Take the discussion of South Africa to the thread about South Africa. The apartheid comparison is nothing new, but the other issues don’t belong in this thread.
This remains disingenuous no matter how many times you say it.
wtf?
Okay, well, you’ve yet to put forth your cites that Israel disenfranchises people. You’ve yet to tell me how it is an apartheid state. So far, you’ve said that “Israel stole land.”
From whom I’m not sure, but hey. Facts aren’t required in GD. 
From my understanding, Jews started coming to (the area known at the time as) Palestine in the late 19th century (in addition to the Jews who had lived there for millenia). These Jews fled, by the tens of thousands, from areas in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere where they faced persecution, and likely had nowhere else to go. This sped up MAJORLY with the start of the Holocaust and other pogroms in Europe, and by the late '30s there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Palestine.
The local non-Jewish Palestinians largely opposed this immigration from the beginning. But the Jews came anyway, sticking together, likely because they didn’t have much other choice. And then, along with various machinations of international diplomacy, declared independence after WWII.
And when they declared independence, they were attacked by every single Arab country. The attackers told the Palestinian non-Jews to leave (to allow them to sweep Israel into the sea, or whatever), and many left. Israel won the war, and lots of the Palestinians were displaced.
Recognizing this, and recognizing that there were atrocities and massacres both small and large on both sides, it doesn’t seem reasonable to say that “Israel stole land”.
Huh, I haven’t insulted Aburish, you have by misrepresenting what he said.
He makes it extremely clear that Saddam was a leftist as he goes on about just how much Saddam modeled himself and his country after Stalin.
Sorry dude, but Stalin was a leftist and people who wish to “build a Stalinist state” are leftists.
So even your own source proves you wrong, though I’ll give you points for deliberately excluding the parts of the interview where he classifies Stalin as a leftist.
Now if you want to turn around and insist that you know more about Saddam than the guy you just quoted and portrayed as an expert go ahead.
As much as I don’t feel like stepping into the middle of this argument, it’s reasonable to call someone a leftist if they are modeling themselves after Stalin in some economic sense. The text you just quoted only refers to Stalin in terms of running a brutal police state, and it’s ridiculous to say that makes Saddam a leftist. I agree with Argent Towers’ view on the subject (although I might leave Castro out of that category).
By that standard we shouldn’t automatically classify supporters of Hitler and Mussolini as right-wingers.
Saddam was an avowed socialist, set up Iraq to be a socialist state on the same lines as Ba’athist Syria and was certainly seen as a Socialist by the East Germans and the Soviets who trained him.
GIGO wants it both ways, classifying any of the governments who discriminate against Jews that are vaguely right-wing as being proof of right-wing anti-Semitism, but insisting that the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the Arab Socialist states can’t be held against left-wingers.
Personally, I don’t think it’s right to claim that anti-Semitism is stronger on the left that than the right, but it’s demonstrably false to claim that it’s worse on the right than the Left.
Anyway, he has yet to produce any evidence that Saddam wasn’t a left-winger other than that some on the Left didn’t like him.
By this standard, Bush wasn’t a right-winger because various extreme right-wingers believe he wasn’t right-wing enough.
The centralization of natural resources/infrastructure and militant nationalism are two things I can think of.
But Iraq has no industrial force.
I don’t.
Militant nationalism isn’t a leftist trait.
How about, “they took land that wasn’t theirs” then?
Well, it’s not surprising that Iraq was viewed as a socialist country when it was ruled by something called The Arab Socialist Party which required it’s members as well as all university students to read Karl Marx and proclaimed itself to be part of “the international socialist struggle”.
Iraq was a fascist dictatorship.
Later in his reign, Saddam added text from the Quran to the Iraqi flag and either wrote a copy of the Quran himself or had a copy written out using ink that contained his own blood. A few people said this indicated Saddam was an Islamic ruler - mostly conservatives who wanted to wrap Iraq into the war on terror, and some non-conservatives who fell for it. Most people recognized the gambit for what it was: Saddam dressing himself in the trappings of Islamic ideology while doing pretty much the same thing he’d always done, which was whatever he felt like. I suspect the same is true of the Ba’ath Party under Saddam (if not necessarily before he took charge).
You mean the land they legally purchased from absentee landlords?
You do realize that prior to the Palestinian Jews, most of the land was owned not by Palestinian Arabs, but by people living in Damascus or Beirut?
Furthermore, it was controlled first by the Ottomans, then by the British and finally by the UN, who were given it by the British.
The UN had to decide what to do with the land and the people living there. They decided to divide it into two states, one predominantly Jewish, while the other was an Arab one, because the Arab leadership made it clear they would exterminate the Jews if they had the chance and were led by an avowed Nazi.
You have an extremely simplest understanding of the history of the region.
Who? Obviously not the Jews who have lived there since biblical times. The Jews who started coming in the 1800s? The Jews who escaped from the Holocaust, searching for ANY place they might be able to live?
What about the land that was vacated when many left due to the urging of the attacking Arab countries?
While I’m sure it’s technically true that at least some Jews took land that wasn’t theirs by force, there seems to be far, far more to the story. Much of that force was defensive in nature- a response to being attacked.
Was anything I said regarding Isreal’s history not true?
Ok, please explain why Assad, Aflaq, and Saddam weren’t really socialists and why the Ba’ath Party wasn’t a socialist organization?
I’ll agree the left-right paradigm is a bit simplistic regarding the Middle East since for a long time just about all the governments(including Israel under the Labor Party) were somewhat left-wing by American standards.
[quote=“CitizenPained, post:140, topic:581985”]
Yes. But it has quite a bit to do with ethnicity.
Look it up, exactly like I had it. see for yourself
Of course not. There are, for instance, Black, Indian and Chinese Jews. But it is ethnicist.
It’s not optional. “Coloured” is the proper name of an ethnicity. Deliberately mis-spelling it is like typing “Joos” for “Jews”
He’s not redefining it. He’s using it in the same sense the ICC and the UN do. I don’t agree that Israel fits the definition, but it’s not because the oppressed class/es is/are an ethnicity/ies. It’s because the level of discrimination doesn’t amount to an attempt at complete segregation, IMO.
See, that’s the goalpost-moving we’re talking about. The context was Israel. Not The Middle East or Asia, but the one country of Israel. Pointing to equity differences across national boundaries is a complete non sequitur.
I’ll skip over the South African stuff as per mod request, but:
Opportunity of access to the same things.
The language of politics has moved on quite a bit since the Revolution. Trying to argue different puts you in the same camp as those who argue that “liberal” still means “libertarian”
I’d wager 90% of the US is Right of where I think the Centre is.
I’ve made my point - there are reasons people say Israel is an apartheid state, it’s not just a vendetta against Jews, as you alleged.
Bit quick to pat yourself, there, don’t you think?
European immmigrants.
For the record: I don’t want to join this debate.
Technically, it’s nationalist. Zionism should be seen as the last of the great 19th-Century nationalist movements, part of the same process that led to the unification of Italy and Germany, the independence of Greece and the Balkan nations, and the redefinitian of the Ottoman Empire as a Turkish nation-state. Just like the the above movements, it had its problems and unintended consequences, but is ultimately irreversable.
Oh and **Dio **- cut out the anti-immigrant rhetoric, ok? I know you think that immigrants shouldn’t be granted the same rights as the native-born, but it’s really not proper to express such opinions in polite company.
That too: No coincidence, really.
And I agree, the world has *got *to deal with the Israel it’s got, despite what some other people would prefer. That’s life.