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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 15, 2010 - 11:05am PT
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Care to try to prove that ridiculous ass-ertion Lil Skipper?
Maybe, Skippy, you should educate yourself before you barf your uninformed spew all over the forum.
Are you even aware that the Palestinians ARE Semites?
Which by any realistic definition makes Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Ariel Sharon and NuttyYahoo all Anti-Semites.
And there is loads of proof of their racist intents regarding the Palestinians.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 15, 2010 - 11:18am PT
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So, exactly how is supporting the human rights of the Semitic Palestinians anti-Semitic?
Care to join me on my campaign to send the Palestinians back to where they came from?
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 15, 2010 - 01:21pm PT
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Folks like Skipt jump all over me for being racist or anti-Semitic because of the words that I post.
What's humorous about that is that the bulk of those post are links to Haaretz or other Israeli sources. The words that get me so negatively labeled are the writings of Israeli Peace Activists and Israeli academicians. One of the linked stories that had the mouth breathers frothing for my "tar and feathering" was an impassioned plea for justice in Palestine written by an Israeli octogenarian and survivor of the death camps. She is the one who likened current Jewish tactics and propaganda against the Palestinians to the Nazi methodology of 1939. Her words not mine. Still, the semi-literate wanted my head on a pike for daring to post such hard to face material.
Fats, Skipt knows what the Pope is thinking. Bwahahahahahaha!
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Jun 15, 2010 - 03:38pm PT
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Time to start a new thread Jeff, this one is taking forever to load, and I noticed that I can often get the days middle east updates here faster than on the new sites cause you folks are digging hard to make your points.
Thank you all for sharing the passion
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 17, 2010 - 04:35pm PT
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Here is what German Jews think.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/organizer-of-german-jewish-flotilla-we-aren-t-betraying-israel-1.296724
9:10 17.06.10
Organizer of German Jewish flotilla: We aren't betraying Israel
German Jewish Voice organization plans to send an aid ship to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in July.
By DPA
Tags: Israel news Jewish world Gaza flotilla
An organization of German Jews that wants to send an aid ship to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza says that its intentions are no betrayal of the Jewish people.
In an interview with the German Press Agency dpa in Berlin, Kate Katzenstein-Leiterer, a leader of the German Jewish Voice organization said instead that they wanted to help preserve the state of Israel by showing that its current policies were wrong.
Israel Navy forces approach one of six ships of an aid flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31, 2010.
Photo by: Reuters
"We want Israel to behave in a way that it can be recognized as a democratic state. Now it is recognized as a criminal state. That is not what we want," she said.
On May 31 nine people were killed when Israeli naval forces boarded ships in a flotilla carrying aid and activists - some of whom Israel says were armed - bound for the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
The event caused international outrage, and has prompted Iran to say it will send its own fleet, threatening more confrontation in the Mediterranean.
"Some see what we are doing as a betrayal. But the question is, what do they really know about the whole thing. Some people don't want to be educated," Katzenstein-Leiterer said.
Jewish Voice plans to fill at least one vessel with educational materials donated by German schoolchildren for Gazan kids, and sail it from a Mediterranean port in mid-July.
"We don't want any confrontation with the Israeli navy. We have informed the (Israeli) ambassador in Berlin, and if they find it necessary to stop and check us, we will let them do that."
"And when they don't find any material that could be a security risk, we want them to let us go into Gaza. We won't unload our cargo in any Israeli or Egyptian port," she says.
Katzenstein-Leiterer grew up in the former East Germany, to where her committed Communist parents returned after fleeing Hitler's regime in World War II.
Her organization is part of the European Jews for a Just Peace movement, a ten-country peace-activist network.
Jewish Voice in Germany says that it has gathered the funds for its aid ship project from personal donations, loans, and a donation from the Left Party, a small political grouping with strong support in the former East.
"Normal people here don't understand very much what is going on in Israel and Palestine," Katzenstein-Leiterer says.
"The German press doesn't show what is going on. People think all Gazans are terrorists, like West Germans used to think that all East Germans were informers for the Stasi (secret police).
Katzenstein-Leiterer says that her group's stance has caused them to be ostracized by the mainstream German-Jewish community, which numbers a little over 100,000.
"Most of the Jews in Germany are immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and they are not on our side. The other members of the community are not on our side either. They say that everything that Israel does is OK, and they close their eyes to what is going on."
A senior activist in the Jewish Voice movement, Rolf Verleger, was reportedly expelled from his position in the Central Council of Jews in Germany because he initiated a petition saying the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was "not in our name."
However, Katzenstein-Leiterer says that there are now a small group of German Jews who, despite the weight that Germany's history places on the Jewish community, want to speak out against a Israeli blockade policy - brought in after Hamas took control of the sliver of territory in 2007 - that they see as wrong.
"The whole blockade, the whole siege of Gaza is illegal. It is against international law and human rights," she says.
"We want to deliver musical instruments and school material. The children and deprived of every kind of school material; clothes, shoes, candies. We don't see that that is any kind of safety risk."
On Thursday the Israeli cabinet was expected to make a decision on scrapping the so-called "positive" list of items that they allow into Gaza in favor of a more relaxed "negative" list of prohibited items that could be of use to militants.
"We just see that a Jewish state is occupying Palestine, laying a siege, and depriving children of the things that they need. We as Jews are saying, 'not in our name.' We want to show that there are Jews in the world that are on the side of these deprived people," she says.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 17, 2010 - 04:55pm PT
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Why are they misguided? You mean like the westerners who eventually wised up and boycotted and divested from Apartheid South Africa were misguided?
Does that mean NuttyYahoo is following an infallible moral compass?
Will history see NuttyYahoo as the PT Botha of Palestine?
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 17, 2010 - 04:57pm PT
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There is no such thing as a clash of civilizations.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jun 17, 2010 - 07:21pm PT
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Sorry, it's pretty clear that radicals, e.g. orthodox Jews, have disproportionate influence over the government of Israel. The settlements policy being a good example.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 19, 2010 - 08:03pm PT
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Why US troops Fats? Why not send the IDF in?
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jun 20, 2010 - 12:11am PT
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The conflict with Israel merely serves as an effective cover for the region's collective failure to build stable, just and prosperous societies. Indirectly, there's some truth to that. Israel, and what to do about it, probably wouldn't even make the top ten list of issues for most middle eastern, Arab, and Muslim countries. Their governments know perfectly well there's damn all they can do about Israel but complain, and use it as a vent for public frustrations. (Might as well complain about the weather.) Their real problems are economic, population, water, resources, growth, over-dependence on oil, and so on.
I suppose Fatty will feel slighted that Israel isn't really considered a serious issue to most middle eastern governments, including Iran, whatever their noisy rhetoric.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:26am PT
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here's the key sentence:
"Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded."
read it all...and before you start crying 'racism', remember shelby steele is a black man...and before you start crying 'uncle tom', read the book!
JUNE 21, 2010 Israel and the Surrender of the West
One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.
By SHELBY STEELE
The most interesting voice in all the fallout surrounding the Gaza flotilla incident is that sanctimonious and meddling voice known as "world opinion." At every turn "world opinion," like a school marm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.
Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.
This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas's remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.
"World opinion" labors mightily to make Israel look like South Africa looked in its apartheid era—a nation beyond the moral pale. And it projects onto Israel the same sin that made apartheid South Africa so untouchable: white supremacy. Somehow "world opinion" has moved away from the old 20th century view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a complicated territorial dispute between two long-suffering peoples. Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the "occupation" of a beleaguered Third World people.
This is now—figuratively in some quarters and literally in others—the moral template through which Israel is seen. It doesn't matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas's recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns—or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.
One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.
When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even "peace activists" in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza. Thus the irony: In the eyes of a morally compromised Western world, the Israelis looked like the Gestapo.
This, of course, is not the reality of modern Israel. Israel does not seek to oppress or occupy—and certainly not to annihilate—the Palestinians in the pursuit of some atavistic Jewish supremacy. But the merest echo of the shameful Western past is enough to chill support for Israel in the West.
The West also lacks the self-assurance to see the Palestinians accurately. Here again it is safer in the white West to see the Palestinians as they advertise themselves—as an "occupied" people denied sovereignty and simple human dignity by a white Western colonizer. The West is simply too vulnerable to the racist stigma to object to this "neo-colonial" characterization.
Our problem in the West is understandable. We don't want to lose more moral authority than we already have. So we choose not to see certain things that are right in front of us. For example, we ignore that the Palestinians—and for that matter much of the Middle East—are driven to militancy and war not by legitimate complaints against Israel or the West but by an internalized sense of inferiority. If the Palestinians got everything they want—a sovereign nation and even, let's say, a nuclear weapon—they would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.
And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity—no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy's wealth proves his inhumanity.
In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians—and by implication the broader Muslim world—into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace.
And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world's great problems today—whether in the suburbs of Paris and London, or in Kabul and Karachi, or in Queens, N.Y., and Gaza. The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West. This is the problem we in the West have no easy solution to, and we scapegoat Israel—admonish it to behave better—so as not to feel helpless. We see our own vulnerability there.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:31am PT
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Certainly well written Bookworm, but this is a much more complex story than that short piece could start to define.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Jun 21, 2010 - 12:01pm PT
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Arafat was a toad. At least he made his wife a rich widow from the money he collected.
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