Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: GST who wrote (238396)	7/31/2007 2:04:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yossi Klein Halevi (a very smart writer, btw, and far from a right-winger) sums it up about Burg well: “Avrum is a friend, but I felt what most people felt—that, beyond the ideological debate, there is something profoundly wrong in his character,” Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer, said. “You don’t take all the perks of the Zionist movement and refuse to relinquish them and then repudiate the most cherished notions of Zionism at the same time. There’s something smarmy about it. He is so totally out of touch with Israeli reality that I’m appalled that he ever had any positions of Israeli authority. That interview really destroyed him, or he destroyed himself.” When even a left-winger like Ari Shavit protests, you know that Burg has gone off the edge. Israelis as far as I can tell feel that Burg has gone crazy. He's an embarrassment.

To: GST who wrote (238396)	7/31/2007 2:27:36 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority.> I am sorry Nadine, but I think your sense of who should feel embarrassed is misplaced.

To: GST who wrote (238396)	7/31/2007 8:19:39 PM
From: el_gaviero	Respond to of 281500

This article about Avraham Burg is a confirmation of what I have been saying all along -- that Israel is in the process of cracking up. Smart, civilized and sensitive Israelis are voting with their feet and getting out, leaving behind fanatics and mass-men sunk into a world of endless, narcissistic, self-serving BS about the holocaust. The permanent existence of Israel was never anything but a long shot. This is because Arabs, weak in any given moment and easy to beat in any given battle, never go away and never give up. They are like water, pliable but relentless, sooner or later circumventing every dam and wearing down every mountain. As rightful owners of the land, they will find a way to get back what they see as theirs. What Israel needed to do -- she did not do. She should have used her great ace in the hole, her special relationship with America, to take a chance NOT in the direction of brutality but rather instead in the direction of forbearance. Decades ago she should have let Arafat set up a real Palestinian state, with ALL of the West Bank, then accepted the hits in good stride that would have come along, with the long range plan in mind of bringing to birth some kind of status quo acceptable to all. Then Israel might have had a chance. But no, instead she chose to use her ace in the hole to achieve security through deceit and brutality. It didn’t work, as it never could have. Too many Arabs --- too few Jews -- too many generations fighting over water holes – too much oil in their hands -– too much accumulated pain and grievance. All Israel accomplished with her brutality was drive away the sensitive and the honest not among her enemies but within her own ranks. Now she is done for. Finished. The drama has many acts to go but hard to see how the conclusion is anything but written (as the Arabs might put it). What the Jews in Israel needed to do was become (in practice though certainly not in name) something like Christians, that is, find a way to spiritualize their tribalism, which is what the sect around Jesus accomplished two thousand years ago. Instead, the Jews of today have chosen to remain with the rigidities of their tribal how-to manual for ethnic cleansing, which they call Torah and we call the Old Testament. The result is that they are hated by the Arabs, and are viewed with increasing mistrust by thoughtful Americans, who see the devastation support of them has cost. Once the Beltway is recaptured by Americans, and no longer is Israel-occupied-territory, Israel herself will be naked before her enemies. As matters now stand, she has no effective political friends except among the corrupt and the traitors. Our very own Nadine Carroll is a poster girl for treason and corruption. One reads what she has to say with a kind of morbid fascination, like looking at the corpse of dead dog by the side of the road, which manages to be twisted into a fantastic shape but at the same time is absolutely rigid with rigor mortis.