Darwin26

Seems that Arafat had little choice... yet all these journalists tell of him walking off ...perhaps a counter offer would have been best ...why didn't it transpire ... who dropped the ball ... but even so ... Would Arafat and the Palestinians be any better off today had they accepted this shell game offer?

Darwin26

Yes i completely forgot to bring up in this line of the thread
who is responcible for scapgoatting ... in the very early days of the xian bible writers (guild ha) they were very clear and determined to set the jews up as the ones who crucified their savior ! ... Matthew is the not the first book written by the guild (sic) but it was placed first as it made the clear distinctions of who killed gawd... i'll get crap an verse later...
Meanwhile ... had it been the jews who killed jesus... (a common name of the times) the charge by them was blasphemy and the penalty for blasphemy was to have a burning torch put down the throat of the silly perpetrator ... well that just didn't line up with the pundits, i mean the prophets ... so this neat crusifixshun was hyped up ...this blasphemer/gawd/savior son of a virgin had pressed his luck too far ...

Dr Rick

Big deal. I can top that: I've read that 9/11 was a big Zionist conspiracy; how else can you explain the established fact that 4000 Jews stayed home instead of going to the WTC that day as faithfully reported through-out the Arab media. And we know that Jews run America. I remember reading somewhere that Jews eat babies, too.

I guess the claim that you read it in a Jewish newspaper is supposed to allow us to suspend any skepticism about a story that you can't even reference and I never even heard of before, huh? That really creates a quandry, though; since "Jews...are becoming the Nazis," how can you trust a story that supposedly arose from their press?

Yeah, that's right; you don't hate Jews and you don't see any reason to feel guilty; it was your deep love of Jews that brought you to compare them to Nazis.

Like many anti-Semites, you don�t even bother with the protestations about how you only oppose Israel�s Palestinian policies and don�t "really hate" Jews per se. In your usage, Zionist, Israeli, and Jew are pretty much interchangeable terms.

Oh, right, it's those Jewish settlers that are at the root of the entire conflict; I guess that explains why we'll never read about a bus blowing up in Tel Aviv or a bombing at a Passover dinner in Netanya.

This person illustrates how difficult it will be for peace to ever come to the ME; the Isrealis, Palestinians, and Arabs don't just distrust eachother; significant portions of their respective populations and their supporters hate eachother, and not just for what they have done, but also for what they are.

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have been wronged and have done wrong; no one is wearing a white hat in the conflict. Suggesting that one or the other should "just leave" because someone else's ancestors was there first or because somebody killed more than someone else is unrealistic and pointless; no one's going anywhere. Until the rest of the world forces them into peace, they will continue to harm eachother and themselves.

Rick

Jeremy Pallant

You can't have it both ways, Loren. First you justify the driver's actions, stating that it was okay for him to run her over, then you claim he didn't know she was there. Seems a little inconsistent to me.

Darwin26

Perhaps we should just put our hands on our hips and take a Cowboy big man of the house GW Bush Posture ....and tell them Gangs in Los Angeles, and across America... terrorizing the city to Just STOP It

The info we are sharing ....about how the holocost and other events affected/effected different cultures ...how it developed from eons ago ...from written word ...was about info sharing...
i sense your post was borderline Flammmming

i have learned a great deal from my friends in far lands in this important thread.

karthik

To rephrase an op-ed from Onion: "Only if one side was more white than the other, it would be much easier to choose the good guys".

PalestineChic19

I am a girl, "Sami" is just short for "Samirah", everyone calls me Sami for short....for some reason.

-samirah

PalestineChic19

I am sorry aobut my terminology in the last post and I guess I should have made myself more clear. I NEVER said that I hated jews or anything of that nature, but I should have used better term for what I wrote about the Israelis. and I also Never suggested that the Jews leave Israel, because we all know that will never happen and Is unrealistic. I am hoping that the "Jewish conspiracy of 9/11" was a joke or sarcasm, because if not, it's bollocks. I acknowledge that it was a terrorist attack and it had nothing to do with the american Jews or Israelis. I'm still not going to feel guilty for the Jews of today though about the holocaust. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't your fault, so get over it already.

I didn't blame the Jewish settlers for the suicide bombings either, all I am saying is that it was their choice to move there and they know the risk they were taking doing so. once again, I've got to make clear that I do not support hamaas or any suicide attacks on Israel, I think they are just hurting the Palestinian cause. It's true that nobody is completely right in this situation and there is so much distrust between the Palestinians and the Israelis that will need to have be worked through before peace is possible.

-Samirah

Loren Pechtel

As I see it: The driver expected her to jump out of the way. Thus the maximum charge that could be brought is manslaughter. I think he believed she had jumped out of the way, thus reducing it to either involuntary manslaughter or no charge at all, I'm not sure what the law would call this.

In addition there is the issue that allowing her to succeed would be a major setback for Israeli attempts to act in the occupied territories. Thus stopping was not an option. I think he should have acted so as to minimize harm consistent with carrying out his mission. My impression is that if he had lowered his blade to just below ground level the result would have pushed her out of the way rather than crushing her. Since he made no such attempt I think he didn't know she was still there.

Dr Rick

No one that wasn't part of Western Europe's anti-semitism in the first half of the last century has any reason to feel "guilty" about the Holocaust, but it played a pivotal role in the simultaneous decline of anti-semitism in Christendom and Europe and its rise in the Arab world over the past 50 years, and still does.

Historically, Islam and Muslim culture was relatively tolerant towards Judiaism even as followers of both were persecuted by European Christianity. After Christians conquered Spain from the Muslims in the late 15th century, they forced both Jews and Muslims to convert, flee, or die. In contrast, Islamic governments usually did not persecute Jews as European Christians did. Unlike in Europe, Jews in Islamic lands in the last half of the second millenium were usually not expelled or forced to convert, and while there was some discrimination, it never reached the level it did in Christian-dominated countries of the time.

But in Europe, the forces of anti-semitism were rising through the centuries and began to reach a feverish pitch in the late 1800s. [In a bit of historical irony, the first modern popular European political movement based on anti-Semitism was founded by Wilhelm Marr in the 1870s, who used the label "Semite" for the "inferior" races such as Jews and Arabs. There is no historical or biological basis for such a distinction, and graducally the term "anti-semitism" has come to signify hatred against Jews, only. To be sure, there are people who hate Arabs only or both Arabs and Jews, but some Jew-haters use the origins of the term to claim that they can't be "anti-semetic" because they support Arabs.] European nationalist movements were fostering the idea that that every people deserved its own state free of the influence of "alien" influences, especially Jews. At that time, many Eastern European and Russian Jews were living in ghettos, and ancient rumors of their barbarism, such as their use of childrens' blood to make matzas, were brought back to life, and some Jews were actually put on trial with such accusations. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document outlining the Jews� conspiratorial plans for world domination was also published around that time; it was fabricated by the Russian secret police and fostered rumors of the "International Zionist Conspiracy" that persist to this day.

The growing nationalist movements of Europe weren't lost on the Jews, and with their increasing persecution turned to Zionism�their own form of nationalism. A small number of Jews had been living in the ancient kingdom of Judea (Palestine) for centuries, and Zionist immigration accelerated in the 1880s with the idea of establishing a Jewish Homeland. That idea didn't fit so well with the Arabs and Muslims of the region, however; tolerance was one thing, but a Jewish politcal movement was another. The first conflicts in that early time were centered on grazing and property rights, but soon nationalist and religious overtones began to dominate the disputes.

It was the Holocaust that transformed the conflict into it's current incarnation. At the time, Arab nationalism was rising against the colonialism of Britain and France, and even though the Nazis considered the Arabs inferior to the "Aryan race," Arab-Muslim religious leaders embraced their cause against the "Anglo-Saxon-Jewish" greed. It was the Holocaust that brought much of Europe to disavow anti-semitism as state policy and was the catalyst, but not the cause, for international recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 just as anti-Jewish Arab sentiment was building. The Arab nations promptly attacked Israel and advised the Palestinians to temporarily leave their homes to make way as they forced the "Zionists into the sea." It didn't quite work-out the way the Arabs armies had planned, however; the Zionists not only repulsed the Arab armies but took additional lands in that and 3 successive wars including Gaza and the West Bank, displacing even more Palestinians.

Israel initially refused to return the lands without a peace treaty (they returned the Sinai to Egypt once Sadat did make peace) and over the years has adopted an attitude that the land now belongs to the Jewish Homeland, a violation of international law which requires the return of conquered lands once hostilities have ceased. Of course, technically hostilites have not ceased, and until they do, Israel is not obligated to return the occupied territories, but the government has given ample reason to suspect that they won't even if a peace accord is reached with proclamations and references to a "Ersatz (greater) Israel." Adequate US pressure against Israel, which is dependent upon US aid, will likely be neccessary to alter that hard-line stance.

Anti-Semitism, in the meantime, has now become part of modern Arab culture and has found its way into modern Islam. Official Arab policy Muslim doctrine isn't just anti-Israeli any longer, it is becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. Copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been republished as factually correct in many Arab countries and widely distributed as "proof" of the "Jewish conspiracy" by state run media. A recent televison miniseries entitled Horseman Without a Horse, produced by Arab Radio and Television of Saudi Arabia portrays the "Protocols" as historical fact and a foundation of Israeli policy. State-run papers such as the Egyptian dailies, Al-Ahram and Al-Goumhuriyya, frequently publish anti-Semitic cartoons and opinion pieces. Other Arab media and leaders have begun to take-up "Holocaust denial" propaganda. Still others routinely draw analogies between "Jews and Nazis," and as some of the posters on this thread have shown us, this form of indoctrination is having its intended effect. Religious leaders have looked to the Koran of late for ways to demonize the "devilish Jews" when just 150 years agoe such re-interpretations would have been unthinkable. Muslim-Arab mullahs now routinely call for jihad not just against Israel but against Jews everywhere.

While all this has happened, Israel has continued to foster a hardline attitude towards it's neighbors and the Palestianians, a people that now live in the most wretched of conditons. Israel's oppression and degradation plays well into the hands of those that call for the murders of the Zionists and their lackeys, the Americans, which helps to explain why the Arab nations have done so very little to help their plight. Using the Palestinian plight as propaganda has served the dictators and theocrats of Syria, Jordan, Iran, and until recently, Iraq well in giving their respective populations a target for hatred, even as some of those countries (Jordan and Syria) have oppressed and murdered those same Palestinians. In reality, it's doubtful that Jordan and Syria would welcome a Palestinian state anymore than Israel; they worry such an entity might incite their own Palestinian populations, and they may be right.

It will take more than a a Palestinian homeland to bring peace to the ME, though one is deserved and a necessary part of any plan for peace. The Arabs and the Israelis will both have to come to grips with the reality that they are both there and will both be there for some time to come. The governments and leaders that have used the Palestinians as pawns to foster their own selfish agendas will have to be persuaded that it is not in their best interests to do so, and that in the long run, continued anti-Arabism and anti-semitism will only bring more death and suffering, not peace and prosperity.

Rick