By your own admission you’ve never met any Palestinians, though you rather arrogantly insist you know how they feel and if you think most Americans Jews are all that knowledgeable about the conflict, then you haven’t met many.
I seriously doubt most American Jews could pass a test on Israeli history if their lives depended on it.
For myself, since you seem to be concerned about the ethnic origins of the the posters, I’m Iranian, though I’ve lived in the US since I was two.
I’m sorry, but claiming that “I know enough from reading wikipedia” on ANY subject is not only incredibly stupid, but it’s also incredibly arrogant.
Wikipedia is nearly universally acknowledged by most academics to be a horrible source of information. Each year, increasingly large numbers of college professors forbid there students from using wikipedia in their papers for a good reason.
The director of the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Rutgers University once said, “the next wikipedia article on the Middle East that’s not riddled with errors will be the first”(yes, he was obviously being hyperbolic).
Now, when acknowledged experts on the Middle East say that you shouldn’t trust wikipedia when it comes to the Middle East, well, then you shouldn’t trust wikipedia.
Arguing otherwise is frankly anti-intellectual.
Now, if you want you can do so, but doing so simply reinforces the perception that you’re aggressively in denial of reality and impervious to logic.
I’m sorry, but you’re trying to defend the above statement really hurts your credibility.
You come across to any reasonable, impartial observer as someone with an embarrassingly superficial understanding of the conflict who, by his own admission rejects any facts that don’t fit into his preferred narrative.
Ok, you’re damaging your credibility even more.
When you first linked to this you insisted it validated your claim that there was far more media criticism of Israel now than in the 1980s.
You’re now conceding that it says no such thing.
Essentially, you’re admitting you tried to fit “facts” into the narrative you wanted rather than allowing “facts” to determine the narrative.
I’m genuinely shocked that you have to ask such a question since you feel so passionately about the subject and you grew up in the 70s and the 80s.
You don’t remember how virtually every night during the first several years of the Intifada, CNN showed videos of unarmed Palestinians getting shot or beaten by Israeli soldiers?
You don’t remember TIME magazine getting sued by the Israeli Defense Minister?
I’m sorry, but what you’re doing is the equivalent of asking me to prove that water is wet.
Exactly who believes this “consensus” you’re talking about?
Hamas doesn’t. The Israeli government doesn’t. Countless Palestinian intellectuals don’t.
Frankly, I find the idea the idea that a Palestinian State consisting of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be economically more viable than any of South Africa’s Bantustans asinine and I’ve never met any Palestinians on the West Bank who believe that and such hostility is even more pronounced in the Gaza Strip.
One last thing.
I don’t mean to come across as a jerk, but could you please remember to capitalize properly and use proper spelling? Occasional typos are one thing, but it’s quite distracting and annoying to read.