goatland is a binary world

[j_b]

quote:

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MtnGoat:

 

Israel: Constition, laws, rights, religous freedom.

Palestinians and their islamic supporters: none of these

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MtnGoat is poorly informed:

 

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/return.html

 

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/VictimGroups/Palestinans/palestinans02.htm

 

in other words, it's not much different than what we did to the American Indians except times have changed and a little powder in the eye (barely) is needed to maintain appearances.

 

sorry about the new thread but the original one does not take replies

[MtnGoat]

I'll read these in detail and respond, off hand one issue that stands out to me is that the second link uses the UN declaration of Human rights as a basis for judgement, which is of course valid given that observers right to do so.

 

However, it's a document I find severely flawed and I am not bound to consider it deterministic or applicable by my standards, just as another observer may choose to do so or not. If this document is used as "proof" of the validity of a particular stance or judgement, I reserve the right to disagree with it anyway.

 

Anyway, I shall read up and respond. From my quick perusal I can already see that a lot of it details problems in Israel I have already mainained is *not* perfect, only far better than those who oppose them.

[RobBob]

quote:

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Israel I have already mainained is *not* perfect, only far better than those who oppose them.

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That statement is chauvinistic as hell.

[MtnGoat]

Welcome to reality. I assume your choice of who to support somehow indicates you have no views of what constitutes "better" or "worse"?

 

Anyone who makes distinctions is inherently exhibiting "chauvanism" merely by using judgement.

 

The issue is not avoiding judgement, which may be a value to some (one I very much disagree with) but how one makes the judgements and by what standard.

 

As I have made it clear, I find a flawed nation, as all are, which maintains rights even at disparate levels, which has laws and courts that even partially function, which has elections that function....

 

Superior to one where rights of internal disagreement are non existent and who expresses "resistance" by choosing to provably target innocents, with full intent and by design as intended primary targets.

 

We are not comparing the perfect and imperfect, but the imperfect and the *more* imperfect.

[Peter_Puget]

Goat, I wouldn’t waste your time trying to rebut such articles. I am willing to posit that they are true. What the hell. What does that mean? Nothing. It provides no argumentation at all. I could respond by stating facts involving abuses against Christians under the PA. I could argue how the Syrians have destroyed ALL the inhabitants of cities because some o fits citizens rebelled against their dictator. I could reference the number of "Palestinians" killed by the Jordanian government when they became a bit uppity. I could mention how by merely advocating basic democratic values such as free speech or the right to vote can get one thrown in jail in Egypt. I could mention how western journalists were cautioned that their lives could not be protected if they shot videos of Palestinians celebrating 9/11. But what does that prove? Well nothing either.

 

I think that the best thing demonstrating the differences between Israelis and the "Palestinians" and the Arabs around them is how they behaved in the Yom Kippur war. When the Israeli army had a noose around the Egyptians and let them go. Can anyone honestly believe that if the positions were reverse that a slaughter would not have happened?

[RobBob]

Once again, I refer you to colonialism, Mtngoat. Something that the rest of the industrialized world stopped doing 50 years ago. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not a nation has elections, etc. Colonialism is defining Israel today...it's why Chirac refered to Israel as "that shitty little country."

[j_b]

Robert Fisk: How to shut up your critics with a single word

21 October 2002

Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer – there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."

 

Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan – a close personal friend of Mr Sharon – believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".

 

You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up.

 

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite list – it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch" – committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".

 

The University of North Carolina is being targeted – apparently because freshmen were required to read passages from the Koran – along with Harvard where, like students in many other US universities, undergraduates are demanding that their colleges disinvest in companies that sell weapons to Israel. In some cases, American universities – which happily disinvested in tobacco companies – have now taken the step of blocking all student access to their records of investment.

 

Lawrence Summers, the Jewish president of Harvard, has denounced "profoundly anti-Israel views" in "progressive intellectual communities", that are – I enjoyed this academic sleight of hand – "advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent". Mr Said himself has already described all this as a campaign "to ask students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom".

 

Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University College London, tells me that Oxfam has refused to accept £5,000 plus other royalties from his new book After the Terror following a campaign against him in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. Now I happen to take issue with some of Professor Honderich's conclusions and I think his book – praised by the American-Jewish scholar Noam Chomsky – meanders. I especially don't like his assertion that Palestinians, in trying to free themselves from occupation, have a "moral right to terrorism". Blowing up children in pizzerias – and Professor Honderich's book is not an endorsement of such atrocities – is a crime against humanity. There is no moral right to do this. But what in God's name is Oxfam doing refusing Professor Honderich's money for its humanitarian work? Who was behind this?

 

Our own John Pilger made a programme for Carlton Television called Palestine Is Still The Issue. I have watched it three times. It is accurate in every historical detail; indeed its historical adviser was a left-wing Israeli academic. But Carlton's own chairman, Michael Green – in one of the most gutless statements in recent British journalism – announced that it was "a tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy is concerned". Why Mr Green should want to utter such trash is beyond me. But what does he mean by "tragedy"? Is he comparing Pilger to a suicide bomber?

 

And so it goes on. It is left, of course, to the likes of Uri Avneri in Israel to state that "the Sharon government is a giant laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitism virus". He rightly says that by smearing those who detest the persecution of the Palestinians as anti-Semites, "the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something approaching respectability". But we can take comfort that 28 brave academics have signed a petition condemning President George Bush's build-up to war and Israel's support for it and warning that the Israeli government may be contemplating crimes against humanity on the Palestinians, including ethnic cleansing.

 

Have Mr Pipes and his chums put the names of these good men and women on their hate list? You bet they haven't. Because all of them are Israeli scholars at Israeli universities. I wonder why we weren't told about this.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=344510

[Peter_Puget]

Egads Please define coloialism fo rme and France certainly had colonies more recently than 50 yrs ago!

[MtnGoat]

fine, refer away. I've already said I disagree with Isreal building the settlements! What more do you want from me on this example than agreement that they should not be doing this? Is there an extra super turbo kind of agreement I am not aware of?

 

Regardless of the settlements, the issue remains that in spite of lapses, abuses of power, and problems and imperfections such as any nation exhibits, Israels governance and tactics are, on the whole, superior to those who seek to slaughter them wholesale. As PP pointed out, the Israelies permitted those who attacked them, in this case egypt, to live and escape.

 

Something that does not occur when Pals capture Israelis, they call home on the cell phone of those they are gutting with their bare hands and tell the wife they are killing her husband right now, can she hear him scream? Yup, moral eqivalence in action.

[MtnGoat]

"it's why Chirac refered to Israel as "that shitty little country."

 

now france is the arbiter of what is shitty... hmmm. Isn't this the same nation with the single greatest increase in anti semitism in recent years, beating of jews on the streets, synagogues attacked, etc, since the Naziis? The france that handed over the jews to Hitler for extermination? That france?

 

The france where govt workers patrol office parking lots searching for cars to show who's working "too much", which is against the law? The france where gangs of wilding immigrants and youths engage in pitched battles involving hundreds? I can see where Chirac has a lot of standing.

 

Well, ok, I've enganged in some slander by proxy which I decry in others, but it was fun, if not entirely consistent.

 

However, I will point out that the nation which demonstrates such persistence of anti semitism may not be the best example to pick for use as exhibiting clear views of Israel. After all, they are the ones who helped Iraq build nukes, until the Israelis thankfully took the bull by the horns and closed that deal definitively. In direct oppostion to our previous administration, who provides nuclear technology to totalitarian states... on the basis of non verified promises they won't be naughty.

 

[ 11-08-2002, 12:30 PM: Message edited by: MtnGoat ]

[Peter_Puget]

Yeow what utter BS! Nonresponsive. Bitter, rambling attackes against a man (or several men) not an argumant at all.

 

For better read try this!

 

Better Read!

[freeclimb9]

quote:

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Originally posted by Peter Puget:

For better read try this!

 

Better Read!

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dude, that's so gay.

[Peter_Puget]

Glad to have brightened up this dreary Monday for you!

[Cpt.Caveman]

It's not dreary for me. I rode my bike to work and harrassed a bunch of motorists along the way. It was true fun and joy

[MtnGoat]

Yesterday some Palestinians demonstrated their commitment to peace and careful target selection by breaking into a kibbutz, shooting two people outdoors, then entering a home and shooting a mother hiding her two kids, then the kids, at point blank range. Darned Israelis.

 

28 brave academics signed a petition to take more worthless stances, and in doings so help out Saddam and his Baath party leninist worldview? What a shock.

[RobBob]

Goat, your latest tack, to describe graphic atrocities (of course only committed by those you don't like) as a defense of Israeli political strategy (colonialism, cordoning off Palestinians a la Warsaw ghetto) is transparent and ineffective. I for one am not going to argue the Israel-Palestine thing anymore...time to move on. Let's discuss global warming again. That was more fun.

[Peter_Puget]

The Egyptian paper, al Ahram, asked for British poet Tom Paulin's opinions on the Middle East:

 

Among other things, he opined that the US-born Jewish settlers should be shot dead. "They are Nazis, racists," he said, adding - unnecessarily, you might argue - "I feel nothing but hatred for them." He also pronounced that the state of Israel had no right to exist, that Tony Blair's government was "Zionist"…

 

Now check out this link:

 

 

 

Pathetic Joke

[Peter_Puget]

Hey did anyone ever give me a definition of colonialism?

[Peter_Puget]

 

I could go on all day but as I said in an earlier post I dont think it proves much. I am not sure what point you're making J_B. Please explain. Mtngoat himself said that Irealis have done some bad things. He merely said they were less vile than the palestinians a point I agree with. In a way you are agreeing with him by showing the diversity of opinion that is possibly to express in Isreal.

 

With hyperbole please explain.

 

[ 11-11-2002, 04:49 PM: Message edited by: Peter Puget ]

[j_b]

quote:

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I dont think it proves much

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I'd expect nothing different from you.

 

quote:

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I am not sure what point you're making

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that israeli policy toward arabs has a large responsability in this bloody mess. I am not surprised you can't see it even after reading the pieces I linked, those with a more open mind should think differently.

[MtnGoat]

"Goat, your latest tack, to describe graphic atrocities (of course only committed by those you don't like)"

 

That's the point, isn't it? Only the Pals continue these atrocities, something consistently not addressed by supporters of the Pals here. Death by violent means is always graphic, but it's worse when it is entirely planned as the primary, totally intended end goal of those carrying it out.

 

These are not attacks on military targets, or accidental shootings in crowded places, these people go directly to peoples houses, seek women and children intentionally, and slaughter them methodically, one by one, point blank, with full intent, because these victims are the fully intended targets.

 

Wether or not you are willing to make distinction between bad, and worse, I am, and I shall not cease to defend those on the receiving end of such actions nor vote for their support.

 

Again, we have the imperfect, represented by the Israelis, and the worse, represented by those who kill anyone they can, by any means they can, anywhere they can do so. If you're comfortable making cause with them, that's your buisness, I shall not ignore that in fact one side is behaving far more badly than the other.

 

"as a defense of Israeli political strategy (colonialism, cordoning off Palestinians a la Warsaw ghetto)"

 

I have yet to see one solution you would personally undertake to convince the Israelis they should permit those who sneak in and commit such atrocities as I describe above, to drop their cordon and trust those who do such things when cordoned to begin with.

 

This is like the gun debate when I ask what the actual victims of real crime are supposed to do when the cops aren't there, which is nearly all the time, and suddenly it gets very quiet. Because reality is a lot different than nice plans about society and it's "protection" which provably does not occur.

 

And here we are supposed to tell Israelis they are being unreasonable with cordons, and apparently, just let their killers just move into Israel in spite of the fact they slaughter Israelis as it is.

 

Don't worry, I don't really expect an answer, just like I never get one on why citizens here in the US should be deprived of meaningful defense in the face of the fact that the police don't protect them, either.

 

"is transparent and ineffective."

 

Oh, is it "transparent"? I'm really interested to know what it is you could possibly think I'm hiding, since I already say whats on my mind anyway.

[MtnGoat]

Peter has made a great point, the links provided show the intellectual diversity possible in Israel, publicly, without being jailed or shot.

 

In stark contrast to nearly every nation which opposes Israel, where these sentiments expressed in oppostion to those lands policies will get you jailed or shot, or both. This single point shows only one of the many huge differences between Israel and those who hate Israel, it's striking to see so many people professing progressive values refusing to support the only nation in which those values exist in the mideast.

 

The Mullahs may still want you dead, and I am not saying anyone here *intends* to aid them, but by taking their side you serve their purposes while you live, because you share a common interest, disarming Israel and forcing Israel to be less effective at it's own defense.

 

[ 11-12-2002, 12:24 AM: Message edited by: MtnGoat ]

[MtnGoat]

"that israeli policy toward arabs has a large responsability in this bloody mess."

 

It certainly does, a refusal to wiped out in the face of repeated wars, for this expressly stated purpose, tends to show a policy towards arabs they will not like, that of kicking their asses. Israel has no obligation to be wiped out by those hate them with religious intensity.

 

[ 11-11-2002, 11:53 PM: Message edited by: MtnGoat ]

[j_b]

http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/forum_eng.html#shohat

 

quite long but a great read. 7 speeches by retired army officers, academics, former ministers. Well worth it.

[j_b]

http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/kurdi_eng.html

 

quite long but wow!

 

note: most destruction occurred after fighting stopped

 

quote:

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off hand one issue that stands out to me is that the second link uses the UN declaration of Human rights as a basis for judgement.....it's a document I find severely flawed and I am not bound to consider it deterministic or applicable by my standards

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Israel signed the human right declaration (as well as the geneva convention), as far as what you'd do we have a pretty good idea by now

 

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I have already mainained is *not* perfect

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yeah, charges of apartheid would dent anybody's 'perfect' democratic armor

 

quote:

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I find a flawed nation, as all are, which maintains rights even at disparate levels

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I suspect pre-1993 south africa was also 'a flawed nation, as all are'

 

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expresses "resistance" by choosing to provably target innocents, with full intent and by design as intended primary targets

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this is terror by definition, a method used by both sides.

 

quote:

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I disagree with Isreal building the settlements! What more do you want from me on this example than agreement that they should not be doing this?

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6 billion aid package a year is a sure way to express disagreement

 

quote:

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Only the Pals continue these atrocities

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http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/309/nation/Group_accuses_Israel_of_war_crimes+.shtml

 

http://web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/MDE151492002?OpenDocument

 

just one example ...

 

quote:

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These are not attacks on military targets, or accidental shootings in crowded places, these people go directly to peoples houses, seek women and children intentionally, and slaughter them methodically, one by one, point blank, with full intent, because these victims are the fully intended targets

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yes, using bulldozers to collapse buildings on top of their inhabitants, or preventing women giving birth from reaching an hospital is not intentional nor methodical

 

etc ....

 

everything is black and white, isn't it goat?