heroin scores so much higher than marijuana shows that there is a lot more involved than just the illegality of the drug. Why is the heroin social harm score 2.5x that of marijuana? Is heroin "more illegal" than marijuana? No, it isn't: in most states possession of a small amount of heroin, like possession of a small amount of marijuana, is only a misdemeanor, not a felony. So it stands to reason that there is another factor that is not related to illegality that causes heroin to be so much more socially harmful. It's the fact that heroin is so addictive compared to marijuana or even alcohol (again, see the link I posted earlier) and addicts go to desperate measures to get their fix. People rob stores for cigarettes, so why wouldn't they do it for heroin, which is more addictive than tobacco?
Getting back to the main point about physical harm: Yes, heroin is mostly more harmful because of the fact that it is injected. But the fact of the matter is that 99% of people in this country cannot be trusted with injecting themselves with anything. The other 1% are trained nurses and physicians. There is a reason that when you get sent home with pain meds after a surgery, they give you pills and not an IV drop. While an IV drop would reduce the amount of drug you need (because it goes directly into the blood instead of traveling through the digestive tract first) and would reduce the chance that you'd screw up the dosage (because with an IV drop you can't forget to take a pill or forget that you already took one), putting an IV in is not easy. Especially putting one into yourself. Especially when everything has to be 100% sterile lest you get a blood borne disease. If heroin was legalized, how many people would really buy an expensive autoclave for their syringes (and take the time to use it every time, even when they really need a rush but have to get to work in 30 minutes) or dispose of them in a sharps container (which must them be specially disposed of by an expensive biowaste service)?
It may not be a 'good' idea. It may simply be less bad that keeping them criminalized. Addiction is a medical diagnosis and it makes more sense to keep it in the medical sphere than the criminal one. Being addicted to anything is bad for you (that's inherent in the term). The consequences of that addiction can be modified by decriminalizing the drug (but keeping it regulated). Nobody but nobody is suggesting that we just drop cocaine packets from the sky. Well, perhaps a few folks might like that.....
I'll buy that. Arresting people for merely using drugs is probably not a good strategy. They should be enrolled in addiction prevention programs instead. But dealing such drugs should remain illegal, IMO. If it's illegal to buy penicillin or ketamine without a prescription from a doctor, I don't see why it should be legal to purchase drugs such as heroin.
While I see what you're trying to do, this sort of nonsense is not going to work on me.
So, in your opinion, are DUI bans reasonable or not? Are speeding bans reasonable or not? These are yes or no questions. Either you admit that there is such a thing as a reasonable ban (although you might draw the line at a different place than I would), or you say that you'd be fine driving on a highway where there are people darting by at 150 mph while chugging a beer.
You can have all the 'reasonable' bans you want in North Korea, where you belong.
On the contrary, you are the one who wants to live in a country without bans, which this country is not. Tickets to Somalia only cost a few hundred bucks, and once you're there, you don't have to pay taxes. Begone.
But Somalia is in a civil war, you say? Fine, then live in North Waziristan, where the locals hate the government just as much as you do. Of course, the locals will probably beat you to death for being an infidel, but at least you'll die happy knowing that there were no police there to restrict their natural right to use their arms.
Interesting. I wish I could read the linked study, but it's blocked by a pay wall. The summary mentions that Portugal decriminalized all drugs, but then it goes on to just talk about marijuana. It does mention that there was drop in HIV transmission but concedes that these could have been due to expanded treatment instead of decriminalization. They also mentioned that there were "more drugs seized by law enforcement," which makes me wonder if drugs were completely decriminalized. Overall, I'm not sure that this article proves that decriminalizing narcotics would be a good thing, but maybe it shows that decriminalizing them wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I feel like hard drugs should remain illegal because while a lot of marijuana related crime is largely artificial (i.e. it only exists because marijuana is illegal), not all hard drug related crime is. For example, one dealer could rob a rival dealer of his stash because he knows that his rival can't report the theft to the cops. But when it comes to heroin/meth related crimes, there are instances where people are so addicted to the drug that they rob stores just to come up with enough money for their next fix. Decriminalizing the drug wouldn't eliminate these kinds of crimes.
But we have the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, constitution-free zones, free speech zones, protest permits, DUI checkpoints, mass warrantless surveillance, unrestricted border searches, and a number of other policiies or agencies that violate the constitution and people's fundamental rights (thanks to people like you)
So the fact that you need a prescription from a doctor to get penicillin, is that a violation of your fundamental rights? Hell yeah, I should be allowed to eat penicillin and Oxycontin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No goddamn elitist doctor is going to tell me otherwise. Same with BAC limits for driving. I know how much alcohol I can handle and no goddamn state trooper is going to tell me that.08 is the "legal limit." Lets do away with speed limits and other traffic regulations as well. All they do is provide a source of revenue for corrupt police departments. And what about nerve agents? Why can't I buy any? My right to mustard gas is protected under the second amendment dammit!
Don't accuse me of straw-manning because that is exactly what you did when you conflated a heroin ban with warrantless wiretapping. There is such a thing as a reasonable ban.
Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended. In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.
As for legalizing highly addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin, I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol. Heroin, etc. are dangerous and they weren't just banned because of moralizers.
Are you kidding me? You're planning your daughter's career based on predictions from Kurzweil and Rifken? They both have notoriously bad track records. Kurzweil is the guy who predicted that we'd have automatic translation for phones ten years ago. (He claims that his prediction held true because 2004 smart phones shipped with crappy text translation apps, but it is obvious from context that he originally meant real time voice-to-voice translation.)
I have no doubt that much of what Kurzweil and Rifken predict will eventually happen, but their timelines are far too optimistic. IMO, the best advice you could give your daughter is to keep away from factory work (everyone will be replaced by robots relatively soon, even in China), law (far too many grads, far too few jobs -- you need to go to a top 10 school if you want any shot at a good job), and academia (same problem as law).
Proponents of the Linux desktop can't use the marketing excuse anymore: Ubuntu is commercially backed with plenty of advertising money, but it has not taken the desktop by storm. Why? Usability. The Linux ecosystem was designed by programmers for programmers, so Linux apps are built with a command line interface that works perfectly and a GUI that's tacked on as an afterthought.
Sure, you and I don't have a problem with messing ifconfig if the Wicd GUI crashes, but what about your grandma? Forget that, what about your non-programmer cousin? And let's not ignore the fact that the Wicd GUI, despite being a GUI, is still pretty complicated compared to the Windows network manager. If you want to connect to a network in Windows, you go to Networks and Sharing, click on the network you want, enter the password, and boom, you're done. With Wicd, the first option you see when you select a WPA network is "WPA Supplicant Driver" and below that you see "Use dBm to measure signal strength." When you enter the password, there is a box to "Use these settings for all networks sharing this essid." That's an awful lot of jargon, and it scares laypeople away.
Linux excels where usability for the layperson is not an issue. That's why it dominates the server market: sysadmins feel most at home on the terminal.
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Right, so according to you the years 637 AD - 1948 AD are a myth and Muslims never lived in modern day Israel. Haifa, Beersheba, etc. just conveniently popped out of the ground when Israeli settlers began streaming in. You can live in your fantasy world if you like, but please stop spewing this mentally deficient rhetoric all over this site.
The Koran and the hadiths brim over with hatred for the jews.
Let's see what the Bible has to say about the Jews:
Looks like early Christians weren't to happy about Jews that refused to convert either. Does this mean that the US, France, and UK hate Israel? No, in fact, they supply Israel's armies with state-of-the-art weaponry. While I won't deny that antisemitism is rampant in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, it is not because of what is stated in the Koran. It is because many Muslims were booted from their lands by Jewish settlers in the first half of the 20th century. This doesn't mean that invading the country in 1948 was an appropriate response, or that shooting rockets into Israel now is an appropriate response, but suggesting that the conflict is a result of Islam is xenophobic. And false.
This is what every arab country would do to Israel given the opportunity.
[citation needed] This is 2014, not 1960. After being thoroughly thrashed by Israel in several wars, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, etc. have learned that it is more beneficial for them to cooperate with Israel than to work against it. Why do you think the Muslim Brotherhood government was booted out by General Al-Sisi? Part of the reason was their Islamist rhetoric and fears about what it could lead to. Egypt doesn't want to lose another war with Israel. Instead, it wants to increase trade with Israel so that some Israeli wealth might trickle across the border.
Gaza is such a small area that the Israelis could just grid it out and make it into an artillery exercise
They could. But they could have also allowed the residents of Gaza to evacuate into Egypt before the bombardment. Sure, many Hamas operatives would have slipped into Egypt as well and escaped the carnage, but the states objective of IDF forces is to destroy Hamas's tunnel network and infrastructure. They could do that even if every Hamas operative had evacuated the city. In fact, it would have been much easier for the IDF to destroy the infrastructure if the city was nearly empty. But instead Israel decided to blockade the entire city and attack it while it is full of civilians. Already nearly a thousand civilians are death. So maybe Israel isn't as bad as Sudan and Syria, which would be okay with leveling entire cities, but they are not innocent. It is clear that the Gaza action is 50% about wounding Hamas and 50% about extractive revenge on the Palestinians as a whole for the murder of those three teenagers.
Westerners scrutinize Israel more because they have more ties with Israel. It feels closer and more tangible. I have never met a single Syrian or Sudanese person in my life. I have met many Israeli people. I have had Israeli classmates and collaborated with Israelis on research projects. My university has tens of millions of dollars of it's endowment invested in Israeli corporations. Many major US corporations have significant amounts of staff in Israel and their are plenty of people making business trips in both directions. Nearly every American knows the names Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but how many Americans can name the largest city in the West Bank?
Let me put it to you another way. One day you hear that your next door neighbor embezzled thousands of dollars out of his workplace. The next day you read in the news about some guy on the opposite side of the country who scammed not just thousands, but millions out of his employer. Which story are you more interested in? The one with your neighbor, of course, because it feels much more tangible. It's not just words on a piece of paper.
And if you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Israelis are Jewish
It doesn't. I'll admit that antisemitism is a factor in why many Arabs are so critical of Israel. But for Westerners, the number of Jews in Israel is a point that works in Israel's favor. Most Israelis are white, are fine with drinking a couple of beers from time to time, and are fine swimsuit models on magazine covers. Most Palestinian Arabs aren't any of these things. Their culture and beliefs are alien to the West and Westerners have trouble seeing things from their point of view. While Western antisemitism exists, Westerners are much more comfortable with Judaism than Islam because Jews have been living in the West for thousands of years while Muslims have only been living in the West for a matter of decades. In other words, Islamophobia is more prevalent in antisemitism in the West, so your theory that negative opinions of Israel are the result of antisemitism doesn't hold water. (At least when applied to the West.)
On the contrary, the only reason that public opinion in the West hasn't already swung completely against Israel is the fact that they are mostly white Jews and not brown Muslims. If it were not for this fact, the majority of Westerners would be in agreement that Israel is an apartheid state.
There is a big difference between doing one or two years of compulsory military service (which happens to a lot of people in a lot of countries) and serving as a general or a defense minister.
List A: The actual past five presidents
Wow, three out of five were military men. But if you look more closely, none of them are "military men." When George W. Bush was running for president, did people call him "Lt. Bush"? No, he was known as the son of an oil tycoon and the Governor of Texas. Similarly, Ronald Reagan was known an actor, not "Cpt. Reagan, commander 1st Motion Picture Unit, Army Air Corps." (Yet people called Eisenhower "General Eisenhower" up until the day he died.) The only person on this list with a significant amount of pre-presidential involvement with the defense establishment is Bush Sr, since he was a director of the CIA. So only 1 of 5 people on this list are "military men" even though 3 of 5 served in the army.
List A: Hypothetical alternative sequence of out past five presidents
The people on this list are all people who are defined by their experience in the military. Donald Rumsfeld is known as "Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense." He was also a member of the House of Representatives, a highly successful businessman, ambassador to NATO, and Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford. But no one remembers him for those things. Similarly, Petraeus is "General Petraeus", not Petraeus, the guy who earned a doctorate in international relations from Princeton. The people on this list have so much defense establishment experience that they make Bush Sr. look green. 5 of 5 on this list are military men. If these people were actually our last five presidents, people all over the world would agree that the defense establishment and the US government were blending into one.
List C: Past five Israeli PMs
4 of 5 on this list are military men. The exception is Ehud Olmert, who did not volunteer for military service and only served for a few years. He is the George W Bush of this list. So List C looks a lot more similar to List B than to List A, wouldn't you agree?
Learn the facts. Israel is an apartheid state.
Why is it that West Bankers have to take one of three "Safe Passages" through Israel to get to Gaza while Israeli citizens can wander the West Bank as they please? Why is it that Israelis are allowed to build settlements in the West Bank while West Bankers are not allowed to build settlements in Israel? Why is it that any Jewish person automatically gets Israeli citizenship (thanks to the "Law of Return") while Arabs have to go through a years long process? What about the "Citizenship and Entry into Israel" law which specifically targets Arabs with Israeli spouses and prevents them from entering Israel to visit their spouses? Are these all strategies for protecting Israelis from the fanatics? All of these restrictions were levied against the West Bank, which the last time I checked, was not the group firing rockets at Israel.
This is how I read your post:
The only PM in the past 40 years who didn't have significant connections to the Israeli defense establishment was Ehud Olmert. (He didn't do anything significant beyond the compulsory military service.)
out of your quote so that it looked like I hadn't already noted the mandatory military service.
If you reread that snippet, you'll see that I said that Ehud Olmert was the only one who limited himself to the mandatory military service. Everyone else on that list was a volunteer and had much deeper ties with the military, serving 10+ years in the military/defense ministry/intelligence agency. The average Israeli does not have anywhere near that much military experience.
Yeah, that's right. Half-facts are a favorite of the apologists. Compare the death count for a three-year conflict with that of a two-week conflict. Makes plenty of since. And while you're at it, completely ignore the two intifadas where thousands of Palestinians were killed. If you are going to compare casualties inflicted by the IDF with casualties inflicted by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e. wars fought against foreign forces), then you also have to include the 1948 war, the reprisals, the Six-Day War, the Yom-Kippur War, and four invasions of Lebanon, among other conflicts. When you tally up the death tolls, I trust you'll find them to be quite similar. If you are only going to count killings perpetrated by the military against people living within it's own borders, you'll find the numbers to be much clearer. US: zero. IDF: several thousand.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, Israel spends 1.5x as much as the US. 2% of Israel's population is active military. If you include reservists, that goes up to 9%. Compare this to 0.2% and 0.4%, respectively, for the US.
Israel is a country that is largely lead by war heros from the 60s and 70s and their acolytes. Let's look at the recent PMs of Israel: Netanyahu (former IDF commando), Ehud Barak (former chief of staff of the IDF), Shimon Peres (former defense minister), Ariel Sharon (former IDF general, former minister of defense), Yitzhak Rabin (former chief of staff of the IDF), Yitzhak Shamir (former Mossad agent). The only PM in the past 40 years who didn't have significant connections to the Israeli defense establishment was Ehud Olmert. (He didn't do anything significant beyond the compulsory military service.) If you look at the financial ties between Israeli government officials and major defense companies, things get even more mixed up.
The fact is that ever since the Camp David Accords and the agreement with Sadat, Israel was never again in danger of being wiped off the map. Sure, there were sporadic threats from groups like Hezbollah, but in these conflicts, Israel was always orders of magnitude more powerful than it's opponent. The Israeli government should have begun massively downsizing it's military, but it did not.
When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When you have a huge military, every problem begins to look like one that should be solved by force. When you're country is led by dozens of ex-military and next to no one that was, say, ex-foreign ministry, macho man diplomacy becomes the rule. When you have a former commando negotiating prisoner swap with Palestinians rather than a former diplomat, you end up with commandos going in and rearresting the released prisoners. This incident is just once symptom of a larger problem. The Israeli government hasn't just fallen victim to the pressures of the military-industrial complex; it is the military-industrial complex.
Sure, these edits were mostly harmless, but @CongressEdits is still a great idea because it dissuades politicians from ordering their staff to make edits that could be misleading. I, for one, would love to see an @HeartlandInstituteEdits.
There are limits here in the US too. But someone always thinks they are "smart" enough to sneak in a bag that's twice the size limit.
Maybe he is not a reporter but this guy [nydailynews.com] is an American on al-Qaeda's side.
There is a huge difference between a fundamentalist terrorist nut and two law-abiding respected citizens of a nation that write for a major news outlet. I can't believe I have to explain that. This is your best counterexample? Really?
Sorry but the opinions if two biased people don't make what they say true.
Sure, they are "biased." And in my opinion, you are "biased." You can't just dismiss someone else's opinion as biased; you have to prove why it is wrong. Besides, if there is anyone who is likely to be biased in favor of a nation on the international stage, it would be two people who are residents of said nation.
They have not been told to leave all of the Gaza Strip. They have been told to leave certain areas where operations will be held.
I assume you are referring to knock on the roof warnings? Read this:
You go to your mosque for daily prayer. No one warns you because the mosque itself is not the target for a bombing, but as you exit the mosque, you are killed by shrapnel from the next building. If you can be killed in this way, it is clear that remaining in Gaza is not safe. You cannot always avoid the places that will be bombed because you do not always know the places that will be bombed. The only safe thing would be to leave the city entirely. If the IDF really cared about minimizing civilian casualties, they would have allowed this. But they did not want to allow Hamas agents to slip into Egypt, so civilians be damned. Strategically, it would be better to strike empty military infrastructure in an abandoned city than what is happening now. Sure, because the IDF did not allow evactuation, 200 Hamas fighters are dead, but 200 is not enough to put a stopper on Hamas or even to inconvenience them very much.
So if Fatah is a sham then any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. You can not have it both ways.
I never said anything about a coalition between Hamas and Fatah, but I agree. Any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. The Palestinians don't have any "real" options on the table. They have a sham government (Fatah) or terrorists (Hamas). Israel allowed Palestinians to have a real option, they wouldn't vote for Hamas.
It is common law that any contract signed under duress is null and void. I would say "Sign or we keep your soldier" would be considered duress.
Then you have a very poor understanding of common law. Duress applies to individuals, not to governments. If the Palestinians has Netanyahu locked in a room with a gun to his head and said "sign this or we will kill you," that would have been null and void over duress. But when two countries are meeting at a civilized dialogue over a prisoner exchange, it is pretty much understood that not signing the agreement means that both sides will keep their prisoners. I mean are kidding me? Threatening to keep hold of a pris
Amira Hass [wikipedia.org] and Gideon Levy [wikipedia.org] are by no means unbiased reporters.
Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda. You won't, because no such reporter exists. That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.
The swap which should never have been done as it rewards kidnappers.
Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding. By rearresting the prisoners, the Israeli government has violated its own laws and has clearly shown that Israeli law do not apply equally to Israelis and West Bankers. This only serves to add fuel to the fires of discontent that Hamas is trying to ignite. Seriously, what was Israel trying to accomplish with the rearrests?
So tunneling can be done without discovery.
You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel that they need to run their power plants and get enough electricity to power their desalinization plants so that they don't all die of thirst? These tunnels were not built for military purposes, and if Israel had not tried to convert Gaza into an "open air prison" with two closed borders no way out, they would have never been built in the first place. Then Hamas would not have pre-existing a tunnel network that it could easily expand into Israeli territory and Israel would have no need to further push the Gazans into destitution by shutting down their farms. First Israel removes Gaza's access to drinking water, and now its access to food. Tell me, who is trying to wipe who off the face of the earth?
Did the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian people do anything to catch the criminals?
Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one. Likud doesn't want the PLA to have a police force capable of controlling the terrorists, because if they did, Israel would no longer have the excuse of occupying the West Bank for "security purposes." Besides, Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza. (It is clear that he was strong armed into saying this, but if Israel could strong arm the PLA into that, they could have easily strong armed the Palestinian Police into searching for the criminals as well.)
According to this [bbc.com] it was Fatah that cut off the funds and not Israel.
Let's be real. For all intents and purposes, Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0. It is a sham. It is nothing but a thin veil over the same IDF-run government that has been in power in the West Bank since the 40s.
All this ignores the fact that Israel, in retaliation for the killings of the Israeli civilians has killed 600 Palestinians. One of the US generals involved in the initial invasion of Afghanistan (I don't remember exactly who -- Dunford maybe) said that the US has achieved the lowest rate of civilian deaths in any war in history. About 15% of people killed by US forces in the initial invasion were civilians. Let's say that the IDF matched this rate and that 85% of the Palestinian deaths are Hamas and 15% are civilians. (Highly unlikely considering the dense urban environment of Gaza, but let's just assume this.) Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three. Gaza is a meat grinder right now. Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go? And the fact that the IDF is undertaking this action so close the the Palestinian General elections.... They are trying to send a message to West Bankers: This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?
I challenge you to find a "left wing" US news outlet that asks Americans to reconsider if the war on Al-Qaeda is just. Hint: There is none. The fact that there are Israelis who are against the military action in Gaza shows that there are a lot more shades of gray in Israel attacking Gaza than there were in the US attacking Afghanistan.
Okay, let me spell it out for you. First, it is clear that you did not read the page that I linked to because there are separate scores for "physical harm" and "social harm." The heroin related crime that you describe would fall under social harm, not physical harm, which is a measure of the deleterious medical effects only.
Second, even if we do look at the social harm scores, the fact that heroin scores so much higher than marijuana shows that there is a lot more involved than just the illegality of the drug. Why is the heroin social harm score 2.5x that of marijuana? Is heroin "more illegal" than marijuana? No, it isn't: in most states possession of a small amount of heroin, like possession of a small amount of marijuana, is only a misdemeanor, not a felony. So it stands to reason that there is another factor that is not related to illegality that causes heroin to be so much more socially harmful. It's the fact that heroin is so addictive compared to marijuana or even alcohol (again, see the link I posted earlier) and addicts go to desperate measures to get their fix. People rob stores for cigarettes, so why wouldn't they do it for heroin, which is more addictive than tobacco?
Getting back to the main point about physical harm: Yes, heroin is mostly more harmful because of the fact that it is injected. But the fact of the matter is that 99% of people in this country cannot be trusted with injecting themselves with anything. The other 1% are trained nurses and physicians. There is a reason that when you get sent home with pain meds after a surgery, they give you pills and not an IV drop. While an IV drop would reduce the amount of drug you need (because it goes directly into the blood instead of traveling through the digestive tract first) and would reduce the chance that you'd screw up the dosage (because with an IV drop you can't forget to take a pill or forget that you already took one), putting an IV in is not easy. Especially putting one into yourself. Especially when everything has to be 100% sterile lest you get a blood borne disease. If heroin was legalized, how many people would really buy an expensive autoclave for their syringes (and take the time to use it every time, even when they really need a rush but have to get to work in 30 minutes) or dispose of them in a sharps container (which must them be specially disposed of by an expensive biowaste service)?
Pretty much everything you say in your comment is wrong. Heroin is much more addictive than alcohol. (That same link shows that a survey of medical experts rated heroin as twice as physically harmful as alcohol.) People do die from heroin withdrawal. The long term effects of heroin use include gangrene near the injection site.
So? Marijuana is also illegal, but it's physical harm score is lower than those for alcohol or tobacco.
It may not be a 'good' idea. It may simply be less bad that keeping them criminalized. Addiction is a medical diagnosis and it makes more sense to keep it in the medical sphere than the criminal one. Being addicted to anything is bad for you (that's inherent in the term). The consequences of that addiction can be modified by decriminalizing the drug (but keeping it regulated). Nobody but nobody is suggesting that we just drop cocaine packets from the sky. Well, perhaps a few folks might like that.....
I'll buy that. Arresting people for merely using drugs is probably not a good strategy. They should be enrolled in addiction prevention programs instead. But dealing such drugs should remain illegal, IMO. If it's illegal to buy penicillin or ketamine without a prescription from a doctor, I don't see why it should be legal to purchase drugs such as heroin.
Citation please.
"It is estimated that 32% of tobacco users will become addicted, 23% of heroin users, 17% of cocaine users, and 15% of alcohol users." So I was a bit off. It's more like 1.5x. And you are right, nicotine is more addictive. But according to a survey of psychologists and medical providers, heroin is 2x as physically harmful to the user as alcohol or tobacco, so I still think that it deserves special status.
While I see what you're trying to do, this sort of nonsense is not going to work on me.
So, in your opinion, are DUI bans reasonable or not? Are speeding bans reasonable or not? These are yes or no questions. Either you admit that there is such a thing as a reasonable ban (although you might draw the line at a different place than I would), or you say that you'd be fine driving on a highway where there are people darting by at 150 mph while chugging a beer.
You can have all the 'reasonable' bans you want in North Korea, where you belong.
On the contrary, you are the one who wants to live in a country without bans, which this country is not. Tickets to Somalia only cost a few hundred bucks, and once you're there, you don't have to pay taxes. Begone. But Somalia is in a civil war, you say? Fine, then live in North Waziristan, where the locals hate the government just as much as you do. Of course, the locals will probably beat you to death for being an infidel, but at least you'll die happy knowing that there were no police there to restrict their natural right to use their arms.
Interesting. I wish I could read the linked study, but it's blocked by a pay wall. The summary mentions that Portugal decriminalized all drugs, but then it goes on to just talk about marijuana. It does mention that there was drop in HIV transmission but concedes that these could have been due to expanded treatment instead of decriminalization. They also mentioned that there were "more drugs seized by law enforcement," which makes me wonder if drugs were completely decriminalized. Overall, I'm not sure that this article proves that decriminalizing narcotics would be a good thing, but maybe it shows that decriminalizing them wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I feel like hard drugs should remain illegal because while a lot of marijuana related crime is largely artificial (i.e. it only exists because marijuana is illegal), not all hard drug related crime is. For example, one dealer could rob a rival dealer of his stash because he knows that his rival can't report the theft to the cops. But when it comes to heroin/meth related crimes, there are instances where people are so addicted to the drug that they rob stores just to come up with enough money for their next fix. Decriminalizing the drug wouldn't eliminate these kinds of crimes.
But we have the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, constitution-free zones, free speech zones, protest permits, DUI checkpoints, mass warrantless surveillance, unrestricted border searches, and a number of other policiies or agencies that violate the constitution and people's fundamental rights (thanks to people like you)
So the fact that you need a prescription from a doctor to get penicillin, is that a violation of your fundamental rights? Hell yeah, I should be allowed to eat penicillin and Oxycontin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No goddamn elitist doctor is going to tell me otherwise. Same with BAC limits for driving. I know how much alcohol I can handle and no goddamn state trooper is going to tell me that .08 is the "legal limit." Lets do away with speed limits and other traffic regulations as well. All they do is provide a source of revenue for corrupt police departments. And what about nerve agents? Why can't I buy any? My right to mustard gas is protected under the second amendment dammit!
Don't accuse me of straw-manning because that is exactly what you did when you conflated a heroin ban with warrantless wiretapping. There is such a thing as a reasonable ban.
Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended. In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.
As for legalizing highly addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin, I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol. Heroin, etc. are dangerous and they weren't just banned because of moralizers.
Are you kidding me? You're planning your daughter's career based on predictions from Kurzweil and Rifken? They both have notoriously bad track records. Kurzweil is the guy who predicted that we'd have automatic translation for phones ten years ago. (He claims that his prediction held true because 2004 smart phones shipped with crappy text translation apps, but it is obvious from context that he originally meant real time voice-to-voice translation.)
I have no doubt that much of what Kurzweil and Rifken predict will eventually happen, but their timelines are far too optimistic. IMO, the best advice you could give your daughter is to keep away from factory work (everyone will be replaced by robots relatively soon, even in China), law (far too many grads, far too few jobs -- you need to go to a top 10 school if you want any shot at a good job), and academia (same problem as law).
Proponents of the Linux desktop can't use the marketing excuse anymore: Ubuntu is commercially backed with plenty of advertising money, but it has not taken the desktop by storm. Why? Usability. The Linux ecosystem was designed by programmers for programmers, so Linux apps are built with a command line interface that works perfectly and a GUI that's tacked on as an afterthought.
Sure, you and I don't have a problem with messing ifconfig if the Wicd GUI crashes, but what about your grandma? Forget that, what about your non-programmer cousin? And let's not ignore the fact that the Wicd GUI, despite being a GUI, is still pretty complicated compared to the Windows network manager. If you want to connect to a network in Windows, you go to Networks and Sharing, click on the network you want, enter the password, and boom, you're done. With Wicd, the first option you see when you select a WPA network is "WPA Supplicant Driver" and below that you see "Use dBm to measure signal strength." When you enter the password, there is a box to "Use these settings for all networks sharing this essid." That's an awful lot of jargon, and it scares laypeople away.
Linux excels where usability for the layperson is not an issue. That's why it dominates the server market: sysadmins feel most at home on the terminal.