dihey—I think I was confusing you with someone else.( i mixed up your name) But, alot of it—I stadn by it. Maybe if you could give an example, I would know how to respond.  I apologize. Your names are similar.

I hardly think that it is worth the indignation you are expressing. It is difficult for me to apologize to someone so arrogant—but I just did.

I think plenty clearly, and, you are expressing Zionist views. I disagree with them. That is the REAL source of your “outrage”.

Why not resp[ond to diamond’s post? Too difficult for you?

By KDelphi, December 27 at 3:04 pm #

dihey….

KD you are confusing me with someone else. I have not written a single word of the multitude that you credit me with in this piece. If you have any decency you will pronto rectify this gigantic misrepresentation after you wake up from your nightmares.

Typical dyev that you only address comments on the nomadic era and make a mess of that in any case. I never said that there was no violence, I never said that they didn’t have clashes. What I said was that there was no such thing as a military state or a standing army or, for that matter, weapons of mass destruction. I find it hard to believe that any rational person can believe that in an era when land was not owned that people would have wars over the ownership of land. Reading your claptrap I now find it even more difficult to believe you’re thinking rationally on any of the issues. You also, of course, don’t touch the long list of Israeli crimes I’ve provided. How could you? This kind of behaviour is indefensible, in law and in religion and a close examination of the history of Israel only makes it more indefensible. You know it’s all true so you just choose to ignore it. Referring to Magna Carta is a sign of incredible optimism on the part of those people who did it. Magna Carta and Israel don’t exist in the same universe. How could Israel possibly be carrying out a massacre in Gaza at this very moment to help some Israeli politicians win the upcoming Israeli election (and while Bush and Cheney are still in the White House) and believe things like this:

‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or be deprived of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be detained, or exiled, or any other otherwise be destroyed; nor will we pass upon him, or condemn him, but by the lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no man will we sell, to no man will we deny or delay, justice or right.’ Clause 29 Magna Carta

Morons like yaz who send greetings to the IDF and then claim that the only cure for Palestinian ‘criminals’ such as babies, pregnant women, old people and your average civilian is to kill them stone dead only prove my point. A point that was also made in the hideous massacres carried out in refugee camps in Lebanon as Israelis ‘guarded’ the camps to facilitate the orgy of murder going on inside carried out by their ‘Christian’ allies. It seems very clear to me that this cure will end in the use of nuclear weapons by Israel but only if they know there’s no country in the Middle East with nuclear capability to respond. Thus all their ranting about Iran. Because, you see, on top of everything else when you get right down to it, the Israeli army are cowards. Whenever they have to actually fight large numbers of armed men they come a cropper, as in Lebanon. All the IDF is any good for is shooting and blowing up children, torturing teenage boys, shooting peace activists in the head, bulldozing houses and carrying out massacres of unarmed civilians. If you don’t believe me, turn on your TV and watch the news. I think my personal favourite was the member of the IDF who shot dead a 95 year old Palestinian woman who was sitting in the backseat of a taxi. I believe that happened in Gaza too. But what does it matter? She was just a criminal who deserved to die.

Dyev—What’s the Magna Carta?

KDelphi,
You don’t think too clearly, do you?  Or else you don’t live in the real world, just your fantasies.  The European nobility EXISTED, whether you liked them or not.  And I didn’t say they they invented rights, although you should read about the Magna Carts some time.  And I fought for/fight for people’s ‘rights’ because I know that they are privileges which have to won with effort and struggle.

And my name is Dyev, not dihey

dihey—I have to go offline, but I will answer some of this tomorrow, One thing I can tell you is that “marching for civil rights” , when you suppose that none exist is kindve silly…I am still not convinced that we are talking the same thing

Yes, I care what happens to other beings—of course, trees, but I care about my own species the most. I have fought for the rights of martine mamamals (yes, they do have them), for many years, for the right to not be invaded by the CIA (at SOA) and many other causes. I didnt say I was a “moral person”, but i try to be. I still do not understand your position on human (nor animal, not plant)“rights”.

So European “nobility” (thats a luaugh!) invented “rights by writing them down, but no “rights”

Give me your definition of human (or other—they would be different—I mean, if you care too much for plants to eat them—you will die)” rights…

What do you think human rights are? Maybe we are not talking about the same thing. Yes, war goes against all decent human rights. No, it doesnt have to exist. The military-industrial complex just wants you to believe that.

Huh???

Kdelphi,
While the Muslims (not the REST of the world) were inventing algebra they were keeping slaves and had their women locked up in hareems.  What ‘rights’ did those women and slaves have?  YOU are confused about ‘human rights’.  The idea arose in Europe, when the new middle classes began to revolt against the nobility.  It arose among those who didn’t have the same privileges as those above them in the social heirarchy.  And they were only achieved by struggle.  And they are only kept by struggle.

I have worked for and advocated for universal health care in the US since the AMA called it ‘socialized medicine’.  I have stood up for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, against Ronald Reagan in toto, against the Shah of Iran, against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for workers’ right to organize, for a woman’s right to birth control and legal abortion, etc., usw.  I know that these will not and/or have not been granted by a benificent god or a benificent power structure.  They have to be fought for by people willing to give their lives to achieve them - not just for themselves, but for others as well.

I do not steal from or kill my neighbors, because I think that is wrong.  But I do not expect that my respect for my neighbor means that he/she will respect me.  I can only know that by knowing my neighbors.  One may be trustworthy, one may not.  That is the reality of life.

And war is a reality of life.  Just because I don’t like it, doesn’t make it less real.  Human beings have fought each other for millenia, for reasons as real as land and as fantastical as the Word of God.  War is common to ALL surviving civilizations.  The ones who would’t fight, or fought badly, lost and were overrun.  This is fact.  And I have seen nothing in my life to convince me that humans today are any different from humans in the past.  We may have better toys and weapons, but that hasn’t changed the people who use them.  That will take evolutionary change.  And evolution takes its own sweet time, and has no favorites.

I was lucky enough to be born a white male in America.  That gave me certain privileges and advantages others did not have.  If I were born black in South Africa (or the south of the USA), I would have been denied certain privileges and advantages that my white masters held to be their ‘rights’.  That’s the reality of the situation and whatever my fantasies about ‘rights’ are, only force would have and did change the situation.

Just because I was born on third base doesn’t mean that I think I hit a triple.  I was lucky and I have tried to spread that luck to as many of my less lucky brethren as I could.

PS - Do you only care about ‘human rights’?  Do you support the rights of trees not to be cut down, of animals not to be caged and killed for food?  They are living beings also.  If you consider them just property to be used and abused, what makes you think that you are a moral person?

dihey—I think that you are confusing a person’s “rights” with what is written down or stated as their “rights”. Just because someone isnt afforded a certain action/good/activity, does not mean that they do not inherently have that RIGHT , as a human being. What , no laws existed until someone wrote them down??

YOu are very confused about who came up with “human rights”. Europe was in the Dark Ages , while the rest of the world was learning Algebra and writing.

Just because women’s rights arent GRANTED, does not mean that the rights dont exist as a result of being born a human being.So , one only has a RIGHT to what one can gain by force?? I think you are just being contrary again. Just because “rights” are not enforceable, doesnt make them not exist…

Do you think that people only deserve what they can force others to give to them?? Social Darwinism?

Then, you say this…

“governments.  There is no international police force strong enough to enforce universal human rights…”  So, therefore, since we cannot make others GIVE land to the Palestinians, they have no RIGHT to the land. People in the US have no RIGHT to health care—-are you certin that you intend to say that?? So only people fortunate enough to be born in a superpower has any right to peace, freedom, land, food, etc.

I have had a gun in my face. I sure as hell didnt like it. More than once. But, I’ll be g-damned if I can figure out what that has to do with what we are talking about—or atttempting to. There are people that die with guns in their faces, standing up for individual rights every day.

Here is what you just posted on “Israel Offers Tidings”, then, you say that they have “no choice ” but to re-occupy Gaza…??
“...Instead the Bush administration refused to accept the results of the Gaza elections which it had encouraged and then supported Israel’s immediately following illegal withholding of funds to the Gazans. The subsequent total blockade by Israel was a well-understood war crime….”

I just do not understand.

Then, at 9:07, on this thread, you said this.
“My point is that if you are going to claim a historical right to a piece of land, the Israelis have as much right as anyone else.  If you believe that is only the last person who lived there that has the right, then whatever I steal from you is mine.” You seem to be saying to cyrena that it is wrong to say that whatever one takes by force is theirs. Then, you say the opposite later on.

Can you explain to me where you stand on human rights? Do you think that any exist at all?? Do you think that “rights” only exist for those who can force their will upon others?

All are noT ‘created equal”—that is a US myth (Some are more attractive, some smarter, some born rich). But, as to RIGHTS (which is what they deserve, although many never get them)—yes, every human being (aye, living being) on this planet has rights. To lead as fulfilling and peaceful a life as possible, given human’s past actions on the planet. No one asked to be born, and, no one asked to be born in a war zone.

If we care about human rights, it is our duty to reduce (or eliminate) war zones. They are incompatible with human peace and happiness.

KDelphi,
Yes, I’m saying that ‘rights’ don’t exist.  Until some god or space alien comes down to enforce his/her rules on all of us, whatever ‘rights’ we claim to have are just privileges that we grant ourselves and deny to others.  If our ‘rights’ are innate and inalienable, why were they not even thought of until the 16th century?  And then only in Europe?  What rights do women have in most Muslim countries? Here in the West, why do Canadians have a right to health-care, while Americans don’t?

What we call ‘rights’ are an evolving set of social privileges, determined and enforced or denied by national governments.  There is no international police force strong enough to enforce universal human rights.  And if there were, who would determine what those rights are?

Saudi males don’t want their women to drive cars.  Should the men or women get to determine who drives?  I want the right to smoke marijuana, but my government doesn’t want me to have that right.  Back in the 1920’s, the government took away American’s right to drink alcohol.

My opinion is that people who talk about ‘inalienable rights’ never had a gun in their face.  People who have know that first you have to survive and telling the guy with the gun that he’s ‘violating my rights’ isn’t going to stop him.

brewerstroupe,
I’m not sure what value your ‘support’ is worth considering that the war’s being fought far from your door and you seem to have picked a side.

BTW - what would have happed if the Maori had not signed the Treaty of Waitangi?  Would Captain Hobson have gathered up the Europeans and sailed back home?

Dyev.
“Can you GUARANTEE that Israel will not be attacked again?”

No more than I can guarantee that some nutter won’t open fire on a kindergarten in Toledo.

What I can guarantee is that Israel will halt the descent into “Pariah Nation” status and that many folk like me will go back to supporting it.

dyev—So you are saying that the “
rights” of humans, exist only to the extent to which they can defend them? Pretty amoral view , isnt it? You do not think that humans, (and other animals) have innate, unalienable rights? Just because they are taken from a person, does not mean that they “lose ” the rights. It means that the person’s rights were violated. It means you are committing war crimes. Denying a person their human rights.

“You all seem to think that there is something the the Israelis can do to make peace.  I don’t.  I don’t think that there is any answer to the Israeli-Palestinean conflict, just as I don’t think that there is any answer to global climate change, short of a massive reduction in human population on this planet, which we’re not likely to bring about willingly. “

I think that you are just being a contrarian, intentionally. There have been many suggestions here, and, from many world leaders.

diamond—well said!“Dyev you’re missing the entire point. First of all human beings have not always killed each other over land. That only started when they began ‘owning’, fencing and farming land and giving certain geographical areas names and forming themselves into tribes and then nations. Before that humans were nomadic and it was more a case that the land ‘owned’ them. In the nomadic era, formalized war with large armies was unknown. There were family squabbles and rivalries and small scale inter-group conflicts but the idea of a formal, standing army and a military state was unknown. Men had weapons to hunt food and to protect themselves primarily from animals…. The way humans survived as hunter gatherers was through co-operation and sharing whatever food they found or killed. Not through murderous competition”

The truth is, these neo-cons from Project for the New Am Century, keep trying to fight to Cold War again. Their actions are how Afghanistan has stayed under tribal control. They have a stake in keeping the Middle East in turmoil, so that they can install friendly dictators like the House of Saud. Or, Saddam Hussein. Or, arm Osama bin Laden and other rogues in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan, is
“still barbaric”, it is because the superpowers have used it as a “war games” zone for so many centuries. It is high time we left!!
(Americans and Russians.)
”  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinean conflict, but you seem to be quiet about them”. I dont know what that means. I also think that it is naive to think that the “wars” in Iraq and Afghan,  “have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. Of course they do. It is , to them, more evidence , that we are against Arabs and Muslims.Our incursions there have affected the entire Middle East—the entire planet.

Or, do you just think that “they hate us for our freedom” or something?

brewerstroupe,
Can you GUARANTEE that Israel will not be attacked again?  Will you and your family stand guard for them?  It’s easy to tell someone else to put down their arms, but much more difficult to do it yourself when you feel endangered.

Dyev

“You all seem to think that there is something the the Israelis can do to make peace.  I don’t.”

How ‘bout abiding by U.N. resolutions? Worth a try don’t you think?

Diamond,
Hunter-gatherers did kill each other and make war intertribally, from what little we know.  We think that the Cro-Magnons eliminated the Neandertals.  I will admit that organized mass warfare seems to be a product of agricultural and post-agricultural civilizations.  However, we are all products of agricultural civilization, so it ill behooves us to take credit for the virtues of those we have eliminated and displaced.  Our history is one of warfare and we are the beneficiaries of the victors.

New Zealand is surrounded by the sea, not people who, for whatever reason, are its enemies.  If the indigenous inhabitants, at the time of the European discovery, had been equally armed, perhaps its history would be different, as would the history of the United States.  Europeans travelled the world, bringing guns to knife-fights which they, the Europeans, instigated.  That is our history.  It is undeniable.  How will your descendants feel if, in a hundred years, the Chinese decide to annex your island?

brewerstroupe,
I can wish that had been done in 1948.  Whether things would be different now, I don’t know.  As things stand now it is a practical impossibility.  We are at a point, all around the world, where the land and its ability to feed us is running out.  Humans warring on humans is no longer the major issue.  We have been waging war on this planet for centuries, and the planet is waging back.  We’re not likely to win, wherever we live.

As for the whole concept of the ‘Right to Exist’, what is the meaning of ‘Right’?  I have ‘rights’ as a citizen of my country only as long as I and my neighbors are able to defend those rights.  Japanese-Americans had rights as citizens until they were taken away during WWII.  So they weren’t rights but privileges which society could grant or deny at will.  The same was true for Jews and others in Germany and Poland during WWII.  Their ‘rights’ disappeared by government fiat.  The rights that Blacks and women enjoy today in the US were not granted and guaranteed by a benificent god or benificent whites.  They were seized by action, sometimes violent, sometimes not.  And they will only exist as long as we, by our own actions, can keep them.

You all seem to think that there is something the the Israelis can do to make peace.  I don’t.  I don’t think that there is any answer to the Israeli-Palestinean conflict, just as I don’t think that there is any answer to global climate change, short of a massive reduction in human population on this planet, which we’re not likely to bring about willingly.

Israel is the last western colonial outpost, and the only one where the ‘natives’ were as well armed as the invaders.  And don’t neglect the effects of western oil politics on the region.  The entire present map of the Middle East was shaped not by the inhabitants but by the West which cared not for peace and equity, but oil.  Consider how different the area might have been if the Americans and British had not overthrown Mossadeg in Iran and installed the Shah in 1953.  And if the West and the Russians had not played geopolitics and dumped weapons all over the area.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinean conflict, but you seem to be quiet about them.

cyrena,
What exactly do you mean by ‘Israel’s right to EXIT the planet’?

There is a petition here, as well as links to other petitions, all having to do with Israel;s occupation of Gaza. I thought maybe some would be intereted. One goes to Dubya, one to the State Dept., one to your Congress people, and, another to PE Obama…

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1771

Dyev

“While I won’t fight for Israel and will criticize its actions, I will not deny that its right to exist is as valid as my country’s.  If you support Israel’s right to exist, you don’t have to support all its actions, just as I am sure you don’t support your own government and all its actions.”

~~~
Who here has denied Israel’s right to exist. (I wrote ‘exit’ the first time, which might be something else that most folks won’t deny…Israel’s right to EXIT the planet).

But seriously, nobody is denying Israel’s right to exist, since they already do. Even the Arabs (including Hamas at this point) have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, most recently last week as part of another hopeful agreement. Israel turned it down. Israel doesn’t want to live in peace with anybody other than themselves. It’s not enough to acknowledge their right to exist, UNLESS it means clearing the entire area so they can have it to themselves. So what they really want is for the non-Jewish population to agree to have themselves slaughtered and subjected to the continuing genocide. That’s what Israel expects in it’s demands to exist.

In other words, Israel will agree to a truce when there is no longer anyone for them to steal land from, or when they have complete control of the entire continent, and the Oceans that border it.
It’s not about existence, it’s about the mass slaughtering of anyone who isn’t a Jew.

Dyev
“While I won’t fight for Israel and will criticize its actions, I will not deny that its right to exist is as valid as my country’s.  If you support Israel’s right to exist, you don’t have to support all its actions, just as I am sure you don’t support your own government and all its actions.”

OK. Please fill in the gap:

My country has a right to exist as a .........(insert ethnicity) State.

Dyev you’re missing the entire point. First of all human beings have not always killed each other over land. That only started when they began ‘owning’, fencing and farming land and giving certain geographical areas names and forming themselves into tribes and then nations. Before that humans were nomadic and it was more a case that the land ‘owned’ them. In the nomadic era, formalized war with large armies was unknown. There were family squabbles and rivalries and small scale inter-group conflicts but the idea of a formal, standing army and a military state was unknown. Men had weapons to hunt food and to protect themselves primarily from animals. So it was not ever thus. Of course murder has been around since Cain and Abel and probably always will be but what you’re referring to is not an inescapable destiny by any means. The way humans survived as hunter gatherers was through co-operation and sharing whatever food they found or killed. Not through murderous competition.

Your attempt to link New Zealand to Israel ignores some basic realities.
1. New Zealand is not a nuclear power.
2. New Zealand does not receive billions of dollars from America in foreign aid which is spent mostly on weapons and maintaining a military machine.
3. New Zealand does not invade and terrorise its neighbours.
4. New Zealand does not practice genocide and the murder of children as a policy of state.
5. New Zealand does not starve people, cut off their electricity or fly over and shoot them dead in the streets.
6. New Zealand is not in violation of 90 UN declarations.
7. New Zealand does not illegally arrest and torture boys as young as fourteen.
8. New Zealand does not fire on and kill children throwing rocks.
9. New Zealand does not have thousands of people held in jails where they are never charged or brought to trial.
10. New Zealand has not built a wall to enclose an entire people, almost all of whom have not committed any crime, in a gulag as a collective punishment.
11. New Zealand does not bulldoze people’s houses as a collective punishment.
12. In New Zealand 25% of Maori children do not suffer from malnutrition.
13. New Zealand has never fired on school children on their way to school or fired rubber bullets at a group of school children and their teacher in a town square as the Israeli army is documented to have done. Don’t bother denying it, I’ve seen the footage.
Some of these children had deep indentations in their foreheads where the rubber bullets hit them. Now you tell me what kind of people fire rubber bullets into the faces of schoolgirls ten years of age on a school excursion purely because of their religion and their ethnicity? Answer: terrorists. If you want to claim this is business as usual I have to wonder what kind of business you think Israel is in. Even the so-called primitive people of the cave age would have thought it was madness to kill children because children are not a threat. But, of course, this is ethnic cleansing and it has its own savage logic.

Dyev.
How do you regard the proposition that Israel should annex the West Bank and Gaza and grant citizenship to all of the residents of that land including those who have been dispossessed?
It seems, from what you have argued here that you might favour such an arrangement.

KDelphi,
No, you don’t have to be white to be a citizen of the US, but only recently.  The US didn’t exist until a bunch of Englishmen who had sailed across the Atlantic and killed and/or driven off the misnamed native inhabitants of the east coast of the North American continent ‘declared their freedom’ from England.  The ‘indians’ had no say in the matter.  That was a bunch of white males - white, predominantly Christian males (although Jews had been here since the Nieuw Amsterdam and a Jewish banker did contribute to the Revolutionary War).  Women had no say in it, Indians and the Blacks who had been imported as slaves to do the labor of the South had no say in it.

While we have,  through the great struggle groups of people who have recognized themselves to be second class citizens - if citizens at all, extended the ‘Rights of Citizenship’ to some of us we are still just recent conquerors, recent exterminators.

I am not a rabid supporter of Israel.  I don’t think the what the Israelis are doing will lead to their long-term survival.  I do not think that anything that the Israelis could have done since 1948 would have led to their long term survival.  The only thing that could have made it possible would have been if their neighbors would have recognized their boundaries as just as legal as the rest of Arabia’s recently drawn boundaries (drawn after WWI by the Great Powers.  But that was not fated.

I had my invitation to go to Israel and defend it in the 1967 war, but I chose to stay here and defend my own country.  This is where I was born and where I, simply by being born here (and being white), was granted all he rights of Citizenship.

For the Jews who emigrated to Israel after surviving the death camps of WWII, that was the first and only place in their lives and the world where they were granted the right of Citizenship.  If they were willing to fight and kill and die to defend it, I wished them well.  I was lucky to have been born an American and decided to direct my efforts to improve the actions of my country in the world.  Ask the Gypsies who still survive in Europe if they would like to have a country of their own.  Ask the Basque.

If I had been born and raised in Russia as a Jew, I would have been willing to die trying to get to Israel, as did the first Jewish Zionist settlers.  Russian Anti-Semitism predated the Communist Party.  Czarist and religious progroms were the fuel of Zionism.  It’s not just the Holocaust.  That was just the end of over a thousand years of Christians (who ruled Europe, which was in the process of ruling the world) actively hating and punishing Jews.  As well as midwives and gypsies and witches and such.

While I won’t fight for Israel and will criticize its actions, I will not deny that its right to exist is as valid as my country’s.  If you support Israel’s right to exist, you don’t have to support all its actions, just as I am sure you don’t support your own government and all its actions.

That also doesn’t mean that there is an answer to the problem.  It is simply the problem that civilized human beings fight over land and workers.  This is the history of humanity since we started telling our children the stories that became history and counting the harvested grain that became the Stock Market.

It has ever been thus, and our civilization, like the hundreds that have preceded us, will self-destruct. Civilized people make war - it is a given.  Civilizations collapse.

Human beings do not react rationally.  Our forebrains help us tell each other lies and chop the world up and rearrange its parts, while our midbrains believe the lies and make the parts into weapons.  We won’t make the jump to forebrain control without an evolutionary goose.  Perhaps the global change we’re bringing on ourselves and the rest of the planet will be it.

Dyev
Once again you miss the point and your knowledge of history is deficient.

My ancestors did not steal the land. The first thing the British Administration did was to put in place stringent measures to protect indigenous title. If the colonization of Palestine had followed the New Zealand model, I would have little argument with it. At no time in our history were the indigenous people driven into less than a quarter of their former landholding and forbidden to return. The colonial practices of the past are regrettable but that does not excuse a conquest and ethnic cleansing in this day and age.

Should you wish to invoke the U.N. as the legitimizing authority I suggest you first ask Israel to clean up the small matter of the 90 or so declarations it is currently in breach of.
It is ironic that a supporter of Israel should claim the sanction of the U.N.
The day after the plan for partition was announced, Menachim Begin proclaimed:
“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.”
Ben Gurion:
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today—but the boundaries of the Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”

Is it surprising that the Palestinians, and the Arab World in general did not feel themselves bound by the U.N. declaration?
They had predicted the Zionist’s response which was to unilaterally declare a State and commence the ethnic cleansing.

Kdel,

Forgot to add the links for you, so you could study up on Obama’s votes, and the bills/amendments that he introduced or co-supported, (including the ammendment/revison to the FISA legislation that he wrote and supported with Chris Dodd, with the intent of preventing retroactive immunity to the telecoms…it didn’t pass).

•  “An amendment from Sen. Chris Dodd that would deny telecom companies retroactive immunity for helping the government eavesdrop on phone calls without a warrant after 9/11 was voted down. As was an amendment from Sen. Arlen Specter that would have substituted the government for the telecom companies in pending legislation over the warrantless wiretapping program. An amendment offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that would have made the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the sole authority for a warrantless wiretapping program also failed.”
(Sorry they don’t provide all of the revision numbers in this piece, since that might make it easier to follow. But then of course as long as there are no specific bill numbers or amendment/revision numbers, you can just easily blur the truth that you pick up in these blogs, and fit them to your own interpretations.)

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/fisa_bill_poised_to_pass_senat.html
Obviously you’re unaware of his efforts on that - one of only 14 senators to vote on the amendment that would have made the telecoms accountable financially, (they can still be prosecuted on criminal charges), since you consitently avoid mentioning it, even though enough of us have. That wasn’t the only revision/ammendment re the FISA mess. In fact, it had been in the Congress as a huge point of contention before Obama even entered the Congress. Since I’ve been watching that for roughly 7 years, I’ve got a record somewhere on EVERYBODY’S votes!! I’ll be happy to search it out for you, though it will take me a bit. It’s not on this hard drive.

These two below should be helpful in the interim. They have all the votes for the entire Congress, back to 1991. Since you’ll only need to study the 109th and 110th Congresses for Obama’s votes, even you should be able to keep it straight.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/

http://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/110th_United_States_Congress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/109th_United_States_Congress

http://thomas.loc.gov/bss/d109query.html
http://www.house.gov/

Then again, maybe not.

I’ll post this on another thread too, one that might have more relevance than the twisted and pathetic lies of a closet homosexual in denial.

Oh, BTW, the top ‘corporate’ donor to Obama’s campaign was The University of California. Other contributors included The University of Chicago, (about half-way down) and four other University systems in the country. Somewhere down at about number 18 or 19, was the US GOVERNMENT. I THINK I did see At&T;as one of these top 20 donors, but I couldn’t swear to it.

It really never hurts to actually VERIFY information before making yourself look like an ass. Of course people wouldn’t be so quick to post unverified lies if they were actually being called to account for it.

Dyev—Maybe “White People” (you dont have to be white to be a citizen of the uS—you have to be of Jewish heritage to be a citizen of Israel), “Bible thumpers” see what a scourge is wrought upon our stealing of lands. Things havent been working out as well for the uS and our allies, as one might have expected….

I met some very committed Zionists in Europe—I was just sitting having a beer, in a very small town, and, noticed that someone seemed to be speaking Hebrew/Am type mix…I spoke to them, and we began to discuss US’s support for Israel. When I protested that I thought perhaps the uS supported Israel, to the point of our own, as well as Israel’s, detriment—-they acted like I had called for “the destruction of the Jewish people”.“You will lose the means by which you live! Arabs will take all from you ! We are your only true ally! You lose more than we do! You must be a Nazi sympathizer! You are not US or Scandanavian—you are German!”.

This kind of blather hurts the uS, Israel, our allies, and the peace of the entire world.It is more religious fundamentalism. Manifest destiny. Zionism.Aryan superiority.

At some point, we need to stop this crap.Perhaps the uS should lead the way, since we pride ourselves in being “a melting pot”.

I would not support anyone who says that Jewish people should be harmed in any way. I also cannot support Israel to the detriment of many races of (other?) Arabs.

I am sometimes puzzled as to how it is possible for Israel’s rabid supporters to not see this—it is not winning them allies. It is hurting them, us and the Palestinians—it hurts the whole world!

These guys in the French cafe did NOT “win me over”, I’ll tell you that. It was the only time I saw a group of French students come to the aid of a almost non-French-speaking USAn!

There are people on this thread that are Jewish—why do they not feel the same? Is it Biblical for you? Were you just raised that way? Have you been to Israel?

cyrena,

PS:  Before WWI, all of North Africa was held by the British, French, and Ottoman Empire.  Most of the present countries and borders were drawn up by the European powers after the end of WWI.  The leadership of the resulting ‘countries’ was given to those Sheiks and their families who pleased or made deals with the Europeans.  There’s nothing very old about the present configuration of Arabia.

brewerstroupe,
  So your argument is the Maoris appealed to one invading colonial power to protect them from another invading colonial power.  And also that your theft came a few centuries before the Israeli colonial theft.  Sorry, that argument doesn’t wash with me.  You’re still benefiting from that theft.

By the way, the UN did certify - in 1948 - that the Israelis had the right to the land that they held.  Who certified that the the British had the right to New Zealand, Australia, The Union of South Africa or the United States or America?

Cyrena,
My point is that if you are going to claim a historical right to a piece of land, the Israelis have as much right as anyone else.  If you believe that is only the last person who lived there that has the right, then whatever I steal from you is mine.

If you want to go back ten or twelve thousand years, no-one lived there.  The Sumerians didn’t show up until about eight thousand years ago.  Which makes them the original deed-holders.  Everyone else is an invader, with no more rights than the next, or previous, invader.

And as for where the Jews were before 1902:  They were in Russia and Poland and Germany and other European countries where the Christian majority granted them no rights.  They were property of the various kings. In Spain, they were expelled in 1492, partly so Queen Isabella could fund Columbus’ first trip across the Atlantic.

I was born a couple of years before the foundation of Israel, and am an American Jew, so I’ve seen all the wars there and all over the world in the last half century.  Israel is the only country that ever returned conquered land after winning a war.  And it didn’t gain them any peace. 

My feeling is very simple.  They have as much right to live as anyone else.  And as much right to a country of their own as anyone else. White folk and Christians have spread themselves all over the world waving their bible in one hand and a gun in the other.  So what gives them the right to tell the Jews that they can’t do the same?

“Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?”  Matthew 7:3

Dyev—By your logic, human beings have no right to exist on this planet, as we had no right to “overtake” the other great apes.

Israel exists , right now, (not China, or when the UK was Imperial), primarily from support by the US.

Where would brewer “move” to? Indigenous peoples of the US, all of North America, and, yes, probably New Zealand, have all been mistreated by white male Anglo-Europeans. However, New Zealanders are not keeping a huge, nuclear stocked, US-backed military to keep indigenous NZers out of Euro-NZers property. Native Am. Reservations are extreme blood on Anglo hands.(And, politicians cannot seem to stop ripping them off, today!) But Palestinians werent just shuffled into a corner.(Bad enough) Apparently, according to Israel, they have no right to exist.

I have heard some Arab leaders say that they dont think that Israel has a “right to exist” (although, I am told, it is often translated incorrectly). That is not the same as actively saying that an entire people have no right to exist, and desrve no means of sustainance.

Too many are taking “Israel” to mean, “the Jewish people”. They are not one in the same.

There is also quitre a bit of difference between the way that NA were treated here in the Americas, from the way they are treated in other former British Colonial powers. The entire US invasion was based on “manifest destiny”. It can be compared to Zionism.

Dyev

Your knowledge of New Zealand History is non-existent but that is not the point. As I and others have pointed out to you previously, the colonial practices of the past belong in the past, along with other barbaric practices such as slavery, and there is not a great deal we can do except to make reparations where possible. This we have done and continue to do in New Zealand.
The salient point is that Israel commenced a conquest in the middle of the twentieth century and continues it today. Not just a conquest and subjugation of an indigenous race but an ethnic cleansing which is something that even the Brits at the height of Empire-building fell short of.

For your information, any Maori would be shocked and offended to read that they were militarily defeated. The Maori, wary of the French particularly and others, asked for British Crown Law to be established in New Zealand, something the Brits, initially, were somewhat reluctant to provide.

The Israelis are a Semitic people, which means that they came from the Near East many centuries ago.  And most of the non-Israeli Semites (Palestineans and Arabs) are not living on the land their ancestors lived on.  They’ve been moving around the Near East for centuries.
~~~~
So, where did the OTHER semites (Muslims, Arabs, and even some Christians of multiple hues and colors)live before 1948 if it wasn’t on their ancestors land? You said they’ve been moving around the Near East for Centuries. I ask because one might conclude the same for Israeli Semites since they had to be some damn where before 1902, when Herzel got his idea to conquer Palestine and make it into place for Jews only, and call it Israel.)

So, where were they? (of course we’ve been over this already, so that’s a rhetorical question).

You say that the Palestinians have been moving all over the Near East for Centuries. What were the Jews doing all of that time? (remember please that Israel didn’t exist until 1948)

And while I’m asking, where’s the “Near East” (like say opposed to the “Far East”) and why can’t we call it what it either was for the first several centuries, (Arabia) or what we call it now, which is the Middle East?

And if the Palestinians/Arabians weren’t on their ancestors land for those TEN THOUSAND YEARS before the Jews set-up their nuclear operation in Palestine, newly named Israel, whose ‘ancestors’ land were they on. The ones that had allegedly been there 12 thousand years ago?

Last question, do you have a source other than the Bible for this anthropological certainty?

brewerstroupe,
The brits took over New Zealand the same way any people took over their land.  They militarily defeated the indigenous inhabitants.  Any treaties they later signed were forced and enforced by military power.  There are no countries in this world that I know of that were not built on invasion and conquest.  Even the Chinese were not the original inhabitants of that land.

If you believe that Israelis have no right to Israel, which they took by conquest, then only your Maori parts have any right to be in New Zealand.  Unless you think that how long ago you stole something gives you the right to claim it as yours. 

The Israelis are a Semitic people, which means that they came from the Near East many centuries ago.  And most of the non-Israeli Semites (Palestineans and Arabs) are not living on the land their ancestors lived on.  They’ve been moving around the Near East for centuries.

If you are not willing to apply your ethics or morality to yourself first, before applying it to others, you are nothing but a hypocrite.

Dyev.

When I die my grandchildren will inherit my land. They are a handsome bunch, being part Maori courtesy of their grandmother’s tribal origins. For myself, I am not so sure, I may have Maori blood but my claim to belonging is based primarily on five generations of peaceful co-existence with the indigenous people who have not yet asked me to leave. Mind you, the colonizers of New Zealand have not yet penned the Maoris up in a small corner of our country. Should we attempt that, the situation might change. I would expect to see a few bombs and rockets flying around.

You may be interested to learn that New Zealand’s founding document is the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840. My family were present at that time. To this day we have a Court called the Waitangi Tribunal which hears any disputes about land or indigenous rights, historical or modern and rules with the full authority of law. The Canadians have adopted many of New Zealand’s models for settling historic claims. The Israelis have not expressed any interest to date.

So, brewerstroupe, you’re a New Zealander. When are you going to return your land to the Maori and return to where you or ancestors came from?

Thanks for adding that Robert. As I said, it is very complex. Not that it is difficult to understand, just that there are many factors and it requires a great deal of writing to bring them all together in a coherent picture.

The Straits of Tiran matter should also be cleared up.
Howard called this the “blockade of Eilat - an act of War”.
This is laughable. Less than 5% of Israel’s trade flowed through the Straits and was easily re-routed. Nasser knew this as did the Israelis. It was a token gesture in protest at Israel’s behaviour in the Golan and Nasser offered a moratorium on it almost as soon as it was announced, along with an offer to have the World Court arbitrate the issue.

Finkelstein on the June 1967 war
6 Days of War: Day 2

06.06.2007 | Chicago Public Radio: Worldview

Listen: Download (Mp3) | Listen (streaming)

“On its 40th anniversary, we’re considering the aftermath and consequences of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War with DePaul University scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Beyond Chutzpah. Yesterday, we heard another perspective on the conflict from American-Israeli historian Michael Oren, author of the best-selling Six Days of War.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jerome McDonnell: Norman Finkelstein is Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePaul and is the author of Beyond Chutzpah: on the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. And I’ll talk with him towards the end of the hour about the very public debate over his tenure bid at DePaul but we’ll spend most of our time today with the Six Day War. And Norman Finkelstein told me about the build up to the war.

Norman Finkelstein: In order to understand the build up to the war the best place to begin is November, 1966. There was an Israeli retaliatory, as they call it, attack on a Jordanian village called Samu. In the course of this attack on Samu they blew up around 125 buildings and killed a large number of Jordanian soldiers.

When that attack happened the Jordanians and also the Syrians began to attack Nasser for not coming to their defense. Here was this Egyptian president claiming to be the leader of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism and he was doing nothing. Nasser was being taunted for his, as it were, impotence in the face of Israeli aggression.

And there were various incidents in the Syrian Golan Heights and also by Syrian-backed Palestinian commandos. Now there there’s a certain amount of confusion which is important to clarify. Moshe Dayan, who became the defense minister during the June ‘67 war, gave an interview in 1976 in which he acknowledges, and now I’m more or less quoting him, that 80%, he said at least 80%, but I’ll say 80% of the incidents with the Syrians were instigated by us. That we were engaged, now I’m using my language, but it’s I think a correct paraphrase, we were engaged in a land grab in what were called the demilitarized zones between Syria and Israel. And in the course of this land grab there were conflicts arising with the Syrians. And it was only as a result of these conflicts that the Syrians then would fire artillery from the Golan Heights on the Israelis. So Moshe Dayan himself acknowledged that was instigated by the Israelis.

In April, just let me get right up to the point where the count down, as it were, begins. In April 1967 one of those incidents instigated by the Israelis then unfolded into an aerial battle with the Syrians. And the Israelis knocked down 6 Syrian planes, 6 Syrian Migs, including 1 over Damascus. And it was at this point again when Nasser is being taunted that “you’re not doing anything.”

Things then start deteriorating between Israel and the Syrians. Come the beginning of May Israel is making clear that it’s going to engage in a large scale strike against Syria and now the test is for Nasser. Are you going to do anything about it? The Israelis are announcing over and over again, the generals, the statesmen, that we’re going to give Syria now a serious blow. And it’s at that point that Nasser announces, or Nasser tells Secretary General [not “of State”] U Thant, that the peace keeping force which had been stationed between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai, that peace keeping force should be withdrawn. And that’s the beginning of the count down to the war.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the rest of Norman Finkelstein’s historical facts on the 1967 Arab-Israeli War click on URL:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1067

Thank you for your support Diamond. You have given me the encouragement to wade into the murky waters of the “67 War, a subject I tend to avoid because of its sheer complexity. So here goes.

Why did Nasser request the withdrawal of UNEF?

Two reasons. Intelligence provided by the Soviets convinced him that Israel was about to attack and he was concerned that UNEF would be in the firing line and he would be blamed for any casualties. One must bear in mind that UNEF was there at Nasser’s invitation subsequent to the attack by Israel/Britain/France in ‘56. Nasser requested that they be stationed on Israel’s side of the border. Israel refused. The second reason, to which I attach little weight, is that he was taunted by both Israel and other Arab States with “hiding behind the U.N.‘s skirts”.

U Thant (U.N. Secretary General)said in his memoir that the war could have been avoided had Israel complied with this request.

One must understand the context of the times. Israel was harassing the Syrians to clear the ground for their diversion of the Jordan River:
Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister at the time, said that 80 per cent of these confrontational episodes were planned and executed by Israel. When asked if the Syrians initiated cross-border wars of attrition from the Golan Heights, he stated:
“It went this way: We would send a tractor to plough some place where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarised area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end [the] Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.
“And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”
Moshe Dayan says Israel lured the Arabs into battles they would lose.
In April 1967, one of these Israeli provocations became a full-fledged aerial battle with the Syrians. The Israelis shot down six Syrian planes, including one over Damascus.
At this point Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, was highly criticised for his ineffectiveness and was seen as simply an orator, and not a doer, for Arab nationalism and unity. He signed a defense pact with Syria and sent troops into the Sinai hoping to deter an Israeli attack. With his first rank forces bogged down in Yemen, the forces available to him were ill-equipped and took up defensive positions only. It was at this point that Israel attacked.
One interesting theory has it that Israel’s attack was prompted by fears that Nasser planned a surgical strike on Israel’s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona.

Further reading:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/arabunity/2008/03/2008525184024810153.html

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/israel/gat1967.pdf

http://www.ussliberty.org/orenbook.htm

Mar is wrong to assume that brewerstroupe’s extensive study of the subject of Israel and Zionism has to be discounted because he ‘wasn’t there’. Quite the opposite, people on the outside looking in can see things more clearly than those who are too emotionally involved. I was once told by a furious South African white that my abhorrence of apartheid was a product of my ignorance and that I should be forcibly put on a plane and flown to South Africa so I could see the ‘truth’. I could already see the truth and brewerstroupe can see it too. I would also like to pass on what Menchem Begin had to say about the Deir Yassin massacre: when someone regretted the loss of life Begin said ‘Out of evil good came’, meaning the flight of the Arabs and the founding of the Jewish state. This is the problem, of course, that the Israelis still believe that out of evil good will come. It won’t. Evil can only give birth to evil the way a shark only gives birth to sharks.

One of the most common and mendacious techniques of the Hasbara is to conflate Palestinian with Arab. The Palestinians are a unique people with their own culture, religions, dress and cherished traditions. They have about as much in common with their Arab neighbours as does an Englishman with a Scandinavian.
Mar contributes to this calumny thus:
“The Palestinians and the Arabs can lose many battles and still survive but the Israelis can only lose one war and they risk extermination”

This ignores the fact that Israel possesses 200 Nuclear warheads and the means of delivery. The Palestinians possess no army, navy or air force and it is they who are on the brink of extermination right now as we speak.

But I find this:
“But the campaign to “humanize” the Palestinians”
...particularly offensive. For your information Mar, the Palestinians have no need of a campaign to “humanize” them. They are human and, in the opinion of my fellow New Zealanders who have served there on peacekeeping missions, exhibit more humanity than their oppressors.
It is also disgusting to read this sort of thing:
“I saw Arabs still scratching the earth with a stick-plow and an ass” when one is aware that the Israeli economy benefits from literally billions of dollars in aid each year and would collapse without it.

“Com on, the Crane commission was accused of antit-Zionist biases.”

One gets used to this.

“allowed the Jews to buy land - usually desert or swamplands which the Zionists cleared by dint of sacrifice and hard work.”

Buying the Emek, published in The New Palestine, New York, May, 1929, by Dr. Arthur Ruppin is intructive on the matter of land purchases:

The acquisition of the Emek Yizael for Jewish colonization has been the object of Jewish efforts for many years. It was natural that this region, the largest fertile plain of Palestine, should have aroused the interest of the Jewish colonization societies at the very beginning…...
....During the war (WWI), and for two years after…....... Hankin immediately grasped the opportunity to conclude a provisional agreement for 70,000 dunam. Half of this land (Nahalal, Djindjar and Nasra) was not irrigated, and cost £3 per dunam, while the other half (Nuris) was partly irrigated….
Thus there have been acquired, since 1910, approximately 225,000 dunams in the Emek Yizrael and about 65,000 dunams in the Plain of Acco—a total of 290,000 dunams, purchased at the price of £970,000.

http://www.zionismontheweb.org/Rupin1925.htm

So much for desert and swamp.

Mar seems to accept Wikipedia as a source when it supports his argument.

But does it really? We have already seen the statements of General Peled, Rabin and Begin. One would have thought they would be authoritative. Never mind, here are some more:
“... Reserve General Matityahu Peled, a lecturer in the history of the Middle East at the University of Tel Aviv, who had been chief of the logistical command during the 1967 war and was one of the 12 members of the army General Staff, said at a symposium at the Zavta Club in Tel Aviv: “The thesis according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war.” Israelis, he added, were under no threat of destruction “either as individuals or as a nation”. While Egypt had 80,000 soldiers in Sinai, Israel had “hundreds of thousands of men poised against them”.
Peled then wrote a long article in Maariv, the largest circulation Israeli newspaper on 24 March 1972: “Since 1949 no one was in any position to threaten the very existence of Israel. Despite this, we continue to nurture the feeling of inferiority as though we were a weak and insignificant people struggling to preserve our own existence in the face of impending extermination.”

Various military men supported his statement and, on 19 April 1972, in an interview with Maariv, General Haim Bar-Lev, who was deputy to Chief of Staff General Yitzhak Rabin, said: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Day War and we had never thought of such a possibility.” General Ezer Weizman who, as chief of operations, had been largely responsible for the outcome of the war, commented: “There never was a danger of extermination. The Jews of the Diaspora would like, for reasons of their own, to see us as heroes, our backs to the wall.”

Then, Mordechai Bentov, a former member of the ruling coalition during the June war, said he had not voted in favour of the war because he was convinced that all diplomatic and political means had not been employed to obtain the reopening of the Gulf of Akaba. He added: “This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived and then elaborated on afterwards to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.”

Why did General Peled wait until 1972 before telling the truth? Kapeliuk believed this was because of Peled’s opposition to Israel’s annexation of the territories occupied in 1967. He maintained that Israel’s leaders had deliberately distorted the objectives of the 1967 war in order to raise the spurious issue of the security of the state. Peled added: “By falsifying the causes of the war and confusing its true motivation, the Israeli government was seeking to render acceptable to the people the principle of partial or total annexation.”
http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/mwoolfson.htm

Com on, the Crane commission was accused of antit-Zionist biases.

Folktruther:

From wikipedia which Brewerthorpe seems to prefer, in this case it appears accurate.

Quote
  The Six-Day War (Arabic: حرب الأيام الستة ,  arb al Ayyam as Sitta or more commonly Arabic: حرب 1967 ,  arb 1967; Hebrew: מלחמת ששת הימים , Milhemet Sheshet Ha Yamim), also known as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Third Arab-Israeli War, Six Days’ War, an Naksah (The Setback), or the June War, was fought between Israel and Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The nations of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria also contributed troops and arms to the Arab forces.[5]

In May 1967, Egypt’s president Nasser expelled the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Sinai Peninsula.[6] The peacekeeping force had been stationed there since 1957, following a British-French-Israeli invasion which was launched during the Suez Crisis. Egypt amassed 1,000 tanks and nearly 100,000 soldiers on the Israeli border[7] and closed the Straits of Tiran to all ships flying Israeli flags or carrying strategic materials, receiving strong support from other Arab countries.[8] On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack[9] against Egypt’s airforce. Jordan, which had signed a mutual defence treaty with Egypt on May 30, then attacked western Jerusalem and Netanya.[10][11][12] At the war’s end, Israel had gained control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The results of the war affect the geopolitics of the region to this day.” See the remainder of the article - google 1967 war.

.

But the campaign to “humanize” the Palestinians that brewerthorpe tries to carry out overlooks the fact that ever since the Zionists were aided by Jewish interests to move to Palestine prior to 1900 there have been elements of Palestinian groups that have tried to push them out by terrorist attacks, not to mention bombing of school buses and kibbutzim. The Palestinian Arabs were determined to push the Zionists out, even though authorities in the Ottoman Empire allowed the Jews to buy land - usually desert or swamplands which the Zionists cleared by dint of sacrifice and hard work. In later days, while Arab Palestinians farmed after a fashion, it was without the benefit of agricultural science and much of the land had gone to waste over the centuries.  A final point, Jews had been in palestine since the Romans - they too were Palestinians.  To the credit of the Zionists and the chagrin of the Arabs, the Zionists made the land litreally fruitful.  While they were doing so I saw Arabs still scratching the earth with a stick-plow and an ass with no intent to nurture the landor move to more modern agriculture - an no help from the oil Arabs either.
                       

As far as where the truth comes from, it is a problem. An assiduous person such as brewerthorpe might get sources that appear to be unbiassed but have an organizational slant of their own. For example, sources from within Israel, e. g religious fundamentalists will have a different view that some Zionists. All Zionism really means is a movement to find their homeland in ertezt Israel (the land of the Israel of the Old testament. ) To my mind, brewerthorpe finds himself on the side of the Arabs. While there is some merit in some of the detail, I tend to rout for the Israelis, remembering that this feud is an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.  The Palestinians and the Arabs can lose many battles and still survive but the Israelis can only lose one war and they risk extermination, ironically, a supplement in a way to the Holocaust.

If you observe and listen you will see the Arab bombings and rocket attacks before the Israeli fighter bombers and tanks. - all the way back to before 1900.

I see I neglected to mention that the King Crane Commission convened in 1919.

For those who, despite MAR’s admonitions, accept that the documents of the period are of some value in understanding the History, Here is a link to the report of the King Crane Commission.
http://members.tripod.com/hagia_sophia/alhumayrah_files/king-crane.htm
This was a fact-finding mission sent by President Wilson to Palestine. The U.S. at the time had no ambitions in the area and was considered an honest broker. The section devoted to Zionism is interesting:

“We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist program for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.

(1) The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made.

(2) The commission was abundantly supplied with literature on the Zionist program by the Zionist Commission to Palestine; heard in conferences much concerning the Zionist colonies and their claims; and personally saw something of what had been accomplished. They found much to approve in the aspirations and plans of the Zionists, and had warm appreciation for the devotion of many of the colonists and for their success, by modern methods, in overcoming natural obstacles.

(3) The Commission recognized also that definite encouragement had been given to the Zionists by the Allies in Mr. Balfour’s often quoted statement in its approval by other representatives of the Allies. If, however, the strict terms of the Balfour Statement are adhered to -favoring “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights existing in non-Jewish communities in Palestine”-it can hardly be doubted that the extreme Zionist Program must be greatly modified.

For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” ....
.....It is to be noted also that the feeling against the Zionist program is not confined to Palestine, but shared very generally by the people throughout Syria as our conferences clearly showed. More than 72 per cent-1,350 in all-of all the petitions in the whole of Syria were directed against the Zionist program. Only two requests-those for a united Syria and for independence-had a larger support ...
...The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.

MAR—what was reported at the time in the American mass media about the 1967 war was that the Arabs militarily attacked Israel.  Not much knowledgeable about the matter, I believed them and contributed money to Israel.  I think most American Jews are duped in the same way I was, although, since they are not interested in political theory, they don’t care as much.

I initally thought Brewerstruope was a bigot, but he obviously isn’t, and is sincerely interested in the truth and justice of the matter.  This is not my impression of most Zionists.  the only way to defend the imperialism of Israel and its apratheid character is to lie about it and indulge in irrationality, and this is what most Zionists do.

“The Brits did not want any more as their presence they thought would inflame the Arabs on whom they were dependent for oil.

As yoiu may recall, the combined Brotish, French and Israeli attempto to retake the Suez Canal”

Re-taking the Suez Canal would not “inflame the Arabs on whom the Brotish were dependent for oil”?????

Nasser must have been even more tolerant than I thought.

FOLKTRUTHER:

Long before 1967.

Thousands of Jews came legitimately from the DP camps and illegally as brewerthorpe says, from the DP camps, through Europe by any means to Palestine. That’s three years and not two short a time to build up the population and don’t forget that women then bore arms as well.

The Brits did not want any more as their presence they thought would inflame the Arabs on whom they were dependent for oil.

As yoiu may recall, the combined Brotish, French and Israeli attempto to retake the Suez Canal was stymied by a combination of American and Russian opposition after which Lester Pearson of Canada recommended that a UN observer force be set up to monitor the “settlement”. Canadian observers were later expelled prior to the 1967 war by the Egyptians.

I care little for the religious myths of either testament of the bible; history begins a lot earlier than the Holocause but in my view that is sufficient to give the Jews a break.

Stuff didn’t just happen in the corridors of power; the real stuff happened on the ground in an unremitting opression in Palestine to which the Jews, Zionist or not responded appropriately.

Brewer seems to be dedicated to his cause; I am not but In know what I experience, what I saw and wgat was daily reported at the time. Scholars sift the remainders of what they think were relevant documents and read into them what they will. It happened on the ground, not in the books. 

People should take their nose out of the books long enough to see reality. I found the revision to Jewish history interesting, but then the whole of the religious history of both the Old Testament and the Gospels are known to be highly speculative, if not questionable, apart from the attempts of the Romans to deal with them.

Mar.

You have no knowledge of where I have been and what my direct experience of the region is. The reason is simply this. If I wish to cite my own “on the ground” experience it would be incumbent upon me to provide evidence. This would entail revealing my identity. This is something I do not choose to do. So you may speculate as to the extent of my travels, it matters not to me and makes not one jot of difference to the validity of the thesis I propound, which relies on the evidence I offer to support it.
One notices that you offer nothing but your purported experience to support your point of view. This is valueless in a forum such as this for the same reason.
Even if we are to accept that you were “on the ground in 1967”, that is not a very good vantage point from which to eavesdrop on decisions made in the corridors of power. I am more inclined to examine the evidence offered by Historians such as Benny Morris, himself an avowed Zionist, which is backed by the documents and diaries of the decision makers.

I can offer no defense to the charge of fanatic or propagandist except to point out that my writing on this subject is also consistent with that of a concerned humanist who sees injustice and attempts to combat it and this is how I see myself. I would also point out that propaganda usually consists of unsupported statements aimed at creating attitudes. It most often does not stand up to scrutiny. I would suggest that your previous posts fit this description rather aptly. They could also be simply the ill-informed opinions of someone who has not read much of the History surrounding this conflict so I do not judge.

I am happy to let the readers decide whether Jews being better farmers is what caused the Arabs to attack and harass them. I am more persuaded to the view that it was the activities of the Irgun, Stern Gang, some of which I have referenced here, and the stated intention of the Zionists to take control of the territory that stirred Arab resistance.

As to the Diaspora, I suggest you consult with Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University who informs us that the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East:
http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel

The Caliphate I have already dealt with in a previous post.

I await an explanation as to why such a disproportionate number of Palestinian children are killed in this conflict.

Thank you Folktruther. I can see that I must pay a little more attention to detail when making my case.
Having long ago seen through the fairy-tale narrative woven around what was, in every sense, the invasion of Palestine, I often under-estimate the persistence of the old myths in the public’s mind.

The British have been made the scapegoats of history unfairly, in my view. Their Mandate to rule Palestine began in 1927. A close examination of the documents and incidents in the subsequent period until the U.N. Partition reveal their constant battle with covert agents of Zionism intent on smuggling arms and men into the territory. For this reason I regard the images of destitute European Jews making their way to the sanctuary of Palestine as largely fictitious. In 1948, the Zionist forces comprised over 90,000 men under arms. One is forced to ask, where did those men and arms come from?

Folktruther - not a war but a continual offensive harassment by Arabs againt settlers. The Jews didn;t have an army then, just farmers who defended their lands and kibbutim against Arab raiders.

Brewersttroupe:

I could raise many points in regard to your trivial pursuit and nitpicking..  I do not notice any .
word about you having been anywhere but in a library and I note that you have your own web site to dig up every pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian snippet you can which is prejudicial to the interests of the Jews and favourable to the Palestinian Arabs. It is Christmas day, and a spoiler to even deal with your nonsense - nonsense because it is, on the surface what you have read in books and documents.  In other words you are a propaganda machine. Perhaps I could be accused of the obverse, but actually I went to the UN task with a fully prejudiced view about the
jews in Palestine and the later citizens of Israel learned at my parents feet. I was convinced by SEEING what was going on that while the Jews were not blameless, they were justifiably on the defensive.

For example, in contrast to the list of Arabs killed by Jews prior to World War II can you offer a similar list of Jewish settlers and children killed by Arabs/Palestinians in the same period?  You even quote the part that the Zionist League was the appointed body to treat with the Mandatory and the Palestinian parallel body. The Post 2005 list is informative but it is the other 100 year end of the eye for an eye exchange and meaningless in itself.  It was long ago when the
Jews/Israelis warned that every attack would be met by a counter blow in reprisal.

The fact that your web site is dedicated to this issue shows to me you are somewhat of a fanatic on the subject.

Insofar as the Balfour Declaration and its sequalae are concerned, the issue then was of course not a Jewish state but a Jewish homeland.  The issue became a state when it was obvious after WWII and the proposed UN partition of Palestine that it was the only was to run there own show, being prevent otherwise both by the Brits and the Mufti. . At this point what the hell is the difference between “state” when the Zionist League have been virtually ignored in favour of the Arabs. It was also very obvious aside from the Balfour Declaration and the Mandatory arrangements that you have quoted that Britain and France were going to march to the drummer that played the “Oil Anthem.”  I think that the growing population of Jews creating successful agricultural pursuits unsettled the Arabs and led them to attack, harass and eradicate undefended farms resulting in armed kibbutzim which when attacked, did result in Arab casualties you mention, and considering the emotional content of attacks on families and children, did result in eye for an eye responses.  Had the Arabs left the Jews to develop their homes and farms there would have been few if any casualties on either side.

YOlive trees - soil destroyers throught the Middle East.

And how the hell would you expect the Jews (read “Zionist League”) to create a “Homeland” when there efforts at settlement were met by murder and attack?

As for the disproportionate count of Jews vs Arabs in pre-settlement Palestine in the pre-1900 years, what the hell do you expect when the Romans, and everybody else drove them from pillar to post for the next 1900 years, aside from a few Jews who hung in there in Palestine, through the Muslim onslaught, the Crusades and the various Caliphates?

I have better things to do than observe on your propaganda, cleverly appearing to be scholarship when you seem to have no direct knowledge of went on

Brewerstroupe—I didn’t know that the ISraeli-Arab war was going on BEFORE WW2. This makes your perspective more reasonable. The Jewish immigrants would have had to know what was happening, at least after a short while.

“It is nonsense to say that the Balfour Declaration was not policy”

How do you set up a Jewish State in territory 90% owned by Palestinians without doing something that “... may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” ? Not one document of the period mentions “Jewish State”. The only concession intended was for the orderly assimilation of those Jews who wished to emigrate into Palestinian society. See:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/15470

This was made very clear in the White Paper of June 1922 which is an official document, unlike the letter from Balfour to his chum:

“Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become “as Jewish as England is English.” His Majesty’s Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab delegation, the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded `in Palestine.’ In this connection it has been observed with satisfaction that at a meeting of the Zionist Congress, the supreme governing body of the Zionist Organization, held at Carlsbad in September, 1921, a resolution was passed expressing as the official statement of Zionist aims “the determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community, the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development.
It is also necessary to point out that the Zionist Commission in Palestine, now termed the Palestine Zionist Executive, has not desired to possess, and does not possess, any share in the general administration of the country. Nor does the special position assigned to the Zionist Organization in Article IV of the Draft Mandate for Palestine imply any such functions. That special position relates to the measures to be taken in Palestine affecting the Jewish population, and contemplates that the organization may assist in the general development of the country, but does not entitle it to share in any degree in its government.”

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp

While you’re at it you might also explain:
#  April 20, 1936 - 2 Arab workers in a banana plantation killed
# March, 1937 - 2 Arabs killed on Bat-Yam beach
# November 14, 1937 - 6 Arabs were killed in several shooting attacks in Jerusalem.
# April 12, 1938 - 2 Arabs and 2 British policemen were killed by a bomb in a train in Haifa.
# April 17, 1938 - An Arab was killed by a bomb detonated in a cafe in Haifa
# May 17, 1938 - An Arab policeman was killed in an attack on a bus in the Jerusalem-Hebron road.
# May 24, 1938 - 3 Arabs were shot and killed in Haifa.
# June 23, 1938 - 2 Arabs were killed near Tel-Aviv.
# June 26, 1938 - 7 Arabs were killed by a bomb in Jaffa.
# June 27, 1938 - An Arab was killed in the yard of a hospital in Haifa.
# July 5, 1938 - 7 Arabs were killed in several shooting attacks in Tel-Aviv.
# On the same day, 3 Arabs were killed by a bomb detonated in a bus in Jerusalem.
# On the same day, an Arab was killed in another attack in Jerusalem.
# July 6 1938 - 18 Arabs and 5 Jews were killed by two simultaneous bombs in the Arab Melon market in Haifa.
# July 8, 1938 - 4 Arabs were killed by a bomb in Jerusalem.
# July 16, 1938 - 10 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Jerusalem.
# July 25, 1938 - 39 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Haifa.
# August 26, 1938 - 24 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Jaffa.
# February 27, 1939 - 33 Arabs were killed in multiple attacks, incl. 24 by bomb in Arab market in Suk Quarter of Haifa and 4 by bomb in Arab vegetable market in Jerusalem.
# May 29, 1939 - 5 Arabs were killed by a mine detonated at the Rex cinema in Jerusalem.
# On the same day, 5 Arabs were shot and killed during a raid on the village of Biyar ‘Adas.
# June 2, 1939 - 5 Arabs were killed by a bomb at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.
# June 12, 1939 - A post office in Jerusalem was bombed, killing a British bomb expert trying to defuse the bombs.
# June 16, 1939 - 6 Arabs were killed in several attacks in Jerusalem.
# June 19, 1939 - 20 Arabs were killed by explosives mounted on a donkey at a marketplace in Haifa.
# June 29, 1939 - 13 Arabs were killed in multiple shootings during one-hour period.
# June 30, 1939 - An Arab was killed at a marketplace in Jerusalem.
# On the same day, 2 Arabs were shot and killed in Lifta.
# July 3, 1939 - An Arab was killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Haifa.
# July 4, 1939 - 2 Arabs were killed in two attacks in Jerusalem.
# July 20, 1939 - An Arab was killed at a train station in Jaffa.
# On the same day, 6 Arabs were killed in several attacks in Tel-Aviv.
# On the same day, 3 Arabs were killed in Rehovot.

....not to mention the aforementioned assassinations of Lord Moyne, Count Bernadotte, the 1946 bombing of the British Embassy in Rome, the numerous letter bombs sent to British MPs, the sinking of the Patria and so on and so on.

...to be continued

More nonsense:

“The Zionist Jews, as Europeans, had more get-up-and go in making land productive that had lain neglected since the Diaspora.”

In 1891 Ahad Ha’Am opened many Jewish eyes to the fact the Palestine was not empty, but populated with its indigenous people when he wrote:

  “We abroad are used to believe the Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed ..... But in truth that is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains .... are not cultivated.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 42)

Orange exports from Palestine (boxes):
1908 - 1909     744,463
1910 - 1911   869,850
1912 - 1913   1,608,570

During the 1944 - 1945, the area of the land planted with olives was 595,405 dunums, of which the Jews owned only 7,000 dunums or less than 1.2%.

“The 1967 war.”

Nasser had half of his military bogged down in Yemen at the time. No serious historian regards ‘67 as anything but an aggressive war planned and executed by the Israelis.

“I distrust your cascade of Wikipedia references”

Wikipedia is simply the most convenient source. You may trust it or distrust it as you choose, it is the original sources that I rely on, all of which are available in the text.

“50 years of ceaseless slaughters and attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Jews”

The casualty list is the most telling witness:
123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.
....a ratio of almost 10 to one. Please explain.

....to be continued

brewerthorpe:
Do you call the camps in lebanon and Jordan “succour?”  No more than the hellholes in Gaza.

You read well, but I sense that you were not there.

Look, the Arabs were the champions of the Arab Palestinians and the sworn enemy of the Jews, whether one calls them Zionist (an advocate of a Jewish homeland in Palestine) Palestinian Jews who had been in residence since before the Diaspora.. The word Palestine, as I am sure you must know, comes from the Romans who called it such when it was THE Jewish homeland.)  The Zionist Jews, as Europeans, had more get-up-and go in making land productive that had lain neglected since the Diaspora.

The 1967 war. Admittedly a premptive strike and in that technical sense Israel did “start” it. But the Arabs, particularly the Egyptians were amassing weapons from the Soviets - Migs, tanks, trucks, artillery and handheld weapons - for their own pre-emptive strike. Trouble is the Egyptians were too careless, too late and/or ill-trained and too ill-motivated to use them properly. In fact, one of the reasons apart from the premptive strike that the Egyptian Air Force never got off the ground is that the Egyptians did not put engine covers on their MIgs and hence they filled up with sand, as did the tank engines to some degree.

Incidentally, I am not Jewish but my association was with the UN forces who were there to observe without prejudice.

I distrust your cascade of Wikipedia references, particularly as any interested propagandist uses it to salt history with their own view. I also distrust the historians, although a student as such once, as history is still being created and as we all know about history, it is written by the survivors and until then it is contested.  In this respect I prefer to believe my own eyes as I saw at the time.

Mind you, I do not condone any ill treatment by Israelis of Palestinians, but nor should anyone condone the 50 years of ceaseless slaughters and attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Jews on women, school buses.

As I said, it is a tooth for a tooth and you can’t turn back the clock to help the Palestininas who were deserted by the Arab world. And please don’t mention Jordan or lebanon.  Jordan kicked out the offending Palestinians from Jordan themselves. The elements in Lebanon harbouring terrorists wrote their own tragic result, even though Israel can never be exonerated for the slaughter in the camp there that harboured terrorists. 

The mid-east is a world where the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is used by both sides so where one starts is of utmost importance.

It is nonsense to say that the Balfour Declaration was not policy -it was brought to the peace table as British policy after WWI. It was Lawrence’s quixotic flamboyance with Hussein that gave hopes to the Arabs (which were realized in the case of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria that they did not really deserve any more than the Jews did. Considering their puny and relatively ineffective efforts with Lawrence. Any more than the Brits desrved Palestine as a mandate or France Syria.

 
While one would like them both to back off, the reality is that the Palestinian and Arab terrorists have borken the peace time and time again inviting the Israeli response.

“In the event, the Arabs refused the Palestinians succour”

Utterly untrue. To this day, Jordan shelters the majority of refugees, as did Lebanon until Sharon committed the massacres of Sabra and Shatila - qv.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre

“Following the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, many Palestinians tried, in one way or another, to return to their homes. For some time these practices continued to embarrass the Israeli authorities until finally they passed a law forbidding Palestinians to return to Israel, those who did so being regarded as “infiltrators”....
.....According to Kirshbaum, the Law has as effect that “no one is allowed in or out without permission from the Israeli Military”. “This regulation has been used to exclude a land owner from his own land so that it could be judged as unoccupied, and then expropriated under the Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953). Closures need not be published in the Official Gazette”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus

“Britain was grossly favouring the Arabs, despite the fact they were two-faced, promising territories to the Arabs while promising a homeland to the Jews under the Balfour declaration.”

The Balfour declaration was a letter from Lord Balfour to his friend Rothschild - nothing more. It has been conjured as being an official document authorizing the establishment of a Jewish State. It cannot be for it is neither an official document nor does it mention a Jewish State. To the contrary, it contains this statement:
“...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”

“the UN peace keeping force headquartered in El Arish, which was eventually ordered by Egypt to get lost so that the Arab nations could erase Israel from the map.”

We have already dealt with the 1967 War so I will repeat just one quote:

Finally, in 1982, the Israelis admitted that they had started the war (although official Zionist propaganda in the United States still does not acknowledge this fact). Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech delivered at the Israeli National Defense College, clearly stated that: “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him” (Jerusalem Post, 20 August 1982).

Mar cannot resist referencing the Holocaust yet again. May one ask why? To the best of my knowledge, not even the most ardent Zionist claims that the Palestinians had anything remotely to do with it.

“the Palestinians ... are their own worst enemies and have gained more from Israeli oversight and would gain more if they stopped their own violence. “

As to who is the aggressor in Palestine today, one statistic alone tells the story:

123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Let us now examine what the historians say about Mar’s other statements.

“it was the Palestinians who fled when the Jews announced their new state of Israel”

This calumny is frequently quoted in an effort to blame the Palestinian exodus on the Arab League rather than Israeli terrorism. We have already seen that the massacre at Deir Yassin occurred before the war began. That in itself would be enough to inspire flight. There is, moreover, not a shred of evidence that the Arab League encouraged Palestinians to leave. Quite the reverse in fact.

“(Benny) Morris, with others of the New Historians school, concur that that Arab instigation was not the major cause of the refugees’ flight[26]. They do acknowledge that Arab instigation during December 1947-June 1948 may have caused around 5 percent of total exodus[27][28]. As regards the overall exodus, they clearly state that the major cause of Palestinian flight was not Arab instigation but rather military actions by the Israeli Defence Force and fear of them.”

“Erskine Childers checked transcripts of all Arab radio services monitored by the BBC in 1948, and discovered that, ‘(T)here was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948’, and that to the contrary broadcasts gave flat orders to civilians to stay put[39]. His point is taken by Glazer (1980, p. 101), who writes that not only did Arab radio stations appeal to the inhabitants not to leave, but also Zionist radio stations urged the population to flee, by exaggerating the course of battle, and, in some cases, fabricating complete lies”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus#Opening_of_archives

Nothing illustrates the “capture” of history by the Hasbara better than this posting by Mar.

“The Arabs and Palestinians threatened running rivers of Jewish blood”

This is mistranslation of a statement made by Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League in May 1948.

Christopher (Lord) Mayhew, Member of the House of Commons, exposed this for what it was:

At the time of the June 1967 war it was stridently asserted by Israel’s supporters that Egyptian President Gamal Nasser threatened to drive the Israelis into the sea.
This claim, for which there was no evidence at all, was almost universally believed in the West and it had a powerful effect on public opinion in Britain and the United States at that time.
In Britain one Member of Parliament even quoted it during a television program, provoking another Member of Parliament, Christopher Mayhew, to offer 5000 pounds to any of the millions of viewers who could produce evidence that Nasser had made such a statement. Mr. Mayhew repeated the offer later on television, and in the House of Commons and broadened it to include genocidal statements by other Arab leaders. As he explained in a letter to the Manchester Guardian:

“I made this 5000 pound offer with a quite serious intention. I wanted to help reassure Jewish people that, in spite of much Israeli propaganda to the contrary, responsible Arab leaders are not genocidal. Those who try to suggest otherwise are seriously mistaken and merely help to increase the fear and hatred in the Middle East which does so much to prevent a peaceful settlement.”

During the following four years Mr. Mayhew received a steady trickle of letters from eager claimants, each one producing some blood-curdling quotation from an Arab leader, usually culled straight from one pro-Israeli publication or another. Mr. Mayhew replied to each claimant, explaining that the quotation was mistranslated, wrongly attributed or invented, as the case might be, but always adding that if the claimant was not satisfied he could take him to court.
Eventually, one claimant, a Mr. Warren Bergson, did take Mr. Mayhew to court. Bergson issued a writ during the October 1974 General Election for Parliament at a time when Mr. Mayhew was contesting the constituency of Bath.
In February 1976 the case was heard. Significantly, Mr. Bergson was unable to offer evidence of Nasser’s alleged statement. Instead, he produced a genocidal threat alleged to have been made by the then Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, in 1948. When Mr. Mayhew produced the original statement in Arabic, however, the claimant was unable to deny that his English version was a flagrant and apparently deliberate mistranslation.”
From: Facts & Fables: The Arab-Israeli Conflict by Clifford A. Wright
http://www.answerway.com/expertans.php?category=369&expertname=abirl&catnam=Breaking+News
see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Mayhew

The blood referred to by Pasha was Palestinian blood and the speech was inspired by the massacre at Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948. See:

http://www.counterpunch.org/martin05132004.html

Another pack of technical nonsense which ignores the nature of the founding of Israel from the British Mandate in 1947. The Arabs and Palestinians threatened running rivers of Jewish blood if the Jews were given a state in Palestine by partition. In the event, it was the Palestinians who fled when the Jews announced their new state of Israel, fearing they would be treated in the same manner that they threatened to slit Jewish throats.

In the event, the Arabs refused the Palestinians succour and they ended up in UN concentration camps, kept there by the desire of the Arab nations to keep the captive Palestinians as a running sore to harass the Israelis.  History has borne that out.

Britain was grossly favouring the Arabs, despite the fact they were two-faced, promising territories to the Arabs while promising a homeland to the Jews under the Balfour declaration. Politics again. At the time of the partition they were grossly favouring the Palestinians. 

The combined French/British/Israeli attempt to retake the Suez Canal in 1957 resulted in power plays that set up the UN peace keeping force headquartered in El Arish,  which was eventually ordered by Egypt to get lost so that the Arab nations could erase Israel from the map. I have personal knowledge of that and unlike many of these writers was in the Mid-East whose view of what went on is biassed by their recency to the problem. The problem is not in the words of Article 242 but in the actions of the Palestinians and Arabs in fomenting trouble .

After 2000 years of hatred, pogroms, not to mention the Holocaust which the Arabs would deny, my opinion is that the Israelis have won those territories after being unjustly attacked by the Arabs, who meant to erase the Israelis from the map.

In the halls of state in the US and Britain and France, the issue is mid-east oil, not the Palestinians who are their own worst enemies and have gained more from Israeli oversight and would gain more if they stopped their own violence.

Where I live it is Christmas day today so happy Christmas all.

Zionism is fundamentally flawed. It is, as my mother would have said, neither fish nor fowl. This is easy to demonstrate by applying Kant’s principle of universality.

Zionism holds that the Jewish people have a right to a “Jewish State”. We have to ask ourselves does this right flow from being a member of a religion or from being a member of a tribe.

If it is religion, it follows that all religions should equally possess this right. Thus Roman Catholics would logically possess the right to occupy and rule the territory from which their religion emanated - say Rome or even greater Italy. This would offend many principles that are essential to the peaceful co-existence of man - freedom of religion, the separation of Church and State. History teaches us that such theocratic states inevitably result in the oppression of minorities and internal wrangles over interpretation and doctrine. This is evident within Judaism today. Orthodox sects such as Neturei Karta hold that G-d expressly forbids taking Israel back by force, that the people will only earn that privilege through peaceful means. They have scripture on their side:

“The Talmud in Tractate Kesubos (p. 111a), teaches that Jews shall not use human force to bring about the establishment of a Jewish state before the coming of the universally accepted Moshiach (Messiah from the House of David). Furthermore it states that we are forbidden to rebel against the nations and that we should remain loyal citizens and we shall not attempt to leave the exile which G-d sent us into, ahead of time.”
http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm

If it is tribe from which the right to a state proceeds, then all tribes must enjoy that same privilege. We should have no objection to any race claiming electoral and legislative privilege in any state in which they claim sovereignty. This is, quite simply, racism.

By switch-hitting between race and religion, Zionists have confused many otherwise clear-thinkers. Like the proverbial cat on hot bricks, they jump from one foot to the other to avoid being burned by the racist or theocratic labels.

Neither is tenable however.

That the Zionist project is corrosive is easy to demonstrate. Since it began and largely because of it, we have seen the rise of the “Islamic State”.

Under the Ottomans, “Islamic” described a nation in the same way “Christian” applied to Great Britain. It described the predominant belief system and the basis for its law. That it lacked the exclusivity of the modern Islamic (or Jewish, for that matter)  State is evidenced by the fact that throughout the Ottoman Empire, many high governmental positions were held by Jews and other non-Muslims.

“The Ottoman Empire was, in principle, tolerant towards Christians and Jews (the “Ahl Al-Kitab”, or “People of the Book”, according to the Qu’ran) ........Under the millet system, non-Muslim people were considered subjects of the Empire, but were not subject to the Muslim faith or Muslim law. The Orthodox millet, for instance, was still officially legally subject to Justinian’s Code, which had been in effect in the Byzantine Empire for 900 years. Also, as the largest group of non-Muslim subjects (or zimmi) of the Islamic Ottoman state, the Orthodox millet was granted a number of special privileges in the fields of politics and commerce, in addition to having to pay higher taxes than Muslim subjects.[48],[49]....
In 1492, when the Muslims and Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sent his fleet under Kemal Reis to save them and granted the refugees the right to settle in the Ottoman Empire.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

The movement from this secular and tolerant form of government to the modern Islamic State is coincident with and most likely the result of the establishment of the Jewish State.

Cyrena- it’sw worse than Israel doesn’t care what the world thinks, they deiberately defied and insulted the UN on purpose in imprisoning Falk.

Brewerstrope— I think that 75% of the Israelis are racist is an underestimate.  EVERYONE who grew up under a racist power system is racist to some degree, including you and I in traces.  It’s inevitable since the preconceptions and presuppositions underlying the mainstream truth consensus is racist.  And this is especially the case in Israel and historically in the US.

A collection of my stinking relatives are coming over for dinner tonight on Christmas eve.  They are are all American Jewish Zionists.  I have been told that I am not the most tactful person in the world and they have the same values and intellect as INHERIT THE WIND if you read TD comments.  They simply can’t think from a world historical viewpoint.
I don’t enjoy these ordeals.

But can they be held responsible for Israeli murderous opporession and brutality.  They have no power.  Oh, I suppose they could be held minutely responsible to the extent of the social power they do have, but that is insignificant.  You understand they are not like Howard, who I would not allow in the house let alone eat with him.

You have to distinguish between the powerful and the people ruled by power.  The German people were not responsible for the Nazi regime even though a significant fraction voted for them, because they had no common power that developed the way the Nazi’s did.  How, for example, can you hold the children and the gullible responsible, let alone the people who oppposed the Nazis.  And the same is true of the people and power in all oppressive polities.

Are you going to blame me for feeding these miserable wretches, one college student of them belonging to a Jewish sorority.  She is a complete idiot who gets such good grades in a top ten school that she was commended by the Chancellor.  It’s enough to make you puke.

One does what one can in a world we never made.

Sara Roy on Gaza

If Gaza falls . . .

01.01.2009 | The London Review of Books
By Sara Roy

“Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.

The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had scheduled to cover Gazans’ needs until the start of February (six more were allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to pay to store food that isn’t being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in November alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra $150,000 for storage in December, money that will be used not to support Palestinians but to benefit Israeli business.

The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to close because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they can find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has made clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to incubate broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein.”

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2252

By Dyev, December 23 at 10:35 pm

•  “If the Israelis were wrong to take their country, so were we to take this country. And if they should give back thieer country, so should we.”

Well I’m all for you guys giving us back our country Dyev. My ancestors have been suggesting that for Centuries. I’d even be willing to help ya’ll pack. Drive you anywhere ya wanna go…land, air, or sea. I haven’t had any takers though. Wonder what that’s about?

Kdelphi,
•  “…My point was that, the Jewish people MUST have emigrated to Europe (if they are originally from Israel or Zion), and , therefore, would have benn immigrants in Europe…”

~~
I get your point completely, since that’s what makes sense, IF in fact they were ‘originally from Zion”. (there was no such place on the planet known as Israel until they created in in 1947, and Zion is a mythical place in the Bible). But that’s the thing. The Zionists spin the tale as if all Jews were collectively run out of the area in the recent past, or even the last 100 years or so. But it’s really been more like a THOUSAND years since they were supposedly run out of the area now called Israel, and they didn’t all get run out at the same time, nor would I imagine that they could possibly all end up in the same place.

So at the time of Hitler’s atrocities, Jews had been in Europe for hundreds of years, and they’d been Russia for just as long, and there were still a large number of Jews in the Middle East at the time as well. There were Jews HERE at the time of Hitler’s atrocities, and they didn’t emigrate from Zion, but from Russia and ALL PARTS of Europe. In fact, now that I sort of think through the history more, Jews have been scattered throughout Europe, and Russia since before the US was the US. So, if they DID ‘emigrate’ to Europe, it was probably long before we had a word for it.

Here’s something from a JewsagainstZionism website
“..The purpose of the Jew is to bear witness to the existence of G-d, through his adherence to the Torah. The Al-mighty granted the Jews the land of Israel as the particular setting which would serve as the most conducive atmosphere to their performance of their duties to G-d.

“The Jews in ancient times were banished from the land of Israel because they had failed to fulfill their obligations to the Al-mighty. Every Jew acknowledges this in his prayers (Umipnei Chatoeinu Golinu Meiartzeinu). They accepted the penalty of exile and were at that time expressed sworn by the Al-mighty not to accelerate their redemption on their own, and especially not to rebel against the nations under whose rule they were found. To the contrary, every Jew is commanded to pray for the peace and well being of the government of which he is the subject.”

So according to this, they were ‘banished’ in ANCIENT TIMES, from the ‘land of Israel’ and they only reason they know that is because the Torah says so. So everybody just ‘accepts’ that the ‘land of Israel’ as described in the Holy Books, is exactly that spot where these Arabs have been living for thousands of years.

Anyway, here’s the link. I just read through it. Even though it was a rehash for me, it was still very interesting. Wish I’d had this when I was pouring over this history for long ago examinations.
Good links too.

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/zionism/history.cfm

To equate the Zionist conquest of Palestine with the near extermination of the indigenous people of America is perfectly valid. To offer the colonization of America as an excuse for the current colonization of Palestine is not at all valid. The colonial pattern of conquest and populate is a thing of the past. One would not condone slavery in any part of the World despite the fact that it has a history nearly as long as that of colonialism. Neither should we condone colonialism for we now know that it entails a measure of ethnic cleansing. It is a very eighteenth and nineteenth century concept - along with slavery. I find it personally devastating that such a practice should be continuing in the 21st century. I had thought that Man, as a species, had become better than that.

Dyev—I do not see where I am in disagreement with you. I know what your point was. I honestly think that Euro-Americnas should leave, or, pay reparations to Native Ams, Af Ams and others. But I’ll be damned if I know where we would get the money after bailing out Wall St. Maybe Germany should pay reparations to Israel. Or, as you said, give Jewish peopel part of Germany.

My point was that, the Jewish people MUST have emigrated to Europe (if they are originally from Israel or Zion), and , therefore, would have benn immigrants in Europe. I do not agree with Hitler. I was responding to your comment.

Now I see why you were so hostile on the other thread. You think I am an anti-semite. I am not. I am an anti-Zionist.

KDelphi,
No, what I am saying is that white Americans took this country by killing and displacing the indigenous peoples in the same way that the Isaraelis killed and displaced the inhabitants of ‘Palestine’.  If the Israelis were wrong to take their country, so were we to take this country. And if they should give back thieer country, so should we. 

Maybe the best thing to do for the Jews after WWII would have been to give them pieces of Germany and Poland, the two countries which most joyfully exterminated Jews as well as Gypsies, Communists, Labor Organizers and Homosexuals to the total of over 14 million.

And to all those who don’t seem to know where historical Zionism came from, read about the treatment of Jews in Czarist Russia.  That’s where Zionism came from. And the place in Africa they were offered later became Uganda, of Idi Amin fame.

By Folktruther:

Falk was Jewish and he was systematically humiliated; Finklestein was deprived of his career by Dershowitz and Zionists; that poor guy who reported on Israel’s nuclear arsenal was imprisoned under horrible conditions for two decades.  Etc, etc.

~~Well FT, Falk is actually STILL Jewish, (just like he’s been all of his life) but I don’t think HE has been ‘humiliated’ because this isn’t about HIM, (or even the others) directly. Falk is a representative of the UN, and while Israel certainly directed their standard contempt for the rest of the world by refusing him admittance, THAT is the only way such actions should be interpreted. It has nothing to do with Falk being Jewish. Israel refused the UNITED NATIONS when they refused to admit Falk, based on NOT his ‘Jewishness’ but his long standing criticism of Israel’s violation of Human Rights, and the multiple other international laws that Israel has violated over it’s 60-year life as a so-called Jewish State.

So it’s highly improbable that Ricard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and ...

http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/event_files/past/_winter03/falk/

was ‘personally humiliated. Pissed and frustrated maybe, but personally humiliated isn’t likely, because this isn’t ‘personal’ aside from whether or not (as Falk himself has noted in most of his own scholarship) whether or not we as human beings actually take the suffering of OTHER human beings seriously.

I think the Israelis have proven that they don’t, (care about the suffering of ANYONE) and that’s plain enough for the world to see.

What you HAVE shown, (because Israel has) is that Israel doesn’t CARE who or where the ‘criticism’ comes from, because Israel will continue to do whatever Israel chooses to do, as long as the rest of the world allows them to behave as the rogue state that Israel is, with ZERO impunity.

So it’s not about Falk, or Finklestein, (denied tenure, but fortunately able to publish his work anyway) or even the poor fellow who let the secret slip about Israels huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.

To the extent that it may be about Falk, it is advantageous, (at least to my own thinking) that the Israeli governments’ treatment of him recently (as a special rapporteur appointed BY the UN)that they have once again been exposed to the world.

In my own opinion, there are STILL too many people totally ignorant to the actions of Israel over these past decades, or horrendous crimes they’ve committed against the Palestinians. Israel is always pissed when they’re exposed for the criminal regime that they are.

Folktruther.

Yes, I apologize for neglecting to acknowledge the point. There are some very courageous Jews who are in the vanguard of the truth movement. Ilan Pappe has had to give up his tenure at Haifa and take up a post at Sussex. Too many death threats - for teaching History! Schlomo Sand will probably be next though his book is a best-seller in Israel.
I particularly enjoyed Finklestein in Cleveland which Robert linked to. He has an unusual manner of speaking, almost an impediment and half-way through, I thought he might be heading for trouble but he finished well. Especially after the Zionist ladies (Howard’s Mother and sister????) tried to put him on the spot!

It is hard to ascertain the level of responsibility that should be apportioned the majority of Jews; those who ignore the outrageous acts of their leaders. On the one hand, most of them are simply ignorant - the product of an education system that is an arm of the Hasbara (propaganda) machine. In Israel, the history is simply not taught. Children learn that the Palestinians are the interlopers.
On the other hand, witness the venom Jews unleashed upon “good Germans” who likewise were ignorant.
A recent survey in Israel revealed that 75% of Israelis are racist to a degree and, in my view, that lies at the heart of the problem.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3381978,00.html

Howard—I know that Israel is a big capitalist haven—so what? Helped the US alot, huh? Hell, the Israeli rep. to the IMF wanted to “privitize” space! (I guess we already have)

By Dyev, December 23 at 11:52 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

“All Americans who believe that the Isrealis hold Isreal or Palestinean lands illegally should leave the United States, return the land to the surviving Native Americans and return to their immigrant (invader) ancestor’s place of origin.  And if those countries won’t accept them, that’s their problem”

By this logic, you would have to agree with Hitler that the Jewish people never belonged in Europe and that, if they were there by ancestry, it was their “problem”.

People who wish to read Howard’s posts—just go to the links offered by brewerstroupe, and others here. Howard, save us the room on the thread. Youre just copying things verbatim.

Brewerstroupe—One of the points I’m making is that Zionism oppresses Jews as well if they get in the way of Jewish power. Falk was Jewish and he was systematically humiliated; Finklestein was deprived of his career by Dershowitz and Zionists; that poor guy who reported on Israel’s nuclear arsenal was imprisoned under horrible conditions for two decades.  Etc, etc.

It isn’t accidental that Aipac featured a minister who praised Hitler and the Holocaust.  Or that they cater support from religious anti-Semites.  they favor power, Jewish power and couldn’t care less how much the Jewish people have to pay for it.  If you oppose Zionist oppression, you hate Jews, whether or not you are yourself Jewish. 

As the American people make a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the Zionist power struture will shrink to be composed entirely of people like Howard. Making its fall inevitable.

News from the beacon of Democracy in the Middle East:

Richard Falk, the professor of international law at Princeton University and the UN’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, had accused Israel of violating international law, international humanitarian laws, and the Geneva Convention. He described Israel’s policies against Palestinians and its siege of Gaza as “war crimes”, “genocidal tendencies”, “holocaust implications”, and “holocaust-in-the-making”. He urged the International Criminal Court to look into the possibility of indicting Israeli leaders for war crimes.

Professor Falk had a little taste of Israel’s Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation when he traveled to Israel, last Sunday December 14th, 2008, to visit the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to report on Israel’s compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. The Israelis “detained” Professor Falk at the airport, treated him as a criminal and a threat to the state, humiliated him and deported him next day back to Geneva.

Despite Israel’s strong declaration that every Jew in the world is automatically granted full Israeli citizenship with all the protections this entails, and despite being a Jew himself, Professor Falk was not spared the humiliations and cruelty Israel treats its enemies with.

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/27441/26/

Hey Howie…Your zionist garbage is NOT getting you & your aim anywhere. The “JackAss” tail has been permanently pinned to your bare behind.

You are a complete idiot.

Awright. Here are some more:

13. In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute terms, Israel has the second largest number of startup companies after the US (3,500 companies mostly in hi-tech).

14. With more than 3,000 high-tech companies and startups, Israel has the highest concentration hi-tech companies in the world — apart from the Silicon Valley, US.

15. Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds right behind the US.

16. After the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies.

17. Israel has the highest average living standards in the Middle East. The per capita income in 2000 was over $17,500, exceeding that of the UK.

18. On a per capita basis, Israel has the largest number of biotech startups

19. Twenty-four percent of Israel’s workforce hold university degrees — ranking it third in the industrialized world, after the United States and Holland — and 12% hold advanced degrees

By brewerstroupe, December 22 at 9:05 pm #

Groundhog Day.

I think Howard is a computer generated Troll.
Here is a link to his identical “Israeli achievements” post from February 1st 2007:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20080130_i srael_inquiry_slams_political_and_military_leaders/

The replies are a lot of fun.

~~~~

Thanks for digging up the link Brewerstroupe. The second I started reading the top post from Howard, (which was the second part of his ‘list’ of Israeli accomplishments) I already knew them from memory, because he’s cut and pasted that shit so many times before!!!

It was like, oh no…here we go again. That same old pilfered trash. Even if any of it WAS true, why oh why does Howard think anybody would CARE? What is the connection between Israeli technological achievements and the fact that they’ve slaughtered and/or displaced millions of human beings over the past 6 decades, and continue to imprison and torture millions of their victims.

I’ve never been able to figure out how Howard connects these things in any meaningful reason or logic.

But yeah, it was fun to read some of the replies again.

Thanks to for the extra reference material and links on Zionist Development Operation for Israel, and all of the collaboration that went on with the Nazis. I’ve found that fascinating, and I’m still reading up on it.

KDelphi,
  Nice response.  Laffin’ our heads off, man !
Here are a few more:

7. The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis

8. According to industry officials, Israel designed the airline industry’s most impenetrable flight security. US officials now look to Israel for advice on how to handle airborne security threats.

9. Israel’s $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined

10. Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita

11. Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.

12. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation by a large margin — 109 per 10,000 people — as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed

Groundhog Day.

I think Howard is a computer generated Troll.
Here is a link to his identical “Israeli achievements” post from February 1st 2007:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20080130_israel_inquiry_slams_political_and_military_leaders/

The replies are a lot of fun.

As I have stated previously and on several occasions on TD, it is fortunate that we have several Jewish scholars like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Sarah Roy, Nurit-Peled El Hannan, Amira Hass, Uri Avenary, Israel Shahak, Illan Pappe and many other Jews who are on the side of Truth, Human Rights, Humanity, Freedom, Equality, International Law, Decency, Peace, Justice and they are NOT on the side of Apartheid, Zionism, Ethnic Cleansing, Brutal Murder/Assassinations, Oppression, Occupation and Racism.

Take this moment to watch Norman finkelstein speech/ Q&A;(Youtube 6 parts) in Cleveland on 12/17/08. Judge for yourself! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FINKELSTEIN IN CLEVELAND

Norman Finkelstein Speech/Q&A;12.17.2008 | City Club of Cleveland
By CCOCops

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2232

Howard—You mean to tell me that most of this crap that we are , for all practical purposes, forced to use to communicate, is actually the fault of Israel? THEY make this junk, that I have to re-boot and re-boot, the printer that never works, the processor that fails, and, that the EU sued for 100’s of millions of euros, due to monopoly and crappy work??

NOW I am REALLY pissed!

Is this what you mean, LittleBoy57 ?

1. The cell phone was developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel

2. Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel

3.The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel. Both the Pentium-4 microprocessor and the Centrino processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel

4.The Pentium microprocessor in your computer was most likely made in Israel

5.Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.

6. Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D;facilities outside the US in Israel

And people wonder when lawyers for the state (israel) argue the symantics of wording (or lack of ALL words) instead of the heart (meaning)of the text, why there is still so much discredit regaurding the state of Israel!! What a freak show!

Some interesting reading on Hamas:

What Hamas really wants.
“THE failure to form a Palestinian coalition government again raises the question of why Hamas persists, despite considerable pressure at home and abroad, in refusing to recognise Israel officially and explicitly. The first answer, which is rarely discussed, is that Hamas is convinced that recognition would be a pointless concession.

It has not forgotten that for decades the international community pressured the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah, both secular bodies, to make the same concession: they were given nothing in return, neither a Palestinian state nor a capital in East Jerusalem. Worse, Israel did not accept any responsibility for the Palestinian exodus of 1947-49 nor did it recognise the right of return (or the entitlement to compensation) of some 5 million refugees.”

http://mondediplo.com/2007/01/05hamas

The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804

Another Hamas Peace Plan Ignored
by Ira Chernus
If you want to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell, just look at the New York Times editorial pages of November 1, 2006. Amazingly enough, the Times ran a full op-ed column by a top official of the Hamas party, Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Yousef repeated the same offer Hamas has been making for years. In Arabic it’s called a “hudna.”

As Yousef explained, a hudna is “a period of nonwar but only partial resolution of a conflict.” It “extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences.” A hudna “affords the opportunity to humanize one’s opponents and understand their position with the goal of resolving the intertribal or international dispute.”

“This offer of hudna is no ruse, as some assert, to strengthen our military machine,” Yousef pleaded. And he offered several reasons to believe it: “A hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. . It goes back to the Koran itself. . When Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God and will therefore keep its word. Hamas has honored its previous cease-fires, as Israelis grudgingly note with the oft-heard words, ‘At least with Hamas they mean what they say.’”

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1104-26.htm

the perverted values of Howard and his ilk are inherited in the presuppositions of the religous tradition of Judism, notibly in the concept of the Chosen People.  Ziofascists simply don’t give a shit about anyone who is not Jewish, and don’t care about the Jewish population either. 

They identify with the symbols and reality of Jewish power, and repress anyone they can who interferes with their hegemony, whether they are or not these people are Jewish.  This is why Inherit maintains that I hate all Jews, parroting the drivel of Aipac, even though I’m Jewish, and why Finklestein was prevented from visiting Israel, and why Sabin was assassinated. 

The Ziofascists are for Jewish power and the Jewish people,as well as the vast majority of the people of the world, are Enemies.  That is why Aipac featured a minister Hagee at their convention who had previously praised Hitler publically.

“Nonsense. Israel desires no land.”

Dear me Howard. Haven’t you been paying attention?

“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever.”
—Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

“The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.”
—Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”
—Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”

—Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
—Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

Here is a map of Eretz Israel.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/israel/images/greater-israel-map4.jpg

By the way. Here’s a starter for ten. Have a look at the map and ask yourself:

Why did the pro Israel neo-cons falsify intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq?

Nonsense. Israel desires no land. They left Gaza and Lebanon. Did you know that ? What aggression?  They are the ones receiving missles and rockets every single day.
Should they not protect their citizens?

They are being aggressed upon.  Stop the rockets. Free Israel. they wish to be left alone.

Find some other scapegoats to blame for all the troubles in the world.

What people should be worrying about is what’s going to happen if Israel ever achieves its ultimate aim and takes all the land from the Palestinians? What will the huge Israeli military machine do then? It’s highly unlikely it will simply be turned off and they will beat swords into ploughshares. What the conflict with the Palestinians disguises is the fascist nature of Israel itself. Israel needs the Palestinians to justify its aggression and outrageous behaviour. If they succeed in driving the Palestinians out and taking the small amount of land they now occupy what then? That’s when countries like Iran and Lebananon will really have to worry that the mindless aggression of the Israeli military funded by American taxpayer dollars will turn its attention to them. If Israel is not controlled by someone at some stage the entire Middle East could go up in a fireball. Did I hear someone say ‘renewable energy’?

Howard is a peculiar Troll. I remember discussing the ‘67 War with him before. He doesn’t seem to believe the words of the people he seeks to defend:

A few months after the war, Yitzhak Rabin remarked: “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai on 14 May would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it” (Le Monde, 29 February 1968).

Israeli General Peled was even more frank: “To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analyzing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal [Israeli army]” (Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972).

Finally, in 1982, the Israelis admitted that they had started the war (although official Zionist propaganda in the United States still does not acknowledge this fact). Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech delivered at the Israeli National Defense College, clearly stated that: “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him” (Jerusalem Post, 20 August 1982).
http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/snakebite/Wars.html

With the single exception of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel initiated all of the wars that have resulted in it occupying almost all of Palestine and making a hell-hole out of Lebanon.

As to who is the aggressor in Palestine today, one statistic alone tells the story:

123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Why is this statistic so significant? Simply because the primitive rockets deployed by Palestinian militants have no aiming technology whereas Israeli weapons are equipped with state of the art lazer and computerized aiming devices. The massive death toll among Palestinian children indicates that they are targeted by the IDF.

Another point not often considered. It is a War crime under the Geneva convention to settle in occupied territory. Israeli “citizens” (the target for some militant’s rockets) are in fact complicit in this crime. By subsidizing settlers in the occupied territories, Israel has made them “legitimate” targets.

Howard writes:

“More land.  Baloney. They are the size of Lake Tahoe.”

Howard: Israel’s obligations have nothing to do with its size.

And even if there WERE some minimum size that a country has a right to be, it would not apply any more to the Israelis than it did to the Palestinians.

But of course, you wouldn’t understand that — since like all Zionists, you think Israeli Jews are better than people.

You can’t have it both ways. If Egypt’s act of blockade was an act of war then Israel’s blockade is an act of war and the UN/US should invade Israel to restore the peace.

Really? We should “liberate” Israel?

Howard you are delusional and have no grasp of the facts. Israel is routinely the one that violates the terms of cease fires it has entered into.

You can continue to deny the facts all you want. It won’t get Israel one inch closer to peace.

Israel does not violate, has NOT violated any cease fire. Not unless there is cause like firing into Israel or digging tunnels into Israel.

More land.  Baloney. They are the size of Lake Tahoe.  just don’t expect ‘em to give away more land unles there is someone to talk with.

They did not turn their backs on Hamas. Hamas has stated from day one to today that they wish to destroy, eradicate, get rid of Israel.  How do you deal with that kind of ‘government’.  Hamas rules with an iron fist.  They could stop the bombardment easy. They refused yesterday to continue the “truce”.

The best friend the gazans could have is Israel. No other people wish to help them. They just don’t know it yet, because their leaders refuse to explain the world to them.

Howard,

Israel routinely violates the cease fire when Hamas has maintained it.

Israel has never sought peace but rather more land.

Calling my analogy “poor” while being unable to assail it shows you have no idea what you are talking about. The situation was exactly the same; a blockade vs an act of war.

Israel has never been patient with Hamas. From the moment Hamas won the election, Israel turned its back on Hamas as the legit gov’t of the OT.

Economic stimulation? That’s a neat name for 500 lb bombs being dropped on heavily populated civilian centers.

History still shows the war started (caused) by Israel’s immediate neighbors.  Russia in Cuba is a poor analogy.

Hamas has declard war on Israel.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza is only because rockets, missles and bombardment has not stopped, i.e, not stopped since day one of the ‘truce’ months ago. Hamas has declared war on Israel.  Israel is being patient and trying to pressure Hamas to change its operandi and get into having a normal gov’ts behaviour.  But Hamas has declared WAR on Israel. period.

Instead of invading Gaza, Israel is trying economic stimuli to make it more responsible .  period.

Applaud Isreal’s efforts.

Thank you brewerstroupe for the invaluable information!
Your post and links are worthy of the time,and trouble that you spent putting it together. Much food for thought!
Thank you Robert Fisk for your always superb journalism.

Howard,

All that matters in determining who started a war is who crossed the border and attacked another nation’s soil first. In ‘67 it was Israel that iinitated the war.

Using your logic, the US and the USSR were in a state of war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Were they? The record seems to indicate they were not. Israel is currently blockading the Gaza strip, is Israel in a state of war with Gaza? If it is, you should stop complaining about rocket attacks from Gaza.

You can’t have it both ways. If Egypt’s act of blockade was an act of war then Israel’s blockade is an act of war and the UN/US should invade Israel to restore the peace.

A blockade is usually determined to be a Cassus Belli or just cause to declare war, not an act of war in itself.

Maybe you should read up on history and international law before spouting off typical Zionist propaganda that no educated, reasonable person believes.

Well, let us remember.  History, that is.  Egypt comes into Sinai with all its troops; announces its intentions to attack. Edges closer. Goes on a war-footing.  Blockades the port of Eilat (an act of war right there),  so Israel gets no shipments in. Syria masses its troops on the border and announces its invasion plans and shells the countryside below in Israel, from its’ heights on the Golan.

No question who initiated the 1967 war. The war was thrust onto Israel. A devensive war if there ever was one.  They sure didn’t go picking on their “neighbors” rite out of the blue.

“And any land in question is a result of the ‘67 war when Israel was attacked on all sides.”

You mean the war that Israel initiated in ‘67? When Israel attacked Egypt!

You know all land acquired via warfare is illegit.

Look at that a Ziotwit managed to slip two lies into one sentence!

Well done!

Any small lands in question does not add up to an absurd 90% that is mentioned. And any land in question is a result of the ‘67 war when Israel was attacked on all sides. Besides at that time Israel begging Jordan to not attack which resulted in Jordan losing the West Bank. And back in 1948 pa’s did not want land designated to them by the UN.

Israel has stated they are most willing to return lands (they really do not have to ) in return for security concerns.  Can’t blame them, either.

Can’t blame them either for the inflated number of refugees.  Contentious issue how many left because of threats and warnings from arab states invading in ‘48.  Might be 50,000 asIsrael begged arabs to reamin. Many did. This is a contentious issue on both sides. Let them settle it together.

Stop the rockets first from Gaza.

a clarification:

Israel has confiscated 90% of the land that should have been the State of Palestine decreed by the same UN resolution that created the State of Israel.

I know personally a family of Christians that had lived in what is now Israel for more than 200 yrs.  In 1949 their family was force off their ancestral lands by the Israeli gov’t ALONG WITH 800,000 OTHER CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND DRUZE that had working farms, olive groves, orchards and vinyards THAT ISRAELIS TOOK OVER AND OPPORATED WITHOUT COMPENSATION OF ANY KIND.  PM YAHOOD BARRACK STATED THAT IF HE WERE A PALESTINIAN HE WOULD BE A TERRORIST ALSO.

The Arab neighbors didn’t help the situation but BY CONFISCATING 90% OF LAND THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE STATE OF PALESTINE, THEY HAVE MADE SURE THE SITUATION CANNOT END WITHOUT PERMANENT EXILE OR GENOCIDE OF THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS.  PLAINLY STATED, ISRAEL IS DOING THE SAME THING AS THE THIRD RIECH.

Free Israel. Yes, little tiny Israel, the size of San Bernadino county.  Free it from the 20 odd somethinig arab countries that surround it with zillions and zillions of acres and empty land who promote Hamas and Hezballah to mislead their peoples in hating Isreal.

Perhaps Israel should leave Gaza. good idea; see how the gazans govern themselves. Oh, they did that already, pulling out all their military and citizens out of Gaza.  Now how to stop the bombardment, which has not for one day ceased since they left Gaza.  Well, they could make an incursion and get at the rocket factories, etc.  But then civilians in Gaza would have casualties.  Don’t want that, of course.  How about some restrictions that pass through the borders to get their attention to stop the terror and rockets.  Oh, goodness they have done that already.

Maybe that’s why since the trial of Gaza failed they are reluctant to give up more territory. Imagine.