iranian citizens, potential casualties of war. look at them. if the above people and the op have their way, many of them will be memories. and i am the one making a joke of this thread???
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Absolutely
Appears to be the case. Nobody wants innocent civilians dead (other than terrorists of course). So sensational you are.
Iran is the central bank of terror. The govt and nuke ambitions must be thwarted so the people of Iran can thrive in freedom.
And our ally, Israel can try to live in peace in this cruel, evil world of hate and terror
Appears to be the case. Nobody wants innocent civilians dead (other than terrorists of course). So sensational you are.
Iran is the central bank of terror. The govt and nuke ambitions must be thwarted so the people of Iran can thrive in freedom.
And our ally, Israel can try to live in peace in this cruel, evil world of hate and terror
i'm being sensational?
at least i am not cheering for the murder of potentially hundreds of thousands of people...
and like everyone keeps saying, israel, through their oppressive policies and manipulating of the us government has made its own bed.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Absolutely
Appears to be the case. Nobody wants innocent civilians dead (other than terrorists of course). So sensational you are.
Iran is the central bank of terror. The govt and nuke ambitions must be thwarted so the people of Iran can thrive in freedom.
And our ally, Israel can try to live in peace in this cruel, evil world of hate and terror
...A Washington insider and someone who deferred to France four times during Vietnam. No military experience at all between the two and these are the two people who want to start a "war" against Iran? :fp: Better find a way to pay for it if they get elected.
Honestly, why do we have to dragged into this? What good will it do for us? What do we have to gain in all of this? NOTHING. Let Israel defend itself.
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Shows: 6.27.08 Hartford, CT/5.15.10 Hartford, CT/6.18.2011 Hartford, CT (EV Solo)/10.19.13 Brooklyn/10.25.13 Hartford
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
Everyday more and more I'm beginning to think this Syria conflict is it weaken irans major neighbor ally. This way our ALLY Israel goes in. Amazing how u read a book 12 years ago and all of the shit in it are happening all over the world. The 2 duche bags running for office dnt give a fuck about u or me. Politics are legalized mafia. Who controls the politicians? The hidden hand you're blinded from. But hey usamamasan, keep beating the war drum and trolling buddy, you're so good at it. Would love to see u on the battlefield. I would bet my life that you'd be the FIRST to run and have a trail of shit falling out of your ass. But why would u be on the battlefield when u can have some poor foreigners kid do the fighting for u. What a fucken clown. But hey buddy, keep "swinging to the rhythm of the new world order, and count bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums....." yeah, let's go start ANOTHER fucken war and kill innocent people. Oh wait, they're not innocent, they're Arabs and Parisian and Muslims and whatever!!! God must be too busy with the other galaxies to care about earth. Then again, I probably wouldn't care about humans either if this is what we've decided to become as an entity...
TOOL- Right in 2
Angels on the sideline,
Puzzled and amused.
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused.
Don't these talking monkeys know that
Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys,
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two
Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
(and this is what they choose)
Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They forge a blade,
And when there's one they're bound to divide it,
Right in two.
Right in two.
Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They make a club
And beat their brother... down.
How they survived so misguided is a mystery.
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven conscious of his fleeting time here
Gotta divide it all right in two (x4)
They fight, till they die
Over earth, over sky
They fight, over life,
Over brawn, over air and light,
Over love, over sun. Over blood
They fight, or they die, all for what? For our rising!
Angels on the sideline again
Been too long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end
Gotta divide it all right in two (x3)
Right in two
Please. This is a serious topic.
Colluding trolls.
serious about cheerleading a potential war that you are not gonna fight it. you are making a mockery of the situation over there...
i have never heard of a troll calling others trolls before. but keep it up though because it is entertaining.
Seriously, knock it off with your troll shit, it;'s so juvenile. It's tiresome and it is just a personal attack like any others but lacking any creativity.
Seriously, knock it off with your troll shit, it;'s so juvenile. It's tiresome and it is just a personal attack like any others but lacking any creativity.
trolling is juvenile. it is not juvenile to call people out on it. why are you attempting to reprimand me for calling them out?
if you want to discuss it and keep it off of the forum, my pm box is open.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Seriously, knock it off with your troll shit, it;'s so juvenile. It's tiresome and it is just a personal attack like any others but lacking any creativity.
trolling is juvenile. it is not juvenile to call people out on it. why are you attempting to reprimand me for calling them out?
if you want to discuss it and keep it off of the forum, my pm box is open.
so the same people that want to stop gov't spending are cool with the potential another trillion dollar (and countless lives lost) war in order to defend another country who we feel is similar culturally?
How about we halve the defense budget (it would still dwarf everyone else)?
Oh yeah, and stop giving billions of dollars to Israel. Israel is cool and all, but we have our own issues.
so the same people that want to stop gov't spending are cool with the potential another trillion dollar (and countless lives lost) war in order to defend another country who we feel is similar culturally?
How about we halve the defense budget (it would still dwarf everyone else)?
Oh yeah, and stop giving billions of dollars to Israel. Israel is cool and all, but we have our own issues.
i completely agree. obama just gave them $4 billion last month.
and like you said the only way to prevent a war is to cut the budget. like when the dems were going to defund the iraq war, but they caved because of political fallout. you can not have both, perpetual war and a balanced budget. you have to pick one.
i say cut the pentagon budget by 60%.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
The U.S didn't give a shit about Israel until after the 1967 war. And neither did American Jews. Then Cold War politics, and the June 1967 war, saw to it that Israel became a strategic asset of the U.S. That strategic asset has remained in place since the U.S seeks dominance of the region and it's natural resources. Though Israel has been testing the limits of this relationship for a long time by acting like a reckless rogue state, and by contributing to making the U.S a target of international terrorism - see 9/11.
The Jewish vote and AIPAC in the U.S are actually pretty insignificant in the big scheme of things, especially considering that the vast majority of American Jews are democratic. And current trends show that American Jews are increasingly distancing themselves from Israel.
But of course an idiot like Mitt Romney doesn't realize this, and he thinks that all Americans hold Israel close to their hearts. They don't. Most Americans now see Israel for what it is, a dangerous racist state. And the more of a liability Israel becomes, and the more it's aggressive militarism threatens U.S interests, the more we'll see America distance itself from Israel. That is unless Americans choose to elect an equally dangerous, religious wackjob for President - Mitt Romney (though the chances of this happening are miniscule, despite what certain agitators here on the message board may try and have us believe), in which case war with Iran, and a whole new set of parameters, may fall into place.
Byrnzie has spent alot of time educating himself on this topic and I give him credit for that (not that he cares). I tend to lurk (as opposed to post) on these Israel/Palestine threads because the fact is I just don't know enough of the history or chronology to form a concrete opinion. I've done some reading about the history of the overall area, but holy shit, what a clusterfuck. Unless you're fully immersed in it, it can be a bit daunting to absorb. That said, I can't help but chuckle when the Brit who lives in China presumes to speak for the broad American opinion. It wouldn't be like Byrnzie to post that w/o some URL in his back pocket to support it, so, B, would you mind divulging? All I could find was this gallup link that is 2 years old. However it paints a drastically different picture than yours.
As for the mis-quote of Ahmadinejad, we've certainly discussed it ad nauseam, but it's a little offensive to suggest that bringing it up again is trolling. The primary salient point I've encountered here was simply that he was mis-quoted in English-speaking news, which is true. But unless I am mistaken, the correction to the mis-quote only changed "wipe Israel off the map" to "erase this zionist regime (state?) from the pages of time". Kinda feels like arguing over whether I should punch you in the face with my fist or elbow. To quote myself:
I think we're focusing on all the wrong nuances of the quote. Whether he said "wiped off the map" or "eliminated" or "erased from the history of time", only the most apologetic of apologizers would suggest the meaning was anything resembling benign. What seems more relevant to me is that it seems he's talking specifically about Jerusalem. At best, you can argue that he "simply" wants the holy city no longer under the control of Zionist Jews. Jerusalem being definitively outside the "original" borders of Israel, c. 1947, that is, indeed, a far cry from saying that he wants the nation of Israel eliminated.
From byrnzie's article:
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, agrees that Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as, "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."[13] According to Cole, "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to 'wipe Israel off the map' because no such idiom exists in Persian." Instead, "he did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."
Again, while clearly antagonistic, the statement could be interpreted to be much more narrow than calling for the elimination of an entire nation.
I guess my question to those better educated on the topic is: are you arguing that this quote in no way indicates a belligerent tone toward Israel from Ahmadinejad? Or just that the mis-quote overstates the degree to which that feeling/tone exists?
he has never said the state of israel should be removed from the map. rather the zionist government should be removed from the pages of time. kind of like how the tea party feels that liberal government should be removed from the pages of time and replaced with a conservative one.
i think that anyone who has read anything about this situation can agree that the zionsim which is behind settlement expansion is a major barrier to peace. israel will not even temporarily halt settlement expansion, which is taking over palestinian lands, bulldozing the current homes, displacing the land owners thus making them refugees, and building jewish only settlements on the land where palestinian homes once stood. and by not halting the expansions, the palestinians will not come to the table to negotiate. and then israel is blaming the palestinians, when it is clearly israel inflaming tensions by their actions. it is simple. stop expanding settlements, and then the palestinians will come to the negotiation table.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
he has never said the state of israel should be removed from the map. rather the zionist government should be removed from the pages of time.
Yup pretty much what I said, though that article I provided made it seem more specific to the control of Jerusalem (aka Al Quds -- yay I'm learnin' stuff!)
kind of like how the tea party feels that liberal government should be removed from the pages of time and replaced with a conservative one.
I'm sure you've been paying attention to the "Arab Spring" -- regimes in the Middle East are rarely overthrown by voting.
i think that anyone who has read anything about this situation can agree that the zionsim which is behind settlement expansion is a major barrier to peace. israel will not even temporarily halt settlement expansion, which is taking over palestinian lands, bulldozing the current homes, displacing the land owners thus making them refugees, and building jewish only settlements on the land where palestinian homes once stood.
No doubt. So are rockets fired into cities and towns from across the border, for example.
and by not halting the expansions, the palestinians will not come to the table to negotiate. and then israel is blaming the palestinians, when it is clearly israel inflaming tensions by their actions. it is simple. stop expanding settlements, and then the palestinians will come to the negotiation table.
You can argue that one side shares more of the blame, but nobody's hands are clean here.
I can't help but chuckle when the Brit who lives in China presumes to speak for the broad American opinion. It wouldn't be like Byrnzie to post that w/o some URL in his back pocket to support it, so, B, would you mind divulging?
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much: Why The American Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End'
P.23: A 2010 Zogby Poll found that a plurality of Americans supported the Palestinian right of return, the evacuation of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land, and Washington getting "tough with Israel," while more than half wanted Washington to get "tough with Israel" if settlements kept expanding. A 2011 BBC poll noted a significant shift in American opinion of Israel's influence in the world: "the U.S public is now divided rather than favourable in it's rating. While positive ratings have remained quite stable since 2010 (43 percent), negative ratings are up by ten points (41 percent). When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a bid for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations in 2011, President Barack Obama, both houses of Congress, both major political parties, and the mainstream media vehemently opposed him. Yet, polls consistently showed that a large plurality of Americans supported the Palestinian initiative.
P.26: A 2005 survey by respected Jewish pollster Steven M. Cohen found that "the attachment of American Jews to Israel has weakened measurably in the last two years...,continuing a long-term trend."
Respondents were less likely than in comparable earlier surveys to say they care about Israel, talk about Israel with others or engage in a range of pro-Israel activities. Strikingly, there was no parallel decline in other measures of Jewish identification, including religious observance and communal affiliation. The survey found 26 percent who said they were "very" emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 31 percent who said so, in a similar survey conducted in 2002. Some two-thirds, 65 percent,, said they follow the news about Israel closely, down from 74 percent in 2002, while 39 percent said they talk about Israel frequently with Jewish friends, down from 53 percent in 2002.
...Israel also declined as a component in the respondents personal Jewish identity. When offered a selection of factors, including religion, community and social justice,l as well as "caring about Israel," and asked "For you personally, how much does being Jewish involve each?," 48 percent said Israel matters " a lot", compared with 58 percent in 2002. Just 57 percent affirmed that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being Jewish," compared with 73 percent in a similar survey in 1989.
A 2007 American Jewish Committee poll found that 30 percent of Jews felt "fairly distant" or "very distant" from Israel; a 2008 J Street poll found that nearly half of American Jews talked about Israel only "a few times year" (26 percent), "hardly ever" (16 percent) or "never" (3 percent); and a 2010 Brandeis University poll found that only 33 percent of Jews felt "very much" connected to Israel while the other 67 percent felt only "somewhat" (30 percent), "a little" (23 percent) or "not at all" (14 percent) connected.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
June 10, 2010 - Peter Beinart
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
...Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
...Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.
But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.
Thanks for the response, Byrnzie. Guess that shows us how much polls are worth. Change the question slightly and get different results. The Gallup poll I posted from 2010 showed 63% of Americans with their "sympathies" more in line with Israel than Palestine.
In any case, both poll results are a far cry from "Most Americans now see Israel for what it is, a dangerous racist state." So stop putting your words in our mouths.
Saying that Ahmadinejad didn't say "wipe off the map" is the same shit as saying Obama was talking about roads when he said "you didn't build that"
Very simple minded for those who don't get the point
sigh...
Ok, fine, I'll bite. I know you are beyond convincing, but perhaps there are others who like to listen to facts and sound reason.
In my view, the term "wipe off the map" is just a foolish idiom developed by pro-Zionist propagandists to make everyone scared--this is not an idiom that exists in the Persian language. Despite that, I don't believe that this is where the major contention lies. I think the major point to be emphasized is that Ahmadinejad did not simply refer to 'Israel' as a country, but to the 'Zionist regime.' The problem with many people in America is they do not realize the way people in the Arab/Muslim world view Zionism. This is because Zionists have spend decades up until now successfully convincing many Americans that Zionism is inherently apart of Judaism and the Jewish people. Thus, it no longer becomes simply a political ideology, but an inherent right to all Jews, equal to that of their right to practice religion anywhere freely, to live their lives, etc etc. This is due to the so-called 'Right of Self-Determination' that can be traced back to the time of Woodrow Wilson and his failure of the 'League of Nations.' What is interesting about the idea of self-determination is that Zionists use it as an argument to justify the creation of a state on their own in Palestine. Ironically they do this while ignoring the rights of the Palestinian native population to recognize their right to self-determination as well. What is more interesting is that Zionists do not simply call for a state as the Palestinians do--one that is inclusive to all--but rather a Jewish state.
Thus, this Jewish-Zionist state has no place for Palestinians in it. If you disagree, look up the Nakba (Plan Dalet) circa 1947-1948 when the Zionist terrorist groups who later went on to form what you now call the Israeli Army, literally, expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes through the use of terror. This is because in their form of 'self-determination', there was no place for a Palestinian native population. Unfortunately for the Zionists, they could not get rid of all the Palestinians, which is why Palestinians living in Israel currently enjoy good old-fashioned second-class citizenship. Furthermore, the Palestinians living in those territories occupied after the June 1967 war live in even worse conditions. The nature that Israel conducts itself in the West Bank (Jewish-only roads, a separation wall that isolates the Palestinian population, checkpoints, etc) speaks volumes as to how the Israeli government sees the Palestinians and the Israelis as distinct. Considering how much Americans pride themselves in the fact that our government distinguishes no one based on ethnicity, it's shocking to the conscious to see so many Americans ally themselves with the Zionist ideology, that advocates such measures taken by the Israeli governments over the past several decades, by the inclusion of there being a 'Jewish State', as opposed to simply a 'State for Jews' in which all can live equally without there being distinctions.
Ultimately, while I do not speak for Ahmadinejad, Arabs and Muslims do not claim to want to expel the Jews from the land of Palestine, or as Zionist propagandists would have you believe, push them into the sea. They do however want to dismantle the Zionist regime--and by this they refer to the racist ideology dominating Israeli governments. Supposedly, the removal of the Saddam regime did not mean the destruction of Iraq (that was just an accident, right?). However, the Zionist paranoia that has infested America that somehow the Arab/Muslim world will together kill the millions of Jews is sheer nonsense. This is a war of ideologies, and the Zionist ideology is a stubborn one. As all racist ideologies are.
Comments
war cheerleader...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Are you familiar with this gig?
war cheerleaders...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Can't handle the truth.
iranian citizens, potential casualties of war. look at them. if the above people and the op have their way, many of them will be memories. and i am the one making a joke of this thread???
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Appears to be the case. Nobody wants innocent civilians dead (other than terrorists of course). So sensational you are.
Iran is the central bank of terror. The govt and nuke ambitions must be thwarted so the people of Iran can thrive in freedom.
And our ally, Israel can try to live in peace in this cruel, evil world of hate and terror
at least i am not cheering for the murder of potentially hundreds of thousands of people...
and like everyone keeps saying, israel, through their oppressive policies and manipulating of the us government has made its own bed.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Even a head slap emoticon.
It's ok though, that's why I'm here...
To help
Honestly, why do we have to dragged into this? What good will it do for us? What do we have to gain in all of this? NOTHING. Let Israel defend itself.
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
"Becoming a Bruce fan is like hitting puberty as a musical fan. It's inevitable." - dcfaithful
TOOL- Right in 2
Angels on the sideline,
Puzzled and amused.
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused.
Don't these talking monkeys know that
Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys,
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two
Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
(and this is what they choose)
Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They forge a blade,
And when there's one they're bound to divide it,
Right in two.
Right in two.
Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They make a club
And beat their brother... down.
How they survived so misguided is a mystery.
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven conscious of his fleeting time here
Gotta divide it all right in two (x4)
They fight, till they die
Over earth, over sky
They fight, over life,
Over brawn, over air and light,
Over love, over sun. Over blood
They fight, or they die, all for what? For our rising!
Angels on the sideline again
Been too long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end
Gotta divide it all right in two (x3)
Right in two
Seriously, knock it off with your troll shit, it;'s so juvenile. It's tiresome and it is just a personal attack like any others but lacking any creativity.
if you want to discuss it and keep it off of the forum, my pm box is open.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
True enough, I shoulda pm'd.
It was meant for both of you.
How about we halve the defense budget (it would still dwarf everyone else)?
Oh yeah, and stop giving billions of dollars to Israel. Israel is cool and all, but we have our own issues.
and like you said the only way to prevent a war is to cut the budget. like when the dems were going to defund the iraq war, but they caved because of political fallout. you can not have both, perpetual war and a balanced budget. you have to pick one.
i say cut the pentagon budget by 60%.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
As for the mis-quote of Ahmadinejad, we've certainly discussed it ad nauseam, but it's a little offensive to suggest that bringing it up again is trolling. The primary salient point I've encountered here was simply that he was mis-quoted in English-speaking news, which is true. But unless I am mistaken, the correction to the mis-quote only changed "wipe Israel off the map" to "erase this zionist regime (state?) from the pages of time". Kinda feels like arguing over whether I should punch you in the face with my fist or elbow. To quote myself:
I think we're focusing on all the wrong nuances of the quote. Whether he said "wiped off the map" or "eliminated" or "erased from the history of time", only the most apologetic of apologizers would suggest the meaning was anything resembling benign. What seems more relevant to me is that it seems he's talking specifically about Jerusalem. At best, you can argue that he "simply" wants the holy city no longer under the control of Zionist Jews. Jerusalem being definitively outside the "original" borders of Israel, c. 1947, that is, indeed, a far cry from saying that he wants the nation of Israel eliminated.
From byrnzie's article:
Again, while clearly antagonistic, the statement could be interpreted to be much more narrow than calling for the elimination of an entire nation.
I guess my question to those better educated on the topic is: are you arguing that this quote in no way indicates a belligerent tone toward Israel from Ahmadinejad? Or just that the mis-quote overstates the degree to which that feeling/tone exists?
i think that anyone who has read anything about this situation can agree that the zionsim which is behind settlement expansion is a major barrier to peace. israel will not even temporarily halt settlement expansion, which is taking over palestinian lands, bulldozing the current homes, displacing the land owners thus making them refugees, and building jewish only settlements on the land where palestinian homes once stood. and by not halting the expansions, the palestinians will not come to the table to negotiate. and then israel is blaming the palestinians, when it is clearly israel inflaming tensions by their actions. it is simple. stop expanding settlements, and then the palestinians will come to the negotiation table.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
I'm sure you've been paying attention to the "Arab Spring" -- regimes in the Middle East are rarely overthrown by voting.
No doubt. So are rockets fired into cities and towns from across the border, for example.
You can argue that one side shares more of the blame, but nobody's hands are clean here.
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much: Why The American Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End'
P.23: A 2010 Zogby Poll found that a plurality of Americans supported the Palestinian right of return, the evacuation of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land, and Washington getting "tough with Israel," while more than half wanted Washington to get "tough with Israel" if settlements kept expanding. A 2011 BBC poll noted a significant shift in American opinion of Israel's influence in the world: "the U.S public is now divided rather than favourable in it's rating. While positive ratings have remained quite stable since 2010 (43 percent), negative ratings are up by ten points (41 percent). When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a bid for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations in 2011, President Barack Obama, both houses of Congress, both major political parties, and the mainstream media vehemently opposed him. Yet, polls consistently showed that a large plurality of Americans supported the Palestinian initiative.
P.26: A 2005 survey by respected Jewish pollster Steven M. Cohen found that "the attachment of American Jews to Israel has weakened measurably in the last two years...,continuing a long-term trend."
Respondents were less likely than in comparable earlier surveys to say they care about Israel, talk about Israel with others or engage in a range of pro-Israel activities. Strikingly, there was no parallel decline in other measures of Jewish identification, including religious observance and communal affiliation. The survey found 26 percent who said they were "very" emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 31 percent who said so, in a similar survey conducted in 2002. Some two-thirds, 65 percent,, said they follow the news about Israel closely, down from 74 percent in 2002, while 39 percent said they talk about Israel frequently with Jewish friends, down from 53 percent in 2002.
...Israel also declined as a component in the respondents personal Jewish identity. When offered a selection of factors, including religion, community and social justice,l as well as "caring about Israel," and asked "For you personally, how much does being Jewish involve each?," 48 percent said Israel matters " a lot", compared with 58 percent in 2002. Just 57 percent affirmed that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being Jewish," compared with 73 percent in a similar survey in 1989.
A 2007 American Jewish Committee poll found that 30 percent of Jews felt "fairly distant" or "very distant" from Israel; a 2008 J Street poll found that nearly half of American Jews talked about Israel only "a few times year" (26 percent), "hardly ever" (16 percent) or "never" (3 percent); and a 2010 Brandeis University poll found that only 33 percent of Jews felt "very much" connected to Israel while the other 67 percent felt only "somewhat" (30 percent), "a little" (23 percent) or "not at all" (14 percent) connected.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
June 10, 2010 - Peter Beinart
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
...Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
...Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.
But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.
And your definition of a terrorist is what exactly? Any Iranian? Any Arab?
How did your so-called precision bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan work out? Only 'terrorists' were killed, right?
Says the person frothing at the mouth at the prospect of another war, and of more death and destruction (from the comfort of his armchair).
In any case, both poll results are a far cry from "Most Americans now see Israel for what it is, a dangerous racist state." So stop putting your words in our mouths.
Ok, fine, I'll bite. I know you are beyond convincing, but perhaps there are others who like to listen to facts and sound reason.
In my view, the term "wipe off the map" is just a foolish idiom developed by pro-Zionist propagandists to make everyone scared--this is not an idiom that exists in the Persian language. Despite that, I don't believe that this is where the major contention lies. I think the major point to be emphasized is that Ahmadinejad did not simply refer to 'Israel' as a country, but to the 'Zionist regime.' The problem with many people in America is they do not realize the way people in the Arab/Muslim world view Zionism. This is because Zionists have spend decades up until now successfully convincing many Americans that Zionism is inherently apart of Judaism and the Jewish people. Thus, it no longer becomes simply a political ideology, but an inherent right to all Jews, equal to that of their right to practice religion anywhere freely, to live their lives, etc etc. This is due to the so-called 'Right of Self-Determination' that can be traced back to the time of Woodrow Wilson and his failure of the 'League of Nations.' What is interesting about the idea of self-determination is that Zionists use it as an argument to justify the creation of a state on their own in Palestine. Ironically they do this while ignoring the rights of the Palestinian native population to recognize their right to self-determination as well. What is more interesting is that Zionists do not simply call for a state as the Palestinians do--one that is inclusive to all--but rather a Jewish state.
Thus, this Jewish-Zionist state has no place for Palestinians in it. If you disagree, look up the Nakba (Plan Dalet) circa 1947-1948 when the Zionist terrorist groups who later went on to form what you now call the Israeli Army, literally, expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes through the use of terror. This is because in their form of 'self-determination', there was no place for a Palestinian native population. Unfortunately for the Zionists, they could not get rid of all the Palestinians, which is why Palestinians living in Israel currently enjoy good old-fashioned second-class citizenship. Furthermore, the Palestinians living in those territories occupied after the June 1967 war live in even worse conditions. The nature that Israel conducts itself in the West Bank (Jewish-only roads, a separation wall that isolates the Palestinian population, checkpoints, etc) speaks volumes as to how the Israeli government sees the Palestinians and the Israelis as distinct. Considering how much Americans pride themselves in the fact that our government distinguishes no one based on ethnicity, it's shocking to the conscious to see so many Americans ally themselves with the Zionist ideology, that advocates such measures taken by the Israeli governments over the past several decades, by the inclusion of there being a 'Jewish State', as opposed to simply a 'State for Jews' in which all can live equally without there being distinctions.
Ultimately, while I do not speak for Ahmadinejad, Arabs and Muslims do not claim to want to expel the Jews from the land of Palestine, or as Zionist propagandists would have you believe, push them into the sea. They do however want to dismantle the Zionist regime--and by this they refer to the racist ideology dominating Israeli governments. Supposedly, the removal of the Saddam regime did not mean the destruction of Iraq (that was just an accident, right?). However, the Zionist paranoia that has infested America that somehow the Arab/Muslim world will together kill the millions of Jews is sheer nonsense. This is a war of ideologies, and the Zionist ideology is a stubborn one. As all racist ideologies are.