Whack the terrorists with spurious analogies! december, you are hilarious. 
On the contrary, the Snow example proves my point.
Dr Snow’s predecessors did not understand how cholera was spread. They tried a variety of mechanisms to prevent the spread of cholera. They were ineffective.
Dr Snow understood that it was spread from the pump. He didn’t fully understand why or how, but he understood that much. And that was a sufficient understanding to take some effective action.
Dr Snow’s successors, with a better understanding still, were able to take even more action, with the result that cholera is not now found in the UK.
History is filled with examples of cases where those who retaliated with force made their situation worse, not better. I have already mentioned the Irish experience, but there are countless others. I think the statement that “without understanding, retaliation is still likely to be an effective strategy” is simply not borne out by experience.
There is also a moral dimension here. I suggest as a moral proposition that a state is not justified in the use of force which may injure the innocent unless it has first done what it can to establish that the use of force is going to contribute to acheiving the ends which are desired. (Other conditions must also be satisifed, of course.)
There is a difference between making useful generalizations about a group, and blind hatred or racism.
“It’s more likely that a Nazi speaks with a German accent than with an English accent” is a true statement, and the application of it helped in the homeland defense effort in Britain in WWII.
Likewise, if a woman phones the police and says that she was just mugged by a large white male, then as a matter of police procedure it makes sense to pay special attention to large white males. That does not make it racism, although it is ‘racial profiling’.
So I think you need to come up with specific examples we can debate, rather than some general feeling you have that we treat Arabs ‘differently’.
As for having to understand something before you can defeat it - December’s point was reasonable, and jjimm’s response was out of line. The U.S. didn’t have to understand the subtle and complex relationships in Japanese society in order to defeat Japan. Of course, any information helps, and it’s a worthwhile effort to attempt to understand your enemy, even if that understanding is only being used to decide where to drop the bombs. But it certainly isn’t *necessary, and it’s not a moral obligation. If you kill someone, you will not be allowed to bring up your family history in court as a defense. You may bring up your psychology only to the extent that you can show that you may have been insane at the time, but that’s about it. “He had it coming” is not a legitimate offense in any state other than Texas (-:
Hmmm, UDS.
Leaving aside the often blurry edge between “understanding” and “excusing” or “justifying”, I’d like to respond to another aspect of your post, which I think may be true but to add to it.
We can often judge those who we believe that we understand well harshly, and even more so if we place them in an historic tradition that we are self-critical of.
How do we react to evil acts which we do not understand?
Some react with fear and hate. Drop a nuke on all who share their cultural identity … that’ll larn’em.
Some with the belief that there must be a good reason for bad behaviors. With a lesser expectation that smells of arrogance. Both reactions are wrong.
The result of the latter is a double standard against the side that you are more similar to.
So, for example, if there were a large group of Israeli terrorists bombing Arab school buses, night clubs, mosques, etc of no military significance whatsoever … weekly … and the Israeli government made limp statements of condemnation, but no effort to stop these terrorists … then there would not likely be huge handwringing about how we must understand why these terrorists were resorting to such measures, how they were responding to bombings in their homeland and to two millenia of persecution and a sense of hopelessnesss that the situation would change … all of which would be their likely excuses. No. The expectation would be that the Israeli government would do everything possible to capture the murderers, try them, and punish them and no one would care about understanding them. Anything less would be met with unconditional condemnation of the Israeli government. As it should be. (And puhleeze don’t start portraying what the IDF does as it attempts to get at the terrorists as comparable to what I hypothetically described! We’ve been there done that too many times.)
But such is not the expectation of the PA by many. No. The reaction is that Arafat is too weak to attempt to bring such people to justice (and ignoring evidence that, at the least, his organization actually facilitates such attacks) or, conversely, that such attacks will only stop after a negotiated settlement that gives them everything that they want … and we should understand why they want it, that such understanding is the only way to solve the problem … that it unreasonable to expect violence to be curbed until they’ve succeeded in their aims … I believe that hopes for the PA to live by the same expectations of acceptable human conduct and that such actions would bootstrap positive outcomes is labelled by collounsbury as “a bloody motherfucking fantasy.”
I am a patriotic American. I also hold America to a high standard and am critical of the many times that our government has failed to meet that standard. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love my country, just that I’m not wearing blinders.
I am a Zionist. No apologies or misrepresentations. I also hold Israel to a high expectation and am critical of the kowtowing that minority ultra-Orthodox and Far Right parites recieve as a result of Parlimentary realities with poor policies occassionally resultant … expansion of settlements has been and continues to be wrong. Inequities in the distribution of governmental resources to Arab neighborhoods compared to Jewish ones is wrong. Individual Israelis in positions of power have been guilty of human rights abuses and hateful conduct and even rare episodes of true terrorist activities. The Israeli government has usually done a fair job in policing its own, but could do better. I feel that the same standards and expectations of conduct and self-policing are reasonable to expect from the Arab side. And that any lesser of an expectation is implicit racism.
I’m going to resist saying something cheeky and simply ask for a link, my curiousity is piqued.
I think there’s merit in what you say. Precisely because I feel closer socially, culturally and what have you to the Israelis and the Americans than I do to the Palestinians or al-Qaeda, when the Israelis or the Americans do something I find unacceptable I feel more ready to express condemnation.
Equally I condemn much of what the Palestinians or al-Qaeda do. (In fact, in the case of al-Qaeda, I’m pretty sure I condemn everything they do.) But I do so with a recognition that, as I feel so distant from them, my condemnation is perhaps less well-informed.
Also I feel that I share fundamental values with the Americans and the Israelis, and the considerations which lead me to condemn such-and-such an act should equally lead Americans and Israelis to condemn or reject it. Hence my condemnation is relevant. But the further I am from some combatant group, socially and culturally, the less relevant my condemnation becomes, and – the crucial point – the less effective it is likely to be at stopping the behaviour to which I object.
Is the result that I appear to be holding, or perhaps even do hold, Israel and the United States to higher standards of behaviour? Possibly. Let’s assume that it is. Is that a form of prejudice against the Palestinians and al-Qaeda? Not necessarily.
(a) You could argue that it’s a form of prejudice against Israelis and Americans. Granted, that would still be racism.
(b) You could argue – I think rightly – that I am holding Israel and the United States to standards which they themselves espouse, and it is only, or at least in part, because they espouse those standards that I am justified in holding them to them. But al-Qaeda, and the more militant Palestinian terrorists, do not espouse the same standards. So pointing out the contrast between standards and behaviour is simply not as relevant.
© You could argue that I am more concerned about effective action than about moral statements. Condemnation of Israel or the United States may have some effect because they care what I (and others like me) think about them. Condemnation of al-Qaeda and Hammas will not have the same effect.
DSeid: The Israeli government has usually done a fair job in policing its own, but could do better.
On some things it does indeed do a fair job, and many Israelis have shown an admirable standard of continuing civility and humanity towards the Palestinians. On other things, the Israeli government doesn’t appear even to be really trying: e.g., dismantling Jewish settlements in the occupied territories or undertaking to recognize a Palestinian state. In certain respects, the Israeli government sometimes appears to be as weak and enslaved by its fundamentalist hardliners clinging to the idea of a Jewish “Judaea and Samaria” as the PA appears to be by violent groups like Hamas and IJ.
*I feel that the same standards and expectations of conduct and self-policing are reasonable to expect from the Arab side. *
Oh, I agree that on the level of individual behavior and common humanity, there is no reason to expect anything different from a Jew than from an Arab. (And in fact, we see that the Arabs who are Israeli citizens aren’t running around blowing up people or thwarting “self-policing”.) Suicide bombing of civilians is inexcusable on anybody’s part.
However, I think that the two sides are structurally in such different case that to expect identical actions from them is completely unrealistic. The Israelis have a nation; the Palestinians don’t. The Palestinians have 50–75% unemployment and severe food shortages; the Israelis don’t. The Israelis have stable property ownership and territory that nobody else is allowed to boss around; the Palestinians don’t. The Israelis have a military and political structure that is capable of protecting their territory and property from major armed incursions (and even from many of the attempted stealth attacks on civilians); the Palestinians don’t. The Israelis have a highly developed economic infrastructure and prosperity that makes most of them highly averse to risking lives or well-being unnecessarily; the Palestinians don’t.
None of those extremely drastic differences has anything to do with implying any intrinsic human differences between Arabs and Jews: they are purely situational. If the situation were reversed and a bunch of Jewish refugees were leading a marginal and uncertain existence on bits of land controlled by a wealthy and stable Palestine, where many of their families had lived on land that was now the property of Palestinians, many of whom now appeared to be committed to stalling and squeezing the Jews in a quasi-colonial stalemate, I’d expect to see exactly these same sorts of violent atrocities on the part of some Jews. I wouldn’t condone them, but I’d be a fool not to expect them, or to expect that they could be stopped without addressing the intrinsic injustice of the situation.
Well kimstu, look historically and be surprised. Jews in the Pale, in shtetls, in ghettos of various sorts through the history of Europe and the MidEast for the last two thousand years … who were living “a marginal and uncertain existence on bits of land controlled by wealthy” Christians and Muslims. I must have missed all the violent atrocities they inflicted upon Christian and Islamic societies in my read of the history books.
I don’t expect the PA to be 100% successful with what infrastructure they have, but I think that we should be able to expect a good faith effort. If the infrastructure they have was used for that purpose rather than for the facilitation of terror and the perpetuation of Arafat’s position, then significant progress could be made.
Already agreed that the settlements have been poor policy resultant of inordinate power weilded by minority parties who control the ability to form coalition governments in the balance of their few seats. Disagreed about attempting to recognize a Palestinian State - Israeli society has declared itself ready to do that from the time of the original partition - it was the Arab states that annexed Palestine - Israel continues to be ready today - as long as she can be assured of security and the issues of exact borders (including Jerusulam) can be hammered out.