Rachel Corrie....dead at 23

RolandTD20Kdrummer

The Israeli army got away with murder.

They get away with murder regularly...riding on the backs of US taxpayers and more billions in religious donations from Christian televangelists.

Rescuing Private Lynch...but forgetting Rachel Corrie:
http://www.monabaker.com/pMachine/more.php?id=A831_0_1_0_M

sad...

Byrnzie

Also, let's not forget Tom Hurndall who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper whilst trying to protect some Palestinian children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Byrnzie wrote:

Also, let's not forget Tom Hurndall who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper whilst trying to protect some Palestinian children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall

Ah, that would explain the pic in the article above I posted.

As soon as I found out any Israeli from anywhere around the world can get a free govt loan (if they stay 10 years) to have some tank bulldoze a palestinian home as the soldiers beat and kick (and shoot) women and children to get them to leave so they can make room make room for a nice new Jewish house...FOR FREE...

Palestinians have no water to drink, just some muddy infested puddle, while Jews just across the way are lavishing in backyard swimming pools, with air conditioned houses.

That's when it all became clear to me exactly what's going on.

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Please give this site some traffic and leave some words of support if you can find the time.

http://www.rachelswords.org/about/

freedomboy

nickcat0 wrote:

I admire people like Rachel who know what they believe in .

Personally , whilst finding her death sad , I've no idea if she was a martyr or a troublemaker .

I find the whole "Middle East" question too confusing . So many conflicting stories , so many atrocities on all sides , I just don't know who are the good guys and who are the bad ?

This applies to Israel , Palestine , Iraq ..... all of them . Sometimes it seems that everyone is in the wrong .

Here is a hint:

Don't side with you oppressor.

Don't side with those who constantly wage war.

There are no good guys, but there sure as hell are bad guys.

Nothing is black and white... surely, all is gray.

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Palestinians are held TIGHTLY to the condition of turn the other cheek forever..

The SECOND they do not turn the other cheek and actually rise up, the media jumps all over it painting them as blood thirsty terrorists that want to kill you and your children.

Granted the response by the palestinians is wrong. But think about it. Who takes their own life in a suicide to defend themselves? A sad, desperate person with no hope whatsoever for the future. Not some maniac...no....not at all. Let's be very clear about this reality. You need to really think hard about it.

Trust me on this...it's a disgusting dual standard that entails the extermination of an entire race of people.

One side is a trillion dollars in endless support...nukes, tanks f-16's and the latest technology of modern weaponry...the other side is sheer poverty, hopelessness, and desperation using anything they can get their hands on to survive.

The equation and numbers are simple to understand. It's a calculated extermination.

Byrnzie

RolandTD20Kdrummer wrote:

Palestinians are held TIGHTLY to the condition of turn the other cheek forever..

The SECOND they do not turn the other cheek and actually rise up, the media jumps all over it painting them as blood thirsty terrorists that want to kill you and your children.

Granted the response by the palestinians is wrong. But think about it. Who takes their own life in a suicide to defend themselves? A sad, desperate person with no hope whatsoever for the future. Not some maniac...no....not at all. Let's be very clear about this reality. You need to really think hard about it.

Trust me on this...it's a disgusting dual standard that entails the extermination of an entire race of people.

One side is a trillion dollars in endless support...nukes, tanks f-16's and the latest technology of modern weaponry...the other side is sheer poverty, hopelessness, and desperation using anything they can get their hands on to survive.

The equation and numbers are simple to understand. It's a calculated extermination.

True. And the U.S has just pumped in another $30-billion to this brutal and illegal military occupation.

http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm

'Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. Indeed, Israel's GNP is higher than the combined GNP of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.'

'Since 1949 the U.S. has given Israel a total of $83.205 billion. The interest costs borne by U.S. tax payers on behalf of Israel are $49.937 billion, thus making the total amount of aid given to Israel since 1949 $133.132 billion. This may mean that U.S. government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.'

haffajappa

Byrnzie wrote:

RolandTD20Kdrummer wrote:

Palestinians are held TIGHTLY to the condition of turn the other cheek forever..

The SECOND they do not turn the other cheek and actually rise up, the media jumps all over it painting them as blood thirsty terrorists that want to kill you and your children.

Granted the response by the palestinians is wrong. But think about it. Who takes their own life in a suicide to defend themselves? A sad, desperate person with no hope whatsoever for the future. Not some maniac...no....not at all. Let's be very clear about this reality. You need to really think hard about it.

Trust me on this...it's a disgusting dual standard that entails the extermination of an entire race of people.

One side is a trillion dollars in endless support...nukes, tanks f-16's and the latest technology of modern weaponry...the other side is sheer poverty, hopelessness, and desperation using anything they can get their hands on to survive.

The equation and numbers are simple to understand. It's a calculated extermination.

True. And the U.S has just pumped in another $30-billion to this brutal and illegal military occupation.

http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm

'Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. Indeed, Israel's GNP is higher than the combined GNP of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.'

'Since 1949 the U.S. has given Israel a total of $83.205 billion. The interest costs borne by U.S. tax payers on behalf of Israel are $49.937 billion, thus making the total amount of aid given to Israel since 1949 $133.132 billion. This may mean that U.S. government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.'

Think of how many Haitis you could rebuild with 83.205 billion!

yosi

Do you guys get off on this echo chamber thing?

"I hate Israel!"

"Yeah! Me too!"

"Israel is the worstest place on earth!"

"Palestinians are little angels on clouds with harpsichords, and the Israeli ogres just want to kill them and eat them and piss in their eye sockets!"

"I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!"

"Yeah, and everyone else would realize how right we are if they weren't so brainwashed by reality!"

"Yeah, I hate reality! It's so complicated!"

This makes me think of a conversation I just had over dinner with a pretty eminent journalist who is teaching at the Columbia journalism school. He said he is tired of interviewing extremists because they are all the same regardless of their politics. He said that their psychology is essentially juvenile, that they all think like 15 year olds. They've just discovered abstract ideas and are using them to explain everything in the world. And when something doesn't fit with their explanation they simply ignore it. Except with a 15 year old it's kind of cute, but with a 50 year old it's really scary. Basically I'm saying that this board has the tone of a high-school cafeteria.

Pepe Silvia

yosi wrote:

Do you guys get off on this echo chamber thing?

"I hate Israel!"

"Yeah! Me too!"

"Israel is the worstest place on earth!"

"Palestinians are little angels on clouds with harpsichords, and the Israeli ogres just want to kill them and eat them and piss in their eye sockets!"

"I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!"

"Yeah, and everyone else would realize how right we are if they weren't so brainwashed by reality!"

"Yeah, I hate reality! It's so complicated!"

This makes me think of a conversation I just had over dinner with a pretty eminent journalist who is teaching at the Columbia journalism school. He said he is tired of interviewing extremists because they are all the same regardless of their politics. He said that their psychology is essentially juvenile, that they all think like 15 year olds. They've just discovered abstract ideas and are using them to explain everything in the world. And when something doesn't fit with their explanation they simply ignore it. Except with a 15 year old it's kind of cute, but with a 50 year old it's really scary. Basically I'm saying that this board has the tone of a high-school cafeteria.

silly, yosi, they don't want to eat them, just harvest their organs without consent!

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=120801&p=2723697

yosi

And my point is proven.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

This makes me think of a conversation I just had over dinner with a pretty eminent journalist who is teaching at the Columbia journalism school. He said he is tired of interviewing extremists because they are all the same regardless of their politics. He said that their psychology is essentially juvenile, that they all think like 15 year olds. They've just discovered abstract ideas and are using them to explain everything in the world. And when something doesn't fit with their explanation they simply ignore it. Except with a 15 year old it's kind of cute, but with a 50 year old it's really scary. Basically I'm saying that this board has the tone of a high-school cafeteria.

A defender of Zionism talking about abstract ideas? Oh the irony!

rebornFixer

yosi wrote:

Do you guys get off on this echo chamber thing?

"I hate Israel!"

"Yeah! Me too!"

"Israel is the worstest place on earth!"

"Palestinians are little angels on clouds with harpsichords, and the Israeli ogres just want to kill them and eat them and piss in their eye sockets!"

"I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!"

"Yeah, and everyone else would realize how right we are if they weren't so brainwashed by reality!"

"Yeah, I hate reality! It's so complicated!"

This makes me think of a conversation I just had over dinner with a pretty eminent journalist who is teaching at the Columbia journalism school. He said he is tired of interviewing extremists because they are all the same regardless of their politics. He said that their psychology is essentially juvenile, that they all think like 15 year olds. They've just discovered abstract ideas and are using them to explain everything in the world. And when something doesn't fit with their explanation they simply ignore it. Except with a 15 year old it's kind of cute, but with a 50 year old it's really scary. Basically I'm saying that this board has the tone of a high-school cafeteria.

+1

TriumphantAngel

rebornFixer wrote:

yosi wrote:

Do you guys get off on this echo chamber thing?

"I hate Israel!"

"Yeah! Me too!"

"Israel is the worstest place on earth!"

"Palestinians are little angels on clouds with harpsichords, and the Israeli ogres just want to kill them and eat them and piss in their eye sockets!"

"I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!"

"Yeah, and everyone else would realize how right we are if they weren't so brainwashed by reality!"

"Yeah, I hate reality! It's so complicated!"

+1

i challenge you to find where anyone on this board has ever said anything like that. it's like you go to the extremes to make jokes and try and take the focus away from Israels actual crimes.

you know, comment like this "I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!" really aren't necessary. no one has ever said that.

that's what you are doing yosi. trying to take the focus away from the actual crimes by creating this imaginary almost ridiculous scenario.

rebornFixer

TriumphantAngel wrote:

i challenge you to find where anyone on this board has ever said anything like that. it's like you go to the extremes to make jokes and try and take the focus away from Israels actual crimes.

you know, comment like this "I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!" really aren't necessary. no one has ever said that.

that's what you are doing yosi. trying to take the focus away from the actual crimes by creating this imaginary almost ridiculous scenario.

He's using hyperbole to make a point! Of course no one has gone on about pissing in eye sockets or Jew rituals. But the debate on this topic goes absolutely nowhere because the intent of all these Israel-Palestine posts seems to have little or nothing to do with learning about different perspectives ... When there's no real interest in viewing the situation from a nuanced perspective (which is the sort of view I feel this issue requires), one is basically left wondering if the point is just to demonize Israelis (which is the sort of argument that folks like Byrnzie hate, but how else to take it?). You can spread awareness about problematic Israeli actions but still concede that BOTH sides are comprised of human beings whose decisions have a huge impact on what the other side does.

yosi

Thank you. I couldn't have said it better.

TriumphantAngel

rebornFixer wrote:

TriumphantAngel wrote:

i challenge you to find where anyone on this board has ever said anything like that. it's like you go to the extremes to make jokes and try and take the focus away from Israels actual crimes.

you know, comment like this "I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!" really aren't necessary. no one has ever said that.

that's what you are doing yosi. trying to take the focus away from the actual crimes by creating this imaginary almost ridiculous scenario.

He's using hyperbole to make a point! Of course no one has gone on about pissing in eye sockets or Jew rituals. But the debate on this topic goes absolutely nowhere because the intent of all these Israel-Palestine posts seems to have little or nothing to do with learning about different perspectives ... When there's no real interest in viewing the situation from a nuanced perspective (which is the sort of view I feel this issue requires), one is basically left wondering if the point is just to demonize Israelis (which is the sort of argument that folks like Byrnzie hate, but how else to take it?). You can spread awareness about problematic Israeli actions but still concede that BOTH sides are comprised of human beings whose decisions have a huge impact on what the other side does.

there are 1.5 million ordinary Palestinians illegally imprisoned as we speak.

what's to become of them. what do you think should happen to these people?

yosi

I think that they should recognize how they have contributed to their own situation through spurning opportunities for peace, refusing to accept the existence of Israel, and making the choice to turn to terrorism. At the same time Israel needs to go through a similar process of understanding its own role in the oppression of the Palestinians. When both sides can recognize how they have traumatized the other, how the other side is just as much a victim of this conflict as they are, perhaps we can have peace, and the Palestinians can have a state in which they would be responsible for their own well being.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

I think that they should recognize how they have contributed to their own situation through spurning opportunities for peace

Such as?

yosi wrote:

refusing to accept the existence of Israel

Why doesn't Israel accept the existence of Palestine?

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0311-26.htm
March 11, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times

Why Does The Times Recognize Israel's 'Right to Exist'?

by Saree Makdisi

'AS SOON AS certain topics are raised," George Orwell once wrote, "the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." Such a combination of vagueness and sheer incompetence in language, Orwell warned, leads to political conformity.

No issue better illustrates Orwell's point than coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. Consider, for example, the editorial in The Times on Feb. 9 demanding that the Palestinians "recognize Israel" and its "right to exist." This is a common enough sentiment — even a cliche. Yet many observers (most recently the international lawyer John Whitbeck) have pointed out that this proposition, assiduously propagated by Israel's advocates and uncritically reiterated by American politicians and journalists, is — at best — utterly nonsensical.

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

Orwell was right. It is much easier to recycle meaningless phrases than to ask — let alone to answer — difficult questions. But recycling these empty phrases serves a purpose. Endlessly repeating the mantra that the Palestinians don't recognize Israel helps paint Israel as an innocent victim, politely asking to be recognized but being rebuffed by its cruel enemies.

Actually, it asks even more. Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

A just peace will require Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile and recognize each other's rights. It will not require that Palestinians give their moral seal of approval to the catastrophe that befell them. Meaningless at best, cynical and manipulative at worst, such a demand may suit Israel's purposes, but it does not serve The Times or its readers.

And yet The Times consistently adopts Israel's language and, hence, its point of view. For example, a recent article on Israel's Palestinian minority referred to that minority not as "Palestinian" but as generically "Arab," Israel's official term for a population whose full political and human rights it refuses to recognize. To fail to acknowledge the living Palestinian presence inside Israel (and its enduring continuity with the rest of the Palestinian people) is to elide the history at the heart of the conflict — and to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian claims and rights.

This is exactly what Israel wants. Indeed, its demand that its "right to exist" be recognized reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians' presence inside their homeland — a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function.

In uncritically adopting Israel's own fraught terminology — a form of verbal erasure designed to extend the physical destruction of Palestine — The Times is taking sides.

yosi wrote:

and making the choice to turn to terrorism.

Why doesn't Israel relinquish terrorism?

yosi wrote:

When both sides can recognize how they have traumatized the other, how the other side is just as much a victim of this conflict as they are

So you think the Israelis are just as much victims in this conflict as the Palestinians? Why do you constantly try to turn reality on it's head?

TriumphantAngel

yosi wrote:

I think that they should recognize how they have contributed to their own situation through spurning opportunities for peace, refusing to accept the existence of Israel, and making the choice to turn to terrorism. At the same time Israel needs to go through a similar process of understanding its own role in the oppression of the Palestinians. When both sides can recognize how they have traumatized the other, how the other side is just as much a victim of this conflict as they are, perhaps we can have peace, and the Palestinians can have a state in which they would be responsible for their own well being.

i see it much differently.

Israel is the only one with the power to bring about the two state solution. Hamas and the whole of the entire world has called for a two state solution on the 1967 borders which will halt all violence. Israel has so far refused, and they continually block all efforts of any hope of peace by not withdrawing to the 1967 borders.

perhaps if Israel stopped refusing to abide by international law, and recognize the rights of the Palestinians, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.