POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Hanan Ashrawi is a brilliant and articulate spokesperson for the Palestinians.
I wish her well, but I fear she has against her very powerful and devious foes.
The logic and fairness of Palestinian statehood should be apparent to everyone.
But Israel is interested in neither logic nor fairness.
It is interested in more land, and it wants that land minus its owners and occupants.
And the United States in matters of policy in this part of the world takes its direction from Israel.
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"On a separate note - since the Holy Ramadan started, 121 people have been killed in 50 separate terrorist attacks committed by Muslims."
That is just uninformed trash.
Please note the reader quotes no details at all even as to location.
Just lets readers assume.
This trash is straight from the Israeli Ministry of Truth.
But if you want a documented fact - not a vague assertion - Israel has killed 1335 children in the occupied territories since the year 2000.
And that number is just the children.
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"The U.S has failed the Palestinians for more than 60 years..."
The U.S. administrations have been over a barrel since the beginning.
Harry Truman did not want to recognize Israel when the gangs of thugs like the Irgun and Stern seized a portion of the land and declared a state with no legitimate basis whatsoever, beyond a vague promise from a British Foreign Secretary decades before.
But Truman was facing an election, and his popularity was sagging.
He faced a literal onslaught of American Jewish leaders pleading and arguing and cajoling for Israel's quick recognition.
He is quoted himself as saying he never experienced anything quite like it. It was intense.
And, in the end, he gave in.
Of course, with his surrender came generous financial contributions to his campaign plus a good press that built him up as a true statesman.
That is how it was in 1948, and that is how it still is more than sixty years later.
Obama's polls have slipped. He needs big money for the 2012 campaign, and he needs the kind of press the major networks and papers liker The New York Times can give him.
Not only that but Israel runs a literal machine for influencing American congressmen. About eighty of them, largely freshmen, are going on paid junket to Israel. They will be well indoctrinated and made to understand the benefits of blindly supporting Israel.
This happens all the time.
One could argue that the endless foreign aid America sends Israel - the largest such amount given to any country on the planet - every year enables Israel to organize its elaborate and costly lobbying organization.
Thus the U.S. itself indirectly pays the bills for this massive effort at influence by special interests.
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“I see injustice in the Palestinians still embracing terrorism.”
What kind of thinking is this?
Who just recently murdered 400 Palestinian children, plus a thousand others, in Operation Cast Lead?
Who pirated a fleet of boats on the high seas, killing nine unarmed people?
Who regularly assassinates people it does not like?
Who fakes passports from New Zealand or Canada to commit its assassinations?
Who regularly steals homes and farms others have owned for centuries?
Who has 150 nuclear weapons, against all international laws and treaties?
Who traded nuclear weapons technology to apartheid South Africa?
Who maintains a literal garrison state, spending an unbelievable part of its wealth on weapons?
Who dropped tens of thousands of cluster bombs on Southern Lebanon to kill and maim for years?
Who killed about 1400 people invading Lebanon?
Who killed four UN Observers, including a brave Canadian officer, while it invaded Southern Lebanon?
Who almost daily flies warplanes over Southern Lebanon?
Who previously invaded Lebanon, killing thousands and occupying parts of it for 18 years?
Whose state started with a concerted terror attack on innocent civilians in 1948, killing and raping and brutalizing hundreds?
Who keeps a million and a half people imprisoned in Gaza?
Yes, Palestinians have at times used terror, but what is their example?
And can anyone reasonably argue that anything Palestinians have done even begins to compare to the endless war and brutal occupation and apartheid for which Israel is responsible?
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“There already is a Palestinian state.
It is called Jordan.”
Oh please, that is a tiresome refrain heard a thousand times.
It is not for Israel to decide such matters. The very repetition of this slogan is arrogant.
Jordan is Jordan.
It is not Palestine.
It does not want the Palestinians.
The Palestinians do not want to live in Jordan.
The Palestinians have a history as old as the Hebrew people.
Indeed, some academic authorities in Israel maintain that the Palestinians are at least in part the descendants of the Hebrews.
When Rome conquered a territory, as it did Israel/Palestine in the first century CE, it typically did not remove inhabitants, unless they were recalcitrant against Roman rule.
Thus, what we likely have in Israel today, are immigrants - most of them hybrid with Germans or Spanish or Russian over centuries - pushing out some direct descendants of the people who lived in Israel in Biblical times.
A dark irony indeed.
No matter what the case, if Israel wants to be regarded as a country like any other country, it must behave as we expect others to behave.
And that doesn’t include apartheid or the regularly stealing of the property of others or torture and assassinations and bloody invasions without pause.
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"Islamic supremacists can never conceal their hatred for the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (cf. Qur'an 5:82) ."
What garbage you write.
The Prophet honored the Jews and called them "the people of the Book."
Jewish prophets are honored by Islam.
Originally Muhammad had Muslims pray towards Jerusalem.
It was changed to Mecca for various reasons.
I think what this writer is demonstrating is the old idea in psychology called projection.
That is a state of mind in which a person attributes to those he does not like the very feelings he or she exhibits.
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‘"Don't you ever tire of pitching propaganda? The partial and carefully selected facts here are the sure sign of a non-thinking ideologue" writes the poster in reference to my five point approach, below, to the way Israel should, and in all probability will, act upon the PLO's move at the UN.’
Hard to believe someone can be so lacking in understanding.
First, anyone who writes of "Eretz Israel" has left the conversation of rational people.
“Eretz Israel” is modern made-up concept, and it is a concept that guarantees endless future troubles.
There are no maps in the Tanakh.
And even if there were, the claim to what temporarily existed in ancient times is a bad joke more than two thousand years later.
The concept also flies in the face of UN resolutions and even American policy.
You use the term "nation-state of the Jewish people" What is that? In fact, it is another made-up concept intended to sound reasonable but actually incorporating dark and dangerous dreams.
Israel is nearly 20% non-Jewish, but those non-Jewish people hold Israeli citizenship and Israeli passports.
It wasn't that Israel planned it that way. It just happened because a lot of Palestinians refused to be terrorized by Lehi, Stern, and Irgun in 1948.
So Israel made up the concept you mention, a concept which is a legalistic construct above what all nations regard as normal definitions of citizenship, effectively excluding these million people by definition.
Unfortunately, a lot of people do not understand the implications of this construct, just passing over it as a phrase with no special meaning, but they are greatly mistaken in doing so.
But were the world to accept this artificial construct, Israel would without question expel these million souls, despite their passports, to God knows where. Many prominent Israelis have in the past actually advocated this, and they include the current foreign minister, the appalling Avigdor Lieberman.
Of course, the biggest fallacy of your words has to do with the concept of Israel itself. Where is Israel? What are its borders? What defines a citizen?
Good and reasonable answers to none of these can be given beyond Israel is what's inside the Green Line, and its people are those who live there.
Such a simple concept, really, but one unreasonable apologists for Israel flatly refuse as they go on with dreams of an Israeli Empire - aka, “Eretz Israel.”
Israel is to close all borders with Gaza? Surely even you know that is impossible. Israel must allow people to move between the West Bank and Jerusalem. That is part of past international understandings and it is a required human need.
"As for the "Palestinians", they'll have to fend for themselves, in all respects, including financial!!"
Putting the word Palestinians in quotes and using a triple exclamation mark demonstrates the angry-child tone of your entire words.
Angry children do not make foreign policy, or, if they do, their work proves the despair of the world.
Of course, the last thing your pompous words leave out is the occupation. The 1967 War was deliberately engineered by Israel in an effort to gain the "Eretz Israel" which the Israeli terrorists of the Irgun and Stern and Lehi failed to grab.
Israel must surrender this land or a traded-equivalent to the Palestinians in the end. There is no alternative unless the world agrees that open aggression should be rewarded with expanded borders.
And I doubt even for Israel, with all its lobbying and inordinate influence, that that is going to happen: that would be a formula for chaos in world affairs.
