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Mobius! Linking to the work of Camera and Max Boot!
I’m going into shock.
He makes up for it by linking to Electronic Intifadah.
What’s with giving moral equivalency to Sharon and Arafat, when there is none and to Electronic Intifadah and CAMERA, where there is also none.
If you would like to find trustworthy Palestinian sources, go to JMCC or to Khalil Shikaky’s work, but please not these hateful propaganda sites. Next you’ll be linking to WRMEA.
Mobius didn’t link to EI. Asaf did.
I find that most people who oppose making “moral equivalents” out of things are really just unnuanced partisans of one side or another. Radical Palestinians also say that there is no moral equivalent between Palestinian resisters and Israeli occupiers, since one side is trying to free its people and the other side is trying to keep them down.
I say that if you kill innocent people as policy, you are just as bad as someone else who does the same thing. Thus, Sharon and Arafat are both evil pieces of $#!t.
Well I’m glad you qualified your statement by saying that most people with my views are unnuanced partisans. That way you can equivocate and say you didn’t mean me. I also like the way you qualified the killing of innocents “by policy” so you can claim that you didn’t just mean the killing of innocent people. I’m not sure where Israel has a policy of killing innocent people, I’ve never heard of that policy.
Please remember that the side that you claim is claiming “they are trying to free their people while the other side is keeping them down” says nothing of the kind. Why put words in their mouth? Simply read the Hamas and PLO Charters and look at their actions, and that’ll tell you exactly what these people want to say.
Now as for nuance:
There are people who think that it’s the same to accidentally kill a person while trying to kill the murderer hiding behind him (who has killed many and plans to kill many more), as it is to climb on a bus filled with families as they return from the Western Wall prayers, pause to think about the glory of 72 virgins, and then blow up those people – children, babies, pregnant women, torah-studying yeshiva students – on purpose. All people who think there is moral equivalency in these instances are unnuanced blobs of immoral goo. They have no sense of fairness or balance or respect for life.
Furthermore, I would add that they are, in fact, partially responsible for the ongoing murder-fest because they allow the immoral side to get away with their lying, hateful justifications of murder of innocents.
Blow up two towers with 3000 people? That’s okay, the US is baaaad.
Blow up buses and restaurants full of innocent civilians and many children? That’s okay, there are people “like them” who are hunting down our murderers of their children and that’s baaaaad.
Go to dance at a disco in Bali and get your face melted off before you die? That’s okay, your government, thousands of miles from the source of tensions with the murderers, expresses support for the baaaad Americans who side with the baaaaad Israelis.
Oh wait, does it matter that this baaad government buys our oil, as do the baaad Americans, thus giving our people food to eat? No, they are in Iraq or Israel or the Phillipines or the Galapagos Islands, and they are keeping our people down! Does it matter that Arab governments are more brutal than Australia, or Israel for that matter, has ever been? No, they are baaad and deserve to be blown up. Does it matter that they created peace plans and a peace process to address our grievances? No, because our grievances have only one solution and their attempts don’t satisfy this ideology of ours or that ideology of ours, so we’ll kill those poor innocent dancers at the disco because….because we want them to give in to our ideology. Did we mention their governments are baaaad?
See? Suddenly anything goes. Truth becomes immaterial and irrelevant; and anybody’s truth goes. You believe in something? Anything? Great! Your position is as valid as the other person who is a good person and doesn’t seek your destruction as you seek his.
Morality becomes irrelevant. Everybody deserves death and maiming, and the most evil people can justify their actions simply by claiming the other side has done them wrong. All the goodwilled people out there who side with the underdogs clap their hands in unison and say, “We understand why they do the bad things, it’s because the others are also baaaad.” Go ahead, blow up airplanes and buses and restaurants, we have sympathy for you and will say that it’s the same as when the other side hunts down your perpetrators of these actions.
Guess what, nuanced one? Going on a bus to kill people has nothing to do with freeing people and everything to do with…murdering innocent people. Launching a rocket to kill Rantisi and accidentally killing an innocent passerby has nothing to do with murdering innocent people and everything to do with…freeing all sides of the murderous, peace-hating vermin who want to kill innocent people. Having an art show at a university with flying body parts representing the “successful” carnage of innocent families in a restaurant is not the same, well, as, um, as, hmmm, a peace rally supported by about half of the population of the other side.
Arafat and his cult of murder is not comparable in any way with Sharon’s views and actions. A simple look at Israel’s firepower and the number of dead and manner of their death on all sides over the last decades would tell any unnuanced observer that the two leaders are/were very different.
Sam you are right. Read about Shamir and Began, the founders of the Likud paty
The State of Israel was also founded upon terror tactics including bombings, assasination and civilian murder. Right wing Zionist radicals like Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir, both to be later elected as Prime Ministers of Israel, were most definitly terrorists by any objective standard. Examples of Zionist terror operations sanctioned by Begin and Shamir include the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed many British soldiers, as well as innocent civilians, the assasination of Count Folke Bernadotte, and the assasination of Lord Moyne. In fact, most of what we recognize as the modern tactics of terror were first intorduced into the Middle East by the radical Zionists: bombing public markets, letter bombs, assasinations, etc.
In the course of the Zionist terror war against the British Mandate, the kidnap and murder of British soldiers was also a commonly used tactic. Eventually the British, exhausted from the struggle of World War II, wilted before the Zionist terror war and withdrew from Palestine, leaving the Arabs to face the same tactics.
The massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, men, women and children alike, at the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin by Irgun terrorists on April 9, 1948 was a key in creating the atmosphere of fear and panic that led approximately 750,000 Arabs to flee Palestine in the Spring of 1948, clearing the way for the establishment of Israel………….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist
Jennifer, are you the local troll?
i agree with u jennifer- what has been done to the palestinians is totally wrong. sharon should be recognised as a terrorist
oh and T_M [[email protected]] the 72 VIRGINS is not actually acurrate, and jus so u no the palestinians did not kill 3000 ppl in the twin towers.
In fact, most of what we recognize as the modern tactics of terror were first intorduced into the Middle East by the radical Zionists: bombing public markets, letter bombs, assasinations, etc. (…) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist.
As a parenthesis., I was a bit surprised to see the Wikipedia entry sounding like the Electronic Intifada site, so I clicked to take a look.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry doesn’t currently include this quote. As you can see from the revision history the Israel=terrorism bit was up for exactly three days — posted, as it happens, from an unregistered user connected to the corporate network at an Israeli network equipment manufacturer.
Close parenthesis. I’m curious, though, Jennifer. The quote you stand behind declares that the kidnap and murder of British soldiers was also a commonly used tactic. Eventually the British, exhausted from the struggle of World War II, wilted before the Zionist terror war. Many people, though, argue that guerilla warfare practiced against soldiers isn’t terrorism — only when it targets civilians.
What do you think? What’s your terrorism?
Why is it that anti-zionists always refer to the King David Hotel bombing? Can’t they find any;
suicide bus massacres by Jews,
school house massacres by Jews,
lynches where Jews crush the skulls of their prey and scoop up their brains in glee,
restaurant/cafe/fast-food joints that Jews blew and killed scores,
plane hijackings by Jews…
Always that single King David thing and the disputable Dir Yassin thing too.
Uh, sure.
It sounds good because the word “hotel” is in it and everybody knows who King David was. Usually, the pro-Palestinians neglect to mention that it happened in the wing that had been converted to British military HQ and that the Irgun called the hotel 5 times as well as a local newspaper to give them advance warning.
There were also two bombings by the Irgun of markets, and a 3rd that was attempted but the terrorist perpetrator was captured and killed on the spot by an Arab mob. Those two bombings killed scores of civilians.
I don’t think what happened at Deir Yassin is disputable, although the number of dead has come down to about 107 from the 250-300 that used to be mentioned.
What has happened, however, is that these small number of incidents, perpetrated by very tiny groups that did NOT have the support of the mainstream Jewish Yishuv or the Haganah and subsequently IDF, have become this catch-all excuse for the 60% or so of the Palestinian flight in 1948. What nobody mentions is that Arab massacres of Jews in 1920, 1929, 1936 and 1948 did not lead to the wholesale flight of the Yishuv and were the primary cause for the establishment of the Irgun and Lehi in the first place. CAMERA has a good page depicting the acts of violence by Arabs against Jews that preceded 1948.
By the way, suicide bombing was apparently invented by Sudanese Muslims in the 1870s.
On Orthodox anarchist a few months back someone tried to argue that the Irgun and Lehi weren’t terrorists, and I posted a list of about six or seven street and market bombings they spearheaded that weren’t directed at military targets.
And I don’t think what happened at Deir yassin is disputable either, although most historians now acknowledge that both the Zionists and the Palestinians had an interest in inflating the death count.
However, I do think Deir Yassin *and other attacks* by Zionist forces played a huge role in the fleeing of Palestinians from many of the towns and villages.
Why do we all have to point fingers and lay blame? try to come up with productive answers to our problems as opposed to just hating the opposision. its points of views like these focusing on the past that is preventing any sort of future. Yes, there were bad acts on both sides in the past, no one denies this, but why focus on them, why not move forward? israel and palastine are like two children fighting, only these children have real guns.
no one who focuses on the past can be truely objective, because no one knows everything that truely happened. true objectivity can therefore only take place in a situation where there is no POSSIBLE fact to contradict this opinion, such as the future. think about it
Of course Deir Yassin had an impact, but that’s because members of the Arab leadership went on the airwaves and talked about how horrendous it was. By the way, the Zionists had nothing to do with the inflated count, it was the Red Cross who came out with the original number (300, then 250) and the Arabs who inflated it and added the rape stories.
But guess what? There were numerous Arab attacks on Jewish communities and individuals around the same period. What do you think happened in Gush Etzion? What happened in the Old City? What happened to the convoy of doctors, nurses and food supplies going to Jerusalem where 70 Jews were killed? There was a war going on and many members of the local Arab community were participants. Ask some of the Jewish fighters in that war why they helped move Arabs from their communities and they’ll tell you it was impossible to get from point A to point B without being attacked or shot.
Ultimately, 6000 Jews were killed in the War of Independence which was launched by the Arabs – this was not a one sided war.
As for street bombings against civilians, I only know of the two bombings and one failed attempt. There may have been other attacks, but they didn’t appear at random. Usually, the Jews attacked because there were numerous attacks on Jews and hundred killed in the 30s and 40s. I do consider any attacks on innocent civilians to be terrorism, so the Lehi and Irgun attacks that weren’t upon military targets would qualify.
It’s very nice to tell people to forget about the past, but it’s not realistic. It’s also very much unlike little children, unless you consider what happened in Yugoslavia and Serbia or what happened in India and Pakistan to be like little children fighting. People are fighting a real war fought about a real piece of land that can only be apportioned in ways that satisfy few. If you can come up with a realistic solution and push aside the extremists, then you will have peace. If you think that some sweet talk about “peace” and the “future” will cut it, you will be disillusioned.
Anonymous poster opines
“israel and palastine are like two children fighting, only these children have real guns.”
I’m sure our saintly anonymous poster exhibits the same equanimity when someone wrongs him. Feels good to be above it all, doesn’t it? I’ll bet sometimes you think the whole world is full of children, endlessly squabbling, involved in their petty conflicts, not heeding the advice of the one true adult…
“no one who focuses on the past can be truely objective, because no one knows everything that truely happened. true objectivity can therefore only take place in a situation where there is no POSSIBLE fact to contradict this opinion, such as the future. think about it”
I’ve thought about it. Maybe you could write the foreword to the next Holocaust denial book (if Chomsky takes ill). After all, there’s no way to be objective about historical events. It’s just as likely as not that the Holocaust ever took place. Why don’t YOU think about THAT.
Arafat and Sharon are nothing alike!
Arafat: evil dictator who stole millions from hungry mouths and made generations of his people into bombs instead of feeding them and making hospitals (Not to mention his attacks on innocent civilians as a POLICY!)
Sharon: elected official who was chosen by democratic process and who never targeted civilians or robbed hungry palestinians of money/aide/food that was rightfully theirs
Difference YES!