Why aren't you condemning them with the same vigor as you condemn Israel?
Because the Palestinians just don't come across to me as the aggressors here. They, from my view, have become the oppressed people.
The fact remains that they could have peace tomorrow if they gave up on the Right of Return.
No clue, but if so, why the blockade? Will this somehow aid in the negotiations? Why bulldoze homes with the people still inside? Does this somehow help?
You could, possibly, be right, but the behavior I can witness doesn't support your position. I'm not seeing any negotiations, gestures of goodwill, etc. I'm not even seeing a defensive posture, but an aggressive one.
Hamas has the right to use weapons to attack its enemies, just as the United States has the right to do so. It is called 'sovereignty'. If you'd like them to stop, either win the war or negotiate a truce.
"Cry me a river", indeed.
Either people are equal, because they are people, or the Jews are somehow better than the Russians and Arabs.
I see what you are doing there, trying to make it into a racial issue rather than a political one.
This isn't some fabrication of mine. This is the truth of it. If you remove the labels placed on these peoples and look at their behavior from a 'blind as in justice' point of view, there are few explanations left.
Where I'm from we have this whole 'civil rights' thing that was followed closely by this notion of 'equality'. It means we put blinders on and look at all people as human beings, created equal under God, and apply the law evenly, with an aim towards justice. We look at what they are doing, outside of who they are. This clearly should not offend you nor anyone else.
Maybe the Israelis should use rockets instead and they'd have your sympathy?
Maybe, if they used them on military targets. But as genuine terrorists that target civilians go, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy to spare. Here at least, we have some parity.
To take you back to the very beginning, if the surviving Russian Catholics started taking out blood vendettas against the German people of today, would this be 'justice'?
I've made all these points already, and I get the impression that you comprehend their content completely.
The fact is, your bias is creating the "tenor of their desire" through creative interpretation.
Your own bias runs deeper than my own, but I appreciate your efforts. Again, I'm not taking issue with the driving over the corpse, but you well know that by this point. I'm clearly taking issue with laughing about it.
You're pointing out that I'm inventing dialogue, when I clearly said so myself, because you're attempting to illustrate a fabrication. My emotional reaction to what I watched is not false.
If you genuinely think that I watched the same thing you did, drew the same (and only) conclusion, and am fabricating an emotion, then just stop here. You're wasting everyone's time.
I don't want a military that thinks these things are a game, nor that thinks they are funny. I'm sorry that you do. But I don't see what's left for debate. They had a grand time killing innocents in a city. I do not like it, to the point that the people complicit in it need to be punished. The end.
We were there to protect them, not to make a turkey shoot out of them.
Either you are lying or your reading comprehension is suffering.
Just because they feel racially superior to the rest of us, it doesn't mean that we have to capitulate to that notion. Were it any other people this would be abhorrent. Yet, because of the Nazis, we're all expected to be cool with it.
This is the topic.
And it isn't an analogy any more than suffrage for women was an analogy. Either people are equal, because they are people, or the Jews are somehow better than the Russians and Arabs. You can't mince words here, this is as clear as night and day.
After that happened she had every right to defend herself and her people, as acknowledged by the UN charter and international law.
Indeed 'she' did. But no amount of nationalistic zeal can excuse 'her' crimes that went well beyond defense. These are well documented, and do not need to be recounted here. That's not the issue. The issue, as I defined it with my post eleven posts ago, is the disparity. Were the US to ban coriander to the Sioux in Montana, they would likewise get no sympathy from me. But there are those that justify things like the blockade, the home-crushing, human-killing Caterpillar machines, and other patently evil tools as 'defense'.
My position is that they do so out of some other mechanism than logic. Compassion might have described it, several years ago, but it falls short today.
Why are you able to do that for the Jews in 1946 but not the Russian Catholics in 1946?
Why don't you answer the question instead of changing the topic?
Well, it is my topic, isn't it? I began this line of discussion with a reply to an AC who was not you. You responded to my comment, and not the other way around.
The premise is simply that outside of the religious angle, there isn't a lot of logical support for making the Zionist issue worse.
You're patently ignoring the fact that no one legitimized an occupation by Russian Catholics of any Arab lands. There's no parity here, and if it made logical sense there would be.
Please don't accuse me of changing the topic. You're the one doing that. We've been discussing fine details of a tangent, and that's all.
You can have a problem with it all you want, but there are six million Jews living in Israel now and they aren't going anywhere. So how do we best resolve the issue and find a peaceful solution? Asking Israel to give up the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself is not a starting point for a just peace. What do you think we would do if a group of Native Americans started dropping rockets on American towns? Do you think we would allow them unfettered trade with the rest of the world so as to continue arming themselves?
The Native American parallel is an apt one. I think the Reservation solution is one of the more shameful things we have ever done to a people. This, actually, is part of the emotional underpinning to as why I don't care to see history repeat itself in this way.
I imagine a plan stepping towards peace would need to include:
1) Palestine gains 100% of the sovereignty that Israel enjoys.
2) The right of Palestinians and Israelis to hate and want to kill each other is acknowledged, as it is a natural human right.
3) Israel and Palestine are both restricted from committing war crimes, and are punished equally by the international community.
In short, parity will be required, because once you remove the 'pre-ordained by God' argument, the rest of it is extraordinarily weak. And, as an American, I fully respect the right for the Jews and Muslims to believe what they wish, and refuse to draft legal structures around these contradictory beliefs. It seems perfectly logical and natural to me, and thusly I advocate it.
Why are you able to do that for the Palestinians in 2010 but not the Jews in 1946?
Why are you able to do that for the Jews in 1946 but not the Russian Catholics in 1946?
And by the way, I am able. There were Allied nations besides the Soviet Union to appeal to. Is there not a sizable population of Jewish people in the United States? Whom did they have to kill to be able to live freely here?
Zionism was not the only answer, but it was the only choice that furthered a problem that was both unrelated and already an issue, and therefore I have a problem with it.
In short, each and every of the Allies had resources that could have been shared to remedy the situation without embroiling us in another century of war. Some took those paths, and I applaud them. If any are, these would be the examples of God's true chosen people. They did what Christ would have done. Those that chose eternal war did so out of anything except desire for justice, peace, or humanism of any kind.
So when you say 'the Jews in 1946', that's a pretty big group of people. Not all of which were Zionist.
The European Jews should have lobbied for remedy from the Allied governments. The Israel stuff is a cop out, and there's just no other way to describe it. What right did any Europeans have to emigrate there? Imagine they were Russian Catholics, also victims of the holocaust, who wanted to live there and wanted to be legitimized as the de facto rulers of that region. Doesn't make sense, does it?
Both sides picked up guns, and only one side became a sovereign entity. To this very day there is one government that is recognized as legitimate and one group of very pissed-off, unrepresented people.
Perhaps, but someone has to say it. We can't all sit around thinking everyone will walk away from this unchanged. The more racially-charged epithets we tolerate the longer it will be until we find peace.
The just thing to do is to right the wrongs by taking action against those committing them. If Poles were keeping stolen Jewish homes, that is an issue to take up with Poles, not Arabs.
Why would Arabs be expected to suffer for Polish or German crimes?
I'm sorry, but you come across as an anti-theist and a racist to me. You're not listening, so I'm not going to entertain you any further. Have a nice day!
They used missiles against targets in a building. Sounds logical to me.
Logical, but off-topic.
Emphasis on the 'begged' to be able to do so. The crew had a distinct desire to unload their entire complement of ammo before returning home. This is central to the premise, and cannot be logically ignored, except perhaps by accident.
The only mission where using up all the ammo is important is one described as 'kill as many as possible'. This goes to motive.
Also, that cuts both ways. Many people here and on other forums take this video as clear proof that the US guns down civilians on purpose. I'm glad to see we agree that this video is not clear proof of that.
Except that it actually is proof that these soldiers believed more in the killing than they did in the mission, which leads to behaviors like gunning down civilians on purpose.
"Come on Mr Journalist, crawl a little further and I can finish killing you," wouldn't be too great a stretch from what actually happened.
"I just crushed the corpse of a civilian with my Bradley, lol!" I can actually see this on Facebook...
It is repugnant, and I'm glad we got to see it.
The point is, ignoring the tenor of their desire paints the situation in too clean of a light.
I'm simply taking them to task for not practicing what they claim to believe is the most important thing in life. How is that unfair?
Your entire question is rhetorical.
You are somehow comfortable with the notion that the only 'true' interpretation is a fundamentalist one. This doesn't pass a basic logic test, let alone a cultural test.
And I know enough to know that they sure as hell don't practice everything in that book.
So you admit, then, that people adapt what the (any) book says to what is relevant to them at the time they need it.
Only the book has the right to define what it means, that's the whole point of religion.
But yet, there exists this statement, and even in the same post. I'll clue you in:
People.
People are the 'whole point' of religion. Specifically how these people live their lives, what their moral code winds up being, etc. You're somehow expecting your reader to believe that an inanimate object sprung into being all on its own and decided by itself what would be contained in the pages.
To the best of my knowledge, no one reads a religious tome in this manner. Or at least no one who would be even remotely interested in what you expect of them.
I agree with parent totally; GP's remark is ignorant in the extreme.
What we should really do is invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to atheism.
I don't know why we need to go about converting anyone to any specific religion, including atheism.
It would seem to me that any except the most vilely heretical atheist would oppose the freedom of religion. Good lord you guys need a handbook or something.
That means Ann Coulter's solution of "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." It will be the worst human rights atrocity in recorded history but I'm damned if I see a better solution.
Can you picture, for even a moment, Jesus Christ himself saying these words?
I cannot. It is simply incompatible with what he taught us about love, understanding, and charity. As I understand it he would rather they kill each and every one of us than we resort to this tactic. Christ never, ever wanted religion at the point of the sword or as a form of government. Indeed he rebelled against it, as God himself instructed him to do.
Christ was a living contradiction to the 'right as a people' belief that had somehow invaded cultural thought. He taught 'right by virtue' instead, even to the point of disobeying what was allegedly God's law.
Anyway, if you cannot picture Christ leading your army of indoctrination himself, then why would you expect it to work?
Like you suggested, no one has that area cornered completely, but some have pretty big chunk of that corner and feel very comfortable with it.
I think you judge these people too harshly. Their culture is under attack and they suspect the entire world of being in league against them at the behest of Israel. It is entirely possible that they see Israeli eradication as the cleanest solution to their problems.
And in at least some ways, they're right, logically speaking.
The right path, the long road, is towards a peaceful solution. But neither side wants that. We outsiders do, but those embroiled in that conflict will stop at nothing to get what they want. Both sides believe God told them to win, which has to be the greatest example of the existence of Satan I can possibly imagine.
Anyway, the true answer lies in 'hearts and minds', and that begins by getting past our personal biases and limiting how we judge people so we can be effective in aiding them.
It's not anti-Jew, the people of Israel happen to be Jewish. This is anti-Israel slowly stealing the land of Palestinians.
Yes, this.
The holocaust was a terrible thing, and no one can deny that the Nazis were in the wrong and that the Jewish people, as a whole, were owed a debt - if ever any race/group was.
But this had zero to do with the Zionist issue of Israel and the English wanting to wash their hands of it in whichever way worked out the best for them. Look into the history, the violence over that silly patch of sand was a huge issue prior to the war, and continues to be so today.
In short, all the evil of the holocaust cannot justify the existence of Israel. It has to do that on its own. Nor can all of that evil excuse the evils conducted by their own government, or any government for that matter. Just because they feel racially superior to the rest of us, it doesn't mean that we have to capitulate to that notion. Were it any other people this would be abhorrent. Yet, because of the Nazis, we're all expected to be cool with it.
That is because the West has become weak and thinks that the more meek it gets, the more everyone will suddenly love it.
In truth, our enemies still hates us and we are losing what allies we once had.
If the West has become weak it is likely due to lacking any coherent direction, because we declared war on a concept, rather than on any specific people. We may as well have declared war on mosquitos. We're flailing blindly in every direction, yelling at the top of our lungs, as if it makes any difference at all. Of course we're going to get weary of it.
In fact, what the people of Turkey mostly want is good government and an end to corruption, security and prosperity, and for much of the youth, to be E.U. citizens so that they can freely study and travel in the rest of Europe
And yet 99% of them claim to be Muslims. They seem to be confused.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Now, how can those 'Muslims' possible support a non-Islamic, secular state? Either they're lying about wanting a secular state or they're confused about what being a Muslim entails. Which is it?
I think perhaps they simply have a different view of what it means to be a Muslim.
And frankly, I'd take their word of it over yours because they have the natural right to define their own religious practices.
Christianity has examples of this as well. Mormons are Christian, for example, but many of the mainline religions wouldn't claim them and they were in fact persecuted for their 'fringe' beliefs.
Point being, a culture's understandings of religions evolve. Deal with it.
Somehow, something has changed. It's interesting that this so closely coincides with the "blockade" incident with Israel, on account of many of the participants having been Turkish citizens.
I think a less-complex assessment is likely the case here: Turkey has been negotiating with Iran.
See, I'd guess that the very last thing Turkey wants is to be the staging point for yet another war on an Islamic nation. They see all the war-mongering/saber-rattling from the US and are troubled by it. They single-handedly undermined the US efforts to impose nuclear sanctions by brokering a fuel exchange deal directly with Iran, and I believe Brazil. They're almost certainly trying to avoid war.
It seems that part of this deal would have included some pro-Islamic considerations including this internet position (which seems common in non-Western societies) and the flotilla.
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder hearing it in this context is jarring and upsetting. It doesn't fit with what we're seeing.
Yes! Exactly, except...
I believe it DID fit with the attitude of the soldiers, and that it is evident in their behavior on the battlefield as well.
Why aren't you condemning them with the same vigor as you condemn Israel?
Because the Palestinians just don't come across to me as the aggressors here. They, from my view, have become the oppressed people.
The fact remains that they could have peace tomorrow if they gave up on the Right of Return.
No clue, but if so, why the blockade? Will this somehow aid in the negotiations? Why bulldoze homes with the people still inside? Does this somehow help?
You could, possibly, be right, but the behavior I can witness doesn't support your position. I'm not seeing any negotiations, gestures of goodwill, etc. I'm not even seeing a defensive posture, but an aggressive one.
Hamas has the right to use weapons to attack its enemies, just as the United States has the right to do so. It is called 'sovereignty'. If you'd like them to stop, either win the war or negotiate a truce.
"Cry me a river", indeed.
Either people are equal, because they are people, or the Jews are somehow better than the Russians and Arabs.
I see what you are doing there, trying to make it into a racial issue rather than a political one.
This isn't some fabrication of mine. This is the truth of it. If you remove the labels placed on these peoples and look at their behavior from a 'blind as in justice' point of view, there are few explanations left.
Where I'm from we have this whole 'civil rights' thing that was followed closely by this notion of 'equality'. It means we put blinders on and look at all people as human beings, created equal under God, and apply the law evenly, with an aim towards justice. We look at what they are doing, outside of who they are. This clearly should not offend you nor anyone else.
Maybe the Israelis should use rockets instead and they'd have your sympathy?
Maybe, if they used them on military targets. But as genuine terrorists that target civilians go, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy to spare. Here at least, we have some parity.
To take you back to the very beginning, if the surviving Russian Catholics started taking out blood vendettas against the German people of today, would this be 'justice'?
I've made all these points already, and I get the impression that you comprehend their content completely.
The fact is, your bias is creating the "tenor of their desire" through creative interpretation.
Your own bias runs deeper than my own, but I appreciate your efforts. Again, I'm not taking issue with the driving over the corpse, but you well know that by this point. I'm clearly taking issue with laughing about it.
You're pointing out that I'm inventing dialogue, when I clearly said so myself, because you're attempting to illustrate a fabrication. My emotional reaction to what I watched is not false.
If you genuinely think that I watched the same thing you did, drew the same (and only) conclusion, and am fabricating an emotion, then just stop here. You're wasting everyone's time.
I don't want a military that thinks these things are a game, nor that thinks they are funny. I'm sorry that you do. But I don't see what's left for debate. They had a grand time killing innocents in a city. I do not like it, to the point that the people complicit in it need to be punished. The end.
We were there to protect them, not to make a turkey shoot out of them.
Either you are lying or your reading comprehension is suffering.
Just because they feel racially superior to the rest of us, it doesn't mean that we have to capitulate to that notion. Were it any other people this would be abhorrent. Yet, because of the Nazis, we're all expected to be cool with it.
This is the topic.
And it isn't an analogy any more than suffrage for women was an analogy. Either people are equal, because they are people, or the Jews are somehow better than the Russians and Arabs. You can't mince words here, this is as clear as night and day.
After that happened she had every right to defend herself and her people, as acknowledged by the UN charter and international law.
Indeed 'she' did. But no amount of nationalistic zeal can excuse 'her' crimes that went well beyond defense. These are well documented, and do not need to be recounted here. That's not the issue. The issue, as I defined it with my post eleven posts ago, is the disparity. Were the US to ban coriander to the Sioux in Montana, they would likewise get no sympathy from me. But there are those that justify things like the blockade, the home-crushing, human-killing Caterpillar machines, and other patently evil tools as 'defense'.
My position is that they do so out of some other mechanism than logic. Compassion might have described it, several years ago, but it falls short today.
Why are you able to do that for the Jews in 1946 but not the Russian Catholics in 1946?
Why don't you answer the question instead of changing the topic?
Well, it is my topic, isn't it? I began this line of discussion with a reply to an AC who was not you. You responded to my comment, and not the other way around.
The premise is simply that outside of the religious angle, there isn't a lot of logical support for making the Zionist issue worse.
You're patently ignoring the fact that no one legitimized an occupation by Russian Catholics of any Arab lands. There's no parity here, and if it made logical sense there would be.
Please don't accuse me of changing the topic. You're the one doing that. We've been discussing fine details of a tangent, and that's all.
You can have a problem with it all you want, but there are six million Jews living in Israel now and they aren't going anywhere. So how do we best resolve the issue and find a peaceful solution? Asking Israel to give up the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself is not a starting point for a just peace. What do you think we would do if a group of Native Americans started dropping rockets on American towns? Do you think we would allow them unfettered trade with the rest of the world so as to continue arming themselves?
The Native American parallel is an apt one. I think the Reservation solution is one of the more shameful things we have ever done to a people. This, actually, is part of the emotional underpinning to as why I don't care to see history repeat itself in this way.
I imagine a plan stepping towards peace would need to include:
1) Palestine gains 100% of the sovereignty that Israel enjoys.
2) The right of Palestinians and Israelis to hate and want to kill each other is acknowledged, as it is a natural human right.
3) Israel and Palestine are both restricted from committing war crimes, and are punished equally by the international community.
In short, parity will be required, because once you remove the 'pre-ordained by God' argument, the rest of it is extraordinarily weak. And, as an American, I fully respect the right for the Jews and Muslims to believe what they wish, and refuse to draft legal structures around these contradictory beliefs. It seems perfectly logical and natural to me, and thusly I advocate it.
Why are you able to do that for the Palestinians in 2010 but not the Jews in 1946?
Why are you able to do that for the Jews in 1946 but not the Russian Catholics in 1946?
And by the way, I am able. There were Allied nations besides the Soviet Union to appeal to. Is there not a sizable population of Jewish people in the United States? Whom did they have to kill to be able to live freely here?
Zionism was not the only answer, but it was the only choice that furthered a problem that was both unrelated and already an issue, and therefore I have a problem with it.
In short, each and every of the Allies had resources that could have been shared to remedy the situation without embroiling us in another century of war. Some took those paths, and I applaud them. If any are, these would be the examples of God's true chosen people. They did what Christ would have done. Those that chose eternal war did so out of anything except desire for justice, peace, or humanism of any kind.
So when you say 'the Jews in 1946', that's a pretty big group of people. Not all of which were Zionist.
It seems they're already aware. It would also seem that 'corrected' is not in any way the appropriate word.
They have the right to say whatever they wish, AND the moral responsibility to be decent human beings.
These are not incompatible.
The European Jews should have lobbied for remedy from the Allied governments. The Israel stuff is a cop out, and there's just no other way to describe it. What right did any Europeans have to emigrate there? Imagine they were Russian Catholics, also victims of the holocaust, who wanted to live there and wanted to be legitimized as the de facto rulers of that region. Doesn't make sense, does it?
Both sides picked up guns, and only one side became a sovereign entity. To this very day there is one government that is recognized as legitimate and one group of very pissed-off, unrepresented people.
Perhaps, but someone has to say it. We can't all sit around thinking everyone will walk away from this unchanged. The more racially-charged epithets we tolerate the longer it will be until we find peace.
In short, all the evil of the holocaust cannot justify the existence of Israel.
How about the evil that occurred after the Holocaust?
Don't you see how it still wouldn't matter?
The just thing to do is to right the wrongs by taking action against those committing them. If Poles were keeping stolen Jewish homes, that is an issue to take up with Poles, not Arabs.
Why would Arabs be expected to suffer for Polish or German crimes?
Logically, they wouldn't.
I'm sorry, but you come across as an anti-theist and a racist to me. You're not listening, so I'm not going to entertain you any further. Have a nice day!
They used missiles against targets in a building. Sounds logical to me.
Logical, but off-topic.
Emphasis on the 'begged' to be able to do so. The crew had a distinct desire to unload their entire complement of ammo before returning home. This is central to the premise, and cannot be logically ignored, except perhaps by accident.
The only mission where using up all the ammo is important is one described as 'kill as many as possible'. This goes to motive.
Also, that cuts both ways. Many people here and on other forums take this video as clear proof that the US guns down civilians on purpose. I'm glad to see we agree that this video is not clear proof of that.
Except that it actually is proof that these soldiers believed more in the killing than they did in the mission, which leads to behaviors like gunning down civilians on purpose.
"Come on Mr Journalist, crawl a little further and I can finish killing you," wouldn't be too great a stretch from what actually happened.
"I just crushed the corpse of a civilian with my Bradley, lol!" I can actually see this on Facebook...
It is repugnant, and I'm glad we got to see it.
The point is, ignoring the tenor of their desire paints the situation in too clean of a light.
I'm simply taking them to task for not practicing what they claim to believe is the most important thing in life. How is that unfair?
Your entire question is rhetorical.
You are somehow comfortable with the notion that the only 'true' interpretation is a fundamentalist one. This doesn't pass a basic logic test, let alone a cultural test.
And I know enough to know that they sure as hell don't practice everything in that book.
So you admit, then, that people adapt what the (any) book says to what is relevant to them at the time they need it.
Only the book has the right to define what it means, that's the whole point of religion.
But yet, there exists this statement, and even in the same post. I'll clue you in:
People.
People are the 'whole point' of religion. Specifically how these people live their lives, what their moral code winds up being, etc. You're somehow expecting your reader to believe that an inanimate object sprung into being all on its own and decided by itself what would be contained in the pages.
To the best of my knowledge, no one reads a religious tome in this manner. Or at least no one who would be even remotely interested in what you expect of them.
I defy you to find a Muslim country as free as most European countries or the US.
So your challenge, if I understand it, is to find a country without freedom of religion that is as free as one that has freedom of religion.
Okay, fine, I challenge you to make a salient comment without contradicting yourself!
Impossible tasks, FTW!
I agree with parent totally; GP's remark is ignorant in the extreme.
What we should really do is invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to atheism.
I don't know why we need to go about converting anyone to any specific religion, including atheism.
It would seem to me that any except the most vilely heretical atheist would oppose the freedom of religion. Good lord you guys need a handbook or something.
That means Ann Coulter's solution of "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." It will be the worst human rights atrocity in recorded history but I'm damned if I see a better solution.
Can you picture, for even a moment, Jesus Christ himself saying these words?
I cannot. It is simply incompatible with what he taught us about love, understanding, and charity. As I understand it he would rather they kill each and every one of us than we resort to this tactic. Christ never, ever wanted religion at the point of the sword or as a form of government. Indeed he rebelled against it, as God himself instructed him to do.
Christ was a living contradiction to the 'right as a people' belief that had somehow invaded cultural thought. He taught 'right by virtue' instead, even to the point of disobeying what was allegedly God's law.
Anyway, if you cannot picture Christ leading your army of indoctrination himself, then why would you expect it to work?
Like you suggested, no one has that area cornered completely, but some have pretty big chunk of that corner and feel very comfortable with it.
I think you judge these people too harshly. Their culture is under attack and they suspect the entire world of being in league against them at the behest of Israel. It is entirely possible that they see Israeli eradication as the cleanest solution to their problems.
And in at least some ways, they're right, logically speaking.
The right path, the long road, is towards a peaceful solution. But neither side wants that. We outsiders do, but those embroiled in that conflict will stop at nothing to get what they want. Both sides believe God told them to win, which has to be the greatest example of the existence of Satan I can possibly imagine.
Anyway, the true answer lies in 'hearts and minds', and that begins by getting past our personal biases and limiting how we judge people so we can be effective in aiding them.
Turks are arabs, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. The paint was going to wear off sooner or later.
Don't be a racist.
It's not anti-Jew, the people of Israel happen to be Jewish. This is anti-Israel slowly stealing the land of Palestinians.
Yes, this.
The holocaust was a terrible thing, and no one can deny that the Nazis were in the wrong and that the Jewish people, as a whole, were owed a debt - if ever any race/group was.
But this had zero to do with the Zionist issue of Israel and the English wanting to wash their hands of it in whichever way worked out the best for them. Look into the history, the violence over that silly patch of sand was a huge issue prior to the war, and continues to be so today.
In short, all the evil of the holocaust cannot justify the existence of Israel. It has to do that on its own. Nor can all of that evil excuse the evils conducted by their own government, or any government for that matter. Just because they feel racially superior to the rest of us, it doesn't mean that we have to capitulate to that notion. Were it any other people this would be abhorrent. Yet, because of the Nazis, we're all expected to be cool with it.
That is because the West has become weak and thinks that the more meek it gets, the more everyone will suddenly love it.
In truth, our enemies still hates us and we are losing what allies we once had.
If the West has become weak it is likely due to lacking any coherent direction, because we declared war on a concept, rather than on any specific people. We may as well have declared war on mosquitos. We're flailing blindly in every direction, yelling at the top of our lungs, as if it makes any difference at all. Of course we're going to get weary of it.
In fact, what the people of Turkey mostly want is good government and an end to corruption, security and prosperity, and for much of the youth, to be E.U. citizens so that they can freely study and travel in the rest of Europe
And yet 99% of them claim to be Muslims. They seem to be confused.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Now, how can those 'Muslims' possible support a non-Islamic, secular state? Either they're lying about wanting a secular state or they're confused about what being a Muslim entails. Which is it?
I think perhaps they simply have a different view of what it means to be a Muslim.
And frankly, I'd take their word of it over yours because they have the natural right to define their own religious practices.
Christianity has examples of this as well. Mormons are Christian, for example, but many of the mainline religions wouldn't claim them and they were in fact persecuted for their 'fringe' beliefs.
Point being, a culture's understandings of religions evolve. Deal with it.
Somehow, something has changed. It's interesting that this so closely coincides with the "blockade" incident with Israel, on account of many of the participants having been Turkish citizens.
I think a less-complex assessment is likely the case here: Turkey has been negotiating with Iran.
See, I'd guess that the very last thing Turkey wants is to be the staging point for yet another war on an Islamic nation. They see all the war-mongering/saber-rattling from the US and are troubled by it. They single-handedly undermined the US efforts to impose nuclear sanctions by brokering a fuel exchange deal directly with Iran, and I believe Brazil. They're almost certainly trying to avoid war.
It seems that part of this deal would have included some pro-Islamic considerations including this internet position (which seems common in non-Western societies) and the flotilla.