Yeah but she made Bush look like a frikking fool.
Well she was making no statement about people in Israel, by that logic, she was talking about the intersection of people in Israel and Jews. So it is, shockingly, a complex mix of religon and geography, as is always the case in the Middle East.
So now you are attacking my choice of words and knowledge rather than address the issue of whether the questioner “assumed facts not in evidence”. That doesn’t change what was actually done and is apparent from a complete transcript.
Nor is buttonholing a person at a party an “interview”. Sam Donaldson shouting to Reagan wasn’t an interview. An interview is saying, “I’d like to talk to you about these subjects” and then doing so. You are, as usually dodging the question, the entire context of the statement and choosing snippets to make it sound different. It is why you are generally so fundamentally dishonest in your posting. If you cannot look at all the facts, all the context and determine the right level of approbation, if any, for all the participants, it is not intellectually honest. It is moral turpitude. And you are engaging in it.
I have never said that Helen Thomas’ statements are without blame. I just think that the right level of blame needs to be assigned. Same with the reporter. Following an old woman around at a party and changing her wording in questions is no more fair here than when Michael Moore questioned Charlton Heston about guns in Bowling For Columbine. It was despicable there and it is not quite as despicable here.
You want an “interview” with someone, you ask them nicely. If they don’t cooperate then you do a 60 Minutes style “refused to comment” or a really jerkish O’Reilly style stalking.
But when you make a blanket condemnation from a snippet of an “instant interview” without reference to the whole 30 seconds or so, that is a demonstration of how fundamentally unfair you are prepared to be in your cause. Here mention of German and Poland appears absolutely horrifying out of context of the whole exchange, but taken in the full context it looks very unfortunate and has a different undesireable meaning, but not nearly as bad.
But if you make judgments by taking things out of context and focusing, perhaps that explains why you have such poor judgment in general.
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t the Jews come from Israel? I’m pretty sure they were there before Muhammed came along. So who occupied who?
As for who’s living there now, Israel was founded sixty-two years ago. I’m going to assume that most of the people living there now were born there. And most of the people who are saying they want to go back are the children and grandchildren of the people who actually used to live there.
I don’t agree that we send the Jews back to Europe (a million Jewish refugees is no improvement over a million Palestinian refugees) but once again anti-zionism is morphed into anti-semitism.
Its funny isn’t it? If you were to ask me right after WWII, I would have guessed the opposite, wouldn’t you?
If you were to exclude ethnic groups, sociology and anthropology and the like as not being science, then they would not be science. However, in the real world anthropology and sociology are science and there are people with academic credentials who study such things, including ethnic groups, with peer reviewed journals who are generally accepted as scientists.
So you are completely wrong and full of poop.
Here is a good link that wasn’t invented just for this thread.
http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Anthropology/Cultural_Anthropology/Ethnography/
Is every ethnic group entitled to go back and occupy land that thir ancestors occupied two thousand years ago? Are Mexicans entitled to take back Texas and Arizona? Can the Lakota tribes retake the American plains states?
The Palestinians are just as much genetic heirs to the original, ancient Palestinian Jews as European Jews are by the way, not that I think ancient genetic heritage means anything, but modern Palestinians are, in fact, descended from ancient Israelites.
So are the illegal aliens pouring into the southwest United States from Mexico.
Once again I don’t think expelling Jews from israel is a good idea but equating the Aliyahs to slavery is a bit odd.
Well, according to the Holy Writ of the Jews, they kinda took it from the Canaanites by force with the approval of God. Then God took it away (sez so in the Bible) ‘cuz they were misbehavin’. That went on a few times and then the Romans kicked the Jews out and God never officially sent a prophet to say it is okay to go take it back now. God has remained silent on the subject.
Now are the descendants of the Jews entitled by hereditary rights to claim the land? (Assuming that there is not a valid UN mandate, which still stands that does grant that right.) No. By that logic, all property law in the world would be subject to constant dispute over who had title. Seventy or so generations would make hereditary rights far too attenuated to pursue.
I’m all for an Israel in the mandate borders. Or at least I was. Seeing that the situation isn’t going to change and that the US taxpayers are being asked to pay to defend the land and subsidize the social services and diplomatically and militarily back the treatment of the Palestinians, I don’t want to have to pay for it through my taxes. The parallels between Apartheid South Africa and the Nazi Warsaw Ghetto are quite apparently to me even if they are off by a matter of degree or order of magnitude. I don’t want to have to pay for it, and I’d like to see the US use its influence to change those situations.
Not exactly. In Germany the attitude was “My God, what have we done?” In Poland it was more like, “Look how shitty things are. It’s the all the fault of the Jews.” There are numerous cases of Polish Death Camp survivors making their way back home and being beaten to death for have the audacity of wanting to get their home back.
Oh, don’t mistake me. Anti-Semitism is not specifically leftist. Anti-Semites move back and forth over the years, but are never really political side or another. These days, the Righty-A-S’ers have mostly fallen by the wayside and its swung back towards the Lefty ones, because a lot of leftists identigy with the Arabs of Palestine. I think they’re being naive and dangerously stupid tools of genocidal Muslim fanatics, but most are just that: tools, not active accomplices. You don’t see academic papers from Right-wingers calling for the dismantling of Israel and crowing about how evil the Jews are.
Helen Thomas, however, would be the first to cheer if Israel suffered a catastrophe. She’s shed crocodile tears and suggest it was all their fault.
Lefty as its entire own insult.
You don’t see that from lefties either. You don’t see any antisemitism at all from lefties. Anti-Israel is not antisemitism.
None, at all. Not one lefty on the planet is an anti-Semite.
How could anybody even begin to think that you’re not playing straight?
That just isn’t true. While I think that Anti-Semitism is not common among lefties, it is hardly non-existent. The communists, who were certainly part of the left had as bad an Anti-Semitic streak as anyone short of the Nazis, who were part of the right. Neither the right nor the left is necessarily Anti-Semitic or prejudiced, but each movement and each individual deserves to be judged on its own merits.
I’ll go even further. You don’t see anything bad at all from lefties. No liberal has ever done anything stupid. If you say you’ve seen it, you’re lying. Similarly, nobody who’s a leftist has body odor. It just doesn’t happen.
It should be easy to show some cites.
Your wiki link just talks about people who use the phrase “new antisemitism” to smear critics of Israel.
Diogenes, do you believe the Israeli Jews should move back to where they came from?
Well, I suppose I might. Of course, the fact that you’d claim that not one single person on the left, ever, had an ounce of hatred for the Jews shows that you’re not exactly interested in honest discussion.
The real question is do we get a No True Leftist, or a Saying Anti-Semitic Things Doesn’t Prove You’re An Anti-Semite?
Off the top of my head, I’d wager that the two easiest examples will probably be handwaved away with the former, right?
David Duke ran for government on the Democratic ticket. No True Leftist?
Father Coughlin. No True Leftist?
Oh, it seems you’ve also got the It’s Okay To Be Anti-Semitic If You’re Using Racism To Argue Against Israel. Describing the Israeli Lobby in Britain as a “kosher conspiracy” is, in your warped apologia, smearing valid “anti-Zionism”.