ISRAEL;WHEN WILL THE WEST DO SOMETHING... PART II

[UCM]

Here goes....

BTW I would be very interested to know where other posters get their info from and which papers/websites they read. I read the BBC and Al Jazeera websites, and read the Guardian and Indie, I also dabble on other websites. What about others? I feel I have a pretty good overview of what os going on via these channels.Just curious.

I look at the BBC website, watch News24, get a paper at weekends (Times, Indie or Guardian) and try to catch Newsnight.

would Love to watch newsnight but am too tired by then saadia!!

The Beeb, the Guardian/Observer, funnily enough the Financial Times and The Economist! The FT has one of the best international news sections of any paper and not at all loony right-wing despite it's name

I know it's late donnie but by then dh and the kids are usually asleep and I like having that time to myself.

I like PD's links, thanks for posting them PD it's heartening to see progressive American links. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking they're all loony rednecks and such a relief to be reminded that there are intelligent people there who don't subscribe to the Dubya view of the world.

I don't buy newspapers, I don't really watch TV, I don't often listen to the radio.... no wonder I am politically and historically 'young' LOL... but I do read the BBC Web site a fair bit and generally think a lot.

mimo - I am sure wars are entered not just for the victory, but for the fight too ! (Perhaps you could come up with an example to support my theory ). Oh, and re: Hezbollah funding by Iran, one could argue Iran were thus already a party in the current conflict, couldn't one... and whilst one is (potentially) arguing that... (and I think it has been mentioned much earlier on this thread) not everyone might be as astute / knowledgable as you re the Iranian speech. I imagine a great number of people will take what he says at face value - both those who fear being a "stain of disgrace... [in the] center of the Islamic world" as well as those who take the Iranian declarations literally and arm themselves with sticks of roll-on Vanish.

hub - I have more to agree with you !

1. I can't think of a war that was just for the sake of the fight ! I will post when I come up with one

2. yes spot on - Iran is fighting a very limited proxy war via Hizbollah - I say limited because what it has been sending to Hizbollah are not the best of what Iran can get hold off nor ground troops (I read about 60 Iranian volunteers have gone to Lebanon - a few of them 70 year old Iraq war veterans !!) These are volunteers, they have not been rounded up by the Iranain regime nor do I think any regular troops will be sent. Iran has a few dodgy submarines and Russian/Korean/Chinese made missiles. Most of what they are sending is dodgy Iranian made stuff - granted even this stuff is capable of killing Israeli civilians which is terrible indeed no denying that.

3. spot on again re. some people taking Ahmadinejad and what he says at face value - hence my eralier comments about propoganda. The origions of Iran's warmongering re. Israel go back to the Iranian Revolution of '79 (the Shah was very friendly with Israel). As an Islamic Republic, its leaders often come up with slogans and rubbish that their marketing gurus are well aware will win over a certain type of voter (don't forget Iran has elections) and will keep the Islamic Republics rather dodgy credentials going re. Islam, etc.

hub - a bit of light relief goes along way, goodnight, my son needs to go to bed

Thanks for your reply Peacedove.I have found this discussion interesting and just hope it dosen't go nuclear.

Oops Not referring to the discussion going 'nuclear'

hub are you jewish?

i'm trying to work out why you, with self professedly very little interest in history are concerned that this debate has not been 'correct'. how would a correcct debate be being conducted.

i feel this debate is very very sensitised to jewish feelings generally. honestly i do. otherwise why would people be reasonably and at great length discussing why it might be that they are VERY angry at how israel has conducted itself now and in the recent past.

I"m sure you'll view my question as inflammatory (i hope not), but i really want to know what it is that you can't see is hopelessly wrong about the israeli position at the moment.

for the record, and as i've stated before, where I"M coming from on this is as the daughter of a southern vietnamese man who lost everything due to misguided and atrocious US policy at the time. that is why I personally get incensed about this stuff. and I"m sure we all have our reasons.

before i go to bed: i guess i'm asking for a declaration of interests....from everyone really.

h2d, there are a sizeable number of people who proudly trace their ancestry to the Mongols. In fact, there are large clans with names Mughal Chughtai etc. which imply a Mongol ancestry.

If we subscribe to who was there first theory, I guess we should now brace ourselves to a Mughalistan extending from the Western frontier of Russia to the Eastern shore of China, and from Mongolia in the North to India in the South. At least we can expect a mass exodus of such people to Mongolia, expelling the residents of Mongolia, because the Mongols were there first.

hi sophable

My declaration of interest

Muslim, male, of Indian stock. In the Mutiny of 1857 as the British call it, and the War for Independence as the Indians called it, great-great granduncle was cannonised for being part of the resistance to the East India Company's rule. Needless to say, property was confiscated and collective punishment meted out to the Indian Muslims of those times, with entire neighbourhoods being demolished, the population being expelled from the cities and large number of people being hanged or cannonised at random.

The British cannonisation of Muslims in India was somewhat different from Christian canonisations. It took place by tying the person/s to the mouth of a cannon, and firing the cannon.

In 1947, as a result of riots, family left everything in India for Pakistan. Family lived through the 1971 upheavel in what is now Bangladesh, saw the bloodshed at close quarters, and was again uprooted without a penny, with brothers having to escape to Burma and live there in refugee camps for a couple of years.

Me? I was personally safe in the West.

I know from family suffering what it is like to be under occupation, what it is like to be of the different faith, or to be ethnically undesireable.

I do not have any anger towards the descendents of Major Hudson or Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, but I do find myself in opposition to colonialism, and to ethnic cleansing/expulsion.

I hope you too, pd, are up with a screaming baby

An interesting and moving background, pd. I wasn't aware of your Vietnamese heritage, Soph. Thanks for sharing.

Soph - you might feel that "this debate is very very sensitised to jewish feelings" but obviously I, and others didn't share that sentiment. I believe the authority on how I feel at the end of the day is me, and that I am a better judge of how I feel than you. So if I tell you that I thought parts of the thread were not particularly sensitive, and that they offended, rest assured that that is how the thread was perceived by me. Now, if you have perceived it differently, that is just fine.

My religion (yes, I'm Jewish) does not impact my desire for 'correct debate'. I like to see consideration of a range of opinions, tolerance for diversity of opinion and mutual respect whenever possible in any discussion, and, on MN, I like to see the published Talk Policy adhered to and things generally conducted in a civil manner, because I think this site is particularly ace. And also, because I think free speech is important, even when what people are posting is not in accord with how we think things should be.

Re: "i really want to know what it is that you can't see is hopelessly wrong about the israeli position at the moment." - I hope I have made it clear in my posts that "if you want to condemn, we must condemn those who perpetrate violence on both sides." (I'm quoting myself, earlier)... I trust that if you think the Israeli position is "hopelessly wrong" you consider that of Hizbollah to hold, equally, as little merit. Nothing would please me more than a ceasfire, full and permanent cessation of hostilities by both sides and a more secure future for our children.

Anyway, I've got shed loads to sort today, and I have sleep to catch up on, so I'm off.

mimoyello is right that politicians stated intentions correlate badly with their acts. This is especially true do to the nature of Israeli politics.
It is interesting that those fools who long for coalitionss & proportional representation never cite Israel,, and for good reason.
PR leads to relatively weak parties, since the barrier to starting your own is vastly lower. Sharon demonstrated this so well recently.
This mean you have a lot of little parties, a pattern we see in all PR systems. You thus get what amounts to a free market in politics.

This is often not good.
Firstly of course, there is no accountability.
You can blame (or thank) Tony Blair for our policy towards the Lebanon crisi. Cameron or Menzies get consulted (is what Rt. Hon means), but have no veto at all.
Blair cannot blame the tories for not letting him do something.
In Israel, there hasn't been a "government" as a Brit would understand it for decades. There has been a frequently shifting mess of factions, who often flounce out. And as above even the Prime Mininster may take his ball home out of his own party and attack it.
This means that those groups who focus on particular issues often get enough votes to make or break governments. In this way PR is more "democratic".
But of course, in a market, you want a strong brand image, so really quite vicious religious parties have sprung up, even though Israelis are very well educated.
In the British Tory party there are people who'd up and join the BNP tomorrow if it stood any chance of getting any power. The Labour party contains MPs who have argued that union activists who murdered people in their cause should be immune from prosecution, and of course George Galloway was pretty popular for a long time in his party. But our system keeps them from being anything other than embarassments to their leader.
But these extremists are all elected in fair fights, so obviously enjoy support.

Imagine if Blair had to keep both sets of mad people happy to keep his job ?
Wouldn't be pretty.
Hence we get Israli politics. Cats with rabies in a bag full of peper.

god hub you were up in the middle of the night too! i woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep.

point taken about your feelings.

in answer to your point, of COURSE hezbollah are indefensible in terms of their use of violence. 100%. BUT and it is a big one and a point i have made repeatedly on this thread hezbollah is a guerilla/terrorist organisation and Israel is a sovereign state that purports to be part of the 'civilised', 'democratic' Western world. It is repeatedly cited and claims itself to be an 'island' of those things in a sea of other.

it is on those grounds that I reserve my strongest condemnation for the Israeli government and even more so for it's unconditional backers the US and UK governments.

If we put aside the moral arguments which have been extensively articulated on this thread and elsewhere, Israel and US's policies do not, have never and can never work. There has never been an instance in which grassroots terrorism has been bombed or terrorised (i use the word advisedly as I believe it is evident that in the case both of Lebanon and of Gaza the Israeli government has and is using terrorism and intimidation to their ends) out of existance.

It is akin in my view to the UK government bombing areas of Northern Ireland where there were believed to be terrorists sheltering. The 'shoot to kill' policy in Northern Ireland was rightly condemned when it was revealed. What the world is witnessing is this kind of tactic taken to the most extreme degrees.

It seems blazingly clear to me that the only answer is to for Israel to sit round a table and talk to those that it rightly fears and hates. Recent history would suggest that the ONLY way that this is a possibility is if the US (and UK) change their policy towards Israel. Perhaps world (really the rest of the world are unanimous in their condemnation of Israel's actions in the Lebanon, there is a reason for that!) opinion is doing something to hasten that result, but I'm not optimistic.

I (like most posters I'm sure) find this thread both frustrating and depressing in the extreme. I should parp myself now, and will try to.

H2D I totally apologise, I didn't mean to sound like I was getting at you, it was a genuine question.
What happens to the people already there???

Were you thinking about this thread, Soph, at 3AM ? I know it does not sit comfortably in my 'Threads I'm On' list, and I am tempted to stick to the MN parenting / chat topics I enjoy more. I too was up for ages, and that is sooo not my style (dd doing a once-nightly cry for nappy / water / her teething pain to disappear at the mo...).

Anyway, I am sure we would benefit more from a face-to-face discussion than across keyboards and really, at the end of the day, probably all the posters on this thread want the same thing - peaceful, lasting resolution. (I appreciate the discussion of the exact conditions for resolution would be an entire different bee's nest, and I ain't gonna go there !).

See you around MN then.

X-posts, fuzz (yes, it takes me that long to type anything sensible !).

Apolgy accepted. I have no idea where the various peoples could / should go... if I did I'd probably be pursuing a political career !

it would be good to see you again hub

actually partly i was worried I had offended you yes. partly i was worrying about stuff i have to do today. and mostly i had had a decaff coffee after dinner and i have NO tolerance for caffeine at all!!! i am a caffeine wimp of extraordinary proportions.

i genuinely share your wish for a peaceful resolution for all. i think whatever your political persuasion it must be very difficult living in israel today, as it must be living in lebanon or the occupied territories. it is like a slow motion tragedy that has no end.

h2d, I cannot describe the pain I have felt when reading of the pogroms and the Holocaust, or looking at the pictures of the same. That is humanity suffering, and in large, very large numbers.

The suffering of a single living being can move a person. When the suffering is by many, the pain is multiplied manyfold.

To me scale of suffering is important; the quality of suffering, too. How much pain can be inflicted with a single bore single-fire rifle? How much more with a machine gun? How much more with a cluster bomb? How much can you inflict with an inaccurate missile, and how much more when you aim it with precision at a basement full of women and children and old men? The pain one imparts with long-life radioactive or Chemical or Biological weapons is far greater qualitavely and quantitavely than the pain from simple weapons.

The wholesale destruction of roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, is far more serious than a attack on a single building.

That is the way I see it.