Biased anti-Israel reporting by MSNBC Muslim activist reporter

The problem is that people want to complain about one side but not the other. You have to look at what the Palestinians are doing - which are wrong and violent, in the larger context of the wrong of Israel - which is conducting ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.

It's a shame the world can't stand up to Israel. If Israel was forced to withdraw to '67 borders and allow the Palestinians to have their state, they would not have to deal with the violence.

But they don't care. To Likud, all of this is good, because it helps them continue to build more settlements, and they will build them for a 1,000 years until there is no Palestine left.

 

I would just like to say "thank you" to deji for being an incredibly informative poster on this issue. I have learned things and re-evaluated my (albeit, limited and not really give-a-damn-ish) thinking when it comes to that area and that conflict.

clutch bbs rules

 

If you had UN forces involved in keeping the peace then yes, it would work.

 

Hate won't go away for generations. But that hate is fueled by Israel's ethnic cleansing that has happened and continues to happen. Israel is admittingly colonizing the West Bank. No one can deny that. Israel is just as much an aggressor here.

UN Peacekeepers will do a far superior job of maintaining peace than the IDF. Palestinians aren't going to attack the UN forces when they have their own state knowing that they would just be replaced by the IDF. The leadership would work with the UN.

The reason it would not work is because Israel doesn't want peace. It wants to expand its country and make it bigger. This isn't about terrorism.

 

This has been speculated about for years on this forum. I doubt he has much insight about his obsession.

 

Jews and Arabs once lived peacefully side by side in that region not so long ago. But it's easy to forget that.

 

there is an art to writing headlines that disguise Palestinian violence/terror

it must be in the AP style guide, because they all do it

Spoiler

 

I have to agree with ATW. Islam with the combination of Quranic Text, Hadith, and the actions taken by its prophet makes Jews into its followers natural enemy.

Jews could care less about Islam except that they have to tangibly deal with the notion that Islam inherently makes them its enemy.

Yes, I already know some Islam apologist is going to point to some hadith or Quranic text that states that "Jews one of the people of the book." and conveniently ignore all the explicit text that states that Jews are the enemy.

 

Mohammed whatever. Look to the historical record that for for hundreds of years before the whole scale migration and dispossession by the Euro Jews of the locals in Palestine that the Muslims and Jews lived together in peace in much of the Middle East.

There is no need to get into the Koran and ancient Muslim teachings. There is a lot of contradictions and crazy stuff in the Bible, too.

 

"Ancient Muslim teaching"?

At some point people like you need to admit that literal interpretation of these text are a LARGE part of the problem.

 

It's a myth to say that Arabs have equal rights - where their votes don't count beyond an advisory appointee. Discrimination is rampant.

The facts were that many Anti-Zionist in the 1800's and early 1900's were Jews living in what is now Israel. This isn't about apologists it's about facts.

Regardless, I think at this point having Israel at the 1967 borders is the best solution, with UN peacekeepers there long enough for the economy of the west bank and gaza to stabilize and for things to simmer down. That might be a decade. But you know it's not Palestinians who would oppose that, it's Israel. And the reason isn't security, it's land.

So I think it's important to just be truthful here and not hide behind what is written in thousand year old books.

 

This is a wildly unreasonable assertion. You can simply look at the fact that Jews overall were treated no worse by Muslims than anyone else prior to the mass transfer of European Jews into inhabited land in the Middle East followed by the formation of a country which holds a gun to everyone's head as the psychotically well armed client state of the country which occupies much of the region - and then actually claims it needs those weapons to defend itself. Let me just re-state that to pre-empt the first thought that gets in most people's heads: they were treated NO WORSE, and that does not mean they were treated well.

Even the grand mufti of Palestine - who loved Hitler - was de facto appointed by the British.

This is a political conflict that has to do with the arrival of Israel, the formation of a new client state on ALREADY INHABITED land, the granting of that state by a foreign invader, the incredibly huge influx of European Jews still suffering from incredible trauma & fleeing their European murderers with a type of fear we will never fully understand, the subsequent loss of homes, the loss of the promise of a country, the loss of lives in a failed attempt to attack foreign invaders thanks to free high tech weapons from the US and UK and since then the military occupation of what's left of the land where Palestinians used to live. Muslims did not have a poorer opinion of Jews than they did of Christians prior to the invasion. As I've mentioned many times, it certainly does not help that Israel holds 200 out of the 200 nuclear weapons in the otherwise nuclear free region.

The only Muslims who tie this to religion are the ones who have nothing to do with Palestine, never lost anything there, never bothered to educate themselves past what they were told as kids at Friday mosque to piss them off. That's pretty much the whole Muslim population minus the levant. Palestinians will rarely ever refer to Islam as the justification for what they do, even if their leaders use it as a rallying cry. Ask a Palestinian who has lived in Palestine what is wrong and you will understand. Obviously you don't have common access to those people and that's no one's fault. What we do have is what Rupert Murdoch and Shelden Adelson and Dick Cheney and Jim Brennan want us to know through the mainstream media and public "representatives".

Islam has contributed almost nothing to the creation of this conflict. Sure, it has contributed to the general anger among the overall Muslim population of the world, but that's neither stopping or starting any problems that actually affect the lives of Israelis and Palestinians. It just creates fun content for Al Jazeera and keeps Islamic imams in their jobs. Muslims are doing ****-all to affect the outcome of what's happening there. Even the people pouring money into this conflict are the least religious people in the region, except in their clothing. Israel is a closed zone, there are no non-Palestinians going there to arm themselves and fight. Barely any Palestinians can leave.

Now, to be 100% clear, I totally reject any act of aggression from Palestinians and Israelis, whether on offense or defense. It goes against my personal ideology to engage in violence. That goes for the Jews arriving at first, the arab war, the intifadas, the "mowing the lawn" operations in gaza, the firing of rockets into Israeli settlements and towns, everything. Because of my ideology, I find all of the stuff currently going on by both sides to be unacceptable. I believe in a one secular state solution with direct democracy and heavy UN presence on a declining scale for 20 years.

But in what I have loosely gathered as your ideology (and obviously correct me if I'm wrong) you believe in people defending themselves against violence with violence, and sometimes even pre-emptive violent measures to prevent expected violence in the future. If you believe in those things, it makes what's you've said above even more absurd. These people are essentially doing what you - IIRC an atheist - would do if you were in their place and attributing it to their religion. Not to mention the rampant atheism in Palestinian territories these days which can never be aired publicly for fear of beheading by the - you guessed it - violent authorities who use religion as a motivational tool.

The only group with a modicum of power in the Palestinian territories who are genuinely serious about Islam is the Al Qassam Brigade i.e. the military arm of hamas. Also known as "the only people who can feed you in Gaza", a quality which dwarfs any other connection they might share with Palestinians.

It's time to throw this junk out man. The invasion was never about Judaism despite what their religious people told them, and Palestine was never about Islam despite what their religious people told them. This is a political conflict where each side accuses the other of religious obsession and that's what has brought to power the religious nut cases in both of their leadership. Even if we were to make a case for which of Israelis or Palestinians are today more dominated by their religion in making political decisions, you need not go further than this board to hear from Deji just how much Jewish extremism has infiltrated government and voters in Israel. These days religious Jews are striking fear into Israelis as much as they are anyone else, and they have a choke hold in Israeli politics. In the Palestinian territories you're talking about a population that bases its voting decision on who can feed them tomorrow and slow the unstoppable Israeli expansion into their land.

Sorry for the rant but your comment here made it seem as though interpretation of religious texts play some pivotal role in the creation, continuance or ending of this conflict. For a brief 10-20 year period in the 60's and 70's you could have made a case for the holy mosque and the different interpretations of winning it back that fueled the fire. That's been gone for a long time. The Arab world and to a lesser extent the Muslim world - both their people and their current leaders - is far less religiously traditional than you make it seem here. Perhaps that's based on your experience in Afghanistan, but I would think you're fully aware of how different the people you met there are from most Muslims today. Today the average Muslim is horrified by what someone in an Egyptian or Afghani village believes about Islamic practice. Things have changed rapidly in the past 5 years.

 

Mathloom, you could have saved yourself that dissertation if you read my post history. I have repeatedly stated that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is mostly political, and that much of the anger that Palestinians have towards Israel is well deserved. However, Islam does nothing but add fuel to the fire.

 

Truer words have never been typed!!!

 

Even the more secular benign Muslim community in the U.S. that I was born and raised from espoused some light anti-Semitic views. Any Muslim American who posts here absolutely cannot deny this. They are lying if they do. The most popular line I always heard was Jews controlling the media.