The struggle of Israel is the struggle of the world (Pilar Rahola)

Someone else for The Guardian to mock?

Pilar Rahola - one short phrase in that article utterly devalues it in its entireity - she refers to 'the lebanese conflict'. conflict???? not the israeli invasion of lebanon, the wrecking of its infrastructure, the killing of 1400 lebanese, the illegal sowing of millions of anti-personel mines, etc, etc... no - the 'lebanese conflict'. what a sickening euphemism.

and you know what? its simple - we expect more from israel. just as we expect much more from the us (who's behaviuor is exponentially worse than israels). just as we expect more from the uk, and every other democracy round the world. we expect israel to behave like the liberal democracy it advertises itself to be. we expect it to be fair, and just. we expect it to work for peace, not make continuous war.

we are horrified when we see it beating up on its neighbours, beating up on the palestinians; just as we were horrified when british paras murdered 14 innocent british citizens; just as we were horrified when US state troopers murdered innocent students at kent state during the vietnam war; just as we were horrified at the million vietnamese the americans murdered during that war, and the tens of thousands they are killing in Iraq and Vietnam - along with their british poodle sidekick.

these ghastly regimes listed are not there to provide cover for israel! just because there are worse regimes in the world, does not mean its ok for israel to behave appallingly - does not mean its ok to kill 1400 lebanese (mostly civilian) and wreck their country, does not mean its ok to massacre 1300 defenceless (mostly civilian) gazans; does not mean its ok to keep the brutal boot of the IDF on the throats of millions of palestinians in the west bank.

its simple - decent, democratic countries cannot behave as israel does, and slink into the dark shadows occupied by the likes of burma, china, and the rest of Pilar Rahola sorry list, and expect that we wont notice.

Feeling better now you've got that well-rehearsed rant off your chest, Steve?

Tell you what - try posting it on CiF. It will go down a treat there, you'll have a bigger audience, and you'll receive a score of "recommendations" from the usual suspects in just the time it takes for a Hamas operative to intone "Itbak al yahud".

And then I'll come on and make this reply, and in just the time it takes for a flotilla "peace" activist spokesman to tell an Israeli naval official "Go back to Auschwitz" my comment will be removed by a CiF moderator:
"Israel would be only too happy to live in peace with its neighbours; the trouble is, some of its neighbours refuse to recognise it and make peace with it. They are islamofascists who want a judenrein Middle East, wherein only Islam reigns. Then, when the entire Middle Easyt is in thral to Islam, they will step up the assault on Europe, to bring that continent into the worldwide Caliphate."

Good old Joe!

Lieberman: Obama Wrong on Radical Islam
Tuesday, 15 Jun 2010
By: Jim Meyers

The new National Security Strategy released by the Obama White House last month refuses to recognize that our nation is at war with violent Islamist extremism, according to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

The Independent Democrat from Connecticut writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the 2006 National Security Strategy correctly identified America’s enemy as transnational terrorists who “exploit the proud religion of Islam to serve a violent political vision.” The new Security Strategy omits that statement.

The administration is wrong to eschew those words and the term “violent Islamist extremism” and instead use “violent extremism,” which is too broad and includes elements that are not at war with the U.S., Lieberman notes.

Administration officials would argue that the term “violent Islamist extremism” bolsters our enemy’s propaganda assertion that the West is at war with Islam, but that logic is “completely unsound,” Lieberman declares.

“Muslims in fact understand better than anyone else the enormous difference between their faith and the terrorist political ideology that has exploited it . . .
“We must encourage and empower the non-violent Muslim majority to raise their voices to condemn the Islamist extremist ideology as a desecration of Islam.”

The White House is also wrong to identify America’s enemy in the war on terror as simply al-Qaida and its affiliates, Lieberman states.

“Defining the enemy by reference to al-Qaida implies that this war in primarily about destroying an organization, rather than defeating a broader political ideology. This war will not end when al-Qaida has been vanquished . . . but only when the ideology of violent Islamist extremism that inspires and predates it is decisively rejected. That ideology motivates many other groups and individuals . . .

“We must recognize the nature of the fight we are in, not paper it over.”

abbot,

why do you repeatedly side with the antisemite eisner?

because he has a brain in his head and has studied the truth about the history of the region which you haven't.
READ The Ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Illan Pappe. Yvette in a nut shell everything your parents told you about Israel is a lie. Before the Arabs attacked them them in May 1948 they had already thrown 250.000 Palestinians out.
Please reeducate yourself.

Let's for the sake of argument accept Pape's 'history'.

Do you then believe that the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Poland, Belarus, China, India, Pakistan, Brazil and just about every other country in the world should hand back to the previous inhabitants?

If Israel ethnically cleansed the Arabs they did and are still doing a pretty bad job of it seeing as how there are more Arabs now within the 1967 borders than there were before 1948.

What about the ethnic cleansing of Jews from East Jerusalem and Hebron by the Jordanians in 1948? Cities they had lived in since biblical times?

What about the much more efficient ethnic cleansing of Jews from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen? Why are you not outraged by that?

Why are you not outraged by Hamas whose charter specifically calls for the 'ethnic cleansing' of 'Palestine' of all Jews?

Why do only the Jews have no right to self-determination?

Israel is the national home of the Jewish people legally and historically.

Going back to what happened 60+ years ago means no solution to the rights of both sides. What was once considered a land and border dispute has evolved into something much more important; as Rahola says: "...I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles.

Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys."

Why do you support vicious racist religious fanatics intent on genocide? Why do you support groups and idealogies that should be so inimical to your own? You support tyranny against democracy; religious repression against freedom; jihad against peace; the rule of the gun against the rule of law.

When will the 'democratically elected' Hamas be holding their next general election?

I love eisner Kafkaesque phrase "re-education" - it's called brainwashing.

Pappe himself has admitted that he writes highly partisan revisionist history. So no, I won't read a self-declared propagandist who hates his own people. And eisner figures are utter garbage - as usual. He is, after all, a racist who advocates the annihilation of Israel, wants the disappearance of the Jews, whilst also a misogynist and liar.

Funny how abbot disappears when we get into any detail.

eisner, the Arabs are in the Levant and north Africa due to the Arab conquests. They are not indigenous at all. Should they all leave?

tomeisner2
I've got a new cause for you, how about taking up the cause of the Red Indians, you can start calling for the repatriation of 200 million non Red Indians from North America.
You can then go around screaming hate propoganda "like a Banshee".
Or if you don't fancy that cause, what about the Aborigines?, 21,million non Aborigines to repatriate.
At least the Red Indians and the Aborigines were established and original peoples.
Unfortunately for you there never has been a Palestinian people, State or Nation, never has been and never will be, so you are "flogging a dead horse" with that cause.

Steveabbott,

Were you ever taught to use capital letters at primary school?

I have to conclude that your appalling grammar is symptomatic of someone who has been very badly educated.

I can see why it was a waste of time trying to teach you "world politics' at university.

Ilan Pappe is the archetype of the historian who does not care for facts. Wikipedia:

Pappé publicly supported an M.A. thesis by Haifa University student Teddy Katz, which was approved with highest honors, that claimed Israel had committed a massacre in the Palestinian village of Al-Tantura during the war in 1948, based upon interviews Arab residents of the village and Israeli veteran of the operation.[14] Neither Israeli nor Palestinian historians had previously recorded any such incident.

Benny Morris, a revisionnist historian himself, states about Pappe:

He says it subjugates history to political ideology, and "contains errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography."

In other words, Pappe's writings are just propaganda, not history.

And now Pappe in his own words:

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.