http://www.kcrw.org/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?tmplt_type=program&show_code=tp

“February 1st, 2006 at 3:20 am”

Nikos, do you ever sleep?

“And oh, btw, ALYB, I welcome and value your potential responses to any of my posts, despite the (arguably) understandable unwillingness of several others to continue their correspondences with you.”

btw: if you are going to be “everyone’s” friend no matter how crazy and offensive their behavior don’t expect me to answer your posts anymore.

As for apartheid, I placed the prefix ‘quasi-’ quite deliberately, but failed to include a note that I’d do the same for the good ol’ US of A, and not merely for ‘minority’ issues. We discriminate more against our majority — women — than we do most everyone else. No, none of this includes awful junk like segregated drinking fountains (but it does cost a whole lot more to build segregated rest rooms!)

But yes, you’re right that the issue in the occupied Palestinian territories is just that: occupation. I worry though that after so many years, simple disengagement is potentially just as damaging as continued occupation. It will leave a vaccuum to be filled by the Islamists of Hamas, and perhaps worse.

I wonder if instead Israel couldn’t make friends out of enemies by helping rebuild the territories, channeling international money to Palestinian contractors, as they’ve done for construction of the ‘fence’.

I’d be happy to see your opinion of this notion.

Yes, Nikos, your comparison was unfortunate, but so is your comparison to the Apartheid State of South Africa.

A recent poll showed that over forty percent of Arab citizens of Israel said they were proud to be considered Israeli.

But to the point, there are Arab members of the Israeli parliament. There are also Arab judges on every level of the judiciary including the Supreme Court. Arabs are represented in all levels of Israeli society except the armed forces. This is because the country didn’t want to force its Arab citizens to fight against other Arabs. (Members of the Druze community do serve in the army as do, if I am not mistaken, Bedouins.

Now, while there is still, unfortunately discrimination in Israel, which is recognized by the government, the level and type of discrimination in no way rises to the level of an Apartheid system.

As far as relations to the Palestinian Arabs are concerned there too the term Apartheid doesn’t apply since both communities see themselves as belonging to distinct societies. The problem isn’t apartheid but “occupation.�

In disengaging itself from the Palestinians the Israelis have decided to stop acting as occupiers. This will take some time but in the long run a two state solution is the right formula for achieving peaceful coexistence in the Mid East. Once the two states are set up and in existence then the two economies I am sure will begin to merge. Of course, the next step will depend on Palestine existing as a secular state.

As far as Greece is concerned, Nikos, don’t underestimate the Islamicists determination to get back all the territory it once conquered and then some. I agree with your sentiment of “Me? I’d honestly rather die than Submit.�

So, once again to the many I must have offended: I’m sorry! I was clueless and hopelessly benighted.

2. ALYB: yeah, I misread your post. It was late and my eyes were swimming—but that night it wasn’t from vodka, but from simple weariness. Really. I was sober.
Quit laughing!

3. digitalcommuter: I’d like to point out that Greece, even under the Ottomans, was never Islamic, and so probably doesn’t fall into the same category as Seville in ‘Al-Andalus’. But such a semi-jest would in truth be willfully ignorant and blindly foolish, because, according to their prophet, the House of Islam must struggle with the House of War (everybody not in Submission to Allah) until they have been brought, kicking and screaming, into the House of Islam. Ugh.

Me? I’d honestly rather die than Submit.

I’m rather fond of my secularism. And of my freedom of speech. And of my freedom to dress how I like, to dance, to listen to music, to drink alcohol (maybe not in excess, however!), and to draw cartoons attacking cultural and religious sacred cows, if I so choose.
And I prefer that the women with whom I associate to have the freedom to choose their own morality instead of having the so-called ‘morality’ of misogynist men from millennia past forced on them at knifepoint.

By the way, I wanted but failed to slip into my Friday-night drunken-while-typing idiocies that one of my family members calls me ‘the Jew-lover’. This, sadly, tells you more about him than it does about me, however. (Luckily, he’s only a distant relation.) My point in bothering to launder in public such soiled family rags is only to suggest that one needn’t have had a Jewish mother to care about the prospects and fate of the Jewish state. Israel has plenty to fear from Islamists who murder innocents in the name of their god. One might therefore hope not that Israel’s leaders cower in readiness to accede to whatever demands the killers make, but that they instead actively and boldly erase the quasi-apartheid conditions that give the Islamists the ammunition to seem a ‘legitimate option’ to the impressionable youngsters they brainwash into suicide-murderers.

Unfortunately, my stupid ‘nazi’ comparison wholly occluded this point. I’m making this admission and statement of regret particularly in light of the past few posts to this thread. As one of my sage co-workers liked to point out: ‘You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’
And your arguments can persuade many more readers if they’re offered with respect rather than with scorn.
Sorry, all. (It’s time for another New Year’s resolution, methinks.)

Calling people names is yellow bird’s game.

Hamas demands return of Seville in internet children’s magazine

Spain Herald

http://www.spainherald.com/2414.html

“The children’s website Al Fateh, property of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, demands in its most recent issue the return of the Spanish city of Seville to the “lost paradise” of Al Andalus, as the Muslim part of Spain was called during its existence between 711 and 1492. The web magazine, whose name means “conqueror,” says it is for “the young builders of the future.”

The web magazine, whose name means “conqueror,” includes an article in which the city of Seville itself is the narrator, saying, “I beg you, my loved ones, to call me to return along with the other cities of the lost paradise to Muslim hands so that happiness may reign in my lands. Dress me, for I am the bride of the land of Al Andalus.”

This demand is also one of the demands Bin Laden has been making.

“Response to “digitalcommuterâ€?, January 27th, 2006 at 11:43 pm entry: I am Jewish, for the record, and I say Israel is a murderously racist, colonizing, occupying, imperialist rogue nation.”

Who cares what you call yourself, yellowbird? From your posts, you seem not to be playing with a full deck.

This is the last time I’ll bother to respond to anything you say.

Hamas Proving It’s Politically Shrewd

What a wonderful world, it looks like Hitler won the war, that it, if anyone bother to read the Hamas Charter. article 22, 28 and 32 are a guaranteed entertainment.

http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html

…and this is their own site, their own words, their constitution. Obviously they all could use a drink to calm themselves down a bit, but what is the excuse of others how are wondering what is Hamas agenda?

Why do people always have to choose such a trite example. How often have we heard the flavour-of-the-week boogeyman refered to as the next Hitler. Joseph Sobran called it a Hitler-of-the-month club. http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030227.shtml

Can’t we do better? Why not call the Israel government and military a foot fungus: it invades, spreads, stings and is really hard to get rid of. It seems that the urea from pee, if concentrated, has some positive effects. Hmmm…could be a new anti-occupation strategy.

Your point that Zionism and Nazism are antithetical strikes me as inarguable; but let me ask this: are Nazism and Stalinism antithetical too? (I’m asking your opinion sincerely, not rhetorically. I don’t agree with everything you write here [of course, as you know already], but your opinions have more often than not enlightened me plenty—as I’m sure your answer to this query will too.)

This weekend’s On The Media featured a Brooke Gladstone-story on the media coverage of the Hamas electoral victory. I recommend it: http://www.onthemedia.org/
It reminded me (although sometimes only by accident) that despite Hamas’s pretensions to being a party of ‘resistance-fighters’, it’s a movement founded on terrorism. Resistance fighters target the occupying military forces; terrorists target civilians. And Hamas, despite their fatuous claims, CELEBRATE the slaughter of innocents.

I also recalled that although, as the story stated, the EU will now stop financing the P.A., that won’t bother Hamas, who get their funds from the vile Wahabi radicals of Saudi Arabia—who get their money from us whenever we fill our gas tanks. Moreover, although I’m ever loathe to agree with anything Netanyahu says, he’s right that Hamas will essentially convert the P.A. into a client of Tehran.
This, of course, is the ultimate fate of Iraq, too.
Which leads us and (much more tragically) those of the Middle East inexorably back toward more and more benighted bloodshed.

Despite the foolish exaggerations of my Friday night typing-while-intoxicated posts, I stand by my (admittedly useless) view that all this could have been avoided in the early and mid 90’s.
Sigh.

Finally, thanks for mentioning the idiocies of the fundamentalist Christians who pray every day for the end-of-the-World-as-we-know-it and its attendant hoax called the Rapture. Their essentially narcotic influence on American foreign policy is a wholly under-reported part of this larger tragedy.

PS, I stand fully by my support for Scandinavian-style democratic socialism (but we’ve had this donnybrook elsewhere, so I’ll save the details of my defense for the next socialism-related ROS thread).

See ya, pal.

They’re not equivalent.

They’re closer than ought to be countenanced, however. After all, Nazis expropriated Jewish-owned property, just as happens now to Palestinian homes in the occupied territories; and Nazis killed innocent civilians, just as do those IDF missiles aimed as overly blunt assassin’s bullets. (You can argue that there’s a massive difference between genocide and ‘collateral damage’ and you’d have a point, but killing innocents is killing innocents is killing innocents.) Additionally, some argue that the ‘fence’ (or wall) in the West Bank effectively renders the Palestinians therein little more than concentration camp inmates – but not even I can fully agree with that. Yes, it’s a blunt and dehumanizing method of confinement, but there’s more nuance to it than a direct correlation with monstrosities like Auschwitz. (Like a lack of crematoria.)

So, my apology is tendered, and tendered sincerely. Mea culpa.

Looked at from this perspective, I think things are improving. I think Palestinians are getting hold of themselves and expressing what they want. Don’t underestimate the draw ( the power of the idea) of living a normal life. Israel’s have been fighting hard to maintain it, and Palestinians desperately want it.