Amercia needs to withdraw its support from Israel...

Sufguy, you've been reading too many Hamas pamphlets again. Drop the crackpipe and slowly back away!

So answer this question: Why did Arafat not accept Barak's peace proposal when it gave him 95% of what he asked for? Was it a senior moment, or wa he afraid of being assasinated by his own people for making peace with Israel?

Do your homework, dude!

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I am the b*stard son of LHutz.

Huh?

Right!

 

Surfguy, you came on too strong, I can't read your whole post. Can you make a tv special about it?

I don't know if I've ever truly had complete sympathy for Palestinians (only b/c my muslim friends all seem to be pretty damn anti-semitic). But could someone please tell me how throwing rocks at settlers and soldiers is anything but a violent act?

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It just goes to show how skewed our priorities are when Mo Taylor makes millions of dollars while some high school teacher, that can actually rebound, scrapes to make a living.

If Mo were half the power forward that Charles Barkley was, he'd be 3'2" and still board more than he does now.

 

i agree with surfguy

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i am a friend of sarah connors i was told she was here can i see her please

 

Im totally with you on this! Im so sick of hearing about these guys. Who CARES!! These guys have been killing eachother since the beginning of times ... things will NOT change!



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its all good and fun till someone gets hurt ... then its absolutely hilarious!

 

Surfguy for Secretary of State!

If we ever get a president....


hehe

rockHEAD

see you in CHAT tonight!
Rocket Fans... come join us tonight for further political discussion, oh and Rocket basketball chat....

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*** THIS SPACE FOR LEASE ***

 

I don't know enough about the history and specifics of of the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts, but here is my take anyway.

The reason the USA chooses to support Israel is :
a) an EXTREMELY powerful Jewish lobby in the USA
b) Should the US be seen to withdraw support for Israel, a large contingent of the Moslem nations in the Middle East will see it as an invitation to attack and crush, once and for all, Israel. It's not just the PLO that hates Jewish people, it is almost all othe Arab and Moslem nations. The USA withdrawing support would would be akin to throwing them to the dogs.

Now I may be wrong, but I thought the Jewish people were awarded the state of Israel as part compensation for the horrors they endured during the second world war. I believe this was done at the expense of the state of Palestine, which explains the ongoing hostilities. Protecting these Jewish people from further persecution is seen, rightly or wrongly as a high priority by the USA.

The tone of your original message suggests t that you see Israel as more the protaganists than Palestine. I find this a little hard to swallow, especially given the single glaring distinction between the two sides - Palestine sponsors terrorism and openly targets civilians and children, while Israel, at least explicity, treats it as a war. Your comments about the rock throwing children are hard to understand. I agree that Israeli soldiers shooting children is despicable, but the Palestinians using their children in this manner is equally so.

Maybe a UN Peacekeeping force is the right answer, however, I think it is obvious that Israel doesn't want to hand control of the issue over to someone else.

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Maybe all the rulers are wrong.
Current Rocket's Salary & Contract Info

 

Sufguy...Israel did make many concessions in the last proposal. Arafat rejected them.

IMHO, what needs to happen in the Middle East is precisely what needs to happen in the US when it comes to politics: NEW BLOOD. The leaders are the same old tired crew who hold the same ancient animosities towards one another and who keep the status quo running. New leadership is needed to provide a new dialogue, one based on mutual respect rather than mutual distrust. Until that happens, nothing on the Middle Eastern or US political front will change.

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I am the b*stard son of LHutz.

Huh?

Right!

[This message has been edited by RocketMan Tex (edited November 21, 2000).]

 

For those that want to educate themselves and know both sides of the story. I came across the following article and thought that it might enlighten some of you. Read the following. It is a long article but this issue did not happen overnight.

Surfguy - My hat's off to you for bringing up a very good topic. One that most people do not know enough about. What they do know is so one sided it is not even funny.

I also would like to vote for you for Secretary of State.
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Palestine

Context of the Crisis

The current situation in Palestine must be analyzed within the context of over thirty years of American policy in the region, and approximately seven years of what has been creatively defined as the Peace Process. The last seven years, we can say, have represented a refining of the American approach, the fruits of lessons learned elsewhere, such as Latin America or Southeast Asia. That is, it represents the refined idea that domination, particularly after the end of the Cold War, must be packaged in the framework of a peace effort.

Perhaps it may seem unusual to discuss the Palestinian dilemma as an expression of US policy, and not of Israeli policy. This idea contradicts the popular notion that Israel, and that Jews, control American foreign policy, nevertheless, we must recognize that the United States, as the single largest consumer of the world's energy resources, and being as it is home to all of the major oil companies except Dutch Shell, the United States has singularly important interest in controlling the region. It is not useful to argue, for instance that the US should change its policy towards Israel because it is detrimental to the United States. That simply isn't true. It is absolutely in the interests of the power elite in the US to control the Middle East by means of a highly militarized and aggressive client state which, by its very existence weakens the Muslim world and divides it. This, we must recognize, is the core of American policy in the Middle East and towards Israel specifically. Policy is not dictated by the Jews, nor is it based on a love of Jews or Zionism. No. US policy in the Middle East or anywhere is based exclusively on perceived national interests, period. Israel serves that purpose quite well.

So, for a little over thirty years, to be exact, just following the Israeli victory in 1967, when Israel proved itself to be not only sufficiently brutal but also militarily powerful, US policy has been to increase and maintain Israel's strength and to simultaneously seek to integrate it more into the region to lessen the likelihood of Arab or Muslim polarization, and thus unity, against Israel.

The Peace Process, ostensibly the effort to arrive at a solution to the Palestinian issue, whereby the official complaint of the Arab and Muslim world against Israel could be settled, began the advanced stages of permanently securing US domination. Of course, there was no need and never has been for the Oslo Peace Process, it has been, essentially the effort of the US to avoid the implementation of international law which would have be detrimental to US interests. The international consensus has always been that the land occupied in 1967 was obtained illegally, and Israel was ordered to withdraw.

What was called in the recent Camp David summit, the sticking point to a final settlement, was Jerusalem? From the point of view of international consensus, there is no issue here. The United Nations said thirty years ago, and has been saying off and on ever since, that Israel's claims on Jerusalem are "null and void." They don't have a right to be there, and they have been ordered to leave. The Peace Process has been the effort to get the Palestinians to accept the position of the US and Israel, in opposition to the rest of world opinion.

It is important to mention here something about the choice of Yasser Arafat as the exclusive representative of the Palestinian people, because the choice itself reveals a good deal about the intentions of the US and Israel in calling for the negotiations to begin with.

Arafat, of course, was in Tunisia, he was not living the realities of the occupation, he was not participating in the Intifada, he was removed from the emerging Islamic sentiment that was spreading in the Territories in the late 1980s and early '90's, and, of course, he was, and is, a secularist. The Intifada itself, though Arafat later would try for his own political legitimacy, to appropriate it, was in fact an expression that the leadership of the resistance was no longer the PLO, but rather the Islamic organizations inside Gaza and the West Bank who were carrying out attacks against Israeli soldiers and inciting the people.

This change of direction, among other factors, helped to facilitate the call for talks, and it came to Arafat as an offer for, really, a revival of his relevance to the Palestinian cause. He was in a position much more favorable to the Israelis, in terms of bargaining power, than, say the leaders of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad movement, who would not have agreed to talks in the first place.

By dealing with Arafat, the Israelis and the American knew that their policy goals could be more easily realized.

What goals are these? Well, we can see fairly plainly what the Peace Process has achieved. What it has achieved, that is, for Israel and the US. We cannot really talk about what has been achieved for the Palestinians, but must talk about what, for the Palestinians, have been the consequences of the Peace Process.

Immediately, for Israel of course, the Intifada ended. Israel was able to delegate security in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, and the peoples’ resistance effectively ended, since resistance would have meant civil war. Direct conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was neutralized.

Israel signed agreements with Jordan and Egypt, and has been moving toward normalization with the Arab and Muslim world. Their economy, which during the occupation and Intifada was miserable, with an international credit rating lower than Bolivia’s, has now improved to an almost European ranking. The high-tech sector has become one of the fastest growing in the world, expanding faster than even London or other Western capitals. This is because of a more secure investment environment, and the absence of any meaningful regional opposition.

Of course, house demolitions have continued since the Oslo Accords, possibly close to one thousand in the West Bank alone since 1993, land confiscation is continuous and settlemnt expansion has been almost daily. The settment population has doubled since the beginning of the Peace Process, and on average 8,630 dunams of land is confiscated every month for the purposes of settlements. So, we can say, that the Peace Process has been tremendously successful for Israel.

For the US, of course, the area is under control, there is no feasible danger of Arab or Muslim unity anywhere in the near future, the indigenous populations do not pose any great problem in the domination of Middle East resources by the US, and Israel has become an extremely useful client for America in other parts of the world, not to mention the only country in the region with free trade agreements with both Europe and the States facilitating more lucrative trading.

For the Palestinians the consequences have been deplorable. They do not have access to water from their own wells, but must buy drinking water from Israel. This situation worsen with every new expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian Territories, as more water resources are siphoned off to meet the needs of Zionist settlers. There is, particularly in the West Bank, no freedom of movement and the Palestinian Authority and members of the Palestinian elite class have monopolized all significant industry, leaving the population destitute and captive to the political favoritism of the Authority.

As I said, these are the consequences, not the achievements of the Peace Process for the Palestinians, consequences that the US government is fully aware of, and is wholly indifferent to. It is not a unique pattern, and it is naïve for us to suppose that this situation has resulted from Jewish or Zionist control of the media and disproportionate influence to manipulate foreign policy. Just as it would be naïve to suppose that Indonesian secularists control the American media and manipulate foreign policy just because the US has continued to finance the brutal repression of the Islamic independence movement in Aceh with zero publicity in the American press; or to say that Central Asian former-communist secularists control the media and manipulate foreign policy because the US can fund Soviet-style tyranny against Muslim populations in the new independent states.

This is US policy wherever a client state is concerned, wherever there are perceived vital interests that have to be secured, and it is US policy in Israel. In fact, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Israel is US policy in the Middle East.

So this is a brief background to the current crisis. It is important to realize, when we understand the actual meaning of the Peace Process, that the clashes, the Israeli massacres of unarmed Palestinian civilians, the destruction of infrastructure through bombing, and the current building of walls around Palestinian areas in the West Bank, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s plan to economically isolate the Palestinian territories, that all of these do not in any way represent a breakdown of the Peace Process, as has been endlessly reported in the press, but in fact only constitute a speeding up through force of what was going to be accomplished anyway through the signing of accords.

A good deal has been said about the extraordinary generosity of Ehud Barak at Camp David. He has said that he was willing to go further than any other government, Labor or Likud, had ever gone before in concessions to the Palestinians. This, of course, must be emphasized in the press to manufacture Palestinian blame for the current clashes. The reality, as you might expect, is a bit different. What Barak offered Arafat, essentially, was a plan that has been a standard Israeli proposal since at least 1968, it is the plan of Ariel Sharon, and, with slight variations, the plan of every Israeli Prime Minister for the last thirty years.

Barak simply re-worded it to sound more palatable. His official proposal was to initiate a 90-10 percentage split of Occupied Territory, with Israel having the minority percentage. It sounds, indeed, like a remarkable concession. Of course, still short of actually complying with international law which requires Israeli withdrawal from 100% of the Occupied Territories, nevertheless it certainly sounded like more than anyone else had offered.

The 90-10 split, however, is misleading. It is actually broken up in a 40-50-10 split, with the current 42% of Palestinian Territory administered by the PA increased only by 8%, to create a 50% total of PA administered Palestinian Territory. Another 40% of Occupied land would be “up for debate” but would remain occupied, and the last 10% would be under non-negotiable Israeli control. So, in reality, it is an 8% concession, or more accurately, he was declaring that Israel would remain 92% in violation of International Law.

Now, the al-Aqsa Intifada, as the Intifada before it seven years ago, has aroused a great deal of concern and some degree of mobilization among Muslims around the world. In the United States, of course, we have seen I believe an unprecedented number of marches and demonstrations and rallies; there was a national rally on Saturday in Washington D.C. sponsored by about 15 different Islamic organizations, and some groups have called for massive letter-writing campaigns to members of congress and to the State Department calling for a more just US policy toward the Palestinians.

The justification that a demonstration is an effort to get the Muslim voice heard, to get our message before the public, has a couple of problems. First, frankly speaking, the message is not getting out. Mainstream media coverage has, and will continue to insure that it cannot get out. It will be ignored or distorted or so totally marginalized by the preponderance of pro-Israeli coverage that it will end up discouraging the people from ever attending a rally again. Second, there is not anything terrifically useful about getting the message before the public, the general public has no more say over foreign policy than you or I, particularly where Israel is concerned. Thirty years of interchanging Republican and Democrat presidential administrations, and uninterrupted support for Israel should be enough to disprove the notion that elections significantly impact policymaking. It is also not very worthwhile or constructive to send a message to the public to increase awareness of a problem without any guidance as to how to resolve the problem.

Foreign policy has only ever been changed, and can only ever be changed through one approach: The domestic cost of that policy must outweigh the profit, the consequences have to outweigh the benefit. So, it is not for Muslims to write to their congressmen or senators or to the state department. The government is not pursuing its policy in Palestine because it was ignorant of our disapproval, there is no reason to suppose that the policy will change just because it is not popular among Muslims. What has to happen, and it is certainly more feasible, in my view, than supposing that 6 million Muslims can alter policy through voting (assuming that all 6 million Muslims in America are eligible to vote, which of course they are not), what has to happen is that Muslims have to mobilize to increase the domestic cost of US policy in the Middle East until the cost is greater than the profit. We have to actually make US policy in the Middle East detrimental to US interests. It is not realistic to try and make the US or any country adopt a policy that is contrary to its interests, so, we have to focus on the interests instead of the policy, if we want to change the policy.

We talk frequently about the billions of tax dollars that the US sends to Israel, but does anyone know that a huge portion of that money actually goes to American businesses in the form of government contracts, with the businesses then providing goods and services to Israel? The weapons they are using to kill children in Palestine were manufactured here, the helicopter gunships were manufactured here, the jeeps they are driving were manufactured here. Those companies have no ideology except expanding their profit margin, they don’t care where their goods are going once the government pays for them

But they are companies right here, close-by, some of us work for them, all of us buy from them. It is far more feasible for Muslims to apply pressure to businesses and persuade them to cut off ties with Israel than it is for Muslims to impact policy through participation in the political process.

Boycotts, picketing, strikes as well as more forceful means are readily available and accessible for the entire Muslim community in America to exercise against those companies who are supporting Israel and whose interests in the region define US national interests.

The solution can only be arrived at through our own empowerment as a community. And this can only come when we, as a community, take the responsibility to address our own dilemmas in our own way, without asking help from our enemies. If we believe Palestine is a Muslim land, if we believe that it is our land, then we could never ask someone else to give it to us, if you ask someone else, then what you are asking for belongs to the person you are asking. Palestine is ours, all of Palestine, if someone has taken it from us, we’re not going to ask them to give it back, we have to take it back, by making it too difficult for them to hold onto it, by making it unsafe for them to hold onto it, by making it self-destructive for them to hold onto it. Then they’ll let it go.


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Titan's fanatic!!!!

It was the first time the Titans sent an offense to the line of scrimmage with Eddie George in the backfield behind McNair to go with Wycheck at tight end and Carl Pickens, Kevin Dyson and Yancey Thigpen at wide receiver.

So many choices, with a full season still ahead.

"I think that might be scary for a defense," Dyson said.

 

All I know is that the US always manages to butt its nose in where it doesn't belong.

The USA should mind its own business. Who appointed them the official "nanny" of planet earth, anyway?

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My dream job is to be a Houston Rockets towel boy.

 

I'm tired of hearing about Israel and I'm tired of hearing about the PLO. Withdraw all support and let them kill each other. When they are through killing each other, perhaps they will realize how stupid they have been and will be ready to try for a real attempt to make peace.

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Hey, I've got a new signature!
302

[This message has been edited by Lynus302 (edited November 21, 2000).]

 

Its a shame to see so many people die for what I percieved as a failed political power play by Ariel Sharon. I may be off-base, because it doesn't make sense to start a major conflict just to get power, but no one ever accused any one in charge in the Middle East of showing common sense.

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Who would've thought Don Nelson would pass up Olumide Oyedeji not once, not twice, but thrice?

 

Dear Mr. Surfguy.....

"Are you saying we should support Barak because Arafat didn't accept the offer?"

No.

"You are talking about a past offer which I did know about so the "do your homework" is a BS remark. From what I recall, this seems to be your favorite line on most of your posts...it should be embedded in your signature."

I'm sorry if I offended you, however, your original post was quite offensive to me. If you knew about the past offer, why didn't you mention it in your original post?

"Okay...mr. all knowing...let's hear you formally educated viewpoint on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What have I stated that is an inaccuracy in your mind?"

No inaccuracies, but no accuracies either. You may want to look at the bigger picture here. My "formally-educated viewpoint" is that this is a conflict with thousands of years of history behind it, and unless both sides are willing to make serious concessions, it will never end.

I liked what you said in the second paragraph of your second post. It makes much more sense than the Anti-Israel hystrionics of your original post. If you want the US to withdraw it's support of Israel, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. It's kind of like the Utah Jazz winning the NBA Title. It won't ever happen.

Anything else?

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I am the b*stard son of LHutz.

Huh?

Right!

[This message has been edited by RocketMan Tex (edited November 21, 2000).]

 

WWI
WWII

I guess we should've kept our noses out of those too? Stuff happening way over in Europe - that doesn't concern us!

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SamCassell

This situation in the Middle East is of the greatest concern to the US -- where do you think the energy that powers this nation comes from?

In General --

I don't know what to make of the situation. How am I supposed to feel knowing thousands of children will bleed so I'll enough gas to get into work tomorrow? The idea of my goverment disinterestedly manipulating such an intense, emotional conflict for its own financial security rocks me to my moral core -- but I know the sustenance of this country depends on our goverment doggedly defending its moral interests.

The solution can't be as simple as withdrawing support from Israel. If we withdraw support Israel on the premise of neutrality or morality, the same should apply for the oppressions we support elsewhere -- but to do so would be to sacrifice our interests in these areas -- could our country survive that?

Ugh -- I'm rambling. This whole thing sucks worse than Palm Beach democrats.

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It doesn't matter if I have a signature!

 

I read most of what you wrote
I have some things to say:
1.I am a left wing man I am to young to vote but if I could I would have voted for barak,
I WANT PEACE, I dont hate arabs I just want to live in peace in my country.
2.you talked about israel lack of wilingness to give up, and meeting arafat at the middle
take a good look at the map look at israel how small it is, if we will give the PLO what they want israel would be nerrow and small milteraly speaking you can not defend a country over 60 kilometers if a full war will start keeping stratigic land are a vitel need for israel security. we have peace with egypt because we gave tham sinai back sinai is 3 times the size of israel and is not militerized if a full war will start we woulfd have inuff time to get our army ready to defaned our borders.
3.you talked about the USA backing us up, remamber if we israelies would not have bombed iraq in 1981 saddam would have had an A bomb by now-imagine that, israel is the only democratic state in the middle east, israel is a western country take the internet users or start-up compenies in israel comperd to any arab land we have a strong army we have an atomic arsenal this is why the US backs us up because we are the strongest in the reigon that's it.
4.I cant tell you (in english) how israelis realy feel but in 2 words-like s@it. we belived there was gonna be peace but we dont know what to belive any more.
as usual my bad english wracked my post.

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The holy land #1 rocket fan