Comments on: Warm n fuzzy Netanyahu hugs Obama and peace, but nuthin about a Palestinian state

By: Sniffy

Sniffy — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:20:28 +0000

Ah, ChrisBerel–we were all waiting for you to fart out of your mouth.

By: Margaret599

Margaret599 — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:40:37 +0000

follow-up comments via email

By: Margaret599

Margaret599 — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:37:56 +0000

Israel only wants to be "a nation among nations, a nation like any other" albeit a "unique, very special one." Too funny! Reading your comments, it appears there might be a general tendency to translate the idea of a Jewish Israel almost entirely in non-religious terms. Which would bring a bit of logic into what people in the US think they are doing when they support Israel, even if it fails to provide a basis for privileging some over others. But perhaps that is not so difficult to overlook, since according of privilege remains common within our own society, if one can get away with it.

By: RowanBerkeley

RowanBerkeley — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:36:56 +0000

Yes — and once you've admitted all that, you can see why I regard the term itself as tendentious. It assumes what has been repeatedly disproved: that a 'nation' can possess a state, unproblematically. My sense about this is that during the highly orchestrated Europe-wide right-wing reaction against Napoleon, around the Congress of Vienna period, one of the gimmicks used was the 'springtime of the nations,' a romantic and basically racist attempt to encourage archaic ethnicities to claim national rights, and then manipulate the outcomes, in a divide-and-rule sort of way. I might add that there have been Jewish political adventurers (or 'idealists') involved in a number of 'spiringtime of the nations' agitations. Sometiimes they have taken their identification with the nations concerned so far that they have forgotten they were Jewish.

By: Chrisberel

Chrisberel — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:51:14 +0000

Another series of Nazi flame wars between ED, Mooser the looser, Rowan and Citz.

By: David_F

David_F — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:47:12 +0000

Usually nation-states are formed from pre-existing smaller states, or chunks of a disintegrating empire. Ideally, the peoples involved already see themselves as a nation (i.e. German, French, American). Nation building requires force (Lincoln, Bismark, Hitler, Ben-Gurion), since dialects and laws must be standardized, authority centralized, and minorities assimilated or expelled. The process might be as easy as the Anschluss or as painful as the Civil War, depending how much the peoples in question really want to be unified under one government. Nation-states created out of peoples who do not already see themselves as sufficiently related by culture, language, ethnicity, religion, etc. tend to be unstable. Most of the artificial nation-states drawn up by the great powers after WW I and II subsequently broke up along ethnic lines.

By: Citizen

Citizen — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:38:45 +0000

Actually, Mooser, you are the one ripe for epiphany on the road to Damascus. Lose your ego, and keep up your logic.

By: Mooser

Mooser — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:33:46 +0000

"You aren't answering the question, Ed:" Rowan, you old left-wing trokstky-Lenninist, you spaketh quite truly, there. And he never does. Saul, I garauntee you will feel completely different about all this in just a little while. In the meantime, shouldn't you be on your way to Damascus?

By: Saul of Parseus

Saul of Parseus — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:31:00 +0000

In a way this is a back-handed compliment to Christians, whether deists, agnostics, or church-goers. No historian would deny that the vast majority of USA citizens from the time of Columbus until even now, were born Christians, that is, into a family that was guided by Christian principles. And that our form and spirit of government was dictated by those principles in conjunction with those of the Western Enlightenment, which applied them as assumptions, merely elevating Reason as the cogent flag-banner. It's too bad modern-day Western gentiles do not grasp this historical fact. Instead, they get to be the only group practically vulnerable to the charge of racism–by those deploying Western gentile principles of universal morality, ethics, justice, and fair governance against them, while ID politics is applauded. The irony is terminal. But only for the official PC out group. If the white people (that's how they are regarded by the others around the world, no matter rhetoric of individuality–itself a white people's creation) cannot ask "If I am not for myself , who will be for me, and if I am only for myself what am I, and if not now, when?" what does this mean? Merely that power is virtue. Not to worry, the evil whites are committing suicide by lack of regeneration– the difference is, they do not have a safe have furnished by any other group. The white goy needs a land other than Heaven no less than the Jew. "On Earth, as it is in Heaven."

By: Citizen

Citizen — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:09:39 +0000

Obviously these are terms of art when used in conjunction. Like the word Jew or Jewish in any phrase, the answer is: dominated by Jews. In grammar-lexicon catalogue, a Jewish nation or ethnic group is solely composed of Jews, customarily nearly all Jews by birth, a token by intentionally difficult conversion. Same as the word "Jewish people". In short, by any definition, a tribe, with tribal beliefs (non-universal religion via religious principle and cemented by distinction of us not them). This leaves "state." In normal historical parlance, this means not a city-state, or polis (the only only one possibly left is the Vatican & it is a de facto religious enclave cloaked with official statehood due to the power of past Catholic religion). The concept of the "state" is of recent origin, and rooted in awarding the feudal mantle of sovereignty onto a self-governing people born onto land within defined physical borders. In this practical sense, Israel is not yet a real state, though those in power in 1948 pretended it was so and used their post WW2 reconstruction leverage to enforce this pretense. Hence recognition of Israel as the "state of the Jews is a real issue". It's a timing issue–Israel would never have been recognized by the great powers but for competing US & USSR domestic politics, especially since it was belated in terms of colonialism's heyday, and belated in terms of the principles of human conduct established ex post facto at Nuremberg. It all came down to Truman needing moneybags and MSM support. It comes down to this with Obama, yet again. AIPAC is the fulcrum of our future, world. At some point you have to pick a side. The tilt of world politics is that insane. Fear rules. Normal means nothing anymore.