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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (168480)	8/8/2005 8:56:21 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Dennis, I fully understand why Israel is as it is today. It is NOT, as you seem to think, due to "continuous assaults" by Arabs. Rather it is a legacy of Hitler. As Eric Hoffer observed: It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. Israel today has far more in common with Nazi Germany than any other country on earth. I don't mean this in a derogatory manner. If the trauma of WWII and concentration camps had not affected the Jews as deeply, they would not have been human. Nonetheless the observation stands and it is not just my observation, but that of many Jews as well. I can quote you rabbis and prominent Jews who pointed this out decades ago. None of this however is the point. The point is that Israel is a nation of very militant and armed to the tooth people who have spent their whole lives in a culture of fear, hatred, and kill-or-be-killed mentality. They have radicalized a huge portion of the world's population, some of whom match or perhaps exceed Israel's temperament every step of the way. So the end result is that sooner or later a huge catastrophe is going to befall the world (and most likely the US) and it will be directly traceable to Israel-Palestinian conflict. As such, Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. ST

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (168480)	8/8/2005 10:18:37 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

I'd like to comment on a few implicit (and some explicit) presuppositions in your post. Being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semite. Jews have existed a long time before Israel. Myself, am neither anti-Israel nor anti-Semite. Rather I am against many policies of Israel and believe that ultimately the Jews, the US, and the world will pay a very dear price for those policies. Your comparison to Congo and other locations misses the point entirely. Congo or other sub-Saharan African conflicts are more or less self contained. This is not the case with Palestinian-Israeli conflict where the potential for a spill-over is great. Furthermore, the United States is a direct party to this conflict...something that you cannot completely claim about African conflicts. You notice that I am terming this as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not as Muslim-Jew or Arab-Israeli. This is a subtle but fundamental point that has been obscured by Israeli propaganda. Unfortunately, this propaganda also polarizes the masses and has a tendency to become self fulfilling. When you term it as collective war between Arabs and Israelis, you miss the point that Egyptian and Syrian governments had even less legitimacy in representing Palestinians than their dubious legitimacy over their own population. To suggest that because Nasser and Assad lost the war with Israel, the Palestinians should forego their rights is absurd. The same goes for other senseless arguments I hear often such as "why don't Arabs (note that it is never Arab regimes) just give some land to Palestinians and relocate them there". Would you like to donate half of Massachusetts to the Irish so they can move out of Northern Ireland and the British can have peace? Would that solution make sense to you? I think you need to step back a little bit and take a look at the issue with less prejudice. ST

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (168480)	8/8/2005 2:13:49 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

Sharon: "Bloodthirsty Jewish Terrorist" A soldier in the Israeli military who deserted over the Gaza withdrawal went up to a Palestinian-Israeli village in Galilee and shot up a bus full of innocent civilians. He killed four and wounded at least 12. The form of this attack was very similar to shootings undertaken by terrorists in Iraq who are deliberately attempting to provoke communal warfare in order to attain their ends. The similarity was not lost on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who said, ' "This was a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist who sought to attack innocent Israeli citizens . . . This terrorist event was a deliberate attempt to harm the fabric of relations among all Israeli citizens." Note also that this act of terrorism was impelled by the Israeli government merely moving a few thousand citizens out of non-Isreali territory back into Israel proper. Imagine if a foreign power forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Israelis into refugee camps. Wouldn't that provoke significant terrorism on the part of the displaced? (Voila, you have the Palestinian radical groups). Rightwing proto-bigots have been writing me the past few days insisting that al-Qaeda terrorism is rooted in Islam as a religion, which is ridiculous. Neither was this man's action rooted in Judaism as a religion. All religions can be a platform for fanaticism, but then so too can secular ideologies like nationalism and Communism. Human beings are human beings, and don't differ that much from culture to culture. Everyone wants similar things, but they define intangibles like honor differently, and prescribe different paths to attaining them. About a fifth of Israeli citizens is Arabs, and about 70 percent of those are Muslims, with the rest being Druze and Christians. Because Palestinian-Israelis have bigger families than do Jews, it is projected that they will be 30 percent of the Israeli population in a couple of decades. juancole.com