Above is video that International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer Bianca Zammit shot up until the time she was shot by the Israeli military during a nonviolent protest in Gaza. The demonstration opposed an Israeli-imposed buffer zone that is having a devastating effect on farmers in Gaza who are now no longer able to work their land. Protesters report that Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition at the protesters at point blank range. In addition to Zammit, 22-year old Hind Al Akra was shot in the stomach and 18-year old Nidal Al Naji was shot in the leg. All three are now in stable condition.
More from the ISM:
The non-violent demonstrations are held in protest against the arbitrary decision by Israel to instate a 300 metre buffer zone as a no-go area for Palestinians where shoot to kill policy is implemented. Different demonstrations at the crossings of Erez in Beit Hanoun, Nahal Oz, Al Atatra and Rafah now take place weekly, and are growing in number despite at least 5 people shot over the last month, some
injured and killed as far as 2 kilometres away from the border.The Popular Campaign for the Security in the Buffer Zone, an umbrella organization that includes organizations representing farmers and Gaza residents living near the border, and also a number of political parties are present at many of these demonstrations.
Those venturing to the border regions to gather rubble and steel do so as a result of the siege on Gaza which, along with Israel’s 23 day winter war on Gaza, has decimated Gaza’s economy, including 95 percent of Gaza’s factories and businesses, according to the United Nations. Additionally, these recycled construction materials are vital in Gaza where the Israeli-led siege bans all but under 40 items from entering.
What is the American Jewish community doing – especially the privileged that lives in its cocoons in the upper east side of Manhattan and gated communities in Florida and elsewhere – to stop this occupation, that’s beeing going on more than 40 years now, and an ethnic cleansing going on more than 60 years now?
It seems to me that they are largely supporting it.
The problem is that many have yet to come to terms with dual loyalty issues. Just ask David Samel. He’ll do a Tasmanian Devil number trying to avoid answering that very question.
It is very hard facing the reality of what is happening Avi, in some way we all deny what we have difficulty grappling with in this situation. The important thing is not giving up until we see what everyone knows is right taking place, it is not correct just to acknowledge in virtual forums. We are going to have to go right into the very center of the support coming from the states and face off, armed with the truth and the demand that justice be done so that true and righteous peace can ensue. It is not an easy fight, but it is the right one.
Dyual loyalty? The anti Zionists Americans are more loyal to the Arabs than their own country.
These Anti Zionist Americans you refer to are just that…Americans! But also and mostly… Humans! Therefore their allegiance is to the truth and to human rights and justice for all, not to a third rate apartheid state!
what deb83 said.
X 2.
Avi, at the risk of satisfying your childish craving to goad me, I will try one more time to explain my position, with little hope of penetrating your brain.
I did not join with the “dual loyalty” argument against Schumer because, for instance, I could see it being used against a critic of US policy on Cuba – “you are siding with a foreign govt against your own.” That was not a defense of Schumer, whose views on Israel I loathe. I just find “dual loyalty” to be a questionable concept. Schumer’s positions have consistently been morally reprehensible, regardless of whether they are in agreement with the President or not. What is your position – that if the US Prez defends Israeli actions or policy (99% of the time), then it is OK to join in because there is no dual loyalty issue? When you exalt “dual loyalty” as the defining issue, that is where you wind up.
Nevertheless, you insist on misconstruing me, saying the following day: “This guy [Schumer] just admitted to supporting violations of international law and the Geneva conventions, in no uncertain terms, mind you. No wonder David Samel is doing his best to downplay the role played by such a monster in defending Israel.” What did this mean? That I minimized Schumer’s role in anticipation that on the following day, he would defend the prohibited practice of collective punishment? Do you not see how stupid this is, not to mention untrue about me defending him in any manner?
Now you claim I will avoid answering “that very question.” What question? The brilliant one you posed? What is the American Jewish community doing to stop the occupation? I agree with Todd – they’re mostly supporting it, and overwhelmingly tolerating it. I’m trying my best, in the little ways we all can, to change minds one by one. What makes you think I would avoid answering this question?
You say “The problem is that many have yet to come to terms with dual loyalty issues.” You think that’s what “the problem” is? I think the problem is that many Jews feel that they are good people, and automatically assume that the Jewish State must therefore be doing good things on their behalf. This automatic ethnic identification is what prevents many Jews from recognizing and admitting Israeli crimes. This has nothing to do with dual loyalty and everything to do with moral blindness. Why do you even bring up dual loyalty in this context? What does it have to do with the inexcusable shooting of peaceful demonstrators?
I simply cannot believe that my reservations about the dual loyalty issue have so confounded you that think I am defending Chuck Schumer and collective punishment against the Palestinians, for which I honestly believe Israeli perpetrators deserve long prison terms. I have offended you, probably when I expressed support for Donald in the face of another unfair attack you made on him, and you have decided to retaliate by lying about me. I guess if you want to be a schmuck, I can’t stop you.
First off, before I read your entire post and forget to address this issue, I’d like to say, that I am not trying to goad you. I’m trying to get you to address a fundumental issue to this very conflict. You chose to escalate the rhetoric and avoid discussing this. I wanted to know why.
If you think human interaction involves passive absorption of others’ words, without any back and forth, without collective brainstorming, if you will, then you live in an abstract and boring world.
Now, I’m going to read the rest of your post and will respond accordingly, depending on what you wrote. Fair enough?
Does Schumer’s admission of his own “Jewishness”, his own loyalty to the Jewish people, his own people not influence this?
He even explained that his name comes from the Hebrew Shomer meaning “guard”, or as he put it, “guardian”.
I have yet to hear anyone speak about Cuba in those terms, with that level of dedication, loyalty and conviction.
That wasn’t the best phraseology to use, I’ll admit. But, you left out an important part of that quote where I wrote: “No dual loyalty there, right?”
Why did you leave out that part? Surely, within the context of the discussion from a day or two before, that should have indicated to you my intentions, even if the first sentence was somewhat ambiguous. Don’t you think so?
No. Of course not. You’re reading some meaning that is simply not there. The point is that you implied that you prefer to avoid assigning Dual Loyalty labels because you are apprehensive about the repercussions that might have in the future, meaning blowback to the Jewish American community.
These two issues are not mutually exclusive. If a Jewish person in the US refuses to admit that that someone like Schumer is loyal to two entities, then Schumer will remain in his seat and continue to brainwash the Jewish masses in the US and the non-Jewish public into believing that he knows better. For example, during the Bush/Cheney years, Schumer was harsh in criticizing administration officials, grilling Gonzales, giving other officials the third degree etc.. All the while, whenever Israel comes up, her spews all his anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab canards and hatred. This in turn, deceives the Jewish public (at least those who are impressionable enough to believe a Senator who happens to be Jewish) into thinking that US and Israeli interests are one and the same.
I have to sign off for a few minutes, but I’ll be back to respond to the remainder of your post.
Every small detail, every little nuance, tiny factor, simple action, all these things form the whole. Within the context of Gestalt theory, for example, the moral blindness you mention, and the dual loyalty, as well as the elements of Jewish identity, all form a certain WHOLE. It matters, because identifying each element of the whole can lead to a solution.
I am confounded by the fact that you thought, for one second, that I have any intention to smear you by claiming – “lying”, as you allege – that you support Schumer’s views on collective punishment. This goes back to the part from a whole and whole from the part issue above. Did you really pause to think whether I could actually make such a claim?
Tell you what, why don’t we put this behind us, specifically the very point you bring up in this last paragraph? How does that sound?
Avi, one problem immediately apparent is your claim: “The point is that you implied that you prefer to avoid assigning Dual Loyalty labels because you are apprehensive about the repercussions that might have in the future, meaning blowback to the Jewish American community. ” Not even close. Nowhere did blowback to the Jewish American community even enter my mind. Nothing I said remotely implies that. Maybe that’s the source of our problem. You imagined I meant something that I did not even contemplate.
You talk about Schumer’s Jewishness affecting his opinions. Of course it does. I was specifically taking issue with Clemons’s formulation of the dual loyalty issue. He complained that Schumer always sides with Israel, even though he has no trouble criticizing Obama. What I said was: “Schumer’’s refusal to criticize Israel for anything is reprehensible, but not because he does criticize Obama. Clemons takes issue with that and I don’’t.” (Comment 75). That’s the gist of my problem with “dual loyalty”. It implies that one should be loyal to one’s president. At least that’s the way Clemons apparently sees it. And that is the problem I have with Clemons’s reasoning. And, I stated that taken to its logical conclusion, that argument could be used against a critic of US Cuban policy. Nothing about “blowback to the American Jewish community.” That’s your imagination speaking, not me.
Most importantly, in response to the Clemons post, I made the following comments:
Comment 21: “Needless to say, my views on I/P are diametrically opposed to Schumer’s… Obviously, I have enormous differences with Schumer.”
Comment 75: “Schumer’s refusal to criticize Israel for anything is reprehensible, but not because he does criticize Obama.”
Comment 84: “Schumer should be criticized for his moral/ethical blind spot when it comes to Israel and his incessant cheerleading for Israeli policies.”
Comment 86: “The problem with Schumer is that he promotes Israel’s interests ahead of the value of life and simple human decency.”
Following this, you accused me of defending Schumer’s views. Do you not see why your lie angered me?
As you acknowledge, you used less than the best phraseology when you said: “This guy [Schumer] just admitted to supporting violations of international law and the Geneva conventions, in no uncertain terms, mind you. No wonder David Samel is doing his best to downplay the role played by such a monster in defending Israel.” I interpreted that as saying that I “minimized Schumer’s role in anticipation that on the following day, he would defend the prohibited practice of collective punishment”? My interpretation is precisely what you said. If you didn’t mean what you said, what did you mean about there being “no wonder” that I downplayed Schumer’s role, given his appalling defense of the Gaza siege? What did you mean?
You accuse me of being “a Jewish person in the US [who] refuses to admit that that someone like Schumer is loyal to two entities.” I simply don’t care about loyalty to entities, or countries, or whatever. I care about moral and immoral positions. Schumer’s blanket support of Israel’s atrocities is immoral. Period. You say that Schumer “deceives the Jewish public (at least those who are impressionable enough to believe a Senator who happens to be Jewish) into thinking that US and Israeli interests are one and the same.” I say that Schumer deceives the Jewish and American public into believing that Israel acts nobly rather than as a rogue state. I think that bringing “US interests” into the equation is a distraction, because who defines US interests? Clemons thinks it’s the President. You think that support of Israel harms US interests? Who gets to decide that – you, Clemons, the President? I think support of Israel harms humanitarian values. It’s much cleaner that way.
Look, I admit that the question of dual loyalty is a complicated issue. Reasonable minds can differ. Other commenters, such as Chu, made some good and interesting points on the issue. But no one took my problems with dual loyalty as evidence that I supported a snake like Schumer. No one but you. And now you continue to accuse me of god knows what.
I wrote this before I saw your last comment. You claim to be “confounded by the fact that you thought, for one second, that I have any intention to smear you by claiming – “lying”, as you allege – that you support Schumer’s views on collective punishment.” Really? You’re confounded? Read again what you said. How was I supposed to know you didn’t mean it?
You want to put this behind us? Fine, to the relief of all, I’m sure. I do feel more than slightly embarrassed at having to defend myself at such length in a such a public forum where we both must have looked like spoiled children. I will put it behind me, at least to the extent that I won’t mention it again. I can’t say I blame us equally, though.
Yeah, right Julian, Americans are more loyal to Arabs than their own country. Fellow Americans here, is this guy a joke, or what?
DS, every American has the obligation to criticize any American president’s public stance and his/her’s adminstration implenting such stance. For those Americans who do not see the US and Israel’s interests as identical, therein lies such obligation. Similarly where American or US enabled Israeli activity is not in the interest of basic universal human rights–at least theoretically,
the US interest is the same when it comes to basic universal human rights. A conflict of interests is just that. When such conflict relates to inconsistent application of public values, depending on the state addressed, or it’s leader, it is the duty of
a good American citizen to speak out, pointing out the inconsistency.
If you lowered the antlers with which you’re prodding me you might see a different Avi. You use the same approach with me that I use with trolls. That’s fine. But, you don’t see the difference. Did you ever play team sports? I offer you in a conciliatory tone an honest answer and you come back for another headbutt.
Does it have to get to the point where we pretend like the other doesn’t exist for there to be some quiet around here? Does that seem mature to you?
Why not address each paragraph separately?
By the way, in your response above about my “lying”, you once again omitted the sentence where I wrote “No dual loyalty there, right?”
Is your ego that enormous that you can’t play fair?
Hey, do I get to be part of this “let’s put it all behind us movement”? I’m doing my part–you should see the sarcastic remarks I just deleted.
Seriously, Avi, your own ego is what has led you to assume that people who disagreed with you were harboring hidden ideological motives that you had to expose. It couldn’t be that David or I might genuinely disagree with you in good faith. No, I had to be a closet Zionist and both David and I were apparently motivated in our disagreement by our soft cushy lives as Jews in America. (And btw, I’m not Jewish, but somehow you “knew” that was what motivated me.) David has just set you straight on his motives and mine are similar–if you’re going to characterize me, I’m a typical sort of bourgeois human rights organization supporting type. It’s why I get mad at Richard–he talks like a peacenik, but acts like an atrocity denier much of the time. And I think Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” should be required reading by every sentient being on the planet at least once a year. If you want an argument, try arguing with me over something I believe. I might still not debate, if I don’t feel like it, but at least then you’d have reason to talk about people running away from a debate.
Er, Donald, please speak to the conflict of interests displayed by Schumer, for example. If you believe in universal basic human rights, would you say Obama represents them, or the Israeli PM?
And would you say American top human values are represented by either Obama or the Israeli PM?
Citizen, I think I agree with everything you said, except insofar as it relates to dual loyalty. The US has done plenty of rotten things around the world having nothing to do with the I/P conflict. Was it in the US interest to do those things? Perhaps. It depends on how you look at it. Certainly the Prez thought it was. Is it the US interest to do what is altruistic and moral, rather than what serves US multinational corporations? You advocate for speaking out on behalf of morality, whether or not it conflicts with the country’s leaders. You speak of consistent application of moral principles to all countries. I’m with you there. But again, Clemons was talking about Schumer siding with Israel while condemning Obama. His excuse of Israeli atrocities is monstrous, but I don’t see how the fact that on this one occasion, Obama took a position slightly critical of Israel, makes Schumer’s offense any worse. I don’t know – maybe I just don’t get it.
Citizen, WFT is up with that? You’ve seen me post countless times and you know damn well what I think of Israeli and American human rights violations. So what’s with this “er, Donald, please speak to ….”? It’s bad enough getting this short term memory thing from RW–if I have to talk to everyone as though they have a memory that goes back three minutes I’ll just type up a manifesto and post it 20 times an hour.
But in the paranoid atmosphere that prevails in the comment section here, I’ll answer, since otherwise I could be seen as dodging the question. Most politicians (here and in Israel) are hypocritical scum on the subject of human rights.
I don’t think Obama, Schumer, or the Israeli PM care about human rights. Schumer is beneath contempt–he’d have to have a ladder to reach the sewer from where he is. Obama is a hypocrite and I knew that as soon as I started paying attention to him. His speeches to AIPAC before he became President told us that–his response to Rev. Wright made it even clearer. (The MSM, as usual, reduced that whole episode to a farce. I wouldn’t defend everything Wright has said, but part of what he said was that the US and Israel were guilty of major human rights violations and Obama repudiated those remarks. Wright’s “America-bashing” was what I would call telling the truth about much of what America has done, and Obama made it clear he wanted no part of it.)
The Israeli government is run by war criminals.
There are no top American values. There are good values and bad values, and sometimes Americans practice good ones and sometimes bad ones. Human rights are part of the American heritage–so are imperialist wars and torture.
Quite right, Donald. I was quite surprised to see Citizen asking if Obama or Bibi represents good values, as if one has to be the right choice. What critic of Israeli policy could really be encouraged by Obama’s 99 44/100% support of Israel. And the question was inappropriately targeted at you as well. I don’t know what’s going on around here. I’m glad there are no guillotines available to execute those who are perceived to be insufficiently revolutionary.
May I interject for a moment? I really hate to see you guys up at arms at each other over purity of definitions, truth in advertising of what seems like labels, and a unseemly hunt for hints of disingenuousness. I – probably most here – wouldn’t like to see the comment section here deteriorate to the level typical of certain left leaning blogs, where it’s libertarians dishing it out with civil libertarians, Obamabots and O’Bummer’s chase each other out of town, and the anti-war crowd, in their frustration at affecting real change, turn on each other with vehemence better reserved for the really bad guys. The David Samel/Donald wing vs Avi/citizen camp reminds me unfortunately of the food fight between Jane Hamsher and FDL gang against the DK posse over healthcare Reform – with Openleft somewhere in the middle. Even as the reform itself suffered, if not defeat, then watering down to something that in the end is a corporatocrat’s darling (also known as Romneycare?). Yet, I keep thinking that, with just a little more discipline in the progressive camp, we could have taken a bigger bite out of their hide.
Avi may have the passion and fury of the israeli ex=pat convert to universalism and human rights. I think I understand Avi’s edge all too well – sometimes I barely manage to conceal my own rage – and once in a while, I too have to let loose (luckily only once a week or so, and, even more luckily, not always here). It’s the rage of those who realize that they were effectively brain washed by a system that took advantage of young impressionable minds. I apologize apriori for psychologizing and may be off the mark for all I know, but my personal experience included years of “de-programming” from a deeply embedded zionist zealotry, complete with exceptionalism and self-righteousness, ie, all the makings of a cult, not just an ideology or a religion. It’s why those who were felt betrayed by communism as an ideal, for example, sometimes veer way off to the right, and those who escaped a radical religion can become zealously anti-religion, even to the point of rebuking the mildest spiritual expressions.
Going back to the dual loyalty issue, I think David and Donald perhaps may not realize how the attitudes of someone like like Schumer can come across as outright treason to those who have not been jaded by decades of learning to live with – and despise – lobbies. The sad truth is that, in the US, people have internalized the hopelessness of directly confronting the disproportionate influence wielded by lobbies. Schumer may well have dual loyalties when it comes to israel, but he also has dual loyalties when it comes to wall street against main street. I David I am sure sees clearly what a totally compromised man Schumer is – the quinessential bastard child of corporatism, egotism and extreme favoritism to one side over another, to cash over virtue, to zionist dogma over nuance of any kind. A true weasel, just like Lieberman, or the half-crazed cantor or the mad hyennas of the right, and the fearful rabbits of the “left”.
So, Avi, it seems to me that neither David nor Donald want to elevate Schumer to the level of a mere dually loyal pol of zionists. That would actually be almost a promotion for him. The label doesn’t stick so well because of way too much slime – no matter how sticky the glue is – it’s hard to stick things in a swamp full of ill intentions. Drying up the pond is the only long term solution and I know citizen believes that electoral reform is the only way out, impossible though it may seem. That is the incredibly sad truth of the state of affairs among our elected representatives. So I would prefer to see you direct all that good passion to where it can do the most good (no, I don’t mean squashing eee or the wit. Too easy). I guess what I am trying to say is that in Schumer’s case, with so many vices, picking on one egregious display of dual loyalty seems almost trite. Frankly, I’d rather see him hang for his untoward championing of the rich over the interests of the people. There are, I think better targets to exemplify dual loyalty, such as it is. Dennis Ross is a great place to start with. Plenty more where that came from.
Anyways, to make a long story short, please stop fighting – we really are all on the same side – even if it’s “only” 99.9% overlap.
You fellas shake hands and we can put all this behind us, then we can talk about what a shithead Weiner is. Kumbaya my lor….
I’ve got no problem with that, danaa. This sort of food fight is degrading to all that participate. I also think I probably spend too much time bashing Witty (someone should refute his claims, but I along with others go overboard with it). This goes triple with some of the folks who aren’t even worth reading (zamaaz, for instance, or the hopefully banned operating system formerly known as BDS.) The comment section could use some improvement by having some people post less of the trivial stuff, and one of those trivia posters is me sometimes. There are some really good posts too (and ironically enough, I think Avi is responsible for some of them).
I’d like to see the ideas at Mondoweiss reach mainstream America and be discussed, but some of us here would be the worst sort of spokespeople. At times I think the comment section is just a disaster area, though there are many superb comments that make it worth reading. You need people who can be calm, intelligent, who don’t concede any point of principle while being able to understand and empathize to some degree with the fears of someone like Witty without giving in to his BS. (You can see why I’d stink at this.) It requires the sort of calm I theoretically approve of while being too bad-tempered to show it in practice. Witty is not entirely wrong on this one point. He’s wrong about most things, but how one argues makes a big difference.
Danaa,
No Danaa. You’re not off the mark. You’ve hit the nail on the head.
Thank you for being a voice of reason and honesty. I appreciate that.
Danaa – I know you’re going to tell me you didn’t spend that much time on your comment, but I very much appreciate your level-headed analysis. This brave ISM woman gets shot in the leg, and a food fight erupts in the comment section. I agree that Avi’s comments are often informative, but he stuck a needle in me one too many times. I think his misreading of my position was honest but very mistaken. Thanks too to Donald, who is certainly one of my favorite commenters here as well.
Danaa – Looking over your comment again, I don’t think I was complimentary enough. It was extremely insightful, and I hope you don’t resent my stealing your “food fight” analogy which was inadvertent.
The only interaction I have ever had with you was the one that started two days ago. That was it. If you want to go down in history as a martyr so be it. יורים ובוכים indeed. I’m a jerk, I’m unfair, I’m a backstabber; hopefully, that’ll help you sleep better tonight.
Talk about childish.
“Dyual loyalty? The anti Zionists Americans are more loyal to the Arabs than their own country”
C’mon, man, I just got up! Don’t make me laugh this hard this early in the morning, on an empty stomach, no less.
BTW, I hear there’s a big Rudolf Valentino revival at the Alhambra this week. They’re showing “Blood and Sand” and the “Desert Sheik” in continuous rotation 24/7, all week, and selling all kinds Arab clothing in the lobby.
All together now: “I’m the Sheik of Araby….”
I have always been disturbed by the “dual loyalty” charges, too. Never liked that locution. And I really don’t think it applies to most Jews in the US.
But when it comes to those who actually work in government, it wouldn’t be too hard, first, to agree what “loyalty” consists of in those circumstances, and compare it to what they have done.
It won’t add up to a pretty picture.
But again, and I keep on telling you, once Zionists decided to make Judaism, or Jewishness (eee still hasn’t straightened that one out) the basis for an armed state, “dual loyalty” becomes an issue, whether it’s valid or not. Tough titties.
The Gazans deserve to be shot when they step onto their land, because they voted for Hamas in the elections that the US sponsored.
That’s something I find intensely appalling. The United States, in fact, has become a worldwide threat to democracy itself. The Palestinians know it, and so do most people living south of the Rio Grande.
There was a great deal of irony in the fact that the imperialist neocons went around the world attempting to impose democracies, under the false assumption that they would then embrace US hegemony.
Of course for a neocon, “democracy” means a puppet government, like the one currently violating the law in Ramallah.
what would happen if a sweet little Jewish kid on the Upper East Side or a Jewish teenages in Boca Raton was shot in the leg by a US Marine? Would holy hell break loose?
Why would it? The US is still waiting for justice in the USS Liberty affair. And everybody knows US Marines are just hick/slum cannon fodder for our elite’s agenda.
Citizen, it seems to me Psychopathic god would ask – within the context of your response to him – how many Jewish American sailors where there on the USS liberty?
Avi, there were none to my knowledge, and that’s a good probability judging from my own experience in the US Army and the latest stats I’ve read. More muslims are in the US military than jews. The jews, the young fiesty ones, join the IDF, even thought born n bred in the USA.
Ok, so should the Israelis be shooting unarmed civilians on the other side of their border, no its reprehensible.
The Jewish kid on the Upper East Side or in Boca would know that they don’t want to get shot. They would know that what was happening was immoral or reprehensible but they still wouldn’t put themselves in a position to get shot.
You mean like how they built their settlement colony (Sderot) right on top of a razed Palestinian village (Najd) less than a mile from the Gazan border?
“And everybody knows US Marines are just hick/slum cannon fodder for our elite’s agenda.”
You’ve been hanging out with that Smedley Butler again, haven’t you? That guy’s a Socialist or Pacifist or something, isn’t he?
Just keep in mind, if we go to war, we’ll have to raise the taxes.
“The Jewish kid on the Upper East Side or in Boca”
Jews are just so goddam smart, huh?
In spite of the Zionist media puppeteers, the taboo of criticizing Israel has now been broken and the ones questioning Israel’s actions are mostly American Jews. Israel-lovers like Indyk, Emanuel, Axeldod, Ross and others haven’t developed a sudden love for Palestinians but they have had enough of Israel’s antics and they want to see a real movement towards peace. Netanyahu is trying to intimidate Obama into submission like he did with Bill Clinton but he’s running into a wall. American Jews are waking up.
Walid,
I’m not sure where you got that information. But, all indicators show otherwise.
Avi, I forgot what were his actual words but they were to the effect that if Israel felt strong enough to continue on Iran or something without American aid, it was welcome to try. Anyway, more along those lines, his feelings were shown in what he wrote in the IHT:
“Today, nothing could better help Obama to isolate Iran than for Netanyahu to offer to cede the Golan, as four other Israeli prime ministers have, in exchange for peace with Syria, which serves as the conduit for Tehran’s troublemaking in the Arab-Israeli arena.
The shift in America’s Middle East interests means that Netanyahu must make a choice: take on the president of the United States, or take on his right wing. If he continues to defer to those ministers in his cabinet who oppose peacemaking, the consequences for U.S.-Israel relations could be dire.”
link to nytimes.com
Avi, the follow-up to Indyk’s outburst, from JPost:
“In a recent opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune, former ambassador Martin Indyk takes Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to task for supposedly resisting President Barack Obama’s attempts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Resolving the conflict, argues Indyk, is an American strategic priority, vital to American interests. By refusing to accede to Obama’s demands, Netanyahu jeopardizes those interests and thus Israel’s standing as an American ally. Netanyahu has to make a choice between alienating “those ministers in his cabinet who oppose peacemaking” and alienating the United States.
Indyk’s argument is flawed…”
link to jpost.com
Huh?????????????
I am not sure what have you been listening to or who you have been talking to. Any critique that has been uttered by the American guardians of empire are nothing but smoke screen. There is no “shift” in policies nor there is an awakening of conscience or concern for the rule of law. What there is is simply tactical manoeuvring without any substantial change in policy or interests.
Aref, I didn’t say anything about a change in policy but simply that these guys are fed up of Netanyahu’s goon tactics. They still remain foirst and foremost lovers of Israel and this is why they are beong critical of it today. Maybe you write them off as Jew-haters; it’s always an easy out:
From Haaretz talking more about it from a little while back:
“WASHINGTON – When I ask a liberal American Jew involved in politics what he thinks of the claim that Rahm Emanuel is an anti-Israeli fifth column in the Obama administration, he laughs. “So, do they really think in Israel that Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Dan Shapiro, Mara Rudman, Dennis Ross and the other good American Jews who work with Obama are a fifth column?” And then he says slowly, like someone explaining something to a person who has difficulty understanding: “How many times do you have to be told … ”
“… that you love us?” I try to complete the sentence.
“No. That your policy is screwed up.”
link to haaretz.com
Walid, I do not write those figures that you mention as Jew-haters–I don’t know where you got this idea from frankly. They may have a disagreement with the yahoo government but to make the quantum leap from this to saying that we can assume that all of sudden those veterans of pro-Zionist US policy have transformed into critics of Israeli policy in general is naive.
Come on. Give me a f***ing break!!!! Now Rahm is anti-Israel!!!!!!!!
If he is what do you call Anti-Zionist Jews?
Maybe Rahm and Axelrod resent that the inauguration of the first African American president was marred by the Gaza slaughter, cruelly timed to coincide Obama’s election and inauguration.
On November 4, the U.S. Presidential Election Day, Israel sent tanks and bulldozers into Gaza for the purpose of destroying a tunnel 250 meters from the Gaza Strip barrier stating that it presented an abduction hazard. On 27 December Israel began a wave of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip damaging or destroying tens of thousands of homes, 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, 800 water wells, 186 greenhouses, and nearly all of its 10,000 family farms; leaving 50,000 homeless, 400,000-500,000 without running water, one million without electricity, and resulting in acute food shortages. An Israeli ground invasion began on January 3, 2009.
The war ended on January 18, when Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, followed by Hamas’ announcing a one-week ceasefire twelve hours later.
Israel completed its withdrawal on January 21, the day after Obama’s Inauguration.
link to en.wikipedia.org
if only it were true, Walid.
Dennis Ross saves on his viagra bill by fantasizing about killing Iranians.
Slippery slope to military strike on Iran
Avi, Thank the media news censor’s for sterilizing Israel’s image. If more of the Jewish community had to swallow the reality of a Jewish state for their evening news, they might gets off their tuchas and do more about it.
Weisenthol, is part of the criminal collective, building a Museum of Tolerance on an ancient burial ground in Jerusalem.
No one evens knows about this story. If this played on NBC, CBS or ABC, viewers just may be able to take of the rose-coloured glasses and see the actual darkness reality of the ‘promised land’.
I just watched a one-hour Channel 4 (UK) documentary on the international press lockouyt during the Gaza Massacre. It’s over a year old now but still worth a look. Available as a torrent, search for “Dispatches Unseen Gaza”
Israel made the decision about restricting Journalists into Gaza. Israel may have won that battle, but they’re losing the war of the world’s opinions.
Avi, like I’ve said a thousand times, Judaism is, at the present time, decentralised. Anyone can claim the mantle of “the Jewish nation” (it is to laugh) and do with it what they want.
It’ll end the way it always does, cause Jews are no different than other religions who have tried this (most of them were smart enough to give it up at least a century ago) with the elite Zionists making off with the profits, and a whole lot of suckers and fanatics left holding the bag.
The Zionists who troll here can’t agree with each other and anything, they won’t defer to their elderly statesman, Witty, and there’s no agreement among them on what the rules are. Some of them claim to be atheists. “Jewish atheists”! On that you can build a “Jewish nation”?
I don’t think so.
Mooser,
That seems to be the problem with the lack of central authority in religion, for good or bad. So where do we go from here? Like you, I don’t have an answer to that question, either.
Why not start with something easy for solidarity of religious conviction, say everybody volunteering to be righteous jews all choose to wear 100% cotton socks, maybe in alternative versions of pale blue and white? Maybe tighty whity underpants too? I’m sure the bible readers among them could find a source in scripture to back up such a mighty movement.
The problem with cotton is that it shrinks and it doesn’t wick perspiration as well as, say, polyester. Plus, the chaffing can get so bad that they might decide to convert to Christianity just to get rid of the garments.
Citizen, your suggestion, while valid, leaves me in quite a personal difficulty. Part of the requirments of being, well, Moosie is wearing boxer shorts, with “*lucky” patterns, two sizes too big.
I depend on the “good joss” from these shorts, and I’m not sure I could change.
That didn’t come out right! The shorts, of course, I change every day, sometimes twice. I’m not sure I could go from “lucky underwear” to tighty-whities, is what I meant.
Do you have any idea what a thrill it is to know there’s over a hundred little fleur-de-lis on your shorts, and yards of extra material? It centers a guy, keeps him in touch with the basics, what’s really important. Try it.
Well, Moosie, you do like Kramer, with nothing between him and the outside world but a pair of thin gaberdines. Ewwww!, Jerry and resident girl squealed. I like the one where George is a bad body, and the one where George wears stove gloves as he has special hands. Just George wearing that puffed, tufted winter coat in the liquor store is hilarious. I wonder why that’s so? At least to me… Are your’s lucky valentine pattern hearts? My gosh, look what’s been done with tea bags lately…
Oh, fleur-de-lis, huh? Kinda like having extra foam bubbles pop out when you unwrap a delivery box? Safety first!
I live in Florida, near many of those gated communities. Those you ask about are not concerned in the slightest. They have more important things to think about, such as where’s a good spot to eat tonight, and hey,
that hired help didn’t blow away those leaves!
This is a horrible incident. When England did similar things in India it ultimately did lead to revulsion at home, which helped create a climate for change. The time course of course was slow, so my despair may not be reasonable. On the other hand, it is worrying that there seems to be so little effect on public American opinion so far.
One of the most sad things here, is that in most reports [obviously not here!] whereas the international volunteer is named, and has her country speaking for her, the palestinians, are usually just “3 palestinians”.
The case of India was different from the case of Palestine. Here are three differences.
First, the British did not want to drive the Indians out of India and take over the whole country for themselves. The British never questioned the right of Indians to live in India. They just thought that Britain could run the place better than the Indians (and at a profit to the British), and did so largely because they had been doing it for a while.
Second, when the independence movement began, although it was seen as a threat to the Empire, it was not a direct threat to the existence of Britain.
Third, the independence movement had the support of the American media as well as good coverage by the British media.
The American public is carefully kept from being exposed to these incidents.
Americans are at a ‘baby-talk’ stage of talking back to zionism/Israelists.
This morning, Trudi Rubin was a guest on C Span Washington Journal, to talk about her recent trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. She had an captivating human interest angle, and her reporting was impressive.
Then a caller said something like, there are too many Jewish people running things in the US, Rubin is Jewish and should not be trusted.
Now, callers get about 60 seconds to make a point, and Americans are not accustomed to speaking harshly of or to Jews. As Karin Friedemann has written, h t t p karinfriedemann dot blogspot.com/2009/02/emotional-abuse-of-israel-advocacy.html
Americans are in the initial stages of dealing with their “inner Jew,” but betimes, their vocabulary will expand and their thought processes will become more sophisticated.
Back to Rubin: in my opinion, Rubin’s response to the caller validated the caller’s point. She got all huffy, said (twice, at least) that the caller should not have been permitted to be heard on C Span, said that her work stood on its own merits, and said the caller’s sentiments were reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
I submit that Rubin proved that she IS ideologically driven and FAILED to conduct herself as a journalist. Instead of asking questions of the caller to ferret out why he expressed the thoughts he did, who else expresses such thoughts, etc., she reverted IMMEDIATELY to the position that is the diametric opposite of what journalism is supposed to accomplish: SHE DEMANDED THAT THE CALLER BE SILENCED.
Why should THAT caller and THAT remark be silenced?
Because Jewish people demand special treatment because of something that happened in Europe before many of us were born.
Rubin did not simply say that the caller should be silenced; she said, “That should not be allowed on C Span.” Twice, she inserted C Span in the formula.
The message is not so subtle: Rubin put C Span on notice: Thou shalt not permit on thy network sentiments that offend the sensibilities of the Jewish people.
In 2005, C Span handled itself as well as it could in a dust-up involving Deborah Lipstadt. C Span had arranged to film Lipstadt discussing her book about her court case involving David Irving. C Span indicated it would also invite Irving to appear. Lipstadt went ape-shit. Determined to silence Irving, Lipstadt deduced that the only way that could happen — that Irving would not appear on C Span, “in important venue,” was if Lipstadt herself did not appear. So she backed out.
A flurry of news items (the usual suspects — NYT and WaPo ) fulminated right along with Lipstadt, and the blogosphere had a field day.
Here’s my favorite clip from the pro-Lipstadt (and Rubin-mindset) kosher blogateria:
www dot solomonia.com/blog/archives/005699.shtml
got that?
Of course you cannot simply toss both sides out there on equal time and leave it up to the marketplace of ideas to sort out truth from fiction
Three point conclusion:
1. You can’t trust dumb goy to be capable of thinking for themselves
2. You can’t trust dumb goy to sort truth from fiction when both sides are given equal time
3. To ensure that dumb goy sort out the correct truth, do what Deborah Lipstadt and Trudi Rubin did: DENY the benefit of equal time to any version of events other than your own.
PG, I saw and heard Rubin on CSPAN. The nice shiksa anchor did not follow up at all after Rubin avoided the caller’s questions, and merely replied that CSPAN should be ashamed of itself for allowing the caller to speak. I cannot imagine CSPAN handling, say David Duke in the deferential manner it handled Rubin. You are absolutely right in your analysis. Goys can’t be trusted to talk about issues concerning Israel. They are children. The CSPAN anchors, often goys themselves, play along–whatever they actually think they keep to themselves. Meanwhile, we have the likes of Rubin playing fonts of wisdom in behalf US and universal human interests, with their thin hasbara playbook.
Excellent post Psycho (I hope you don’t mind me calling you that),
We witnessed the complete opposite when W&M were invited to speak, also Jommy Carter and others. The Israeli lobby will insist that. someone from their team be allowed
to speak also to provide “balance”, though they steer clear of Finkelstein and Chomsky,because they know they’ll be humiliated.
I also recall how the lobby demanded that someone ve permitted to speak before the doco about Rachel Corrie was shown at a filmfrstivsl inSan Fran. Sadly for the Zionist shill on that occasion, he got practically bood off stage.
Mooser: “Citizen there’s two words I wish you wouldn’t use on Mondoweiss. One is “goy” and the other is “Shiksa”
Citizen: “Sure, anything you say. Now, what are the two words you object to?”
Citizen: “Gee, you mean I can’t use words I found in Philip Roth’s books? Does that mean I can’t ever become a great American novelist? Aw, come on, play fair! PS: I also heard them a lot during my 3o years living in Chicago Metro and collar burbs. “Goy” was always a fav of my mother-in-law, for instance. “Shiksa” has always been a fav of my wife. And you?
I am shocked by the journalist question, whether Bianca ”has posed any threat on the soldiers”… poor lady was filming only.. what can be more obvious than a video???!!!
Israel and the Islamic Republic of Gaza are at war. How stupid can the people in this video be? There is no man’s land between Israel and Gaza. Don’t get in it or you will be shot. The soldiers on the border cannot know if any of the marchers is wearing a suicide vest or not so anyone approaching the border is a potential threat. Can anyone vouch for sure that none of the marchers had a grenade in his pocket?
And there are rules in a war that protect civilians. Which Israel breaks. Which is why Israel is accused of war crimes.
If the Gazans were to declare a death zone 100 meters into Israel and shoot everyone who comes into it, Israel would declare this to be “terrorism.”
Because the people in Gaza have no right to defend themselves.
In asymmetric warfare, the kind which Hamas employs, it is difficult to know who is a civilian and who is a soldier. The suicide bombers do not come in uniform.
It is the automatic response of Zionists to justify Israeli war crimes, with any excuse.
Israel and the Islamic Republic of Gaza are at war.
You meant the Zionist state of Israel, the theocracy state of israel and Gaza?
>> In asymmetric warfare, the kind which Hamas employs …
Israel employs some pretty asymmetric warfare of its own. But you’re absolutely right: Strip Israel of all its weaponry – or arm the Palestinians to the same level as Israel – and let’s have some nice, symmetic warfare.
Was White Phosphorus more selective huh? Who destroyed chicken farms, food factories? uprooted olive trees and all sort of livehood?
Read Goldstone report maybe that will make you a human being again.
>> Read Goldstone report maybe that will make you a human being again.
Not likely, seeing as how that report was an anti-semitic lie fabricated by a self-loathing traitor in order to bludgeon “the only democracy in the Middle East”. ;-)
Sorry, meant to say “that maximalist report”. :-)
haha you make me laugh as usualy my dear eljay.
eee is ungodly created creature, he won’t understand what we are saying here, not programmed to understand all that, we need to upgrade him.
I read the report and it clearly states that ALL parties investigated should be presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law because the evidence the commission collected is not high quality enough to be accepted in court. So why are you jumping to conclusions?
Because we have babies burnt by white phosphorus which was dropped from Israeli jets, but also the destruction of civilian infrastructure is not contested not to mention the illegal blockade. Wake up eee for God sake, the day you will meet your god, you will be punished for being complicit and apologists for these crimes.
Why are the Israeli troops jumping to the conclusion that any civilian in their killing zone is a suicide bomber?
“So why are you jumping to conclusions?”
This, from the same brain who just minutes ago was trying to convince us shooting civilians is OK because they *might* be “soldiers”.
Another logic-free comment from the three e.
“In asymmetric warfare, the kind which Hamas employs, it is difficult to know who is a civilian and who is a soldier. The suicide bombers do not come in uniform. ” (eee)
Wasn’t that the argument used by terrorist bombers when they were hitting civilians on a bus? Their argument was that since all Israelis are reservists of some kind, this makes them soldiers and fair targets to be assassinated by suicide bombers. What about all those gun-toting settlers that are terrorizing Palestinians, aren’t they fair game too?
Because the civilians are not presenting themselves as “human beings” – they’re only presenting themselves as “victims” or “aggressors”. In a sense, they are mobile versions of the terrifying lentil patches and water reservoirs that frighten the IDF into the kind of irreversible shock that apparently makes truces irrelevant.
Goldstone is clear that only a court can prove that war crimes were committed. He is also very clear that ALL parties he investigated should be assumed innocent until convicted. You are just jumping to conclusions in order to bludgeon Israel.
You God “speak” is wasted on me. I am an atheist Jew. Once I die I will be nothing more than dust in the wind.
3e is intentionally confuting personal criminal responsibility with the determination of facts and events. The Goldstone Report indeed notes the principle of presumed innocence, but not in the sense that 3e is trying to imply. The following is the relevant quote from the report:
“Once I die I will be nothing more than dust in the wind”
As the Holy Book says:
We have sown the wind, and will inherit the wind-bag.
So why are you jumping to conclusions?
Israelis were the fisrt to jump on conclusions when they called this report all names.
atheist Jew
What does that mean? How can you be a Jew and atheist at the same time?
Once I die I will be nothing more than dust in the wind.
Then for sake of the wind and the land.
Thanks Mooser for recalling us the beautiful Judaism.
The irony Mooser is that the so called “atheist Jews” wants to own all Judaism and use it to achieve their colonial ambitions.
Nothing wrong with being an atheist Jew. I happen to be one myself. The problems start when one denies the full humanity of others. Whether it is because “God said so” or because “I said so” is entirely beside the point.
ah eee, you showed so much promise when you first appeared. Now the well is dry. The shtick you whittle has become a nub. The rug you pace is threadbare.
eee displays “irrational supportred of Israel”
The Goldstone report is the equivalent of an indictment, for which sufficient evidence must be shown. 3e is arguing that everyone who is indicted is therefore innocent. Rather it is that their guilt has not yet been conclusively proved.
aparisian – you wrote, “not programmed to understand all that”
I can’t articulate exactly how intensely true that statement is; people like eee are not capable of understanding any fact/truth other than their own programming. This is at the heart of the Israeli psychosis: 60 years of zionist programming — the underlying and essential philosophy of Iron Wall: kill them until they submit; their militarized culture, the permission granted to children to behave as thugs, their very landscape — walls and barriers between them and any others not them, Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to death — all these things have turned Israelis into a population of monsters.
The librarian at a local library is a very nice Jewish man. I wanted to find the original version of a German book about antisemitism; Librarian was very helpful. As we discussed the topic, I mentioned that the term/concept did not originate in late-nineteenth century Germany but in 15th century Spain.
(This is where the ineffable part comes in, that I cannot articulate.) Librarian said, No, it’s from Germany. But the look on his face and in his eyes displayed an intense struggle to grasp this completely alien bit of information: “How can this be? This can’t be so; it is not what I have been programmed to believe for so many years in so many ways….”
THAT is an indication of the work that will be involved in “upgrading” eee and his/her fellow vowels and consonants as to what the world looks like when a more human point of view is permitted to penetrate a programmed defensiveness.
Shmuel,
You quote proves exactly what I have been saying. Since the quality of the evidence collected by the commission is below that required for criminal trials, ALL individual Israelis should be presumed innocent. the Goldstone report is mere allegations until an Israeli is convicted in a court of law.
That would require Israel actually submitting to a court of law.
You must be doing this on purpose. The commission determined the facts, which can and should be cited as such, but individual criminal responsibility is determined in a court of law and requires a different kind of evidence. That is not to say that the incidents documented in the report should not be treated as fact. There is no such thing as “all individual Israelis” here. The Israeli state definitely committed these actions. For individuals to be prosecuted however, a different kind of process must be instituted.
Good analysis Psychopathic god i totally agree.
Israel engages in asymmetric warfare in that it does not have all-around borders. What other state spills over relentlessly with ever-movable borders (and de facto control) on some of its sides?
Hey, Shmuel, you might call me an atheist Christian. The creed is in the deed. And no, I don’t agree with triple e’s anti-univeral basic human rights creed, which he identifies as Jewish/Israeli. I rather stand next to you than Goering. Triple e stands with Goering.
“You God “speak” is wasted on me. I am an atheist Jew. Once I die I will be nothing more than dust in the wind.”
Yes, and until you die you will be a lot of other things, most of which can only be adequately expressed in Yiddish.
I dunno about that, Mooser, German is a pretty useful language, and, after all, Yiddish is just a bastard child of Hoch Deutsche. You don’t have to be a Nazi to know that BTW.
You’re an idiot on multiple levels.
1. Suicide bombing has been dropped as a tactic, several years ago.
2. The woman shot was an international volunteer holding a camera, not a weapon – though it’s obvious that Israel is now so demented it’s threatened by even video cameras.
3. I don’t see any soldiers in proximity to the protesters, do you? Just cowardly IDF in their concrete towers shooting at kids.
I had to laugh at ~0:30, the dainty ladies in hijab with their big designer handbags. I’ve lived & travelled in the middle east and I recognise the type, they’re a “threat” to nobody except perhaps Mr. Visa and Mr. Amex.
There are rules of engagement in war, and then there is just common decency, and we keep seeing Israel violate both, no amount of huffing and puffing from the likes of you can undo that. Any nation marketing itelf as a democracy can’t go around shooting non-violent civilian protestors and expect to get away with it.
Sumud,
There were a few “dainty ladies in hijab with their big designer handbags” that turned out to be suicide bombers both in Israel and Iraq.
Common decency? This is a strange complaint from a people that threw Arafat’s dangerous chef from the tenth floor and killed 1400 of each other in civil war. You can complain about Israelis as much as you like. But we do not kill each other like you do. Arguing for decency from your position is a joke.
“They suck.”
Keep setting your hair on fire, eee, it doesn’t divert anyone’s attention from Israel’s crimes.
You characterize the argument incorrectly.
My argument is simple. Given how Hamas has waged war, Israeli soldiers have every right to suspect civilians approaching the Israel-Gaza border.
“There were a few “dainty ladies in hijab with their big designer handbags” that turned out to be suicide bombers both in Israel and Iraq”
E, that is kind of a racist statement, but it may be difficult to recognize, so I wanted to inform you.
It’s like saying “all Jews are swindlers, just like Bernie Madoff, since they have big houses”.
Given how Hamas has waged war, Israeli soldiers have every right to suspect civilians approaching the Israel-Gaza border.
Israel and its apologists can shout this until they are blue in the face, and it will not change international humanitarian law. The “presumed innocence” the report does stress (as opposed to 3e’s misrepresentation) is the presumed innocence of civilians – intentionally disregarded by the IDF in its standard operational practices (corroborated by Breaking the Silence testimonies).
Sure, young arab ladies with big handbags = suicide bombers, how predictable. Just think, there are MILLIONS of ‘em across world, all hunting jews. Watch out!
You sound desperate to drag Iraq into the mix. It’s a different country, did you know? Perhaps you should wean yourself from the zionist teat and learn a little about the world.
Palestinian civil conflict, it proves what exactly? We know it was US/Israel funded, designed to derail a democratically elected government. Maybe you weren’t aware though, for your edification (it’s a long article but broken into pages, try a page a day and rest in between paragraphs if need be):
“The Gaza Bombshell”
link to vanityfair.com
Sorry to disrupt your tribalist mindset but you are mistaken in assuming I’m Palestinian. In fact I’m atheist, Australian, and of anglo/christian descent. So now my pedigree is established, I’m permitted to speak of human decency? In the end it’s unimportant what you think. I’ll just email / post / tweet this footage out to all and sundry, and let it speak for itself.
On the supposed superiority of zionist ethics, I’ll leave you to reflect on just one of Ben-Gurion’s pearls of wisdom:
“If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter.”
“Arguing for decency from your position is a joke.”
Hmm well, nobody has to prove anything before they are granted human rights. They are universal, not dispensed according to the mood of whatever lunatic is Israeli PM.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Shmuel,
You are just wrong. The Goldstone report clearly states:
The Mission fully appreciates the importance of the presumption of
innocence: the findings in the report do not subvert the operation of that principle. The findings
do not attempt to identify the individuals responsible for the commission of offences nor do they
pretend to reach the standard of proof applicable in criminal trials.
“You go to war with the army you have” D. Rumsfeld
They can suspect them, they can’t shoot them. Not on their own side of the border.
Them’s the rules.
OH well, eee, suicide bombers are always a product of disparity in
economic and military force. Witness the Germans and Japanese as they faced their defeat in WW2.
“The findings do not attempt to identify the individuals responsible for the commission of offences nor do they
pretend to reach the standard of proof applicable in criminal trials.”
The findings concluded that war crimes were committed. The process of establishing who should be charged with those war crimes is up to Israel or the Hague.
Then let them build their buffer zone on their own land!!
There is no “Islamic Republic of Gaza” you hateful Islamophobic racist. There is Israel, and there is occupied Palestine.
Also there is no “no man’s land” between Israel and Gaza. On the Gazan side of the fence, there is an IDF enforced “kill zone” and on the Israeli side there are migrant settlers squatting on the ruins of Palestinian villages.
And the IDF “kill zone” sometimes is stretched to the sea. No further, because there they’ll meet the IDF Navy “kill zone” where they shoot civil-so-suicidal fisher man. From here we learn that IDF must know the concept of “friendly fire”.
Er, eee, Gaza is owned by the Palestinian people; as is the land the Israel wall is built on.
“Israel and the Islamic Republic of Gaza are at war. How stupid can the people in this video be? ”
And why are they at war eee? Is the word occupation yo hard got you to pronounce?
Eee, what logo does the Islamic Republic of Gaza boast on its F-16s, Apache helicopters, heavy tanks? And, btw, what is the duration of
an Israeli jew’s reserve IDF status?
The “no-man’s land” that eee touts has been instigated illegally by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on Palestinian agricultural land within the Gaza strip. The Palestinian farmers have every right to access their land.
The protest was a non-violent protest of unarmed farmers. eee tries to justify the IOF shooting by implying that the unarmed farmers could be armed. Of course this is nothing but an attempt at hasbara to justify the Israeli military’s illegal actions. Neither eee or the IOF who fired on the farmers had any proof that the farmers were carrying weapons. Under IOF operational orders, IOF soliders are not allowed to fire on anyone unless they the soliders are in immediate danger. The protestors were in no way endangering the IOF soliders and thus the solider’s actions were not only illegal under international law but also in breach of Israeli military operation orders.
What, one wonders, goes through the mind of an IDF soldier when they fire a single, well-aimed bullet at an unarmed Palestinian? Society then welcomes him back into its warm embrace.
This pattern is repeated in the thousands, tens of thousands over the course decades? We are witnessing a social pathology at work.
You are right, in fact it explains why Americans are so fucked up after welcoming back to their society the veterans responsible for killing 2 million Vietnamese.
How about the US air men that fire bombed Tokyo killing a hundred thousand people or those that dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If I recall correctly, they are part of your “greatest generation”.
eee, I’m glad to see you comparing Israel’s evils with those of the Americans. There’s hope since you’re at least recognizing the Israeli ones. One has to almost feel sorry for the IDF, they get their asses kicked in the field by Hizbullah and they end up taking out their frustrations on unarmed Palestinian women and children.
Walid,
I am trying hard to understand why the people on this blog are so worried about Israel while there is so much to fix in the US.
Irrational hatred anyone?
This is a blog dedicated to discussing Jewish identity and the unique relationship between the US and Israel. Thus, the ‘fixation’. And you sound just like all racists. Everything you disagree with is the result of the critic’s ‘irrational’ mind-set, unprovoked ‘hatred’. It’s all about the illness of the critic in the end, whether that illness is psychologically or biologically based.
The Israel Lobby bribes and blackmails our political leadership, daily breaking Federal law, into financial, political, economic, and diplomatic subsidization of Israeli ethnic cleansing. This eventually led to 9/11, as Osama Bin Laden made very clear. Operatives of the Israel Lobby, e.g. Paul Wolfowitz, Harold Rhode, Judith Miller, and many others, lied us into war in Iraq.
Our people are dying and our nation is sliding into bankruptcy in no small part due to the activities of the Israel Lobby. Irrational hatred? No. Hatred? No. Anger? Hell, yeah. The anger and resentment will grow until, and only until, such time as the leadership of the Israel Lobby decides to stop putting the interests of foreign murderers, torturers, thieves, ethnic cleansers, and colonists before those of our own people.
Also, the Israel Lobby wouldn’t be facilitating Israeli crimes if the Israeli political establishment weren’t such d-cks to take the ‘aid’ and use it to commit crimes in the first place. They could have used it to try to establish a stable peace. But no, they chose to use it satisfy their covetousness of their neighbors’ land and water. So there’s plenty of justification for anger at both. As you well know, it’s growing in America. Live with it.
You’re assuming people here don’t talk about other atrocities elsewhere. It’s a blog about the I/P conflict–if you want to play “why don’t you talk about atrocity X”, the logical ones to use would be those committed by Palestinians. Then we’d explain why we think the Israeli ones deserve the bulk of our attention, you’d deny it, names would be called, and time wasted, but at least it would be somewhat relevant.
The US is involved in supporting Israel’s crimes and we also helped instigate the Palestinian civil war that led to Hamas’s victory in Gaza.
Perfectly rational hatred of shooting nonviolent civilian protesters.
“Perfectly rational hatred of shooting nonviolent civilian protesters.”
Yes, they respect the right to peaceful protest in Israel, but the UDF reserves the right to shoot you.
I suspect this will become the new Israeli mantra with the new onslaugh. Of non violent protest. They looked like they could be potential suicide bombers, so we shot them. Thenwhdn the ptoresters respond with violence, Israel will say “see, we told you”.
eee, you are so right! I don’t know how all you wonderful Jewish atheist Israelis can stand to touch our bloody money.
At least you would encourage all American Jews to avoid any service in the military, so they don’t have to participate in war crimes and atrocities, right?
Once again, chump, if you think we are so terrible, don’t take our money.
Gosh, now I think about it, why doesn’t Israel put out a “bull” or proclamation saying that all Jews in America who will not imeediately move to Israel are trefe? How can you leave all the other members of your “nation” in such moral peril?
As opposed to Israel’s “greatest generation” which blew up the King David Hotel, full of British women and children?
Mooser,
Pecunia non olet.
And, if we are so bad, why are you giving us money?
We are giving you money, eee, because the US campaign finance laws allow it; you’ d get nothing except US goy congress members and wannabes are whores. This is not new, look to the partnership between goy nobility and jewish middle man in the Middle
Ages. Of course today, in the USA it’s all about who has the money.
I get your point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely uneccessary, and it was a tragic event.
But Iraq is the good war, and so is Afganistan, since we have Obama leading the fight. Gee, sometimes I am so proud of Washington and their efforts to protect us from Islam-o-fascism.
Chu, Iraq and Afghanistan are just as unholy and just as unecessary. Nothing to be proud of.
missed the sarcasm…
Chu, there are reasonable arguments that Hiroshima and even Nagasaki were necessary. I take it, nobody in your family was a US Marine in WW2?
No, Walid, Iraq and Afghanistan are much less defensible than Hiroshima.
Citizen you presume a lot, and I had a grandfather in the Army during WWII who felt it was the right thing to do.
I am aware of the arguments of why it was necessary. There’s a book called Hiroshima that talks about the after effects of the bomb. Worth reading since it’s only a few hundred pages.
Hey, why stop there in your comparison, eee, how about the Americans and Brits who bombed Dresden? That was a large city of innocent civilians, with an enormous amount of innocent refugees too–with zero military status. As to the bombing of Japan, you might want to look at the fact that Imperial Japan was arming every single Japanese, and training them in killing, and, as well, you might want to calculate the cost to the US Marines of taking over the outer Japanese military outpost islands, and then factor in the projected cost to the US troops of invading
Japan–and, just for kicks, eee, why not factor in the fact that Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? I mean, triple e, there you are not really
talking about settlers taking over a country, and laying seige to its occupants, or stifling by occupation; or even talking about preventive war, or preemptive war on the part of the Americans.
Citizen,
As usual you are a day late and a dollar short.
Did you not know that the Japanese were liberating Hawaii from its colonial occupiers, the US? How do you think the US came to hold Hawaii? I did not know that that Irish-German-English-Scot-Italian populations were indigenous to Hawaii. Is that what they taught you at school?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a justified attempt to get rid of a colonialist imperialist power, no? Therefore, NOTHING the US did afterwards to Japanese civilians could be justified because the reason the US went to war was unjustified. Since when are you justified in defending a colony taken by force? No?
What, like how the Japanese Empire “liberated” China and many other Pacific nations?
You’re an idiot, eee. This is like arguing that the British Empire “liberated” India by conquering it from the existing rulers. I won’t argue that what the United States did to Hawaii was right — it wasn’t — but at least they were given full statehood and citizenship. As opposed to what your people did to the Palestinians.
Are you joking? The Americans were the worst kind of colonialists in Hawaii. All they cared about for decades were their plantations. They didn’t even bother to make “Bantustans”. Only in 1950! did things begin to change.
The Americans subdued the Hawaiians by making Hawaii a huge Naval base and by allowing non-indigenous immigration.
And after all that, you have the gall to tell me that the US had the right to kill millions of Japanese civilians because the Japanese attacked one of your colonial outposts. Hawaii was not even a state in 1939!
And then you call those people “the greatest generation”! Why? Because they defended your colonial empire!
Whats especially disgusting about Zionism, is how sanctimonious it is.
You have no right to talk, as a proud supporter of colonialism and apartheid, you racist Jewish supremacist.
Well, actually, eee, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was an attempt to stop FDR’s boycot of oil going to Imperial Japan, not exactly a friend of China and environs. I agree with you that Hawaii was once a colonial victim of the USA. Today, Hawaii is a US state, and it’s citizens have full USA citizenship rights. Now, let’s talk about the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the OTs.
“What, one wonders, goes through the mind of an IDF soldier when they fire a single, well-aimed bullet at an unarmed Palestinian?”
For the vast majority, I’d suggest nothing at all, or elation. That’s what happens when you demonise /dehumanise people, as some have learned.
I suggest people look at the “Collateral Murder” video from Wikileaks, which gives a pretty authentic idea of what ‘goes through the mind” of a soldier killing members of the “other”. There’s quite a bit of the elation Shmuel mentions in that video, lots of bravura, an adrenalin-heightened sense of a “mission that needs to be accomplished” which leads to eagerness to shoot and be done with it. What appears as callous disregard for life to a civilian is just the natural byproduct of brain washing process that all military combat training is really all about.
The questions and recriminations, if any, all come later. And for many soldiers at least in the US military, the dichotomy between civilian/normal life which values humanity and the knowledge that somewhere along the way they set that principle aside, is at the heart of the personality disintegration typical of PTS.
I do not know how many experience that in Israel, though we know some certainly have. Which is probably what led ex-IDF soldiers to found “Breaking the Silence” and others to testify to it, annonymously. perhaps for much of the same complex reasons that motivated one individual to leak the video in the first place, and two other company members to write a letter apologizing to the Iraqi families.
In the heat of shooting, i think soldiers do what they have been trained to do. Since the entire training of a soldier is geared towards learning to deny/ignore the humanity of those they must shoot at, the ability to “set aside” questions of shared humanity are at the very core of allowing one human to kill another. After all, if questions of “humanity” enter during the “heat of battle”, the killing business may not go so smoothly. As an “insurance”, the military training process also tends to instill a strong sense of “kill or be killed” into all potential encounters with the “other side”, to allow fear to come in, just in case, pesky doubts about the necessity of the killing action should creep in.
In Israel, where the IDF soldiers frequently encounter palestinians who are generally unarmed, it helps that the entire society is brain washed into denying the humanity of those “others”. So it becomes relatively easy to shoot at demonstrators, with the amount and severity of shooting limited only by some ever-changing “rules of engagement”.
Danaa – one of the chilling things about the wikileaks video was their nonchalance and actual enjoyment of the killing. It’s war by video-game, these are kids playing a game. No wonder the Iraq War has had such massive casualties when killing is so easy and painless. As soon as the wikileaks Iraq footage came out I was reminded of this:
“DF’s newest heroes: Women spotters on Gaza border”
link to haaretz.com
“Dozens of terrorists have been hit after being identified by the spotters. “If I don’t report to the force on the ground that the person is armed, they will not shoot at him,” says Sgt. Sapir Gonen, a lookout shift commander at the Nahal Oz command center on the border. She says that “every soldier at the command center needs the operational skill to know what weapons look like … and how an armed man conducts himself, as opposed to someone who is not armed.”
It’s the same thing, bored teenagers with a screen and a joystick connected to machine guns. There is no heat of battle.
Danaa, you are correct; there is an analogy; the number of GIs with PTSD has been growing by leaps and bounds. Suicides by GIs is at an all time high. The US Army has set up special “warrior transition” units at US military bases in the states (and overseas?) to handle it–they are not being successful. The “transition” (back to sanity) amounts to giving huge amounts of pills, which the “warriors in transition” back to sanity trade amongst themselves–when they are not simply occupied being warehoused, drooling in the aisle in their wheel chairs, supposedly taking part in the reality
of normal Americans walking by.
To shoot and kill: link to haaretz.com
“what goes through the mind of an IDF soldier”
and
eee gratuitous, typically hideous “you, USA, suck” response about PTSD afflicting US soldiers.
Here’s how IDF expresses its PTSD:
your soldiers are descending into “fucked up” brutes, eee. is it worth it to you?
“eee. is it worth it to you?”
Worth it, it’s meat and drink and mother’s milk to him. After all, you can’t have a nation without some national characteristics, right? Otherwise us Jews would be just like anybody else, and then why would we need a Jewishstate? And isn’t it wonderful that the characteristics of the Jewishnation are the very same ones that eee admires and espouses? And I ask you, what possible higher values can there be than the will to power, and what gives more satisfaction and proof of superiority than prevailing over your “enemies”? Trying to please God? Don’t make eee laugh! We tried that once, and look where it got us!
No sir, as long as there is one nation on this earth the Jews can still lord it over, we ain’t beat! And with a shabbes Goy like the US, well, let’s just say Israel can do a lot more than throw cherry tomatoes.
Shabbes Goy like the US. Exactly. What real jew could admire a goy or jew, given this. I don’t admire it, and I’m not even jewish.
An earlier comment to me from eee just days ago:
You are just ignorant about Jews and are jumping to biased conclusions. The Jews are not a race. We are a nation with a unique religion.
So ‘the Jews’ are defined by a ‘unique religion’, ‘not a race’.
eee today:
You God “speak” is wasted on me. I am an atheist Jew. Once I die I will be nothing more than dust in the wind.
Israel is a ‘nation’ based on religion, and eee’s membership card lists his religious preference as ‘atheist’? What a sad, confused, little individual. One day the internal contradictions will cause eee’s head to explode.
You have serious reading comprehension problems.
Let me make it simple for you.
Jews are a nation. No other qualifiers needed.
This nation has certain peculiar customs that you call religion. These customs are based on certain beliefs that many in the nation have. Having those beliefs is not a necessary or sufficient reason to be part of the Jewish nation.
I see. But it’s a contradiction to say I am, ‘Atheist’ Jew.
I can say I am an Atheist living in America, but I cannot be an Athiest Catholic? Comprendo?
Maybe Israeli Atheist works? Are you the Israeli with the heavy accent?
You cannot be an atheist Catholic because Catholicism is a religion, not a nation.
Get it into your head: The Jews are a nation. That is how we have self determined ourselves. There is no contradiction whatsoever in being an atheist Jew.
what does ‘self-determined ourselves’ actually mean? I always thought Judaism is a religion, but your telling me I am wrong?
Chu: I see. But it’s a contradiction to say I am, ‘Atheist’ Jew.
No, it’s not. Judaism is a culture and a civilisation of which religion is a central part. There is actually a millennial tradition of atheism within Judaism (generically referred to as apikorsut or Epicureanism, as such atheism was originally identified with the Epicurean school). One of the most important Jewish-atheist thinkers in pre-modern times was the 9th-century Hiwi al-Balkhi, who published a book of 200 criticisms of Bible – lost, but addressed in the writings of Saadiah Gaon, Abraham ibn Ezra and Moses ibn Ezra.
Shmuel, with all due respect to the paradoxical tradition of atheist thought within Judaism, the State of Israel is built upon its religious, biblical tradition, not the seemingly contradictory impulse you identify. (I’ll have to take a look at this al-Balkhi figure.). Israeli citizenship, its borders, its broader set of civil law, are all rooted in the Jewish religion, meaning both biblical imperative and rabbinic authority. And that is what makes you and similarly minded people regrettably such a rarity. The more dominant tradition of Judaism is that of narrow orthodoxy and ostracism. That’s the tradition experienced by Spinoza and da Costa, for example, and other critics of the Jewish religion and its bureaucratic authority. And that’s the narrow tradition that the ‘atheist’ eee is trying to impose here.
Shmuel -thanks. always learning something new.
Marc,
First of all, I wanted to establish that Jewish atheism is not only not a contradiction, but a “hallowed” tradition. As for Zionism, to the extent that it is a Jewish movement, it is fundamentally atheist (even pagan). Jewish tradition as a whole cannot be characterised as uniformly intolerant – certainly not in the modern era – and I do not believe that the intolerance that saw Spinoza and d’Acosta excommunicated is at the heart of 3e’s conception of Jewish exceptionalism. Curiously (although not directly relevant to your point), modern Zionists have embraced Spinoza, not only as a Jew, but as a “proto-Zionist”!
As for Zionism, to the extent that it is a Jewish movement, it is fundamentally atheist (even pagan).
That’s where you and I have a fundamental disagreement. With all of the various ‘Zionisms’ floating about, Zionist Israel is inextricably linked with religion. (Even Herzl winds up relying on a biblical imperative of sorts as I read him. And many of his most ardent Christian supporters viewed Zionism through a racial and religious lens.) I realize this topic can’t be treated seriously in a few lines, but take this eee fellow for example. eee is a self-described atheist, yet Israel’s existence, as the argument goes as best as I can follow, is premised on a biblical history. So Jerusalem is the capitol of the Jewish nation, Judea and Samaria are Jewish territories, etc. I can’t see how a ‘Jewish’ culture sufficiently supports these arguments.
Jewish tradition as a whole cannot be characterised as uniformly intolerant – certainly not in the modern era
I agree with that second bit, although it could be argued that ‘Jewish tradition’ is entering a new dark ages to the extent that it has hitched its wagon to Zionist Israel.
Curiously (although not directly relevant to your point), modern Zionists have embraced Spinoza, not only as a Jew, but as a “proto-Zionist”!
Fascinating. How did they reach the conclusion that Spinoza was a proto-Zionist?
Israel’s existence was never premised on any “biblical history” which is an oxymoron. It was premised on the fact that the Jews were a nation and therefore deserving of a country, just like all other nations.
In the end, Israel’s right to exist comes from the fact that it exists. It needs no more justification than that. And if you have a problem with that, that is why we have the IDF. If Israel would have lost the 1948 war, it would not be in existence today. Yes, in international affairs, might is necessary to on order to be right as the Jews learned the hard way.
>> Israel’s existence was never premised on any “biblical history” …
Right, and that’s why Israel is the “Promised Land” to which the diaspora is “returning”. If Israel were a new country for this so-called “nation” of Jews, there would be no “return”, there would be only emigration to it from other nations.
“what does ’self-determined ourselves’ actually mean?”
I’m not sure, but when my Mom caught me at it, she gave me hell, and told me never to do it again!
The Jews are returning to Israel because there is historical fact (not “biblical history” which is an oxymoron) that there was a Jewish kingdom in Israel.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Oh, give it a rest. This is about a bunch of white Europeans from a religious minority stealing land from a native population.
As you’ve kindly pointed out yourself, we’ve seen this story before.
“was” being the operative word.
Marc,
The mytho-history concocted by Zionists has a lot more to it than Bible, and (IMO) very little to do with belief in God – assuming that is what were discussing.
I agree about the dark ages, and take it very personally.
Regarding Spinoza as a proto-Zionist, briefly, Ben-Gurion called Spinoza “the first prophet of secular Zionism”, due primarily to his recognition of positive social aspects of the Mosaic constitution and the words of the prophets, and his fundamental criticism of diaspora rabbinic Judaism, thus paving the way for secular Jewish nationalism – within a Jewish national territory (with which he associated the Mosaic constitution).
did she make you wash the sheets?
“not “biblical history” which is an oxymoron) that there was a Jewish kingdom in Israel.”
There just happens to be no historical or archeological evidence to prove it.
Interesting indeed! But is it really clear that Hiwi was Jewish rather than a Marcionite Christian? I guess that all sorts of sectarian groups used to mill around in the raffish margins of empire.
“The Jews are a nation.“, threee. Ah, now it is changed into “The Jews” again, within one thread. So, when are you going to call me an anti-semite?
The mytho-history concocted by Zionists has a lot more to it than Bible, and (IMO) very little to do with belief in God – assuming that is what were discussing.
Ay, therein lies the rub. I can’t quibble with you about Zionists’ belief in G-d, though the Bible seems an indespensible part of the mytho-history they’ve concocted. (For the record, I am a Christian, however IMO one’s faith should be a catalyst for lifelong inquiry and an admission of humility, not the stuff of nation building. From time to time I listen to shortwave broadcasts of sermons by the so-called Christian Identity movement here in the States. The bible story as they tell it has the US as the true Israel, with white American Christians the true Israelites. Yeesh.)
I agree about the dark ages, and take it very personally.
That is sad. Unlike others here I think that there is a uniquely Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the most promising parts of that history having arisen in opposition to the dominant Christian and Jewish ideologies of the times.
Mhughes,
I am not an expert on Hiwi al-Balkhi, but from what I have read, and especially the responses he elicited from contemporary (and subsequent) Jewish scholars, filled with the kind of venom that is reserved for heretics of one’s own faith, I am convinced that he was a Jew. I doubt that Saadiah Gaon or his students would have bothered to relate to the theological claims of a Christian with such assiduousness and passion. Besides, his heresies were not particularly new within Judaism, and are attested to in the Mishnah (redacted 2nd cent.).
Got it, eee, this is exactly Goering’s POV. So why was he set up for hanging at Nuremberg?
“How did they reach the conclusion that Spinoza was a proto-Zionist? ”
How did they reach the conclusion that Spinoza w2as a Jew? He was cursed out of the synagogue for his un-Jewish religious ideas, and declared to be an ex-Jew by the rabbis.
RoHa: How did they reach the conclusion that Spinoza w2as a Jew? He was cursed out of the synagogue for his un-Jewish religious ideas, and declared to be an ex-Jew by the rabbis.
He wasn’t exactly declared an “ex-Jew” (not possible in Jewish religious law), but they made it pretty clear they didn’t want him around. But then two things happened, he got famous and appeciated by non-Jews, and many Jews decided they’d had enough of the rabbis too (and with his help and enlightened European legislation, were no longer subject to their authority). So he became a hero, and everybody (Jews and Christians) wanted to be associated with him: he was an assimilationst, no he was a secularist, no he was a nationalist, no he was an apostate, no he was a modernist, no he was Moses, no he was Jesus, no he was a democrat, no he was a constitutionalist, no he was a Zionist, Jew, Christian, atheist, philosopher, theologian, ecologist … Enough to drive a poor Jew crazy ;-) Good thing he was dead by the time most of this went on.
Shmuel, no one has yet discovered a machine or a rhetorical process which can determine if a person believes in God, or exactly what they believe in or don’t believe in.
Even if a person is willing to die “for their God” people kill themselves (and each other) for the most trivial of reasons.
I determined way, way long ago that I would never be stupid enough to ask a person “do you believe in God” and anybody who asks me that has to take my answer “You bet I believe, and He is telling me to screw you in the tuchas right now.
And after all, if God doesn’t exist, what good is an atheist?
All of eee’s atheist Jew talk is just a social phenomenon. It’s the equivalent of all those socialist students who go on to work on Wall St.
But that atheist Jew nonsense sure is convenient when somebody points out the supposed contradictions between Judaism and Zionism. Like everything else about Israel and Zionism, it’s a distraction to avoid putting the righ names on things.
eee may be an atheist, but he sure doesn’t mind being in thrall to a bunch of true believers.
My reading comprehension is just fine. It’s your incoherent and illogical argumentation that is the problem.
The problem is your dogmatic approach to the issues and the biased way you judge Israel. What you find acceptable in the US is a reason to BDS Israel. BDS your own government and leave us alone.
The threat to American national security by blowback from support for Israeli ethnic cleansing and colonization stems from two sources: the Israel Lobby in the US and the policies of the Israeli government.
We get blamed for Israeli crimes. If we sever relations with Israel and cease to support Israeli crimes, we will no longer get blamed. If Israel decides to stop ethnic cleansing and colonization, we won’t be blamed for what wouldn’t be happening anymore.
We win by achieving either objective. Therefore Israel is as legitimate a target as the Israel Lobby. We’ll work both angles until one works out. Live with it. If you want to continue ethnic cleansing and colonization without growing pressure and hostility from the US, tell the Israel Lobby to shut down.
That was directed to eee April 26, 2010 at 11:43 am.
Israel shouldn’t be left alone to continue its crimes.
“Leave Israel alone.”
But be sure to send money, weapons and veto every anti-Israeli resolution in the UN.
Most of us would LOVE to see Israel left entirely, completely alone, all by itself pariah self.
You are the gift that keeps giving eee:
“Leave Israel alone”
link to youtube.com
Hey chump, how about leaving the Palestinians alone? That’s the issue. You aren’t the victim, you are the perpetrator.
Polyphemus is getting cranky!
Colin, not so fast, your way is letting the US off the hook too easily. It has been complicit to Israel’s crimes all these years and now you are saying you’d like to see it walk away from it and leave it holding the bag. America helped bring this ugly baby into the world, has nurtured it and covered up for it all these years and now it has to help in picking up the 5 million pieces that are scattered all over the place.
you get your zionists out of US government, send back the $180billion PLUS the jet fighters and you got it, baby; you’re on your own.
don’t let the door hit ….
Psycho,
Again you got the wrong address. Talk to your own Congress. Put whoever you want in your government. Your issues are all with the US. BDS your own government.
eee – you’re having another logic misfit.
Israel is the perpetrator, the US is the enabler. It makes sense to start with the perpetrator.
Not when the enabler is your own government, and the only superpower, and supporting Israel to further its interests.
So you concede that Israel is nothing more than a puppet of US corporate interests?
Pure manure eee.
You just don’t have the guts to face up to what Israel does, and the thousands of skeletons rattling around in the zionist closet. As long as you blame the US you can avoid breaking out of the carefully constructed Israeli bubble you inhabit.
I don’t blame the US. You blame the US!
You say that without the US Israel is nothing. Well, since it is your own country, act on what you say. Instead of changing what YOU are doing, you want to change what I am doing. How crazy is that?
Gee, right, how crazy is it that any human being would want to stop another human being from murdering. Especially, you know, children. Regardless of nationality.
Wow, what is wrong with us?
EEE, nobody here finds acceptable in the US anything they hold Israel accountable for. Please show how you got that notion.
“Jews are a nation. No other qualifiers needed.“, says trheee. And how does someone enter that nation? By religion or by genealogy. There are qualifiers, lowercase es you are. Both Nuremberg and Tel Aviv wrote these qualifiers into law. BTW, didn’t you just forgot to type “The Jews” here?
One enters the nation by agree to tie one’s fate to that of the nation and by learning its customs, what you call religion. One can of course also be born into the nation.
Actually, there are international laws post-WW2 that are not as self-aggrandizing and far more legalistic than your shoddy definition.
And in any event, you are merely confirming that Israel is merely a foreign intrusion. Israel is primarily Ashkenazi (i.e. European) culture. Your grandparents didn’t bother respecting the existing nationality of Palestine.
threee: One enters the nation by agreeto tie one’s fate to that of the nation
[not Nuremberg nor Tel Aviv laws gave people freedom to "agree"] and
["and"? you mean both are required?]
by learning its customs, what you call religion [Assimilated Jews from Russia or East Europe learned Jewish customs before entering?] . One can of course also be born into the nation
[Huh? A baby ties its fate & learns customs at birth?].
And, since you write “The Jews” sometimes (alternating even within this one thread actually), subsequently you call me an anti-semite if I’d agree with you. What an opportunity that would be.
“One enters the nation by agree to tie one’s fate to that of the nation and by learning its customs, what you call religion. One can of course also be born into the nation.”
And you can tie yourself to the Jewish religion by being an atheist? Very interesting! Is there a special classification for “atheist Jews” in Israel, the Jewishstate? Are you exempted from military service, like the haredim, or do they make you an officer right away?
Oh, BTW, if a guy wants to leave the Jewishnation, how does he do it? By turning three times in a circle and saying “I criticise Israel” ?
“One enters the nation by agree to tie one’s fate to that of the nation and by learning its customs, what you call religion.”
So you’re a convert, eee? How the hell can you convert to a religion if you’re an atheist? Wait, don’t tell me you became an atheist after you converted to Judaism!
Just another lost hippie who got caught up in a cult.
Eee, are you saying it’s always gentiles who call Jewish custom religion?
Moosie, if you were born from a Jewish mother, I think the only
usually recognized way to stop being a Jew if to declare in public, “I found Jesus, hallalulah!” I think that would work at least for traditionalist Christians and Jews. You don’t even need to turn in a circle. Personally, I never knew Jesus was lost. Heck, if I met him tomorrow, I’d say, “Easy for you, you don’t have any kids!” And, my goodness, what would Jesus do if he was subjected to a military draft? Or even subjected to taxes? He was a carpenter, who dragged into his power, what a few stray fishermen–who left their families to follow him around? Today, they’d go to jail for avoiding child support… Further, could Jesus get a job today? Would he be competing with illegal Mexicans who found jobs in the US construction industry?
eee, this is the last time I will engage you as I find you to be dishonest, illogical and a racist. I do not agree with many policies of the US, my home country, including its uncritical support of Israel. For the record, I also do not agree with US support of the degenerates running Saudi Arabia. (There, a bit of ‘balance’ for your unbalanced mind.) But then this site is not dedicated to discussing the degenerates running Saudia Arabia, is it? You come to a forum, the primary subject of which is the relationship between the US and Israel, and then express surprise that commenters focus on that topic. Really, what is your point? (I ask that question rhetorically because I fully comprehend your purpose here and have no further interest in your infantile ranting.)
I am not against discussing Israel. I am against leveling unfair criticism at Israel. To show that criticism is unfair you sometimes need to show how it is not applied in other cases.
You are clown who conflates Jewishness w/ Zionism. Hence, you find antisemitism in all criticism of that shitty little Levantine country.
And who the hell are you to decide what is ‘unfair’ criticism? What the hell does that even mean?
We’re in a particular time period. We are not living during the Dark Ages. So we judge crimes within the context of the period w/ live in.
It’s funny actually, Jewish supremacists like yourself often trumpet Israeli accomplishments (desert bloom, ‘only democracy’, etc.). At the same time, you want no standards applied to Israel’s crimes.
When Israel kills a bunch of Palestinians or demolishes homes or colonizes more land or blah blah blah – you talk about Darfur or the Congo or about the history of American colonialism or about Iraq.
You’re a freak. A dime a dozen Zionist troll.
eee, there was a Jewish nation and a very small one and it lived in Palestine and in other neighbouring countries. This where the thing about a nation stops and everything else is make believe to make the illegitimate legitimate. This becomes more obvious when a Jew claims to be an atheist while still insisting on a free pass to Israel, as someone here already noted.
Who are you to tell me, a Jew, what the Jewish nation consists of or not? The Jews have self determined themselves. We have no need for anybody’s approval, and if you don’t like it then that is what the IDF is for.
” The Jews have self determined themselves.”
Oh, go self-determine yourself.
“That’s what the IDF is for…”
Yes, to protect the settlers who are self-determining themselves. We know what the IDF is for.
The Jews have ….
And if I say “indeed”, threee, you’ll call me an anti-semite.
“We have no need for anybody’s approval…”
So then don’t complain about unfair criticism. Comes with.
You are right eee. The “Jewish Nation” has existed from time immemorial. Homer sang of it, only he knew it as the Land of the Cyclops: A nation of ungrateful, single-minded gluttons with a taste for human flesh who shunned the world.
Triple E, if hundreds of people told me I was defending the indefensible, I’d start to question my beliefs – or at least question whether I was on the right blog.
Polly,
Millions of Americans are telling you everyday by their support of Israel and by how they vote for Congress that you are on the wrong side. Yet, you don’t seem to follow your own advice.
Polly, what right do you, as a human being, have to tell a Jew anything! Get it through your head, there are human beings, and then way up there where they don’t have to abide your questioning, are the Jews, clutching their Nobel prizes like so many angelic harps or something. Oh wait, I’m not talking about all the Jews, I’m talking about the self-determined Jews, the real Jews!
Oh, eee? Being the big proponent of democracy that you are, then, shouldn’t you reject the militant ethnic cleansing that created Israel in the first place? If it had been put to a vote in 1948, even with the illegal immigrants getting a voice, Palestine would be a democratic government with equal rights for Muslims, Christians and Jews, rather than the ethno-theocracy it is today.
“Millions of Americans are telling you everyday by their support of Israel and by how they vote for Congress that you are on the wrong side.”
Are those the same people who are doing all the aprtheid in America, and murdwering people in Iraq and Vietnam? Gosh, just a few short comments ago, you couldn’t stand them, but know they are your bulwark and defense? Ho-kay!
“Not when the enabler is your own government, and the only superpower, and supporting Israel to further its interests.”
Which is it, eee?
‘Don’t talk about me!’ ‘No. Wait. Talk about me in glowing terms.’ ‘Don’t criticize me. Offer me unconditional support.’ ‘No. Don’t talk about me.’
It’s like arguing with a 13-year old in the throws of a hormonal eruption.
Where did I ever ask to be talked about in “glowing terms” or given “unconditional support”? You are like a person that looks in the mirror and kicks the dog beside him because he doesn’t like his own looks. Fix your own country and Congress. You are the superpower. Don’t kick us. Kick yourself. BDS your own government.
I think that ziocaine is related to hormones. It may be that once started, some people are unable to control the process, and become a slave to ziocaine.
No, I think “eee” is in exactly in the right place.
I’ve been reading this blog for the past few days, and I have learned some things, thanks to the others. “eee” and “Witty” and others consistently get blown out of the water by reasoned, well-informed arguments that make their meanderings look silly, yet they keep coming back – why? Either they are masochists, severely delusional, or unwittingly truly do want to get to the heart of the matter, but, like someone who is incapable of admitting he is wrong (like the “Concord fallacy”), keeps plugging away using a kind of “barricade” reasoning – basically, “that’s the way it is, and even if it’s irrational , too bad, I’ll just wall myself in here and wait till it’s over”. (This irrationalism has proved to be deadly for the Palestinians, incidentally, but they are “collateral damage”.)
They are acting like foils, giving everyone else an opportunity to sharpen their intellectual knives here against them, and are thus adding to the lively debate here (maybe against their wishes) rather than killing it, in my opinion.
I find it quite moving that they keep returning here.
As propagandists for the “official” Israeli position, they are completely hopeless, so what is their goal? I think that they feel they are a part of this community, in a strange way.
>> I am against leveling unfair criticism at Israel. To show that criticism is unfair you sometimes need to show how it is not applied in other cases.
Using the crimes of others to justify your own: What justice! What inspiration! What a “nation”! What a joke.
I never heard a single commenter on this blog over the last three plus years defend the rule of, e.g., the Saud clan over the citizens of Saudi Arabia. Note, that’s over the population of Saudi Arabia, not that and also Saudi Arabian occupied territory filled with another population.
Nor have I heard anyone on this blog defending the US support of Saudi Arabia, although we all know oil, the most precious world commodity, is somethng the US gets for such support.
Is anyone else utterly shocked that the Israeli on this blog is trying to justify his military opening fire on civilians on Gazan soil?
Are you joking? Do you know how many times Americans have shot at Iraqi civilians JUSTIFIABLY because they did not stop at road blocks?
If the Gazans do not want to be shot, they should not approach the border.
How close is Sderot to the border? Refresh my memory.
No man’s land is inside the borders of Gaza. That was the status quo at the end of the last war.
Which war, exactly? Between whom?
>> Do you know how many times Americans have shot at Iraqi civilians JUSTIFIABLY because they did not stop at road blocks?
If Americans hadn’t UNJUSTIFIABLY invaded and occupied Iraq, they’d have no reason to shoot an any Iraqis!
Man, that is just so fucked up!
I wish he would make up his mind about the US. Are we atrocious invaders and baby killers, or justifiable shooters?
Man, for the amount of pelf we shower on Israel, you would think we could at least buy rhetorical consistency!
Eljay,
Well then, fix your own home. Do you know how many thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed unjustifiably by Americans according to you? Why the irrational interest in the IDF when according to you, your army is doing so much worse? Why are you not proposing to BDS your own government?
It must suck to be Israeli. With all that apartheid and ethnic cleansing and structural dependency on foreign aid, when do you find time to criticize anyone else? Or is that what the cluster bombs are for, to substitute for actual dialog and diplomacy?
I’m not American, I’m Canadian. But that, of course, has nothing to do with your using the crimes of others to justify the crimes of your own government. Well done.
I certainly hope it never happens, but should Israel ever succumb to the military might of another nation, it’s nice to know that the aggressors will be able to placate you with similarly despicable “reasoning”. (“Hey, Israel did bad stuff, so now it’s our turn! Go BDS yourself!”)
eljay, I am sure he’ll find an argument somewhere for a questionable Canadian issue and blame you too. – It’s not just Israel, you all have blood on your hands, so let us continue to build settlements and take over East Jerusalem. DON’T SILENCE ME!
Well then, fix your own home.
————–
How abot fixing your own first eee? What are you doing about it apart from spending your time here telling people to fix theirs? Fix your own bloody murderous, Frakenstein type of a country before telling others to fix theirs. Your logic! Live by your own logic first!
No, not at all. How the hell do you think they established them selves in Palestine in the first place, by asking “pretty please”? As eee just said a few comments ago “that’s what the IDF is for”. And they get their orders direct from God. Oops, sorry eee. But damn, if we’re gonna be a nation based on religion, we gotta get God in their somewhere. Or else what do we got, nose size?
Now if you can come up with something else which makes us a “nation”, I’d love to hear it!
Oh. BTW, eee, I’m in, right? I’m Jewish, clipped and Bar-Mitzvah, you betcha, Jewish all the way back, not some Moishe-come-lately convert, so I’m in, right. And I’m not even an atheist Jew, I’m a real goddam God-believing Jew. So I get to be in the Jewish nation, right? Look, I don’t expect to be made head-Jew right away, but I do expect I’ll be rated in accord with my age, accomplishments, income and Jewish background, which is impeccable!
Oh sorry, I forgot, we are a nation because we self-determined ourselves! “West of the Fountainblue, I am the law!”
Great, Mooser, every hillbilly in the USA will appreciate your contributions to our culture and land. And so too, will what’s left of the WASP elite.
Shocked? That’s what Israelis do, they spend their entire lives sitting in front of a computer making excuses for their crimes.
I’d be shocked if that particular Israeli didn’t.
Israeli forces kill a “Hamas militant” by bulldozing his home
Democracy in action!
Exactly, a democracy defending itself. The guy was stupid enough not to surrender so now he is dead and his house is gone also. He was a real genius.
“Democracy defending itself.” Echoes of Weimar.
You do know that the rest of us in the civilized world find the practice of killing a suspect and stripping his family of every worldly possession to be not just illegal and immoral, but incredibly cowardly as well.
Yeah, eee, like a few of those Warsaw Ghetto guys, they just didn’t surrender….
You know it takes a real monster of a police state to not just summarily execute someone, but slaughter anyone who might be in the same building as them and leave entire families homeless.
Israel escalates the War on Playgrounds
Maybe some day Israelis will understand that 5 million Palestinians are a hell of a lot of people to kill and they’ll never finish killing them all or chasing them away. They will stay in their faces for ever. For now, they don’t think so.
eee, normally I shouldn’t be telling you what your nation is or isn’t about but you busted our ears telling us what a Palestinian isn’t to justify having stolen his land and water and for that, you deserve to be told time and gain that the Jewish nation as defined by the Zionist enterprise to steal Palestine is bogus. There was a Jewish nation and it lived in Palestine until the Zionists cooked the numbers. I won’t insult you by referring to your European origins, this is really not my business but you don’t sound very oriental and therefore not really part of the authentic nation. Being an atheist puts you even further away.
“Being an atheist puts you even further away.”
Walid, if eee was really a convinced Zionist, he wouldn’t be here.
He’s looking for a way out, and he came to Mondoweiss to find it. Naturally, he’ll kick scream and spit all the way, and never admit to anything, but that’s why he is here. He knows something is terribly wrong with him and he’s hoping he’ll find out what it is.
Look, I grew up with plenty of convinced, real Zionists. They wouldn’t waste a second arguing with anti-Semites, why should they. And actually hang out, day after day, at a website which questions the tenets of Zionism? They wouldn’t waste their time, or get a tsimmes: those who criticise Israel are liars, and anti-Semites and there’s no point in arguing with them.
It would be nice if eee (and his ilk) would thank us some day, but I don’t expect it.
Believe me, if they didn’t want to absorb and consider what they see on Mondoweiss, they wouldn’t be here, and apprently, they can’t stay away.
Mooser, are you saying he’s one of those fence-sitters Ahmed wrote about? I thought you guys were saying that he was a paid agent hired to come on blogs such as this one to spread the good word.
Oh no, not a fence sitter, he hasn’t got the balance required for that. No, he’ll jump to the other side, but we’ll never know about it. I don’t know why he has to aproach the process of growing out of his indoctrination this way, but he does. (Maybe it’s a Jewish thing? Just joking!) Otherwise, why is he here, turning his soul inside out for us. How many times has he said we were all worthless, dumb, Jew-haters, blah, blah, blah, but there he is again next day!. Hell, from the amount of time he spends here, I would say that criticism of Israel is the mainstay of his information diet! He couldn’t stay away if he tried.
If he is a paid troll, it does show the Israeli economy is indeed going great guns, so to speak. Cause they sure don’t care about getting their money’s worth.
Mooser, he might say you are just projecting in the freudian sense.
He can say whatever he wants, but the point is, why is it so important to him to say it here? He could go to lots of websites where he would be a hero, but he prefers to be the schmuck at Mondoweiss.
He’ll never leave, and he’ll be the most anti-Zionist Zionist ever before he’s through.
Great – another long thread by half a dozen commentators attacking an imbecile troll. A wanking circle.
What choice do we have? These are the Zionists. If we just collectively turned our backs on them, we’d only have our own choir to be preaching to.
you’re showing your age. a good wank can be therapeutic.
“Great – another long thread by half a dozen commentators attacking an imbecile troll. A wanking circle.”
Richard, life always gives us hard choices. I guess the only thing you can do is save yourself from wankerdom or being associated with wankers. Run! Cancel your registration. No, that won’t be enough! The only way you can, with integrity, respond to this, is by becoming a Zionist-supporter yourself! As someone of your high intelligence can easily see, us anti-Zionists are a bunch of wankers.
As an act of almost incredible genorousity, although he by no means deserves the benefit of your suggestions, why not write Phil and Adam a long e-mail (no, better make it a registered letter) telling them how the website should be run, and who should be allowed to comment. And who banned. I am holding my seppeku sword to my bowels right now, just say the word, baby!
But I warn you, when Phil and Adam get your thesis, they may look at each other and say “Parker, Parker, does that sound like a Jewish name to you? Me neither!” and throw it in the trash.
You could always change your name, it might help.
Your right of course RP. But it has its uses. Provided we keep our responses short and to the point, even though we’re responding to a flaming pillock, passersby, who will see our fresh comments, will be tempted to stay and learn a new perspective. A pointed weapon grasped firmly is the best defense against a goggling Cyclops.
MORE ON THE WEASEL NAMED WIESEL ( Interview)
Haaretz
From the interview:
“I didn’t speak then about his [Netanyahu's] policy or his programs, I spoke about his oratory. He is a great orator. Great speaker. For the other things, let the Israelis decide, not me.”
Is Wiesel just going senile? Earlier in the interview he is reported as calling Netanyahu “a great statesman, a diplomat and a man of vision…”
sherbrsi, it was as absurd as Bush calling Sharon “a man of peace”.
This Jerusalem ad thing is about hustling money for his “humanitarian” foundation. The last report he filed showed annual revenues from contributions of about 5 million on expenses of a million. I don’t feel sorry for him for his 13 million Madoff hit.
Is Wiesel just going senile? Earlier in the interview he is reported as calling Netanyahu “a great statesman, a diplomat and a man of vision…”
————
“….and complimented him by saying that no one since the late politician and diplomat Abba Eban has ever been as good and as strong in defending Israel’s reputation and honor.”
So much for “oratory skills”
Akiva Eldar: Why does the IDF allow officers to live in illegal outposts?
Haaretz
Link
link to haaretz.com
From the link TGIA provided, which mostly discusses IDF officers living in the settlements within the OT they are suppose to police:
“Dr. Ruth Amir, head of the interdisciplinary studies department at the college, asked the Teleseker company to examine the percentage of Israelis who would be prepared to leave the country and move to the United States to live if they were able to obtain a residence visa quickly and easily.
The finding revealed a considerable gap between the “yearning Jewish soul” in the (Israeli national) anthem and the desire for a green card. No less than 60 percent at all income levels responded in that they would take off if given the chance.
The title Amir chose for her study: “I love you, homeland, but I want to leave.”
PROMOTION: Mamilla Hotel
“officers who settled in an illegal outpost in the first place”
ROTFLMSJAO (“S” for Skinny)
There’s a version or a permutation of the old “food tastes like poison and the portions are so small” joke here, I’m pretty sure.
A long thread attacking an inbecile troll like 3e is part of the cure for PEP.
Many, many people have never seen a Zionist-supporter talked to like they were an ordinary person.
And that whole “atheist Jew” megillah might open a few eyes. Again, it’s only the fact that the kind of “nation” Israel claims to be, and the kind of actions Israel takes are so inconceivable to most Americans that the truth is not easy for them to grasp.
Mooser, you are certainly right that most Americans have not ever considered the fact that a self-proclaimed Jew could be simultaneously a self-proclaimed aetheist or (consistent) agnostic. Most Americans would pick up on that conflicting issue ASAP if it was a Christian saying they are both
Christian and atheist or (consistent) agnostic–or even, more likely an American saying they followed Christian ethics but did not necessarily believe Christ was/is the son of God.
Who is a Jew? Is eee one, or yonira, or Witty, or Mooser?
Where do we go from “being born of a Jewish mother?”
And what does that mean?
link to en.wikipedia.org
I guess the practical notion is that Mom has usually ruled the daily lives of her children, they being captive baby-child prisoners of who cares for their daily practical needs. That’s a lot of power. Ask nearly any divorced dad in the USA. It’s also likely why the Catholic Church wanted children of mixed marriages to be brought up by a Catholic mom. Otherwise, how can you distinguish between such rule, and Nazi Germany’s conception of earning the
Mutter’s cross, gold or silver? Is there a practical distinction then what Mommy teaches by her every daily action and remark raining down on her dependent kids?
Why is it that the father is usually the uber spirit in so many Western
families? Isn’t the jewish mother an exception to the traditonal power of the Western daddy in Western civilization? I’ve never actually seen this discrepancy addressed.
Of course these days, in the US nanny nation, the fathers no longer have
any traditional power. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just saying. What % of mothers in the USA are single moms? Isn’t Uncle Sam their substantial paycheck daddy?
i entered gaza w/bianca and said goodbye to her there as she decided to stay behind and join the ISM. she is from malta, a very beautiful compassionate brave young woman. she has been there since last may almost a year now. i have thought about her many times since we left her. i do not know what else to say..onward w/my prayers in solidarity. look at her face, she is the threat facing israel. the threat of young free people who come to stand witness and risk their lives as palestinians do every day.
Time to pass the hat around and get the Zyklon-B cannisters ordered. Lemmie see, 7m Israeli Jews x 4.3m cannisters and ‘Zowie’ we have a ‘Judenrein” Middle East that’s at peace with itself – well, until the Great Satan is ‘delt’ with anyway…. :)
TheAZCowBoy
Tombstone, AZ.