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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
What about Saudi Arabia?
Brother West is a true follower of Jesus Christ, therefore, all men are his brothers and all women are his sisters. Even the ones he disagrees with.
What a hypocrite! Isn't this the same country which recently kept Julian Assange in solitary confinement for a week? Oh, I remember now. It was because it was because he had a leaky condom, it had nothing to do with Wikileaks.
What a beautiful man!
Phil your headline should have been, "Jewish passengers to Gaza said to be detained in Ashdod, shaken but not stirred."
Everytime you bring up Lincoln and compare the situation of the 1850's and 60's to now it scares me. Remember that a political solution was not found for the problem of slavery and that a civil war with a death toll of 600,000 was the end result. I hope you are wrong about the analogy or that history does not repeat itself.
This old fart had never heard of them before but I liked it when the protagonist in the video stopped running, stopped acting like the victim and looked at the people who were chasing him in the eye, showing his resolve. He was then able to chase the cowardly mob away. Good metaphor for the BDS movement.
"I don't understand why empires insist on making the same mistakes as their predecessors."
Empires don't make decisions; politicians do. Politicians make decisions based on their own short-term self interest.
Didn't Lincoln favor shipping ex-slaves back to Africa? It wouldn't surprise me if he was in favor of a similar project for Jews. This would hardly qualify as support for the current state of affairs.
Great! So now Turks are not supposed to be in international waters? I have to assume that's because God first gave you the land, and then He gave you the sea? And no Israelis were killed during the attack on the flotilla. Are you genuinely confused or did you just feel like making that up?
Moshe Dayan might be Israel's most celebrated general but he was a lousy observer of how society deals with "mad dogs" and other animal pests. In my experience, people don't let dangerous animals roam around their neighborhoods, they call Animal Services to come and collect these creatures and take them somewhere to be destroyed. Behaving like a mad dog is not a good survival strategy for a country and I sincerely hope the Israelis are not using Moshe Dayan's poor advice to guide their policy. It should be obvious to anyone that pissing off the rest of mankind is not going to lead to long-term security, especially when you make up less than 0.1% of the world's population. I don't get it; so many Nobel prizes, so many IQ points and yet so many stupid decisions....why?
So now funding comes with strings attached? Weren't you the one who said a couple of days ago that Americans should just keep their mouths shut and keep forking over the $3 billion in aid to Israel, that just because we're funding the occupation and settlements we shouldn't expect to have a say in what happens? Maybe it wasn't you, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But it would be easier to follow zionist arguments if they had any sort of moral consistency.
If you are impressed by Maimonides, you might want to follow his advice: "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes."
"It is a result of Israeli excess, disunity....(etc.)"
I don't think you can blame it on disunity. If I remember right, 80% of the Israeli population was polled as being united behind the Gaza offensive while it was taking place. If you consider the fact that Palestinians make up 20% of the population of Israel, you can only conclude that close to 100% of Israeli Jews were united behind the IDF's assault on Gaza. Is it anti-semitic of me to point this out?
Or maybe it's pure anti-stigmatism. I can just picture all those poor Jews from Russian, poring over the scriptures after getting new glasses and they still can't see well enough to make out what the scribes wrote!
"Hydrocarbon fires are quite hot enough to destroy the temper of steel."
I don't think so, Syvanen. The melting point of steel is 2750 degrees F and hydrocarbon fires don't burn above 1500 degrees F. I looked into this in 2005 when there was a skyscraper in Madrid that was 55 stories high and burned for 18 hours straight until nothing was left but the steel frame. I kept wondering why it hadn't come down like the World Trade Center Towers. And then I found out that the WTC events were the exception, not the rule. There are many inconsitencies with the original story such as: the fact that a third building also fell, one which was not even hit by a plane and had only a small fire in it, the fact that the buildings fell at free-fall speed, that they fell onto their own footprint, and that all their contents were pulverized into fine dust. Whatever brought the buildings down, my eyes and my brain tell me that the government's explanation is pure B.S.
I heard Norman Finkelstein speak at this same auditoreum at UCI a few years ago. There were 3-4 hardcore zionists in the back of the room who continuously heckled him throughout the whole presentation. They must have interrupted him more than a hundred times and although campus police was present, they made no effort to remove them or to stop the disruptions. I remember he was a class act; he asked us to concentrate on his words and filter out the hate coming from the back of the room. That professor who gave the UCI students a tongue-lashing for embarassing him in front of a speaker is a hypocrite; Finkelstein was treated much worse by outsiders (the lead heckler was a 50'ish woman) and no official from UCI was present to defend him. Clearly, a double standard here.
Israel is the strongest military power in the region of the Persian Gulf because of the extensive influence of the domestic Israel lobby (both Jewish and non-Jewish) on the government of the USA. Proximity to oil fields does not bring power but political influence over a super-power does. The Israel Lobby is to Israel as Samson's hair was to his strength.
"First I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed by the white moderate."
.......just as we have been gravely disappointed by the "liberal Zionist."
There is a lot more violence in Israel-Palestine today than there is in South Africa , don't you think? Things are probably going to get worse when the "demographic time bomb" goes off. So why would Jewish Israelis want to pass this violent legacy on to their children? I hope you're not saying that they love the land more than they love their own children.
"The complaint was drafted by the prime minister's political advisor, Ron Dermer, who complained of three specific incidents which he described as severe defiance of Israel."
Sounds like those IMPUDENT Palestinians are at it again!
Yes! He's definitely a hottie!
If you look to Jesus Christ for guidance in how to partition the land, you might as well give it all to the Palestinians right now since Jesus declared in the sermon on the Mount that "Blessed be the meek, for they will inherit the land." And it is quite a stretch for you to claim that "Christ teaches broad respect towards rulers, kings, and governments." A cursory reading of the New Testament reveals that Christ was not impressed by an individual's social standing or earthly powers, but only by whether or not that individual was following God's will. Christ taught that no man can serve two masters, he will either serve one and betray the other or vice-versa. (No dual loyalty to God and government.) Yes, Ceasar can have his coins; after all, he had his face imprinted on them, but that's about all he can have.
Richard,
Any short-term gain for myself or my tribe, if it is immorally gotten, will in the long-term be harmful to our interests in ways that I might not be able to foresee at this time.
"EVERY question has at least five criteria that a moralist must way.
1. Is it good for me?
2. Is it good for my family?
3. Is it good for my community?
4. Is it good for the world at large?
5. Is it good for the US?
To make any single loyalty a fetish is to be less than humane."
This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the way in which a moralist makes judgements. Moral principles are based on whether or not a particular action is morally just, regardless of how that judgement affects the individual or tribal interests. A true moralist decides on a general principle, such as "it's morally wrong to kill people and take their resources, therefore, even if my retirement plan suffers, I will not invest in companies that manufacture weapons." Decision-making that is subjected to the prism of "is it good for me/my tribe" will lead to decisions that will be advantageous to that individual/tribe at the expense of morality. Loyalty has nothing to do with moral decision-making since a true moralist understands that selective morality is the height of immorality.
Yonira, Torah Law and Sharia Law are basically the same thing: they are both equally backward and have no place in a modern nation-state. Do you really want to see Jews stoned by other Jews for having sex out of wed-lock?
"There are many that are motivated to criticize Israel by a sense of personal integrity, that a society that they are actively directly associated, are acting in ways that conflict with their personal integrity."
Of all the choices you gave us, I think this one can describe 100% of American taxpayers, since the government uses its power to separate us from our money and sends it to Israel to finance immoral actions, thereby making us all accomplices. No need for us to waste time THOROUGHLY examining our motivations to the point of paralysis!
By the way, why is it OK for anti-abortion activists to hold up health care reform over the financing of abortion but noone says a peep about the financing of the military, and how people who object to the killing of post-natal human beings might be offended by having their taxes going to finance this atrocity? Why is it OK to kill children but not fetuses?
Don't discount what a Jewish Israeli mother of a child who was violently killed has to say just because of her ethnicity, google her and listen to what she actually has to say. She is an outspoken critic of the war for land taking place in Israel/Palestine, she is very critical of the leaders of Israel, and she considers herself a sister to those who are losing children on both sides. She lived through the worse thing that could happen to a mother and did not have an ethnic reaction to it as most people would. Give her the respect that is due her; she is fighting for the universal principle of justice, as I hope we all are.
That's right, they do, and that's why it's so galling to hear about "the only democracy in the Middle East," with their "purity of arms" and "the most moral army in the world" engaging in "self-defense." It's the hypocrisy, stupid! (not to you Mooser, just in general.) That's why I find Lieberman and the settlers much easier to stomach. At least they're being honest in what they're doing: ethnically cleansing the land of non-Jews, by any means necessary, because they believe that they're God's chosen people and the rest of us can eat shit and die.
Billy Joel was right. Only the good die young.
The awarding of the peace prize this early in the game is based on hope: hope that he won't escalate the war in Afghanistan, hope that he'll persevere in his attempts to bring peace to Israel-Palestine. They know the warmongerers have his ear and are twisting his arm in the direction of perpetual war; they are appealing to his idealism by demonstrating that the people of the world are expecting great things from him. It's an attempt to influence his decision-making in the right direction.
"Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you." Matthew, Ch. 5
V, when you say that "there has to be some basic distinctin between all of a people and those in power," you seem to be implying that a situation exists where the Jewish state or Jewish organizations are pushing one action but the majority of individual Jews are in favor of an opposite action. But in my experience, this is not true; usually individual Jews, at least those who make their opinions known, are pushing in sync with their government and/or organizations. For example: the Israeli government is in favor of military action against Iran and recent polls show 66% of Israeli Jews agree while 56% of Americans agree. During the war on Gaza I saw it reported that 97% of Israeli Jews agreed with their government's actions against the people of Gaza. I didn't hear about a poll on American Jews' opinions but I did see numerous press reports of Jewish organizations rallying to support the state of Israel with a few individual Jews protesting against the assault. Obviously, noone can claim that every single Jew is in support of this militaristic approach but from my observations, it sure looks like the great majority of Jews, both inside and outside of Israel, are in favor of these wars.
"Most Jews look to their personal behavior and relationships much moreso than their political solidarity."
How convenient that we live in an age when major crimes such as murder, looting and rape have been outsourced to political institutions! We can then claim complete innocense when the state tortures people in our name or when our country's soldiers fly off to kill others on our behalf. "My personal behavior is impeccable; all my personal relationships are based on mutual respect." Any thinking moral person can see that this position is not only absurd, but cowardly as well. As long as there are organizations deriving their power from our consent, their funding from our taxes or donations, and are committing atrocities on our behalf without our earnest opposition, we are responsible for their actions. This is what is meant by "silence is complicity," and it applies to everyone, including Jews.
She's right, of course. Is there really that much difference between living on land that was stolen in 1948 vs. in 2009? I find these settler-types refreshingly honest.
Catholics don't sing any national anthems or have any flags in church, including those used to drape coffins. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" is supposed to mean that you check your nationalism at the doo to the church. And the pope is the head of the universal (Catholic) church, not just a head of state.
"The pioneers of a war-less world are the youth that refuse military service."
Tammy Wynette's "Stand by your Man" does a pretty good job of describing America's infatuation with it's BFF Israel:
"Sometimes it's hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times
Doing things you don't understand.
But if you love him you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh be proud of him
'Cause after all he's just a man."
What's it going to take for the battered wife to grow a pair?
Rehmat, just as Jack Ross might need a lesson in Islam, I think you need a lesson in Christianity.
Christianity is not a tribal religion, unless you consider it the religion of the tribe known as "the whole human race." Christianity teaches that we are all siblings, children of God. True Christians are to believe that "There is neither Gentile nor Jew, freeman or slave, male or female for you all are brothers in Christ." The whole of Jesus' religion can be boiled down to the first 2 words of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father" for if I truly believe that we share a father, than that makes you my brother, and obviously I am supposed to treat you with love and respect and not steal your land or wage war against you. The 10 Commandments are obsolete. Now obviously, many Christians do not act in this way but this goes against the teachings of the founder of the religion and they are not acting as true Christians (Bush comes to mind.) Jesus said it best when he said "You cannot put new wine into old wine skins." In other words, a new religion was being born, not an offshoot of Judaism which teaches that Jews are the favorite people of God and that for a Jew his "neighbor" is another Jew. This was a radical new concept 2,000 years ago and still is today; a declaration of the universal brotherhood of man many years before DNA analysis would show how we are all related!
Excellent post! It's the "isms" that are literally killing us: nationalism, tribalism, zionism, nazism, racism. Let's not replace one with another, let's work toward justice instead.
I agree with you that the challenge to Jews is to break free of ethnocentrism. To be an integral part of the human family rather than an outsider in the schtetl, now that would bring a real sense of security, not the false security of walls and bombs. And freedom from ethnocentrism is freedom to live your life as a human being without the constraints of having to seek approval from your tribe. But at a time when being a Jew is defined more by who your mother was (DNA) than whether you believe in a particular God, many Jews see freedom from ethnocentrism as an existential threat. Ethnocentrism is what defines them and that's why they celebrate their exceptionalism. Kind of reminds me of that comment that Obama made during the campaign about small town folks clinging to their guns and Bibles...I can see those small-minded settlers clinging to their machine guns and Talmuds, and they seem to have more political clout than less ethnocentric Jews. And it's not a good survival technique in the long run regardless of what Alana Newhouse says; yes the religion survived but many individual Jews did not.
Because the ruling family doesn't care about the Palestinians, or even their own people, for that matter. They only care about staying in power.
What a jerk! Naming other (Jewish) Rachels that have lost their lives but didn't mention a single Palestinian, as if they still didn't exist. Had a good laugh at the end though, the audience was great. I hope they bring this movie and speaker to a theater near me.