Our support of Israel

There is nothing we can or should do to lessen the medieval fury of such monomania:

Yes we should.

Otherwise I definitely think we should try to make peace while we're taking care of terrorists.

 

The Palestinians have demonstrated that they don't want peace. The only conclusion that Arafat will accept is the destruction of Israel.

How can the author blame Israel for delaying talks with Arafat when the PA has done nothing to stop the terror attacks against the Israelis? Arafat was the one who walked away from the last round of peace talks, not Sharon. In Gaza and Ramallah, Palestinians danced in the streets when the WTC collasped, because Arafat and his fellow terrorists have brain washed a generation of Palestinian youth to hate and kill.

The Israelis have been merciless at times in their treatment of the Palestinians, and they are not above severe criticism for past events, but anybody who thinks that the Palestinians can be placated with anything but a homeland that-

a. has Jerusalem as the capital

and

b. leaves an Israel that cannot be defended because the Palestinians will be able to divide the country and take the high ground

<b> is kidding themselves!</b>

Neither of these events can ever occur!

The author is also asking the United States to turn its back on a close ally, and retreat from the only democracy in the region. If we quit helping Israel, the Israelis will have no choice but to turn to China for help to survive, and we can't allow that exchange of technology to occur.

We must take a stand in this world and favor nations that seek freedom for their people. Arafat's Palestinian homeland will be a dictatorship, and even Palestinians sympathizers can't deny the obvious fact that the Palestinian people are better off under Israeli rule than having their lives controlled by Arafat and his terrorist thugs. One by one, we should endevour to free the countries in the Middle East, and help the Arabs set up democratic governments. It is the RIGHT thing to do.

 

Actually, I somewhat agree with this, I think we need to smite terrorism, but it is time to slap both of these little brats...Israel and Palestine, and tell them that we will not let them bring the entire world into war because they can't get along.

I would tell Israel to either hit the peace table or risk losing BILLIONS in US aide, and I would tell the Palestinian people that the US is committed to getting this situation resolved in the best manner possible, however, if they continue to bomb, innocent civilians then they will be on our terrorist list too.

While we are doing this we should hunt down any and all terrorists and their camps.

DaDakota

 

You are comparing Israel to a brat because they are determined to defend themselves?

How can you demand that Israel negotiate for peace while Palestinians are killing Israelis? You and the author are asking the impossible.

You say you would force Israel to the table? LOL, they were at the table, and Arafat walked away! The Palestinians then commenced to send suicide bombers into pizza parlors and youth discos.

Let me translate your true feelings to the Israeli people-

<i>DaDakota wants the Israeli people to know that when your safety is threatened, go ahead and defend yourselves. Unfortunately, now DaDakota's safety is threatened, so you need to quit defending yourselves, make concessions to terrorists, and allow yourselves to be put at a disadvantage to make Americans feel safe enough to live their fantasy lives once again. Sorry, but we don't want to fight for freedom around the world like our fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers did. We don't care anymore if other people are ruled by tyrants, as long as the NFL starts its games on time. We have more important things to do than stand up for right and wrong, like watch cable TV and eat high fat foods.</i>

Is this correct or have I exaggerated your true feelings?

 

Ask yourself this: What are the Palestinians really angry at us for?

On the surface, the answer is that we're supporting Israel militarily. But delve a little deeper, and you must ask yourself this: Why are they angry at us for supplying Israel with arms? The true answer to that is that they want to destroy Israel.

That is the only honest conclusion that one can come to after considering two facts:

1) Guess who the recipient of the largest amount of military aid in the Middle East is? Saudi Arabia. Guess who is the second largest recipient of US aid? Egypt. Israel is a distant third. The argument that the US is supplying weapons to the Israelis in order to foster the destruction of the Arabs (which is what the Palestinians claim) is absolutely false. The amount we give those two Arab nations in defense aid is over 10 times what we give Israel. We just happen to be the world's gun dealer, and the Israelis are one of our clients.

2) Before Ehud Barak was elected out in favor of Ariel Sharon, the Israelis had offered to give back virtually all (95%) of the occupied territories, and had even started pulling out. They had offered to allow a Palestinian state, which is why the Palestinian Authority was created. But they refused to release known and convicted terrorists they held in prison camps, so the Palestinians rejected the offer. But aside from releasing those terrorists, the Israelis had essentially given in to all of the Palestinians' demands. And the whole time, the Palestinians kept sending suicide bombers into cafes and shopping malls.

Especially considering #2, is it any wonder that Sharon was elected? That they refuse to continue the peace process at this point? The Palestinians have shown that they are not really serious about peace, since they rejected the Israelis acquiescence, and kept sending bombers anyway. They also have a tendency to break their word when dealing with the Israelis. Why should the Israelis deal with them under those circumstances?

The Israelis are definitely not angels. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are led by fanatical madmen. But at least the Israelis aren't hell bent on committing genocide - if they were they would have killed all the Palestinians long ago. The Palestinians are, however, hell bent on destroying Israel. If they were interested in peace, then they would have accepted Barak's proposal last year, since it acceded to all but one of their more trivial demands and basically demanded nothing in return, other than that Arafat try to stop terrorists in Palestinian lands.

It is sad to say, but the occupied territories have become a terrorist mini-state in themselves. There is a generation of young men there who have been bred to become suicide bombers by their own leaders, and Arafat can no longer control them. They will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel, and they revel in the thought of bringing the US to its knees, because we won't let them do it.

They are angry at us for not allowing them to destroy Israel and commit the genocide they long for, and that is the sad truth.

 

treeman,

I was wondering what sank the treaty last year. It seemed like Clinton was pissed at Arafat; now I understand.

 

Cohen:

For what it's worth, I think Arafat will play ball as far as he still can. But like I said, he's no longer really in control of his people. And when we start killing Taliban Afghanis and Al Queda muslims, the Palestinians are going to explode. Arafat knows this and he is scared sh*tless.

What a mess.

 

If you reward the PLO you reward terrorism.

 

The Israelis knew this all along, but Clinton got them to ignore that bit of wisdom for a while... It's coming back to bite us in the ass now.

It was nice seeing Arafat shake hands with Rabin on the White House lawn. But it was just a photo op.

 

Part of the problem is that these two peoples have occupied essentially the same few thousand square miles for centuries. Both claim it as holy ground. Israel simply had more financial might to push the Islamic community out and keep them there.

What are you going to do? You can't separate them because they both believe the land was given to them by God. Israel wants Palenstine eliminated as much as Palestine wants Israel destroyed. It is basically a huge land dispute with neighbors who cannot and will not share.

The US doesn't help by aiding anyone. The only reason we aid anyone at any time is because it serves our financial interests. If there was no oil under all that sand and rock, we would probably let them kill each other. There are plenty of wars going on around the world where the US is uninvolved because there is no economic force driving our interest.

It would be nice to mediate peace but neither of them really want it. They just want the other gone or destroyed or both.

 

Jeff, if the Israelis wanted the Palestinians to disappear, they would. Obviously, they don't want the other Arab states to attack them in retaliation for such an act (which they certainly would), but Israel would survive such a war. Don't forget those 100 Jericho nukes they own...

Until the peace process failed utterly last year, the Israelis really did want peace. They were tired of being attacked constantly, and were ready to deal, which is why they elected Barak in the first place. After it became apparent that the Palestinians weren't in a mood to deal, and that war was pretty much unavoidable, they decided to put replace Barak "the Peacemaker" with Sharon "the War Criminal"...

At this point, and considering what just happened, I don't see any possibility of a peaceful resolution to the crisis. A agree that at this point, neither side is really interested in peace (except maybe Arafat finally, but it's too late for him). Our response could very well inflame the entire middle east, and possibly spark another general Arab-Israeli war - a real war, not an intifada.

I also agree that the core of our interest is oil, which is why we've been trying to facilitate the peace process for so long. But we are also genuinely interested in preventing a genocide. But after seeing the Palestinians dancing in the streets, many Americans aren't in the mood any more to restrain the Israelis...

The peace process is dead, and both the Palestinians and the Israelis are on their own. That's fine for the Israelis, as they can defend themselves, but the Palestinians are in trouble. We'll just focus on protecting the Saudi oilfields, and maybe grabbing a bit of Rumallah...

 

peace might seem like a good and logical idea...but we cant let that happen nor will it happen easily. Israel is Gods chosen land and they are His chosen people and no one can destroy them...they have God on their side and every nuke on the planet wont harm them. I will give you an example. A while back, Palestine shot 3 missiles Israel's way only to find out the missiles landed somewhere in the desert and they never exploded. They werent defective, either. God is watching over His people and it says in His Bible that once Israel re-acquired its land (which it did in 1948 i believe) that NO ONE would EVER take it back from them. This is history 2001 years in the making. It was prophesized a long time ago and the ONLY way anyone will take over Israel is if they freely and peacefully hand it over to someone...wihch is a small problem. You see, it is one of the major signs pointing to the return of Christ and the end of the world. Im only 23 and personally id like to live a little more of my life thank you LOL. They have been fighting forever it seems....and the Bible said they would anyway...so my advice is...bomb the terrorists, kiss Israels butt because you cant beat them anyway and stay on their (Gods) side.

 

Couldnt agree with you more Jeff. I say we should have the guts to put our interest (oil) aside and let them handle each other. There is no way to stop either one of them from going after each other. Let them fight it out without US help and then become friends with whoever survives.

 

emoreland:

As for those prophesies, . Any nuke anyone sets off in Tel Aviv will work just fine, as long as they didn't replace the plutonium with bubble gum.

We've got a batallion of Peacekeepers in the Negev / Sinai (as per the Camp David Accords), and we pit them against the Israelis every year in military exercises. We've never lost, and the Israelis have never won.

Everyone can be defeated, God or no God.

ROckets03:

The Israelis will win in such a war, no question. They will nuke everyone around them if they have to. So the prospect of being friends with triumphant Palestinians is moot...

But there is one little thing here, concerning oil: the Israelis have no significant oil deposits - at least, not significant relative to what our Arab "friends" have in Saudi and Kuwait. We're going to protect the oil deposits we know about, regardless of what happens to the Israelis. It was just always thought that it'd be a good idea to have a friendly, democratic nation (even one that's really just a non-hostile, theocratic democracy) in the area just in case we needed to seize some oilfields. Since we're already occupying Saudi, that's not necessary anymore, and hasn't been for 10 years... But that's really irrelevant at this point.

 

Originally posted by DaDakota
"I would tell Israel to either hit the peace table or risk losing BILLIONS in US aide"-won't The u.s president that will say such a thing be risking being re-elected because of the powerfull jewish lobby in the u.s.?

Originally posted by treeman
"Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are led by fanatical madmen"-If we israelis were led by a fanatical madman than a lot more palastinians would have died by now so far Sharon has not done anything that gives any 1 the right to call him a madman.

"For what it's worth, I think Arafat will play ball as far as he still can"-I agree with you about this point but I think that with every moment that pass we find out that Arafat all along saw the peace process not as a goal but as a mean to destroy Israel, we should all remember that the first terror hi-jacking of a plane was done by arafat pepole he was the bin-laden of those times, Arafat will "play ball" only to see if his goal can be achived.

"It was just always thought that it'd be a good idea to have a friendly, democratic nation (even one that's really just a non-hostile, theocratic democracy)"-Israel is one of the only true democracies around beacuse of the system that was used until now all opinions could be heard and represented.

Originally posted by Jeff
"What are you going to do? You can't separate them because they both believe the land was given to them by God. "- I guess you have never been in Israel because if you were you would know that most of the Israelis are not religious and do not belive that god gave us the land, most Israelis see it as a naitonal home for the jewish pepole the land of israel was picked because of the history and the connection of the jewish pepole and the land.

 

Ashe:

Sharon never had any intention of continuing the peace process. I'm not necessarily saying he's wrong - I think he turned out to be right, under the circumstances. But to just flat out say you don't want peace in an election... Well it boggles the mind from an American standpoint. Also, he's representing the hard-line Likud party, which represents the Orthodoxy and the settlers, which are all madmen - true Zionists, in every sense of the word - so he's at least partially complicit, as much as they are. He also used to run the settlement program there, correct? He would have likely started a war anyway, regardless of what happened in the US.

Arafat is defeated, and he knows it. Did you see his face when he offered his condolences? He was ghost-white and shaking... He knows that his days are numbered. He has always wanted to destroy Israel, but now that he's confronted with the real battle, he's afraid. Especially since he can't control his troops anymore.

You operate in a theocracy in our eyes, because Talmudic law is institutionalized in your country. Also, the religious lobby is totally inseparable from either major party. Still, it's rule by law, and you do have democratic elections, which is what I meant...

 

Don't know if this was already posted....

Dear Friends,

Yesterday I heard a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage," and he asked, "What else can we do? What is your suggestion?" Minutes later I heard a TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about these issues especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's been going on over there. So I want to share a few thoughts with anyone who will listen.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I fervently wish to see those monsters punished.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it.

Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for being women and have buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been destroyed . The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care of it . Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. (They hae already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. I think that when people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral qualms about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die not kill that's actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get Bin Laden. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. To get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and the West.

And that is Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. AT the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about winning, in the end the west would probably overcome--whatever that would mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else?

I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.

Tamim Ansary

 

I think you are mistaken if you think Tuesday's action was caused by our support of Isreal. It's much deeper than that. This Islamic faction has been calling us Satan and issued a "holy war" on us because our country leads the world in those things against the Koran. Adultery, p*rnography, Greed, Drug Abuse, etc. As we have become more global, our "Western ways" have spread. They want that to stop. Could we stop? Near total Freedom has it's price. We have to fight for our existance because they are ready to exterminate us. Tack on the fact that we are in their holy land through Saudia Arabia is like having pigs in their mosque. Then we also support rich oil powers that oppress their people. I believe we should pull our troops out and stop giving to the rich oil countries.

The fact that we support Isreal is just a bonus reason to hate us.