Here is a great primer for the un-initiated on the Arab-Israeli conflict....

http://knowledgenews.net/moxie/worldtou ... ct-4.shtml

I think that's a partial... I am a "lifetime" member of this place, and wholeheartedly recommend it.

I don't think they do lifetime anymore, but it's only $24 / yr.

If you don't want to fuck with a free trial and just want to see the three parts of this, PM me and I will send you the PDFs.

'Israel was a creation of the UN. Anyone who supposedly believes in international law has to concede that ground, and therefore Israel's right to exist'

This is nonsense. Laws change, are unjust, are cheats, are lies, are mirages, are distractions, etc. International law is especially mercurial. Clearly all of this shite is not the fault of Jews or the Jewish state, and clearly, as you have suggested, there are reasons to support Israel that are non-religious. There are also reasons to make UN resolutions that happen to fly in the face of what the UN is supposedly about, or what international movements away from colonialism are about, or what democracy is about, etc. Israel's creation was a gob in the face of many a trend and many a people, and that is why, 'right to exist' or no, they are still at war. It will not go away easily as people live on the ground, facts, similar to settlements, but with memory and anguish and all manner of willful expressions.

Imagine a late 19th century federal government that armed blacks, gave them lands, and ran roughshod over the culture that was dominant in the South of the period. Terror, you think? Now imagine that they only ran roughshod, established the vote, and left. Terror for sure. It is not right, but it is the result of stupidity and conniving, of manipulation and reading only that which one prefers. No one is right, but one group asked for hell and brought it with them, helped to create it. No one is clean in hell. Make your bed and sleep tight.

Just dumb. And here we are more than fifty years subsequent and not one iota smarter.

Rick Reuben wrote:

Carnival of Souls wrote:Have you read Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America?

The book by neo-con Mossad agent Yossef Bodansky? Yes, I've read excerpts from it. Bodansky is part of this Likudnik think tank in Israel with illustrious PNAC scum like Wurmsmer. Of course Bodansky promotes bin Laden as a master of terror. Wouldn't you, if you were trying to deflect attention away from an inside job?

Berman is also listed as a "contributing expert" for the Ariel Center for Policy Research, headquartered in Shaarei Tikva, Israel, a title he shares with noted pro-Likudniks like Binyamin Netanyahu, Yossef Bodansky, Frank Gaffney, Meyrav Wurmser, and Joseph Farah. The Ariel Center belies any notion of impartiality when it refers to the Occupied West Bank as "Judea and Samaria."

That's hilarious. A real objective source you've got there on Iraq. What does Bodansky think about Ahmed Chalabi and 'Curveball'??

carnival of souls wrote:Also, my father, a thirty year veteran of the Army and a retired colonel was in the Middle East in the 1990's and was part of intelligence teams that were tracking Bin Laden's movements even back then.

Could you ask your father why he couldn't catch bin Laden when he was at the Dubai American Hospital in July 2001? Or when he was surrounded in Tora Bora in 2002? Actually, ask him if he thinks bin Laden is dead. And if he knows where those aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium and mobile WMD's are, too.

Say hello to Hour of the Wolf for me, too.

You have read "excerpts" from the book. It shows how informative you are.

YOU still are deflecting the facts.

His book showing details of Osma Bin Laden having meetings with Hussein and setting up training camps was researched and released in a book years before the Iraq invasion or 9/11. Pretty monumental and yet you still ignore it. Evidence that contradicts everything you are saying.

Carnival of Souls wrote:
His book showing details of Osma Bin Laden having meetings with Hussein and setting up training camps was researched and released in a book years before the Iraq invasion or 9/11. Pretty monumental and yet you still ignore it. Evidence that contradicts everything you are saying.

Hello deary.

Given that mooted connections between Hussein and Bin Laden were roundly debunked after the war by, among others, the Pentagon, I am genuinely curious as to what evidence Mr Bodansky brings to light.

I'm not very keen on shelling out for this book as frankly it sounds bunkum.

sparky wrote:

Carnival of Souls wrote:
His book showing details of Osma Bin Laden having meetings with Hussein and setting up training camps was researched and released in a book years before the Iraq invasion or 9/11. Pretty monumental and yet you still ignore it. Evidence that contradicts everything you are saying.

Hello deary.

Given that mooted connections between Hussein and Bin Laden were roundly debunked after the war by, among others, the Pentagon, I am genuinely curious as to what evidence Mr Bodansky brings to light.

I'm not very keen on shelling out for this book as frankly it sounds bunkum.

"Bunkum"? How dense are you?

The book was RESEARCHED AND PUBLISHED IN 1999. EVIDENCE LINKING THE TWO WAS BEFORE 2003 OR 2001.

Does that sink into your thick skull?
If you can't be bothered to by a book and educate yourself, I will copy paste sections of the book here when I have the time.
Cite me specific, textual evidence against his claims after reading the material and then we can debate. Otherwise you don't have an argument and a closed mind.

Carnival of Souls wrote:
"Bunkum"? How dense are you?

The toys come flying out of your pram pretty quickly, don't they?

In turn:

The book was RESEARCHED AND PUBLISHED IN 1999. EVIDENCE LINKING THE TWO WAS BEFORE 2003 OR 2001.

Which was my point above: the Pentagon issued a report after the war - as linked above - stating that there was no direct link between Bin Laden or Hussein. Your implication is somehow this ex-spook hack had information at hand that the Pentagon could not access six years afterwards.

That seems illogical.

If you can't be bothered to by a book and educate yourself, I will copy paste sections of the book here when I have the time.

I will not spend money on a book that sounds - admittedly from your rather overheated spiel - to be crank work. If you post something convincing, fine. But I suspect that all that will be offered is hearsay; weak, secondhand conspiracy theory.

Given the efforts that the Bush administration put into convincing people that there existed such a link between Hussein and Bin Laden, the admission by the Pentagon - long after this book was published - that no such form evidence exists, compromises your assertion.

Does that sink into your thick skull?

Grow up and stop throwing hissy fits, you touchy muppet.

The UN is not a font of wisdom. It is not a place where people receive divine revelation. It is not a body that interprets religious texts. It is not even a justice system per se. It is a voting-based political institution that makes political decisions in the way that all voting-based political institutions do.

So, from the point of view of the UN, Israel has the right to exist simply because that is the decision the UN made.

If people want to revisit that decision...if the UN wants to revoke that existential right...that will be a political process as well. But until the UN changes its mind, it hasn't changed its mind, and the decision stands.

There are points of view other than those of the UN. And the decision making processes behind those points of view are as varied as mankind itself. But I've not been talking about those.

All I'm saying is that if you want to cite UN decisions as having authority over Israel related conflicts, then you also have to accept the UN has authority over whether Israel has a right to exist.

I'm not saying the UN is always right. (Hardly!) I'm not saying individuals cannot pick and choose as to which decisions they agree with. Everyone has the right to an opinion.

What I'm saying is that people should be consistent as to what authority they think the UN should have. To say something akin to "the UN has authority to make decision A relating to X because I agree with A, but the UN has no authority to make decision B relating to X because I disagree with B" is to undercut ones own implicit claim that the UN has any authority at all.

In short, people should make up their mind as to whether they think the UN has the authority to create legitimate demands in Israel related matters or not.

Earwicker wrote:

galanter wrote:I'm a lot more interested in supporting a peace process that has a chance of working.

What do you think that such a process might need? In other words what would both sides need to do to give any peace process a chance to work?

...

I suspect your peace process involves the fellas with the biggest guns doing whatever the fuck they want to do. Cause they can.

But do enlighten us.

Not unlike my previous response, I'm going to reply that the peace process is ultimately a political process. There is, so far as I can tell, no unifying and specific moral code that all involved already agree with. And different players are going to have more or less empathy for other players in an uncorrelated way.

But it's my utilitarian calculation that even from the point of view of pure self-interest, an overwhelming majority in the region (and the world) are going to be better served by nurturing a peace process than encouraging the violence to continue until a total military victory is achieved by one side or the other.

The details of the peace can (perhaps) be worked out as long as there is a negotiating process in place. But the creation of a negotiation process is a mandatory first step.

I just heard on the radio that Israel and the Palestinians (minus Hamas of course) have issued a joint announcement agreeing to such a process.

Meanwhile Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran further marginalize themselves as the few who seem to think their own interest is best achieved through violence. Iran is not an Arab state, and increasingly Hezbollah and Hamas are viewed by Arabs as being a problem rather than a solution.

galanter wrote:OK, I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands that their missile program is about weaponry. Just like their nuclear program.

Really.