A question for Mr. Jacoby

Wasn't much of the land that is now considered Israel emptied of Palestinians and Arabs? Maybe Jacoby wants to hang his hat on the phrase "the first modern, Western nation" in contradistinction to the forced relocation of the Palestinian people, which was done under the auspices of the United Nations, which was created and dominated by the United States and it victorious Western allies.

Palestine was not judenrein before Zionism was born.

Correct.  In fact, the past 1000 years or so of the middle east show a similar pattern in most Islamic territory toward Jews.

The first thing we can note from this history is that there were Jews.  They were not summarily killed. Eventually, post 1948, nearly all of them have moved to Israel such that there are few if any left, but there were hundreds of thousands alive in 1948.

One thing though: a brief history of Real Zionism.

Zionism has meant and continues to mean a variety of things, some accurately describing widespread Jewish belief in the period after WWII, and some not.  What indisputably occurred is that the Jews sought and obtained a state under UN charter in 1947, and subsequently cemented by military victory in 1949.  If that's what one means by Zionism, fine; nearly every Jew in Israel supports that.

The 1949 war created the "Palestinians" (who hadn't been called that before 1949). Assured of a quick Arab victory, many of the Arab (non-Jewish) inhabitants of what is now Isreal left, intending on victoriously returning.  Didn't work out that way, and the ones who stayed were shown more insightful than the ones who left.  The now homeless ones were encouraged to wait until next time by nearby Arab states, who largely declined to assimilate them as Israel was assimilating Jews.

Next time came in 1967, when Israel preemptively attaced the armies of several Arab countries which were massed along its border.  When this one was over, Israel controlled considerably more territory than it had before 1967, including lands which had become occupied by those Arabs who had left Israel in 1947.

Now we get to a second, more aggressive form of Zionism (which was really born of the 1967 war), the belief by some Jews that they should control all territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River/Dead Sea, territory which includes what we now call the "West Bank" and the "Gaza Strip". These Jews began to establish settlements in the newly conquered territory, financed largelty by American Jews and with the general agreement of the Israeli government.  Naturally, the local inhabitants resented the settlements, and violence became commonplace.  Israel supplied military security to the settlements.  The popularity of the settlements in Israel has been highly contentious all along.  Many Jews do support the Zionist agenda, something like the Manifest Destiny which granted Americans control of a slice of N. America which went from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Many other Jews point to the immense cost, measured in all of money, lives, and political currency it costs to maintain these settlements, and suggest that it's not worth it.  Still other Israelis oppose the settlement on the basic Palestinian premise, that the Jews should leave the Palestinians in peace.

You asserted that Hamas strongly supports a position that Palestine should be judenrein, but you can produce no reason to believe Hamas supports that position at all.

Back to the history of Jews under Islamic rule.

Islamic rulers have tolerated Jews to varying degrees; nearly always, they were second class citizens (simply because they were not Muslims, if they converted, they were usually assimilated in).  Sometimes they were allowed to own real estate and conduct commerce, frequently not.  This model was repeated in all Islamic countries. Jews were tolerated, but needed to know their place.

I suggest that Hamas would be conducive to such an arrarangement.

Hamas is mainly concerned with the power of Jews, not Jews themselves.  If the Jews lost control of the territory of Israel, Hamas' mission would be complete.  While Jews retain any power in the middle east, Hamas will use any and all means, including killing random Jewish children and old people, to attack Jewish interests.

So in that context, it's not really meaningful to discuss Hamas' tolerance or intolerance of Jews living in Palestinian territories.  Any tolerance Hamas might discuss is predicated on removing all Jews from any power.

I am absolutely sure that Hamas wants to create an Islamic state.

PT you and I have to work hard to scrape up a disagreement here. Your analysis is excellent.

That said, I think I'm just a bit more harsh on Hamas than you are: I see them as both wanting to establish an Islamic state but also wanting to eliminate the Jewish state, at least as it might exist in any part of its current territory.  A Jewish state in Nebraska, maybe, but never in Asia minor.

That wouldn't leave any Jews in the position of "power brokers". 

Common viewpoint among humans: see Kouncil of Konservative Kitizens, Sons (and Daughters) of the Confederacy and the whole Neoconfederacy.

Talk is cool.  Violence needs to be suppressed. 

I'd apply a test similar to that which I'd apply to an abortion case

I know you didn't just now call Israel a foetal alien (facehugger spawn). dayyum, it's gettin hot in hurr...,

What reason do you have to believe that the Jews who currently live in Israel, whether they are observant or not, would be willing to live in an Islamic theocratic state as envisioned by Hamas?

If you are arguing that Hamas believes in removing Jews, I still ask how do you support that argument? The fact that Hamas does not believe there should be a Jewish state by itself does not prove that Hamas believes in removing Jews.

If you are arguing that Hamas believes in creating a state that some Jews may not want to live in so those Jews may leave on their own, I'll concede that, but now we are very, very far from the judenrein stuff that started this thread.

A lot of whites left South Africa.  Some now write that they are glad they did.  More power to them.  I don't think it is fair to say they were forced out by the ANC or even that the ANC made them leave.

As long as everybody gets one vote per person, I think the people under Israeli rule should decide democratically what kind of government there should be.  If there are Jews who'd rather leave than face that then I say good riddance.  Their refusal to live under majority rule is no reflection on Hamas. 

I see not little but a lot of difference between the policies that the ANC implemented that resulted in the removal of White South Africans and ethnic cleansing.

The main "policy" was whites-don't-get-to-rule-the-country.

If Hamas proposes that synagogues are to be banned, which they have not as far as I can see, and Hamas gets enough votes to pass that in a situation where every Jewish person can vote then that might be analogous to your genetic testing scenario. But we are not there yet and I have not seen an argument that Hamas proposes and would be able to pass anything like that.

But if Black Americans say "I refuse to live anywhere unless political power is controlled by Blacks" they are free to leave.  Under those circumstances no blacks are forced to leave the country. 

The Palestinian authority specifically says that Palestinian Nationalism is not based on religion and that Jewish people can live in peace in land under their control.  (See my first quote)

The Pan-Africanist Congress in South Africa before liberation did not include white members and was about as anti-White as you claim Hamas is anti-Jewish.

I'm still waiting for an argument that Hamas believes Jews should have to leave Israel.  I don't think I've seen one.  

Are you still claiming it is reasonable to infer that Hamas holds that position? If so what makes it reasonable? If not, we have nothing left to argue about. 

 

If Israel ceases to exist as a state then it doesn't matter whether Hamas calls for the removal of Jews since Hamas favors the destruction of the Israeli state.

Well now we've passed the point where this is being fueled by "No argument of my opponent can go unaddressed"

I really did not intend to continue posting here last time but there was a substantial concession on the issue of what Hamas advocates and I thought there was a different half-way interesting topic that sprung up about using/concocting the term judenrein.

I concede that Hamas calls for ending the Jewish State.  I do not concede that Hamas calls for removing Jews.  If Jews would rather leave than live in a country that is not a Jewish state, I do not consider that being forced to leave since the region under Israeli control is not majority Jewish.

So I'll grant you the last word, and accept that there will be some points made by my opponent that will be unaddressed.

I imagine you see where I stand and if you had to, you could do a good job at figuring out how I would respond to pretty much anything that is written on this topic.  There is no reason for me to continue using bandwidth.

It seems you (dwshelf) are arguing that Israel has already accomplished what the White South Africans proposed.

But the ANC didn't turn down the offer because it hadn't yet been accomplished.  If it had already been accomplished, the ANC would have worked to reverse it.

Let's consider a hypothetical history of South Africa. In our history, various whites come from Europe, conquer some territory somwhere in Africa, kick out all the blacks, and start a democratic country.  In our history, the former inhabitants of that territory attack a few times, but lack technology, and fail to seriously threaten the country.

Comes the third millenium, and some of the descendents of those former inhabitants are still pissed off.  Still lacking military technology, they appeal to the rest of the world for sympathy.

I say they get very little sympathy.  The history of the world shows conquering territory to be the norm.  The old world conquered the Americas.  The Muslims conquered the middle east. The Romans conquered.  And so on.  It's neither right nor wrong, it's reality.  Like polar bears eating seals.  The only thing unique about it would be the lack of assimilation.  In some random space, that might get some points.

So let's go one more.  Let's say that the new whites establish the border, blocking cross-border assimilation, but they don't kick out the original inhabitants.  However, the number of whites which arrive greatly exceeds the number of indigenous blacks, such that when they interbreed, yielding a mixture from white to black, with the typical person being say 80% white and 20% black.  Now, in the next country over, some pure black guy demands that they leave.  Yawn.

The reason SA was unstable was the active suppression of people, not the historic conquering of territory. 

‘Israeli terror is worse’ says former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni..,

Israel is a racist state that commits war crimes and resorts to terrorism worse than that employed by the Palestinians, former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni charged in an unusually scathing interview with Nazareth-based Arab-Israeli newspaper Kul al-Arab. Other highlights from the interview include “(Prime Minister) Sharon should face justice,� “Israel is following Mussolini’s way,� and “some soldiers behave like animals.� When asked how she characterizes the prime minister, Aloni responded: “Sharon is a big, arrogant nationalist. He suffers from megalomania and doesn’t mind sacrificing the lives of others, as happened in the invasion of Lebanon.� “Sharon and the Israeli leadership always try to make Israelis believe the lie that the Palestinians want to throw us to the sea,� the former minister charged. “In fact, we are the ones who commit war crimes against humanity, and I hope Sharon will face justice.�

What business is it of Chirac?

Europe and its media - which were hoodwinked by the peace propaganda of Oslo while Israeli colonization accelerated - has a duty to stop ignoring the reality depicted by their diplomatic envoys to the region. Israel is perceived as part of the West, the enlightened world which presumes to have drawn lessons from its colonialist and Nazi past and to combat racism. The Citizenship Law and the law against intifada compensation which passed in the Knesset, along with other laws, contradict proclaimed European concepts of "combating racism and discrimination." But Israel participates in European sports tournaments and maintains close economic, scientific and cultural ties with Europe, as though it met the criteria of the human rights charter. Indeed, it is impossible to separate, historically, the establishment of the State of Israel from the genocide of European Jewry. Therefore, Europe bears historic and moral responsibility for both peoples living in our land - the occupied Palestinian people and the Jewish-Israeli people - the occupier. This should be enough to obligate Europe not to assist Israel in implementing its master plan, regardless of whether or not that plan jeopardizes the security of the region and the world.

Comes the third millenium,

Sorry. I was being overly clever here, what this meant was "comes the year 2000".

I wasn't trying to suggest any significant connection between todays Israel and Biblical Israel. 

Jewish terrorist kills four on bus in Arab town

A Jewish Israeli man in an Israel Defense Forces uniform opened fire on passengers on a bus in a Druze neighborhood of the Israeli Arab town of Shfaram on Thursday afternoon, killing four people and wounding 12. The terrorist was killed by a mob that boarded the bus after the shooting.

instead an insidious and lethal parasite

A fascinating link, cnulan.

History prior to 1945 might well be filled with examples that support your thesis but

I'm taking that line out of context PT, but it's not to malign your thought.

1945 was indeed a watershed year: Both Germany and Japan surrendered, and submitted to a peaceful, successful reconstruction.  No terrorism, no insurrection.

We promptly forgot the intense ugliness which preceded those surrenders, and focused on the pretty reconstruction part as the way to resolve conflicts.  We've been trying and trying to resolve conflicts without the ugliness ever since.  And yes, that creates opportunities for the uncivilized to strike blows.

I think the Chechens and others are slowly but surely reversing the assumed historical trend.

The naive post 1945 Pollyanna view of conflict resolution is indeed being reversed.  It only takes so many 911's, so many school massacres by Chechens, so many subway bombings,  to get the point to sink in: we cannot allow an uncivilized enemy to use our own civilization as a weakness against us.  If given a choice between "most of them dead" or "1% of us dead", we'll pick the former.  We'd like to find a better bargain, but we're going to have to face the reality that we can't get out of this without a more intense application of force than we've offered so far.

What exactly do you see as the differnce between the terrorist bombings that took place two weeks ago in London that killed 52 people and the state sanctioned bombings that accompanied the U.S.'s illegal invasion of Iraq which killed tens of thousands of Iraqis?

Terror is political violence with no military intention.  War is political violence with a military intention.  Killing 52 subway commuters does not reduce England's military capacity.  Bombing Iraq had a direct military purpose.

War we have a chance of containing. If left unsuppressed, terror threatens to dominate the daily lives of everyone. 

(we seem to have momentarily slipped into the all-italic zone) 

 

A nekkididity factor of staggering proportions could be involved with answering this kwestin...,

I'll leave that part to those guys on TV, cnulan.

I guess people really do buy that stuff, or the ads would go away. 

There was no military occupation on 9/11/01.

Claiming "friendly relationship" == "occupation" is one of those nonsense word games.

Are you claiming that there were no American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and the adjacent region on September 11, 2001?

Did I claim anything of the sort?  No.

From the perspective of those like bin Laden who regarded the Americans as infidels their presence in the land that contains the holiest sites in Islam was an affront of the most profound sort.

If all weird perspective need to be taken seriously, we're beyond communication.

If the way a weird perspective gains respect is by murdering civilians, we can expect an increasing rate of murdered civilians. 

I fully understand that of the world's 4 billion people, fully hundreds of millions of them hate the United States and everything we stand for.  It's common.

So long as they remain non-violent, all's well.

When they decide to try to kill American civilians, we need to deny them the opportunity. It just doesn't matter what their beef is.  Not because their beef is known a priori to be without merit.  We need to deny them the opportunity because if we try to appease them, we encourage more killing of American civilians.

Basically, there exist an infinite supply of people with an anti-American beef. We can't make them all happy.  We can't pay them all off. We can't stay out of their way. If they behave in a civilized manner, we should treat them as peers, with respect.  When they're actively trying to kill us, we need to kill them first.

the truly weird perspective is the one that insists it need not consider common perspectives that differ from its own.

Add to this the mystifying tricknology of dopamine distraction theatre which exists to keep the weirdo's feeble attention off of the real issue at hand and voila! In his recently published book "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy," author Matthew Simmons argues that Saudi Arabia will be unable to maintain its current level of oil production, with large-economic repercussions. Simmons also examines the political and social climate of the nation and its desire to conceal the potential shortfalls from global consumers. The fact that the weirdest {because so very solipsistic} perspective in the world is incapable of questioning itself - while frustrating - can rather easily be understood by the vigilant black man. We have lifetimes of experience with understanding this perspective. The dead giveaway of the weird is the paradox of his ACTIVE AVOIDANCE of the study of human nature and realpolitik. It is equivalent to his aversion to nekkididity. Genuine understanding - like jaybird nekkididity - is associated in the mind of the weird with the extremely unpleasant emotion of shame. The weird is deathly afraid of shameful nekkidness and consequently, he is genetically biased against knowledge of self and knowledge of realpolitik. Some of the weird can *seem* as if they understand, because, intellectually, with their forebrain word manipulations, they *do* understand. But down at the hindbrain level, where they really live and comprehend the world, there is no understanding at all. None. (How many times have you observed this P6?) The weird cannot comprehend their own incomprehension. Any attempt to get one of them to start to understand this problem, results in the equivalent of turning his eyes toward a bright light. The light hurts. The weird closes his eyes and turns away. If the light continues to shine, he begins to get angry. Every day, in every newspaper in this country, you can read about a weird man, usually between the ages of 35 and 55, who has killed his family, and then himself, because his marriage is on the rocks, his wife is going to divorce him, and take his children and home and life--as he knows it--away from him. Some men deal with this as best they can, without resorting to violence. But the weird men, more than you'd think, cannot accept this violation of their hindbrain's understanding of reality. They would rather kill, and die, than understand it.

Natan Zada reminds the Israelis what their next battle to come is going to look like. Natan Zada is the nightmare of the Israeli secular identity. Unlike most Israelis, Natan Zada is coherent and consistent. His message is clear. He managed to internalise the Zionist dream. He is fighting for a purified Jewish society. In fact, Natan Zada is ahead of Halutz and most Israelis. While Halutz engages himself in a step by step ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, Natan Zada extends the battle to the entire biblical Israel.

'Ha-Mechabel'

For those who still fail to see it, based on his recent declarations and intentions, Blair’s political tendencies, mirroring some of the principles of fascism, are of the Zionist type. The man truly believes in the Zionist notion of cultural clash in which ‘we’ stands for Judeo-Christian goodness and ‘they’ stands for Muslim fundamentalist evil....Zionism predates Nazism. If this is not enough, while Nazism has been defeated over sixty years ago, Zionism is still an active successful political practice that inflicts pain on millions of people, and shows little sign of being in decline. Moreover, Blair’s illegal war in Iraq is in practice a Zionist war against the Arab pockets of resistance. The ‘War Against Terror’ is just another example of a major Zionist battleground. As sad and mad as it may sound, Britain and America are operating currently as a Zionist mission force.