You know, using Westchester County as an example of LIBERAL racism isn’t going to get you too far.

After all, it’s Republican Peekskill that gave the world the KKK riots at the Paul Robeson concert, where the cops hung back to let them, and it gave us George Pataki, that clod, and finally, Mr. Neo-Nazi himself: Mel Gibson.  Yeah, ol’ Mel is a Peekskill boy who made his name in Australia.

Scarsdale is and always has been Rich Republican, and, while it’s been about 35 years since I’ve lived in Westchester, the county government has been GOP for as long as I can remember. And Republican Yonkers is a disgraceful BASTION of old-fashioned segregation.

In fact, Westchester politics is such a jumble that nobody can make sense of it one way or another.

I guess you figured if you got REALLY granular nobody would know what you are talking about and challenge you.

Now that I have seen something resembling content from you, Yani, I at least have an appreciation for your antipathy--precisely what I would expect from an unenlightened and uninformed Zionist.

Non credo, I think there is a major distinction between so-called “liberals” and those whom we refer to as progressives.  True progressives are those who seek out journalists who speak truth to power, like Amy Goodman and Bill Moyers.  They are not blinded by propaganda, whether it eminates from Washington or Tel Aviv.  They seek to pierce through false claims of anti-Semitism which obscure the truth about an illegal and brutal forty-year occupation.

I do not buy into the claim that a Hillary Clinton, a John Edwards or a Barack Obama are unaware of that truth.  Just as global warming is to Exxon Mobil, these corporate shills see academic studies like those offered by a Noam Chomsky or a Norman Finkelstein, not to mention President Carter’s “Peace not Apartheid” as being an “inconvenient truth.” Just as they find selling out to the corporatocracy the easier road to travel, so too they chose to tout the Israel-is-always-right line precisely because it provides the easier path than the road less travelled by the likes of a Dennis Kucinich.

Just as the war in Iraq was the product of fixing the intelligence around the policy, and not the product of “faulty intelligence,” so too the one-sided policies of America’s so-called “Democratic leadership” on this issue is the result of disengenous posturing and not the work of well-intentioned individuals who have been duped by AIPAC and Tel Aviv.  And this is precisely why these pseudo-Democrats should be held accountable for the disasterous policies throughout the Middle East.

non credo, point well taken, but…

Marginalization is the process used by the corporate media to create what Noam Chomsky refers to as the “democracy deficit.” It is not limited to those Dems who challenge the AIPAC propaganda line, but applies across the board to any who would challenge the vested interests of the American ruling class, be it on the Middle East, NAFTA, the WTO, the oil cartel, the healthcare insurance industry scam, the prescription drug pricing scam, the military-industrial complex, Enronesque accounting schemes or, most especially, media consolidation and the Fairness Doctrine.

Where the UK and European democracies conduct campaigns over the span of weeks, our system has devolved into a permanent electoral cycle.  No sooner were the votes being counted for the 2006 mid-terms before candidates begin declaring for 2008--Why?  To give them time to troll for the billions of dollars needed to buy time for their 30-second deceptive ads as the corporate media astutely covers only the image but never the substance of the corporate favored candidates.

To suggest that any of the so-called Democratic “leadership” are captive to this is to ignore the fact that these charletons have willingly bought into the corrupt system as the easy path to success--certainly the easier path to success than the road traveled by Dennis Kucinich.  It is their lack of integrity and not the threat of marginalization which is the true source of their self-imposed captivity to lobbies including, but certainly not limited to, AIPAC.

In the end, the real reason for perpetuation of this unacceptable status quo is neither AIPAC, Israel, the Republi-crooks or even the cowardess and dishonesty of the corporatists trying to pass for Democrats.  The fault lies with We the People.  Until a majority of Americans awake to the need to become active citizens who seek out substance from alternative media rather than passive consumers; until they begin to replace the Democratic “leadership” with progressive Democrats who put integrity before the prospects of re-election, ours will be a very dim future.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to non credo and all truthdiggers.

Ga:

You TOTALLY misunderstood me. Totally.

If someone is randomly shooting rockets into towns and cities, and places his launchers in towns and cities, you are saying it’s just as wrong to shoot back to knock out those launchers, and maybe hit civilians they are using as shields, as to just randomly shoot back into populated areas as well.  In fact, you are saying that the ONLY moral thing to do is let the assholes keep shooting at your civilians and NOT take action because you would then be guilty of killing them.

So… You figure that the attacked have a moral obligation not to stop the attackers but just to accept death and destruction out of fear of bringing the same on the attacker’s people.

I do not understand this.  Don’t bother explaining--you didn’t understand a word I said. All you read was “Israelis always bad, Palestinians always justified”. I said no such thing, nor implied it.

Non Credo:  Most often you make solid points in your posts, but the suggestion that the Republicans and the pro-Israel lobby have made it impossible for Democrats to oppose the administration’s war policies is not one of them.  Those Democrats with integrity, like Dennis Kucinich, have had no problem speaking out either against the administration’s war policies or against Israel’s 40 year illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.  Corporate-sponsored Dems like Hillary Clinton don’t speak out against such things as Israel’s erection of an apartheid wall “on occupied territory” precisely because they lack integrity.  That is why we have seen Hillary trying to out-Cheney old dead-eye Dick by stating that no options are off-the-table with respect to Iran when she appeared before AIPAC.

The only reason the pro-Israel lobby has been so successful in narrowing the range of acceptable discourse in this country is because disengenuous pols have allowed it to happen.  Those who remain silent in the face of injustice become complicit in the outcome.

Oh yeah, I left something out…

America’s “blind eye” regarding the overwhelming amounts of Iraqi/Palestinian civilian deaths vs. American/Israeli civilian deaths is quite disgusting. What’s the ratio by now, like 1000 to 1?

And condemn me for stating it, but when an occupied people, under extended extremely harsh and humiliating circumstances, facing this disgusting ratio of dead, decides to inflict some death on the occupying forces civilian populous—by suicide bombings for example—in order to change that occupying countries’ thoughts about said occupation,
well that is legitimate warfare. And it always has been.

If Russia, for example, occupied the U.S. like we are in Iraq, what would you do? (And I ask all “red-blooded” American “patriots” that question.)

The root is the Arabs’ inalterable desire to destroy Israel.

There is a difference between Isreal and the Isreal occupied territories. The Arab desire is regarding the latter. This is a BIG difference that few acknowledge or even seem to understand.

Re: #114892 by Inherit The Wind

Thank you for a well written post. Who can add to that beyond one thought… like it or not.

So let’s cut this horseshit that the difference between legitimate warfare/resistance and terrorism depends solely on which side you are on.

We have this idea, in the U.S., that there is something called “good” and “bad” killing. Many believe that it is not just okay, but “good” to kill “bad” people, and “bad” to kill “good” people.

(Many will further clarify “good” people as “innocent” people. This is how many people justify capitol punishment; “people on death row are bad people and their victims were innocent people.")

This is the basic argument, isn’t it? That deliberate killing of civilians is “terror” and hence wrong. But also that the accidental, or collateral killing of civilians is not “terror” and hence not wrong—that’s different you say.

Now, we could, look at the many wars of the 20th century, where Western countries deliberately bombed and burned whole cities of our enemies, but, that’s different, one would say.

But today?

Well, what about the Battle of Fallujah? *

But let me cut this post short.

Wars are no longer fought as armies in the fields, or tanks against tanks, planes against planes. There are no more carpet bombings, no more fire storms.

We have “smart bombs” now. We have “depleted uranium” shells now. We have “cluster bombs” and “daisy cutters.” We—U.S., Britain and Isreal—have MASSIVE FIREPOWER. We can rain UTTER DESTRUCTION from the sky targeted by GPS.

If, let us suppose, an enemy of ours wanted fight back… let us say, an enemy with only grenades and small arms as weapons… just how shall they fight back? Hmmm??

When a people has been on the receiving end of massive firepower and debilitating and humiliating occupation—for years—fostering a form of generational hatred, just what is not, to them, legitmate in fighting back?

The U.S. and Isreal is running down a steep road toward the belief that all civilian deaths on our sides are the results of illegitimate “terrorism” and that all the civilian deaths on “their” side are the result of legitimate tactics.

The difference is that “they” kill innocents “on purpose” and “we” kill innocents “by accident”.

They are still dead, though, in the end. And killing and the hatred will continue for another generation, will it not?

*
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK21Ak01.html

“FALLUJAH - Three years after a devastating United States-led siege of the city, residents of Fallujah continue to struggle with a shattered economy, infrastructure and lack of mobility.

The city that was routed in November 2004 is still suffering the worst humanitarian conditions under a siege that continues. Although military actions are down to the minimum inside the city, local and US authorities do not seem to be thinking of ending the agonies of the over 400,000 residents of Fallujah.”

Yani (#114795), let me try to help YOU understand with an experiment that involves far less risk.  Read all the comments that have been submitted since yours appeared.  Classify all the assertions you read there according to those “true-or-false, right-or-wrong or good-or-bad” terms that you claim to comprehend so well.  Then, convince the authors of those assertions of the validity of your classifications.  (Note that I said “less risk,” rather than “no risk!") When you have finished, take two aspirin and call me in the morning! 

RE:  #114892 by Inherit The Wind on 11/21 at 4:18 am
================================

Nice explanation, ITW
---
And here’s an example of them going after civilians. In this case a young father.

Iran, Syria Stepping Up Support of Terrorists - Yaakov Katz

A day after Ido Zoldan, a young father, was gunned down in a Palestinian shooting attack near Kedumim,in Israel, IDF officers warned Tuesday that Palestinian terrorist groups would continue trying to perpetrate terror attacks in an effort to derail peace talks ahead of the Annapolis meeting. Fatah’s Aksa Martyrs Brigades took responsibility for the West Bank shooting attack, saying it was “a protest against the Annapolis conference.” Defense officials said there was growing Iranian and Syrian involvement in motivating Hamas and Islamic Jihad to carry out terrorist attacks, including the transfer of funds and instructions.

(Jerusalem Post)

Ernest Canning on 11/20 at 10:18 pm
(1149 comments total)

Robert:  Anyone who is so ignorant as to suggest that “terror” is the source of occupation does not merit a response.  What most people refer to as terrorism is, in fact, guerilla warfare.  It is the tactic that a weaker foe traditionally turns to in the face of overwhelming force.

While it is true that the force in power describes ALL resistance as ‘terrorism’, that does not make that the correct definition.  Check out what Lenin said about the use of ‘terror’.

You have confused guerrilla warfare and resistance with terrorism.  They are decidedly different.  Guerrilla warfare is targeted against military and government control targets--army and police.  It might attack a control center, or even, under some circumstances telephone or postal services.  It is intended to disrupt the functioning of the military or the government. It is either strategic or tactical, or both.

This completely differs from terrorism, which is NOT directed at strategic or tactical targets. It is TOTALLY directed at civilians, at innocents, at women and children, solely to terrorize the population of the opponent.  I find it despicable that intelligent posters ignore this obvious difference.

If a suicide bomber drives a car bomb into a military installation, that’s guerrilla warfare, whether you agree with the bomber’s position, or his target’s.  Still, from an disinterested POV, it’s a legitimate target.

When a suicide bomber walks into a wedding, or a pizza parlor filled with children, or a bus filled with commuters and detonates his bomb, that’s terrorism.  From a disinterested POV, that is NOT a legitimate target.

I find it impossible to understand anyone disagreeing with these two limited definitions of Guerrilla Warfare vs Terrorism.

Of course, where it becomes muddy is when a legitimate target--a military or police station, or a rocket-launching site, is buried in the midst of civilians.  Then, the owner of the target is USING the civilians as human shield, and relying on the humanity of his opponent, or on international outrage, to prevent his installation from being attacked.

It’s a poor tactic, because the other side then must make the tactical decision: Which is worse: Risking killing civilians to get at the target, or allowing my people to be killed instead.  Usually the decision is to protect one’s own.  But in that case, the greater share of the responsibility MUST fall on the target, who deliberately elected to use innocents as a shield.

So...If Hamas launches rockets from Gaza at military and governmental targets in Israel, that’s guerrilla warfare. Civilian deaths as a result are unfortunate, but are not “terrorism”. If Hamas deliberately launches them at civilian targets, solely to terrorize Israelis, that’s terrorism.

If the IDF launches missiles or other armaments at the sites of the Hamas missile launchers in Gaza, that’s legitimate warfare. Civilian deaths are unfortunate, but on Hamas’ head. If the IDF randomly launches attacks on civilians solely to terrorize Gazans, that’s terrorism.

So let’s cut this horseshit that the difference between legitimate warfare/resistance and terrorism depends solely on which side you are on.  There are, in fact, clear-cut definitions that delineate which is which.  These definitions will hold up for disinterested observers and go beyond the biases held by the supporters of either side.

Robert:  Anyone who is so ignorant as to suggest that “terror” is the source of occupation does not merit a response.  What most people refer to as terrorism is, in fact, guerilla warfare.  It is the tactic that a weaker foe traditionally turns to in the face of overwhelming force.

It is interesting how the ideology of imperialism and aggression always produces phrases like terrorism to demonize any who would resist conquest and occupation.  The resistance movements throughout occupied were labeled “terrorists” by the Nazi occupiers.  In Franco’s Spain, the remnants of the former Republican army were given the terrorist label by the fascists.  Those who fought for independence in Algeria were labeled terrorists by the French.  In all three cases, as conquest settled into occupation, the occupiers turned to brutal repression and torture in response to resistance. 

(No doubt, if the word “terrorism” had been around at the time, the British would have applied it to the Colonial forces during our own Revolution.)

Israel’s occupation of Palestine has not provided an exception to the rule.  Consider the following from a 2001 study by the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem on the “torture of Palestinian minors” quoted by Prof. Finkelstein in “Beyond Chutzpah:”

“Israeli security forces, some of them masked and some with their faces blackened, arrested them at their homes late at night...After arriving at the police station, policemen used severe torture when interrogating the detainees...[including] severe beatings, splashing cold water on detainees (the events occured during winter), putting the detainee’s head in the toilet bowl....”

The report implicated Israeli medical personnel, who would examine handcuffed and blindfolded detainees, sometimes treating them after they were tortured, before sending them back for more.  B’Tselem found that these were “not isolated cases or uncommon conduct by certain police officers, but methods of torture adopted at the police station and used against dozens of detainees.”

This is not an isolated report.  On page after page Finkelstein quotes from reports of numerous human rights organizations like Amnesty International documenting Israel’s systematic use of torture, which has been so severe as to produce multiple deaths.

Of course, Finkelstein’s carefully documented academic study on the reality on the ground as well the manner in which Zionists and their allies utilize false claims of anti-Semitism to conceal the similarities between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Nazi occupation of Europe led to a well-orchestrated hard-right campaign, led by Alan Dershowitz, to smear Finkelstein and remove him from his tenured position.

“The root of the “problem” is not Israel’s administration of the territories. The root is the Arabs’ inalterable desire to destroy Israel.”

You have identified 1/3 of the problem. 1/3 is the Israeli practice of terrorism on the Palistineans and not being serious in getting the settler issues resolved. The other 1/3 is the inability of the U.S. to see the whole problem for whatever reason. We are perceived as turning a “blind eye” now matter how many human rights abuses the Israeli’s perpetrate.

Hopefully in Annapolis Condi Rice will be able to bring a more balanced U.S. viewpoint to the negotiations but I am not hopeful. We have been down this road too many times before.

#114815 by Howard on 11/20 at 7:22 pm

Excellent response!

RE:  #114803 by Robert on 11/20 at 6:41 pm
(576 comments total)

says “"OCCUPATION BREEDS TERROR

Israel must leave the territories, and must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not “”
==================================
=======================================

NO.  TERROR BREEDS “OCCUPATION” !

The root of the “problem” is not Israel’s administration of the territories. The root is the Arabs’ inalterable desire to destroy Israel. No country should be asked to commit national suicide in order to appease world public opinion. No easy solution of the territorial dispute of the “West Bank” and Gaza is possible until the Arab nations give full recognition and acceptance to Israel and are genuinely willing to make peace and to establish full normalization of relations. Israel is surrounded by implacable enemies. Does anybody really expect the Israelis to turn over the strategically crucial territories of the “West Bank” to those who are sworn to destroy them? Look what happened after leaving. Gaza.  Rockets are daily sent into Israel. And Israel well remembers the example of Czechoslovakia, which, under irresistible international pressure, turned the Sudentenland over to Hitler’s Third Reich — and ceased to exist as an independent nation just a few months thereafter.

Jews have been living in Judea/Samaria since Biblical times. The area was made judenrein (free of Jews), following the Nazi model, by Jordan, when it was in possession of the territory, form 1948--1967.. After 1967, Jews moved back into the territory and a great hullabaloo was raised and is still being raised about the not more than 200,000 “settlers,” who do not occupy more than 2 percent of the area. But there is no concern about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who, lured by the prosperity of Israel, have flooded into the area, nor of the more than one million Arabs who live in Israel proper and who enjoy full rights of citizenship.

Israel acquired the territories (the “West Bank” and Gaza) in defense of an aggressive war waged against it. No country in history has ever been asked to return such territories. Do the Poles return the huge chunk of Germany that they acquired in the wake of World War II? Do the Czechs return the Sudetenland, do the French return Alsace-Lorraine? Of course not! Only Israel is being asked to return such territories. The last sovereign of the “West Bank” and of Gaza were the Ottomans. The “West Bank” and Gaza are unallocated territories. To speak of Israel as “occupier” is preposterous; to speak of it, as Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN did, as “illegal occupiers,” which is poisonous slander. He knew better. But unfortunately, the Big Lie of Israel’s “occupation “ has been repeated so long and so often that even people of good faith have come to believe it and to accept it.

OCCUPATION BREEDS TERROR

Israel must leave the territories, and must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not

Seth Freedman

November 19, 2007 7:00 AM

“When I first moved to this country, I was prepared to play my part by enlisting in the IDF and serving in the West Bank. While there, I saw for myself the effect my mere uniformed presence had on the Palestinians I encountered on a daily basis. Every interaction took place with me holding all the cards - it was me with the loaded gun in my hands; it was me barking instructions to “stop or I’ll shoot”, “lift up your shirt”, “don’t come another step closer”; it was me playing with my quarry as though they were puppets on the end of short, taut strings.

However, I still believed that we “did what we had to do”, since it was a case of us or them, and we could never ease up in our actions for fear that the next Palestinian we encountered was the one with a bomb strapped to his chest. And so it continued, bursting into buildings to round up the residents and lock them in their own basement, so that we could take over the house and grab a few hours’ sleep in the middle of a mission - and all perfectly acceptable in the context of war.

But that was when I saw the wide, silent eyes of the families’ children as we screamed at their father - their hero, their protector - and wrested from him the reins of power inside his own house. And that’s when it started to dawn on me just what kind of effect our actions were having on the next generation, who were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle and imposing our will on them through the sights of our guns.

Once I left the army, my forays into the West Bank were on more equal terms, as I sought to meet the very people whose towns I’d previously patrolled, to hear their stories about life under military rule. From Jenin to Bethlehem to Ramallah and beyond, the extent of the suffering and the depth of the torment was exposed to me time and again. There was no doubt in my mind that our mere presence in their daily routines was twisting the knife every time they encountered a soldier - and breeding extremism and radicalism all the while.

The unspoken truth that every Israeli knows, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, is that occupation breeds terror. Every incursion, every raid, every curfew and collective punishment, drives the moderates into the welcoming arms of the militants, who promise to return their honour and their wounded pride by fighting the oppressors’ fire with fire of their own. And that fact alone should be enough to shake Israelis awake and realise that the occupation has to end, as much for our own security as for the sake of the Palestinians that we’re subjugating.

Even those who only care about the safety of the Israeli people, and to hell with the Palestinians, should be backing the withdrawal of troops to the Green Line. They should know that the labyrinthine network of checkpoints is not actually making them safer, but is there just to make the Palestinians’ lives a misery, thus endangering Israeli lives further in the end. And they should recognise that while Israel’s presence continues to fester in the Palestinian territories like an open sore, there is little to no chance that the Palestinians will seek rapprochement and dialogue with their neighbours.

And that means that any coexistence projects - such as those promoted by OneVoice, the Clubhouse network, and so on - are doomed to fail while the occupiers refuse to acknowledge the plight of the occupied. Israel has the upper hand whichever way you look at it, and to treat the situation as somehow balanced is to overlook totally the sheer injustice of it all.”

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seth_freedman/2007 /11/occupation_breeds_terror.html

(Continued from above post)

OCCUPATION BREEDS TERROR

“Israel must leave the territories, and must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not”

“Of course, the Israelis have suffered decades of terrorism at the hands of extremist Palestinian groups, and as such have every right to demand their government protects them from similar atrocities in the future. But, for all that Israelis have had it bad, they haven’t seen every facet of their lives systematically destroyed at the hands of an uncaring occupying force. They haven’t seen their economy run into the ground by crippling border closures and sanctions, they haven’t been denied freedom of movement between their homes and farmlands, and they haven’t had to beg soldiers to let their wives through checkpoints in order to give birth in hospital.

At the same time, the settlements are as much of a problem to a viable Palestinian state as anything, thanks to the watertight security their presence demands from the army, restricting Palestinian movement and cutting the West Bank into tiny ribbon-like strips. As one Palestinian said, in Emma Williams’ essential book on the region, “thanks to the settlers and their infrastructure, we’re locked so tight into the State of Israel we’re like a bug in concrete.”

But still the expansion continues, and still the stranglehold on the Palestinians persists. While the Israeli public stays silent, while their taxes swell the government’s coffers, they are tacitly aiding and abetting slow torture on a national scale. On top of the sporadic killing that the occupation inevitably causes, the killing of an entire people’s hopes and dreams takes place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And it has to stop. Even though it’s no doubt too late to pull many of the current generation back from the brink of hate and enmity, there’s still time to ensure that today’s resentment doesn’t have to be instilled into the children of tomorrow. Playing the “fighting terror” card might win Knesset votes, but it doesn’t push things forward nor work out how to pave the way towards long-lasting future peace.

Israel must leave the territories, and they must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not. The occupation is illegal, it is abhorrent, and it is utterly counterproductive if its aim is to bring security to Israelis. Anyone who ventures into the Palestinian towns and cities, who witnesses the devastation for themselves and hears the tragic tales from the horse’s mouth, knows this. And anyone who prefers to cover their ears or avert their eyes is only doing damage to both sides in the long run. Israel will never have peace whilst it crushes Palestinian aspirations - and both sides deserve far better lives than those they are being forced to endure at present.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seth_freedman/2007 /11/occupation_breeds_terror.html

Non Credo asks, appropriately, where the profit would be even for elites in waging war against Iran since it would drive up the price of oil.  Good point if you were dealing with rational people who are not ideologically blinded by the goals of Disaster Capitalism.

Consider the 3/20/06 newsletter from investigative reporter Greg Palast, who asserts he obtained a copy of a 323 page pre-war State Department Memo revealing the goal in Iraq was not to obtain control in order order to increase oil production but to suppress it.  As a result the 2005 profits of the five largest oil companies soared to a whopping $113 billion as compared to pre-war profits of $34 billion in 2002.  Of the $686 million in compensation received by former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond during the period 1993 to 2005, $400 million came at his last year at the helm.  Exxon’s net income skyrocketed from $4.8 billion in 1992 to $36.13 in 2005.  It’s 3rd quarter profits in 2005 of $10 billion works out to $4.5 million per hour.

For some, there is far greater wealth to be acquired from a disruption of the oil supply than there is in securing it. This, of course, entails an irrational focus only on immediate riches without regard for long term consequences, something we’ve already seen in their corrupt effort to deny the human impact on global warming.  Indeed, I am reminded of the display used by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” where gold bars are put on one side and the earth on the other--the central point being what good are gold bars if there is no planet?

What we have already seen in Iraq is thoroughly irrational, but, for a select few, it has been extremely profitable.

To Yani:  The only “issue” I have is hit-and-run snipers who have nothing substantive to say yet complain about those who do.

Seems simple enough to say that you would dance around it. Thank you for the example

You need to get some chutzpah and I say this with all sincerity. This “grey” world you want to be in is not reality. There is a black and white. Choosing to talk around issues as opposed to taking them head on with truth and honesty is one of the problems we face in this world.

Your fear of using the word “ wrong “and justification is nonsensical to me. Do I think that it is rhetorically charged? No. That is nonsense. There are things in life that are wrong.

If your child is caught shoplifting do you not tell them it is wrong?
Is genocide not wrong?

If you truly struggle with people’s use of vocabulary, a dictionary might help.

rowman (#114726), the reason why I explicitly cited to the final sentence of your #114707 comments was to observe that I liked everything in that sentence except the word “wrong.”
--
Now would it not be far better for you to understand the specifics of this and to know why it is wrong so as to properly challenge them on it?
--
If you do not agree with me that “wrong” is a rhetorically charged word, I am not sure I can persuade you otherwise.  However, even a cursory view of history would probably be enough to indicate that the word tends to start more arguments than conclude peaceful agreements!  Personally, I side with Kant’s observation that there are precious few propositions out there that are flat-out false, even in the domain of “pure reason.” On the other hand, making a giant leap from Immanuel Kant to Clifford Geertz, I believe that our conversations are full of what I like to call “terminological disconnects,” where two people use the same word but differ in their semantic or rhetorical denotations or connotations of that word.

For example, if you told me that the sky is green, there are all sorts of hypotheses I would explore before declaring your assertion to be false.  The simplest is that we have different color vocabularies.  One more appropriate to our times would be a metaphorical usage with environmental connotations:  “The sky is refreshingly free of pollutants.” To give you an idea just how far we can press this game, if you finally convince me that you really believe that the sky has the same color as the grassy field, I might then wonder if you were color-blind!

Do not think that this is an idle game, though.  Life is full of terminological disconnects, and part of the human condition seems to be that we are really irritated by them.  Personally, I find this a better explanation of our behavior than the hypothesis that hostility is wired into our genes!

RE: #114709 by Stephen Smoliar
I had to read my post several times. I do not recall using the adjective “wrong” and do not see where I did. I did say that accelerating the rapture, as some believe, is based on incorrect doctrine / interpretation so I suppose that you could rightly infer this as being “wrong”.

I stand by what I said. If someone states that we humans can influence G-d’s timing or plan by something we do, and they cite the Christian / Judea text as a basis for this, their interpretation is incorrect and their doctrine is flawed.

I disagree that “grounding the challenge on the premise that something is “wrong” does little more than blunt the rhetorical impact of the challenge.”

If I told you the sky was green today, would you tell me I was wrong or would you dance around the issue for fear of offending or some other reason?

rowman (#114707), skating onto the thin ice of cultural relativism, I wish to challenge your use of the adjective “wrong.” I believe that much of the mess in which we are enmired can be attributed to hard-and-fast attempts to reduce everything to true-or-false, right-or-wrong, good-or-bad.  Like it or not, we live in a world with a massive number of belief systems.  We can talk about challenging each other’s beliefs, which is why I wholeheartedly embrace the rest of your final sentence; but grounding the challenge on the premise that something is “wrong” does little more than blunt the rhetorical impact of the challenge.

#114509 by Ernest Canning,
“ …In short, the Christian right has its own agenda… to accelerate the Rapture”. Same could be said of some Muslims (Ahmedenejad version).

You would be partially correct on this being that there are “Christians” that do believe this but not all do. For those that do, problem is, it is based on incorrect doctrine / interpretation.

Now would it not be far better for you to understand the specifics of this and to know why it is wrong so as to properly challenge them on it?

The obsession of the Muslim Arabs with Israel is totally irrational. To have Israel as an independent country in the middle of the Arab-Muslim world is utterly intolerable to them. That is the reason that, making allowance for the very cold peace with Egypt and the more recently concluded peace with Jordan, the 21 Arab states, among them the richest countries in the world, with a combined population of more than 200 million and with a land area greater than that of the U.S., have concentrated obsessive ferocity by military, economic, ideological, political, diplomatic, and any other means to destroy the tiny Jewish community of Palestine, and its successor, the Jewish state of Israel—only 7 million people, in a country just one-half the size of San Bernardino County in California.

Acts of terror in the United States, Argentina, England, and Israel have sobered many who had believed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be the cause for the unrest in the Middle East. The fact is that war is endemic in the Arab world and that the Muslim Arabs have been waging war against each other and against their non-Arab neighbors for centuries. But, as much as the Muslim Arabs hate each other, most of them are united in their greater hatred against the “infidel Jews” and their tiny country, and they have built vast war machines for the ultimate “jihad” to nuke the Jews, to poison them by chemicals or biologicals, or to chase them into the sea. The focus on the Palestinian-Israel conflict plight is designed to divert attention from the many domestic and inter-Arab problems, and to direct the Muslim-Arab frustration against Israel, the “infidel Western outsider.” The suggestion that Israel divest itself from its historic heartland, the 2,362 sq. mi. “West Bank,” and from the Golan would lead to strategic suicide. The real cause of the never-ending turmoil in the Middle East is the unremitting desire of still most of the Arab-Muslim states to destroy Israel, their inability to come to terms with its very existence. That hatred and that intolerance are fueled by Arab-Muslim fanaticism and intransigence and unwillingness to accept diversity in the region. Only when that will be overcome can peace and tranquility finally come to the Middle East.

An Opening Shot for War on Iran?

By JONATHAN COOK

Counterpunch

September 27, 2007

Israel’s air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.

From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?



It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel’s month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.



The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.



But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel’s public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.



The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group’s program of “creative destruction” in the Middle East—the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel—was at risk of being shunted aside.



Instead the “pragmatists” in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq—presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons’ day in the sun had finally passed.



Israel’s leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran’s development of a nuclear program—whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim—had to be stopped at all costs.



While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.



http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0307.htm#Top

Don’t like the way things are?  Get a job on Wall Street where bonuses this year are to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each, totalling in the billions.  Those folks can refi their high interest mortgages.  Ah, war!

That’s the point where you and I diverge, non credo.  With or without Israel, the Bush regime would be carrying out war not only as an instrument of the corporate global project but as an end onto itself.  As astutely observed by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine:”

“Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the War on Terror has served to maximize its profitability and sustainability as a market....

“Through all its various name changes--the War on Terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the Third World War....the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged.  It is limited by neither time nor space nor target.  From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition.  But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.

“That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate America after September 11.  The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars from the Pentagon ($270 billion a year to private contractors, a $137 billion increase since Bush took office; U.S. intelligence agencies ($42 billion a year to contractors for outsourced intelligence, more than double 1995 levels); and the newest arrival, the Department of Homeland Security.  Between September 11, 2001 and 2006 [the DHS] handed out $130 billion to private contractors--money that was not in the economy before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.  In 2003, the Bush administration spent $327 billon on contracts to private companies--nearly 40 cents of every discretionary dollar.”

Another settlement freeze (sure)

What do you mean when you say ‘no’?

Last update - 10:31 18/11/2007 | Haaretz
By Gideon Levy

“A festive day for peace: Israel is planning to announce a freeze on construction in the settlements as compensation for refusing to discuss the core issues. The Palestinians are ecstatic at all the good-will gestures Israel is throwing their way. First came the release of prisoners, now a freeze on construction, and the prime minister has already spoken with the settler leaders and informed them of the decision. They said it was a “difficult meeting,” as it always is, winking at each other deviously.

Undoubtedly, Israel wants peace. But a tiny detail seems to have been forgotten: Israel has signed a series of binding agreements to freeze settlement activity, which it never intended to fulfill. Of the 40 years of occupation, only during three has construction been stopped despite all the agreements and promises to do so. There is no reason to believe that Israel will behave differently this time.

Of all Israel’s iniquities in the occupied territories - the brutality, the assassinations, the siege, the hunger, the blackouts, the checkpoints and the mass arrests - nothing serves as witness to its real intentions than the settlements. Certainly for the future. Every home built in the territories, every light pole and every road are like a thousand witnesses: Israel does not want peace; Israel wants occupation. Whoever is serious about peace and a Palestinian state does not put up even a shed.

From Oslo through Camp David and on to the road map, Israel has not put an end to the most criminal enterprise in its history. A short memory refresher: In article 7 of the Oslo Accords, Israel promised that “no party would undertake unilateral steps to alter the situation on the ground, prior to the completion of negotiations for the final status.” That really made an impression on Israel. During the 10 years that followed, the number of settlers doubled. What about the heroic peace efforts of Ehud Barak as prime minister? During the 18 months of his government, Israel began the construction of 6,045 residential units in the territories.”

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=1321

(Continued Part II)

Another settlement freeze (sure)

What do you mean when you say ‘no’?

“And why did Israel sign up to the road map two years later? “The government of Israel will freeze all its settlement activities, in accordance with the Mitchell report, except for natural growth in the settlements.” And what happened in practice? Accusations that the Palestinians are not implementing the agreements, and a boatload of new settlers. This was also the case in 2005, another major “year of peace”: the disengagement. And what did Israel do in its own backyard? Another 12,000 new settlers.

This terrible enterprise, whose purpose is to foil any chance for peace, is also a criminal enterprise. According to Peace Now, based on Civil Administration data that have been kept hidden for years, about 40 percent of the settlements were built on privately owned land of Palestinians helpless to safeguard what is in most cases their sole property that was robbed in broad daylight by an occupying state. This took place years after the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that it is illegal to build on private Palestinian land. Indeed, while Israel is debating whether it is a state of laws, whether the prime minister was given a discount for the house on Cremieux Street, and whether we want a powerful Supreme Court, we should remember that what is happening in the territories is the real corruption that engulfs us.

Now we are on the eve of another peace event, yet during the past year another 3,525 new residential units were built in the territories, under the auspices of a government that talks incessantly about the end of occupation and two states. All the grandiloquent statements are void of substance when we read the data: Construction is at a peak in 88 settlements. Go to the territories and see for yourselves. When the construction firm Heftsiba imploded, suddenly hundreds of new settlers came to light, further proof of the magnitude of the “frozen” enterprise.

The mountains of excuses, “settlement blocs” and “natural growth,” as well as “beyond the fence” and “inside the fence,” cannot conceal the naked truth: The enterprise has not ceased for a moment. It will not stop now. The hands of a quarter million settlers are soiled by iniquity and felony, but they are not the true guilty party. That belongs to all Israel’s governments, with the exception of Yitzhak Rabin’s second government. All of them have a hand in the iniquity.

Nowadays, when Ehud Olmert says no, what does he mean? Is the “no” really “no” - perhaps it is only “maybe but not right now?” In view of past experience, the bitter truth is that Olmert’s “no,” like all those before it, is more inviting than “yes.” “

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=1321

Non Credo (#114492) my thesis regarding Krugman’s silence is not that he has chosen not to dare but that he has chosen to deliberate.  If your first point, that this is an emergency, is true, then it may also be true that an ill-conceived position does more damage than a postponed one.  (Read Max Hasting’s piece in the latest NEW YORK REVIEW, which examines, among other things, the postponing of D-Day and why it was justified on the grounds of inadequate preparation.) Regarding your second point, look back at what I wrote (#114292) about Einstein:  A powerful mind is not necessarily always powerful in all things.  Having a reputation for “getting it right all the time” is a terrible burden to bear!

non credo, I am certainly receptive to reviewing Mersheimer’s book and comparing it to other accounts, though unfortunately, those other accounts are not readily available.

However, I think one has to be careful not to overstate the case for suggesting either that the U.S. runs Israeli policy or that Israel runs American foreign policy.  Relations between nation-states are usually far more complex than that.  Often times what is perceived as one dictating to the other is merely the product of a symbiotic relationship where there are shared goals.

Take for example the Aug. 15, 2006 Democracy Now piece addressing the newly formed Christians United for Israel (CUI) which hoped to rival AIPAC as a pro-Israeli lobby.  As noted by Max Blumenthal, “Christian Zionism has been a force within the Christian right for over 20 years...They’ve made themselves an asset to Israel by sending millions in aid....They’re a major source of Israeli tourism, especially during the Second Intifada....which is a key source of revenue for the Israeli government.”

But their reasons for supporting Israel differ markedly from AIPAC’s.  “The majority of America’s 60 million evangelicals are premillenial dispensationalists.  They believe that end times could come at any moment, and they’re looking for signs of that, so they’re sypathetic to Israel for that reason.”

In short, the Christian right has its own agenda--one that should concern every Israeli since their support is intended to accellerate the Rapture in which only those Israelis who convert to Christiani will rise up and be saved, while the rest are left to burn.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/15/1326256

In the case of one Richard B. Cheney, the real driving force behind Bush administration policies, his goals are neo-fascist and economic.  For Cheney, Israel, AIPAC and the Christian right are merely convenient weapons he keeps within his arsenal.

Ernest Canning on 11/19 at 9:21 am
(1141 comments total)