Israel/Palestine Shenanigans

[do_ron_ron]

IS in Iraq is burying alive women and kids in the north of the country...they belong to a religious minority...complete nutheads the lot of them. Stuck in the dark ages.

This is still being reported as 'rumours' or vaguely as 'reports'. Lets wait until we get independent verification. It is also slightly suspect that these 'reports' happen when the US start bombing again.

 

[arknor]

Dark ages of the Middle East, for the commonly accepted context, would be modern times. Last 20-30 years or so.

yup once they offered to the world knowledge and all they offer in modern times is violence and anarchy

 

[wingman44115]

This is still being reported as 'rumours' or vaguely as 'reports'. Lets wait until we get independent verification. It is also slightly suspect that these 'reports' happen when the US start bombing again.

you saying they shouldn't be bombing ISIS?

 

[do_ron_ron]

you saying they shouldn't be bombing ISIS?

I am saying the 'atrocities' being claimed are at present suspect coming at the time the US started bombing.

Does the US give a rats arse if people are under an authoritarian regime? Not really as they support and/or put in their puppets who are authoritarian. The Saudi's etc, etc ,etc. The only thing that bothers the US is they are the US's puppets not freelance. Would ISIS be any worse than a lot of the regimes the US has put in or supports. NO.

 

[Devlish]

I am saying the 'atrocities' being claimed are at present suspect coming at the time the US started bombing.

Does the US give a rats arse if people are under an authoritarian regime? Not really as they support and/or put in their puppets who are authoritarian. The Saudi's etc, etc ,etc. The only thing that bothers the US is they are the US's puppets not freelance. Would ISIS be any worse than a lot of the regimes the US has put in or supports. NO.

As compared to who? Is there a nation you would hold up as being perfect, or are you just comparing countries and international policy to your own personal morality?

As has been said before, some people seem to object simply because something involves the US, whilst quite happily ignoring the massacres of hundreds of thousands because 'they're doing it to themselves'.

We should be encouraging actions like this and condeming the times we didn't do anything like ooooh not bombing the hell out of Assad when it would have meant that 170,000 lives may have been saved and the liberal rebels in Syria would have had a chance to defeat the SAA and ISIS rather than now living with the consequences of ISIS running amok around the region massacring people. But we were, as always, ******** ourselves about being seen to support US military action. That worked out well eh.

 

[LockyOK]

So by extension, you think the Jews that courageously fought against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrorists.

How about the members of Irgun and Lehi in Palestine in the 1940s?

Zionism has a long history of terrorism and no Zionist has any right to criticise anyone.

 

[Devlish]

How about the members of Irgun and Lehi in Palestine in the 1940s?

Zionism has a long history of terrorism and no Zionist has any right to criticise anyone.

Lets not forget the British in India or establishing concentration camps in the Boer war - and the Americans attacking brave british soldiers in the colonies! The british certainly cant criticise the nazis and the americans cant criticise al-qaeda. Nobody should actually say anything really.

 

[dowie]

So by extension, you think the Jews that courageously fought against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrorists.

You seem a bit confused? How does that relate to whether a UK citizen is legally allowed to fight within a foreign army?

 

[badcompany]

Dark ages of the Middle East, for the commonly accepted context, would be modern times. Last 20-30 years or so.

explain.

 

[badcompany]

If they were stuck in the3 Dark Ages then they wouldn't be doing that...Arabic culture in the so called Dark Ages was anything but Dark or barbaric.

rubbish.

islam caused the dark-age.

 

[badcompany]

yup once they offered to the world knowledge and all they offer in modern times is violence and anarchy

fallacy

 

[Tefal]

Lets not forget the British in India or establishing concentration camps in the Boer war - and the Americans attacking brave british soldiers in the colonies! The british certainly cant criticise the nazis and the americans cant criticise al-qaeda. Nobody should actually say anything really.

The actions of long dead people cannot be used to judge the country of which they happened to be born.


it's always a silly argument "oh but so and so where just as bad x hundred years ago". great some dead people were ******** that changes the current situation how?

 

[FoxEye]

The actions of long dead people cannot be used to judge the country of which they happened to be born.


it's always a silly argument "oh but so and so where just as bad x hundred years ago". great some dead people were ******** that changes the current situation how?

It's the only line of argument they have. Even if you reject it time after time, they keep coming back to it, as they have nothing else.

Essentially, modern day atrocity is OK because some historical atrocity was caused by someone else. Therefore, no one can judge them. You have done the same/ would do the same if you were them.

That's it in a nutshell. That's the only defense they have, and so we get to keep hearing it ad nauseam.

 

[Gilly]

explain.

What about it do you not understand, and I will attempt to provide reasonable response.

 

[do_ron_ron]

As compared to who? Is there a nation you would hold up as being perfect, or are you just comparing countries and international policy to your own personal morality?

As has been said before, some people seem to object simply because something involves the US, whilst quite happily ignoring the massacres of hundreds of thousands because 'they're doing it to themselves'.

And there are some people who quite happily ignoring the massacres of US sponsored regimes while moaning about the others. Both regimes are equally repugnant but are treated differently by this country's politicians and media.

We should be encouraging actions like this and condeming the times we didn't do anything like ooooh not bombing the hell out of Assad when it would have meant that 170,000 lives may have been saved and the liberal rebels in Syria would have had a chance to defeat the SAA and ISIS rather than now living with the consequences of ISIS running amok around the region massacring people. But we were, as always, ******** ourselves about being seen to support US military action. That worked out well eh.

A very simplistic analysis of the Syria. You forget that the West held Assad senior and junior up as moderate regimes for decades.

All apart from the question of who the hell gave you the power to decide what regimes should be 'bombed the hell out of'. It is cultural imperialism at it's most rank.

Syria is a hotchpot of religious, cultural and political groups vying for supremacy with outside interference from the major world powers and regional powers. As usual it is the ordinary people who suffer.

Last major fights we supported the US was in Afghanistan and Iraq - are you trying to hold these up as shining examples of good for the ordinary people?
Afghanistan will fall into the abyss about a year after the US/UK leave.

 

[do_ron_ron]

Lets not forget the British in India or establishing concentration camps in the Boer war - and the Americans attacking brave british soldiers in the colonies! The british certainly cant criticise the nazis and the americans cant criticise al-qaeda. Nobody should actually say anything really.

One of the first examples of getting the Jews to wear a coloured badge was in Britain about the 1100-1200's.

 

[do_ron_ron]

You seem a bit confused? How does that relate to whether a UK citizen is legally allowed to fight within a foreign army?

I was replying to your posts about people fighting the regimes in power over them. Gaza is the Palestinian Warsaw Ghetto in a lot of ways only this time the Israelis are the oppressive regime and the Palestinians are fighting back with what they have.

 

[Craterloads]

Great report from Vice

http://www.vice.com/read/israeli-racism-gaza-kleinfeld-511

In Israel, racism and extremism are exploding. It began shortly after the kidnapping of three Israeli boys—Naftali, Gilad and Eyal—in Gush Etzion, that led to the assault in Gaza which has seen over 1,000 killed. A Facebook page calling for the murder of Palestinians went viral. In one photo, a soldier posed broodingly with his gun, the word "vengeance" written on his chest. In another two teenage girls smiled happily with a banner that read: “Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s values.”

A few days later, at the boys' funeral in Modiin, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu fanned the flames. “May God avenge their blood,” he said to the gathered mourners. “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created,” he tweeted later.

Bibi got his wish. Over the weeks that followed, videos began to emerge almost daily of right-wing mobs roving across cities from Jerusalem to Beer Sheva, waving Israeli flags and screaming “Death to Arabs!”

Many ended in physical assaults. Last Thursday two Palestinian men were attacked on Jaffer Street in West Jerusalem as they delivered food to a grocery market. The following day two more Palestinians, Amir Shwiki and Samer Mahfouz, were beaten unconscious in the Eastern part of the city by a gang of 30 young Israelis wielding sticks and metal bars.

Nationalistic Israelis have also turned on Israelis who disagree with them. Photographs have even emerged of pro-war protestors dressed in t-shirts with “Good Night Left Side” prints, a slogan usually used by European neo-Nazis. Violence from these groups has reached unprecedented levels. Last week in Haifa, a city usually presented as a model of liberal co-existence, an anti-war rally was attacked by 700 people carrying weapons.

The worst is reserved for Palestinians. Four weeks ago in East Jerusalem, a group of Israeli men, acting in revenge, poured gasoline down the throat of Mohammed Abu Khdeir and burned him alive. For some his death, just like Jamal’s, was an aberration, an act without precedent from some mad fringe of Israel’s far-right. “What have we become?” an Israeli relative of mine asked that evening, shocked that somebody with “Jewish values” could commit such a crime.

But while the recent spate can be partly seen as a visceral reaction to the tragic killing of the three boys, this kind of violence is not really that new. Take the story of Jamal Julani. He was walking along a street near Zion Square when a group of young Jewish Israelis, one as young as 13, kicked him in the head over and over. "A Jew is a good soul, an Arab is a son of a bitch," overheard one bystander.

There were hundreds standing in Zion Square that evening in September, but nobody, not even a duty officer on the scene chose to intervene. When paramedics did arrive, it took ten minutes of defibrillation and constant CPR to restore the dying boy’s pulse. He had been so badly beaten that police at the scene had assumed he was already dead.

“Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not 'Jewish extremists’” said an editorial in Haaretz, Israel's left-leaning newspaper. “They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of 'the Jewish state'."

"When you translate it into English you realize how horrific it is, but in the Israeli context there's nothing shocking about it."

Israel has never been the kind of free and open society it has tried so hard to project. Racism did not begin with the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir or the beating and attempted lynching of Jamal Julani. “Zionist doctrine has always pushed society in a very particular direction,” the academic Marcelo Svirsky told me. But it is getting worse. “There is a phenomenon happening right now across Israeli cities that I have not seen before, having lived in Israel for 25 years.”

One of the most striking aspects of this “phenomenon” is how young the people taking part appear to be. Those posting on social media, running amok in lynch mobs, and crashing leftist rallies with sticks, chains, and brass knuckles are, for the most part, young people—many in their mid-20s, some in their teens.

Three weeks ago the activist and journalist David Sheen published an article on Storify called “Terrifying Tweets of Pre-Army Israeli Teens” after he searched the word “Aravim,” Hebrew for Arab, into Twitter. What he found was a harrowing amount of morbid bile presented in the form of grotesque selfies from teenage girls.

Other quotes included "I spit on you, you stinking Arabs," "From the bottom of my heart, I wish for Arabs to be torched," and "Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!"

What is going on? For anyone familiar with Israeli politics, the answer should be obvious. In the past month alone the stream of racism coming from politicians and religious authorities has been relentless. Take Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister, who called on Israelis to boycott Palestinians who don't support the war. Or take Ayelet Shaked, the Jewish Home party politician and member of the Knesset (Israel's national legislature) who recently called for the murder of Palestinian mothers. “They should follow their sons,” she said. “Nothing would be more just.”

“Those words the girls said are not in any way strange to the discourse in Israel,” Sheen told me. “When you translate it into English you realize how horrific it is, but in the Israeli context there's nothing shocking about it.”

"Price Tag attacks" on people taking action against settlers have grown in number without the police really trying to stop them. Vigilante patrols led by extreme organizations like the state-funded Lehava have cropped up across the entire country to stop Jews and Arabs from having romantic relationships. Perhaps the biggest victims of this fanaticism have been refugees from sub-Saharan Africa. Locked up in detainment centers, they’ve faced abuse from almost every part of the Israeli establishment. From the hundreds of Rabbis banning Jews from renting apartments to Africans, to politicians like Eli Yishai, the ultra-orthodox Interior Minister who in 2012 said “until I can deport them I’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable.”

“Both governments under Netanyahu have been responsible for inciting racism,” Svirsky said. “They’ve put in place a long list of anti-equality and anti-Palestinian legislation in all areas of life. That’s why it’s become normal in political discourse to express extreme ideas toward Palestinians. The obsession with a state only for Jews has brought Israeli society into a racist abyss.”

"Half of all Jewish Israeli high school students said Arab-Israelis should not receive the same set of rights as Jews."

For Israeli youth, things might have gotten marginally better in 2013 if a proposal by the left-wing Zionist party Meretz to have anti-racist education included in schools hadn’t been voted down by the Knesset. The bill had been submitted by the Arab-Israeli MK Issawi Freij after a theme park in Rishon Letzion admitted renting out its facilities on separate days to Jewish and Arab schools to “avoid conflict.”

Issawi’s fear that racism was growing in Israel’s schools echoed what others had been saying for years. In a recent study by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, half of all Jewish Israeli high school students said Arab-Israelis should not receive the same set of rights as Jews. Of those who identified as religious, half said the now familiar slogan “Death to Arabs” was legitimate.

In 2010 a group of concerned teachers sent a petition to the education ministry explaining precisely these fears. “We cannot remain silent in light of the increasing presence within the walls of schoolhouses of expressions of racism,” they said. “We see ourselves as educators who must issue a warning. The prevalence of racism and cruelty is growing among young people in Israel.”

According to Sheen many Israeli teachers, particularly those who teach civics, have become afraid to even broach the issue of human rights in the classroom. Earlier in the year Adam Verete, a teacher who dared to call the IDF an “immoral army,” was hauled before a tribunal and later fired after a pupil complained about his “extreme leftist” views. “They can't even bring up the topic without inciting in their students rage and racism,” Sheen said.


Of course, militarism and nationalism have always been part of the Israeli education system—embedded in history books, on maps on the walls, in cartoons of Palestinians on camel backs—but under Netanyahu’s watch, things seem to have gone further. The first major change of the former education minister Gideon Sa’ar, a man who described teachers as “lifelong draftees,” was to enlarge a program designed to inspire even more enthusiasm for the army.

“Service in the IDF is not only an obligation but a privilege and a social value,” Sa’ar said at the time. “The connection between the school system and the IDF will become stronger in the context of the program that I initiated." The budget for civic education, a rare space for critical debate on Israel and its “democratic values,” was cut in favor of an orthodox Jewish studies curriculum. Heritage tours to Hebron were introduced as a way of increasing support for settlements and the idea of Greater Israel. And whatever passing reference to an alternative Palestinian narrative that remained in school textbooks was quickly removed.

“During the 1990s and early 2000s there was some kind of attempt to be more factual,” Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told me. “There was an effort to be more academic and scientific, to speak about Palestinians, even if the ideology was the same. Today it’s back to simplified stories and sheer indoctrination. It’s going backward.”

Though Israel remains a multicultural place, for the most part Palestinians and Israelis live deeply separate lives. Within the 1948 borders just five non-segregated schools are available for young children to meet and learn about one another. Within the occupied territories, physical barriers introduced after the Second Intifada mean contact is almost non-existent.

“There used to be so many more casual opportunities for Israelis and Palestinians to get to know each other,” Sheen said. “Now you have a whole generation—the terrifying-tweets cohort—that has never even known a Palestinian.”

Beyond the physical barriers the mental walls are perhaps even stronger. “I grew up without knowing any Palestinians,” Peled-Elhanan said. “All I had to do was cross to the other side of the city but the thought never occurred to me. This was the kind of education we got—that Palestinians, if they exist at all, exist as an obstacle.”

Israel likes to use its status as the region’s only European-style democracy to fudge criticism of its occupation and siege. Usually this works. There is, particularly in the Jewish diaspora, a monumental gap between how Israel is represented and what is actually happening. But in the present conflict, with over 1,000 dead in Gaza and youngsters pouring through Israel in violent mobs, these delusions may finally be coming undone.

For those who live in Israel and do not support the war or the right-wing government, it is becoming more difficult to voice an opinion, and some people are weighing their options. “Two nights ago there was a big protest in Tel Aviv,” Sheen said. “A long-time leftist was holding up a sign that said ‘flee while you can.’ In conversations I’ve had with hardcore activists, everyone has said they are preparing an escape plan. For people who have children or want to have children, this is no place to raise them.”

 

[dowie]

I was replying to your posts about people fighting the regimes in power over them. Gaza is the Palestinian Warsaw Ghetto in a lot of ways only this time the Israelis are the oppressive regime and the Palestinians are fighting back with what they have.

I can see that you were replying to my post, you quoted it. I just don't think you followed the thread, my post was in relation to another poster citing a particular law in regards to an argument that British people joining the IDF were breaking the law. I really don't see how a conversation about a legal position relates in any way to a question about whether Jewish resistance fighters in WW2 were or were not 'terrorists'?

 

[tonschk]

"There Was an Interview In Fox News And The Guest Was Robert De Niro…

The Host Asked Robert About The Events Related To Gaza…


Robert Replied: “Why do we blame Israel or the Israelis for what they do?”

The Host Was Shocked Because He Knows That De Niro Is Always Declaring His Sympathy With Philistinis…

De Niro Looked At The Host And Saw His Confusion… So He Continued:

“Ok let me explain, if you were bitten by a mad infected dog, who will you blame? the dog or its owner? Definitely the owner, so, all the blame is on USA Government’s shoulders for adopting and supporting a state like Israel”

Well Said…