Who is in favor of Israel's actions?

[Valigator]

I dont think anyone is advocating cutting and running, and your right on many levels......I think we all know what role the United States and their allies are going to have to engage in, it doesn't make it any more palatable.

[BILLY D.]

Originally posted by Valigator
I dont think anyone is advocating cutting and running, and your right on many levels......I think we all know what role the United States and their allies are going to have to engage in, it doesn't make it any more palatable.

val

war is never palatable. i spent 27 years of my life practicing every day so we wouldn't have to fight in another one. it's called deterence. being strong so no one would ever attack us.

thanks to a generation of fondas, asners and cindy shi%cans, karters and klintons the forces that be saw their opening and explored it to the max on 9/11. actually they tried in '93 also but didn't have their ducks in a row.

for the most part the world hates our guts. and as martha says "thats a good thing", they are jealous of our success in finance and government and the freedom of our people. they can not deal with a free society, they have no idea how it's done. why they are led by one man dictatorships and receive their law by some holy? guy that is in charge of propaganda. oh yes, they hate our guts but they envy us, saying why can't our country be like that?

they also hate the ties that made their governments rich. do you think it was a camel jockey who designed the first bit and drilled for oil there? you can bet your sweet backside it wasn't.

fabs you asked about the russian jews. well most of their decendants are the ones who screwed up vals neighborhood. i arrive at that conclusion by deciphering one word she used. chabad. that is an eastern european hebrew word for a church/synagoge, comunity center. those were the jews forced out of greece many years ago. they were forced into the ukraine. remember when i asked you if your father had ever spoken of the ukrainian university in rome? i would suspect that if val done some searching she would find many russian names amongst the folks in that neighborhood and the church conclave.

one thing that jews produce in prolific amounts is lawyers. it's like diarrhea, it runs in their jeans. one thing that lawyers learn is how to utilize past successes, in law speak it is called precedence. now remember to keep that word in your memory bank. we will use it again later. thank you kiddies. we all watch the lawyer shows on tv and should remember many quotes by lawyers where they say "in the case of shlabotnik vs o'reily blah, blah, blah.

well val my lady, that is exactly how they were able to build and have that chabad in that neighborhood. they learned very well the successes used by the minorities to nuzzle their way in to places they were formerly not allowed to go. hundreds of jews in the aclu din't hurt matters any either. ACLU= All Commies Love Us.

back to the question of israel. the us and england when ceding the land taht was taken from the arabs thought that the land was originally, forget the word JEWISH for a moment, israelite, should be given to the jews for a homeland. because it was their land before they were run out of it. they were there first, PRECEDENCE. yes they also shared that land with non jews.

fabs determination about the jewish leaning towards democrats is absolutely correct. the jews as a hole are socialistic and tend to team and form together. by socialistic i do not mean communistic, which the democratic party has become in my lifetime. the last democratic president i voted for was JFK. does that tell you anything? lbj was a dictator with an alligator mouth and a humming bird a$$, nixon wasn't much better, and karter was a total piece of toilet paper and i could do a 20 page disertation on klinton. when klinton turned the other cheek, and i don't mean monica's, in '93, that was an open invitation to the muslims to do what ever they want to whoever they want. what a pa he was. no we didn't have any wars while he was potus but look at the trail of destruction he left behind.

to me the democratic party has no morals, no heart, no soul and no conscience. now thats the party, i'm not talking individuals here.

back to the good stuff. the twins win. beat the sox.

[fabsroman]

Billy,

Damn good post. Thanks for all the info with the exception of precedence. I already knew about precedence.

[Valigator]

Now that was funny Billy, dont care who you are...


Tell us some more

[BILLY D.]

Originally posted by fabsroman
Billy,

Damn good post. Thanks for all the info with the exception of precedence. I already knew about precedence.

fabs

i knew that you were cognizant of that fact but other folks don't know. thats why i included it.

by the views of this topic i can tell more people are reading it than val, you and me.

also thank you for the compliment. like i've told val, i didn't spend three years in the seventh grade for nothing.

[BILLY D.]

Originally posted by Valigator
Now that was funny Billy, dont care who you are...


Tell us some more

pretty lady

now i could read into that and and say, " you say you don't care who i are or could you mean what i are".

i can tell you what i are in a hurry. i'm a straight, roman catholic, conservative gun owner. need more?

i'm a father of 5, with 6 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.

i can write on any topic, some may be personal experience while some may be from research work. my only default in this area is i don't tend to differentiate strongly enough between the two.

by the way, journalism was one of my favorite subjects in high school. i can always give you the who, what, when, wheres, and whys.

and after a house full of youngin's ya get to be a pretty good story teller also.

[Cal Sibley]

It is said that time heals all wounds, but it's doubtful that applies in Mideast politics. When I first started to work in Saudi Arabia it didn't take long for me to be branded a "Crusader." It matters not that they've been over for almost a thousand years, or that we didn't even exist as a people then. The only things here were small bands of Indians and Mexicans, both primitive societies, but nontheless I was still a crusader. I guess to their minds that's as valid today as then. My first trip to a Riyadh bookstore to buy an atlas produced books where every map of Israel had been blackened out (by hand). I sort of understood why all the pictures of scanty clad women waving from the decks of boats had been blackened out by the same method. You're not to make an opinion of what is good or bad. Some local Imam will make it for you. Our problems with the Islamic world today extend far beyong Israel. For most of the 2,000 years since Christ
died, the Islamics have been calling the shots on the world scene. Our western type societies are johnny come latelys. The
Muslims in the middle east are again flexing their muscles, and I frankly don't believe it matters who the scapegoat is. The US will do as nicely as Israel. The "evil satan" will raise hackles just as much as the "zionists" today. I see no way of living with these people short of an all out war. It's said the two major problems we face are religion and politics. Here we have, not one, but both. Well, that's my take on it for better or worse. Best wishes.

Cal - Montreal

[skeet]

As I have stated a couple of times in the past...the Arabs as a group of people, who are lead by a Theocracy and tribalism also do not want anyone in the world who is not born muslim to convert...They want the rest of the peoples in the world dead and the world to be run as it was a thousand years ago. Those people were smart and if not for the fact there was so much tribalistic hatred and distrust would still be running the world as it was before the Crusades. They knew the world was round and had libraries of up to a million books at a time when a large library in Europe would include as many as a dozen or so books no one could read. Also remember that the Jews are, like the Arabs, a society you are born into. You can practice the Jewish religion but you really aren't a jew unless born one. This being said I feel that backing the Jewish state in the middle east has cost us much monetarily as well as the hatred and distrust of over a billion arabs. I personally feel that if the arabs ever decide to put their differences aside and fight together, that the jews will start a nuclear war that will envelope the entire world. That would be their last defense. There is, in effect no discernable difference between the jews and the arabs(both semetic people) other than the fact of religion. And a lot of the reason for the strife going on now is to take the heat off the Iranians for a while as they continue to develop their atomic arsenal

[Valigator]

Thank you for your input, man that means the world to me...I gotta tell ya I am grappling every day with the religion aspect of this war...all I am getting is that it was prophesied, and this is what is was suppose to be, now as a Christian I was taught that man was given "choice" only man could determine what and how he was suppose to enter into heaven...I wasnt taught that the Jews were suppose to bring us into the Apocalypse wasnt taught that the religion of Jews and Muslims were to bring us to our downful. I was taught that we had ten commandments...we were suppose to abide by those ten commandments and we were pretty much suppose to be alright. I wasn't taught that the Jews were going to rain down hell on earth because of 2 soldiers at a checkpoint. What does that mean to all the other soldiers that have died ? Something isnt right here...something doesnt feel good, and if you wanna know the truth..I dont totally trust the Israel's and why they have done what they have done...something just doesnt feel right here...

[Valigator]

and while I am at it, I have worked my entire life to raise my grandchildren, which are not here yet, play with my bird-dogs, and even breed a few, paid my taxes, stood up for the underdog, and in the prime of life going after the bad guys to children...hid my money, paid my taxes, worked my butt off, literally planned my entire future, and your telling me its, God's will? Well I got news for you? God told me to be a good person and help my fellow man every step of my life, but some of you are telling me...oh no...this was propesised and your %hit out of luck...I dont think so...I am sick and tired of doing the right thing...and all of a sudden, my world comes to an end because someone wrote it hundreds of years ago....well if you wanna believe in that GOD go for it, I am not ready to accept it.....and between you and me, God has greater things in store for me than this...

[Valigator]

In summary, our Nephite apocalypse does not teach us to calculate the day and hour of the end and await its coming on hilltops. It does not require us to fatalistically ignore duty or science. Rather, it restores high moral vision when meaning loses its sight. And its enduring element is to pour hope and courage into the midst of despair.

[Slim-Zippy]

The dictators and Imams have used Isreal and the "West" as an excuse for all there problems as a way to keep control of the population and keep their power and position. It is always easier to teach hate than reason, because hate is only about emotion and not thought. If you control the media and it is propagandizing hate of the "West" constantly then hate is what a population will believe and act on. If you add the twist of religous leaders teaching hate to it then it really becomes
complicated to find a non-violent solution to the problem.

You cannot appease ingrained blind hatred of the Jewish people or the West. When Bush set out to democratize Iraq and Afghanistan he threatened the power and control of every dictator and religous leader in the middle east. They then declared Holy War on us as whole not just Isreal. If we stand around with our political parties fighting each other over power and not committed to solidarity, then we will have more acts of terrorism in our country.

[8X56MS]

From the git go, I supported Israel's right to strike back. Now I am even more firmly of the opinion that they need to really take names, and kick butt. Iran should get a bit of it too now.

[Valigator]

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus (8-8-06)

[Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.]

History is the story we tell ourselves in the present about the past. But how we punctuate the story—where we put the periods, the commas, and the ellipses—depends not on everything that happened, but on who is telling the story, where we stand in the narrative, and what outcome we want.

As Rebecca Goldstein notes in her study of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, there are “powerful tendencies in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happen to have been born.”

Israel and Hezbollah both have stories to tell based on their particular circumstances....

There is at least one historical example that suggests a way to short circuit the narrative loop.

The Lore of the Irish

For just under 837 years, the English and the Irish have warred against one another. Terrible things have been done in those long centuries, and the Irish tell endless stories about them. They know when it began: On Aug. 23, 1170, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke—“Strongbow” to the Irish—waded ashore with 200 Norman knights and 1,000 men-at-arms near Waterford on Ireland's southeast coast. He took the town in five days, then marched north and smashed an Irish army near Dublin.

Thus began the longest war in European history. For more than 40 generations the Irish seethed at the occupation, rising up time and again to fling themselves in bloody rage at armies they could not hope to defeat.

The Irish call it “the long sorrow,” and they can recite it with the precision of a rosary: “Red” Hugh O'Neill's war against Elizabeth I; The First Land War; the Great Rising of ‘98; the Tithe War; Catholic Emancipation; the Fenian revolt; the Second Land War; the Easter Rebellion.

The stories, poems, and songs that the Irish wrote about these events taught each generation about courage and resistance, but also about hatred, tribalism, and a certain kind of suicidal madness the poet William Butler Yeats called “an excess of love.”....

What are the stories Hezbollah will tell about Bint Jbail, which the most powerful army in the Middle East was unable to secure after almost a week of savage fighting? As the English did to Dublin in 1916, the Israelis flattened the place with artillery and bombs, but that will not extinguish the narrative that Hezbollah held out against the mighty Golani Brigade.

What are the stories the Israelis will tell about life in the shelters? Will they conjure up the spirit of Masada, the Jewish people's equivalent of the Easter Rebellion, albeit one that ended a good deal more tragically? Will they tell themselves that once again tiny Israel is beset by enemies on all sides?

Both of these narratives will end up with a lot of people dead and homeless, economies derailed, and infrastructures shattered. They may even lead to the unthinkable: a regional war. They will pump up a tribalism that says, “We are special, we are better, we are owed this, and the wrongs we do to others are canceled out by the wrongs others have done to us.”

The Good Friday Agreement

History does not mark all roads, and all analogies are fraught with danger. Like the Oracle of Delphi, Clio the muse of history predicts what we want her to predict. But the recent history of Ireland is worth some study.

Starting in 1992, the principal antagonists in Northern Ireland began to talk with one another, in large part because majorities in both communities were fed up with the sectarian violence. It was not easy, but the talks led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which has kept the peace for the most part between warring Catholics and Protestants. It was a process the United States helped along, unlike the role the United States is playing in the current Middle East crisis.

To reach an agreement, the parties had to get past a series of myths.

The first myth is that force will get people to do what you want them to do. It never did, it never will. If Qassams and Katyushas have not caused the Israelis to throw in the towel, why would Israel think that bombs and artillery would force Hezbollah or Hamas to give up? To suggest that Arabs will react any differently to violence than the Jews or the Irish is simply racist.

Rather than terrorizing the Lebanese and the Palestinians, the current war has united both communities. The collective punishment that Israel is inflicting on Gaza and Lebanon simply produces collective rage at both Israel and the United States. A poll by the Beirut Center for Research found that 89% of Lebanese do not consider the United States an “honest broker,” and 87% support Hezbollah's “retaliatory rocket attacks.”

Even al-Qaida, which normally refers to Shiites as “dogs” and “a thorn in the throat of Islam,” has called for aiding the resistance in Lebanon. Indeed, Israel has managed to drive Shiite Hezbollah into an alliance with Sunni Hamas.

The second myth is that you can design someone else's country. You cannot tell the Lebanese what their internal politics should be, nor can you tell the Palestinians that they can have a nation but only if it is riddled with Jewish settlements and surrounded by a wall. Such a Palestinian state is not a country but an open-air prison, much like Gaza is today.

All the settlements will have to go, the borders returned to the 1967 Green Line, and Jerusalem will have to be shared. The occupation is illegal, immoral, and clearly not in Israel's interest, despite being of its making. Instead of listening to David Ben-Gurion, who urged Israel to withdraw from the lands conquered in 1967, Tel Aviv established the settlements and kept East Jerusalem.

In return, the Palestinians will have to abandon the right of return and accept a deal that compensates them for the lands they lost in 1948. Regardless of the injustice behind the original expulsions, asking Israel to dismantle itself unilaterally is a non-starter. Israel is a country, if for no other reason than the Holocaust made it so.

But Israel cannot continue to hide behind the argument that it won't negotiate with “terrorists.” If England could talk to Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army, Israel can to talk to Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel recently held a two-day seminar on the 60 th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Jewish resistance. The blast killed 92 people. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

Some in the Middle East will resist such a settlement, just as some hardliners in the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland reject the Good Friday Agreement. But in Northern Ireland those forces have been increasingly marginalized. For all its fragility, the pact is generally holding.

Despite eight centuries of occupation, and 24 years of civil war, Irish on both sides are downplaying their respective nationalist narratives and finding common ground.

The world does not need more tribal allegiances and stories that tell us it is all right to blow up pizza parlors or flatten towns in Southern Lebanon. It needs solutions anchored in the real world and a moral order that sees no difference between a dead Jewish child and a dead Arab child. The living weep for them equally, and no pain is greater or less because of the weight of history.

[BILLY D.]

val

this is from a few years ago. i thought it applicable.

"we, the jews, do not rejoice in victories. we rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown or strawberries bloom in israel."

another one?

"we have always said, that in our war with the arabs, we have a secret weapon. we have no where else to go and we have no alternative."

these words were spoken by golda meir. if you don't know about golda, she was born in kiev russia and emigrated to the u.s. with her parents and was raised in milwaukee wisconsin. she was a school teacher here in the states and moved to israel in her late years.

not a pretty lady, her beauty was in her heart and her mind.