Many. E.g, Saudi-Arabia. And why racist? This isn't really about race, is it. I'd agree with Mathloom that the settlers are a problem. Extremists on both sides are a problem.
Echostylez: That's pretty much it, except there's a fourth thing. It gets the whackos out of their hair and makes them the Palestinians' problem. Two birds, one stone... Kwame: I think most places are racist compared to the US / Canada / UK. Israel is xenophobic and makes life tough for anyone they deem as "not Jewish enough," whether that's me, legal immigrants from Russia, refugees from Africa, or Arabs that live on either side of the green line, officially or not. I certainly didn't expect that when I came here. I naively believed the Israeli PR. Most of the Middle East, imho is pretty freaking racist. In my last job I dealt a good deal with the Mid East and Africa, and I met some real righteous bastards, but I'd say, sadly, Robert Mugabe and some of the leaders of the post-colonial revolutions in sub-Saharan Africa would win the contest of "most racist regimes." Mathloom: Israel's government isn't interested in changing the status quo. When there are no missile or terror attacks, the voters are apathetic, when there is one, they vote for hawks and demand revenge. The whole thing keeps the politicians secure in their jobs, in war or peace. The political parties that are actually serious about peace are minor, minor players. Gideon Levy is being pretty dramatic here, but I think it's pretty fair to think this "freeze" is just a ruze to keep Obama and the EU off Bibi's back. Just today, despite the freeze the Knesset voted for several millions in shekels in new grants to settlements in the West Bank. I don't think much will change as long as this generation is alive in power. Iran, imho opinion is likelier to make peace with the US before Israel does with itself. The average Israeli has no interest in either war or continuing the occupation, but as long as they can pay their bills and no one is trying to kill them, they don't say much, which to be fair...makes them like most Western societies. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1134593.html <QUOTE> Netanyahu should admit Israel doesn't want peace By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent Tomorrow will mark six months since the prime minister's foreign policy speech at Bar-Ilan University. It's now time for another historic speech. In the near future, the prime minister needs to convene the right audience, find a fitting site and deliver the speech of a lifetime. We don't want peace, he should say, going down in history as the first Israeli leader to tell the truth, the whole truth. In contrast to the superficial "two states for two peoples" speech, this time his remarks will be full of significance, showing real intent. The speech will inspire a great deal of trust and more than a little sympathy for a man speaking the truth. They won't again be able to lambaste Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for tricks and verbal sleights of hand. There will no longer be a need for his tiring and ridiculous maneuvering. Instead of hopelessly contorting his face because of so many winks and nods, he will be able to stop winking in all directions. In his speech we will hear what is going to happen. It will end Netanyahu and Israel's deceptions. The truth is liberating. Such a step will free the prime minister from domestic and international pressure. There will be no further need to freeze construction in the settlements and in the next minute declare them "national priority zones." There will be no further need to send apologetic inspectors on bizarre treks across the West Bank. No further need to rip up construction-freeze orders in front of the cameras and argue that we are a state of laws; that now there is a freeze, but it will be immediately followed by massive construction. The settlers will have no further need for their ridiculous protests or for lying down on the road screaming in unison. Netanyahu will no longer have to call them "brothers" and then bring in the police against them. There will also no longer be a need to continue using the phrase "without preconditions" while decisively changing the situation on the ground over and over. And there will be no need to support a referendum bill and then immediately order that its passage be delayed, as is the case with Netanyahu. The curtain will fall. The performance will be over. It will then be possible for the makeup, masks and costumes to be removed and to follow the straight and narrow. Then, maybe for the first time in his life, Netanyahu will be convinced of the power of truth. An Israeli leader who speaks the truth will also free himself of international pressure. The world will understand that it is dealing with a deep, continuing recalcitrance over peace that no pressure can overcome, so the world will throw up its hands and surrender. Some of the Arabs will do the same. They will all know there is a North Korean leader in Jerusalem who is as stubborn as a mule, that most of his Israeli subjects don't want the likes of him and don't want change. The world, which has bought Israel's web of lies and excuses, hasn't opened its mouth. This includes Europe, which is incapable of coming to a single firm and courageous decision, and America, which dances to the drum of the Jewish lobby - they will also be happy to be relieved of this deceptive burden. Because that is the truth. We don't want peace. It's as simple as that. It's good for us to wallow in the current situation. There are no terrorist attacks so there are no Arabs. Life is a bowl of cherries, so why change? Society is comatose. It doesn't object and doesn't even ask, led like a flock of sheep, not asking why we need a freeze if at the same time more and more of its funds will be allocated to the settlements in huge quantities. They don't ask why it's okay for the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba and not for Kiryat Shmona. They don't care at all what is happening in their backyard and don't wonder why the whole world disapproves of us. They just want to enjoy life, and who cares about two states or the end of the occupation? Netanyahu should speak this truth in his high-profile speech. After we are freed of the burden of fraud, we can consider without hindrance what we really want to do: to build and build in the territories, to remain forever on every hilltop and in every valley, in the Golan Heights, and of course, in the "holy sites." And everything is a holy site. And we want to deepen the occupation and be even more cruel to the Palestinians. Maybe they will finally fulfill our dreams and disappear. We can enact more and more racist laws and unequivocally say no to the Syrian president, who is driving us crazy over his desire for peace, and no to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is in despair and failing. We can completely stifle the remaining good intentions of U.S. President Barack Obama and show contempt for the world, as we would so much like to do. Netanyahu, speak the truth, and you'll see what one good speech can do. </QUOTE>
Deji, My issue is with justice. Many Palestinian civilians have died to defend their land. Settlers get a 10-month freeze? Loans? You realize that there are people who question China for dealing with certain African countries. Where's the outrage towards providing loans to the settlers? It is a much larger and more pertinent issue. Why isn't scrutiny of Israeli policy bearing any fruit? When has it ever? Israel has become so powerful, but unfortunately I see that while its power increases exponentially, its willingness to take on the additional responsibility does not. On the flip side, Palestine is getting exponentially weaker, and when no one is responsible, it creates a dangerous situation. If the voters are passive in a terror zone, then I don't think anything will make them active. Except, as you're saying, missile attacks. That's a vicious and disgusting cycle for everyone. Sit back or spill blood? Terrible. A recipe for disaster. Someone has to bring an ounce of humanity to this conflict. All cashflow to the region should be halted immediately IMO.
Mehh. A reaction to a deeper, personal conflict IMO. I'm not convinced that Turkey is acting in anyone's interest but it's own. I guarantee that Turkey's slowly improving democracy will suddenly come to a standstill, will be labelled incurably corrupt forever and face difficulty mingling with its "fellow" EU nations going forward. In summary, no one is bringing humanity to this conflict right now.
BTW, has anybody seen the dueling billboards on I-45 over the last year or so? First in several locations was one that said "Save Gaza" and showed a sad looking child. Eventually it went away and was replaced by one saying "Save Gaza from Hamas Aggression" which showed a different, but equally sad looking child. Both, of course, showed a website where you can go to donate to prevent the bad guys from harming the poor little child. It seems to me that people on both sides are more interested in finding a demon to demonize and fight than a human to humanize and nurture.
It's more than loans. It's subsidized by the gov't. So are taxes. I know people that are apolitical that live there just for the tax breaks. You get to send the poor people out to the hills along with the religious nuts. If you are a neo-con you are peeing yourself with joy. When Europe scrutinized America's Jim Crow treatment of blacks, and wrote essays and plays about it -- did any of that bear fruit? Pre-1967. Back that, Israel was the darling of the world's Left. Even Barak's Avoda party is technically still a member of the Socialist International. What a sad joke. After 67 the world's perception of Israel completely changed. Before the Six Day War, Israel also wasn't nearly as close to the US, but that changed, partly because of the war, but in my opinion ever more so because of McNamara's Cold War policy. A strong partner on the border of so many Warsaw Pact client states sure looked appealing in those Gulf of Tonkin days. So the occupation and the sweetheart security arrangements with Uncle Sam happened to coincide. Kennedy and Eisenhower, btw were not particularly fond of Israel or its leaders (who were to them, a bunch of commies). But I don't want to be guilty of oversimplification, which is always dangerous to do, and leads you to some very easy to come to and false conclusions. Israeli politics changed radically between 67 and the early 80's and it is a radically different place. With all the bad that came with it, it's economy also no longer relies on orange exports, so that might explain why sensible people will still vote Likud. They are politicians. The secular ones answer to their voters. The religious ones answer to God...who they believe takes a special interest in the happiness of they and their flock. They really believe God is on their side,every issue is absolute and black and white, and to me are absolutely no different from Hizbollah or the Religious Right in the US. That's because their politicians are even more corrupt and they are even less accountable to their people. As corrupt as Israel may be, the voters get pissed and call for elections all the time and flip flop between parties (who are becoming more and more alike). It's far from ideal, but at least the guys in power have a reason to be scared of pissing off people. I don't think that's nearly as much the case in Ramallah, and way less so in Gaza. Even most people and NGO's sympathetic to the Palestinians are extremely patronizing and are too often apologists to the corrupt Palestinian government(s). They, like AIPAC in US and many of the Conservatives in the UK, are too earnest in their zeal to support their horse in the race to keep things honest and see the situation for what it is. And that's tough. Without outside help, Palestine starves, but it's hard to account for where that help goes. I've meant plenty of Palestinians who I felt little to disagree with, but they were secular leftists who comprise as small a minority in their constituency as their counterparts do in Israel. They are very active in organizing peaceful demonstrations along the security barrier and attract plenty of international respect and sympathy but have little influence on the policies of the PA. Good luck with that. In the UK they are differentiating between products from pre-67 Israel, and Palestinian areas (which get breaks on duties) and products from the settlements (which don't) and even that is a huge controversy both from mainstream Israeli politicians and pro-Israel Tories in the UK who think they are doing Israel a favor. There are many multinational corporations here that take advantage of the high educations and low wages (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, etc) as well as more than a few that are outright Israeli (Checkpoint comes to mind). Politicians the world over can get spineless pretty quick when it affects the wallets of their constituents. A lot of noses can be held in a stinky room full of easy money. This isn't so different than a Western oil company putting its oilfield crews in volatile places in the MidEast to drill, only because the cost of producing a barrel of oil is a fraction of what it costs in Russia or Canada. What's a few lives compared to killing the goose that lays golden eggs? Even my old boss, a diamond mogul and a very right-wing religious Jerusalemite, said it wouldn't be hard to argue that by definition, Israeli-cut diamonds are conflict diamonds, since they help fund activities in a war zone. Lev Leviev is the biggest name in the industry, and he underwrites much of the expansion in the West Bank for settlements. But my boss also said too much money was being made around the world to care -- and he cited many of his clients in the Gulf States as examples. You'll always have NGO's, columnists and leftist politicians more than aware of all of this, and complaining about this stuff, but in the end, not enough people care. What this is, in essence, is a simple dispute over real estate that belongs in a small claims court. It sure as hell isn't worth dying, much less killing over. In my opinion, Likud short-sightedness and belligerence will eventually render the two-state solution unattainable. Then Israel will have to decide whether to end occupation and offer universal suffrage and rights to everyone here or not. If it doesn't (and don't think for a second these guys in power want that) then I think it will be safe to call it Apartheid and the world will react in kind. But for now, they benefit from the ambiguity, and I think Bibi's real plan is to keep things as ambiguous for as long as he can, and keep pointing at Iran and quoting Churchill, and weaseling his way into preserving the status quo without giving too much. That seems to work so far. I think it's spineless and makes life crappy for everyone in the long term, but again, these are just my opinions. I've probably bored everyone that read this...and I'm now an hour behind in what was supposed to be an all night writing session and I just invested a bit too much on this. I have to get back to work.
Deji; You certainly paint a dark picture and at the moment there isn't much I can argue against it but at the same time I wouldn't rule out the possibility of momentous change. In 1987 it seemed very unlikely that Apartheid would end anytime soon yet in seven years Mandela was president.
I think the SA situation is not really analogues here. For one thing, the dispute in Israel-Palestine is mainly in regards to land ownership as both sides are trying to claim territory for an independent state, or in the case of Israel to grab a larger share of the land in dispute. In SA, there were no land disputes and the issue at hand was oppressive minority rule over a majority which had no say or representation in government. Now if you ask me about Arab Israeli citizens, who make up about one fifth of Israel I believe, they are definitely treated as 2nd class citizens but the situation is also nothing like the apartheid system in SA. Arab Israelis get to vote and have their representation, although they are systematically discriminated against by the establishment, much of which is done through a wink-and-nod system, rather than official discriminatory policy, which is arguably just as bad.
SA isn't exactly racist, they hate anyone that isn't saudi, even other arab people from the time i spent there. Very arrogant assholes.
Saudi Arabia isn't racist. Its the saudi nationality superiority complex that is a problem, they pretty much hate all non saudis. You can't even become a citizen of that country, well it is VERY difficult. That being said, westerners actually are given more respect over there, when my dad was brought to oramco, he was paid 2 times more than the avg saudi and he was given more power due to just being american.
Yes I am. Half Dubaian and moved here recently . 1) Fact of the matter is, the world is better when someone moves to better conditions. I'm a realist, not an idealist. I agree with your point though that better is not necessarily good. That doesn't change the fact that better is better. 2) No it would not. Your statement is a complete fabrication. Maybe it's limited to some remote experience you've had. There are multinational people who do this openly and freely all the time. I will attempt to upload pictures and websites for you as I myself am involved in this. 3) Slave labor exists despite Dubai. You missed the point. My point was that those receiving over-inflated salaries could sacrifice some of that to the labor camps. It would be a tiny fraction of their disposable income and wouldn't make a difference to their lives. Again, it's nice to talk about ideals. But let's deal with the reality of things here, shall we?
I thought this would make headlines, crazy stuff. http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2009/12/20/12219831-ap.html Israel admits to organ harvesting JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families. The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, “We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.” The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives. In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,” the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2. In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. “We’d glue the eyelid shut,” he said. “We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.” Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel’s attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report. Hiss became director of the institute in 1988. He said in the interview that the practice of harvesting organs without permission began in the “early 1990s.” However, he also said that military surgeons removed a thin layer of skin from bodies as early as 1987 to treat burn victims. Hiss said he believed that was done with family consent. The harvesting ended in 2000, he said. Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss’ dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report “anti-Semitic.” The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden’s foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state. Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.” While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel’s Health Ministry told Channel 2, “The guidelines at that time were not clear.” It added, “For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law.”
Seriously, what has Israel not done? From using banned weapons to thieving organs, nothing is unexpected from them. <object width="460" height="370" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0" classid="clsid27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="flashObj"> <param value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/26396137001?isVid=1&isUI=1&publisherID=281851582" name="movie"/> <param value="playerID=26396137001&@videoPlayer=53614604001&domain=embed&autoStart=true&adServerURL=partnerid=%26" name="flashVars"/> <param value="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="base"/> <param value="false" name="seamlesstabbing"/> <param value="true" name="allowFullScreen"/> <param value="true" name="swLiveConnect"/> <param value="always" name="allowScriptAccess"/> <embed width="460" height="370" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" swliveconnect="true" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" seamlesstabbing="false" name="flashObj" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" flashvars="playerID=26396137001&@videoPlayer=53614604001&domain=embed&autoStart=true&adServerURL=partnerid=%26" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/26396137001?isVid=1&isUI=1&publisherID=281851582" id="flashObj"/> </object> Look at this. Palestinian gets stabbed by an Israeli settler then gets runned over by the guy 2 times with Police watching. When a Palestinian does something, its TERROR, but when Israel does something, its ERROR. Sad.
