| Author | Message | ||
     Señor Moment © Citizen Username: Howardt Post Number: 2474 Registered: 11-2004  |
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| tom Citizen Username: Tom Post Number: 5747 Registered: 5-2001 |
I know a few Turks who would hit you upside the head if you called them Arabs. | ||
| Aquaman Supporter Username: Aquaman Post Number: 999 Registered: 8-2001  |
With all that Arab land, what's so critical about that tiny yellow speck? | ||
| gertie Citizen Username: Gertie Post Number: 16 Registered: 6-2006 |
It's the last apartheid state? | ||
| Hoops Citizen Username: Hoops Post Number: 2091 Registered: 10-2004  |
tick, tick, tick... Hate index creeping towards RED | ||
| kathy Citizen Username: Kathy Post Number: 1345 Registered: 5-2001 |
Iranians aren't Arabs either, and neither are Afghans, or Pakistanis, or the peoples from the rest of those 'stans. Mr. Moment seems to be confusing Arab with Muslim. And what counts as "Arab lands" anyway? Egypt and the other countries on the African continent were certainly not Arab if you go far enough back in their histories. | ||
| tom Citizen Username: Tom Post Number: 5754 Registered: 5-2001 |
For that matter, do the Palestinians even consider themselves Arabs? | ||
| Wendy Supporter Username: Wendy Post Number: 3082 Registered: 5-2001 |
Ummm. I think many of you are missing the point, intentionally or not, of the OP. Call it Land then instead of Arab land. I believe the OP was pointing out the ludicrousness of the tiny country "unjustly" being an occupier. Gertie, care to elaborate about what you think makes Israel an apartheid state? Heck even the UN finally revoked General Assembly Resolution 3379. And if you don’t know what that is, perhaps an unbiased course in middle east history is just the ticket for you. Perhaps as a woman you'd care to live in various mid-east countries and report back about which countries allowed you the most freedom. Perhaps you just want to stay uninformed and provide knee-jerk comments however. | ||
| Southerner Citizen Username: Southerner Post Number: 1494 Registered: 2-2004 |
Change the colors and that map reminds of the electoral college. | ||
| flugermongers Citizen Username: Flugermongers Post Number: 749 Registered: 5-2001  |
I like how Howardt hasn't commented back - he probably found that picture and doesn't know what he's talking about... | ||
| Señor Moment © Citizen Username: Howardt Post Number: 2475 Registered: 11-2004 |
Hey, flatulence-monger, you clearly dont know what you're talking about. I posted it because I thought it was funny and provocative. Clearly I was right. I was away from my computer all day so couldn't read or post. (Why would I post again anyway? To put down the folks who had? To start unnecessary bickering?) Last night I saw Wendy at school who said that a number of people had responded. So here I am. I guess you posted your comment to be provocative, too. It is. Now go fcuk yourself. | ||
| ess Citizen Username: Ess Post Number: 3079 Registered: 11-2001  |
What Wendy said. Well put. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 1032 Registered: 1-2006 |
Referring to a UK government report today, Melanie Phillips notes, in part: Any serious study of today’s antisemitism must ask— although regrettably this report fails to do so — why Israel is singled out for treatment afforded to no other country on earth; why Israel is scapegoated for the crimes of others; why Israel is dwelt upon so obsessively for seeking to defend itself, while countries which deliberately inflict terrible things upon the innocent are scarcely reported; why Israel alone is demonised and delegitimised through systematic lies and libels; why Israel alone is not allowed to defend itself while other in other countries this is taken for granted; why the legitimacy of Israel’s existence alone is called into question while that of artificially created countries like Pakistan are not; why Israel alone is blamed for a refugee problem while everywhere else in the world displaced populations are routinely ignored; why unlike any other country in history Israel alone, as the victim of genocidal warfare of which it was the victor, is expected to defer to its aggressors — which continue to wage war against it — and give them everything they are demanding. http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1327 | ||
| Eats Shoots & Leaves Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 3623 Registered: 9-2001  |
Because, as Tom Lehrer sang so long ago in National Brotherhood Week: "Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics And the Catholics hate the Protestants And the Hindus hate the Moslems And everybody hates the Jews" It is a sad uniting theme across history. Excellent points she makes. This does not mean we should not criticize Israel when it does things that are immoral or wrong, or accept everything Israel does, but it does mean that we should view Israel with the same lens we view other countries. } | ||
| Charlton Citizen Username: Charlton Post Number: 15 Registered: 8-2006 |
Shoots: If Israel was viewed through the same lens as everybody else they would no longer have the 'special relationship' and not be such a factor in U.S. middle-east policy and the U.S attempts to mediate a middle-east peace process. | ||
| Tom Reingold Supporter Username: Noglider  Post Number: 15605 Registered: 1-2003  |
I agree with all of the above defenses of Israel. It's a shame, though, that the map that Senor Moment posted, which I've seen go around a few times, is so inaccurate. None of the countries east of Iraq is an Arab country. Still, the points are still valid. | ||
| Eats Shoots & Leaves Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 3624 Registered: 9-2001 |
Yes they would, just as we have favored Pakistan the last few years and, at other times other countries where some of their actions are open to question (Egypt comes quickly to mind). More importantly, I am not so concerned about how the US views Israel--the problem is how the rest of the world views Israel. That is the point of Senor Momento's original post, I believe. Israel is trying to secure its borders, while the vast majority of the Middle East is avowedly at war with it or at least refuses to recognize it, and also supports, either tacitly or actively, terrorists trying to destroy Israel. Where is the massive concern about this? What country formed out of the crucible of European imperialism does NOT have people claiming it is illegitimate, or its borders too broad? How different is Israel than Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or even the US (vis a vis Native Americans or Puerto Ricans)? Yet, Israel is treated far differently and receives far more approbrium, is boycotted and allowed to be attacked, and is used as the rallying cry for Middle Eastern dictators who take the time honored approach when faced with internal dissent--blame the Jews. It is no accident that Egyptian television recently ran a mini-series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and made it appear to be a true docu-drama. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 1044 Registered: 1-2006 |
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/ September 09, 2006 Searchable Phase II Reports Earlier, I noted that CQ reader Harrison Colter provided me with searchable versions of the Phase II documents released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday. I'm now hosting these documents for others to use as reference: Phase II - Overall Accuracy Phase II - Iraqi National Congress intelligence Hopefully this will make it easier for all of us to peruse the actual data, rather than relying on the politically-charged conclusions from all sides. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 1046 Registered: 1-2006 |
An excerpt from a thorough article by Andrew Bostom, M.D., about, what else, the truth behind Arab efforts to exterminate Israel: from: http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/013028.php#more The clear excess virulence of the Antisemitism in Europe’s Muslim versus Christian populations, combined with the evidence that globally, Muslims in Islamic countries exhibit even more fanatical Jew hatred than their European co-religionists, defies the “conventional wisdom” regarding the ultimate origins of Muslim Jew hatred in Western Europe, and beyond. This very flawed construct—that Muslim Jew hatred is merely a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda—ignores both empirical contemporary observations, and primary, uniquely Islamic components of Jew hatred, both past and present. When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal “…phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background.” Ilan Halimi’s torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran. For the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Koran, hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters), and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred on to which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted. Examples of this archetypal Jew hatred from the sacred Islamic texts, sira, and main early Sunni historiographical accounts, include: Koranic verses labeling Jews as malevolent enemies of Islam (5:82), and disobedient slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61), including, for some, transformation into apes and swine (5:60); or the more profoundly hateful narratives (in the hadith, sira, and early histories, for example by Tabari) which maintain that the perfidious Jews fomented sectarian strife in early Islam by promoting heresies—including Shi’ism itself—that threatened the unity of the Muslim community (umma), and the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim Book 026, Number 5431) that the Jews caused Muhammad’s protracted, excruciating death from poisoning. As the scholar Georges Vajda observed, these archetypes, in turn justify Muslim animus towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination”, as dhimmis, treated “with contempt”, under “humiliating arrangements”. | ||
| anon Supporter Username: Anon Post Number: 3055 Registered: 6-2002 |
Joel: I know you never answer any questions, but I keep hoping: Why weren't Jews in Muslim countries subject to the same type of pogroms as they were in Christian Russia, Poland, Ukraine? Why were Jews so tolerated and even treated well in Muslim Spain, and when they were expelled by the Christians, in Muslim Turkey? | ||
| Ender Citizen Username: Enderw Post Number: 121 Registered: 4-2006 |
The idea that Jews in Muslim countries were treated well just doesn't hold up...it is a 'new myth' created by revisionist historians. Not true, Jews were always 2nd or 3rd class citizens in Muslim countries. Suffering from pogroms suggests that Jews were treated well until the pogrom. Pogroms against Jews have happened throughout history - whenever the ruling power in most societies need a scapegoat, it was easiest to scapegoat the Jews because for much of history, after they were kicked out of Israel the first (and hopefully the last time), they did not have a homeland. Your point above - why weren't Jews in Muslim countries subject to pogroms - can be consistent with them being treated like cr*p all the time, as opposed to in Christian countries, when they were treated reasonably well, except when the population wanted to open up a can of whoop-••• on the Jews. Your second question - "Why were..." is not true in the first half (i.e. they were not tolerated and treated well in Muslim Spain) and even if it were, it has nothing to do with the second part, even though you use the wording 'and when' to suggest there is a link. | ||
| tom Citizen Username: Tom Post Number: 5811 Registered: 5-2001 |
Your logic doesn't hold. Pogrom is defined as "organized killing of minority: a planned campaign of persecution or extermination sanctioned by a government and directed against an ethnic group, especially against the Jews in tsarist Russia." The fact that you haven't yet been exterminated in no way suggests that you have been treated well so far. | ||
| Wendy Supporter Username: Wendy Post Number: 3094 Registered: 5-2001 |
tom, regardless of the how pristine enders' logic is regarding pogroms, his/her point about the myth of Jews being treated "well" in Muslim countries is a valid point and one I've recently been educated about. | ||
| tom Citizen Username: Tom Post Number: 5812 Registered: 5-2001 |
But he shouldn't be letting the "christian" countries -- Russia, Spain, Poland -- off the hook so easily. | ||
| Wendy Supporter Username: Wendy Post Number: 3095 Registered: 5-2001 |
Agreed. | ||
| anon Supporter Username: Anon Post Number: 3058 Registered: 6-2002 |
I grew up among many Jews from Turkey, a Muslim country. They emigrated from Turkey before it became very secular in the 1920s. They never spoke of serious discrimination in Turkey and always said the Jews were treated well there. (Of course it may have been that the Turks were too busy killing Armenians to pick on the Jews). Jews acheived high social and economic status in Muslim Spain. They never acheived that in Czarist Russia. The Jews of Spain were expelled by the Christians and many were given refuge in the Muslim Ottoman Empire. I am not saying that Jews had it great in all Muslim countries. I just don't see where Islam is any more inherently anti-Jewish than is Christianity. | ||
| Eats Shoots & Leaves Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 3628 Registered: 9-2001 |
It is now. | ||
| anon Supporter Username: Anon Post Number: 3063 Registered: 6-2002 |
I said "inherently". | ||
| Eats Shoots & Leaves Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 3629 Registered: 9-2001 |
I do not want to wait for another Holocaust before Islam figures out that Jews are not inherently the enemy. That is what it seems to have taken for Christianity to figure it out. Current Islamic textbooks, popular media, and accepted political statements all demonize Jews in the same way that pre-Holocaust German and Polish societies demonized Jews. I have not seen broadly accepted media in Israel or in US Jewish society doing the same about Muslims (although I know some individual Jewish people who are equally racist). On a related note, the head of Hamas' media ministry recently made a speech in Gaza where he told Palestinians to stop blaming everything on Israel and instead focus on building a positive society on their own. To paraphrase, he said that Israel did not cause Palestinians to be corrupt, to kidnap and hold wealthy Palestinians for ransom, to kill their political enemies. I have no idea how much resonance this had in Palestinian society. I hope he is not a voice in the wilderness. |
