Current Developments + WB: The Clock is Running

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July 20, 2006

(Billmon and I posted in parallel on the issue. So here is the novelty of a combined thread.)

Billmon:

The Clock is Running

—

Bernhard:

After a preparing and devastating air campaign, Israel is now entering Lebanon with ground troops.

The strategic target seems to be to clear some 20 miles of Lebanese land of any Lebanese human and to establish and hold a line at the Litani River. This is a repetition of the 1978 Operation Litani which, at that time, was aimed against a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) force in South Lebanon. Israel more or less did win that tactical move, but made no strategic gain and the costs on both sides were high.

Unlike the PLO, essentially refugees not really liked by the Lebanese, Hisbollah is an indigenous force. So the outcome may very well differ this time. In response to Israel’s action in 1978, the UN set out resolution 425, demanding a retreat of Israel behind the international accepeted border. Israel did fullfill that resolution’s demand – in June 2000 – except for giving up the Sheeba Farms. This, and Lebanese prisoners in Israel’s hands, gave/give Hisbollah a permanent issue to keep the struggle going.

(The Katami river, like the Sheeba farms area, is a major water source in the general arid area. It does have real strategic value. So maybe Lebanon will get it back in 2028.)

In May 2006 Israel assassinated two leaders of Islamic Jihad in Sidon, Lebanon. This led to a few small rockets being fired at Israeli military outposts and responding serious air attacks. The crisis was finally ended through UN mediation. It was, to my knowledge, the first open Israeli action in Lebanon since 2000 and the starting point for today’s hot conflict. (BTW: Did you see this mentioned in any recent MSM article?)

While watching the current developments, in horror, I am sure the big chessboard is set up for an even deadlier game. This is not about a two Israeli soldiers taken POW. This is not about Lebanon or Hizbollah at all.

The current war is a small proxy for the fight between the US and Iran, a third world county by any means, and even bigger, between the US and anybody else about the control of the most important world energy ressources, i.e. direct or indirect control over all of the Middle East.

I have no idea what the next steps in that war may be, but some incident that will lead to a near term involvement of a very, very weak Syria is likely. From there on, your guess is as good as mine.

Posted by b on July 20, 2006 at 19:21 UTC | Permalink

Comments

R’Giap:
The difficult question is what can be done. You are wrong in thinking I dismiss the protests against the war in Iraq. I remain naively hopeful on the grounds that despair is less pleasant. In Amit Ghosh’s novel “Glass Palace” (which I read because someone here recommended another of his books) one of the characters is a militant for Indian independence who considers Ghandi to be soft, but changes her mind after witnessing the British brutally anihilate a rebellion in Burma. She says that she realized that it was naive to think that so brutal and sophisticated a foe can be beaten by violence – something at which it is expert and comfortable. It’s not wise to oversimplify, but that is an important point.
Miss Manners points to what I think is another fundamental issue. I’d argue that the difference between a rising internationalist and democratic reform movement worldwide in 1910 and the triumph of the Nation States in 1914 was at least partly due to the invention of modern advertising. In the mid 1960s in the USA, Sam Huntington was arguing that established order needed to regain contol over the media. They did.
Finally,my dislike for Fannon is undoubtedly based on dislike for what we all found most appealing in his work and undoubtedly reflects my limitations as 20 year old more than anything else.
Gotta go. much to think about.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 0:47 utc | 101

On suicidal tendencies:

All that is solid melts into air.

The faster the m-c-m’ spins, the more we have to realize that this part was not just rhetoric.
Where does all that new “m” come from?
Ask an Appalachian resident about where all those valleys went that were as old as the hills.
Ask Gaia

Posted by: citizen | Jul 22 2006 0:47 utc | 102

noam

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 0:50 utc | 103

citizen
there is more than an indirect connection between a paolo freire & a chris hani. theirs is a humanism that seems purely abstract today. there is an educator in america, herb gintis who also wrote/writes well on this level of gradual empowerment
in an indirect answer to ms manners i would say that absence of humanism is cause for ‘suicidal tendencies’ – i am always in a difficult position in believing the almost divine power of the mechanism of history but at the same time a constant witness to constant brutality
& smalltime fear

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 1:01 utc | 104

You folks take care and thanks.
Gotta Go To.

Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 22 2006 1:27 utc | 105

hipocrisy knows no bounds in the mind of a confused self hating zionist citizen_k. I see he hasn’t resiled from his position that if someone attacks you with murderous intent one can only defend oneself by standing still. If the victim resists that is an assault as unlawful as the assault which the attacker loosed upon the defender. We no longer have our basic human right to defend ourselves.
Put simply the violence including the ‘terrorist violence’ ie the taking of civilian life for a political objective was initiated by the zionists and every action by the Palestinians has been a defence of those initial attacks. No amount of semantics or false assertions on the part of citizen-k that I am a whitefella by race rather than culture can change that.
In fact I am unaware of anyone in MoA attacking another poster on the grounds of race before but maybe I wasn’t paying attention. I admit I would probably be more offended if citizen-k was correct.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 22 2006 1:28 utc | 106

Tony Judt in Haaretz

Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They – gentiles, Muslims, leftists – have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They – Europeans, Arabs, fascists – have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven’t changed. Why should Israel change? c
For a while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment of the Holocaust in education and the media: What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal settlements and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the arguments of Israel’s critics, did not yet shift the international balance of opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the “West Bank” and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians’ case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophec.
What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.
Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel foreverc.
This new willingness to take one’s distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco’s Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class – including many of the sizable Jewish contingent – nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis.

Posted by: citizen | Jul 22 2006 1:33 utc | 107

an interesting interview with the ‘angry arab’

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 2:11 utc | 108

there is a map of Golan Heights Communities here Anyone who cares to click the link will see Kyriat Shmona clearly marked on it.
they may prefer to read the demography written by the invaders of Golan here where one can pick out interesting little tid-bits such as the fact that although the population of Israelis has now reached 18,000, 1000 more than the 17,000 Druze population, the land distribution does not reflect that.
Israelis have acquired farms totalling 80 sq kilometers in the 2.5 decades they have occupied Golan whereas the Druze own 20 sq kilometers of farms after many hundreds of years of living in Golan.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 22 2006 2:34 utc | 109

citizen (k?)

That Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis.

It is not the PR image but the underlying reality that must be changed.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 2:51 utc | 110

Remember R’Giap’s long ago post on supply lines in Vietnam???
Well, check out Pat Lang’s art. in CSM:The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq
American troops all over central and northern Iraq are supplied with fuel, food, and ammunition by truck convoy from a supply base hundreds of miles away in Kuwait. All but a small amount of our soldiers’ supplies come into the country over roads that pass through the Shiite-dominated south of Iraq.
Until now the Shiite Arabs of Iraq have been told by their leaders to leave American forces alone. But an escalation of tensions between Iran and the US could change that overnight. Moreover, the ever-increasing violence of the civil war in Iraq can change the alignment of forces there unexpectedly.
Southern Iraq is thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian special operations forces working with Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades. Hostilities between Iran and the United States or a change in attitude toward US forces on the part of the Baghdad government could quickly turn the supply roads into a “shooting gallery” 400 to 800 miles long.
…
Compounding the looming menace of the Kuwait-based line of supply is the route followed by the cargo ships en route to Kuwait. Geography dictates that the ships all pass through the Strait of Hormuz and then proceed to the ports at the other end of the Gulf. Those who are familiar with the record of Iran’s efforts against Kuwaiti shipping in the Iran-Iraq War will be concerned about this maritime vulnerability.

Posted by: jj | Jul 22 2006 3:13 utc | 111

Israelis have acquired farms totalling 80 sq kilometers in the 2.5 decades they have occupied Golan whereas the Druze own 20 sq kilometers of farms after many hundreds of years of living in Golan
– Kiwi Settler

And

One of the more pressing current human rights concerns for Maori relates to land issues.
In 2005, approximately 6 per cent of land remained in Maori ownership and 94 per cent of Maori
ancestral land base has been appropriated by a variety of historical processes, including
voluntary sale, fraudulent purchase, confiscation or alienations of land under the various Native
Land Acts, and the individualization and fragmentation of title resulting from the Native Land
Court.here

Seems like the Druze are doing pretty good comparatively, Settler. Are you going to murder yourself and your children, if any, in recompense as an act of self-defense? I advise against it, but I’m just a self-hating Zionist, not a self-loving (to put it nicely) Settler Revolutionary.
If not, or if you are dillydallying, you should try the map again and note it includes, but is not limited to Golan Heights. Or consult the CIA
Listen, I thank you for a valuable discussion as you went out of your way to prove my point that some criticism of Israel is based on ill-intent, but I don’t have much to say to someone who can say that the deliberate terror killing of defenseless children hiding in an apartment is an act of self-defense. By the way, aside from the moral deficiencies that are obvious to anyone not consumed with hatred, this PFLP massacre strategy was doomed to failure. What did they think? Kill some children and millions of people will flee in terror even though they have nowhere to go?
Sickening.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 3:14 utc | 112

actually, citizen k and I are different folks. But I guess I should post more if I want the distinction to remain familiar.

Posted by: citizen | Jul 22 2006 3:40 utc | 113

citizen
I speak for myself, but your intelligence is sorely missed.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 22 2006 3:56 utc | 114

I think we had 3 different citizens at one time, and then all these arrows. It can get confusing.
But then, I love mystery and nuanced argument. Can’t really say enough for nuance.
And citizen, thank you for the link on the strip mining and the teacher. I’ve walked over a few exposed seams of Kittaning, Pittsburgh,etc. in my life.

Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 22 2006 4:03 utc | 115

Hail Citizen:
Articles like the one on mining used to make me think of the grand fraudulence of American “liberatarians” who find Tyranny in zoning laws and pollution regulations, but are oblivious to the uncompensated destruction of a homestead by a mega corporation. However, the last few years have shown that the Glibertarians can also applaud secret police, torture, and extraordinary rendition, so their double standard on property rights has paled in comparison.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 4:50 utc | 116

Play around with semantics and attributing views to me I haven’t come close to expounding, all you need citizen k.
Ultimately all you do is reveal the desperate conundrum you find yourself in.
Natch you have still failed to address the point I made, that all the violence which has occurred in Palestine has been a result of the illegal invasion, occupation, murder, and rape of the inhabitants by the zionist invaders.
As the zionists have escalated their crimes and killing Palestinian children in their homes occured early on in the piece, the Palestinian’s escalated their reaction.
I make no attempt to attribute a persona to posters other than what they reveal by their statements citizen-k, but anyone who talks as you do about the way the Palestinians have responded to this agression has surely never been in a real fight. That is a fight with someone who is prepared to risk everything in the belief they will get the outcome they desire.
Whether the other person is full of booze, belief or bullshit bluster it pretty much always goes the same way.
It’s a horrible situation because it doesn’t matter how hard the other person may try and just keep the agression at a level where no-one will get badly hurt, if you don’t learn quickly that your own self protection comes first you could die, or at the very least get maimed badly.
Each time the attacker comes in harder the defender must respond just as hard. If you don’t do that the attacker will wear you down with the advantage gained by getting in more hurtful shots.
There is no choice and the ironically foul thing about it is you end up getting more and more pissed off at the other fella for ‘making’ you do it. But of course he hasn’t made you. You can always not do it and be maimed or killed.
Is that what you reckon the Palestinians should do?
That would be racist of course because the law is pretty consistent about the rights of someone attacked on their land to respond defensively in measure to their attacker. So why would that response be denied Palestinians? Because they are arabs?
It is from these situations which males tend to go through in their youth most of us learn not to start fights and if someone does start a fight to be prefectly happy to appear the humiliated fool and lick the prick’s ass if it comes to a choice between that and getting into a no holds barred blue.
But there hare exceptions to that. Exceptions which so called civilised people are having to relearn. Amerika is learning in Iraq at the moment that while man will usually grow out of fighting to the death over honour, even fighting to the death over sex, they never ‘grow out’ of fighting to the death over protecting their family or their land.
Whatever brick-bats you care to lob in my direction racist, or otherwise will never change the fact that the zionists deliberately set about stripping the land from the Palestinian people and ridding themselves of those people by murder and exile.
Incidentally whatever did happen in the 19th century when my “Levantine” as you so chamimgly put it, great-grandfather, grabbed a swathe of land from the Tangata Whenua, it was dishonest unfair and something which most of us are still making amends over, but it wasn’t that.
But even if it had been it wouldn’t make a shred of difference to what has happened in Palestine. As someone put it to you yesterday ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’.
But if it does help you deal with your own confusion by all means throw rocks but don’t mistake those missiles for a valid argument, which either expiates the zionist killers or entitles them to keep their Apartheid state.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 22 2006 10:17 utc | 117

A link from Juan Cole’s site :
Bush Urged To Give Israel More Time for Attacks

WASHINGTON — Bucking calls in the international community for a cease-fire in the Middle East, Jewish organizations launched a major lobbying offensive in the nation’s capital this week to give Israel more time to deal a decisive blow to Islamist militants in Lebanon and Gaza.
With the civilian death toll in Lebanon surpassing 200 early in the week, international calls were increasing for a cease-fire and the deployment of an international force to Lebanon, and the United States signaled that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would arrive in the region Sunday. Israeli military officials, however, were saying that they would need up to two more weeks to decimate Hezbollah’s operational capabilities.
In an effort to head off calls in Washington for a quick cease-fire, some officials with Jewish groups have spent the past few days urging policymakers to make sure that Israel is given ample time and freedom of action to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

Do you think they will be successful?

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 12:35 utc | 118

Watching you, Debs and Citizen K, go back and forth is like watching your friends get drunk and go at each other in a way that will make it impossible for them to talk to each other in the morning, or for years to come perhaps.
Please give it up. Both of you.
This is an old drunken brawler himself telling you from the depths of his own regrets that what’s driving you is not good for you, that nothing good can come from it.
I don’t really know either one of you, but I know you’re both better than this.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 12:42 utc | 119

Lebanon Israel Facts the Media Isn’t Telling You
Since we are –have become–the media, –and what I can’t understand– is, why is no one talking about the kidnapping of the Gaza Civilians “a doctor and his brother”, that started this whole continuing night terror off?
Why does no one take into account the holistic picture of Gaza and the Hebrew ill-earth war?
There is nothing like a good arguement to bring one’s assumptions to the surface. The fact that our beliefs may have personal consequences which we are prepaired to accept does not in itself tell us whether they are true or false. Is it that those commititted to the traditional Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm sense that it is they who will be left behind? And it seems they will do anything in their power to keep us stranded in the double bind of ideology of status quo? As long as it benefits them of course.
No they would move us in another direction, away from the sweet salty cliff of the ocean abyss in search of a new frontier, the final frontier, the human mind. They are afraid. Afraid to explore. It would mean leaving the military mind. They are not explorers, no adventurers in this gang. They comfortable on their mental Island. And why wouldn’t they be they have kingdom, the most coconuts. Truth be known they are lazy and to extrapolate further, they are cowards. They would deny having to rethink their thoughts, their age old cliches, give up their cliques and comforts and trinkets of mental Jewelry. They are terrified. And in their terror comes with it grandiose notions of control. They are not only terrified to see, but terrified to even look. As if by notseeing, (Not see-ing, not see, Nazi Nazi-ing in Joyceian speak) a new dimension does not, nay, can not exist. Finally, they would do anything in their power to keep others from looking/seeing discovering, even mentioning another way to see. As if by not speaking it will not be.
Why? I have sd before, I think what we are in the middle of, and above all else, in the mist of a grand ideological paradigm war. A battle for reality. A battle of arbitary and political subdivisions as if they were natural facts, ancient and inviolable, as if we were end products in evolution. Possibly, because we are conditioned to be; told all our lives that knowledge is power, (Bacon) that objects are best understood by breaking them into compartmentalized parts (Descartes) –which is the classic ‘need to know basis’ military hierarchy grup-think*–and that the interactions between objects can best be understood mechanistically (Newton, Galileo) and these accomplishments have served us, to a point. These are root assumptions. And living metaphors. But they have out lived their usefulness. It is time past time to move on, to grow. We are stagnating. Those committed to the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm enjoy substantial power. In the scientific arena, for example , they still control the purse strings for awarding research grants and for major government ans private foundations. However, they are not the be all/end all. The Continuum Movement wants to be free; must be free. Systems holism has given birth, yet those whom benefit from non change want to starve the birth.
We outside the box thinkers, progress by embracing a systems holism we are non monolithic and a cultural pluralism tribe. The neocons and their ilk would stamp that out. Figuratively and quite literally, I suspect.
Sadly, the ying yang twins, Sidon and Tyne fail to see that one wants to rub the other from existence. Never realizing that it is part of itself that it would kill.
The Jews were the first to deny the Goddess. Thus begain the Phoenica ying yang war.
May God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep! ~Blake
*grup-think: the social mindscape

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 22 2006 13:06 utc | 120

i have learnt my lesson in ad hominem attacks some time ago, here & their uselessness even in they are informed by real fury
i learn from all here – debs yr fury & perhaps our share experience in the third world(?) offer affinities that are clear
i have also taken citizen k’s criticism to refine my argument – to be a little less epithetic – perhaps of our community razor i find the most difficult because i do not hear a real voice
other than that i think – that there needs to be a special care – because i do accept that anti zionism can easily slip in the ruthless nature of events into a form of antisemitism
but this fear of being antisemitic must not be used as a bludgeon to inhibit critiques of the state of israel & their murderous policies because that is what those policies & actions are, murderous
the american complicity, perhaps even initiative is to be condemned from our hearts & hopefully with our feet in the next few days
all i know here is that we need each others fury & even our ittitation even if that sometimes confuses the picture – the situation itself has confusing elements
& i understand their is fury articulated here at events but also the wall to wall coverage of essenbtially – the idf public relations department on all television except for al jazeera

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 13:14 utc | 121

Not to continue the barroom brawl, but there is one point I would like to comment on.
Debs said: …a result of the illegal invasion, occupation, murder, and rape of the inhabitants by the zionist invaders
While I can agree with just about all the rest that was written, this statement is both right and wrong at the same time. The original Zionists who came to Palestine back in the early part of the 1900s legitimately purchased their land. They didn’t invade, they didn’t occupy. It was only in the aftermath of WWII when the western-powers-that-be gave away a significant part of their country and Palestinians suddenly found themselves pushed off their own property without compensation that the shit hit the fan. The rest of the history follows as Debs wrote.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 13:21 utc | 122

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis. ‘Cause, you know, we wouldn’t want them to run out of bombs or anything..
I’m headed to the bathroom, to wash my hands of the Government.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 22 2006 13:53 utc | 123

Israel’s Terror

Israelis must end the occupation of Palestine. They must tear down the wall, remove settlements, free prisoners and make monetary restitution for the devastation of Palestine. Of course, the United States government would actually do that. The damage done with American permission will only be undone on our dime.
Secondly, Israel must join the Non Proliferation Treaty, as Iran has done, and submit to inspection of their arsenal containing between 100 and 300 nuclear warheads. The numbers of nukes are guesses because Israel neither denies nor confirms their existence.

We must visualize a better world before we can realize it.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 22 2006 14:20 utc | 124

The Palestinians will never have a viable state. Period. There is no way Israel will agree to them having an Air Force, a Navy, an Army with real tanks, helicopters, an international airport, not even a strong police force equipped as our police forces are equipped here. It won’t happen because no other country is going to take over complete military defense of Palestine nor is Israel going to disarm itself so it wouldn’t be a threat anymore. Palestine will not be allowed any type of defense, and therefore will not be a viable state. End of issue. The two-state solution has been dead in its tracks for decades. I find it amazing that this deal-breaking obstacle is hardly ever brought up.
I agree, JFL, that Israel should be subject to the NPL just like everyone else is. Either that, or it should be disarmed since their research and development of nuclear weapons was completely illegal and other countries are being threatened with annihilation just on the suspicion that they may be starting a program. And most intereting, it is Israel, the country with the illegal nukes, that has the chutzpah to make threats against Iran.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 14:41 utc | 125

bauback’s link

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 14:50 utc | 126

@Ensley I have no desire to keep it going either and it is perfectly correct that Palestinians sold land in the intermission between the 20th century European war’s two halves. The invasion I was referring to occurred later when those European nations which are so keen to legitimise Israel now closed ther doors on the jewish refugees and pointed their ships in the direction of Palestine. The ships were run aground about where the rockets are landing now off Haifa and further south at Jaffna I think.
I remeber a refugee who had been on one of the ships telling me about how they got bounced around the Med before they did run aground. He got the shits with the whole thing and went to Australia.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 22 2006 14:55 utc | 127

I agree, JFL, that Israel should be subject to the NPL just like everyone else is.
This is the type of counter-factual purely ideological assertion that gets nowhere. “Everyone else” apparently does not include the US, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, and so on. So what can you possibly mean?

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 14:59 utc | 128

Well, perhaps the word “everyone” was not quite accurate. We still have a few little outlaws. Perhaps you can find a more updated version of the NPL list of signatories, cit k, that shows the US, France, UK pulling out of the treaty. My memory isn’t that good.
But according to the original, except for India, Pakistan and Israel and N. Korea (which dropped out) — they should all be required to sign it. This is the roster:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/npt/text/npt3.htm
Signatories

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 15:26 utc | 129

A. Razor was right that without good will there is no possibility of progress.
B. “I’m drowning” is not a good reason for flailing around wildly and pulling others down too, but people who are drowning are usually not very good about thinking clearly about the best tactics. The middle east is a deep and rough part of the ocean.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 15:31 utc | 130

@Debs Nor do I want to brawl.
The only reason I brought up the early Zionist movement to begin with is that history is so poorly taught nowadays, in American schools at least.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 15:39 utc | 131

So what can you possibly mean?
Iran has signed the Non Proliferation Treaty, Israel has not.
End of argument.
@citizen k – it’s not that your arguments cannot be easily refuted. It is just that it gets tiresome to constantly do so.
@everyone else – what’s the deal? Ignore this little schmuck and he might fuck off back to LGF.

Posted by: DM | Jul 22 2006 16:15 utc | 132

Put simply the violence including the ‘terrorist violence’ ie the taking of civilian life for a political objective was initiated by the zionists and every action by the Palestinians has been a defence of those initial attacks.
You evil know it all. Burn in hell with Noah Feldman. You are on the same side of killing innocents. The only difference is which innocents your blind arrogance designates as targets.
And I think the spat underway here is fruitful. Who actually cares about the lives of actual humans, and who will harden their hearts and deny the suffering of innocents in order to feel the righteous superiority of their own blindness? The “left” and the “right” have a historical problem with hardened hearts in the name of moral superiority. And Mr. R. G. is on record here gloating over the incineration of innocent Shia since to him the tragedy proved one of his dogmas. For example. A tradition proudly continued on this thread.
Happily, not everyone can be bullied.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 22 2006 16:37 utc | 133

DM:
Read the whole conversation or shut up.
Or take your little whiny Red football and go home.
This is whole thread is total horseshit.

Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 22 2006 17:10 utc | 134

Woops. So riled I left off the name of the responsible party. 133. Guilty.

Posted by: razor | Jul 22 2006 17:11 utc | 135

ms manners
shut your goddamned mouth. you’re fine with the nonsequitor riposte, but short on brains where it counts.
just shut your fucking mouth.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 22 2006 17:29 utc | 136

there’s a site somewhere for all the grouchos.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 22 2006 17:34 utc | 137

The West is a vile and hypocritical evil empire. It is very selective in attacking Saddam Iraq , Milosevic Serbia and now Lebanon but ignores all the evil actions it and its subcontractors like Israel do. What the West does in Lebanon (and make no mistake, Bush is the REAL Israeli leader)& Iraq today is much worse than anything Saddam or Milosevic ever did. Why? It is on a much larger scale.
Other “gallant” acts of the West was to deliberately target 250, 000 innocent German civilians. Germany still is occupied by the West to this very day and is frankly not allowed to have its own policy. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks the truth by saying Germans are “an educated people not allowed to think for themselves”. True, the German people are taught to hate their country and Angela Merkel hates her nation SO MUCH that she prefers Churchill to Bismarck. Hey, Hitler did bad things but why should Germans hate their country? The fucking British don’t hate theirs and they have killed more people than anyone!! They still celebrate tyrannical mass murderers like Winston Churchill.
Japan has to suffer nuclear fallout and death from the US/British nuclear terrorist strikes that killed Japanese civilians. Likewise, Japan has to bow before the West and is not allowed its own views.
Ireland was given independence from the evil Bastardised Retarded Empire of Britain only on condition it obeyed the West! Same with India and Pakistan, Africa. etc, etc. No wonder organisations like IRA, Hezbollah and Hamas exist. And al Qaeda was caused by West policies too.
The West wants to denounce Iran all it can. Why? It was the one that got away. They ousted pro-German Pahlavi Sr. and replaced him with his son (on condition he obeyed the West!). The Iranian people were not having it, and eventually ousted the West from their country.
The West is not even a loyal friend! Saddam was a diligent enforcer of the West’s will in the 1980s. how was he rewarded? He lost Iraq. That’s if Iraq is even there anymore.
It is time for the vile and evil West (the British and Americans, and their damn clients like Israel) to stop bullying the world. And leaders like Angela Merkel should learn to love their countries and break away from the vile tyrrany of the West.
Up with Putin and Ahmadinejad! Even the Chinese and French are going too soft on the West. So are the Irish (Charles Haughey was the last leader there to stand up to the tyrranical British) and even the Libyans (Ghaddafi, how could you?).

Posted by: Down with the West | Jul 22 2006 17:53 utc | 138

@Slothrop:
Eventus Stultorum Magister.

Posted by: Ms. Manners | Jul 22 2006 18:28 utc | 139

Ensley: We now have two examples of statements by you indicating the unique status of Israel – violation of NPR and dual US citizenship. Neither is correct. So the question is why you feel it necessary to believe these easily checked false things.
Just as the Iranians would be stupid to give up their nuclear bomb program without some solid assurance of protection from the US, the Israelis would be stupid to give up their nuclear bomb program without protection from Arab hostility. What odds would a rational person give Israel of protection against a “rogue” ISI member sending a Pakistani nuke into Israel without fear of retaliation in kind?
This insistence that everyone else is playing by Marquis de Queensbury rules with the only exception being the pefidious Zionists is not credible or creditable.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 18:32 utc | 140

DM:
You write to inform me that when Endsely says
“Israel should be subject to the NPL just like everyone else is.” what he means is that Iran has agreed to obey the non-proliferation treaty. How interesting that “everyone else” means “Iran”. So are you in favor of the US war on Iran to enforce non-proliferation?
Amazing.
As for LGF, thanks for bringing it up, because I was going to say that you can find exactly the same eliminationist rhetoric there, the same “my grievances justify any crime” moral code.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 22 2006 18:43 utc | 141

razor
must i remind you – you insufferable buffoon – that it is not i who is incinerating shias
why don’t you read somthing – the ‘assasins gate’ for example – even your friends have tired of the exercise
& on your part i have never felt good will rather a haughtiness whose intention is to hurt
never to clarify
yr facile judgements offer little – your hypercritique is a mask for another kind of emptiness or in your case, lessness

Posted by: r’giap | Jul 22 2006 18:50 utc | 142

JFL (at 10.20) yes, ideally. Absolutely. Isreal should comply with ‘international standards.’
If that took place, it would only be because the US, and others, withdrew their support and bountiful cash. If Israel was required to comply with them (mind you, others don’t either, but Isr. is an extreme case) Israel as we know it would no longer exist.
It would instantly become a minuscule third world country, struggling with its economy, internal politics, its rafts of poor and disgruntled, its neighbors, and so on, and incapable of “implementing democratic reform.”
It would become negligible, like Aruba (yikes that is part of NL, not a good example) – some tinpot place, as seen from the West.
That is unimaginable, naturally. In the mental landscape Isarel looms larger than Antartica, Turkey or Uzbekistan…be it in the Western World, or the Arab World, and by extension to all the places inbetween.
(South America has enjoyed the spotlight being removed from it. Others I leave out for now.)
Why? Because Israel is the splinter outpost of the West, the 51st state, the bet the West has made, and boy has it cost in arms and support for both Isr. and those around Israel so that they are either non-agressive or barely kept alive, ineffective, limping along, but not killed or ‘camped’ outright too blatantly – or kept on as client states to profit from the world market to keep their economies stable. Israel (i first typed isreal) has been armed to teeth and corrupted – its criminal class now at the top, as is the case in the US.
All this has nothing to do with either hate, pity or love for the Jews, though that is a good line for propaganda. Keeps people riled up. Busy with side issues.
WW2 had many victims, and just recently the dead in Darfur are uncountable. The break up of ex-Yugo is basically forgotten.
Now I realise this is only part of the story …but it is in my mind the most important part.

Posted by: Noirette | Jul 22 2006 18:58 utc | 143

Mr. R.G.
There are blinding motes in your eyes. And yes, you gloated.
I have no good will towards those who wilfully destroy it. It is a basic rule of good will: Whoever lets themselves be played for a sucker by a cheat, betrays all. It turns out to be a basic rule of life.
If you in good faith want to learn about this small this great world, there is a wonderful world explosion of materials out there. Of course, it cannot be found where you prefer to rule from. I suspect the same from you as from the past: tiresomely conventional, and given to much credit for flavor and originality when called a stalinist fruitcake.

Posted by: razor | Jul 22 2006 19:00 utc | 144

Ah, again you can’t read, k. I didn’t say Israel was in violation of the NPT. How can it be if it didn’t sign it? You have to sign something to be in violation, you know (like the Geneva accords, which it is a signatory on and is in violation of). No, Israel did not sign the NPT. Period. And I think it should! Tough shit if you don’t agree. But you will note that the UK, US and the others you said were not signatories in order to justify Isreal’s refusal to sign had indeed signed it as well. So, where is the retraction for your deliberate line of bullshit to excuse Israel? Come on, dude.
And please give me a link which has actual evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear bomb program, aside from your heroes Bush and Olmert. I am waiting. Not suspicions, not self-serving bullshit. Evidence, facts, that kind of thing. There has been no evidence whatsover that Iran has violated the terms and conditions of the NPT. All the bullshit is coming from the neocons and Mossad.
And signing the treaty won’t take away Israel’s precious little bombs. It will just open the door to inventories and inspections like the other countries have. Again, you are saying that Israel and the two others shouldn’t be subject to the same rules as the rest of the world? Is that your thinking?
Done feeding you. The banquet is over.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 19:18 utc | 145

razor. you constantly announce the superiority of your insights while failing to explain the substance of your insights. I suspect english is not your first language, but even a random selection of posts suggests a massive disorientation of the presentation of your “ideas” I think would even fail were it all written in your native tongue. here’s an example. I always read your posts, but I cannot say, after all this time, whether you support the war or not.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 22 2006 19:19 utc | 146

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