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sbenois
Supporter
Username: Sbenois
Post Number: 15371
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 7:09 pm: | 
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Here's the link via the Anti-Defamation League.
http://support.adl.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Thank_Bush
We all owe George Bush a big thanks for doing the right thing.
I say this thread gets 176 posts.
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Mr. Big Poppa
Citizen
Username: Big_poppa
Post Number: 788
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 7:51 pm: |
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Here's a better link:
http://support.adl.org/site/PageServer?pagename=SCREW_Bush |
Strawberry
Supporter
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 7566
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 8:10 pm: |
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I have been saying this since 2000. Any Jew who opposes President Bush is a fool. He has and remains the finest friend the Jewish people have ever known.
I am proud of my President and I am proud of the Israeli people.
God bless to all. |
sbenois
Supporter
Username: Sbenois
Post Number: 15372
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 8:15 pm: |
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A chosen president for the chosen people? |
Nancy - LibraryLady
Supporter
Username: Librarylady
Post Number: 3700
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:11 pm: |
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Ok, I'll hold my nose and send the email to thank him for this ONE THING only. |
sbenois
Supporter
Username: Sbenois
Post Number: 15377
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:13 pm: |
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Why do you have to hold your nose? Are you sending him a package?
OH! I'm going to have to call the Secret Service. |
tjohn
Supporter
Username: Tjohn
Post Number: 4515
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:18 pm: |
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It is only this week that I have come to understand the magnitude of our strategic blunder in invading Iraq. We removed Saddam Hussein whose Iraq served to counterbalance Iran. Of course, that counterbalance had become a liability in many ways, but counterbalance it still was. In the course of the fighting in Iraq, the Shiites in Iraq have become more organized and able to fight back. So we have the prospect of Iraq becoming the first Shiite Arab nation. And it is too early to tell who will win the fighting in Lebanon. Israel will certainly prevail militarily, but Hizbollah may win hearts and minds. To our disadvantage, Iran and Hizbollah have become more of a player in the Middle East and our strategic missteps have only helped them. The signficance of the fact that some Arab states criticized Hizbollah for starting the fighting indicates that resurgent Shia Islam is scaring the status quo Arab states.
So, if I was thinking of thanking Bush for being a friend of Israel, I might first wait a few years to see how things pan out. |
Glock 17
Citizen
Username: Glock17
Post Number: 1481
Registered: 7-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:19 pm: |
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Israel doesn't deserve praise for anything, and neither does our president. |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 5303
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:24 pm: |
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Remind me again which country you guys are citizens of. |
Wendy
Supporter
Username: Wendy
Post Number: 2793
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:24 pm: |
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Glock, others have suggested the same: please read a history book or two. Also, please tell me you didn't learn your ignorant, racist opinions from any CHS teachers*. If you did, please let me know who they are and I will make it my business to get them out of our school district. Thanks in advance.
Wendy Lauter
*Yes I know you're in college now. But somehow I think these opinions were formed a few years earlier. Feel free to correct me of course. |
sbenois
Supporter
Username: Sbenois
Post Number: 15379
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:26 pm: |
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Quote:Remind me again which country you guys are citizens of.
The US. |
Glock 17
Citizen
Username: Glock17
Post Number: 1484
Registered: 7-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:27 pm: |
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Ignorant? Racist?
I'd say you are ignorant of the world around you. I choose to look at the world exactly as it is. The truth is out there. |
kathleen
Citizen
Username: Symbolic
Post Number: 575
Registered: 3-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 10:55 pm: |
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This is interesting, from the Guardian:
In his last interview - after the 1967 six-day war - the historian Isaac Deutscher, whose next-of-kin had died in the Nazi camps and whose surviving relations lived in Israel, said: "To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest." Comparing Israel to Prussia, he issued a sombre warning: "The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase 'Man kann sich totseigen!' 'You can triumph yourself to death'."
In Israel's actions today we can detect many of the elements of hubris: an imperial arrogance, a distortion of reality, an awareness of its military superiority, the self-righteousness with which it wrecks the social infrastructure of weaker states, and a belief in its racial superiority. The loss of many civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon matters less than the capture or death of a single Israeli soldier. In this, Israeli actions are validated by the US.
The offensive against Gaza is designed to destroy Hamas for daring to win an election. The "international community" stood by as Gaza suffered collective punishment. Dozens of innocents continue to die. This meant nothing to the G8 leaders. Nothing was done.
Israeli recklessness is always green-lighted by Washington. In this case, their interests coincide. They want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model. They argue this was the original design of the country. Contemporary Lebanon, it is true, still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset - a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority.
The country's confessional chequerboard has never allowed an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim - today perhaps even a Shia - majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the 1970s, providing for the entry of Syrian troops, with tacit US approval, and their establishment there - ostensibly as a buffer between the warring factions, and deterrent to an Israeli takeover, on the cards with the invasions of 1978 and 1982 (when Hizbullah did not exist).
The killing of Rafik Hariri provoked vast demonstrations by the middle class, demanding the expulsion of the Syrians, while western organisations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution. Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal and produce a weak government in Beirut.
But Lebanon's factions remained spread-eagled. Hizbullah had not disarmed, and Syria has not fallen. Washington had taken a pawn, but the castle had still to be captured. I was in Beirut in May, when the Israeli army entered and killed two "terrorists" from a Palestinian splinter group. The latter responded with rockets. Israeli warplanes punished Hizbullah by dropping over 50 bombs on its villages and headquarters near the border. The latest Israeli offensive is designed to take the castle. Will it succeed? A protracted colonial war lies ahead, since Hizbullah, like Hamas, has mass support. It cannot be written off as a "terrorist" organisation. The Arab world sees its forces as freedom fighters resisting colonial occupation.
There are 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli gulags. That is why Israeli soldiers are captured. Prisoner exchanges have occurred as a result. To blame Syria and Iran for Israel's latest offensive is frivolous. Until the question of Palestine is resolved and Iraq's occupation ended, there will be no peace in the region. A "UN" force to deter Hizbullah, but not Israel, is a nonsensical notion.
Tariq Ali
From Google search for Tariq Ali: Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore, Pakisstan in 1943. His uncle, the head of Pakistani intelligence, sent him abroad to England where he was educated at Oxford University and became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor.
I don't think he learned anything he wrote at Columbia High School. And perhaps others who take a dim view of some of Israel's history have only been reading Isaac Deutscher.
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kathleen
Citizen
Username: Symbolic
Post Number: 576
Registered: 3-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 11:02 pm: |
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Oh -- and it looks like Iraq's Prime Mininster won't be sending one of those thank-you telegrams to George Bush:
BAGHDAD, July 19 (UPI) -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Wednesday denounced Israel's attacks on Lebanon, The New York Times reported.
"The Israeli attacks and airstrikes are completely destroying Lebanon's infrastructure," Maliki told reporters in Baghdad. "I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers' meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression."
well, you can't win 'em all.
How many Americans died and are still dying to make this guy a Prime Minister? Who is to thank for that?
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Factvsfiction
Citizen
Username: Factvsfiction
Post Number: 1100
Registered: 4-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 11:08 pm: |
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kathleen's "work" never seems to be done.
Finding the sparse number of Jews that are hypercritical of Israel is really hard work, afterall. |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 613
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 11:58 pm: |
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Notes from northern Israel
Is Israel Using Arab Villages as Human Shields?
By JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corseted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hizbullah had targeted Nazareth late on Sunday. “Nazareth is a mostly Christian town”, he added, managing to cram into a single sentence of a few words two factual mistakes and a disturbing hint of incitement.
Whatever the precision of its rockets (and Nazareth’s residents are certainly worried enough about that), Hizbullah struck not at Nazareth but at a site some distance from Nazareth -- a site of strategic significance to Israel, though I cannot say more than that as we are now officially under martial law in the country’s north.
Matthew Price was also wrong about Nazareth being a “mostly Christian town”. During the 1948 war in which Israel’s army ethnically cleansed much of the surrounding area of Palestinians, Muslim villagers fled to Nazareth in search of sanctuary. Today, two-thirds of the city’s 75,000 inhabitants are Muslim -- or at least they are by the religious classification system imposed on all citizens by the Israeli authorities.
Which brings us to the nasty element of incitement from our BBC reporter.
Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel’s enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel’s Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields -- protection for Israel’s war machine.
Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hizbullah rockets trying to reach these factories. No one at the BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that “mostly Muslim” villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth -- and its mistaken Christian status -- became part of the story for the BBC?
Because Israel wants to portray Hizbullah, and its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, as a crazed Islamic militia, as fanatical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians with equal vehemence. This is all part of Israel’s claim that it is fighting George Bush’s “war on terror”. Predictably, the BBC obliged by regurgitating this piece of racist nonsense.
If anybody still doubts that Israel is shaping the news agenda of broadcasters like the BBC, here was as good as the proof.
* * *
According to the jingoistic Jerusalem Post, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the army are delirious at their success in dictating the headlines and tone of foreign news broadcasts.
Ehud Olmert’s media adviser, Assif Shariv, told the Post that the international media were interviewing Israeli spokespeople four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese. Another government adviser, Gideon Meir, boasted: “We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."
Which may explain why we know so little about what is happening in Lebanon and Gaza -- and why we know so little about what is happening inside Israel too.
To remind you, I, like other residents of northern Israel, am under martial law. As are the foreign journalists -- and in addition they are required to submit their copy to the military censor. So all I can tell you, without breaking the law, is that you are not hearing the entire picture of what has been happening here in the Galilee.
Certainly, a piece of news that I doubt you will hear from the foreign media, although bravely the liberal Hebrew media has been drawing attention to the matter, is that the “only democracy in the Middle East” has all but silenced al-Jazeera from reporting inside Israel.
The reason is clear: until recently al-Jazeera had been running rings around the local and foreign press.
Al-Jazeera is the Arab world’s most serious and popular news gatherer, and essential viewing for anyone who wants to get a realistic idea of the news from both sides of the border. When I heard the missile strike close by Nazareth on Sunday night, al-Jazeera told me what had happened a full half hour before the Israeli media, and a day before my colleague Matthew Price.
How do they do it? Because most of their staff in Israel are Israeli citizens, as well as being Palestinian Arabs. Their journalists belong to the forgotten fifth of the Israeli population whose citizenship is Israeli but whose nationality is Palestinian.
So not only do al-Jazeera’s reporters know the northern patch of Israel like home ground (because it is home ground) but they are also not cravenly waiting for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and army’s spokesman to tell them what is going on.
Watching al-Jazeera has been a revelation: it has dedicated a substantial portion of its coverage to events inside Israel as well as in Lebanon, in stark contrast to Israeli broadcasters who rarely use any of the footage from Lebanon.
Similarly, al-Jazeera faithfully translated Ehud Olmert’s speech word for word into Arabic, and then included a lengthy analysis from a local correspondent for its viewers. Israeli broadcasters, on the other hand, repeatedly mistranslated the televised words of Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah into Hebrew and English, removing context and his calls for negotiation.
Similar misrepresentations of Nasrallah’s position in the foreign media presumably reflected their over-reliance on the Israeli broadcasters.
But al-Jazeera’s coverage inside Israel -- the Arab world’s best chance of being exposed to the Israeli point of view -- is being effectively shut down. In the past two days, its editor has been arrested on two occasions and another senior journalists taken in for questioning. According to its reporters, they cannot move from their office without being followed by the Israeli security services.
Why are they receiving this treatment? Because, according to Israel’s only serious newspaper, Haaretz, the country’s Hebrew media have been inciting against them. In particular Reshet Bet radio station, one of several wings of the Israeli media loyal to the government, has been telling lies that al-Jazeera is revealing classified information, namely the location of rocket strikes.
Is the claim true? According to Haaretz again: “Other TV networks, including Israeli news services, made similar reports without suffering from police intervention.”
Freedom of the press rarely means much when governments go to war. The local media usually consider it their patriotic duty not only to strip of vital context the information they offer their viewers but they often falsify the record too. Much of Israel’s media are clearly doing both jobs with some accomplishment.
But the fact that some in the Israeli media see it as part of their job to silence journalists not as craven as themselves is the real eye-opener. Maybe they realise al-Jazeera just makes them look like propagandists.
* * *
Nabila Espanioly, the director of a charitable organization in Nazareth promoting women and children’s interests, makes a point worth remembering as the foreign and Israeli media huddle in the shelters of Haifa and Nahariya interviewing terrified “Israelis”.
In fact, they are talking not to Israelis but to Israeli Jews. The fifth of the Israeli population who are not Jewish but Arab are rarely to be found hiding in public shelters because the authorities neglected to build any in their towns and villages.
In other words, although the Israeli army has sited several important weapons factories and military intelligence posts close to Arab communities in the north, the Israeli government has not offered the Arab residents any protection should there be fall-out -- quite literally in the case of the Katyusha rockets -- as a result.
This is another tiny facet of the discrimination endured for decades by the country’s Arab population that so rarely surfaces in media coverage of Israel.
Similarly oblivious to the ironies, the Israeli and foreign media have been running heart-warming stories about how “Israelis” are opening their homes and hearths to their compatriots fleeing the north. Again for “Israelis” substitute “Israeli Jews”.
No one I know here in Nazareth believes they would find much of a welcome in Tel Aviv or Beersheva should they go looking for one. Which leaves them with nowhere to run should they need to.
The only Arab communities out of the line of Hizbullah fire are those in the southern Negev belonging to the Bedouin. But that is not much comfort. Most of the Negev’s 150,000 Bedouin have been forced to live in squalid tents and metal shacks by an Israeli government that bulldozes anything more permanent. The authorities also deprive many of the Bedouin communities of water and all public services. So sweating it out with the Katyushas may be the better option.
* * *
A final footnote -- one to ponder in the quieter moments after the worst of the suffering is over. Those Israeli Jews fleeing for their lives as they head south to the quiet -- so far at least -- of Tel Aviv and beyond offer a small echo of events nearly six decades ago when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes by the Israeli army.
Israeli Jews have always taken the view -- and happily tell any outsiders as much -- that the “Arabs” lost the right to their homes in the war of 1948 because they “fled” (in fact many were forcibly expelled, but let that drop for the moment).
The Israeli government has adopted much the same view, even refusing to allow the 250,000 of its own Arab citizens who are classified as internal refugees -- their ancestors fled the fighting in 1948 but have citizenship because they stayed inside what is today Israel -- to return to their original homes and land.
So how exactly should we regard those Israeli Jews now fleeing from Nahariya and Haifa? Should they lose their homes, their land and their bank accounts just as the Palestinians did in 1948?
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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dave23
Citizen
Username: Dave23
Post Number: 1893
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 9:16 am: |
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Israel is a small country. |
Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 3596
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 9:17 am: |
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And it's not like Cook is an unbiased source. |
Hoops
Citizen
Username: Hoops
Post Number: 1710
Registered: 10-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 9:51 am: |
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Rastro - I dont think there are any unbiased sources of information in the middle east. What he said in the article with regards to how the public receive information regarding the situation they are in has some merit.
I disagree with his premise about using Arabs as human shields but agree that the information Americans receive daily is not the whole truth. It is better to have a rounded picture of what is happening there then to simply hear a news report and pick a side.
Israel has a mighty war machine but is a fragile state because it is surrounded by states unfriendly or merely tolerant of its existence. Terrrorists on the doorstep lobbing bombs at it is wrong no matter what the cause. Israel is right to defend itself in a very strong manner, however it is not right to murder people blindly.
I keep reading that Israel is at war. In my opinion unless Israel declares war on Lebanon they are not at war, they are taking a police action using their military. The best thing for Israels long term security would be a strong Lebanese state. How the Lebanese recover from this attack will go a long way towards deciding whether Israel can live in peace. |
kathleen
Citizen
Username: Symbolic
Post Number: 578
Registered: 3-2005
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 2:00 pm: |
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Fvsf.
Tariq Ali is a Pakistani Muslim and Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, is not Jewish.
What's unthinking in your responses (among other things) is your eagerness to promote the notion that when people are in a minority, their viewpoint and even their character is suspect. You seem to think the majority should triumph. That road has a bad history. I wouldn't keep encouraging others to go down it.
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Bob K
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 12192
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 2:19 pm: |
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Rastro, the problem is that as far as the Israel/Palestine/Arab conflict, there are no unbiased sources. Everything, from all sides, is spin, spin and more spin.
I have tremendous respect for Israel and the Israelis. They managed to build a country out of nothing and when initially all their neighbors tried to push them into the sea. However, as time as gone on and the conflicts with their neighbors have become less large scale "traditional" wars and more of an insurgency by the Palestinians they have done much to demonize their opponents.
The Jews are the most persecuted people in recent history. However, this doesn't give them the right to persecute Palestinians, Bedouins and just about everyone else. |
Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 3605
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 3:30 pm: |
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But Bob, the Israelis would be happy to simply be left alone. At this point, there is acceptance in Israel that a two state solution is the only way to peace, and people are willing to give it a try.
The persecution of Palestinians, as you call it, is not without context. Would you be so concerned for the Palestinians were they in Egypt, being persecuted by other Arabs? How About Jordan? I assume you were up in arms about Black September, and the annihilation of Palestinians in Jordan decades ago? More Palestinians have been killed and persecuted by other Arabs than Israel could do in centuries.
I'm not saying it's ok for Israel to do it because others have. I'm saying you cannot have selective outrage. |
Factvsfiction
Citizen
Username: Factvsfiction
Post Number: 1103
Registered: 4-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 - 4:39 pm: |
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kathleen-
What is reprehensible is that you post non-objective articles written by a VERY small group of Israeli Jews or American Jews as a means to further your obviously Pro-Palestinian political agenda, without noting the credentials, perceptions, and opinions of these authors in their own country, (Israel) or in academic circles. Or issues of questionable scholarship.
You of course don't want to note the far greater number of opinions, articles, and books by academics and writers that are overwhelming contrary to the small few that you can drum up.
Intellectual honesty here? |
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