Israeli-Palestinian Roadmap - Sharon Not Complying

Thank you Mr. Clutch. Due to reading your post, I will be avoiding dinner this evening!

 

Holy smoke, it is bad enough that ugly stick victim Arafat is spoken of in sexual terms, but now that tub of goo Sharon is added to the mix.

Don't let Outlaw read this thread, or he will surely cruise for chicks tonight!!!

 

There's something in all this that I just don't get... can someone enlighten me?

How can these settlements be accepted by anyone who seriously discusses the creation of a Palestinian state? I don't get that. If I remember the maps I've seen correctly, those settlements make the creation of a border between two states impossible. What's the deal with that? Shouldn't we be pressing Israel to give up the settlements as much as we press the Palestinians to give up terrorism (not that I'm equating the two -- I'm not -- it just seems that both must be resolved for anything to go forward)?

 

http://www.cactus48.com/partition.html
That isn't acurate. The jews who later became Israel were attacking Palestinian villages before the UN partition. It wasn't an all of a sudden thing where the Palestinians attacked. I know why you would think that was when the war started but it wasn't. That's the common line you hear all over the place, but the fact is that prior to May 15th 1948 Jewish forces occupied Arab towns in the land that was partitioned to the Palestinians.

The war begins

"In December 1947, the British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine by May 15, 1948. Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa called a general strike against the partition. Fighting broke out in Jerusalem's streets almost immediately...Violent incidents mushroomed into all-out war...During that fateful April of 1948, eight out of thirteen major Zionist military attacks on Palestinians occurred in the territory granted to the Arab state." "Our Roots Are Still Alive" by the People Press Palestine Book Project.

Zionists' disrespect of partition boundaries

"Before the end of the mandate and, therefore before any possible intervention by Arab states, the Jews, taking advantage of their superior military preparation and organization, had occupied...most of the Arab cities in Palestine before May 15, 1948. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, 1948, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14, 1948...In contrast, the Palestine Arabs did not seize any of the territories reserved for the Jewish state under the partition resolution." British author, Henry Cattan, "Palestine, The Arabs and Israel."

Here's more.

The Deir Yassin Massacre of Palestinians by Jewish soldiers

"For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion...The attackers 'lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them,'...The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country." Israeli author, Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel."

Was Deir Yassin the only act of its kind?

"By 1948, the Jew was not only able to 'defend himself' but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, 'in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes'...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that 'every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.'" Norman Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict."


So to say that the Israelis were just peacefully abiding by the UN partition and then all of a sudden they were attacked is very misleading. So the Chicken or the Egg is actually a very good analogy.

 

FB -- that's my understanding too.

If you get a chance, read Blood Brothers. It's a book by a Palestinian Christian (Elias Chacour, I believe is his name)...he tells his personal story

 

FB, I can find quotes to counter every one of your quotes. We can play "battle of the quotes" for this subject until we are very old men, and that is just a waste of time.

The Palestinians are masters of disinformation. Edward Said, the most respected spokesman for their cause in America, has been caught lying about his childhood in Palestine. The Arab press is not free, and NOTHING printed in newspapers controlled by dictators should be accepted without fierce scrutiny.

I find it interesting that your Israeli Jewish sources are highly controversial in Israel, and they are referred to as "new historians" and "revisionists". Of course, much of your knowledge on this subject seems to be the result of reading Robert Cork's website.

Even in Israel, this debate is very controversial. After 55 years, so much misinformation and disinformation has been spread that nobody seems to know the truth about the Birth of Israel.

We should be able to agree on the following- Israel accepted the original UN partition, while the Arabs did not. The Arab armies attacked the Jews to drive them out of Palestine, against the wishes of the International community. The two sides have been at war ever since.

Arabs live in Israel, have the right to vote, and serve in the Israel Knesset. Arabs live and work with Jews in Israel peacefully. Jews live in the occupied areas, but will be killed if they venture into Arab areas. Israel has never insisted that all Muslim Arabs have to leave Israel, while most Palestinian Arabs have insisted that ALL Jews be expelled from Palestine.

Jews have the only representative democracy in the Middle East, while the Palestinians live under a virtual dictatorship with a puppet PM. Jews enjoy Western style freedoms, while the Palestinians have no freedom of press, speech, or property rights. Summary executions are still the norm in the Palestinian areas.

You see, both sides say they want peace, and both sides say they want what is best for their people. You believe who you want, but for me, actions speak more loudly than words- and FAR more loudly than discriminate quotes from internet websites.

 

Both sides were going off before the Partition and the Arab Palestinians were against it.

<a HREF="http://domino.un.org/unispalselect.nsf/d3d3f04027b6e56285256bc00050873d/fdf734eb76c39d6385256c4c004cdba7!OpenDocument">First Special Report to the Security Council: The Problem of Security in Palestine</a>

<i>

6. The Secretary-General has been informed by the Arab Higher Committee that is determined to persist in its rejection of the partition plan and in its refusal to recognized the resolution of the Assembly and "anything deriving therefrom". The Subsequent communication of 6 February to the Secretary-General from the representative of the Arab Higher Committee set forth the following conclusions of the Arab Higher Committee Delegation:

"a. The Arabs of Palestine will never recognize the validity of the extorted partition recommendations or the authority of the United Nations to make them.

"b. The Arabs of Palestine consider that any attempt by the Jews or any power or group of powers to establish a Jewish State in Arab territory is an act of aggression which will be resisted in self-defense by force.

c. It is very unwise and fruitless to ask any commission to proceed to Palestine because not a single Arab will cooperate wit the said commission.

d. The United Nations or its commission should not be misled the believe that its efforts in the partition plan will meet wit any success. It will be far better for the eclipsed prestige of this organization not to start on this adventure.

e. The United Nations prestige will be better served by abandoning, not enforcing such an injustice.

f. The determination of every Arab in Palestine is to oppose in every way the partition of that country.

g. The Arabs of Palestine made a solemn declaration before the United Nations, before God and history, that they will never submit or yield to any power going to Palestine to enforce partition.
"The only way to establish partition is first to wipe them out – man women and child.

7. The Commission has no reason to doubt the determination and force of the organized resistance to the plan of partition by strong Arab elements inside and outside of Palestine. In an official report, dated 4 February 1948, the Mandatory Power states that:


"1. The High Commissioner for Palestine reported on 27 January that the security position had become more serious during the preceding week with the entry into Palestine of large parties of trained guerrillas from adjacent territory. A band of some 300 men had established itself in the Safad area of Galilee, and it was probably this band or part of it which carried out an intensive attack during that week on Yechiam settlement, using mortars and heavy automatics as well as rifles.
<b>
2. On the same date, the High Commissioner further reported that a second large bank of some 700 Syrians had entered Palestine via Trans-Jordan during the night of 20-21 January. This band had its own mechanized transport, its members were well equipped and provisioned, and wore battle dress. The party appears to have entered Trans-Jordan from Syria and then crossed into Palestine at a point at which the entry of Syrians was not expected. The Syrian and Lebanese frontiers are manned on the Palestine side by both troops and police, although the nature of the border country makes it extremely difficult to secure the entire frontier against illegal entry, especially at night. On arrival in Palestine, this band appears to have dispersed, and its is thus now impracticable to deal with it by military action. So far as is known, its numbers have not engaged in illegal activity beyond the possession of arms.
</b>
3. Arab morale is considered to have risen steadily as a result of these reinforcements, of the spectacular success of the Hebron Arabs in liquidating a Haganah column near Surif, and of the capture and successful dismantling by the Arab National Guard of a Jewish van filled with explosives which was to have been detonated in an Arab locality. Even the relatively serious loss of life and damage to property caused by Jewish reprisals, have, in the High Commissioner's view, failed to check the revival of confidence in the fellaheen and urban proletariat. Panic continues to increase, however, throughout the Arab middle classes, and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.

4. Subsequent reports dated 2 February indicate that a further party of troops belonging to the 'Arab Liberation Army' arrived in Palestine via the Jisr Djamiyeh Bridge during the night of 29-30 January. The party, numbering some 950 men transported in 19 vehicles, <b>consisted largely of non-Palestinian Arabs, all in uniform and well armed.</b> It is now dispersed in small groups throughout villages of the Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm sub-districts. The security forces have taken action to prevent further incursions across the Jisr Djamiyeh and the Sheikh Husseini Bridges."


8. A subsequent communication from the Mandatory Power under date of 9 February 1948, also reports that:

"A report has been received from Jerusalem to the effect that it is now definitely established that a second party of some seven hundred guerrillas (believed to be under the command of Fawzi Bay al Kankji) entered Palestine via Djamiyeh Bridge on 29th/30th January. It is understood that this band dispersed rapidly among the villages of Samaria and that there is now in that district a force of not less than 1400. Although this force has dispersed, it remains cohesive and is increasingly exercising considerable administrative control over the whole area. As an instance of this, the force has of its own accord and in collaboration with Arab National Committee, already deals with local bandits and other petty crimes. The presence of this forces, which exhibits a surprising degree of discipline, has been warmly welcomed by the inhabitants of Samaria. It appears anxious to avoid becoming involved with the British Security forces. The secrecy which cloud the entry of the second contingent is due to a deliberate and successfully imposed policy of silence.

"Individual attacks by Arabs on British troops and police have increased. These are due partly to a desire to obtain arms even at the price of murder, and partly to nervousness, particularly in rural areas, caused by the frequent use by the Jews of British uniform in order to facilitate offensive action."

9. The main facts controlling the security situation in Palestine today are the following:

a. Organized effect by strong Arab elements inside and outside Palestine to prevent the implementation of the Assembly's plan of partition and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory.

b. Certain elements of the Jewish community in Palestine continue to commit irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation, although that Community is generally in support of the recommendations of the Assembly.
c. The added complication created by the fact that the Mandatory Power, which remains responsible for law and order in Palestine until the termination of the Mandate, is engaged in the liquidation of its administration and preparing for the evacuation of its troops.....</i>

 

btw, remember the horrible massacre last year in Jenin? Of course, it never happened, but that is the M.O. of the Arab press. Think about how the "massacre" of Jenin would have played to a world devoid of 24 hours news channels and a world wide press apparatus.

If the battle in Jenin would have happened 50 years ago, I have no doubt that many would be writing about how the IDF had entered Jenin and massacred women and children.

Now, consider this account of Deir Yassin-

http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac17.htm

I won't post the article, but note at the end of the essay, there are first hand memories from Arabs who claim that the Deir Yassin massacre was fictional. It was created to turn the Arabs against the Jews- just like what happened in Jenin.

As Yogi Berra said, a leopard doesn't change his stripes.

 

yeah, yeah......and Tariq Aziz is an Iraqi Christian. What of it?

 

what?? it's not the Christian that i'm focusing on..it's just how i came in contact with the book...he tells the story of being run out of his town as a small boy...being told by the israelis they were only occupying it for a time...then watching them set torches to his father's vineyard and ultimately to his home. for no other reason than they were palestinian.

if you're looking for a good guy in this scenario, johnheath, you won't find it. root for israel if you like. i certainly sympathize with their concerns...but you can't put the israelis up on such a pedestal that you blind yourself to the crap they've pulled, too. crap from the very beginning.

 

No Max, I disagree. There are plenty of "good guys", and most of them are on the Israeli side. The Israeli government has always treated its citizens with respect, and has treated law abiding Arabs with that same respect.

That fact is that Arabs living in Israel enjoy more freedoms and more protections under the rule of law than Arabs not only in the occupied areas, but the vast majority of the Middle East.

Have there been war crimes committed by the Israelis? Of course! Don't make the mistake though, of treating isolated events of treachery and extend them to define the policy of the Israeli government.

The fact is that most Israelis will do anything to achieve peace if their security is guaranteed. Most Palestinians support suicide bombers attacking little girls. That is a huge cultural difference.

 

How are the above statements NOT mutually exclusive?

I agree with you in some measure. I don't think the bombings and targetting of civilians will stop, even if a new Palestine is created. But you're calling Israeli aggression and war crime "isolated events" by which I should not judge the entire nation or the government's policy. How is the same not true of the Palestinians?

I go back to my original point here...there are no good guys...no one's hands are clean.

 

Why would anyone sign this waiver?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4664677,00.html

Gaza visitors must sign waiver in case army shoots them

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Friday May 9, 2003
The Guardian

The Israeli military yesterday began obliging foreigners entering the Gaza Strip to sign waivers absolving the army from responsibility if it shoots them. Visitors must also declare that they are not peace activists.

The move came hours before an autopsy on James Miller - the British cameraman killed in a Gaza refugee camp - confirmed that he was almost certainly killed by an Israeli soldier, despite the army's assertions to the contrary.
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The latest victims include a one-year-old boy, Alian Ba****i, shot dead in his home in neighbouring Khan Younis refugee camp on Wednesday.
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The military also now requires visitors to Gaza to declare that they have no affiliation to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which is close to becoming a banned organisation since it was revealed that members met with two British suicide bombers days before the attack on a Tel Aviv bar last week in which three people were murdered.

The ISM acknowledges that the bombers - Asif Hanif, who blew himself up, and Omar Sharif, whose bomb failed to explode and who is still being hunted - attended one of its meetings but says the organisation had no idea of their intent.

A Hamas militant was killed in a helicopter missile strike in Gaza City yesterday.

 

This isn't about quotes it's about military action going on prior to Israelis independence. That was my point. It wasn't as if Israel declared independence and all of a sudden they were attacked. Both sides were fighting prior to that.

As for Edward Said we had that argument before, and Said came out of it ok, despite the mud slung at him.

Also as far as disinformation goes, boths sides are guilty. You are correct that it wasn't a massacre at JEnin, but the report said that atrocities were committed by both sides.

But a piece of major misinformation that came from the Israeli side was about the standoff at the Church Jeruselem. ISrael made claims that the clergy inside were being held hostage. This turned out to be a lie as the clergy inside testified to the fact that they were never hostages.

I don't want to sound like I believe that ISrael is the devil and the Palestinians are angels. That's far from the truth. But you seem to have a limited view of both sides of the conflict.

Mad Max:

Thanks for the book recommendation. It sounds very interesting, and I will definitely read it.

 

Even the Israeli papers are portraying Bush and the poor fall guy Powell of wimping out when confronting Sharon. (Of course you would expect Sharon who has supervised mass slaughters to be pretty determined.) They mention the 2004 election angle as a one possible motivation for Bush wimping out.

********************************

From determination to wimpiness

By Gideon Samet



The Sharon government had an impressive diplomatic achievement this week. In the hands of the seemingly clumsy leader, actually a Speedy Gonzales, it appears the entire diplomatic structure built by the president of the American superpower with staunch pledges for peace is collapsing.

One small sign of this was a weekend address when George Bush - still chewing the rhetorical gravel of the vision named for him - suddenly made no mention of the road map meant to fulfill his vision.

But there is further evidence piling up from every direction showing that, even before Sharon opens his mouth, the administration has no appetite to eat the political stew that it had cooked up.

And this is certainly the case after Sharon speaks, like in the interview he gave in yesterday's Jerusalem Post. With political rudeness, the minute Colin Powell left, the prime minister said Jews will continue living in Shiloh and Beit El under Israeli sovereignty. That, of course, was the absolute opposite of one of those supposedly moderate remarks that he tossed out in a Haaretz interview a month ago.

In his conversations with Powell, Sharon did not feel any special need to explain his opposition to gestures. Hearing a polite reminder about a settlement freeze, Sharon asked, actually mocking Powell, if he was recommending abortions. The somewhat impressive step under these circumstances - removing a number of outposts - didn't even come up. The administration doesn't want to quarrel. Certainly not a secretary of state isolated at the conservative top.

Because Powell knows what Sharon knows: In the thin atmosphere where the presidential vision is floating, there's no real desire to push for an Israeli-Palestinian deal. In their conversations, Powell spoke clearly, but well understood that the visit was an idle move before Sharon's trip to the White House. The secretary rejected Sharon's position that the gestures from both sides have to be "serial." They have to be parallel, without conditions. He tried to tempt Sharon on the matter of the right of return. If you make an announcement that Israel will not accept the right of return in any agreement, he told the prime minister, America will back you up. But mostly, he filled his mission with reiterated messages that the president is "determined" to move the process forward.

But the reasons that turned Powell's jaunt into something so wimpy will continue to play a role in the Sharon-Bush meeting. The reasons have been listed many times, and the passing time only sharpens them: The president's aversion to any tension with the Jewish voters, the skepticism in his surroundings about the benefits of nurturing a radical national movement in a Muslim region full of dictators.

Because of these reasons and their ilk, Martin Indyk, a former senior administration official and ambassador to Israel, asked ironically, why didn't Bush pick up the phone to Sharon to make clear that the secretary's visit must be a success, accompanied therefore by steps of compromise?

Sharon's opposition to any such moves was so sourly evident that only a very specific American position could accept it. Which position? The one that has long assumed that the American strategy does not abide by pressure on Israel and shoving a Palestinian state down its throat.

In the huge spin before the war, Bush clearly showed that he knows how to stick tenaciously to a goal, while constantly changing the texts that explain it. Thus, the elimination of weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the war quickly gave way to getting rid of a tyrant. In our case, the exact opposite has happened. The presidential text has become more determined in its language, but the deed - the manner in which the vision is executed - is what is changing, fading and evaporating.

This progression of events in the history of the Bush peace initiative - from determination to wimpiness - is not only Sharon's achievement. The prime minister's success would not have been possible without a willing ear in Washington ready to pick up the message. It's the undoubted consensus among American commentators that the main thing on the president's mind now is his re-election. So, there aren't many opportunities left to find out if the Bush vision is worth more than the hot air blown into it. Sharon's trip to him next week might be the last such chance.

haaretz

 

The mighty U.S. cowered by Sharon!? This is shameful.

 

Read the newspaper Max! The Arafat government has been supporting suicide bombers during the latest uprising. How can you not see the difference between the way that the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority have operated over the past 5 years?

 

I realize that, but my comment referred to the original UN partition plan, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. If the Arabs had accepted the original partition, we would not have had 55 years of war, and Israel would have far less land today. There is no way that anybody can argue with this point.

op/ed from the Boston Globe-
Edward Said, the world's most renowned Palestinian intellectual, was exposed as a fraud last summer. The experience apparently taught him nothing.

For decades Said had passed himself off as an exile -- an Arab born and raised in Jerusalem only to be driven out by the Jews in the runup to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He had told the story often, lacing his narrative with poignant detail.

"I feel even more depressed," he reminisced in March 1998, "when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh in east Jerusalem." In a BBC documentary he recalled his years at St. George's, an Anglican prep school in Jerusalem; he and a boy named David Ezra, Said recollected, used to sit together in the back of the classroom. He told another interviewer in 1997 that he could still identify the rooms in his family's former house "where as a boy he read 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'Tarzan,' and where he and his mother read Shakespeare to each other." All this was lost when his family fled from Talbiyeh in December 1947, driven out, as he explained, by the "Jewish-forces sound truck [that] warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood."

But as Justus Reid Weiner showed in Commentary, the influential journal of opinion, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. The Saids, it turned out, had lived in Egypt, not Palestine. Edward Said grew up and went to school in a posh neighborhood in Cairo, where his father had a thriving business. Now and then the family would visit cousins in Jerusalem; Edward was born during one such visit in 1935. But on his birth certificate, the Saids' place of residence was listed as Cairo; the space for indicating a local address in Palestine was left blank.

Weiner looked into the expulsion of Talbiyeh's Arabs in 1947. It never happened. He checked the student registries at St. George's. There was no mention of Edward Said. He even interviewed David Ezra, the student with whom Said sat in the back of the room.. Because of his bad eyesight, Ezra told Weiner, he had always sat up front.

Said occupies a lofty perch in the world of letters: He holds an endowed chair in English and literature at Columbia University, he is a highly sought-after lecturer, and he has served, at various times, as president of the Modern Language Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

But he is known above all as a zealous champion of the Palestinian cause. For many years he sat on the Palestine National Council, the PLO's "parliament in exile," and was a close advisor to Yasser Arafat. He has savaged Israel and pressed the Palestinians' case in every forum imaginable, from op-ed columns to radio broadcasts to congressional testimony. And his words were accorded great moral force, for wasn't Said himself a victim of Zionist usurpation? Hadn't he himself suffered displacement and exile?

When the world learned that he wasn't and he hadn't, his moral authority shriveled. It was as if, one observer put it, "we found out that Elie Wiesel spent the war in Geneva, not Auschwitz."

One might have thought that the embarrassment of it all would convince Said to stop lying about himself. And yet his fabrications continue.

During a visit to Lebanon in July, Said was seen hurling rocks over the border into Israel. Throwing stones at Israelis has been a popular pastime among Arab tourists in southern Lebanon ever since Israel withdrew in May. This stoning has drawn little international attention, even though several Israelis have been wounded, some permanently. But when Agence France Press released a photo of the world's most famous Palestinian intellectual joining in the violence, it made the papers everywhere. Said was sharply condemned, even in quarters where he is normally only praised. The Beirut Daily Star was appalled that a man "who has labored . . . to dispel stereotypes about Arabs being 'violent'" would let himself "be swayed by a crowd into picking up a stone and lofting it across the international border." On Said's own campus, the Columbia Daily Spectator blasted his "hypocritical violent action" as "alien to this or any other institution of learning."

His response was to shrug off the incident as merely "a symbolic gesture of joy" -- and to lie. His rock, he said, had been "tossed into an empty place." Witnesses told a different story. London's Daily Telegraph reported that Said "stood less than 10 yards from Israeli soldiers in a two-story, blue-and-white watchtower from which flew five Israeli flags."

As for the damning AFP photograph, Said professed surprise: "I had no idea that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention." But AFP had a very different explanation -- as two Columbia professors, Awi Federgruen and Robert Pollack, found out when they contacted the press agency. What they learned, they wrote in the Spectator, was that "the photograph of [Said] throwing the rock was in fact delivered to this news agency by none other than Professor Said himself."

For a man who has written that intellectuals are bound "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible," Said seems to have a hard time sticking to the facts about himself. Perhaps that is because he knows that there is no professional price to pay for his deceptions.

When Weiner exposed Said's elaborate falsehoods last year, Columbia responded by doing -- nothing. "Amazingly, Professor Said was not sanctioned or reprimanded by the [university's] president,'' writes Weiner in a new essay in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. "Nor has the dean, the board of trustees, or the university senate publicly addressed Said's dissimulation."

To anyone familiar with Columbia's history, this lack of interest in a professor's deceit is remarkable. For Said is not the first famous member of the English Department to be caught in a series of public lies. In the 1950s, a junior instructor named Charles Van Doren won national acclaim for his brilliant run on the NBC quiz show "Twenty-One" That acclaim turned to scorn when it emerged that the show was rigged, and Columbia made it clear at once that it would not keep a known liar on its faculty. "The issue is the moral one of honesty and integrity of teaching," said Dean John G. Palfrey, and "if these principles are to continue to have meaning at Columbia," Van Doren could not remain. The young teacher was contrite, but to no avail. He left Columbia and never taught again.

No such punishment -- indeed, no punishment at all -- was meted out to Said, even though his fraud was clearly worse. (As Weiner points out, "while Van Doren had to be coaxed by the producers of the program to compete dishonestly, Said initiated and carried out his deceit by himself.") Why the double standard?

When it comes to mere mortals, Columbia still insists on honesty. Just a few months ago a 19-year-old Columbia student who falsely told a professor that he had been in a car crash (in order to get more time on an assignment) was suspended for two years. Yet Said, whose concocted tale of exile and dispossession was far more elaborate and misled far more people, has faced no discipline whatsoever.

A professor who spreads untruths is like a doctor who administers poison or a judge who takes bribes. Each betrays his calling. Each is a menace to society. Doctors who kill can be stripped of their license; corrupt judges can be impeached. But a professor who deceives -- at Columbia, at any rate -- is free to go on deceiving. Is it any wonder that Edward Said is still telling lies?

What atrocities in Jenin?? The IDF lost 20+ men, because they were determined to fight in close quarters so civilians would be spared. The townpeople were cleared out by the Arab terrorists, and the cars and home were booby trapped. The Arabs basically blew up the town in an effort to kill the IDF.

In any standoff, civilians are ALWAYS treated as hostages. That is a silly point.

My view is that people who support Arafat and the PLO are in fact supporting terrorists and a dictatorship. The Arabs who enjoy the most freedom in the Middle East live in Israel. I see that nobody cares to address that point.

 

Glynch, I can't take you seriously when you post garbage like this.

Israel has a free press, so "the Israeli papers" aren't all portraying the same viewpoint. Haaretz may have this opinion, and that is fine. Israel is a free country.

Now, if a Palestinian paper prints a story, you know it is the viewpoint of ALL Palestinian newspapers, because Arafat and his henchmen tell the reporters what to write. Newspapermen who stray to far from the Dictator's allowed propaganda have a funny way of winding of dead.

There are bad cultures that need to disappear, and the Palestinian Arab culture is one of them. The Palestinian Arabs deserve a culture of freedom, and it is only a matter of time before this happens.

 

i never defended the arafat government...never attempted to.

this isn't a 5 year old issue...i didn't realize we were limiting this discussion to the past 5 years.

you still didn't answer my question....but honestly, i don't care enough to wait for an answer.