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thatcrazycajunLemme see if I've got this...Hezbollah, a militant faction of Islamists who have basically taken over southern Lebanon, whose philosophy has at its heart the complete and utter destruction of the state of Israel, and who have shown themselves more than willing to sacrifice innocent lives (including women and children) to their mad dreams of pan-Arab hegemony, began launching Russian-made Katyusha rockets into civilian enclaves in northern Israel a couple weeks ago. Israel, left on its own by a world filled with nations thus far too gutless to help (including its so-called chief ally, US, sad to say), is using its military resources to defend itself and deprive these madmen of their capacity to continue such attacks, while trying mightily to minimize any collateral damage or injury...and Israel is the one that gets raked over the coals by international opinion? I must be missing something.
Gods forbid I should ever support Condoleezza Rice, one of the chief architects of our current debacle in Iraq, on anything, but I have to admit I'm with Madame Secretary and her boss Junior on this one. A cease-fire cannot precede the achievement of some kind of arrangement to insure a permanent, lasting, enforceable peace between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. Anything else is merely a guarantee of endless repetitions of this same destructive cycle.
Gods forbid I should ever support Condoleezza Rice, one of the chief architects of our current debacle in Iraq, on anything, but I have to admit I'm with Madame Secretary and her boss Junior on this one. A cease-fire cannot precede the achievement of some kind of arrangement to insure a permanent, lasting, enforceable peace between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. Anything else is merely a guarantee of endless repetitions of this same destructive cycle.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 02:38 am (UTC)If militant anti-Americans had been gathering strength in Mexico for decades and then some of them entered the country illegally, kidnapped US citizens, and hustled them back to Tijuana, Tijuana would be history. But the same people who would be calling to level all of Mexico argue that Israel should roll over and let Hamas and Hezbollah continue to kill indiscriminantly. Bah.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 11:25 am (UTC)And then, what if, in 2006, after Mexico had spent a decade rebuilding its infrastructure and enconomy in the wake of the US invasion and a decade of civil war, a powerful millitia group that had formed as a response to the US incursion and the general chaos that followed, kidnapped two U.S. soldiers for the purposes of negotiating a prisoner exchange.
And what if, in respose to these two kidnappings (as opposed, remember, to the thousands of Mexican prisoners held indefinitely in the U.S.) the U.S. bombed Tijuana to rubble, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, maiming thousands, specifically targeting non-militia locations?
And what if the U.S. then proceeded to bomb to bits every major bridge, airport and thoroughfare in northern Mexico -- dropping bombs on caravans of refugees while they were at it -- making it impossible for humanitarian aid to get in or civilians to get out?
Fuck Israel. _They_ are the ones who are killing indiscriminately (well, they're doing far more of the indiscriminate killing than their adversaries), and have been for decades.
How pathetic is it that skinheads, neo-Nazis and other anti-semetic sickos can point to actual _facts_ to justify their bigotry these days, rather than having to make shit up, as they have historically? Why try to convince people that we have horns when you have factual accounts of Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children for target practice?
Frankly, if the Israelis want to carve out a nation in the desert, surrounded by people who don't care much for Jews, I say give them a strip of land that runs the length of the Texas-Mexico border. That'd solve the immigration problem, and eliminate all of the bloodshed.
Of course, it wouldn't serve our political/economic need to maximize oil company profits, but everything's a compromise...
no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 10:08 am (UTC)I tell you, as a Jew who is proud of, and endlessly entertained by, his heritage; who is, if anything, a cultural chauvanist in favor of Jews in general; and who was brought up to regard the Israelis as heroes, carving out a simple livelihood surrounded by Arabs who hated them because of their religion and sought to destroy them out of pure, evil hatred:
Israel is an obscenity.
Do your research and you'll figure out what the rest of the civilized world already knows:
Israel (and I speak here of its government and military), is a raving theocracy that, not content to have merely stolen a big swath of land from its Palestinian inhabitants and ghettoize them on the outskirts of their new nation, has systematically degraded and terrorized them for 50 years, all with the unconditional support of the United States government.
Israel may be a small nation surrounded by enemies, but they are enemies they have, for the most part, earned, and they are massively more powerful militarily than any of their neighbors. In addition to their own nukes, they have the most powerful and warlike nation in the world backing them up.
In the last couple decades, Israel's behavior has gotten worse and worse -- a predictable result of its third-rail status in American politics. They can get away with anything, and do.
The docket of abuses and war crimes perpetrated by the IDF staggering. The history of Israel is one of a long, agonizing act of ethnic cleansing, with the will to actual genocide lurking, not very well hidden, beneath the surface.
While this doesn't justify murderous acts like the car bombings that have killed so many innocent civilians in Israel, one can view them as the desperate, pointless acts of people driven beyond reason by powerlessness in the face of systematic repression and abuse.
Aside from the suffering caused by the car bombings, the worst part about them is that they make it easy to miss the fact that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances (in the same sense that the Pacific ocean is a bit damp).
Go to http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ for solid statistics clarifying just how one-sided this horrible conflict has been.
All of this grieves me to say. I've never been more disillusioned about anything in my life. But as much as I want to think of the Israelis as the good guys, I can't ignore the evidence.
No government, military organization or "resistance force" in the region has any moral standing in this conflict at this point. The blood of the innocent could fill the red sea. But, U.S. sentiment notwithstanding, Israel has as much as or more to answer for than the rest of those nations combined.
I am revolted by Israel. I am ashamed of Israel. And so, in fact, are many Israelis (there is much more vocal opposition to the Israeli government's actions by Israeli Jews than there is by American Jews, who inhabit a very selective reality distortion field where Israel is concerned).
If I thought it could be managed, I'd be as eager for the dissolution of Israel as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (albeit through much more peaceful means).
PS, regarding the cease-fire:
Aside from the fact that by cavalierly rejecting the current cease-fire offer, the U.S. is condemning ghod knows how many people on both sides to unnecessary death and suffering, the whole rationale is flawed. How stable could peace negotiations be with all sides pounding the bejeezus out of each other (one side disproportionately moreso than the others) -- as opposed to during the calm of a ceasefire?
And how do you figure that a ceasefire guarantees "endless repetitions of the same destructive cycle" more than the ongoing continuation of the same destructive cycle?
Peace, brother.
D
Rebuttal
Date: 2006-08-02 04:24 pm (UTC)"Stolen"? Is it your thesis then that Israel has no legitimate claim to the land, even though its people have ancestry and religious history there going back at least as far as the Palestinians, if not farther? I agree that all claimants should have access - Christian, Jew and Muslim - but to say that Israel stole the land is going a bit far, I think.>>Aside from the fact that by cavalierly rejecting the current cease-fire offer, the U.S. is condemning ghod knows how many people on both sides to unnecessary death and suffering, the whole rationale is flawed. How stable could peace negotiations be with all sides pounding the bejeezus out of each other (one side disproportionately moreso than the others) -- as opposed to during the calm of a ceasefire?
And how do you figure that a ceasefire guarantees "endless repetitions of the same destructive cycle" more than the ongoing continuation of the same destructive cycle?<<
Because absent (a) the removal of the Arab militants' capacity to make war and (b) any kind of binding pledge on their part not to start up again, a cease-fire now is worth about as much as the ones previously agreed to in 1996, 1993 and earlier.
Re: Rebuttal
Date: 2006-08-02 05:39 pm (UTC)--------------
Yes, that is in fact my thesis: there were 700,000 people living in that area when the Zionists decided that their claim to the land trumped that of the current inhabitants, and nearly three quarters of a million people were forcibly evicted from their homes and land. They had no right, politically or morally, to bring about the wholsale disposession of the Palestinians.
It would be as if the Naitive Americans decided at this point to assert their ancestral claim to United States territory and drove everyone else out to live as refugees in Canada and Mexico.
Except that their claim is more legitimate: their ancestors inhabited this continent for many thousands of years, with no competing cultures, before Europeans came over, killed the vast majority of them in a breathtaking act of genocide, and relegated them to poverty and squalor on a few tiny patches of land. And all of this happened in the past few hundred years.
So no, the Zionists had no political right to the land, except in their own minds; and as for the religious history of the region, I consider all of it bullshit, and I don't make exceptions for the Zionists just because it would serve "my team" to be a hypocrite in the matter.
So when the Zionists say that the land should be theirs because the Jews are God's chosen people, that means no more to me than if they said that they were entitled to it because the Great Voodoo Puppy of Rigel 6 had revealed the Prophecies of Skeletor to them through the carbon patterns on a burnt piece of wheat toast. Garbage in, Garbage out. No cigar. Israel -- like America -- was founded on ethnic cleansing.
---
>> ...Absent (a) the removal of the Arab militants' capacity to make war and (b) any kind of binding pledge on their part not to start up again, a cease-fire now is worth about as much as the ones previously agreed to in 1996, 1993 and earlier.
I see. So the Arabs have to lay down their arms and promise to be good, and the Israelis need make no concessions themselves, because they're the Good Guys, and would never hurt a fly unless it was in self-defense.
You've fallen for the American myths of Israel the infallible and Israel the victim. Do you actually think that if Hezbollah disbanded and turned over their guns and missles to the Israelis, Israel would just live and let live? The Israeli government is as intent on the annihilation of the Palestinians and the Lebanese as Hezbollah is on the annihilation of the Israelis.
If I were Israel's neighbor, I wouldn't feel safe unless the U.S. made it's billions of dollars of military and financial aid to Israel contingent on Israel's good behavior (starting with the dismantling of the Wall), because that kind of ultimatum is probably the only thing that might stand a chance of halting Israeli agression.
But in this country, if you so much as suggest that any policy of the Israeli government might possibly be slightly flawed, you get branded and anti-semite and, if you're a politician, run out of town on a (3rd) rail. So the U.S. is unlikely to do anything to mitigate the situation diplomatically.
The truth is, the current administration _wants_ chaos in the Middle East. An unstable Middle East drives up the price of oil, which increases oil industry profits. And there is a faction of the Bush junta that is convinced that the apocalypse is nigh, and that anything they do to bring about the End Days and the return of their savior, He, The Most Viscious, Pissed Off, Gun-Toting, Raghead-Smiting Christ, will guarantee them their own reserved parking space in the afterlife.
And if a few thousand brown-colored heathens are killed in the process. If thousands of children are orphaned and maimed; if tens of thousands of innocent civilians suffer incomprehensible misery, grief, hunger and despair...well, they're only a bunch of filthy ragheads, they're not really human anyway.
There will be no peace until Israel loses the unconditional support of the United States and is forced to play by the same rules as everyone else.
Re: Rebuttal
Date: 2006-08-03 07:59 pm (UTC)Stipulate that an immediate ceasefire won't guarantee, or necessarily make more likely a long term solution.
Would it actually make matters _worse_? Would it actually make a lasting solution _less_ likely?
If so, how?
If not, why not agree to the ceasefire? At worst, it will prevent a few deaths and give some Lebanese civilians a chance to flee the targeted area, maybe give the folks on both side a chance to bury their dead.
Re: Rebuttal
Date: 2006-08-04 01:25 am (UTC)Stipulate that an immediate ceasefire won't guarantee, or necessarily make more likely a long term solution.
Would it actually make matters _worse_? Would it actually make a lasting solution _less_ likely?
If so, how?
If not, why not agree to the ceasefire? At worst, it will prevent a few deaths and give some Lebanese civilians a chance to flee the targeted area, maybe give the folks on both side a chance to bury their dead.<<
And give Hezbollah a chance to regroup, rearm and recruit more fanatics to try again in a year or two or three....*That's* how it makes things worse. That's the way it happened before, and unless the world and/or Israel nails their misbegotten hides to the wall first, that's the way it will happen again.