Into the Fray: Brain dead on the Right?

[shira]

The only thing more dangerous, delusional and disastrous than the Left's proposal for a two-state solution, is the proposal now bandied about by the Right - for a one-state solution

=========

...One might be excused for believing we have arrived at the “End of times” when we see such far-reaching meeting of minds between rabid anti-Zionists on the radical Left and the fervent pro-Zionists on the hawkish Right. When Omar Barghouti, who spearheads the anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and sanctions drive, and Tzipi Hotovely, one of the leading hardliners in the Likud, largely agree on the principle of one-state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and differ only on the particulars of the characteristics that state should have, who can be blamed for believing the we have arrived at the era when “the wolf lives with the lamb, the leopard lies down with the goat.”

Accelerating absurdity

But this absurd situation is emerging before our very eyes – at an accelerated pace in recent weeks – when stalwart Zionists such as Hotovely, Yoram Ettinger, Caroline Glick and Uri Elitzur began to embrace a one-state future and the granting of citizenship to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria....

...Economically, joining the two populations in common citizenship would catapult Israel backwards from the status of a developed nation to a “developing” one, jeopardizing its membership in the OECD, and, insensitive souls might claim, moving it from a post-modern society to a pre-modern one – with all the attendant repercussions for Jewish emigration (yerida)....

...However, as the non-Jewish proportion of the population rises, the justification for this is undermined. Indeed, it would be naïve to believe that this situation could be sustained. When non-Jewish minorities approach 30% and more, the logic for replacing “Hatikva” as the national anthem, in favor of a more inclusive composition, more representative of sentiments of other segments of the population, becomes difficult to resist....

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Brain-dead-on-the-Right-318026



Fragmentation on the Israeli Right.

Fascinating similarities between the BDS version of 1-state and the Greater Israel proposal. Both would lead to the same endgame. There's virtually zero difference between the 2 proposals.

[pelsar]

1. the reality.....never a strong point for the far right and left

both apparently believe...and this belief is as strong as any of the Pastafarian tenets are they what they believe will just have to happen when the one state comes into existence.

and when it doesn't fit their visions, both the far left and the far right will offer the same exact reasons:
it was done wrong (the process), but dont worry, in the long run, it will work itself out, it must because their "gods" have ordained
it........

both belittle the actual wants and needs of the people themselves, both groups believe they know whats "good for us" and neither group really cares what actually happens to the people involved as their is a greater "justice" that must be met.

the reality of such a merge would probably look more like Lebanon than Switzerland..but, not only is such a view irrelevant its not even acceptable to even think/question it (just ask them, questioning their "gods" their beliefs is simply not tolerated), you will not get an answer.

what the hell, the gods of "justice" and religion have their own demands and us little people simply cannot understand them......

[shira]

2. The author, Martin Sherman, is against 2 states too...

If you read the end of the OP, you'll find his solution:

The hard, cold truth is: To survive as the nation-state of the Jews, Israel must adequately address two imperatives: geographic and demographic.

While old school two-staters are willing to imperil Israel geographically to address the demographic imperative, budding one-staters are prepared to jeopardize it demographically to address the geographic imperative.

The only paradigm that addresses these imperatives simultaneously is one that entails a reduction of Arab presence west of the Jordan. The most plausible – arguably, the only – noncoercive manner to achieve this is by inducing economically incentivized emigration – as I have argued in numerous columns.

Now here's why he's against 2 states....

Incomprehensible and indefensible

As time goes by, continuing support of two-statism, by alleged pro-Zionists, as a feasible policy option for Israel, is becoming increasingly incomprehensible logically, and indefensible morally.

For unless we are prepared to embrace the bizarre formula, recently proposed by Shimon Peres, that peace should be pursued with “our eyes closed,” deleting any record of the past from our memories; unless we are prepared to totally dismiss the lessons of experience, clearly continued support for two-statism is fraught with risk and bereft of rationality.

Two-statism is fatally flawed in its logic, because its proponents offer no persuasive mechanism for its successful implementation.

Their only formula is a repetition of what has already failed, without providing any compelling explanation why it is likely to work in the future when it hasn’t in the past.

Two-statism is fatally flawed in its morality because its proponents insist on the implementation of measures that will expose millions of Israelis (and eventually Palestinians) to dire dangers that have regularly resulted from previous attempts to implement similar measures. The only formula they furnish for contending with these dangers is to hope they won’t occur, without providing any compelling explanation for that.

Despite the slim likelihood of success and the disastrous cost of failure, twostaters cling to their haughty, but harebrained, notions, proclaiming that their adherence to failed folly somehow confers upon them intellectual and ethical superiority. Isn’t that bizarre!

And Plan B is? Given all their disproven prognoses, unfulfilled predictions and broken promises, one can only wonder what, if anything, might induce two-staters to recant – or at least reconsider – their position.

After all, over the past two decades, during which the goal of two-states has been vigorously pursued, with huge international endorsement and massive financial backing, all the warnings of the dangers by its opponents have proved true, while all the promises of benefits by its proponents proved false. Yet unmoved by evidence, two-staters persist in their fanatical – see Santayana above – insistence that theirs is the only way forward.

In so doing, two-staters fail in their moral duty – twice.

First, in failing to put forward any convincing argument why their hitherto disastrous doctrine will now succeed and how this miraculous metamorphosis will take place.

Second, in failing to prescribe what measures they propose if such a miraculous metamorphosis does not occur and the Palestinians – for whatever reason – do not dramatically change their behavior patterns, but continue to conduct themselves as they have over the past half-century and more? What if – as in the past – any territory ceded to them is used to mount attacks on Israel? What is the two-staters’ Plan B? What Israeli response, and pursuant policy, would Dershowitz and other twostaters then endorse?

These issues are becoming ever-more pressing and pertinent, especially since all the post-Arab Spring developments across the region make the prospects for two-stater success even more remote, and failure more perilous than ever.

A mega Cast Lead?

But even if we suppose, despite the odds and the evidence, that two-staters are right, and it is possible to locate some mythical moderate Palestinian who is prepared to sign an agreement with Israel in good faith and who genuinely intends to honor it, how is implementation to be ensured? After all as Peres, in a more lucid era, pointed out: “The major issue is not [attaining] an agreement, but ensuring its actual implementation in practice.”

What if for reasons of political – or physical – survival, that moderate Palestinian was forced to renege on the agreement? What if he was unable/unwilling to rein in renegade radicals backed by rejectionist regimes or organizations? What if he was removed from power – either by the ballot or the bullet – and replaced by successors whose raison d’etre was repudiation of the recognition of Israel? After all, as Peres once observed: “The number of agreements the Arabs have violated is no less than the number which they have kept.”

What if, after it is established, it turns out that the Palestinians really meant what they said – that the founding of a Palestinian state is (merely) a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel? What if they really believe their National Charter, that “the partition of Palestine in 1947, and the establishment of the state of Israel, are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time?” What if they act to promote this belief? What if the residents of the Coastal Plain are subjected to anything even remotely approaching what the residents of Sderot have been subjected to for years? This is not an implausible prospect and twostaters have moral duty to provide a plausible contingency plan to respond to it.

Would they demand that Palestinian sovereignty be revoked and the Palestinian state be annulled, because it was established under false pretenses? Would they endorse a massive military campaign in the “West Bank” to quell the violence that made the maintenance of socioeconomic routine in the Tel Aviv area impossible? On a scale and intensity far greater than the IDF’s 2008/9 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza? Along a front much longer (about 400-km. long as opposed to 50 km.)? In topographical terrain far more disadvantageous?

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Mad-hatters-flat-earthers-and-two-staters

Gotta admit, he has a point.

What's your solution?

[pelsar]

3. of course hes got a point....

Last edited Sat Jun 29, 2013, 04:43 AM - Edit history (4)

the two state solution guarantees zero and can easily fall in to his scenario....

his base premise, his foundation belief is that there is a solution. Where is it ordained that in fact there is a solution to the conflict? is it "written" somewhere? I understand that many believe that somehow there must be a solution, but that too is just a belief.

wars have lasted hundreds of years in the past......
_____

the solution with the most chance of success is for the PA to develop first a real western democracy, as history shows that democracies have the best chance of living with their neighbors, whereas theocratic dictatorships (that those here on DU apparently support) do not play well with their neighbors.

however as long as dictatorships and anti western regimes are treated as if they are the "will of the people" and put on equal footing in the international arena there is not much chance of it happening. Of course the future is full of surprises, maybe the Palestenians will have their own arabs spring, toss out the UN groups, the progressives, the jihadnikim, and all those others who are active and passively pro Palestinian dictatorship and believe "justice", nationalism (self-determination) are all actually more important than real lives living in security with civil rights, hence they go to to the "top of the list" and get the int'l resources while internal civil rights does not.

by rejecting all of those that 'have their best interests' at heart", and go independent, they have a chance and then so too does the region.

[Ken Burch]

5. progressives don't deserve to be on that list.

And as to the regimes you list...well, nobody really likes them, but refusing to negotiate with them isn't an option. It's not a serious position to argue that everybody should just leave all of this alone and give unquestioning support to whatever the Israeli government does in the name of "security" until such time as all the governments on the Arab side are overthrown. And it's simply bullshit to act like all of this is the Arab side's responsibility. Why do you pretend it's that simple when it never has been?

And why are you taking a position that basically means war for the rest of bloody eternity?

Nothing you argued in that post above can possibly lead to a good future for your kids, or anybody else's kids there.

[Ken Burch]

6. You can't demand that the democratic change in the PA happen while the Occupation continues.

Keeping the troops there works against democracy, by giving the anti-democratic and violent forces an argument for their position

They will develop democracy when they are independent.

Palestinian resistance to Israel was never caused by lack of internal Palestinian democracy. It was caused by the harm the creation of that state(and I'll accept that most Israelis never intended to cause that harm)did to Palestinian people. They'd have had the same reaction if it was Italian Catholics trying to set up a state(as they kind of did during the Crusades)or if it was Baptists from Texas.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that there would never have been Palestinian opposition to Israel if if hadn't been for some leaders putting the idea in their heads. The truth is, that once one country is formed on another people's suffering, that other people are inevitably going to resist what's happening, and that that resistance has nothing to do with bigotry. The Native American resistance to U.S. expansionism in North America illustrates that, for God's sakes.

The real way to begin to end the conflict is to admit that Palestinians actually are a nation and really do have legitimate grievances. And the to address the ones that can be (such as by actually admitting that Palestinians were driven out of their homes in 1948 and didn't deserve to be). You start to make peace by acknowledging the other side's humanity, because only then can you expect the other side to recognize yours, when your side is the occupying oppressor force and holds almost all the power in the conflict.

No, this won't end the conflict by itself, and yes, Palestine does need democracy. But democratization, in a continuing war, a war in which victory as we once knew it is impossible, can't be made a demand of the occupiers. The United States, at its birth in 1793, was just as repressive as Palestine is now(more so, in fact, since to my knowledge Palestinians don't have slave plantations). And democratization won't make Palestinians less hostile to the Israeli government-only a real effort to address the suffering inflicted on them can do that.

BTW, Jordan is just as repressive as Palestine, and I don't seem to hear you demand that THEY democratize. This tells me you don't really care about Arabs establishing democratic systems at all.

[shira]

8. What's your plan B if the solution you prefer fails? n/t

[Ken Burch]

10. Keep trying, and find some way to get people talking.

We already know that what you prefer(maintaining the status quo until the Palestinians accept the Likudnik canard that the whole thing is THEIR fault, despite the fact that we all know that both sides are to blame and that the Palestinians have suffered, since 1948 and even more so since 1967, far more than the Israelis)can't lead to aornything ever getting better.

Nor can keeping the IDF in the West Bank indefinitely.

Nor can building more settlements, NONE of which have any possible justification.

Nor can ugly stunts like having the IDF destroy harmless solar panels just because the NGOs who built them didn't wait for the Occupation authorities to approve their construction(approval the authorities were never GOING to give, simply because those authorities can't accept the idea of anything being done to make the lives of Palestinians any easier).

In short, NONE of the hard-line measures have any hope of changing anything for the better. All they can do is preserve the status quo for a short while longer, and that isn't really a worthwhile goal. The status quo can't even be good for Israel, since it simply leads to the day when more extreme resistance groups emerge and choose even worse tactics.

[shira]

17. No, no...I'm asking what's your plan B when your solution fails?

Whatever solution or justice you feel is appropriate - after all the talks that precede such a settlement - after all the settlers leave, after there are exact 1967 lines to the last inch, reparations, apologies, refugees, etc. The Ken Burch solution to the tee. When that fails and the rockets fly, the suicide bombers start exploding everywhere, what's your plan B?

You know, just in case...?

More talk ain't gonna cut it.

[shira]

27. So you have no plan B, right? n/t

[Ken Burch]

31. Asking for a "Plan B" is meaningless. I'm not OBLIGATED to have a "Plan B".

Your fixation on that implies that there is some kind of good in the status quo. There's no good in it...it doesn't really make anyone safer, it doesn't make Israel any more secure than any other approach, it doesn't offer any hope for ending the conflict, and it makes it harder and harder to make a case that the Palestinian side should even bother trying to negotiate with the Israeli side rather than just say "screw it, we're gonna stick with the armed struggle".

Why are you so rigidly committed to the status quo when you know it's hopeless? When you know it can't be sustained?
That suggests to me that you are personally addicted to the conflict, that you care more about having a "side" to cheer on and defend than on actually trying to end the suffering and make anybody's life better.

The status quo isn't "strength". It isn't "security". It isn't "stability". It isn't anything. And at some point, you will have to accept that, if you really care about Israel on any level then having a country to root for in battle.

My fall-back is to keep trying to end the conflict...to keep trying to address the grievances that drive it...I can't lay out a specific detailed plan because specific, detailed plans don't work in the I/P situation. The only thing that can is flexibility and continued effort. That's what people who WANT the war to end would say...Unlike Netanyahu, who doesn't want the war to end because he's been poisoned by his father's hatred of the world and his obsession with avenging his brother's death at Entebbe(a death that's already been avenged many times over and about which nothing else can possibly be done). I doubt even his brother would want him to be this fixated with immiserating the Palestinians and keeping them powerless.

[shira]

38. So if by some chance, after LOTS of negotiations & Israel doing everything....

...they can possibly do within reason for long-term peace Hamas and company decide to blow shit up in a massive attack....your plan is for Israel to just return to the negotiating table and talk about what.....terms of absolute surrender?

[Ken Burch]

39. That wouldn't happen.

Hamas isn't going to blow things up just for the sake of blowing things up. If they did, especially if their doing so were to lead to Palestinian self-determination being further delayed (Israel would respond forcefully and the effect of that response wouldn't be altered in any way by what people outside of the area said about it, or by whose "side" they took in the overall conflict.

I'd denounce Hamas for doing something that insane, for the record. Not out of the expectation that it would make a difference(it wouldn't)but simply because it would be the right thing to do.

What it really comes down to is that you believe that that maintaining the Occupation and continuing to build what you know are illegal settlements in the West Bank(none of which are being built in areas that Israel could ever have more legitimate claim to than Palestine does, btw)are the only possible choices. You think the hard line actually helps. So you are automatically going to dismiss any alternative proposals(unless they come from the insane Israeli right...like those crazies you keep quoting who still pretend that "Jordan is the Palestinian state"-something Jordan never has been and could never possibly be), which makes it problematic to carry on any discussion or debate with you at all.

And, in fact, it often appears that your only reason for posting here is to try to badger or demonize anybody who disagrees with you into ceasing to post.

[shira]

48. You don't know that. It's what Hamas is all about...

Last edited Tue Jul 9, 2013, 09:33 AM - Edit history (1)

Hamas and Islamic Jihad don't want to simply rule in peace, get jobs for the people, etc. Their main purpose is to attack Israel, and with the rest of the so-called "progressive" world and Arab regimes backing them (hundreds of millions) they believe they have the long-term advantage over tiny Israel. They're not going to stop attacking Israel b/c if they did, they'd cease being Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

What it really comes down to is that you believe that that maintaining the Occupation and continuing to build what you know are illegal settlements in the West Bank(none of which are being built in areas that Israel could ever have more legitimate claim to than Palestine does, btw)are the only possible choices. You think the hard line actually helps.

That's bullshit and not what I believe at all. I'm like most from the moderate left to moderate right, for 2 states so long as it means peace. If there was yet another pullout before peace could be reached, I'm certain Israel's enemies would attack it again & again if given the chance. That said, after turning the keys over to the Palestinians and many wars and thousands of lives later, Israel would just have to re-occupy the territories once again to stop it. So what would be the point of pulling out early if it means having to re-occupy once again? If they don't re-occupy, they'd have to REALLY do so much damage that their neighbors wouldn't dare attack again. These options are worse than the status-quo, so why go there?

So you are automatically going to dismiss any alternative proposals(unless they come from the insane Israeli right...like those crazies you keep quoting who still pretend that "Jordan is the Palestinian state"-something Jordan never has been and could never possibly be), which makes it problematic to carry on any discussion or debate with you at all.

Actually, over 50% of Palestinians support a confederation with Jordan post-occupation.
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2013/p48e.html

Are they rightwing crazies? Apparently, everyone who doesn't agree with Ken Burch is a rightwing crazy.

And, in fact, it often appears that your only reason for posting here is to try to badger or demonize anybody who disagrees with you into ceasing to post.

That's what you do, assigning the worst motives and viewpoints to your opponents here.

All I ask for here is an honest debate. It's about time you're being honest now about your views on free speech and favoring regressive, anti-liberal dictators and tyrants over western democracies. It only took years to pull that out of you.

[Ken Burch]

50. I support free speech and you know it. I oppose tyrants and you know it.

Stop trying to paint me as evil.

[shira]

57. But you supported a tyrant like Chavez who was against free speech. n/t

[Ken Burch]

58. I didn't agree with his decision to take the rich man's station off the cable network

I supported the guy because he was the only president Venezuela ever had that ever did anything for the poor. There weren't any candidates running against him that HAD any progressive social views. Capriles damn sure didn't.

And a tyrant wouldn't have recognized the electoral victories scored by opposition candidates-an ACTUAL tyrant would have either deported Capriles or lined him up to be shot-not let the guy serve several terms as a state governor.

Capriles lost because he had nothing to offer the people...they knew that nothing he proposed could possibly I be good for anyone but the wealthy and the light-skinned...he had no respect for Afro-Venezuelans or the indigenous.

Capriles lost on the merits, and he'd have lost no matter what. Why is it so difficult for you to accept that?

May I assume you'd have backed the Contras in Nicaragua and cheered when the rich people's candidate, Violeta Chamorro, was elected as a result of the U.S. promising to continue the economic embargo and the Contra War UNLESS the people obeyed George Bush and voted to end the Revolution and put themselves back on the bottom of the dungheap?

You don't care about the poor, the dispossesed, those struggling to survive. You just care about a few arbitrary abstractions...human suffering be damned.

If you really wanted to prevent any Latin American leader from acting like Chavez, you'd be demanding that the U.S. NEVER intervene in Latin America(or Africa or Asia)again. Anything he did that you are pretending to be offended by was a result of the U.S. history of crushing the hopes and dreams of the poor, by brute force if necessary. That's all "anticommunism" ever was...a fight to kill the poor and exalt the rich. It never had a damn thing to do with "freedom", which "pro-market" types never allow us to have anyway.

[shira]

64. Chavez brutally suppressed free speech far worse than just that...

Here's a HRW report on it:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/03/05/venezuela-chavez-s-authoritarian-legacy

Now pull my other leg, telling me how you don't support totalitarian dictators. Love your ode to Chavez here...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101657130

Chavez' support of the most vile, brutal rightwing regimes on the planet (Iran, Syria, Libya under Gaddafi, N.Korea) should, alone, turn you off in a big way against him. Think of the tens of millions of victims severely oppressed in those societies if you're even capable.

If that's not enough, he was a vile basher of gays and jews...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2469146
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2469446

That you're still a fan of Chavez just goes to show your views are so extreme as to be irrelevant here. Your concern for Palestinian human rights rings hollow in light of the foulness you support.

[Ken Burch]

65. Human Rights Watch is not a reliable source on human rights issues.

HRW's comments on human rights issues always correlate exactly with the "line" of the State Department and the White House of which countries are "enemies" and which are "allies". They never say anything about human rights violations imposed by the IDF in its occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. They usually give the Colombian government(a government far more repressive of free speech under Uribe than anything Chavez ever did)a complete pass. Same with Mexico in its treatment of the indigenous and the radical opposition, or with any other U.S. "ally".

[shira]

66. Your defense of Chavez speaks volumes. And HRW routinely hammers Israel....

Their anti-Israel bias is well known:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watch#Anti-Israel_bias

You're defending a tyrant like Chavez who very much supported the worst, most vile & brutal inhumane regimes on the planet (Libya, N.Korea, Syria, Iran). You represent all that's wrong with the "progressive" movement, twisting the cause of human rights to serve an illiberal political agenda.

[Ken Burch]

32. The question of having a "Plan B" is meaningless.

Why am I OBLIGATED to have a "Plan B"? "Plans" don't work in the I/P situation. Only continued efforts to establish dialogue can ever work.

the "Plan A" that you defend...use brute force to try to keep the status quo in place in the West Bank for the rest of eternity...has never worked as a plan for peace OR safety, and never can.

Why do you always do these "prosecuting attorney" tactics, anyway? The proper way to discuss things is to argue about ideas on merits...not to personally demonize your opponent. You don't need to try to present people who disagree with you as evil...just come up with a reasonable critique of their views and offer better alternatives.

Nobody who posts here on a regular basis is an bigot against the people the State of Israel claims to exist in the name. Nobody here wishes those people harm or wishes to drive them away from Israel. Nor does anyone who posts here wants to spread any form of religions extremism OR dictatorship. It's just that some of us have disagreements with your views...and that's ALL it is. Really. vi
Please stop with the personal vilification...it's destructive and it's unfair.

[pelsar]

12. Jordan?

Last edited Mon Jul 1, 2013, 03:03 AM - Edit history (2)

any state in my mind that is not "western democratic" is illegal, wrong, not acceptable- --- no exceptions allowed and no excuses about "self-determination (nationalism) to excuse their abuses

got it? I dont give a shit, what color they are, how tall they are, how long the've been around, what color their eyes are and what injustices they've had in the past, real or imagined.....western democracy with its civil rights as its base foundation for all, and any society that rejects such rights is wrong

is that clear enough?

incase you missed what happens to dictatorships....and whats waiting for jordan and the Palestenians-just look at syria, libya, egypt. And since the Jordanians are not trying to kill me, i'm less interested in them, and have no demands, my neighbors apparently, at least some of them, are: yesterday, today and probably tomorrow as well, hence i do have a few demands from them.

you apparently dont take such a stance and believe that societies that reject basic civil rights are acceptable...you know the racist ones, the ones that treat women like objects etc all in the name of "multi culturalism" and process


Your "process" that you 'respect like in zimbabwa, iran, syria, lebanon, rwanda, sudan, Pakistan/India population exchange, Pot Pol, Russias october revolution, Chinas revolution and its little red book apparently have to kill millions upon millions, before they find this "progressive 'nirvana of yours" and in the meantime, you will "respect the process and their culture......

[Ken Burch]

13. Societies that don't respect basic civil rights AREN'T acceptable.

But military occupation of those societies by other societies is EQUALLY unacceptable and cannot, in THIS day and age, WHILE a war is still going on, lead to the establishment of basic civil rights.

The military occupation you are a part of has never been about democratizing Palestine, and cannot possible cause its democratization-because even a fully democratized Palestinian leadership will STILL demand self-determination and sovereignty over the entire West Bank, will STILL demand the removal of ALL settlements, and will still push for some recognition, at least partially, of the right of return.
None of those demands were the result of Palestine not being as democratic as it should be, because Palestinian resistance was based on grievances felt by ALL Palestinians at the marrow of their being, not by an inflamed few with no one else really caring, as your side's leaders would still like to pretend.

And Palestine has just as much chance of democratizing AFTER independence(as the United States did, coming into being as it did in 1793 as a slave-owning theocracy with sham elections involving only an elite minority)as it does having it at the outset. They'll make it happen if they wish to...and it looks as if they DO wish to. But the best way to STOP them doing it is to make democratization, a beautiful thing that most people everywhere naturally want to happen, into a humiliating concession forced on them by another country's army when that army is still carrying out perpetual low-intensity warfare all around them.

And my point about Jordan is that, if you don't care about THEM democratizing(I support the continuing demands for democracy that people throughout the region are STILL fighting for, including the millions rallying against Morsi in Egypt on Sunday, proving by their actions that you were and are wrong to write them and their dreams off as a mirage)than you don't really care about Palestine democracy at all. And you are just using "democracy" as a way to justify what you are doing to Palestinians, despite the fact that you know perfectly well that what you are doing i.n their land will never, under any circumstances, HELP them get democracy

[pelsar]

15. i believe in self interest....

and its in my self interest that the PA/Jordan/Syria/Egypt all become democratic..its that simple.

we've already seen in history that in fact democracy can and has come out of occupations. You can claim that it can never happen again, they were just "flukes" (germany, japan, Israel, S. Korea) but they had one thing in common: democratic institutions were put in place before the occupation left, those societies were also isolated from the rest of the world, in that there was no world wide resistance fighting the democracy.

now the PA is different, and it will require a differnet approach, but the foundation is the same: first democratic institutions are to be in place. That is the job for the progressives to do. Clearly the UN wont, israel, tried and failed and that leaves people like you who claim (i dont believe u) that socieites that dont have civil rights are "unacceptable" if 10,000 get killed as they "transition" from PA dictatorship to new dictatorship or democracy, its acceptable to you,and you can't even conceive of other options.....

fact is your pushing for a theorcratic anti civil rights govt.....If you really truly believed that such societies were unacceptable you would find those Palestinians who are fighting for civil rights NOW, who believe that civil rights, as much as the PA took them away can put them back, irreguardless of the occupation

but thats not you....your first and foremost promoting a dictatorship and ignoring those very Palestenians who believe otherwise..and that is because you believe you know better than them-guess what that makes you?

[Ken Burch]

21. Democracy only came out of POSTWAR occupations, not thing kind your army is doing.

An occupation going on while a war is still underway is totally different.

The occupations you listed above were in place after the shooting stopped. Rebuilding those countries was the project of those occupations. None were actively engaged in restricting and collectively punishing the civilian populations in the way those were(and the democratic institutions you speak of in the British occupied Jewish sectors of Palestine predated the British presence, a presence that never treated the Zionist population with anywhere near the brutality that the IDF occupation has imposed on Palestinian Arabs. The British left most people alone and admitted that it was possible for a person living under that occupation to actually BE an innocent civilian...something your army's high-command has always refused to admit about West Bank residents).

I admit I took it too far when I first said that democratic institutions had never grown under occupation regimes IN THE PAST...they did, in the cases you mentioned. But those situations have nothing in common with this one, and even in those cases, the fact of the
occupation had nothing itself to do WITH the growth of the democratic institutions. Germany, once the Nazis had been totally crushed on the battlefield(which, again, is a different situation from the present, since it isn't possible to have a World War II-style "unconditional surrender" defeat in the I/P war, for either side, and since such an outcome is really no longer possible in any war anywhere anyway)were naturally going to work to restore the democratic tradition they had been working on since the 1870's, having seen that dictatorship led them nowhere. The Japanese people were naturally going to want to try something other than the militaristic, aristocratic old order now that it had turned their country and large parts of the Pacific into an ashheap). Those people didn't need to be MADE to be democratic. Neither did the people of South Korea(who lived, btw, under a brutal military dictatorship for most of the post-1953 period, a dictatorship that the U.S. troop presence was mainly intended to sustain, since the U.S. political and corporate leadership didn't really want South Korea to be a democracy for most of the post-1953 era).

It's a fairly obscene notion to suggest that any people, in any country, have to be MADE to be democratic, that some people just naturally prefer to be oppressed and powerless.

And it's also fairly strange for you to assume that more democracy in the Arab world would lead to the Arab world giving up its hostile position towards Israel...it suggests that most rank-and-file Arabs never cared about the Palestinians getting dispossesed, and never cared about the creation of Israel at all...that those things were just imposed from above by a few mustache-twirling villain types. Please tell me you don't really believe that Arab sympathy with Palestinians never really existed and that Palestinians themselves never had any legitimate grievances about what happened to them in 1948. I credit you with being an intelligent person and neither of those views would be intelligent or even based on life in the reality-based community.

The truth is that democratically-elected Arab governments would still support Palestinians getting a real state, and that a democratically elected Palestinian government would still demand self-determination. What other positions would you EXPECT them to take?

I want democracy for all countries...it's just that I reject the Kiplingesque notion that people of "the West" are entitled to claim to be "the betters" of people in the Arab/Muslim world or of people in any other region, or that we can possibly be effective in helping secular or progressive types anywhere by wagging our fingers at the world and acting as if we, people with a heritage of resource theft, imperialism, genocide against non-European peoples all over the world, latter-day usury(through the Western demands for austerity in exchange for loans to countries in non-European countries) have any claim to regional moral superiority. There are good things in the West, but none are unique to it, and most of them(including democracy and secularism)had to be fought for FROM BELOW, at massive human cost, with the leaders of most "Western" institutions fighting against those things to the bitter end.

The people, working from below, are the only ones who can be the authors of freedom in the world we live in now. And they will insist that that freedom include freedom from want and freedom from exploitation(both of which are just as important as things like elections and separation of religion and state). They will only end up backing religious extremists(Hamas and Hezbollah in one area, the U.S. "religious right" in another)when they feel that no other path is left to them. So the way to fight those groups you and I both object to is to end poverty and the economics of permanent high unemployment...for democracy to grow, austerity must end.
That's how you stop religious crazyheads from running things...not by keeping one country's army on another country's soul until the second country satisfies the first country that it's "democratic" enough.

[pelsar]

49. you live in a real fantasy world...that much is certain...

And it's also fairly strange for you to assume that more democracy in the Arab world would lead to the Arab world giving up its hostile position towards Israel...it suggests that most rank-and-file Arabs never cared about the Palestinians getting dispossesed,

you actually believe that the arab world actually cares about the Palestenians.....do you have any idea how the arabs treat them when they are in their own country?

The Palestenians in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait.....they are on the bottom of the pecking order, the very bottom....limited rights, no citizenship.

do you believe the arabs care about the starving gazans? is that why they have organized so many packages to gaza to be sent though egypt? (virtually zero).
________________________________________________________

open your eyes......

democratic countries have very different values than that of dictatorships, to begin with they have freedom of speech, so what is actually important becomes known, and people like you who believe that you know what they want can be ignored, which is probably why you believe freedom of speech has to be linked to the proper political viewpoint.....you dont want to hear that they may disagree with you.

[Ken Burch]

54. So, in the end, it appears that you're still accepting all of the following old assumptions:

1)That it was only "Arab leaders" who ever questioned anything that was done in the process of creating the State of Israel...that the rank-and-file themselves would never have cared at all if it hadn't been for their leaders whipping them up and "filling their heads with nonsense".

2)That Arabs never did anything out of genuine concern for the Palestinians or out of solidarity with their plight.

3)That there were no legitimate reasons for anything that was ever done or said on the Arab or Palestinian side-that none of it was based on anything real, that no Arab or Palestinian ever had a valid grievance about what happened in the process(please tell me you don't still believe in the "no such thing as a Palestinian" canard-I gave you more credit than that in the past), and that the key to ending the conflict revolves around getting the Arabs and Palestinians to admit that everything they ever felt, said, or did was driven solely by bigotry or bullshit.

In short, it appears that you base your views on this issue on a complete rejection of reality and a complete refusal to acknowledge that anybody on their side was ever an innocent victim or ever possessed any shred of humanity.

Care to tell me why I should believe that ANY of the above is an inaccurate depiction of your views on the subject?

[pelsar]

55. is it inaccurate?..of course

Care to tell me why I should believe that ANY of the above is an inaccurate depiction of your views on the subject?
because you see everything through a filter that rejects what you dont want to hear or believe. Your views are very simplistice and when shown to be wrong...i.e. very very wrong (democracies coming out of occupations) in the end you have to make some kind of futuristic claim that it cant happen again as per one example. The arab spring being a second as per the 100,000 killed in syria and the MB arising and having the coup after that......you probably believe they're all on they're way to democracy
_______________________

if your asking why the 48 war got started?.....you tell me, did the local arabs rise up and reject the turks en mass? reject the brits en mass? How many arabs stayed and became citizens?

Do you actually believe that the invading syrians, egyptians, jordanians were doing it for the locals to create a democracy and not for their own land grab?

this i gotta get an answer to.....

__________________________
2)That Arabs never did anything out of genuine concern for the Palestinians or out of solidarity with their plight.

here i would say zero...which explains why the Palestenians still live in refugee camps while the arab countries have tons of money and treat them like dogs

That there were no legitimate reasons for anything that was ever done or said on the Arab or Palestinian side-that none of it was based on anything real, that no Arab or Palestinian ever had a valid grievance about what happened in the process

of course they have grievances...they've been the arab/progressive toys to play with since 48. How many other refugees since 48 are still in camps?
a democratic country was created where none existed....thats the ultimate good in this world, the refugees main grievance is that they are not part of it. ( i find "self-determination/nationalism without western freedoms to be nothing more than form of fascism and those that support such a creation are equally bad)

[Ken Burch]

56. I have never said it wasn't a good thing that Israel exists.

What I have said and do say is that the suffering inflicted on Palestinians in its creation(much of which, including the expulsion of ANY Palestinian not taking part in the fighting)needs to be acknowledged as an injustice and apologized for(as I believe the suffering inflicted in the creation of MY country needs to be acknowleged and addressed as well).

I'm not a one-state advocate...I favor two-states. And I favor democracy and free ch speech as much as you do-it's just that your army isn't in the West Bank to create Palestinian democracy(no such demand is part of your government's terms for ending the occupation, btw) and, as occupiers, no one IN your army has the right to preach about "human rights" while carrying out a mission that is predicated on denying human right, since no people living under military occupation DURING wartime, as opposed to after it(the postwar German and Japanese situations)is ever given rights BY its occupiers.

Furthermore, no Palestinians living under the IDF occupation see the IDF as their protectors, or as democratizers. They will make democracy on their terms, when they choose to prioritize that...and your country army can't do anything to change that.

It goes without saying that a democratically chosen Palestinian government would still demand the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, would insist on at least partial RoR(none of the current leaders really expects full RoR)and would still expect to get East Jerusalem as its capital. No Palestinian leadership chosen by ANY means would settle for a state without at least some right to self-defense(that right wasn't even denied to Japan or either Germany...why should Palestinians be expected to be MORE helpless than the countries that joined forces against democracy in World War II?) or a state that is expected to accept Netayahu's demands that they admit their cause was never based on anything honorable or legitimate.

Furthermore, it isn't as though the creation of a democratized Palestinian leadership(something you and I both want)will make either Fatah or Hamas vanish from the scene. They will still be there, and they will still always have just as many weapons and soldiers as they have now. And it's not as though the democratically chosen Palestinian leadership will ever say "ok, we'll look the other way while you guys go scorched earth on the asses of the militants". If they did that, they'd immediately be overthrown, and you wouldn't be able to crush Hamas or Fatah militarily anyway...military victory isn't possible there anymore, as it isn't possible in any war anywhere else anymore either. Yitzhak Rabin(who was a soldier far longer than you will ever be)understood that...why don't you?

[pelsar]

67. this is an example why you don't dislike dictators....

It goes without saying that a democratically chosen Palestinian government would still demand the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, would insist on at least partial RoR

thats the dictator mentality...that they know what the "people need and want" (which is exactly what your ideology is ).

the whole concept of democracy is the people get to vote in whom they believe best serves their interest. Who will best use their limited resources to make their lives better....and a Palestenian western value democracy may in fact disagree with you. They may infact be more concerned with spending their limited resources on having better lives, having better relations with israel...etc.

I can't say what they will want, and neither do you, hence your:

"it goes without saying" is your usual "white man's colonial mentality of knowing what the local brown man wants and needs"
_____

once you accept that your views of justice and what 'goes without saying" is exactly same as the colonial white man of the 1800's you'll be able to start to see things with a little bit more of knowledge, but until then you apparently are blinded by your ideology (defending chavaz?....a wanna be elite dictator who's friends were the worst of the worst....-pathetic)

[Ken Burch]

68. Not the dictator mentality at all.

And it's pretzel logic to assume that it's an "anticolonialist" view that only Western white people wish for democracy and that everyone else has to be FORCED into wanting it.

Do you honestly think that the Palestinian, people, with a fully democratic leadership(something I want them to have as much as you)wouldn't CARE about getting their own state? Are just fine with the status quo going on indefinitely? See ANYTHING positive in you and your fellow soldiers being there? Would be perfectly happy, after independence, to live in a relationship with Israel that says that Israel can be trusted with the right to self-defense but THEY can't? Would be just fine with their sovereignty being revocable by force every time your side thinks it should be? If so, why would you think ANY of things would be possible?

Or how do you think it could ever be possible to PERSUADE any of them to want such things? What do you think, might I ask, that could possibly induce them to settle for neither getting statehood NOR a vote in Israeli elections? What could possibly make them accept not getting EITHER of those things? I assume you don't buy Shira's canard that they'd secreastly be willing to move to Jordan and live eternally under the thumb of the Hashemites.

We know by now that they can't ever be militarily crushed into accepting less than what they'd have originally settled for, if that's what you're thinking. If that were possible, your army would have done it already, and that nothing the international community has said could have stopped that. That it wouldn't even have happened if every it country in the world had said it would back you in it.
Just accept that that outcome is impossible already.

BTW, the views of the colonial white men of the 1800's were that nobody else should be ALLOWED to run their own countries or have any rights at all-that the resources of the non-European world(I'm including the white leadership of North America in that term in this case) belonged solely to the European world(and even there, to the wealthy Protestant minority of that world, in the British and North American conception of all of this) and that all people in the non-European world existed solely to serve the needs of the white Protestant economic elite. How does anything I have said here compare to that?

What you're really arguing here is that, if I wasn't what YOU misleadingly call a "colonialist" or an "elitist" or an "egotist", if I actually(as you don't believe I do)showed "respect" for what people in other cultures(particularly in this case people living in Arab and Muslim cultures), that I'd accept YOUR notion that those people are either natural serfs or natural thugs, that almost none of them believe in the notions of freedom or democracy and can only be MADE to believe in those things through the application of force from outside(I assume you think that Egypt would be MORE democratic if the U.S. Army were occupying the place, even if the U.S. forces were there to restore the Mubarak dynasty), that, in short, the people of the Arab and Muslim world are incapable, for some reason, of imagining and creating a non-repressive life for themselves on their own terms. All of those beliefs are EXACTLY what 19th Century imperialists believed. None of mine are.

I've never said that everybody is exactly the same-nobody ever HAS said that, and that would make life bloody boring if it was true- and I never would say that-but I do think that everybody has a capacity for good, for hope, for self-liberation, and that everybody, if given the chance and if rewarded for taking it, can and will try to live their lives for those things, simply because people, different as they are, do have a natural wish, at some level, for a life that isn't soul-destroying and miserable. And I won't apologizing for believing that, because the alternative to believing that is to believe that human beings are nothing but sheep or scum, that nothing positive is really possible, and that, really, we should all just slash our wrists and be done with it, because no form of hope really exists.

[pelsar]

69. We know by now ......

Last edited Sat Jul 13, 2013, 02:17 AM - Edit history (2)

We know by now ......

so please tell me..how DO YOU KNOW what they actually want and believe what is best for them all without them having a free society?

thats why you apparently have no problem with dictators...as they too "know" whats best for the people

lets just start with that...how do you really know what they believe in...
(keep on the subject; the colonial white man. like u, claimed they knew what was good for the locals...)

but it does explain why you only believe in freedom of the press in certain conditions...conditions that only the elite dictate..

did you know that the gazans wanted hamas and shari law? apparently not.....
___



and you make your life very easy when you write this:
I'd accept YOUR notion that those people are either natural serfs or natural thugs, that almost none of them believe in the notions of freedom or democrac
..you've been claiming it forever, since apparently in your black and white world your one of those who believe: you're with us or against us kind of people......

[shira]

75. Burch is part of the Totalitarian Left, which is what the Euston Manifesto opposes

Of course, Burch and his associates tend to lump all their opponents together, both the Eustonites (liberals, centrists) along with the anti-totalitarian, racist Right (like the EDL and its associates). I'm not sure that's done on purpose, however. I think they see the world in black/white and cannot fathom shades of grey in-between.

[Ken Burch]

89. I see all sorts of shades of grey(although I'm going to resist saying the number "Fifty")

Last edited Sun Jul 14, 2013, 03:20 AM - Edit history (1)

And I sometimes make shades-of-grey choices.

I chose not to be anti-Chavez NOT because I don't care about democracy, but because I believed that, on balance, he and his party and his program were far more to the good than to the bad.

A person doesn't have to be anti-Chavez(and thus anti-social justice)in Venezuelan politics to be non-totalitarian, anyt more than a person had to be an unquestioning supporter of everything "The West" did in the Cold War just to prove that you weren't a Stalinist(and, if you understood much about the actual Left in "the West", you'd realize that virtually no one in it was a Stalinist after 1956, and that the numbers of those who held to that position were rapidly falling even before that year).

I'm against all that the old Stalinists did...but Stalinism is extinct now(the regime in North Korea is just a theme park...and there's really nothing anybody could do to bring the Kimocracy down there).
It's just that I reject your insistence that I "denounce on command". Denouncing bad dictatorships in places like Eastern Europe and China and, sometimes, Cuba isn't really a worthwhile exercise. Eastern Europe didn't shake off the chains of Stalinism because of any denouncements from outside(or because of Reagan's silly speech in Berlin), it was the PEOPLE of Eastern Europe doing it on their own and it was Mikhail Gorbachev doing the right thing and making it clear that he wouldn't send in the Red Army to save the old dinosaur regimes.

My way of opposing Stalin was to work for radical democratic socialism INSTEAD of Marxist-Leninism. That was the choice 90% of the Left made in "The West" after 1956. That is the choice that those in Occupy, in the anti-austerity protests around the world(including the one in Israel, which the Western Left did, in fact support)have made, that is the choice the Left has made throughout Latin America and much of the rest of the developing world today. Nobody but a handful of powerless and irrelevant eccentrics still holds to anything remotely similar to the CP line, or to Maoism, or to any "hard left" creed of that ilk. The dominant influence on the genuine radical Left of today is, if anything, anarcho-syndicalism(the single most anti-oppression ideology on the planet).



The Euston Manifesto does NOT defend the West Bank Occupation, as far as I recall. And it's most important plank was its support for the Iraq War. Please tell me you don't still think THAT was a good idea.

[shira]

93. Your #65 shows you support totalitarian rule...

HRW explained how harmful Chavez's authoritarian rule was, and yet you defend him. You're silent on his support of the darkest, most cruel regimes on the planet (Iran, Syria, Libya, N.Korea) that subjugate millions of poor souls. You defend Chavez while savaging the West (especially America and Israel). It's clear where your loyalty lies. Stalin would have supported the same vile regimes as Chavez, but this doesn't bother you in the least. You're a mouthpiece for pretty much all totalitarian dictators who are anti-West. You don't criticize any of them - even the most extreme batshit insane regressive tyrants - out of solidarity, all for the cause of "anti-Imperialism, anti-Colonialism, anti-Capitalism".

Euston doesn't defend the occupation, nor did they support the Iraq War (which they were very clear about in their Manifesto). They're simply an anti-totalitarian movement.

If I'm wrong about you, then riddle me this:

Which do you support and proudly defend more? Western Liberal Democracy or Totalitarianism? I think your advocacy answers that for you.

[Ken Burch]

23. It's a despicable lie to say I'm promoting a theocratic anti-civil rights government

I just opposed keeping a largely innocent people under military occupation. And reject the arrogant notion that that occupation could possibly be good for those people.

It simply can't ever be progressive to ever say "no, we have to keep those other country's troops in your streets until your leaders are democratically pure". Doing that doesn't hurt the anti-democratic types...it helps them. And it doesn't help the pro-democratic secular types.

And this is the fact you cannot get around:

EVERYONE in the West Bank wants the Occupation to end. No one there who works for greater democracy sees it as helpful to their work, anymore than anybody in the black majority in South Africa that disagreed with the policies or tactics of the African National Congress in its resistance campaign ever believed that preserving apartheid was ever helpful to any of their efforts to create an alternative to the ANC. Even Inkatha never saw its disagreements with the ANC as a justification for maintaining the status quo.

And again, there is no reason to think that a more democratic Palestinian leadership would demand less from Israel or would do what you REALLY seem to want Palestinians to do...to agree with YOUR country's leaders in their assertion that the Palestinian struggle has never had any grounding in real suffering or legitimate grievances, to accept the insulting notion that, between Israelis and Palestinians, Israelis are the victims and Palestinians the villains, OR to settle for not getting a state at all. NO Palestinian leadership will ever deny the reality of the Palestinian experience.

[pelsar]

70. i cant think of many reasons.....

And again, there is no reason to think that a more democratic Palestinian leadership would demand less from Israel

lets see if you really have an open mind and one that is not closed to what others might believe.

lets see if you can list a few reason why a democracy in Palestine might actually have different values than that of a dictatorship.

and if you can't figure that out....then i stick with my claim that you have no problem with dictatorships. (as long as they represent the people...as dictatorships always claim they do)

we've already established that your not in favor of freedom of speech, unless of course its the 'right speech" and has a few other conditions....
_______

you would make a good dictator with your beliefs:
EVERYONE in the West Bank wants the Occupation to end.
personally i've met enough people in my life to know that there is no such thing as everyone believing in the same thing...only one kind of person believes that they actually know what everyone believes.....and they are not good for pluralistic societies, they simply dont believe in them.

[Ken Burch]

71. I can believe that it could and probably would have different values

It would likely be more secular, and(I hope)would be more transparent and socially progressive. But it would NEVER be different on the question of self-determination. I never said it wouldn't be different on any issues at all.

And it's likely that Hamas could be beaten electorally, if a progressive, secular alternative emerged that had a program to deal with poverty and high unemployment, an alternative was also willing to talk tough with the Israelis and make a firm stand against ever having the IDF on Palestinian soil. In fact, iti's likely that, as soon as a REAL Palestinian state were to be created, a state in which sovereignty would never be in question and it was certain that the Occupation would never again be reinstated, you'd likely see Hamas fade away to nothing in terms of popular support, as it's also likely that Fatah would fade...both are war factions, and neither has a program to deal with the day-to-day concerns of the people during peacetime. This is why the Occupation actually helps both of those groups...without it, Fatah and Hamas would have no way of sustaining any popular support at all. They'd instantly be seen as archaic institutions that had nothing to offer. The only thing that keeps those groups going at all is the sense among rank-and-file Palestinians that they'd be helpless against the IDF were those groups to go away. If you were Palestinian, you'd might well support the continued existence of those groups for the exact same reason-you can't really dismiss the thought.


So you've read my wrong on that.

And I'm the first to admit that I don't know what is in the heads of Palestinians on all matters, or even on many.

But you can make SOME conclusions so far, based on the actions and reactions of rank-and-file Palestinians to the way eventshave played out around them.

The fact that you haven't seen ANY Palestinians express any serious interest in any of Netanyahu's proposals is telling. If his ideas for denying Palestinians independence but making it up to them (insuffeciently, as we both know it would be)by encouraging "economic autonomy&quot something Netanyahu would never really allow in practice, since any economic improvement in the Territories would make it too hard to use Palestinians coming across the Green Line as cheap labor-and since no people anywhere on the earth
will trade jobs for freedom, as the universal black rejection of Booker T. Washington's self-loathing "Atlanta Compromise" proposal in the early 20th century makes clear)is a clear sign that that proposal has no real support in any quarter there.

The fact that there is no real Palestinian support, nor will there ever likely be, for being forced to move to Jordan(or worse yet, to stay where they are and only get to vote in Jordanian elections, while having no power over their own affairs) shows that that insulting and bigoted alternative proposal will never have "legs" there.

And the fact that you've seen no significant political force emerge in the West Bank that advocates what you REALLY seem to want(I hope I'm wrong about this)that is, that advocates saying that the Palestinian struggle was never based on anything grounded in reality, that Palestinians have NO real grievances against the Israelis about anything, and that they should all just BOGOF to Amman or something because their identity isn't even real(they're just part of the mythical "unrelenting Arab plot"-that would be the unrelenting Arab plot that, these days, half the Arab world HAS more-or-less relented from"to destroy Israel&quot has emerged, nor is ever likely to. You just don't see moments in human history when a people repudiate the reality of their own experience.

Here's the part of your views on the matter that has never made sense to me...please try to explain...if the Palestinians were really inherently anti-democratic at this point...if that were so...how could keeping your army's troops marching through their streets harassing people on a day-to-day basis, using force even to stop NONVIOLENT protests(you will admit, I'll assume, that SOME Palestinian protests are nonviolent, right? Because some, in fact most of them are-the reason we don't hear about those in the States is that protests in the West Bank where nobody gets injured or killed don't look "sexy" on the evening news here)could ever, possibly, under ANY circumstances, CHANGE that? Do you really honestly believe that you can BEAT people into secularism and liberalism? That you can inculcate a love of democracy(a wish for which can emerge in the hearts of anyone, anywhere...as the protests in Tienenman Square proved, as the "people power" protests in the Phillippines that brought down Ferdinand Marcos proved, as the mass resistance against austerity programs that has swept around the world proves, and as the immense protests that knocked the Islamic regime out of power in Egypt proved despite your insistence that you KNEW what everybody who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood wanted and that what they wanted was repression and anti-modernism proves)into people of democracy and modernity BY REPRESSING THEM WITH VIOLENCE AND GRINDING THEIR ECONOMY INTO THE DIRT?

Kindly tell me how that could ever work. Kindly tell me how a scorched-earth campaign to wipe out Hamas and Fatah could ever succeed(if it could, wouldn't your army have DONE THAT by now? Isn't the fact that your commanders haven't had you do any
such thing a pretty telling sign that they KNOW that couldn't possibly work?)on military terms and how, even if it could, that would ever get what I think you think it might do...that is, get ordinary Palestinians to just settle for whatever crumbs the Israeli Cabinet threw at them?

You clearly seem, based on what you've posted here so far, if I've read it correctly, to be sold on the idea that continued force and subjugation can bend the Palestinian people to YOUR notion of what is right in this situation, can make them do what they've not given any indication to anybody that they would do...that is, basically surrender and accept nothing more than a statelet-on-sufferance that could be taken away at any moment, with the settlements left in place, and without even an acknowlegment that any of them ever suffered undeservedly, that any of them were driven from their homes undeservedly, or that any of the pain in their lives today had anything to do with what was done in the name of creating Israel. That clearly is what you, at some level, see as possible...but why? And what would MAKE them want that? Can you actually OCCUPY a people into agreeing to any of the above.

And of course there might be a few people who've done well individually off of the status quo that might be quietly pro-Occupation(there were a few such collaborators among black South Africans, among other instances)but it could only be a few, since the status quo is specifically designed to immiserate the many. I didn't say that Palestinians have a hive mind, nor do I think that(and you know perfectly well that I don't). But there are moments when you can sense the will of a people. Why do refuse to accept that that is the case here?

As to the refugee camps Palestinians are kept in in other Arab countries...I despise them and denounce them. They should be dismantled and those living within them should be allowed to permanently settle in the countries where the camps are(although I'd also say those people should get a vote in Palestinian elections.) But there was never a time when having that happen, necessary as it would be, would EVER have caused those people to cease identifying as Palestinian or to cease trying to get home. An Israeli should relate to that as much as anyone. It's not evil to want to go home. Nor is it something people can be made to "get over".
You're going to have to accept that they have just as deep a connection to those lands as the people who call themselves Israelis do...and that, even if they don't get to go home physically, that connection has to be respected and honored. Honoring it in some way, acknowledging it in someway(as I believe the massive injustices and genocides committed against Native Americans need to be acknowledged)is the only way to end the war in their hearts.
Israel is a necessary country...a country that isn't ever going to go away anyway. What does it have to lose by admitting that some people on the other side suffered in the process of creating that country when they didn't have it coming? That there was innocent victimhood on both sides?
I'm for every

[pelsar]

72. its doesnt make sense to you...

because its not what i believe:

Here's the part of your views on the matter that has never made sense to me...please try to explain...if the Palestinians were really inherently anti-democratic at this point..

you keep telling me that i think the Palestenians cant have a democracy on their own...because of their genes or something or other. I know you like to believe that, as it makes it easy to make me some kind of racist

except that its not true....there is nothing inherent that makes the majority of the Palestinians presently not interested in western democracy...read that again and again..



Do you really honestly believe that you can BEAT people into secularism and liberalism?

no..i dont know why you think i believe that, other than you perhaps you have a hard time with ideas that don't fit your preconceived notions


if I've read it correctly, to be sold on the idea that continued force and subjugation can bend the Palestinian people to YOUR notion
well you've read wrong and keep on reading wrong


----

but there are moments when you can sense the will of a people. Why do refuse to accept that that is the case here?
you've got to be kidding...you can sense the "will of the people" from 2,000 miles away? Wasn't your sense wrong in Egypt when the MB took the popular vote, how were your senses in gaza when hamas took the popular vote? Whats the sense say about the egyptian military coup?

you can "sense the will of the people" what does this sense say about the iranians people....their spring was short lived

[Ken Burch]

73. Your interpretation the Egyptian and Gazan votes was simply too sweeping

Those were simply the votes people cast at that time, and for generally pragmatic, not ideological or hate-based reasons. Neither vote justified an absolute final conclusion on those people. You made such conclusions and even though, for example, the mass protests that forced Morsi out of power proved that the majority of Egyptian people are NOT incorrigbly anti-democratic, you still refuse to accept that they were rebelling in favor of democracy and against religious dictatorship when they clearly were.

You are the one who has reached sweeping and dismissive conclusions about these people. I haven't. All I've really said is you can't assume the worst about them and that, if you DO assume the resot, you can't then conclude that repression on your country's part can make them stop being as bad as you think they are.

They should have democracy and all the rest. But only those who aren't involved in perpetuating the status quo(as you are in your service as a soldier and I am as an American who pays taxes and thereby helps FUND the perpetuation)have no moral standing to lecture these people on the choices they should make about governance. In backing your side through my taxes, I am complicit in the oppression of these people. So, while I wish them to have democracy, it's not my place to DEMAND that they get it OR to act as if the majority there don't want it and have to be MADE to implement it.

And as to democracy leading to less belligerence towards other countries, I live in the country that is considered the global symbol of democracy by much of the world...and my country has spent much of its history soaking other countries(and the areas of North America traditionally held by the indigenous people, in blood and gore, mostly the blood and gore of the innocent(often pretending that we had the backing of God, in his "Christian" form, in the endeavor). So no, democracy does not necessarily lead to less militarism. I know that from American history.

I'll try this again...why do you think that democracy, given how little a civilizing role it has played in, for example, making the United States' role in the world any less bloodthirsty at all, any less arrogant, any less demanding in the insistence that the wealth of the developing world must be turned over entirely to the corporate apparatus of the developed world, is going to have an effect on the way Arab countries act towards Israel that it hasn't had on the way any other countries' deal with each other?

Do you really believe that rank-and-file Arab peoples never cared about what was done to the Palestinians at all? Never had any feelings at all about what went down in 1948? That none of it was based on ANYTHING real?

If you do believe that, or anything close to that(if for example, you think Israel could cut some sort of deal with democratically-elected Arab countries to cut the Palestinians loose that no Israeli government has ever been able to get any actually existing Arab government to cut)please explain why. I can't see any possible reason to believe such a thing(if for no other reason than that, if that were possible, it should have happened between 1948 and 1967, in the era BEFORE the time that most Palestinians were displaced).

And, if you think I've mischaracterized your views on this, then for God's sake, please explain what you actually do think, what you actually do believe to be possible, and why you think and believe these things. I'm open to hearing that, because it's always better to have the most informed discussion possible.

But just stop already with the accusation that I support dictatorships. I'm pro-democracy...I'm just anti-hypocrisy and anti-sanctimony.

[pelsar]

74. nope....you dont get to make conclusions

you keep telling me what my conclusions are...and the reason your always wrong is because your mind set is so simplistic that you have a hard time with changing environments....

Here is where your wrong...and hypocritical:

those were simply the votes people cast at that time, and for generally pragmatic, not ideological or hate-based reasons. Neither vote justified an absolute final conclusion on those people

Your view is that if they had voted in a progressive person that had your approval you would be shouting that its proof that these people are progressive etc..BUT because they didn't vote in the "progressive" guy you have to claim that it really doesnt mean anything.

that is why your stance is so hypocritical..its that simple.
(of course being a supporter of the elite wanna be dictator chavaz doesnt help your position much either)

voting tells us something about a culture but only for a limited period of time, that will be hard for you to understand......


Do you really believe that rank-and-file Arab peoples never cared about what was done to the Palestinians at all? Never had any feelings at all about what went down in 1948?

now that over 100,000 syrians have been killed....can you tell me who actually cares in the arab world?
when iran and iraq had a war and over 1 million were killed...can you tell me in the arab world, who actually cared? When Lebanon had a civil war for over 10 years..do you have examples of the caring arab world? When gaza was shut down.....do have examples of the caring arab world sending stuff via the egyptian border to help them?

where are these examples of the caring arabs states?..where? where? where?


So no, democracy does not necessarily lead to less militarism. I know that from American history.
how many times have democracies attacked other democracies.

I'll give you a challenge: what is the one thing that occupations that became democracies had in common....figure that one out and you can consider yourself enlightened...

[Ken Burch]

76. That only applied to POSTWAR occupations.

What the IDF has going in the West Bank isn't about producing democracy, and it can't produce it because it's a WARTI ME occupation.

The POSTWAR occupations of Germany and Japan had nothing in common with what your troops are doing in the West Bank.

The POSTWAR occupations were positive and focused solely on rebuilding the country. YOUR occupation is negative and oppressive and tries to keep the West Bank from rebuilding by preventing the NGO's, the only groups that have the capacity to rebuild, from coming in and rebuilding it. A benevolent occupation that had the objective of preventing future conflict would let ANYBODY who wanted to come in and help do so, regardless of motive. It would care solely about making peoples' lives better.

The POSTWAR occupations didn't harass innocent civilians(or refuse to admit that innocent German or Japanese civilians could exist)on a daily basis, didn't block them from going to work, didn't restrict their water supply, didn't steal their olive trees, and didn't build massive American and British settlements on land illegally seized from German or Japanese territories. Nor did it claim that Americans had the right to live in Germany and Japan but the Germans and Japanese should have to move.

If you and your country were running a POSTWAR style of occupation, it would be possible for democracy to emerge there. But what you're involved in here has nothing in common with that.

It was many posts ago that I admitted that Germany and Japan were examples of occupations in which(although not necessarily due to their presence)democracy existed. So you can stop acting like my position is STILL that no occupation in history ever produced it. Those did. The one you are in can't, and I would argue that it isn't designed to, but is designed instead to prevent the emergence of democracy and encourage the emergence of the worst, most anti-democratic Palestinian leadership possible, so that your leaders can then sanctimoniously say "See? See? This is why everybody is obligated to TAKE OUR SIDE and unquestioningly back WHATEVER WE DO TO THESE PEOPLE! Because we are good and they are evil". You may care about democracy in the West Bank as an individual, but Netanyahu doesn't. If he did, he wouldn't have been advocating proposals in which Palestinians would have to give up virtually any self-rule at all, in exchange for what he pretends would be economic prosperity.

BTW, what do you mean when you say that I "don't get to make conclusions". Who are you, the Conclusion Commissioner? You make conclusions about ME all the time...why do YOU get to do that if I don't? What gives you this particular entitlement? And what entitles you to make these sweeping dismissals of any possibility that Arabs and Muslims are capable of displaying humanity or a desire for freedom that comes from within rather than being imposed from without? And do you not see the inherent contradiction in your defense of the notion that people can somehow be coerced into wanting freedoms that they wouldn't have wanted on their own?

Finally, Germany and Japan didn't become peaceable because Allied troops occupied those countries for years. They became peaceable because the people of those countries had seen the worst of war and decided that they wanted no more of it. For God's sake, give human beings SOME credit for learning from their experience.

I don't defend any of the bad choices Chavez made on human rights(although all of them were trivial). The reason I gave critical, not unambiguous but critical, support to Chavez and the PSUV(for whatever that was worth) was that ever candidate who ran against him and his party was a candidate who wanted the poor to lose everything, and most of whom even wanted the community councils, the only voice in the major issues of life that the poor of Venezuela have, to be abolished and to go back to right-wing "representative democracy&quot you know...the legislative and presidential elections that are always rigged to favor the wealthy). There was no anti-Chavez candidate who offered anything at all to the poor, to Venezuelans of color, to workers. So why should I support a reactionary candidate just because he meets YOUR standards of Jeffersonian purity(a comic phrase, when you remember that Jefferson was an unapologetic slave owner and sometimes slavefucker 'til the end of his days)?

[pelsar]

77. seems you missed the question...

i simply asked you what do occupations that produced democracies had in common.....nothing more and nothing less. i realize its not on your 'cue" cards, which means you might have to do some real research. try it. The question has nothing to do with the present conflict, hence your answer should not include the words: west bank, israel, idf, etc

give it a try...
______________________________________________________

and supporting Chavez?....you defended the elite wanna be, anti free speech SOB, it has nothing to do with any other candidate, you simply supported him as some kind of "protector of the poor" and the way he ran over the civil rights of others simply because you reject their view point. What interests me is that your view of freedom of speech and civil rights are not valued as the rights of individuals but as the collective, which means individuals in fact do NOT have those rights. They have them on the condition that other values are also met.... that is not civll rights, that is not freedom, that is nothing more than the standard dictatorship-right or left, you guys are all the same. If you believe what we tell you to believe, only then will you be rewarded with the right to speak out, as long as its the right thing/approved thing to say...whos your real hero: stalin? Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin, Castro (you probably like Castro)



you seem to have a problem with understanding what I write. This must be the 100th time i written that i disagree with this:
you to make these sweeping dismissals of any possibility that Arabs and Muslims are capable of displaying humanity or a desire for freedom that comes from within rather than being imposed from without

I realize and accept that your ideology requires that anyone who disagrees with your view point must, by definition be a racist....the only problem with that opinion and view point is that its not true....So everytime you make the same BS claim I'll have to call you on it.
_______

now then, lets see if you can find what all of those different occupations had in common to produce a democracy...this will be original research for you and nothing in your notes will help you on it. Your going to have to do some thinking here...

and it has nothing to do with :
If you and your country were running a POSTWAR style of occupation, it would be possible for democracy to emerge there but i will give you credit. at least you have now modified your view point to accept a real historical fact (took you long enough) that democracies did in fact emerge from occupations. you might recall you started out claiming it never happened and could never happen.

[Ken Burch]

78. The occupations after world war II didn't PRODUCE democracy.

Democracy took root on its own UNDER those occupations, largely because the countries in question were being rebuilt and more or less left the civilians alone.

The U.S. occupation didn't try totally dictate who the people of Germany and Japan would be permitted to vote for. It didn't try choose who would and would not be the leaders in postwar Germany and Japan. Naziism was effectively banned, but Naziism was an extinct force in German life once Hitler blew his brains out and the Nuremburg trials began, and nobody in Palestinian politics comparable to the Nazis. Neither Fatah nor even Hamas want a Judenrein world, and neither would end up setting up concentration camps or anything else comparable to Naziism. So if that's where you were going with that, you are wrong. Germany and Japan did NOT become democracies because the U.S. put limits on who they could and couldn't vote for. Naziis were never going to win another German election after what they had put the country through, and the people of Japan weren't going to do that with the Imperial militarists that had brought them to grief. Both nations had learned on their own.

Since your occupation is based, in part on trying to KEEP Palestine from being rebuilt and from lessening its misery in any way, it already has nothing in common with the occupations we've been discussing above. The U.S. didn't restrict the water supply to the Germans and the Japanese, or do anything comparable to tearing down solar panels that the NGO's built for them. All the U.S. did in its occupations was to try to make people's lives better, to end hunger, to reduce poverty, to rebuild universities and to help those countries get access to new civilian technologies for living. Has the occupation you take part in done anything REMOTELY like that?

Germany has not been a militaristic nation since the German people restored democracy. Neither has Japan.

The transition to democracy in both places was one of the factors that led to those nations becoming peaceable, but the occupations in those countries weren't the cause of those transitions. To say that they were implies that no significant number of people in either Germany or Japan WANTED democracy. Germans had been building a democratic system in the 1920s, but it was destroyed by economic sabotage from other European countries. Japan had a growing democracy movement on its own.

So, those two countries became peaceable as they were given the chance to build democracy, but NOT because they had another country's troops on their soil. They'd have done the same thing if the Allied troops had all left at the end of 1946.

The occupations didn't produce the democracy...the democracy simply happened at the same time. The defeat of Naziism and the defeat of the Japanese imperial war machine were the true key factors...and there's no possible comparable defeat that can happen here. It isn't possible to have a world war II-style "unconditional surrender" victory over Hamas and Fatah. No wars anywhere end that way. So it's totally out of touch with reality for you to argue that occupation can produce that kind of result here, especially since your occupation isn't benevolent, isn't trying to rebuild the country and DOESN'T leave the vast majority of Palestinians alone.

Democracy happened after World War II in Germany and Japan. It happened while they were occupied. The occupations in those countries can't necessarily be credited with the emergence of democracy, though, becaue in both countries the anti-democratic forces were totally crushed by the time the occupation began. There was no significant base of support in Germany for attempting to revive Naziism. There was no significant popular basis of support in Japan for preserving the militaristic old order. Both peoples had voluntarily turned against tyranny after seeing that it had brought them to grief.

But that situation has no relevance to the I/P conflict, because it has nothing in common with it. So can we please give the "occupations and democracy" thing a rest? I've answered directly the question you posed...and there's nothing more to say about it. Only in the past and only after the shooting was done did occupations and democracy occur at the same time. That can't happen while the war goes on AND while the occupier works to stop reconstruction and economic revival.

Therefore, there is no reason for you to obsess on the question of trying to prove that you and your army can CAUSE Palestine to democratize. Palestine will only democratize(as all other peoples have only democratize)by its own choice. And when and if it does, you can't assume that new elections will lead the Palestinians to settle for Netanyahu's humiliating terms-or for the totally discredited ultra right-wing fantasy of a confederation with Jordan. Nor can you even assume that they would give up the armed struggle...because they have no reason, at this point, to believe that anything else will ever work for them. They've never been given any reason to trust any other approach...and you need to be calling your OWN country's leaders out about their refusal to ever reward positive changes in Palestinian tactics.

[pelsar]

79. i forgot ...you believe in the tooth fairly.

what was it you wrote about the military coup in Egypt?...that you could "sense" that the people wanted a democracy (we'll ignore that over 50% voted the opposite way).


Democracy took root on its own UNDER those occupations, largely because the countries in question were being rebuilt and more or less left the civilians alone.

in case you dont understand what the occupation of germany and japan was about: it was about complete and utter surrender to the occupying forces: everything they did, from food distribution, to education, to politics to taxs was under the thumb and required approval from the occupying forces.

but my question was not limited to just those occupations..i mean't all occupations that when the occupiers left there was democracy, dont limit yourself to your cue cards.

Democracy happened after World War II in Germany and Japan. It happened while they were occupied. But that situation has no relevance to the I/P conflict, because it has nothing in common with it

of course its relevant, but not yet..... your looking for the common thread of why different occupations resulted in democracies, you'll have to open your brain abit here and do some real research, then you can twist it to fit your ideology, but first the research.

[Ken Burch]

80. It had nothing to with submitting to U.S. domination.

The defeat in the war was enough to get the message through.

Yes, the U.S. had control, but it wasn't the U.S. control that LED to democracy. After the war, the people saw the truth on their own-they saw what Naziism and Imperial nationalism had produced. They learned.

And you continue to forget that the U.S. treated the peoples of Germany and Japan in a purlely positive way. They totally rebuilt the countries(something Israel is never going to do in the West Bank). They didn't treat everybody as a criminal on a daily basis. If you were peaceful, if you were just trying to do your job and go on your way, they left you alone.

Are you really, seriously arguing that the problem in the West Bank is that the IDF doesn't have ENOUGH control over Palestinians? How much more do you need, for God's sakes?

Should they have to go to you for food? for water? for anything at all? How is THAT going to help? And how will that do anything but strengthen Fatah and Hamas?

It's not going to be possible to create a Palestinian state if the PA is totally disbanded and you go back to the pre-Oslo era. And, unlike Germany, you can't use control and coercion to MAKE Palestinians be the way you want them to be. It doesn't work that way there.

[pelsar]

81. ah....After the war, the people saw the truth on their own

This "truth" just appeared....so this is true out of all occupations that become democracies...this "truth" just appeared and everyone everywhere simply accepted this "truth" and they all worked for it?

tell me just out of curiosity, were there some who didnt see this truth? what happened to them?..if they even existed?

i doubt you see it, but there is no daylight between you and every other believer ...

THE TRUTH WILL APPEAR AND IT WILL BE ACCEPTED.......
----------


Are you really, seriously arguing that the problem in the West Bank is that the IDF doesn't have ENOUGH control over Palestinians? How much more do you need, for God's sakes?

i'm not arguing anything, it didnt even mention them nor will it until we see some research on your part that finds the common thread between democracies that came out of occupations (more than just germany and japan).

this is how better conclusions are made: first research with no agenda

[Ken Burch]

82. The only other common point was military victory by one side over the other.

But the fact that that hasn't happened yet in this conflict proves that it's impossible, for EITHER . Both sides are at permanent a thend irrevocable military stalemate and nothing can change that.

It's not as though, if only the whole world said to Israel "OK, we'll look the other way for a month, and while we do you can do whatever you want to the Palestinians" that the whole thing would end up with the equivalent of a surrender treaty signed on the
deck of the U.S. Missouri.

And, given the political dominance of the all-but-fascist West Bank settlers, we can assume that the Israeli side would never be magnanimous or compassionate to the Palestinians if it were able to defeat them-OR accept them having a state AFTER defeating them.

The other factor was one side establishing hegemony and domination over the other...and neither side can do that in this conflict. So negotiation is the only option.

[pelsar]

83. thats not called research.....

The only other common point was military victory by one side over the other.

wow...thats some research you did...i.e. zilich, nothing, nada.

your have the classic traits of the narrow minded/believer

first you have a conclusion
second, you dont want to do any research that would upset your conclusion.
third..you believe that the truth shall simply "be known"
_____________


i admit to have learned quite a bit about your beliefs: basically your nothing less than a religious zealot where your version of religion and facism is nothing more than a variation on all those other versions that are out there.

You all believe in a "truth" that will magically appear one day and all will accept it...and to get to that truth, anything goes and any damage that occurs while getting to that truth is always acceptable, because that TRUTH is simply the TRUTH and whatever it takes to get there is always acceptable, one shall not question the TRUTH.

[Ken Burch]

85. Education about democracy also occurred-but the success of that

didn't require the presence of troops. Pro-democracy exiles did much of that on their own-especially the Social Democrats, including such heroes as the wartime resistance fighter Willi Brandt.

And no, I don't believe in "truth" in a religious sense. I meant merely that they saw the failure of fascism and militarism. That's not being "religious".

In neither country, nor in any country, was anyone who was fundamentally anti-democratic as a person made, through coercion, to become a genuinely democratic person. That simply doesn't work. Nobody went from anti-democratic to democratic as a result of doing prison time, either.

What really happened in Germany, for example, was that the pre-1933 democratic forces reasserted themselves. Once Hitler was defeated, they were bound to do that anyway. The key factor was the Nazi military defeat...not anything the troops did after the
war, because after the war a non-democratic outcome wasn't even a possibility. There was no large group of people who wanted that, and even most of those who had backed Hitler saw that his ideology had brought disaster, so the surrender brought them around.

I've covered re-education, national reconstruction, goodwill-that pretty much covered it. In some cases the local population was disarmed, but in the examples I mentioned, that really didn't matter. Other than the tiny "werewolf" faction in postwar Germany there was no campaign of armed resistance to the Allied occupation, and none in Japan either.

If you really think there is anything else...just say it. You're not entitled to condescend to me like this. And you have no claim to superior knowledge of the facts.

And stop already with trying to make me look like an idiot-just go ahead and make your case for your own position. I don't carry ALL the responsibility in this exchange. You have an obligation to express your exact position and support it as well.

[pelsar]

86. a better system

my conclusions come out of what i have learned..and when they dont work i change them. You on the other hand apparently have a belief that does not change, no matter what happens.

hence i believe my belief system is far superior to yours.
________________

which is why you can make such 'god like predictions:
Once Hitler was defeated, they were bound to do that anyway yes i know. it was inevitable, everyone wanted it.....everyone saw the truth after that....
___
now please tell me when this didnt happen:
In some cases education about democracy also occurred
any examples when there was no education about democracy....please site these examples or retract your statement

[Ken Burch]

88. I change my conclusions with learning as well.

You simply haven't presented any information that would justify my embracing your belief that keeping the IDF in the West Bank has any chance of assisting in the creation of full democracy there...or that, once the occupation ended and independence was achieved, that
there'd be no interest in the local population themselves in democracy. You also haven't provided any information that supports the conclusion that Palestinians and other Arabs can't democratize themselves, but can only have democracy imposed on them from without. Nor have you explained how imposing it from without would even be possible. Would you have the U.S. invade every Arab or Muslim country it hasn't invaded to date? They don't have the resources to do that.

And I stand by my conclusion about the events in postwar Germany. The whole basis for any popular support for Hitler was the mythology, created by the Italian takeover of Abyssinia and the Franco coup against the democratic government of Spain(an event conservative historians comically mislabel the "Spanish Civil War", when in fact it was nothing but the army moving to deny democracy to the people, period)that Fascist troops could never be defeated in battle. Once that was disproved, once the Naziis were shown to be just as vulnerable and just as defeatable in combat as any other army, they saw that Naziism was nonsense. They were ready to restore democracy. It hardly took Allied military control of a totally crushed Germany to get the people there to move past the ugliness that Hitler stood for. They weren't going to give it another go. Nobody is that masochistic in defense of a defeated ideology.

But again, none of the occupations during which democracy emerged has anything in common with the one you are a part of. The others were all done in a positive spirit, AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER, not as part of the war. And all of them included reconstruction and reconciliation, which your occupation isn't a part of.

And it appears that it was education in democratic values that you were talking about(some form of it occurred in all occupations during which democracy somehow emerged). But it is correlation, not causation, to say that the occupation was what led to the democratic education. And if education in democratic values is ever to work in Palestine, it must be done by Palestinians educating other Palestinians...not by IDF soldiers in uniform, or by a handful of collaborators working under IDF control. That's all I'm saying.
They Palestinians are automatically going to reject anything anyone in an IDF uniform tries to force them to agree to. So would anyone else under someone else's military occupation today, especially one in which they've been shown no compassion, no tolerance, no acknowledgment that they are human beings like anybody else.

The way to get the Palestinians to move away from the choices they have made is NOT to coerce them...instead, they need to be given reasons to think that trying something else will be rewarded...not simply dismissed and treated as nothing was enough, as the more conciliatory Palestinian choices(imperfect, but more conciliatory and done in a real effort to work with your side)were in the Nineties. They tried it your way and got nothing but more illegal settlements and more misery.

[pelsar]

91. baby steps....

And it appears that it was education in democratic values that you were talking about(some form of it occurred in all occupations during which democracy somehow emerged).

now were getting somewhere....and yes it occured in ALL occupations a 100% of them. Infact where there was no democratic education there was a failure of democracy to take hold....hmm what does that tell you about it?

now the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine receive something like 2.8% in the last election.....so their "truth" which is similar to yours apparently isn't seeing much daylight....

jesus christ you actually wrote and believe this?

instead, they need to be given reasons to think that trying something else will be rewarded

the Palestenians are not "dogs" or animals...they are thinking human beings that have the ability to make choices, they dont need to be "rewarded" for being educated toward a democracy.....having real free speach without your limitation would be "reward"enough alone

now who is the one who believes the Palestenians are 'limited"...glad you've made that clear.

[Ken Burch]

92. I never said Palestinians are "limited" and you know it.

And I wasn't talking about democracy on the "need to be rewarded" thing either...I was talking about changes in tactics.

Stop twisting my words.

The Democratic Front didn't get many votes in the last election because they didn't have much of a program...not because Palestinians didn't care about democracy.

Besides which, none of the authorities leading the Occupation ever tried to teach Palestinians about democracy anyway, or did anything
to encourage it...instead, they often worked against it, such as when they arrested elected officials and refused to let them carry out the duties of their offices. That doesn't encourage democracy, and it wouldn't have encouraged democracy to bar Hamas from running in the PA elections-the only way you have actual democracy is to let people actually vote for the parties they want to vote for. Barring Hamas wouldn't have caused anyone to vote for a party that YOU would have preferred...instead, it would simply have driven those who were backing the party(most of whom did so for its anti-corruption image and the social service network it ran, not for the unpleasant parts of the program, as post-election interviews with many Hamas voters have borne out)to refuse to participate in elections at all, but to make other choices instead...many, many more of them would likely have chosen violence, and chosen it for the same sad reason everybody who chooses that does so...a sense that nothing else gives them a chance.

I'm all for Palestinians educating themselves about democracy...but it needs to be THEM doing it, especially since this isn't a postwar Germany situation in which the populace has been defeated(as I've pointed out, military victory is impossible for either side)and since your troops don't actually have the capacity to FORCE Palestinians to listen to your notions of civics lectures.

That's why negotiations have to happen, that's why there needs to be face-saving and sense that nobody was beaten or humiliated...because this can only end in compromise, and both sides need to come out of it with their self-respect intact. If you were, in defiance of reality and perhaps the laws of physics, to actually get the sort of crushing victory you'd need to act on post-world war II occupation terms, that wouldn't even be the end of the fighting...because all that would do would cause somebody ody else to rise up on the Palestinian side vowing to "avenge the shame", and then you'd be right back to where you started. Why go through out that because you think you can't be sure it WON'T work? Why place so much on what is clearly a long-shot bet?

[pelsar]

97. i dont twist your word... i just interpret them....

you were clear: for the Palestenians to "change tactics" they have to get rewarded" by Israel ...your words not mine. To me, thats clear your talking "down to them".

I personally find that idea and concept (reward) similar to your limited version of free speech (i.e. only if its attached a specific political viewpoint)..ugh! again, you've shown how you dont see individuals, but the collective, which is clearly fits your other nationalistic (right wing) view point as well.

The Democratic Front didn't get many votes in the last election because they didn't have much of a program...not because Palestinians didn't care about democracy

and again you show your disrespect to the Palestenians and what they're values are, but this i understand: since as you've written in the past: the TRUTH shall come to pass all by itself...when the people sense it..sure sounds like next coming of JC doesnt it.
_____________________

but those are not the real issue...
far more interesting are your acceptance of the following, which at first you declared did not happen: Keep these in mind as we add more to the list.

1) occupations have in fact produced democracies (israel, japan, germany, india....) Each with their own particular circumstances

2) occupations with successful democracies all involved democratic education
____

There were occupations that infact failed to produce democracies or seriously failed ones once the occupier left
the obvious example being iraq, Lebanon (remains a deeply failed one) and many more depending upon the the interest of the occupier when they were the occupier.

of course with your "truth" seems to me you believe that democracies will develop no matter what the occupier does, once they leave... its just a matter of time and it doesnt really matter how many get killed in the process ( 10yrs- 30 yrs 100 yrs 500 yrs - 1000, 10000, 10000000 dead) its all just part of the "inevitable process"........lets clarify that:

true or not true......

[Ken Burch]

98. Democracy emerged in India in SPITE of the British Empire(the occupiers there)

If you give THEM credit for India being a democracy, are you going to give credit to the old apartheid regime for the fact that South Africa is a democracy? To Southern segregationists in the U.S. for the partial triumph of the black freedom movement?

There was no democracy in India while the Raj was still in place. They didn't even have elections until 1948, for God's sake. The people who committed the Amritsar Massacre don't deserve any credit for the democratic system developed by the people they once massacred.

I believe that democracies CAN develop indigenously anywhere. India is a good example of one. They developed a democracy because they, the Indian people, CHOSE to do so, not because the British made them. There's no real evidence that the creation of a democracy REQUIRES an outside occupier. That is a paternalistic and Eurocentric view of life, and essentially an imperialist one. A genuinely commitment to democracy is based on the recognition that it can only really be built from below, and by including all in its development. Nominal democracy imposed from without(the Iraqi situation)simply doesn't take hold(what happened in Germany after the war wasn't democracy being imposed from without...it was democratic forces within Germany retaking life once the Nazis had been crushed by united anti-fascist effort, including the efforts of anti-Nazi partisans like Willi Brandt and the heroic deeds of resisters like the White Rose. There was no way that the German people, having seen their country reduced to ash by Hitler's beliefs, were going to try to revive the Third Reich).

Democracy developed under some occupations in the past...I've said that many times now, so please stop acting as if I'm still saying it never happened...I've put that particular point to rest and you have no reason to keep hammering away at me on something I'm no longer saying...But it mainly developed under POSTWAR occupations...it didn't develop under any occupations DURING wartime(internal democracy existed among Zionist groups prior to their arrival in Palestine, and the presence of the British forces played no relevant role in its further development) anything remotely like the one your army has carried out. An occupation that sought to create democracy would have scheduled home rule and local government elections in Palestine from the start, would have respected the results of those elections(instead of arresting elected officials and preventing them from serving in the offices they've been elected to) and would have allowed the locals to have full control over their internal and local affairs. Your occupation was never about that, because your occupation was run, the top levels, by people who never really accepted the idea of a Palestinian state and never wanted the Palestinians to develop effective and democratic means of self-government. And those officials haven't even claimed that they wanted a democratic Palestine...because they didn't want Palestine to exist at all-many of them still haven't given up on the "Jordan is Palestinian state" canard.

I believe that you personally want democracy for all(as I do)but it's not going to take in this situation if it is seen as something they are MADE to do by the IDF. It can emerge if they Palestinians themselves are allowed to own its development.

And by references to "rewarding" obviously what I meant was that they can't be expected to change their tactics without anything changing for them as an immediate result. Your side has no right to make any moral demands on them, especially since it is your side that has most, if not all of the power in this situation. That's what makes your position so arrogant-sounding...you are part of a force that holds total power over the Palestinian civilianry, yet you STILL act like your side in this are helpless victims and their side are the oppressors. Instead of that, why not admit that you DO have power over them and that what your army has done has had a lot to do with driving the choices their side has made?

[pelsar]

99. i never said it cant happen...

Last edited Mon Jul 15, 2013, 06:03 AM - Edit history (1)

There's no real evidence that the creation of a democracy REQUIRES an outside occupier

obviously it has..most of europe is that example....the question is how many dead are required in the process? how many revolutions


i know what you meant:
And by references to "rewarding" obviously what I meant was that they can't be expected to change their tactics without anything changing for them as an immediate result

and that is the problem: you dont see the intrinsic value of democracy for its own people. Democracies produce better environments for its very own citizens and as a plus democracies with their shared values systems make for better neighbors.

You can't see that because you dont see the individual Palestenians as a free person living within a society worthy of basic rights. You see first and foremost the collective, the nationalistic right wing mentality that claims: country first before individuals, democracy, like freedom of speech is only worthy if the other proper values are in place in your eyes.

your wrong: democracy does not require "rewards" it has its own value, just like freedom of speech.
___

and india?...they chose democracy because they were educated about it....remember you already agreed that education about democracy is a relevent part of it.

why do you keep up with this fantasy?
A genuinely commitment to democracy is based on the recognition that it can only really be built from below, and by including all in its development. Nominal democracy imposed from without(the Iraqi situation)simply doesn't take hold

japan is an example of democracy being imposed. Japan had no knowledge, no experience with democracy..the US imposed it and it now has one. It doesnt mean it always works...read that twice: it doesnt means that it always works since all countries and cultures are different but it does mean that is has worked, so you can stop with the absolutes....

...now accept this and we'll move on, since we already covered this

[delrem]

100. You aren't talking about Israel, dude.

[pelsar]

102. pay attention....

this is called research in the backgrounds of occupations....its a simple concept: looking at other occupations, what worked and what didnt....looking at the common denominators for both failures and success, this then gives those who arent ideologues/fanatics/believers and other believer types, a better idea on a route to end the occupation while ensuring a stable PA that wont be repeat of gaza.

simple concept: conclusions as a result of research..

[delrem]

106. I think everyone who has a lick of common sense

understands more or less what is a "best route to end the occupation".

Not one of those would condition the outcome on "ensuring a stable PA that wont be repeat of gaza", whatever that disgusting sounding condition means.

[pelsar]

107. thats why your "common sense" has no meaning

whatever that disgusting sounding condition means.

exactly my point....as we have seen from your posts, your not one of those who look upon the actual human experiences in this conflict and others and attempt to learn what would result in a better environment for all those involved: i.e. more secure lives, more civil rights, more freedom for the long term.....the idea is to avoid a "Palestinian spring" with its violence that will spill over to israel with a result that may bring hamas to power, thats the israeli interest.

as i understand you have no interest in what may work or not work..your interest i believe is the "god of justice" that belief that states, that if your version of justice is carried out, than the we shall see 'peace throughout the land" and if it doesnt bring peace, its really not that relevant is it....this justice of yours is not about peace, security less violence, better lives in your eyes, thats all secondary. First comes this "justice" as per your definition and then magically "all will be well"

...you're all the same, you believers...of course the ironic part is that many of those involved in the conflict actually reject your version of "justice", but then they're not really relevant are they, after all, they're just the "brown people" (isnt that what the locals are called in "progressives speak..&quot

____

dont forget...call me a name now, (using the word disgusting isn't direct or personal enough.....you're losing your touch)

[delrem]

108. I will accept the above statements as pelsar's full response,

both explaining and defending the disgusting sounding condition he appended as a condition that Palestinians must be forced to submit to.

[pelsar]

109. thats what i like about this place.....

Last edited Tue Jul 16, 2013, 07:32 AM - Edit history (3)

its not fun with the Christian right, the religious settlers, the jihadhnikim...those people are religious, believe in a higher being and admit it. So there is not much to argue with....but you guys here are fun, because on one side you say your "not religious" dont believe in this higher being..and yet if we dig a bit we find that you have the same exact characteristics of all of the openly religious groups....you got your high priests, your 'holy writ" your hierarchy of deserving people, etc. And most important, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that no one will ever get to..but you do have the "process" what needs to be done to get there, and when it doesnt happen, well, somebody screwed up.
__

but more importantly your eluding to the idea that all people have a right to nationalism (oops self-determination)...well, that something even the progressive movement has a hard time with...the obvious example of giving back the hunting lands to the native american indians is never going to happen, and the progressives apparently believe that justice can be served with buying them off... so they dont get their justice.

but more to the point: pot pol, ho chi mein, stalin, assad, hitler, iran etc are all examples of self-determination/nationalism gone wrong....hence there is no such thing as the "right to create dictatorship" at least not in my book, the history of dictatorships is not a good one and should be avoided when ever possible and with the PA it is in fact possible.

the religious never to seem to understand the concept of unintended consequences, because its never relevant, it always just part of the necessary process that must be done for that magic "self-determination and absolute justice that is just waiting at the end of the rainbow.

[Ken Burch]

110. You're not entitled to talk down to people. Stop it already.

You've been treated with respect in all of these exchanges, this obligates you to treat the rest of us with respect as well.

And the fact remains...keeping your troops in the West Bank does NOTHING to establish any of the democratic norms you claim to support. This is because the occupation you are a part of has nothing in common with any of the occupations during which(but NOT as a result of which)democratic systems were created.

The key difference is that all of the occupations in which democracy DID emerge were occupations occurring AFTER a war, not as part of a war. All of them involved the occupier engaging in goodwill activities and rebuilding/reconstruction projects. All of them left the majority of the population alone on a daily basis, rather than constantly engaging in shows of force and constantly reminding the locals "who is boss" through intimidation and immiseration. And none of those occupations were carried out by occupying powers who believed the occupied lands in question were THEIRS and not the lands of the occupied peoples' themselves. The U.S. wasn't ever going to annex Germany or Japan. Nobody in Great Britain wanted to make India into British soil.

These are the defining differences.

The occupations during which democracy occurred gave the occupied peoples' breathing space and accepted that there presence was to be temporary and eventually end...the West Bank occupation YOU take part of(and which is really much more a form of perpetual low-intensity warfare rather than an occupation in any previous historical sense)if it has any historical similarities in its character at all, resembles...the Roman occupation of ancient Israel.

Palestinians don't have to be treated as if they don't want democracy and can only have it forced upon them. They need, instead, to be treated like decent, moral, civilized human beings who want democracy on their own and will naturally create it if given the chance. That's the only way to make democracy happen there...to let THEM create it, rather than to treat them as a nation of convicts for whom democracy is a form of eventual parole.

[pelsar]

112. 1: its called freedom of speach: 2: you do it as well 3: its called tolerance

Last edited Tue Jul 23, 2013, 06:50 AM - Edit history (1)

tolerance...its a good word and a key to working free culture. A crucial part of the that tolerance is to tolerate what you dont like nor understand.


this obligates you to treat the rest of us with respect as well
almost lost my coffee there. I have zero obligation to anyone here, zilch, nada, nothing...i see the world differently from you and that includes cultural exchange of ideas. if you cant even accept that, no wonder you have zero tolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.


you claim I've been treated with respect?...Not when I am indirectly called a concentration camp guard, or my family is called out as "wanton killers of children" as well as a zillion other indirect demonizations of family, friends and neighbors. (those generalizations for the IDF, zionists, etc)

You know what will get my respect? when some here calls israel an apartheid state, when gaza is referred to as a concentration camp, when, me and those i know, are referred to as attempting genocide on the Palestenians and YOU call them out on it, YOU tell them its not true and its nothing more then demonization of a whole people and its wrong.

start doing that and I will start respecting your views a bit more
__________________________________________________________________________

first you get a few points for finally and clearly acknowledging that democracy came out of several occupations, not just one or two. And here you even get some credit for noting the differences, so you can infact learn, but boy it sure takes you a long time to see the obvious.

however your still stuck on the same record:

They need, instead, to be treated like decent, moral, civilized human beings who want democracy on their own and will naturally create it if given the chance
yes i know you have this religious belief for it to occur naturally..tell me, this process that is now happening in Syria with over 100,000 dead. is this the "natural creation that your talking about?

Libya is that too an example of this creation? i need to know a bit more about this process that your talking about so i have some idea how many dead are involved. Didn't India and Pakistan have over 100,000 dead in cleaning out the populations for a 'better democracy.

Cambodia and Pot Pol..was that part of your process as well (how many dead? 3 million) and of course with Iran, I'm sure the imans know there time is limited once western democracy takes hold, whats your time estimate and death estimate?

tell me more about this natural process and the quantity of dead i can expect.......since its fair to assume i will be involved given the proximity of the PA and the refugees that occur during this natural process...and are we obligated to take them in ? what if some are suicide bombers and i or my kids get killed while treating the refugees while the PA goes through this "natural process of yours

is that justice?
(remember hamas used the sudanese refugees as cover to kill israelis on the negev border a year ago)

[geek tragedy]

53. The Afrikaaners would have approved of that logic.

Team Israel has gone from denying apartheid to defending it.

The day will come when the US is forced to divorce Israel. Can't come soon enough.

[shira]

59. I've found that those accusing Israel of Apartheid turn out to be the biggest supporters...

Last edited Wed Jul 10, 2013, 03:01 PM - Edit history (1)

...of anti-Palestinian apartheid.

Like in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.

Horrible, obvious examples that make Israel's acts pale in comparison, but not a peep from the anti-Israel crowd screaming racism.

[geek tragedy]

60. Hey, congrats, you've surrendered the possibility of being a Light Unto the Nations,

but you're better than Syria (for the time being). Truly awesome achievement.

[shira]

63. Exactly my point. You support Apartheid vs. Palestinians throughout the mideast...

...outside of Israel.

Imagine that - those yelling the loudest are its biggest defenders.

Meanwhile in Israel, Palestinians can become citizens, military commanders, representatives of the Knesset, judges on the supreme court, or President of Israel like Majali Wahabi. There's nothing to stop the Palestinians of E.Jerusalem from doing it.

[Ken Burch]

4. So, basically, he's against anything that could EVER lead to peace.

If it isn't gonna be one state OR two states, what the hell else IS there?

We already know that nothing can possibly be made better on either side by preserving the status quo.

You basically just admitted that YOU don't ever want the war to end, shira-because in endorsing this maniac's opposition even to a two-state solution, you've dismissed the only possible ways TO end it.

There's no possible way that it's a responsible position to argue against changing anything.

[shira]

7. I never said I endorsed Sherman's solution

His solution...

The hard, cold truth is: To survive as the nation-state of the Jews, Israel must adequately address two imperatives: geographic and demographic.

While old school two-staters are willing to imperil Israel geographically to address the demographic imperative, budding one-staters are prepared to jeopardize it demographically to address the geographic imperative.

The only paradigm that addresses these imperatives simultaneously is one that entails a reduction of Arab presence west of the Jordan. The most plausible – arguably, the only – noncoercive manner to achieve this is by inducing economically incentivized emigration – as I have argued in numerous columns.

That won't lead to peace either. Nothing will, except for Israel's neighboring states becoming liberal western democracies.

[Ken Burch]

9. Look, democracy's great(although the west doesn't have an exclusive franchise on it

and isn't entitled to lecture the rest of the world about it, especially considering the number of times the United States has overthrown democratic governments in various countries just because those governments were socialist in their economic policies).

but lack of democracy isn't the cause of the Arab/Israeli dispute, or of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The cause of the dispute is real injustices that both sides have experienced.

Palestinians would have spent just as much time fighting against the Israeli government if they'd had a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy as they did under the regimes they did have. It was never a case of rulers causing a dispute that the rank-and-file had no interest in.

Putting it all down to "lack of democracy" is about denial...it's about pretending that there's nothing real in this...You are an intelligent person. You know perfectly that the expulsions of 1948, the Occupation since 1967 and the settlements are REAL and valid grievances on the Palestinian side. Why do you keep acting as if none of those things matter?

Palestinian resistance(whatever you say about some of the tactics, and I've condemned the bad ones here many many times)is based on reality. Please accept that.

[pelsar]

11. justice?

so your all about justice?

well lets look at your justice and why is it not creating wars...since you claim without your version of "justice" there can be no peace.

so where are the wars?

n. american indians: why are they not uprising and why isn't american returning the lands to them?

your ancestors screwed them and no amount of casinos will amount to "justice"

how about the aborigines in Australia? any justice there, i dont think so, yet i sure don't see them grabbing any guns.
how about the way the vietnamese immigrants in the US...no justice there in the way the've been treated.
Native Canadians...have they been bought off, so they're not uprising...is that "just"

Muslim Indians were kicked out of India, that sure wasn't "just" why aren't they attacking india to "return home"
_______

but my favorite is your own egotistical viewpoint that you actually believe that your version of "justice' is what every else in the world has to believe, because you know what is right and anybody who disagrees with your version of "justice" apparently has no idea what real justice is and is wrong...Because you know better, in fact you know better than all those other "dumb" cultures who believe justice is something else

You know what REAL JUSTICE looks like and they don't (is it because they the "brown people" and just cant understand? and have to be "educated"? in to your way of thinking?)

[Ken Burch]

14. It's never. ever been about ME.

And if you aren't aware that Native Americans and indigenous people continue to struggle, globally, for justice and self-determination, you need to study. You might Google the phrase "Idle No More". Those struggles aren't over.

Democracy can never be real if it's forced on to people as a spoil of conquest. In Germany, democracy didn't have to be imposed AFTER THE WAR...after 1945, the people there wanted it back on their own. And their was a postwar democracy movement in Japan as well.

And you might want to check out what's going on in Egypt at the moment-only the LARGEST demonstrations in human history, people in the streets FOR DEMOCRACY.

And they aren't being forced to do it by me. Or you. Or "the West". They're doing it on their own.

Democracy in Palestine and self-determination in Palestine are separate issues. Democracy can never be imposed by the denial of self-determination, but only through its realization.

[pelsar]

16. Democracy can never be real ????

Democracy can never be real if it's forced on to people

so japan has a fake democracy?...this should be good, as you try to explain it. (spare me the religious belief that is was destined to be, japan was a militant society with no history of democracy.....)

Democracy in Palestine and self-determination in Palestine are separate issues
self-determination is nationalism dressed up for the progressives, its the samething and is akin to aparthied in that it claims that people with certain genes get special rights, hence it is related to how they will govern themselves and affect the geographic area.

I'm aware of the American Indians fight for "justice"....so when do they get San Francisco, because without their ancient hunting grounds, justice will not be had..... is the USA going to do the "right thing" for justice and close down the Capital and give it back to the rightful owners?

well is that not justice? or you one of those that believes they can be "bought off?" and then call it "justice"
____

and the protests in egypt are not about democracy...their about his failed govt, the economy is taking a dive and so is personal security. Dictatorships, the kind of thing that you find acceptable as part of your multi culturalism are never to good about economic issues

[Ken Burch]

19. There are a lot of questionable aspects of Japanese "democracy".

For one thing, after the initial liberalism of the U.S. efforts, the U.S then went on, in the early 1950's, to push restrictions into the Japanese system that privileged the corporate right-wing, who later formed the comically misnamed "Liberal Democratic" party, and made it as difficult as possible for parties representing working-class interests and the poor to ever come to power. Japan is a modern consumer society now, but it's elections are pretty much a sham, and it's ridiculous to assume that rank-and-file Japanese people had to be made to want elections at all. Once the war was over(and the fact that that war as unchallengably over and the Japanese side was absolutely beaten in the way the Palestinians never can be), the Japanese people were naturally going to want to break with the old order that had brought them into such a miserable situation. Therefore, the Japanese occupation and the West Bank occupation have nothing in common, so postwar Japan can't be used at all to argue that the West Bank occupation can "bring democracy" to Palestine.

And Palestinian self-determination isn't about "giving" Palestinians anything, unlike your silly analogy about San Fransisco and ancient hunting grounds. It's about admitting that Palestinians are real human beings, most of them as decent and moral as anybody else, and that they had real and mainly undeserved suffering that needs to be acknowledged. It's also about admitting that a military occupation isn't infinitely sustainable and that the settlements, almost all of which are illegal, are neither sustainable, justifiable, nor worth perpetuating the war.

Your comments about Native Americans are too insulting and unconsciously racist to merit a detailed response. Shame on you for trivializing and ridiculing their pain and their grievances. You're better than that.

[shira]

18. What's going on in Egypt isn't democracy. The vast majority still want sharia....

And that's perfectly okay with you. They want to elect another dictator. So be it, that's the will of the people as far as you're concerned.

The seculars and moderates who want freedom of speech, equal rights for women, etc... can all go to hell according to progressives like you who will NEVER help them out.

And that's why it is perceived that you and your fellow like-minded progressives support the totalitarians in the mideast, and not the moderate seculars and liberals.

That's why people like Pelsar and myself believe you're against genuine peace and liberal, progressive values. It's why you, as a nationalist first, support the formation of a future Hamastan, with sharia and all...

It's why genuine liberals and progressives in Israel (and throughout the mideast) don't trust you and your pro-regressive, pro-totalitarian cohorts one f---ing bit.

[Ken Burch]

20. I do believe in helping out seculars and progressives.

Last edited Mon Jul 8, 2013, 05:15 PM - Edit history (2)

But keeping the occupation in place can't help them in Palestine(the fact that none of them support the occupation and none have benefited from it politically proves that).

And supporting people like Mubarak in Egypt or the Pahlevis in Iran never helped seculars and progressives in those countries. All it did was crush seculars and progressives in both places...that's why virtually all the seculars and progressives in those countries wanted those tyrants forced out.

There's nothing that YOU support that is actually good for seculars and progressives at all. We both know that delaying Palestinian independence, keeping the IDF in the West Bank, and building more settlements only hurts those people.

It can't help seculars and progressives in the Middle East to put denunciations of opposition leaderships before support for the overthrow of the last of the remaining old regimes. No dictator can be a midwife of freedom. And preserving the status quo in Palestine can't ever be good for secular progressives there. The fact that none of them wants it preserved and that no Palestinians at all defend the IDF presence on their lands proves this, for God's sakes.

You sound like those die-hard defenders of apartheid in South Africa who insisted, to the last, that nothing mattered more than crushing the African National Congress. Those people would have preferred Inkatha to be imposed as the leadership of the black majority there(something all non-Zulu members of said black majority would have rejected forever). And, since Inkatha's partisans roamed the streets hacking non-Inkatha people to death with swords, we can assume that an Inkatha-led independent South Africa would pretty much have been like Burundi or the territories controlled by the psychopaths of the Koni's "Lord's Resistance Army" instead of the mainly peaceable secular democracy South Africa is becoming.

[shira]

26. But nothing you and yours advocate would help seculars/progressives there...

Last edited Mon Jul 8, 2013, 07:05 PM - Edit history (2)

Pelsar and I believe that at the very least, freedom of speech/expression must be allowed in such a "democracy", first and foremost. From there, more will follow.

I believe personally in the Attaturk model, along with freedom of speech.

You have nothing to offer seculars/progressives in such totalitarian regimes. You favor elected tyrants, like Chavez for example. No freedom of speech/dissent, etc. Chavez not only defended but supported the regimes in N.Korea, Iran, Burma, Syria, and Libya under Gaddafi - by far the worst of the worst countries when it comes to human rights.

You're for Palestinian nationalism first and foremost, without progressive values. And like Iran and Gaza, you and yours will do nothing to see that progressive values are promoted in such a society. You will all continue to bash liberal western "capitalist" democracies while defending totalitarian regimes.

Let's face it, you're for a socialist tyranny in the W.Bank once the occupation ends. You couldn't care less about peace either as your position is pro-war. In case you forget, Israel cannot force the Palestinians to make peace, and Israel shouldn't be expected to end the occupation before a peace deal is made. Because if that's what you want - occupation ending before peace - that's what you'll get - WAR.

I swear I cannot tell the difference b/w your position and that of the most extreme fascist Rightwingers. Nazi Germany was socialist too, so why not support them? It appears you favor such regimes. The USSR under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot. This is what you want for Palestine too. If elected by the people, and if they are socialist nations then you're for it...

Where am I wrong?

[Ken Burch]

30. I favor freedom of speech as much as you do. And Chavez DID allow it.

Taking a television station that spoke solely for rich white people and did nothing but demand Pinochet-style coups(any coup in Latin America IS going to be just like Chile in 1973-there can't be a humane coup with positive results for the people in that hemisphere) off the cable system didn't restrict freedom of speech in Venezuela. The wealthy(Chavez' only opponents)can't be persecuted or oppressed, and are never denied the ability to express themselves anywhere. The people of Venezuela are much freer now than they would be if any of Chavez ultra-conservative, white supremacist opponents(no one who wanted an anti-racist Venezuela where the poor had a decent life was ever anti-Chavist, and few ever your right-wing hero Capriles. Chavez won re-election over and over because the people supported him and loved what he stood for-and of course they would, because he was the only leader in Venezuelan history that ever cared about the workers or the poor and the only one that ever opposed racism(no conservative or centrist Venezuelan leader ever did a thing for Afro-Venezuelans or indigenous Venezuelans-the only

I never liked Chavez alliances with North Korea and Iran...but they simply didn't matter. There was never any possibility of either country's bad leaders to be removed while Chavez was in office, and if that couldn't happen than those alliances were meaningless.

Any leader that makes life better for the poor will always be better than a leader that imposes austerity budgets. Demands for "free speech" are obscene when the poor and the dispossessed are too hungry to talk. Free speech, by itself, without a just society around it, isn't anything at all. Neither is seculainsm. What good is either of those things when the system is rigged against you and your kids are hungry. I'm not against democracy at all-I just see it as inseparable from human equality. Do you really disagree?

The poor can't do anything with "free speech" while they ARE poor and they have no hope of escaping poverty, while they face the risk of losing their jobs for speaking out against their exploiters(a fear no poor people ever had in Venezuela under Chavez, since none of them were ever punish for speaking out about what THEY care about). That's why it took 188 years, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for the United States to finally get to the place where it had anything close to a moral right to call itself a free country.

You have to work for "human rights" and human equality(which should be considered just as much of a human right as "free" speech and secularism)at the same time and with equal fervor. Without human equality and freedom from want, free speech isn't anything at all. And you know it. Free speech, by itself, can't help anyone.

[shira]

40. Chavez didn't allow it. Here's HRW on his authoritarian legacy...

http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/03/05/venezuela-chavez-s-authoritarian-legacy

Yes, I get it that you're a fan of dictators like Chavez. He can do or say anything he wants and you'll just lap it all up "in the name of the poor and oppressed". All the fascist anti-capitalist dictators, both left and right wing are the same and that's why Chavez was such a big supporter of the fascists running N.Korea, Iran, Syria, Burma, and Libya.

And it does matter that he supported their brutal rule against individuals in those society who want free-speech and a more secular, pluralistic society. You support state-sponsored repression over individual liberty...all in the name of helping "the poor". Sorry, but I call bullshit on that, Ken. Here's how Chavez destroyed the Venezuelan economy...

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/ways-chavez-destroyed-venezuelan-economy/story?id=18239956#.UdvmyRaYc00

They're 96% dependent on oil, among other things. Take the oil away, and Chavez has almost no way to feed his people. While it's a good thing the poverty rate has gone down in Venezuela, it's also gone down in neighboring states too, where privatization (capitalism) is allowed to flourish. So the leaders in those countries can also claim they care about the poor...right?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dina-siegel-vann/official-antisemitism-sub_b_1305309.html

If you look at that link above, you'll see how Chavez' state-sponsored antisemitism went unchallenged due to the restrictions Chavez put on freedom of dissent and criticism. Just an FYI for you, but poor & impoverished Jews in Venezuela actually exist too. You think they might have something to say about state-sponsored anti-Jewish bigotry and incitement to violence?

[Ken Burch]

22. What's going on in Egypt IS about democracy.

Those were the largest protests in human history against Morsi last week. They did and do want democracy. You just refuse to accept that because you refuse to believe that Arabs can be civilized human beings and can make modern free societies on their own. I think, at some basic level, that you STILL think the U.S.(possibly aided by the IDF)should have intervened to save Mubarak. You do realize that there's no way he could have been kept in power at that point, don't you? And you can't really believe that anything would be better if Mubarak(as he wished to do)have stayed in long enough to hand over dynastic power to his sons, I hope. The last thing Egypt needed was it's own version of the Pahlevis.

The massive anti-Morsi movement PROVES that Egypt isn't a lost cause. It proves that the election of the Muslim Brotherhood isn't the end of the story, as you'd have preferred it to be.

The secularists didn't lose in Egypt because Egyptians are atavistic anti-democratic berserkers. they lost becau. se they advocated fiscal conservatism and free-market economics, things that could only make life worse(as they've only made life worse in Israel under Netanyahu The Republican).

If you want democracy to spread, work for economic democracy as well. People want to live under systems that guarantee them at least a somewhat decent life in exchange for their labors. They won't vote for a party that puts "free elections" ahead of feeding their kids. As Brecht put it "food is the first thing...morals follow".

It's equality that makes democracy. Creating an egalitarian world is the only way to create a democratic world. "Elections" and "secularism" as abstracts can never be worth making the poor poorer OR putting workers out of work.

You outed yourself as an unconscious anti-Arab racist with that post.

[shira]

25. Democracy is about more than just an election...

No progressive or liberal would be in favor of electing another totalitarian regime that is pro-sharia law and against virtually every progressive/liberal value in existence.

[Ken Burch]

29. The U.S., at its birth in 1789, was pretty much just as repressive as Hamas is now.

They executed gays...women had no rights at all...no one who didn't own property could vote, no such people had any means of protecting themselves against exploitation by their bosses...not only was there slavery but of the genocide against Native Americans was just starting...for all but a wealthy, white, male few, freedom was a pathetic joke in what would eventually be called "the land of the free". Every bit of freedom that ever existed for the non-elite in the U.S. was only established AFTER independence, as the result of struggle from below, struggle suppressed by the "free" leaders of our "free" country.

Given our own country's history, What right do I have to demand that another country be kept under colonial occupation UNTIL it has leaders that satisfy someone else's demands for "democracy"? Israelis who use "lack of democracy" as a justification to keep the IDF in the West Bank don't care about democracy there at all, because all of them know that keeping the IDF there can only harm the pro-democracy movement(and there is one, one I support), by giving the anti-democracy types the chance to paint the pro-democracy people as lackeys of the occupation. The occupation never protects pro-democracy types from repression by anti-democracy types either, but simply suppresses ALL protests on any issue.

The Palestinians don't have to be MADE to be democratic-they need to be given control of their own lives and shape those lives and their country on THEIR terms. That is the way to help democracy there-you help it by helping life be made better.

Democracy IS more than election...it is popular control and popular decision making over all the aspects of life that affect the people collectively. It requires the acceptance of human equality and the right of all to have an equal say. But none of those things concern you.

[shira]

41. No they weren't. And even if they were, it's 250 years later....

That kind of shit doesn't fly now in today's world, nor should it be tolerated in the least.

You keep saying the Palestinians need freedom. They won't get freedom under Hamas. Tell me, how will Palestinians' lives change for the better once the occupation goes away? How has it changed for the better under Hamas since Israel left Gaza back in 2005? How has life changed for the better for Arabs throughout the region living under fascist rule? Egypt, Syria, Libya? Life doesn't really get any better for "the people" under the totalitarian leadership there that you support.

Israelis who use "lack of democracy" as a justification to keep the IDF in the West Bank don't care about democracy there at all, because all of them know that keeping the IDF there can only harm the pro-democracy movement(and there is one, one I support), by giving the anti-democracy types the chance to paint the pro-democracy people as lackeys of the occupation. The occupation never protects pro-democracy types from repression by anti-democracy types either, but simply suppresses ALL protests on any issue.

That's bullshit.

Most Israelis want 2 states if that means peace. They're against it if means just more war. Why can't you see that?

[Ken Burch]

43. There is no way to get peace, ever, without having 2 states. There is nothing else that can work.

Peace can't be made by keeping Palestine under occupation forever.

As to Hamas, I think it's likely that they will collapse when independence is achieved. After, Eire didn't end up being ruled by the Irish Republ, ican Army.

But it's not possible to persuade Palestinians to move away from Hamas OR Fatah by keeping the IDF marching through their towns. Doing that just strengthens those organizations, because it allows them to argue(unfairly, but persuasively)that if Palestinians break with those groups, they will find themselves helpless against Israel. The Occupation is a gift to the armed factions...it nurtures them and gives them a lease on life they would never otherwise have.

As to Gaza, Hamas held on there because the Israeli pullout didn't lead to the end of the siege Gazans live under. It didnt lead to prosperity or any social improvement(and it never could have led to that, because Gaza isn't sustainable as an entity on its own).

[shira]

47. But Hamas and the PLO want more than 2 states...

They don't speak for all Palestinians when what they want is Israel's annihilation, but that's what they and many other Palestinians actually do want. Not all, but a lot of them.

It's why after 20 years of Oslo, autonomy within the W.Bank, and Gaza to themselves they have nothing to show the world that what they truly want is 2 states alongside Israel in peace. They've built no infrastructure to sustain their own state as they're wholly dependent on international aid.

What you want is 2 states w/o peace. You're assuming peace will follow next. So all you really have is blind faith. No different than any other religious extremist.

You also don't know that Hamas will simply go away once the Palestinians have their own state. That's nothing but an unfounded belief as well.

You'll have to excuse reasonable moderates and centrists for not having the same blind faith you do when it comes to solving the Israel/Arab conflict. The moderate middle, from center left to center right is looking for evidence there will be peace rather than an escalation to more war once land is given up. These are the people you are truly against, as you support elite, fascist rule instead.

[Ken Burch]

24. It's telling that you seem to equate "justice" with "barbarity".

That you can't see "justice" as making people's lives better, or as ending human suffering, or as acknowledging people's pain and apologizing for its infliction.

And that you cannot seem to imagine, based on your post, that any Arab or Muslim could ever have a vision of justice that is kind, life-affirming, inclusive or positive in any way at all

To you, "justice", as seen by Arabs or Muslims, is simply a euphemism for retribution.

You simply won't grant those people any humanity at all.

[pelsar]

33. wow..is all im gong to say..

from another post:

Free speech, by itself, can't help anyone.
you do you have little understanding of societies...... Free speech is the basic engine for change....and according to the previous posts, you put it at less important than "justice" At least that explains why your for limiting free speech..first thing all dictators do (always for justice). Your becoming clearer and clearer, your nothing less than an apologist for dictators, facist and anybody else who claims they are for "justice' and helping those who were unjust.

btw, its funny how your against all govts yet you were obviously for chavez... a wanna be dictator.
_______

i dont equate justice with barbarity..i simple recognize that "justice" is defined by culture and there is no 'universal justice" that you obviously believe exists.

Muslims and Arabs have a variety of cultures each with variations of the what is justice. Your the one who is barbaric as you refuse to acknowledge the different cultures and different viewpoints.

your the exact same character of the colonial white man of past, the exact same cardboard cut out that defines who and what the "brown person needs, hence you can define for them what is "justice"

and this: freedom from want
damn you really are a "cardboard cutout" that is the most repressive, colonialist, anti freedom, anti justice, anti human belief that i can imagine.
___________________________

just for fun, why should the Palestenians get "back their land" and the American Indians not?...how does your "justice"square that hole?

[Ken Burch]

34. "Freedom from want" is a phrase coined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

You know, the guy who led the alliance that DEFEATED HITLER. How could you call him "repressive, colonialist, anti-freedom, anti-justice, anti-human"? Social equality can't oppress anyone and it damn sure can't lead to colonialism. And a society without it, or at least something close to it, will be barbaric...like modern day Texas, or like South Africa under the Afrikaaners.

(btw, since you seem to be trying to accuse me of being a Stalinist as well as a friend of Islamic extremism-neither of which is true, and both of which couldn't be true about the same person at the same time anyway-Stalin didn't do any of his evil deeds out of support for "freedom from want"-he acted solely to preserve his own power at all costs. Stalin didn't improve life for the workers of the USSR-if anything, he actively made life worse for them by making workers' controll of the factories an impossibility under his bloodsoaked rule AND by, worst of all, trading much of the Soviet wheat crop for foreign weaponry for the Red Army. Stalin was never in any real sense a Marxist or a person of the Left-if he had any ideology at all, Stalin was a Great Russian Nationalist and a right-wing extremist. Nothing that was repressive in any of the puppet states he created in Eastern Europe after 1945 had anything to do with the original ideals of socialism, ideals those states discarded from the start. The repression was solely about keeping the Party in power at all costs. The actual Left is totally free of blame for any of that.

So don't ever call me an advocate for dictatorship. I favor freedom...in fact, I favor MORE freedom than you, because you don't want people to be free from want and free from exploitation, and if people aren't free from those things, what else matters?

A world without freedom from want can't BE a world in which freedom of speech and secularism mean anything at all...because freedom only matters if you and your family have food, shelter, clothing and know you will never be poor. It is a useless concept to anyone starving in a refugee camp or sleeping on the street. And countries without social equality, or worse yet, countries like mine, where our major parties seem to believe that increased social inequality and the right to use perpetual high unemployment to "discipline the labor force&quot Netanyahu likes those things himself, which is another reason you should hate him, and your man Lapid has proven he doesn't care about anyone but the wealthy by becoming Netanyahu's austerity enforcer-and if he's for austerity now, Lapid will never be able to be for anything humane later, will never ever be able or willing to propose anything compassionate or progressive or egalitarian)are countries where free speech becomes irrelevant and comically useless, because it can't ever be used to change anything in those countries and because it means that public debate will only be about issues that the wealthy care about.

Free speech is only of values when it is about helping those below find their place in the sun...it isn't important when it's about abstractions or about the issues the priviliged concern themselves with.


And are you really saying a person has to be anti-Chavez(which, in Venezuela, means being right-wing on everything, since no one on the Left there, no poor people, and no people of color wanted on Chavez replaced by the ultra-conservative Capriles, a man who never expressed progressive or humane views on the issues)to prove that she or he isn't against free speech? If you put free speech before social equality, you are giving up on social equality and on any hope for a decent life for the poor or the dispossessed at all. In the United States of 1789, where "free speech" and separation of religions and state were in the Constitution but freedom from want and freedom from exploitation weren't, no one who wasn't already an economic aristocrat had anything to live for, had any hope at all. None of those people gained anything from "independence" whatsoever, and no one who wasn't wealthy, white, and male had any freedom. Every who wasn't an property-endowed caucasian economic aristocrat lived virtually as a serf, workers gained no rights until the 1930's, people of color gained no rights until 1964, and women and LGBT people are STILL fighting for their rights(people of color may start losing their rights now, with the Voting Rights Act now rendered essentially meaningless without the presclearance requirements-everything else in the Act is just irrelevant window dressing with no force).

And here's the thing:

Even if you found a culture that DID feel that way collectively and universally, it wouldn't be pomissible to break that culture of that belief by having an army of a different culture patrol its streets and arrest and harass people within that coununtil they gave up that belief. That
wasn't how it worked in Germany OR Japan after the war: in both countries, the people embraced voluntarily and on their own terms. They weren't MADE to embrace it by the presence of American troops. Germany had had a democracy movement throughout the 19th Century and early 20th centuries...the Weimar Republic would have developed into a stable secular democratic system if the winners of World War I hadn't sabotaged it and enabled Hitler by spending the whole 1920 to 1933 era economically punishing the secular democrats for actions that were solely committed by the military class that the German people overthrew in 1919.
And the fact that Japan had had aristocratic militarist rule for all of its pre-World War II history didn't mean that the ordinary Japanese people supported those rulers...it simply meant that they had no means of getting them out. Blaming the Japanese commoner class for the crimes of the Imperial war elite, simply because they had lived under the rule of that elite, is about as fair as blaming the Irish for the crimes of the British Empire. In societies like, the people are NOT responsible for the actions of their rulers.

As to your talk of giving San Francisco to the Native Americans(an idea I wouldn't totally dismiss, btw, and I don't know why you assume that I would)I'm not proposing between Israel and Palestine that is remotely comparable to that. I'm not calling for the State of Israel to dismantle itself or for Israeli Jews to leave. The West Bank, however, isn't part of that state and can't legitimately be incorporated into it, at least not without creating what you say you don't want...a unitary state with the Jewish and Arab communities holding equal power. That result couldn't be avoided because you wouldn't be able to deny Palestinians a vote in Israeli elections under those circumstances, and you couldn't, without using Gestapo tactics, deport enough of them to prevent a demographic problem. A Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza isn't comparable to giving Native Americans a large American city. My ideas on the way to address the grievances of both groups involve compensation, apologies AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT, not territorial revanchism, which isn't a feasible goal.

Getting the IDF out of the West Bank does NOT equate to the dissolution of Israel. The West Bank and Israel are separate and always will be.

[pelsar]

35. you want zombies...

A world without freedom from want can't BE a world in which freedom of speech and secularism mean anything at all...because freedom only matters if you and your family have food, shelter, clothing and know you will never be poor

you want us all to be the same, to have the same needs provided for by something or somebody..that is your definition of freedom and to do so you will be more than willing to suppress the freedom of speech to those who disagree with such a view point...because opposition voices to this "freedom" that you have defined is what your beliefs cannot tolerate.

oh you will call them "rich" "exploiters" evil selfish, unfeeling or whatever demonization terms fits....just as your were for chavaz shutting down the opposition TV because it didn't fit his (your) agenda.

UGH!!!! those view points are the real enemy of the people everywhere, shutting down free speech, attempting to shut down free thoughts.......to all those that disagree with your views!

there is nothing, absolutely nothing worse than attempting to take away a persons right to think, believe and speak as they want to. That is the basis for freedom of everything else, freedom to cause change, to fix things, to screw things up and fix them or not, to be INDIVIDUALS

that is what your against, your against us being individual human beings, everyone one us to think, to believe and to speak as we please.......i cant think of anything so wrong, so bad, so evil as what you believe.

sorry ken thats not even censorship its simply facism "in the name of the people" China, USSR, Chevaz, Pol Pot, Cuba, Assad, Hamas, khommeni.....your all the same: first thing they all do is limit freedom of speech and attempt to limit freedom of thought-all in the name of the "people"

at least your finally out with your beliefs

[Ken Burch]

36. Uh, no, I dont want anybody to be a "zombie"

What I do want is for people to have the right and ability to use ALL their energies doing things that truly matter to THEM...something you can't do when you're poor OR when you are working a crap job just to "pay the bills". How does THAT equate to zombieism in your book? You can't imagine freedom of the mind and freedom from human misery co-existing in the same world? Why not? Why not try to make a world like that? It would be a world where the human spirit soared, and where everyone would be easily able to be their best selves...not the cold, ruthless, anti-creative, empathy-free self you have to be to win under capitalism.

Do you really think people have to be struggling day-to-day to make ends meet to be individuals, to be free? Where the hell does THAT thought come from? You've obviously never known a minute of poverty or suffering if you think that hard times make people free, or that "suffering builds character". All suffering really ever builds is scar tissue.

And I've never called for free speech to be shut down...just for the other freedoms I mentioned to be established at the same time as it. How could that possibly be a bad thing?

Oh, and Chavez can't be compared to China or the USSR at all. People were free to criticize him the whole time. Capriles, the candidate of the rich white folks, was free to RUN every time. Did Chavez have to be voted out of office and replaced by a candidate that only cared about the wealthy before you'd believe he wasn't a tyrant? Capriles wasnt any more committed to human rights than anybody else...and campaigning for privatization and the return of foreign control of Venezuela's oil isn't the mark of anyone who favored human rights or democracy. Mr. Perez, Chavez predecessor and your probable model of a "democratic" leader, murdered 3,000 trade unionists in the streets of Caracas just for marching against austerity. But that doesn't matter to you.

And I've never tried to shut down YOUR views...I just don't feel obligated to agree with your views or to give you special deference. And the rich in Venezuela(the only people who ever watched it, since no poor person would ever prefer market economics to social justice)have been able to express everything they wanted to express. Chavez would have won every election even if the rich man's channel had been on the cable system-he won because his programs he implemented helped the poor. Why is it so difficult for you to accept that the poor of Venezuela and the non-white majority honestly backed chavismo and the PSUV ON THE MERITS...backed it because it was good for them? Why do you assume that a Chavez defeat would have been the only legitimate outcome of a Venezuelan election? Isn't that an example of YOU being an egotist? Of you assuming that the people in that country would naturally share your(surprisingly ultraconservative)political and economic views(btw how did you ever hold those views and vote Meretz? They were and are sharply to your left on every matter, not just the peace issue)?

Nothing I've said equates to opposing free speech. Nothing at all. I just don't think it's MORE important than all the other freedoms Freedom from want is of equal priority-because in a society where inequality grows and the poor lose to the rich, freedom simply doesn't exist.

The true enemies of freedom are those who want the rich to win and the poor to lose...because when that happens, freedom doesn't exist anyway. No one who is struggling to feed and house their kids can ever be said to be free...nor can anyone who's pension is stolen by management, nor can anyone sleeping in a cardboard box on the street.

The notion that freedom requires market economics and inequality is a myth-always has been. To see how much of a myth it is, look at all the countries(including Chile in 1973 and Iran in 1953)where the U.S. TOOK AWAY FREEDOM because the people had elected governments with economic policies that the rich in the U.S. didn't agree with.

[pelsar]

37. you've made yourself very very clear....

A world without freedom from want can't BE a world in which freedom of speech and secularism mean anything at all.

Freedom of speech have a meaning all themselves, they are beyond rich or poor, they are the basic human right that defines us as individuals..with our own thoughts, and beliefs (thats what you dont like)

I have no idea how you or your dictator/progressive friends define "freedom of want" but i do know how you define freedom of speech.....and you define it as only being able to say what is allowed. That is why you think chevaz shutting down a TV station that didn't agree with him is a good thing.

Freedom of speech means rich exploiters and their evil govt buddies, get to talk as much as they want to convince the people (like you) that they are really on side of the "people". It also means that sadistic people like che guvara gets to have his say, as does stalin, martin luther king, mandella, netanyahu

I dont believe you believe in real freedom of speech, you just want it for those who "think properly" for the "nirvana" of "freedom of want" i.e. we all want the same, we must be the same, we must be like zombies-no individualism allowed here.

how about defending the Tea Parties/republicans/fox news/koch brothers right to own, sell newspapers and convince the folk that they are right in their views?...will you defend that right or do you believe their views should be shut out from the public?

_____

Why is it so difficult for you to accept that the poor of Venezuela and the non-white majority honestly backed chavismo and the PSUV ON THE MERITS
I never said so...from where i sit, he was a facist dictator wannabe, people can get sold on all kinds of stuff... he convinced you he was 'for the people" when in fact he was just one more rich sadistic power hungry elitist

[Ken Burch]

42. Again, I'm not calling for free speech to be delayed.

I'm calling for the other rights I mentioned to be honored AT THE SAME TIME. That has nothing in common with calling for free speech to be denied to anyone.

And not having a tv station on cable didn't deny the rich of Venezuela the right to free speech...they were always able to express everything they wanted just to say anytime they wanted to say it. No anti-Chavez voices were suppressed at all. If Chavez really had been a dictator, he'd have deported or jailed all his opponents and had Capriles lined up and shot. Yet Capriles got teo run the campaign he wanted to and all the votes he received were counted. He lost because, of as a wealthy conservative, he had nothing to offer the poor and multiracial majority of the Venezuelan electorate. Venezuela's elections are freer and more legitimate than those in the U.S., because unlike the U.S., the votes of everybody(rather than just rich white people)actually matter and the poor, unlike the poor in the U.S., have a say and have something to live for(none of them have anything to live for in MY country, or in any country where free market economics, which always mean austerity, misery and permanent hopelessness for the many, hold sway).

I'm for as much freedom as you are...and I'm fine with people who disagree with me say whatever they want(I don't try to stop you from saying whatever you want, even when you insult me). I just don't see freedom of speech as more important than all other freedoms.

If you were a slave in the U.S. in 1789, the First Amendment, admirable as it was, was useless to you. Same thing if you were a woman wanting to get the right to be economically independent of men, or a working man who didn't own property and thus didn't have the right to vote, or if you were a Native American trying to prevent the white man from stealing your land. Freedom of speech, to be meaningful, must be accompanied by a meaningful say the major collective decisions of life(including the decisions of how the economic system is to be run, how the environment is to be treated, how the state intersects in your personal life-as LGBT people found out in this country through years of hard, repressive experience).

It wasn't the First Amendment that made democracy in the U.S.-it was organized resistance to oppression from below. it was mass protest, it was strikes, it was civil disobedience and boycotts. Debates among the comfortable middle-class(your notion of free speech)had little to do with any meaningful victories for the overall cause of freedom. Change mainly came when people put their bodies on the line for it

So don't ever call me an opponent of freedom again-it's been a lie every time you've said it and you know it was a lie, And I've done nothing, ever, to deserve such abusive and unjust treatment from you, especially since all I've ever done here was exercise MY right to free speech in response to you exercising yours. Doing that never justified abuse and invective from you.

[pelsar]

44. no..Freedom of speach is not dependent upon anything...zilch

there you go again....

Freedom of speech, to be meaningful, must be accompanied by a meaningful say the major collective decisions of life(including the decisions of how the economic system is to be run, how the environment is to be treated, how the state intersects in your personal life-as LGBT people found out in this country through years of hard, repressive experience).
______

freedom of speech is a value by itself, it is the engine of change. It is when people get to say that the economy should be capitalistic or not, it has nothing to do with any other value. Those values will change and change again (gay rights, environmental rights midget rights).

And not having a tv station on cable didn't deny the rich of Venezuela the right to free speech.
of course it did, denying a person the legal means to express his opinion is censorship. Are you For censorship? Would you like to forbid the tea party to own a TV station?
___

So don't ever call me an opponent of freedom again
of course I will, that is the essence of freedom of speech.. you put an basic element of being human, and individual and connect it to a specific set of political values whos based on the "collective viewpoint"..UGH..double UGH and in my world that demands much verbal abuse,...tons of it

unless of course you believe the Tea Pary gun carrying conservatives and the anti obamacare crowd, should be able to have their own TV and newspapers if they want to promote their view point, and you will defend their rights to do so..... then i might change my mind.

[Ken Burch]

45. societies that ONLY have freedom of speech are never societies where the poor ever win.

And the Tea Party have their own tv station...it's Fox News. There's no country anywhere where anyone on the Right is ever oppressed or denied free speech. That only happens to the poor and the dispossesed.

If you're rich, you can't be a victim of persecution. Period.

[pelsar]

46. that makes no sense....because it doesnt exist....

societies that ONLY have freedom of speech are never societies where the poor ever win.

any society that has freedom of speech as a cornerstone will have by definition a dynamic society the express the various viewpoints of the individual s and their ideological groups within that society. They will not only have freedom of speech, they will many other freedoms that are related because the people of that society have voices....they may not be the direction that you believe they should be, but that is why there is freedom of speech, so that the individuals can express their view points and make them happen....and people like you can be ignored


There's no country anywhere where anyone on the Right is ever oppressed or denied free speech.
really? are you really sure about that..i mean really really reallly sure about that?


If you're rich, you can't be a victim of persecution. Period.
so a black rich TV star in the states cannot claim to be victim of persecution?...even if they say they are?

well..do you think fox news should be allowed to be shown? how about the koch brothers buying up the LA times....should that be illegal?

[geek tragedy]

52. Oh, he favors ethnic cleansing.

Maybe he can pick Radovan Karwdzic's brain on this.

His Israel is not one worthy of support, or defending.

[shira]

61. No more than you do by wanting all 300-500,000 settlers ethnically cleansed...

...from the territories.

At least Sherman is for giving the Palestinians a choice.

You'd forcefully have all the settlers removed.

[Ken Burch]

84. The settlers aren't legitimate residents of the territories.

And the only reason they are there is to effectively incorporate large chunks of the territories into Israel...areas Israel doesn't even need, for any practical reason.

It would be different, in all liklihood, if the settlers would be willing to become Palestinian citizens. But it can't be legitimate for them to be on Palestinian land and remain Israeli citizens.

[delrem]

87. Bless you for how thoroughly you count the snakes in the pit.

I had to turn off filters to read your entire proceedings in this OP, and in a world where time is limited it was worth it. I'll now have to turn them back on because there's no way that I could handle that level of vitriol and obfuscation.

I wouldn't, in my dreams, have imagined that a hasbarist would be so forthright in their contradiction of reality as to paint Palestinian rejection of the Jewish settlement project in "Judea and Samaria", esp. in area C, as support for ethnic cleansing. (while the whole team is busy trying to sell a "two state solution", no less!)

In terms of "greatest likelihood" I think that particular maneuver has to've been floated by a hasbara apparatchik in a test run. I can't see it being picked up by mainstream hasbara because it's way too dangerous, way too obvious and paints a veridical portrait of Netanyahu's mindset.

[Ken Burch]

90. Thanks for the support. Sorry you had to turn off the filters.

Sometimes, those who are obsessed with silencing debate make this group pretty damn toxic.

[pelsar]

114. silencing debate

no ken.....your belief that freedom of speech that it has to be limited, controlled has confused you also on the definition of debate:

freedom of speech and thought are absolute values....they dont exist with conditions

debate does not mean "silence" the other, that is what you would like to do. For those of us who actually believe in the concept of freedom of speech it means debating the different viewpoints, including those that are opposed to ours, those that are foolish and naive and saying so clearly.

it does not mean "silencing the other.' You have made that claim constantly and my only conclusion is, because you would like to silence all others that disagree with you, you think that we want to do the same (you seem to believe that us humans are all the same).

that has now become clear. it is you that wants to silence others, Speech and thoughts cannot be silenced as much as you and your fellow believers want and dream of silencing us, changing our thought patterns, restricting our viewpoints and ability to spread them to others. (you probably believe that capitalists, tea party members should all have restricted speech-dont u....)

its not going to happen, its been tried before, many many many times, yet the human spirit, seems to be able to survive those attempts.

[Ken Burch]

115. I never said that speech or debate has to be limited

What I was saying was that speech and debate should be respectful on a human level and not abusive or based on insulting anyone or acting(as you often do)as if those who disagree with you should be treated as if they are idiots who are not entitled to be given a non-insulting response. Freedom of speech is about freedom to discuss ideas...there's no such thing as a right to insult or to condescend. If you think someone is factually wrong, just show the facts that demonstrate that. All human beings(other than someone like Hitler, obviously)are entitled to a basic level of respect and civility. And there's no point that anyone could ever try to make that can ONLY be made by talking down to or denigrating personally those the person trying to make that point is trying to make it to.

Can you really disagree with any of what I said above? Can you personally justify any situation where debating contemptuously or in a tone or personal abuse is actually justified?

Why is it not enough for you or anyone else to say, when you disagree with people here "here is where you are wrong and this is what I think"? Why does it always have to be this "just keep guessing why I think you are stupid" tone?

(btw, when you said that you'd been equated to a concentration camp guard by others, I denounce that. It was inappropriate and you don't deserve that. No one alive today does. You are entitled to be spoken to respectfully as well and if I've hurt you in any way in the past by things I've said about you as a person, I do apologize and will try in any event to be more careful. Neither of us is a villain. Neither of us has evil ideas. We are both simply decent people who disagree on some things. OK?)

Nothing I've ever said equates to silencing anyone. There is nothing you would want to say in this forum that you can ONLY say by treating people you disagree with as if they are too unintelligent to have any right to have an opinion about anything you support.

And a person doesn't have to be anti-Hugo Chavez to be pro-democracy. I disagree with the measures he took towards some opponents, but that doesn't obligate me to demand that his party be forced out and replaced with what would be forced by the U.S. to be a fully capitalist(and thus automatically anti-poor, racist and anti-worker)government.

Nor does a person HAVE to put democratization ahead of the end of the end of the Occupation of the West Bank to prove that that person supports democracy in Palestine and everywhere else. It makes no difference whether democracy comes before self-determination or afterwords, and there's no reason to think that democracy is more likely to happen in places like Palestine if outsiders FORCE it on the local population rather than letting that population work towards it themselves. Hamas will collapse once Palestine becomes independent, because it will be politically unsustainable at that point. Your argument comes close to saying that the Arab Spring can't make democracy, but repetitions of the U.S. invasion of Iraq somehow could(in Iraq, democracy is pretty much a joke, as far as that goes. Same thing in Libya. Outside intervention did NOTHING in either place to make democracy happen.

And your government isn't even making democratization one of its justifications for the Occupation, so why even use that to justify the presence of you and your fellow troops? Obviously democracy can't be made there under an occupation that doesn't even make democratization a goal.

The way to stop people like Chavez from coming to power is to make it possible for people to govern in Latin America and other places as full democrats of the Left WITHOUT them being in danger of a U.S.-orchestrated coup. You'd have seen no Fidel Castro if the U.S. hadn't murdered democracy in Guatemala and you'd have seen no Chavez(or Daniel Ortega-Evo Morales IS fully democratic and doesn't apply to this discussion)if the U.S. hadn't overthrown Allende and put Chile under a brutal police state for eighteen years.

The way to stop groups like Hamas and Hezbollah from emerging in the places where they do emerge is to stop creating situations in which the people who end up backing those groups feel the levels of desperation that drive them to such choices. Hamas wouldn't have emerged if Israeli leaders hadn't put delegitimizing the PLO(a group that was at least secular and potentially democratic) ahead of ending the Israel/Palestine conflict. Hezbollah wouldn't have had the support base it developed if the Israelis hadn't been making life miserable for the people of South Lebanon. And the mullahs would never have come to power in Iran at all if the U.S. and Britain hadn't overthrown Mossadegh and put the discredited and useless Pahlevis back in power in that country. The lesson is, when it's obvious that a whole people want change, let them HAVE the change they want under reasonable leadership, under humane democratic leadership. When you do that, ugly leadership isn't going to emerge.

Most of the situations in which ugly leaders emerged were due to stupid interventions by "the West&quot interventions, more often than not, AGAINST democracy and against free speech). That legacy, that history of hypocrisy, is one of the main reasons I reject your insistence that democracy be seen as proof of the moral superiority of "the West" and as something that only "the West" can create in the non-Western world.

One of the lessons that "the West" needs to take from our ugly history of actions towards the non-West is simply not to intervene against democratic governments again and to apologize for the times in the past when we've done that. We should never have overthrown Mossadegh, or ANY of the governments we overthrew in Latin America(while Cuba needs democratization, it goes without saying that it would have been a tragedy if the Bay of Pigs invasion had put an "anticommunist" power in Cuba, because the U.S. would have forced that government to be right-wing, white supremacist, antilabor and antidemocracy for the rest of eternity), or Africa. Other than World War II, U.S. troops on foreign soil left nothing but misery behind them when they left. The justified shame I feel as an American with democratic and egalitarian values drives my views on most issues, and it means that the U.S. will never have any moral right to send troops to anywhere in the non-West again.

[pelsar]

116. of course i have to right to insult....your good at it

there's no such thing as a right to insult or to condescend.

and please tell me who is going to be the arbitrator of such rights?...can i be sarcastic and if the person i'm being sarcastic too, believes i've insulted them, do i get fined? go to jail

who gets to decide how i can speak? is there some 'speech panel" that will judge my words and if some one somewhere feels insulted i am them guilty.

btw, your past posts have been incredilbly insulting to me, my family, my neighbors, my community (how many times have your called me a racist, how many times have you insulted the people in the IDF? how many times have you insulted my neighbors?

for the betterment of the conversation i expect you to change the way your write about us..and of course apologize for gross generalizations about us

[Ken Burch]

117. funny thing with that concept of arbitration

you feel that YOU have the right to arbitrarily decree that I oppose democracy just because I don't take exactly the view YOU take on what matters in the West Bank and Venezuela, and to repeatedly label me anti-democracy even though I've proven I'm pro-democracy over and over again and never should have HAD to prove it.

I have never insulted your family, btw, or even mentioned them. For whatever it's worth, I wish your family well, and its the wish that none of your descendants should ever again have to be soldiers that drives some of what I say. There is no worse thing than having to spend a life in the useless activity of war. And the only neighbor of yours I ever even have indirectly mentioned was that general(a man who can certainly take care of himself and who is incapable of being persecuted or oppressed)and I wasn't even talking about HIM, but about the military leadership as an institution. You can't just take any comment about any institution in Israeli life as a personal attack on you. And you can't just make ANY critical comment about the Israeli government or military or the nation as a personal attack. In a democracy, the people are always separate from the government and the individual is always separate from the institution. My comments have mainly been about the institutions of power in your country, and there is no reason those institutions should be given any more special deference or freedom from comment and critique than the same institutions in any OTHER country. Israels themselves don't give the army and the politicians the kind of exemption from dissent and discussion that you want me to give them.

I even apologized for any offense to your neighbor the general(a person who, for all I know, wasn't even aware of the exchanges you and I have had over the years, and who had little reason to care about them) yet you refuse to let that one go. Why?

All that I've said is in the spirit of ending war and promoting peace and reconciliation. I want Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side in peace, with a reconciliation process and an effort to establish rising living standards for all. And I want you and your fellow soldiers to not have to BE soldiers anymore, because soldiering is always the worst thing a person would have to spend her or his life having to do. That is all I've worked for and spoken for here. I didn't call for your country to go out of existence, or to unilaterally disarm, or to do anything at all that would place it in danger.

You think, from what I gather, that it's still possible to "defeat" the armed factions and then somehow get a peace deal based on getting surrender from them. I think(and a lot of Israelis and millions of people of good will from the rest of the world also think that this is impossible, that "victory" in the old sense isn't possible anywhere in a war and that negotiation involving all engaged parties is the only way forward to peace. What happened in Northern Ireland, where negotiation, involving even those that some called "terrorists", was the path to ending most of the hostilities there while military victory is clearly impossible, supports the argument that peace-through-negotiations is the path to ending wars in most places.

And I am convinced that continuing the Occupation can neither bring security to Israel, nor democracy to Palestine(democratization isn't even one of Netanyahu's stated objectives in keeping the IDF there, so it's not as though it could be an unintended consequence) nor peace between Israel and Palestine. And that it's already clear that the Occupation can't do anything to stop Hamas.

If you disagree with the views I have expressed(views that are simply conclusions I've arrived at through study, research and careful thought, and which were never "religious&quot than make a factual case against them. Propose an alternative strategy. Just speak to me and everyone else with a basic level of human respect. Is that asking too much?

I have as much right to post in this forum as you do. It's enough that you have the right to debate me and disagree with me. You don't NEED to try to drive me out of here or try to pressure me into ceasing to speak out on the I/P issue, because it's a world issue, and it's an American issue to, given the massive support the U.S. government gives to the immiseration of the Palestinian people, immiseration that can't possibly lead to peace or to anything better at all.

[pelsar]

118. the problem with your censorist*

*thats a person who believes in censorship

is that you want to curtail my freedom of speech. You want to tell me not just what i can and cannot say (insulting is forbidden) but you want to even direct me as to how i say something, worse you or your panel will decide what i meant to say if i didnt say it according to the rules.

do you have any idea how scary that is? how ethno centric that is? how egotistical? how much of a straightjacket you want to put us in? jesus fuking christ....YOUR the one that wants to curtail the conversation, your the one that wants to limit what we say and how we say it

Have i insulted you yet, because i can go on and on about how limiting our communication and how we express ourselves is precisely what a controlled society is all about

but it explains why you confuse debate, insults etc with a secret agenda..this will be hard for you to grasp as i've already said it a few times, but like democracy emerging out of occuapations, i know that if i persist you will eventually get it

I have as much right to post in this forum as you do. It's enough that you have the right to debate me and disagree with me. You don't NEED to try to drive me out of here or try to pressure me into ceasing to speak out on the I/P issue, because it's a world issue,

i dont want to drive you out, i want you here writing what your writing, that is what debating is all about, and the better we learn from what other people think in an uninhibited environment the better it is...

and eventually you will learn that you have insulted my family, me, my neighbors and only open conversation will provide the tools with which you will be able to understand just how insulting you have been...and of course i will expect strong apologies and promises that you will never do that again....or I'll tell the "Politically Correct Speech Board" on you and they will come get u.

[Ken Burch]

119. criticizing your country's government is not an insult to your family.

You can't make the state and the people inseperable. That's the way you create fascism, not democracy.

And it isn't an insult to the people of a country, of ANY country, to criticize that country's government. In every country, the people are the people and the government is the government.

And I strongly suspect that what you REALLY want is to make it impossible for anybody to make critical comments about the government or about the actions of the IDF. No good comes of trying to do that, or of even trying to make it more difficult to criticize your government and the leaders of the army in which you serve any more difficult than commenting about any other country's army or any other country's government. There should be an EQUAL right to speak out, without being demonized or falsely accused of bigotry(in the way critics of your country's government are too often falsely accused of antisemitism) whether of the U.S., of Israel, of Russia, of China or anyplace else.

Israeli generals and politicians shouldn't get any more protection from criticism, any more personal deference, or any greater assumptions of good intentions and morality than the generals or politicians of any other country. When a person gets power, life-and-death power, it has to change that person. She or he will inevitably stop thinking purely or even mainly in terms of right and wrong and start thinking in the cynical terms of "national interests", interest that seldom find congruence, on the part of any government with any rigid concept of right or wrong. And that person will end up accepting the logic of power...the notion that she or he has the right to send other people off to die in the name of some random notion of "necessity". Saying that isn't an insult to the people who will be sent off to die, OR to their families...it's just an acknowledgment of universal reality. There's no reason to think that change doesn't happen to political leaders in your country when it does happen to such leaders everywhere else(including my country, to my great chagrin). Best to just accept that as the way of the world. No country gets immunity from it. And I doubt most ordinary Israelis actually believe that your country's leaders are immune to it, or that pointing it out is an insult to them. Some of them, in the pages of Haaretz and other publications of conscience, say it THEMSELVES on a regular basis. Do you take is as an insult to your family when THOSE people say it? And what do you lose by accepting that it's the truth?

And what I meant was that acting as if the Arab Spring is a movement AGAINST democracy and for more tyranny(which appears to me to be the view you take)is a bigoted view. That isn't the same thing as saying that you are a bigot...there's always a difference between saying "YOU are a racist" and "that is a racist thing to say". Years ago, I probably said the first thing about you in a moment of anger, and for that I apologize(btw, at some point you need to apologize for saying that I oppose democracy, since that is equally wrong and untrue). You often post things that sound universally dismissive of Palestinians and other Arabs...given that your country is going to have to find some way to co-exist with both groups, it would be in your own self-interest and that of your family to become less sweeping and more open-minded than that...it isn't born in you and it isn't part of the better angels of your nature...nor is the view that Palestine can only be democratic if someone else MAKES it be democratic from outside. It is a sweeping dismissal of the Palestinian and Arab peoples to imply that they can't build democracy on their own terms. My references to American and European history have been in the service of pointing out that democracy is new to the world, just barely less new in "the West" than anywhere else, and that it has only begun to be built in the West from below, against the wishes of the Western political and economic leadership(look how long it took, for example, to end legal segregation in the U.S., for example, and how hard both political parties fought to keep it from ending for decades)in acts of rebellion. It was never something that was inevitable in "the West", it still hasn't been fully won in "the West&quot the U.S government, for example, still refuses to let the American people elect the president by direct popular vote)and that, therefore, "the West" including Israel(a country where the progressive minority who support human rights have my deepest admiration, btw)is not entitled to lecture the world in a finger-wagging tone of superiority about "democracy" OR "human rights".

Now, I have made all the apologies I need to make. I insulted no one by opposing the Occupation OR by calling for peace-through-negotiations-the only possible path to peace, since peace-through-military victory is impossible. And it isn't an insult to you OR your family simply to disagree with what your government has done to Palestinians, any more than it is an insult to me and my family for people outside the U.S. to denounce my country for its persecution of African-Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ Americans(among many others).

If you disagree with my ideas, criticize my ideas and explain and defend yours. I'm always willing to listen, but I'm not obligated to agree with you. This is just supposed to be about ideas...not about trying to shred people. And you have no reason to be personally angry with me. The point of debate and discussion is to deal with ideas and actions, not to slag off other people.

[pelsar]

120. first off..i decide if I've been insulted ....not you

Last edited Wed Jul 24, 2013, 02:27 PM - Edit history (4)

its the one who has been insulted that gets to claim...and you, the one who has done the insulting, must learn not to insult me....and you still are

Now, I have made all the apologies I need to make. tsk tsk tsk, you have a lot more to go. I"m afraid i'm still feeling hurt and i decide when i'm no longer insulted.
______

so i shall wait for some additional apologies...after that we shall discuss how you can discuss the I/P conflict and what words are insulting to us israelis or demonizing us israelis..because after all, even our politicians have families having loving children and are wonderful grandparents

But more important...you seem to believe that YOUR CULTURE gets to decide what is insulting and what is not, what is free speech and when is it permissible? Perhaps you might try to explain what makes YOUR CULTURE the domineering culture that gets to define these important human rights?

Since you will probably try to explain that your culture is not the domineering culture, then i shall explain to you why you owe me many more apologies because in the middle east culture, honor is important, very important, and when u unfairly and rudely criticize our politicians your dishonor us and that is insulting, and i have been very patient with you as you dishonor us left and right without remorse.

so the first thing you have to do is apologize for dishonoring our politicians, and remember its not your culture nor your place to decide if you have dishonored us or not.

Secondly if you want to criticize them, you'll have to do it without broad generalizations like "they dont want peace, they see the Palestinians as less then human, etc. those are dishonoring us and have no place in the conversation.
___

and please dont complain that i want to stifle the conversation, that too is very insulting, i just want you explain yourself without insulting us, you may feel that you are being restricted, but your aren't, if you dont insult me, my clan, my tribe and honor our leaders, then i can listen better..correct? so as you write i'll explain which sentences are insulting. and you can remove them

[Ken Burch]

121. Then kindly tell me what exactly IS insulting to you, your famiily, your "clan" as you see it.

It sounds like you take it as an insult for me to say anything about your government at all that doesn't give it special deference or doesn't simply assume that your leaders have a special claim to moral purity. Is that how you see it?


If that isn't it....would you just clear the air about all of this and tell me what, to you constitutes and insult and what doesn't?

it's not fair to try to make people guess about that.

Do you think it should be harder to comment about what YOUR country's government and military does than it should be about any othe country's? That there should be special limiting rules about that?

[pelsar]

122. its not about being limited....its about respecting our culture

if you believe that you have to respect our culture and that your culture is not the domineering one than you'll simply have to accept what i tell u.

and DONT use your culture to define us: In your culture you dont believe that your govt people should get special deference, in our culture we in fact do. Our govt officials get a special honor applied to them for entering the govt and we respect and honor them. One of the ways is not to criticize them so obviously and crudely and dehumanize them and make gross general accusations..stuff you may fine acceptable in your country but certainly not acceptable here.

you may find it limiting but thats because you obviously dont understand our "communication culture." In our cultures where honor is very important we have a different set of rules for communication.
____

I'll give you an example of how you might want to criticize our Prime Ministers policies.

Netanyahu, may in fact be a wonderful person, and clearly he cares about his country and all of its citizens, but i believe that policies toward the Palestenians may in fact be in error. Not because he doesnt care or see them as being good people, but because he is getting mistaken advice from his honorable advisors.

see, that way your not dishonoring him but at the same time criticizing his policies

[Ken Burch]

123. I go to the comments sections at Haaretz and other Israeli papers

And none of the commenters there(or the columnists), most if not all of whom are Israelis, for the record, seem to give politicians that kind of deference. And when I see debates in the Knesset, I frequently see them turn into screaming matches between the mk's. It's common for Israeli politicians and their supporters to refer to other Israeli politicians, from what I've seen, as "kapos&quot or worse), for God's sakes(something I've never come close to saying about any Israeli politician, let alone you, and something I never WOULD say, or even think about them, for the record.)

And I don't hear you giving that kind of deference to the feelings of those you disagree with in this forum.

So it sounds like you are saying that only I and others who disagree with the Israeli hardliners should be bound by those restrictions of tone.

[pelsar]

124. and they are being very disrespectful.....

Haaretz unfortunatly has taken its tone from the west and is slowly attempting to corrupt our culture to be like yours...i would think you would be very much against that. Sometimes you have to make a stand against this western corruption and stand up for your principles of cultural purity....dont you agree? Let us decide how our culture will develop without this outside influence.

as far as my comments go...like u i believe one should adapt to the local cultural customs and i noticed here on the forum that people can be very insulting at times, so i have adjusted and i do believe i fit in.

i just saying you should respect our culture, the one that is trying to exist despite yours and others best efforts to make us like your western culture, which dishonors everyone here.

I've given you some information as to how discuss honorably our govt and its honorable officials. you can disrespect us if you if wish and keep your own cultural ethnocentric/western politically correct version if you like, but it will be clear that have no respect for our indigenous culture.

btw, we don't use the term "right wing or hardliner" that too is a western description and a disrespectful one at that....we prefer the hebrew word of "afarsek." Its a description of someone who believes very strongly in their citizenship, in the plurality of the society and of gods goodness. You may disagree with them, but you must respect them and not call them names or demonize them

[Ken Burch]

125. Small point: by birth, you are American

Is your culture, personally, THAT different than mine?

And, given that Israelis have come from all over the world, include people from all races, most language groups, differing varieties of religious Judaism and in some cases no specific religious beliefs at all, is there actually a single Israeli culture?

[pelsar]

126. is there a "single' israeli culture...

you dont get out much....do some traveling...you will find that there are very clear generalities about israelis, not always good, but very clear.

yes i was born in the US...but i've adapted to the local culture, the indigenous one, the one we want to preserve without undue western influence...

I assume you agree on this point as you are very aggressive with this attitude towards the arab countries so it would seem to me you would have the same principle towards the israeli culture....

so in the future please limit your criticism to a non insulting pattern that will create an environment that is less aggressive and insulting and will create better communication that honors our govt and our leaders.

[Ken Burch]

127. I am not insulting towards the Arab countries.

It's just that I don't share your sweeping negative generalizations about Arab and Muslim peoples...and you don't appear to show any respect towards Arab cultures, because it isn't respectful to say that a culture can only be democratic if somebody forces it to be from outside, or to deny that Arab and Muslim people are incapable of mobilizing for a liberation agenda on their own, created by themselves. If the people backing the Arab Spring wanted MORE repression, they'd have just joined Al-Qaida...they wouldn't have formed an entirely new movement that has specifically called for democracy as part of its program.

I recognize that all cultures are vastly different than each other...recognizing that doesn't mean making dark assumptions about their intents and capacities. All cultures have an equal amount of good and bad things to them, and all of them make, in my observation, at least some attempts to progress and improve.

Finally, the culture of Palestinian Arabs is just as indigenous to the area as that of Israeli Jews. Both have equal ties to the land, and any settlement that creates two states, IMHO, must recognize equality of connection.

The culture you are a part of would not be threatened by anything I've advocated, btw.

And the last couple of posts have been a serious effort on my part to try to understand what you say I don't understand. If you think I'm uninformed, then I'm asking for more information. Please accept that my intentions are honorable in asking these things.

[pelsar]

128. how much of your speech are you willing to give up....

And the last couple of posts have been a serious effort on my part to try to understand what you say I don't understand. If you think I'm uninformed, then I'm asking for more information. Please accept that my intentions are honorable in asking these things.

I dont doubt your sincerity, don't misunderstand me, i just want to know, at what point will you decide that you can no longer abide by other cultural rules?

if my culture clearly states that insulting our politicians, our prime minister, is not permitted since is dishonors them, and i explain to you that means your sweeping generalizations about them "no wanting peace" is insulting.

will you then no longer mention it?

[Ken Burch]

129. But your culture DOESN'T equate criticism of your politicians to insulting them.

I've been reading about Israeli culture in Israeli newspapers, watching debates in the Knesset, and sometimes actually talking with ordinary Israelis that I encounter in my path through life. Some agree with me, some don't, some would rather just talk about the weather, but NONE have taken my opinions as collective cultural insults.

People IN your culture speak far more harshly about your politicians than I have or than I ever would. And that's MOST people, not just a few, people from all parts of the political spectrum. They speak far more harshly towards THEIR politicians than anybody here ever does towards American politicians.

And I'm not sure that YOU are the sole arbiter of what your culture does and does not allow. You, are, in fact, the ONLY Israeli I have ever communicated with that ever tried to enforce severe restrictions on what can be said about your country's politicians.

It's one thing to say that active-duty soldiers should get deference-but elected officials? Since when? And Why?

Why should your prime minister get any more deference than the prime minister of any OTHER parliamentary democracy?

As far as that goes, your current prime minister didn't speak deferentially towards Yitzhak Rabin...or condemn his assassination(an assassination that took place after your current prime minister's political party held rallies in which people held up posters depicting Rabin in Nazi uniform...and depicting him that way SOLELY because Rabin was trying to make peace-protests your current prime minister not only never condemned, but SPOKE at in some cases, from the sources I read).

You don't speak for Israelis as a group or a culture any more than I speak for Americans as a people or a culture. You're just one person-I am just one person.

So back off. I'm all for cultural understanding, but that's not what you are interested in here...you just want to shut me up, even though nothing I've posted has ever done you, your family, your neighbor the general, your country or Binyamin Netanyahu himself any harm at all. You're indulging a persecution complex and I'm nobody's persecutor.

From now on, I will alert on any posts from you in which you treat me like an idiot or accuse me of being insensitivity when all I've ever done here was to post things you disagreed with.

[pelsar]

130. so you do want to "shut me up"....

From now on, I will alert on any posts from you in which you treat me like an idiot or accuse me of being insensitivity when all I've ever done here was to post things you disagreed with.


you just want to shut me up,

i have written it must be about 10x now that i do not want to shut you up, i simply dont believe in it, i simply do not believe in "shutting downs peoples opinions, no matter what they are.
____

but you..you have now stated clearly that you will alert on my posts that you decide are "insensitive" WOW...DOUBLE WOW!!!!!

Apparently, and I am not surprised, from what i have learned about you, is that you have now actually threatened to attempt to shut me down if i dont use words that you deem acceptable, words that do not properly describe the conflict, words that make sweeping false insulting generalizations of masses of good, hardworking, sincere people and all because of your ideology and so you wont be insulted.

But, its been quite a thread here, where you (and you are sincere about this) believe in limited free speech, mainly to those who do not agree with your ideology or must speak using the approved list. And you are more than willing to support elitist rich, dictator wannabe as long as they say the proper words (what they do is of secondary importance).

your not one who is too concerned with any unintended consequences and apparently have no opinion when thousands upon thousands are killed when this "natural process to democracy" starts and you have no opinion of when it might end....and at what cost.

but you are sincere, that much i will give you....
now since i dont want to be "alerted" on and before i'm thrown in the "virtual gulag" where, no doubt, there will be attempts to re-educate me....I shall summarize:

_______

ideologists, like religion when take to the extreme, no matter what the sincerity or 'good intentions" are is what fuels these conflicts, and unfortunately your one of them.

[Israeli]

131. I am more in agreement with you ....

than with pelsar Ken Burch

he is talking nonsense .

[Ken Burch]

132. Thanks for that, Israeli. n/t.

[pelsar]

133. israeli....

Last edited Sat Jul 27, 2013, 11:33 AM - Edit history (2)

you may be in agreement with Ken.....but i find philosophies that can be pro "dictatorships" or power grabbing democracies (chavez) , pro intolerance, pro limitation of freedom of speech, have nothing to do with Meretz or anything that i could possibly agree to.

furthermore any idealism that cannot (by definition) even take in to account the possibility of thousands of deaths do to "unintended consequences" and never get questioned, is on par with the worst of the religious crusades.....

you may agree with ken on those points, but my point of view is hardly nonsense

my little discussion here was just an attempt to find out just how much he is willing to "respect" other cultures as per his claim...and find out when the "respect ends" and he invokes his superior culture values and attempts to "shut me up."

Ken, is sincere, but then so are all ideologues and they've lead to millions upon millions of deaths in the past and will so in the future. He's no different than the extreme settlers, their rabbis, Hamas and their friends.....they're all intolerant of the other while believing with all of their hearts, that only they know what is best for every one, while their beliefs when questioned, alway have an absolute answer, no doubts, no options...just an absolute answer that tolerates no deviation.

i'm not the one that believes in nonsense.....

[Israeli]

134. pelsar...

my responce was towards Ken's post # 129 and your comment :

our govt and its honorable officials

Pleeeese .....how honorable do you consider MK Anastasia Michaeli of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party to be when attacking fellow Knesset members ??

Ref:

&feature=player_embedded#at=41

[pelsar]

135. oh that.....

i was "playing with him"....
wondering if i claim to honor them...does that mean he will have to respect my culture and "honor them as well"...

but 'honor our politicians?...now that is a joke....

[Israeli]

136. "playing with him" !!!!!!!

hope you enjoyed yourself ?

[shira]

94. Jews would be there if they hadn't been ethnically cleansed in 1948

You and yours defend and support that cleansing by maintaining Jews have no rights to live in territory that Jews had lived in for thousands of years. Denying the Jews' historic, cultural, and religious ties to the region is beyond contempt.

I'm all for their choice to live there as Palestinian civilians, if that's what they want. It shouldn't be a problem in any genuine peace deal.

[Ken Burch]

95. They don't want to live there as Palestinian citizens, though.

And I'm all for RoR for the actual descendants of the indigenous Jewish communities in the West Bank, but most of the settlers have NO personal connection to the area. A big chunk of them are right-wing crazies fro the States. And they haven't shown any interest in living in peace and equality with their neighbors. Instead, they encroach on land, they take most of the water, they steal olive trees that represented the only livlihood for Palestinian farmers,they harass Palestinians who are just trying to work THEIR land next door to the settlements, and they act like THEY have the right to be there and the Palestinians DON'T. Why would you think that such behavior would make Palestinian Arabs, people with an EQUAL connection to the land, having lived their for fourteen centuries, want them around?

It isn't about religion or ethnicity. It's about arrogance and disrespect. Anyone else treating the Palestinians like this would get just as much global condemnation.

Had the settlers come in gently, in small numbers, in a conciliatory spirit, it might well have been different.

[shira]

96. How do you know? 10's of thousands of settlers will violently resist...

...being taken out of their homes in the W.Bank. They will elect to stay.

And rather than demonize all settlers, you should read the following:

With settlers' help, Palestinians to get new homes
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113418516

Settlers give pre-Passover bread to nearby Palestinians
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113437589

Think you know who the settlers are? Think again
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113420215#post1

Rabbi Menachem Froman's Unique Legacy of Jewish-Muslim Coexistence
http://forward.com/articles/172271/rabbi-menachem-fromans-unique-legacy-of-jewish-mus/#ixzz2Z51fFyDF

Arabs and Israelis Meet in Hebron to Discuss Co-Existence Despite Fear of Reprisals
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/10/arabs-and-israelis-meet-in-hebron-to-discuss-co-existence-despite-fear-of-reprisals-video/

The vast majority have no problem living alongside Palestinians peacefully. You're thinking of the Kahanist crazies that make up a very small percentage.

[Ken Burch]

111. Yes, they will violently resist. Not because they want to live as Palestinian citizens or in peace

but because they believe that the West Bank is part of Israel and that Palestinians have no connection to the land or no right to remain on it.

And if they wanted to live peacefully alongside Palestinians, they NEVER would have stolen the olive groves that the Palestinians planted...groves that represented the ONLY livelihood Palestinians have or could have.

There has never been a defense for the settlers or for Ariel Sharon's creation of the settlement project in 1973. Israel is ONLY the lands on the Israeli side of the Green Line. That is all the land Israel needs.

There can't possibly be anything on the Palestinian side of the Green Line that could possibly be more important to have than having an end to the war.

[shira]

113. What did you think of those links? You're generalizing for all settlers, aren't you? n/t

[Israeli]

101. before you answer this :

Kahanist crazies that make up a very small percentage.

They are not a small percentage .... from Moshe Feiglin to Avigdor Lieberman , from Baruch Goldstein to Yigal Amir .... Kach rules the Wild West Bank .

They hide behind other names but their ideology remains the same .

[Ken Burch]

103. I wasn't the one saying they were a small percentage. Shira was.

You've helped make my point, though.

[Israeli]

105. I know ...

and you are welcome .

[shira]

104. So how do you account for the articles cited, showing settlers wanting peace....

...and co-existence alongside Palestinians?

Are they the minority in your opinion?

[COLGATE4]

28. Well, you know what they say:

'The lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb isn't going to get much sleep'.

[geek tragedy]

51. So, the author favors apartheid, since they reject one and two state solutions.

Which is the current trajectory of Israel.

[shira]

62. Nah, he's for giving Palestinians citizenship in a 1-state scenario

....along with monetary inducements to leave if they wish.