eliya wrote:It's like a cold war kind of thing, Iran is saying they have nuclear weapons, Israel is saying they have nuclear weapons, Iran has nuclear weapons, Israel has nuclear weapons.

Er - no - Israel has nuclear weapons and is rattling them. Iran does not have nuclear weapons.

That is not analogous to the Cold War.

And Rick didn't need to mention that Israel is having firecrackers hurled at them all the time because the mainstream press is forever mentioning it in the West - your request for saying why such and such a violent act takes place would lead back a lot of years, turning into a history lesson that wouldn't look at all good for Israel (or, if you'd prefer, 'wouldn't look good for successive, elected Israeli governments').

Weren't you the fella bleating about the actions of your government a short while back how you don't agree with them and shouldn't be considered as supporting them?
If so why you getting all defensive all of a sudden?

Face it *your government* is a cruel, tyrannical and oppressive bully...

...and with big old nuclear bombs to boot.

Are you kidding or something? What did I say which defended the Israeli government in my posts? I'm just saying "show the whole story". That doesn't mean I agree with anything the Israeli government is doing.

edit: my mistake, Iran doesn't have any nuclear weapon. Anyhow, Ahmadinejad seems to brag about the missiles they have and how far they can get. I still think it's a cold war kind of thing, Irani government is bragging about their missiles, Israeli government is playing it like they don't know what nukes are, then they say they will bomb gaza. But they say it because of something else that happened. I just think that when you're bringing a story somewhere, you should bring the whole story and not just part of it, regardless whether it's Israel or not. It doesn't matter if it's being covered by the media or not.

I'm not gonna argue with you anymore. You're trying to turn me into an evil dude while I'm not.

Did I say that Iran is going to nuke israel? I just said that they brag about missiles they have, I said that they probably won't nuke Israel.
I'm not asking for balance in the media, I ask you not to be show just one side of the story. Maybe this kid is the first kid is the first major casualty, but people are suffering there. Yes, people are suffering in Gaza too, but there's not competition of who's suffering more. People on both sides of this situation are suffering. I'm the one who's admitting the truth and the shitty situation. You're the one who likes to show only one side of the story.

I'm not making any posts about this kind of stuff cause I try to keep myself out of it, sometimes I just can't. I'm not making any posts about the shutdown in Israel cause I know that everybody knows about it and that it's shit that the Israeli government did that. You think I'm happy with this shutdown? You think I'm happy with kids dying in Gaza? You think I'm happy with them having less conditions than I do? NO! But I'm not happy when people are getting bombed in Sderot.

That's my last post here and in other threads where you're involved. It seems like you're not reading what I'm writing or that you don't try to understand what I write. There are lots of matters where we agree, but you're always trying to turn it into an argument where I'm a right winged fuck head.

I'm tired of it.

Yes, I write sloppy sentences. Iran doesn't have Nuclear weapon. but they want to. So yes, they say they have missiles(not necessarily nuclear) which can get to Israel, Israel is responding with saying they have nukes. That's what I mean by playing a cold war game. I just don't understand how you get from that sentence to me being a fanatic who wants to nuke Iran.

I feel so much like giving you soooooo much shit, but that's what you want, so I won't give it to you.

Rick Reuben wrote:

eliya wrote: Iran doesn't have Nuclear weapon. but they want to.

Who told you? Benjy Netanyahu?

Israel wanted nuclear weapons, and then they got them. So they committed the first sin. Now you say the rules change, and Zionists are permitted defensive nukes, but Muslims aren't? What bullshit.

where did I say that? what the fuck? I said Irani gov wants Nukes, Israel got it first, did I say if it's good or bad? Did I say anything about not giving Muslim people nuclear weapons? Did I even get into this argument?

That's not what he said, Rick.

He said he didn't think Israel will be the first one to start a Nuclear war.

You're putting words in his mouth that he never said.

The Israelis got the land (back) by diplomacy, and then successfully defended it militarily.

That's not theft.
It's ART.

Sorry about the strange question marks all over the place, but that's how he posted it.

Bringing down the new Berlin Walls

13 Feb 2008

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the Palestinian breakout of Gaza offers inspiration for people struggling to bring down the new Berlin Walls all over the world.

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon�s master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

�[Sharon�s] fate for us,� wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, �was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today � that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it.�

Israel�s and America�s experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the �international community� whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as �disputed� and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as �Hamas militants� who �refuse to recognise Israel�s right to exist� when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians� right to exist.

�What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public,� wrote Uri Avnery, a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, �is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week . . . Why doesn�t our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas . . . It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence.� Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the �reality� of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words �Sympathise with Gaza� in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika�s yellow card said: �It is actions like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds.�

In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime�s despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a �hundred-year war�. That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama�s chief whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: �The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.� Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement written by five of the west�s top military leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass destruction � with the exclusion, that is, of the west�s nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because �the west�s values and way of life are under threat�.

Where is this threat coming from? �Over there,� say the generals.

Where? In �the brutal world�.

On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that �the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]� is over. The reason he gave was that �the international community� (basically, the west) was facing �serious challenges�. One of these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America�s National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown�s Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed to be as much as �25bn. What Brown was doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as �Apocalypse Soon�. Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new �nuclear threat�. The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a �sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks�.

Behold Nato�s instant �brutal world�.

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates �us� from �them�. This is described today as a great divide of religions or �a clash of civilisations�, which are false concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called �the other� � an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of �discovery and conquest� were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the �integration of countries into the global free-market community�, the terms of which, noted the New York Times, �require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations� internal affairs more deeply than ever before�.

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even �promoting democracy in Iraq�, according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical members of the public. That �we� in the west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This is neoliberalism � socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. �Rather than acknowledging,� wrote Chalmers Johnson, �that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental failure � namely, culture.�

What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call �the left�. At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Ch�vez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of Ch�vez�s Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, might have written: �Opposition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred.� If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why can�t we?

krakabash wrote:The Israelis got the land (back) by diplomacy, and then successfully defended it militarily.

That's not theft.
It's ART.

This is just bullshit, which is a sort of art in certain circles.

The Zionists thieved land, cajoled colonialists in a time of dying colonialism, engaged in terror, engaged in intrigue, purchased land legally and illegally, and have, in the process, asked for every bit of the enmity they have received in the subsequent 60 years. They deserve every moment of hell that comes their way. They knew that they were making a land grab, that the land was connected by centuries to groups who, though not militarily capable of fending off the colonialists, would remain connected with the land they sought. They knew that those peoples, along with the entire region, would not sit well with a Jewish state in the midst of Arab lands. It was known and assumed that they would have to fight to keep the land, to spill blood for years. That is not in any way a mission of peace. Israel was created in a predatory manner that sought to capitalize off of victimhood (understandable), the Cold War, and the shift from colonialism to post-colonial rule. The Zionists colonized the areas they desired. The UN went along in so far as the major powers cared not one whit about the Arabs. The UN resolution that assisted the creation of Israel was in no way a vote for democratic traditions, human rights, etc. It was a toss off for post-colonial rule and opened the door for the importation of millions who had no prior connection to the land save religious belief and a desire to live somewhere that would place them in a position of advantage (understandable on multiple levels, not least of which is the inherent escape from various forms of persecution).

The fact that Israel's most obvious analogue was apartheid South Africa ought to tell people something. Democracy for the chosen, subservient inclusion for some of the 'others,' and fascism for those that won't accept.

Ranxerox wrote:

krakabash wrote:The Israelis got the land (back) by diplomacy, and then successfully defended it militarily.

That's not theft.
It's ART.

The Zionists thieved land, cajoled colonialists in a time of dying colonialism, engaged in terror, engaged in intrigue, purchased land legally and illegally, and have, in the process, asked for every bit of the enmity they have received in the subsequent 60 years. They deserve every moment of hell that comes their way. They knew that they were making a land grab, that the land was connected by centuries to groups who, though not militarily capable of fending off the colonialists, would remain connected with the land they sought. They knew that those peoples, along with the entire region, would not sit well with a Jewish state in the midst of Arab lands. It was known and assumed that they would have to fight to keep the land, to spill blood for years. That is not in any way a mission of peace. Israel was created in a predatory manner that sought to capitalize off of victimhood (understandable), the Cold War, and the shift from colonialism to post-colonial rule. The Zionists colonized the areas they desired. The UN went along in so far as the major powers cared not one whit about the Arabs. The UN resolution that assisted the creation of Israel was in no way a vote for democratic traditions, human rights, etc. It was a toss off for post-colonial rule and opened the door for the importation of millions who had no prior connection to the land save religious belief and a desire to live somewhere that would place them in a position of advantage (understandable on multiple levels, not least of which is the inherent escape from various forms of persecution).

The fact that Israel's most obvious analogue was apartheid South Africa ought to tell people something. Democracy for the chosen, subservient inclusion for some of the 'others,' and fascism for those that won't accept.

Seconded.

I'm not an expert in Middle-East issues and maybe the following thought is just plain wrong but I'll write it anyway. Perhaps it has been already expressed by Ahmadinejahd, I can't remember.

I started to reckon that the "Jewish State" could have been created in the occupied Germany and/or Austria. Those two states combined have an area of 440,893 km² and it would have been possible to accommodate the citizens of the new country (Israel is 22,072 km² large). Nazism was responsible for the holocaust (I don't obviously think that all the German people caused the extermination of the Jews). Given that (after 1900, at least) a new country to be created has to secede or steal the land of other countries, maybe it would have been easier to put Israel in Europe instead that in a place surrounded by understandably hostile neighbors. Instead if German people had been made aware of the full extent of the Shoa maybe they could have accepted a Jewish state as a neighbor.

There would have been a lot of problems, anyway (how to move the Zionist colonists already settled in Palestine, where to locate the new state in the German/Austrian territory and all the cold war problems related to that, etc.) but maybe we could have spared a part of the 50 years of war and chaos in the Middle East.