Arafat And His Cronies Out To Ruin The Day (Again)

Great Debates
21

Noone Special, thank you for your constructive criticism, I will be sure to do that in the future.

However, I believe my OP was very balanced. There was nothing “zionist” about it…Arafat REALLY DID call for more terrorism, and that’s something noone can deny.

So just from reporting facts, I don’t see why I get opposers to my message…? I personally think that it’s their blind following of the anti-Semetic movement that causes them to instantaneously insult my posts, not my “zionism”, which clearly isn’t show in the post above.

So I screwed up on my first post? I didn’t screw up on this one, but immediately I get shit about my last post. It’s really sad that people have to hold grudges and bring up the past just to make themselves look good on future posts, rather than talking about the present content.

Thanks for the reply “Noone”.

22

jjimm, what you see as advocating ethnic cleansing, I see as a pessimistic view of reality – a view that unfortunately may be accurate. After 55 years of attacks, no peace process betweeen the Palestinians and Israelis has come close to succeeding. AFAIK it’s a tragic fact that Palestinians are taught to hate Israel and to hate Jews. They have summer camps for children named after terrorists, preaching terrorism. Anti-semitic material is presented in their media. It’s hard to imagine what it would take to change the pervailing attitude to acceptance and cooperation. It’s also hard to imagine a Palestinian leadership that would create that change of attitude. You can’t blame those who see that as hopeless.

23

Um, no you don’t have the right to talk about anything you want, at least, not here, dude. This is a privately owned message board.

24

I find that statement quite ironic when put into context of this conflict.

Krillan you’ve got to understand that they only way to beat terror is to have the people that support the terror realise that there is a better way. You can fight it with guns and tanks. That only breeds more anger.

You find it frustrating that when things look like they might be changing along comes another bastard with a bomb. That bastard wants you to get angry, that bastard wants the Israeli forces to strike back. They want the peace process to fall. This is what dissident republicans in Ireland have done for the last 10years.

Nobody here thinks that these terrorists are right. Nobody here thinks that Israel is all wrong but there are two sides.

25

I find that statement quite ironic when put into context of this conflict.

Krillan you’ve got to understand that they only way to beat terror is to have the people that support the terror realise that there is a better way. You can fight it with guns and tanks. That only breeds more anger.

You find it frustrating that when things look like they might be changing along comes another bastard with a bomb. That bastard wants you to get angry, that bastard wants the Israeli forces to strike back. They want the peace process to fall. This is what dissident republicans in Ireland have done for the last 10years.

Nobody here thinks that these terrorists are right. Nobody here thinks that Israel is all wrong but there are two sides.

26

Yeah yojimbo, I agree with you completely. But can your ideology work in the real world? Of course if both sides surrendered to one another and said “this just isn’t cool, man!”, then of course there would be peace. But as you said, there’s those that don’t want to hear of it. There are those that don’t want peace. And you know what? That’s all it takes…is a few punks with bombs strapped around them to end a peace movement. The leaders of Palestine need to properly punish those who go against the peace…and we just haven’t seen anything of the sort. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen exactly the opposite of that. For example, Palestine wants all 6,000 terrorists freed from prison (even though the road-map documents don’t speak of anything about releasing prisoners). The Palestinians see it as a fair peace movement so long as it runs by their terms…you see the flaw with that? I do, and others do…but why not? The whole world is letting them get away with it…I don’t blame them!

27

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this OP. You guys that criticize this thread because his first one is off the mark are way out of line. The first thread he opens goes off the rails, so the guy straightens up, flies right, and posts a more thoughtful OP, and now you want to claim that his point of view is not valid because the first thread ‘tainted’ him? Give me a break.

The OP in this thread is dead on. The chief enemy of peace is not Israel. Israel doesn’t want that damned territory. Israel would love nothing more than to have its people live in peace side by side with a thriving, pluralistic Palestinian state.

The problem is that there are a whole bunch of people trying to kill Israelis, and that causes serious security concerns. To just wave these away as mere details to be negiated is ridiculous.

And Arafat IS an enemy of peace. He always has been. He’s a crooked dictator wanna-be who has siphoned billions of dollar from his own people. He has never tried to build up his own country and make it work, choosing instead to focus all of their problems on Israel. He is complicit in creating an atmosphere of hatred towards Israel amongst the young Palestinians, which makes it very difficult to achieve a lasting peace. And his own security organization always seems to be implicated in (or outright take credit for) terrorist acts just as a meaningful set of positive changes is about to happen.

For those confused about right and wrong in this conflict, I offer this basic test - if you could wave a magic wand tomorrow and magically make all of the weapons of the Palestinians vanish, and remove any murderous impulses from its young people, what do you think Israel would do? Wipe them out? Or breathe a sigh of relief and get on with their lives?

Now turn the situation around. If all of Israel’s weapons vanished tomorrow and Israel had no way to defend itself, what do you think would happen? Answer: Israel would be destroyed, and its people slaughtered.

Can you imagine living under that kind of pressure? What kind of people would Americans be if they were surrounded by countries just waiting for a chance to kill them? What would they do if, say, Texas demanded independence and Texans went around the U.S. killing people? Thousands of people.

It amazes me that Israel has remained as restrained as it has. Sure, Israel has made some mistakes. But when it comes down to it, Israel is a free, peace-loving nation full of people just trying to get along with their neighbors. In contrast, the Arab world is full of brutal dictatorships that have a history of aggression towards Israel.

And yet, Israel seems to be the constant focus of criticism in the world and in the U.N.

28

The thing is, Yojimbo, Israel doesn’t want peace. Israel wants the bombings to stop. Peace is just a means to an end - a good means, perhaps the best means, but a means nonetheless. Israelis would rather have no bombings and no peace deal than peace and dead Israelis.

I know: that’s short-term, zero-tolerance thinking. But the short-term is all we’ve got. For one, no Israeli politician can tell his public that we may have peace in the future, but until then some of your family has to die. Shimon Peres tried saying that, which is why he was never elected prime minister and never will. For another, I don’t think Israelis believe that there’s such a thing as the long-term in the Middle East. For that you need trust and stability, which simply aren’t there.

You said that terrorism can only end through understanding and concessions, and you brought up Ireland. But what about the other English colonies - Scotland and Wales? They fought their colonizers for centuries, both openly and through what we now call terrorism, and they lost. Today they may be equal members of the UK, but that’s a recent development, and it wasn’t bought by force of arms.

It’s untrue that terrorism can’t be defeated. History can’t back that claim up. Look at the Cathars, the Moors, the Native Americans, the Judeans… we haven’t forgotten how completely the Romans vanquished us. All these victories were won by the harshest, most horrendous means, and I would hate to have to resort to them myself, but the option is still there.

We want peace, but we don’t need it.

29

Alessan the Scots fought for a long time and lots of people died.

The problem is if you try and use “the harshest means” it’s not going to work. You’ll still have terror on your streets or a country so tied up with security that it would be impossible to live and do business in. Israel now is only financially solvent because of US backing IIRC (I could be wrong about that). A country that like it or not would be a pariah to a lot of the world and more importantly a target for any fruit loop who supported Palestine.

You would not gain freedom by that road you would gain terror on a greater scale.

You can dream about getting rid of this problem with a iron fist but it just wouldn’t work. You could kill millions and you still wouldn’t be safe.

30

Yes, Alessan but if your not going to adress the legitmate grievances of the Palestinians then the only outcome is likely to be continuation and escaltion of the cycle of violence. No people have the right to brutalize and oppress another.

Also Peres was Prime Minster from 1986-88.

31

“Israel doesn’t want that damned territory. Israel would love nothing more than to have its people live in peace side by side with a thriving, pluralistic Palestinian state.”
I don’t think I have ever heard anything so naive about the Arab-Israeli conflict . Of course Israel wants the land. What do you think they have been building the settlements for including during the Oslo peace process? What do you think that slogan about Jerusalem being the eternal and undivided capital of Israel means?

“if you could wave a magic wand tomorrow and magically make all of the weapons of the Palestinians vanish, and remove any murderous impulses from its young people, what do you think Israel would do?”
The present government would at the least annex all of East Jerusalem and continue building extensive settlements all over the West Bank leaving maybe 40-50% for a rump Palestinian “state”
There are also ideas floating out there which are basically ethnic cleansing ie. declare Jordan the Palestinian state, annex all of the West Bank and get the Palestinians to leave for Jordan.

“If all of Israel’s weapons vanished tomorrow and Israel had no way to defend itself, what do you think would happen? Answer: Israel would be destroyed, and its people slaughtered.”
It’s unlikely there will be a genocide. My best guess is that lots of Jews will be expelled and the rest will continue living as second-class citizens. Not much worse compared to what a right-wing Israeli government would do in similar circumstances.

“It amazes me that Israel has remained as restrained as it has”
Nonsense. Britain has also faced terrorist problems but I haven’t seen them killing hundreds of civilians, tearing down their houses, imposing crippling sieges etc. Israel is restrained compared to Russia or China but its human rights record is pretty much bottom of the liberal democracy league.

32

Claiming that Israel doesn’t want the territory and has remained restrained all these years is a tad disingenuous. Israel has occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights since 1967, an understandable act to some degree, in order to defend itself against Syria, Jordan, and to a lesser degree Egypt, much as the Sinai was occupied to defend against Egypt. What isn’t so understandable, and has caused headaches in the peace process, is the policy of settling occupied territory with its own people. Israel unfortunately can’t simply say “fine, have your damn territory,” build a wall and be done with it without leaving the settlers on the wrong side of the fence. Some of those settlers would also be more than willing to go on killing sprees themselves, much as you claim the Palestinians would if Israel were to wake up disarmed tomorrow.

Not to attempt to pin blame primarily on one side or the other, but Israel also has itself acted in an aggressive manner towards its neighbors. It started the ’56 war (though with its reasons), the ’67 war (though with its reasons, and preemptively), and invaded Lebanon in ’82 (though with its reasons), just as some examples. It is unsurprising that Israel winds up being the one criticized by the UN and the world precisely because it is stronger than its neighbors are. If things had turned out differently in ’48 and Israel was never created as a state, Syria, Egypt and Jordan would probably be frequently condemned for their mistreatment of their Jewish minorities, who would themselves have likely continued ‘terrorist’ acts even in defeat.

33

Well, Ireland is the real world. I don’t know if you’ve studied the peace process over here, but I think there are lessons to be learned. Yeah, there are some dissident Republicans and Loyalists who will never accept the status quo, but the main terror groups have been on ceasefire for a while now. More importantly, the grass-roots support for the terrorists has been distinctly eroded thanks to political concessions. It’s a slow, flawed, process full of painful compromises, that often seems to involve going 4 steps forward and 3 steps back, but things are way better than they were 10 years ago. I concede that the Israel/Palestine situation is more complex, but I’m fairly sure that if the UK had behaved in Northern Ireland the way Israel behaves in the Occupied Territories, we would have become an international pariah.

34

But that’s exactly my point. Israel doesn’t want that territory per se - it wants it right now because of its precarious security situation. Any map of Israel will show you how dangerous to Israel the Palestinian territories would be if they were occupied by a threatening power. Israel occupied the Golan heights not because it wanted the water there, but because of the constant threat of attack from the Golan, the shelling of the farms below, etc.

I disagree with the settlements and think they should be withdrawn. The settlements are a legitimate area of criticism against Israel. But again, I believe that the driving impulse behind those settlements is the exasperation of those on the right in Israel, and their determination that the Palestinians can not be trusted and therefore should never be given a state. This is the kind of extremism that develops when a country is essentially at war for 50 years.

That said, I don’t think there is another country on this planet that would have remained as restrained as Israel has given the constant threat to its very existence. Certainly not the United States, which has always responded to threats with overwhelming force. Certainly not Britain or France, which have been colonial powers. Certainly not Russia, which to this day has a history of brutally crushing any internal threats and revolts in its outlying territories. Yet all of these countries sit on their high horse and dictate to Israel how it must behave in the face of grave danger.

And you know what really bugs me? It bugs me that many on the left who heavily criticize Israel for things like the occupation of the Golan Heights and its security crackdowns in Palestinian territory are the same people who used to do flips and twists to excuse the butchery of the Soviet Union. I can’t count how many times I heard that the poor Soviets were just paranoid because of WWII, and their invasions of Eastern Europe were understandable because the poor Soviets needed a ‘buffer zone’ from the oh-so-hostile western democracies. And yet Israel, which is at its core a just and decent democracy, receives nothing but hostility.

35

I concur, Sam. Its seems that every day I find a new notion of a double-standard on issue after issue. It almost makes me sick to my stomach.

36

Oh. So, if a Palestinian argues that (reversing Krillan’s argument) “the only thing that will end it is the Palestinians wiping Israel off the map, because nothing except termination will stop the Israeli terrorist groups from doing what they were taught to do since they were toddlers: murder innocent Palestinian” he/she is not being an extremist anti-Semetic prick, he/she merely has a “pessimistic view of reality.”

Gotcha. :rolleyes:

A few days ago, I was invited to a Seeds of Peace graduation of Israeli and Palestinian participants. It was quite surreal (at least for me) walking into the room and seeing Israelis and Palestinians together, singing, laughing, and socializing. As I listened to Colin Powell make his little speech, I realized something. As much as Mr. Powell or I wanted to place our hopes on this generation of Mideast leaders, I knew that creating the peace wasn’t so much up to them as it was for us. These kids can talk about brotherhood between Arabs and Jews all they want, the truth is as long as there are people in the US, in Europe, or in the “Arab street” who feel that security = crushing the other completely, they are not going to experience any peace or coexistence in their lifetimes. They’ll continuing suffering while people like Krillan and december continue promoting extremist viewpoints.

There is an excellent article in Newsweek about what ca be done to end suicide bombers. Israel should look to its ally Turkey as an example of success in its fight against terrorism.

As much as I’d like to be a good Christian and forgive Krillan’s trespasses, I find his first thread simply abhorrent. Furthermore,
just as anti-Israeli arguments can sometimes hide anti-Semitic sentiments against Jews, anti-terrorist arguments can sometimes hide anti-Muslim or anti-Semetic sentiments against Arabs. (Let’s not forget that Arabs are Semites, too.) Fortunately for the rest of us, its easy to tell who is being sincere in his or her criticism and who is hiding behind a stalking horse.

37

Sorry, I’m not sure I get what it is exactly the OP wishes to debate in this thread. It sounds like what he is saying is that any measure of supression and brutality toward the Palestinian people as a whole is justified as long as Arafat remains a political figure. Or what?

So far the disucssion, while interesting, seems to center mainly on whether the OP is trying to “stick pamphlets under our windshield wipers”, as Alessan so colorfully put it. Could the OP just state briefly what his position is and how the linked article (which requires a registration that I do not care to make) is relevant?

38

You think you’re being cute, but there is not a parallel between the Israeli attitude and the Palestinian attitude. Israelis are not raised to want to wipe Palestinians off the map. For years, Israel has possessed weapons that would enable them to literally drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank. Israel has chosen not to use their weapons against the Palestinians.

Note that Israel has many Arab citizens, who vote, serve in the Knesset, etc. In fact, the only Arabs in the middle east who can vote are the ones lucky enough to be citizens of Israel. OTOH the PA sure doesn’t welcome Jewish citizens. AFAIK they don’t tolerate Jews. Nor does Israel preach anti-Arab or anti-Muslim themes the way the PA promotes anti-Israel and anti-semitic themes.

There have been a small number of Israeli terrorists who attacked Palestinians. These people have been aggressively opposed by Israel’s government. An Israeli who murders a Palestinian is considered a murderer, just like an Israeli who murders another Israeli.

This is the opposite of the PA which has done little or nothing to oppose Palestinian terrorist groups. In fact, the PA is associated with Al Aksa, one of the terrorist groups operating against Israel.

39

There’s an exact parallel, December in many ways Israel has made living conditions in Palestine predujical

Most of the alleged antisemitic propganda is in itself propaganda, I’ve yet to see credible sources for this. The PA itself always catergorically stated that Jews who emigrated before circa 1920 (?) were Palestinians. You say Israel like it’s a monolithic entity in truth there are sevreal parties in Israel with racist antiArab themes, some of them currently in the governing coaliton

Besides from many of the IDF assaults which could easily be considered terrorism, there have been settlers who have murdered Palestinians, they are rarely brought to justice (see cite) even when they are the sentences are laughable such as the Israeli settler who was given a year suspended sentence for shooting a Palestinian boy.

http://www.btselem.org/

Why should the oppressed be responsible for the oppressors security especially when it treats there policeman and checkpoints as military targets? Anyway it has made a number of arrests, particularly after the roadmap allowed more room to operate.

40

Well, that (at least the settlements, Israel’s actions towards its neighbors and extremism within parts of the Israeli populance) is my point as well. I’m to the left, though not insanely, and you’re to the right, probably more so than I am to the left but not insanely. I don’t view Israel’s actions as being inexcusable or particularly restrained, it’s a young nation still carving out its existence just like all nations have throughout history. What is really bothersome to me is the settlements, and I’m glad to find that we are somewhat in agreement.

Occupying territory vital to its national defense in the absence of peaceful existence with a neighbor is one thing, which is the reason I’d never condemn Israel for still occupying the Golan. I’ve never defended the USSR for its actions and never would. Much as the same people to the left who flip-flop on Israel and the USSR bug you, what bugs me is when people to the right claim that Israel’s actions are entirely in accord with peaceful co-existence with its neighbors. They aren’t, at least not any more so than any young nation engaged in violent contest with its neighbors is. It’s understandable, of course, but Israel’s actions aren’t always entirely good and just any more so than any other nation.