You answered your own question a post or two ago (emphasis mine):
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
It's perfectly acceptable to blockade an enemy to prevent him from receiving weaponry that can be used to kill your citizens or soldiers. The United States did the same thing forty years ago. The Allies did it during both World Wars. What's the problem?
I'm not seeing any negotiations, gestures of goodwill, etc.
Then you haven't been paying attention to the last twenty years of peace talks and gestures of goodwill.
I'm not even seeing a defensive posture, but an aggressive one.
The posture is in the eye of the beholder, but it should be noted that international law does not require you to wait until being attacked to take defensive action.
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.
If you admit it's a war then you can't condemn Israel for blockading them.
if the surviving Russian Catholics started taking out blood vendettas against the German people of today, would this be 'justice'?
That's interesting, because the Palestinians engaging in the modern day vendettas against the Israelis are two or three generations removed from the Palestinians that were displaced during the various wars waged against Israel. Why aren't you condemning them with the same vigor as you condemn Israel?
The fact remains that they could have peace tomorrow if they gave up on the Right of Return. The Israelis are willing to work with them on every other issue besides that one. The Palestinians refuse to accept any peace that doesn't give them the right to settle anywhere they want within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. There will be no peace until they give up on this fantasy or defeat the Israelis on the battlefield. Since they've shown no willingness to do the former and the latter is impossible I don't hold out much hope for seeing a just peace during this generation.
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.
The issue, as I defined it with my post eleven posts ago, is the disparity
Cry me a river. When Hamas stops launching rockets into Israel the Israelis will stop attacking them. It's really that simple. As far as "disparity", give me a break -- if someone pulls a knife on me are you doing to condemn me when I respond by pulling my pistol?
But there are those that justify things like the blockade
The blockade is justified as long as Hamas continues to try and import weaponry that is later used to murder Israeli civilians.
the home-crushing, human-killing Caterpillar machines
Maybe the Israelis should use rockets instead and they'd have your sympathy?
I wonder if, in the entire history of the music industry, if they have taken in that much.
They would have if it wasn't for the evil tape recorder/cd-burner/napster/p2p users. The record industry would have made trillions of dollars but for that technology and the taxes on their earnings would have paid off the national debt three times over by now.
Well duh. BP is a big evil corporation. The pirates are just sticking it to the man! You expected people to argue in favor of equality under the law rather than demonizing those that they dislike? What have you been smoking and why aren't you sharing?
You're patently ignoring the fact that no one legitimized an occupation by Russian Catholics of any Arab lands.
I'm ignoring it because it's a thinly veiled attempt at changing the subject. Even if I were to acknowledge it as a legitimate argument, it fails as an analogy because Israel was created by the international community through the United Nations out of an area that was not a sovereign country. There was no "occupation" until Israel was attacked by foreign nations bent on destroying her. After that happened she had every right to defend herself and her people, as acknowledged by the UN charter and international law.
Palestine gains 100% of the sovereignty that Israel enjoys.
That would happen tomorrow if the rocket attacks ceased and the Palestinians came to terms with the fact that there will be no right of return.
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?
There were Allied nations besides the Soviet Union to appeal to.
Ask the Polish Government in Exile and the Hungarian Revolutionaries how well that worked out.
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?
You didn't even read the article I previously linked to, did you? The United States had immigration quotas at the time and would not have accepted all of the displaced persons from Eastern Europe.
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.
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 European Jews should have lobbied for remedy from the Allied governments.
Yes, because Joe Stalin was such a caring man and would surely have intervened. Or did you forget that Poland was under Communist occupation at the time?
Seriously, put yourself in their shoes. Why are you able to do that for the Palestinians in 2010 but not the Jews in 1946? More than half of your family disappeared in the camps, while the survivors are still being attacked and killed. What would you do?
Both sides picked up guns
The Israelis picked up guns after they were invaded. They accepted the partition plan while the Arabs rejected it and invaded the lands designated for Israel. No amount of revisionist history can change this underlying fact.
and only one side became a sovereign entity
Whose fault is that? At varying times Israel has made generous peace offers to the Palestinians. Negotiations usually break down over the "Right of Return". The "Right of Return" would be demographic suicide for Israel and is never going to happen. Until the Palestinians accept this there won't be a lasting peace in the region.
It does matter. The Jews couldn't return to Europe without being murdered. What should they have done? Moved back to Poland in spite of the dangers and tried to fight it out in the courts? Would that have been your choice if you were a displaced person? You'd take your family back into that environment? I think not.
Furthermore, the Arabs weren't "suffering" until they rejected the partition plan and decided to settle the issue with violence. Jews were already living in Palestine and had been doing so for thousands of years. Palestine hadn't been self-governing for a long time prior to the partition plan. One way or another you had to reconcile the fact that you had two populations living in a soon to be decolonized area with different political objectives. The partition plan was an honest attempt by the global community to do this. One side accepted it. The other side picked up guns. The rest is recent history.
"Well, I don't know about "everywhere else," but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to "go home" to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them -- killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.
The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.
In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not "go home." When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives."
16,000 is a "shit ton"? You realize that there were single battles in the American Civil War, World War I and World War II with higher casualty counts than that? Of course Mexico started that war too, but don't let the facts get in the way of your rant.....
ut the nutters on the Internet claiming to be civil libertarians are bitching about health care, which doesn't violate any civil rights.
The individual mandate violates the right of free association (I'm to be compelled to associate with a for-profit entity), the 10th amendment and possibly the 5th amendment.
And I thought technically, civil libertarians are like the ACLU.
The ACLU has no right to claim to be a civil rights organization as long as they cling to the discredited notion that the 2nd amendment doesn't protect an individual right to firearm ownership.
Since you aren't an American and have no understanding of what our Republic stands for I see no further reason to waste my time explaining it to you. I'll just leave you to contemplate all of the genocides committed against unarmed populations in the 20th century.
I think you misunderstood me. I have no problem with amending the Constitution. I have a problem with the people that claim it's a "living document" so they can interpret it differently without going through the amendment process.
The 14th amendment only confers citizenship to those under the jurisdiction of the United States. One could make the case that the children of illegals shouldn't qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
No clue, but if so, why the blockade?
You answered your own question a post or two ago (emphasis mine):
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
It's perfectly acceptable to blockade an enemy to prevent him from receiving weaponry that can be used to kill your citizens or soldiers. The United States did the same thing forty years ago. The Allies did it during both World Wars. What's the problem?
I'm not seeing any negotiations, gestures of goodwill, etc.
Then you haven't been paying attention to the last twenty years of peace talks and gestures of goodwill.
I'm not even seeing a defensive posture, but an aggressive one.
The posture is in the eye of the beholder, but it should be noted that international law does not require you to wait until being attacked to take defensive action.
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.
If you admit it's a war then you can't condemn Israel for blockading them.
if the surviving Russian Catholics started taking out blood vendettas against the German people of today, would this be 'justice'?
That's interesting, because the Palestinians engaging in the modern day vendettas against the Israelis are two or three generations removed from the Palestinians that were displaced during the various wars waged against Israel. Why aren't you condemning them with the same vigor as you condemn Israel?
The fact remains that they could have peace tomorrow if they gave up on the Right of Return. The Israelis are willing to work with them on every other issue besides that one. The Palestinians refuse to accept any peace that doesn't give them the right to settle anywhere they want within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. There will be no peace until they give up on this fantasy or defeat the Israelis on the battlefield. Since they've shown no willingness to do the former and the latter is impossible I don't hold out much hope for seeing a just peace during this generation.
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.
The issue, as I defined it with my post eleven posts ago, is the disparity
Cry me a river. When Hamas stops launching rockets into Israel the Israelis will stop attacking them. It's really that simple. As far as "disparity", give me a break -- if someone pulls a knife on me are you doing to condemn me when I respond by pulling my pistol?
But there are those that justify things like the blockade
The blockade is justified as long as Hamas continues to try and import weaponry that is later used to murder Israeli civilians.
the home-crushing, human-killing Caterpillar machines
Maybe the Israelis should use rockets instead and they'd have your sympathy?
then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening.
You mean like Fannie and Freddie?
I wonder if, in the entire history of the music industry, if they have taken in that much.
They would have if it wasn't for the evil tape recorder/cd-burner/napster/p2p users. The record industry would have made trillions of dollars but for that technology and the taxes on their earnings would have paid off the national debt three times over by now.
Well duh. BP is a big evil corporation. The pirates are just sticking it to the man! You expected people to argue in favor of equality under the law rather than demonizing those that they dislike? What have you been smoking and why aren't you sharing?
You're patently ignoring the fact that no one legitimized an occupation by Russian Catholics of any Arab lands.
I'm ignoring it because it's a thinly veiled attempt at changing the subject. Even if I were to acknowledge it as a legitimate argument, it fails as an analogy because Israel was created by the international community through the United Nations out of an area that was not a sovereign country. There was no "occupation" until Israel was attacked by foreign nations bent on destroying her. After that happened she had every right to defend herself and her people, as acknowledged by the UN charter and international law.
Palestine gains 100% of the sovereignty that Israel enjoys.
That would happen tomorrow if the rocket attacks ceased and the Palestinians came to terms with the fact that there will be no right of return.
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?
There were Allied nations besides the Soviet Union to appeal to.
Ask the Polish Government in Exile and the Hungarian Revolutionaries how well that worked out.
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?
You didn't even read the article I previously linked to, did you? The United States had immigration quotas at the time and would not have accepted all of the displaced persons from Eastern Europe.
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.
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 European Jews should have lobbied for remedy from the Allied governments.
Yes, because Joe Stalin was such a caring man and would surely have intervened. Or did you forget that Poland was under Communist occupation at the time?
Seriously, put yourself in their shoes. Why are you able to do that for the Palestinians in 2010 but not the Jews in 1946? More than half of your family disappeared in the camps, while the survivors are still being attacked and killed. What would you do?
Both sides picked up guns
The Israelis picked up guns after they were invaded. They accepted the partition plan while the Arabs rejected it and invaded the lands designated for Israel. No amount of revisionist history can change this underlying fact.
and only one side became a sovereign entity
Whose fault is that? At varying times Israel has made generous peace offers to the Palestinians. Negotiations usually break down over the "Right of Return". The "Right of Return" would be demographic suicide for Israel and is never going to happen. Until the Palestinians accept this there won't be a lasting peace in the region.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
It does matter. The Jews couldn't return to Europe without being murdered. What should they have done? Moved back to Poland in spite of the dangers and tried to fight it out in the courts? Would that have been your choice if you were a displaced person? You'd take your family back into that environment? I think not.
Furthermore, the Arabs weren't "suffering" until they rejected the partition plan and decided to settle the issue with violence. Jews were already living in Palestine and had been doing so for thousands of years. Palestine hadn't been self-governing for a long time prior to the partition plan. One way or another you had to reconcile the fact that you had two populations living in a soon to be decolonized area with different political objectives. The partition plan was an honest attempt by the global community to do this. One side accepted it. The other side picked up guns. The rest is recent history.
And just as enlightened New York has to deal with voters from backwards parts of the nation
Is there anyway you could have said that and come off as more of an elitist douche bag?
Don't feed the trolls.
In short, all the evil of the holocaust cannot justify the existence of Israel.
How about the evil that occurred after the Holocaust?
"Well, I don't know about "everywhere else," but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to "go home" to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them -- killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.
The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.
In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not "go home." When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives."
killing a shit-ton of Mexicans
16,000 is a "shit ton"? You realize that there were single battles in the American Civil War, World War I and World War II with higher casualty counts than that? Of course Mexico started that war too, but don't let the facts get in the way of your rant.....
With a sharp knife and a quiet step
Firearm > sharp knife
ut the nutters on the Internet claiming to be civil libertarians are bitching about health care, which doesn't violate any civil rights.
The individual mandate violates the right of free association (I'm to be compelled to associate with a for-profit entity), the 10th amendment and possibly the 5th amendment.
And I thought technically, civil libertarians are like the ACLU.
The ACLU has no right to claim to be a civil rights organization as long as they cling to the discredited notion that the 2nd amendment doesn't protect an individual right to firearm ownership.
Since you aren't an American and have no understanding of what our Republic stands for I see no further reason to waste my time explaining it to you. I'll just leave you to contemplate all of the genocides committed against unarmed populations in the 20th century.
You are wrong.
What about rape, murder and sexual molestation?
All of those happen in the animal kingdom as well.
What about those sick fucks who get off torturing animals?
What about my cat toying around with a mouse even though she's well fed and could easily kill it without allowing it to suffer?
I think you misunderstood me. I have no problem with amending the Constitution. I have a problem with the people that claim it's a "living document" so they can interpret it differently without going through the amendment process.
So how many cats did you interview for your study to determine what their motivations are?
The 14th amendment only confers citizenship to those under the jurisdiction of the United States. One could make the case that the children of illegals shouldn't qualify.
The rest of the animal kingdom kills when it's hungry and eats what it kills
You've never owned a cat, have you?
We are the only species that acts violently for no reason. What reason does a man have to randomly abuse or kill a woman?
Rape is not unique to homo sapiens.
These are things that are human incarnations of violence for the purpose of entertainment.
I take it you've never watched a cat play with a mouse before killing it?