Saint_;1342291 wrote: Actually I like the Israelis for a couple of reasons:
1. Yeah, my father was there in Germany at the liberation of the death camps and that psychic shockwave certainly rebounds across my psyche as well.
2. I actually met death camp survivors in college in a class called 'The Holocaust." They came to our class to speak and my hair is still standing on end because of it. I feel bad for them.
3. I'm perenially for the underdog. israel is surrounded by extremely EVIL countries who've all got it out for them, especially Iran.
4. I like scrappy fighters. The Israelis don't take crap off anyone. Remember when they hunted down the Olympic murderers? Or when they liberated that airport? or the Six-Days War? Or when they bombed that nuclear power plant? They think it up and do it. They don't waffle, or ask permission.
(It would be even more cool if I wasn't worried they were going to start WWIII.)
Saint_;1342305 wrote: From what I've read, there aren't any true "Palestinians." The various conglomerate of nomadic tribes in that region that call themselves "Palestinians" now, weren't ever a nation. Kind of like if the transients in your city suddenly got together and said a certain park was "theirs."
I'm more concerned with the present than the past. If I assigned guilt based on distant ancestors, I'd owe a lot of Brits for the massacres of the Vikings and the entire Cro-Magnon race would owe the Neanderthals for extincting them.
According to my faith, unless they come around and get on board with Jesus, they just lost that protection.
Oh COME ON, Koan! You know as well as I do that the "Palestinians," for want of a better word, have been nuking Israeli cities day and night for decades now, killing innocent women and children without a care in the world. They have homicide-bombed nightclubs full of teens and even blew apart a children's toy store! Somehow the Israelis are the bad guys for defending themselves?!!
The Israelis have shown incredible restraint. Try to imagine what the U.S. would do if the Canadians had attacked us in the same way. Canada, as a country, would have ceased to exist.
Saint_;1342313 wrote: No...I just read that. Did they exist as a country? What was their country called? Wait let me look it up! Well it says here that the Ottoman empire ruled that part of the world so the "Palestinians" did not exist as a country. I was right.
True...but I still like them.
Slang: "nuking" as in using random missile attacks on civilian targets.
A street gang kills your spouse in a parking lot. You wipe them out. Justified. Aggressors can't complain about casualties.:yh_wave
And to me that's completely unfair. Is anyone concerned about all the Israeli children that the "palestinians" have killed? No, somehow they are "poor" and "put upon." To me, they are stone killers. I honestly would not be upset if the Israelis, who have made concession after concession while the "palestinians" have laughed at every one, pushed them right out of Gaza and into the ocean.
Wow Saint, that has to be the most mis-informed and biased set of posts I have ever seen in the Garden and it's the best proof ever of the effectiveness of the Israeli media lobby.
Shall we take a few of the points?
No true Palestinians.
At the time of the Balfour treaty and at the start of Jewish immigration into Palestine the population was in the millions and was, as near as dammit, as great as the land would bear given the agriculture and water abstraction techniques of the time. Indeed, one of the major riders put on the British Mandate was that any immigration should not be to the detriment of the native population and, when the rate of entry became so high that this was no longer true, the British called a moratorium on further immigration. It was at this point that the Jews resorted to terrorist tactics and leaders such as David Ben Gurrion and Ariel Sharron were listed as wanted terrorists. To suggest that there were no Palestinians because the land was part of the Ottoman Empire is like suggesting that there are no Serbians because it was part of Yugoslavia.
Israel is the underdog.
No single country or combination of countries bordering Israel has sufficient armed force to overcome the IDF so how is she the underdog?
I'd reverse that giver Israeli action in the Gaza Strip, Israel is the big bully and the Palestinians are the underdogs.
Palestinians have been nuking Israeli cities day and night for decades killing innocent women and children.
Can you "nuke" a city with a home-made rocket that has a range of maybe a mile, no guidance system and very little payload? As for day and night for decades, how many do you think they've launched? It's hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. How many have landed in populated areas? It's tens not hundreds. How many casualties? About one tenth of one percent of the women and children killed by the Israelis in "retaliation". In a tit-for-tat war who is retaliating against whom?
As for suicide killers, the first reference I can find to such was an off duty IDF soldier who walked into a Mosque during Friday prayers and started machine gunning down the worshippers and kept going until he was killed. Somehow the Palestinians are bad guys for defending themselves. Tell me, who is the aggressor? Who started the violence? On what basis are you assigning blame?
Israeli restraint.
Restraint is using a proportionate response and what we see is anything but that. How long is is since the firing of a dozen rockets that hurt no-one resulted in the occupation of Gaza with the loss of hundreds of lives including many crushed when their homes were bulldozed on top of them and the shelling of schools and the UN relief compound. The ongoing blockade of Gaza is, literally, criminal.
Israeli Concessions.
These have always been of the form "we'll stop building any further illegal settlements on your land. The only settlements they've removed are those NOT sitting on top of the only water source in the area. Some concession!
At the end of the day, all of the violence in the area is wrong. Whether it was right in the 1920s to allow such a large influx of people into an area without the resources to support them I do not know but I do know that the current cycle of violence has been going on for over sixty years and is the direct result of that decision. To call one side evil for using violence and consider the other totally justified in their use of even more violence is unsupportable and certainly does not help in resolving the conflict.
