The Glade 4.0

This is why Israel is painted as the villain - they have the power. People too often see that as being some sort of moral deficiency. It's not.

Those who criticize israel have no idea how incredibly lucky the world is that Israel has the power.

Note that it is not a bad thing for a bunch of genocidal violent terrorists (Yes, that description does make up the majority of the palestinian population - the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas. That makes them just as bad as the taliban, al qaeda, or ISIS. If a 12 year old boy publicly supports hamas, he's now a legitimate bomb target - he is a terrorist) to be marginalized and held in containment while the group they want to commit genocide against has all the power. If the situation were reversed, every Jew in the middle-east would now be dead, and we'd be at war with Palestine.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Israel regularly categorizes children under the age of 12 as terrorists.

If a child under the age of 12 supports Hamas, they are a terrorist.

Your age doesn't matter. What matters is that you want to kill jews.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

A) It wasn't particularly aggressive
B) It wasn't exclusively "their stuff" to begin with. If we're going to argue about who t used to belong to, there's no reason to draw an arbitrary line where it's convenient for the Palestinians
B) It's water under the dam. Israel can hardly be expected to simply go away because of the decisions of the Allies after WWII.



Actually there is, which you'd know if you had any business at all talking about what's defensive and what isn't. By limiting the movements of the Palestinians the Israelis limit them to homemade rockets, instead of having money to purchase sophisticated weapons from Iran or wherever, meanwhile claiming its the "extremists" doing it. Israeli settlements are the best thing that can happen in the West Bank because A) Israel needs that land anyhow to overcome its tenuous defensive position (something else you forgot to mention in saying "sorry it's not defensive" when you are in no position to evaluate that) and B) it lends hope that one day the Palestinians will buy into the Israeli system and accompanying economic prosperity.



So what? I hate to break it to you, but the terrorists can only operate the way they do with the support of the population around them. If that population was serious about getting rid of them, they'd be ****. Terrorists know this, and they also know that westerners are suckers for "but innocent people!" There are none.



And that's after how many peace agreements that have proven fruitless?

First, none of that has anything to do with Orthodox Judaism.

Second, they've pretty much seen that there is no other means of dealing with the Palestinians. The Palestinians need to simply accept total defeat. THEN they can work with Israel. The Palestinians have made it clear over and over that they will accept nothing less than the total elimination of Israel. Given that goal, Israel has no realistic choice except to keep fighting until the Palestinians simply capitulate unconditionally, or abandon that goal - not just rhetorically, but take active steps to contravene it such as turning over all their extremists, preferably for public execution. The only other alternative for Israel is to totally eradicate the threat. Period. This is not anything to do with "genocide" (yet another turn thrown around far too losely) but simple reality - no nation can tolerate an existential threat in close physical proximity like that.



So what? They've been doing that because of the position they were put in in 1967, with Nasser on the eve of a major invasion. It isn't as if they just got that land and then arbitrarily decided to hold down the Palestinians in a vacuum.

Israel may have considerable power and wealth relative to its size, but it is still tiny. If you scaled up Israeli casualties since 1948 to a nation the size of the US, they'd have taken about as many casualties as we did in WWII! Their geographical position remains tenuous. Israel has managed to outclass its neighbors so badly because of those neighbors ineptitude. "But the Palestinians have had it shitty for 50 years!" really doesn't matter. The Palestinians should have quit fighting 30 years ago.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Children under the age of 12 frequently ARE terrorists, soldiers, and other violent things in many parts of the world - this has nothing to do with Israel; this has to do with an entire population that just cannot give up a hopeless fight and has made it their "national" identity. This isn't Israel engaging in some absurd paranoid propaganda - child soldiers ARE THE REALITY in many places

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Define "supports Hamas"? While it is indeed the stated goal of Hamas to eliminate the state of Israel, they also run a number of humanitarian programs too.

No one is saying that children of that age CAN'T be terrorists. I'm saying that Israel categorizes nearly everyone they kill in this stupid conflict as a terrorist, based on physical location, not actions, motivations or anything else.

In my opinion, it's not generational. I have a 90-year old great aunt who is a very devout Christian, and as such, really wants to visit Jerusalem before she dies. She's wanted to do this for over 30 years. Unfortunately, since she is German (well, was German, she became a US citizen almost 60 years ago) and old enough to have been a teenager during the Nazi era, Israel requires fairly substantial proof that she was not involved in Nazi activity to issue her an entrance visa. Not that she was, but since she can't prove it, they won't let her into the country. Despite this insult, she's still a staunch supporter of Israel and everything Israel does, to the point that she became very angry at me when I suggested that she just book a flight and check the little "no" box on the form where they ask about that. Seriously, US citizen for 60 years, speaks perfect English, old woman, the chance that she actually gets flagged for that is basically zero. Even then, she's only out the cost of a plane ticket if they do deny her. But she absolutely refuses to even consider it without official permission, not wanting to "defraud" such a great nation.

They aren't engaging in "ethnic cleansing." They're trying to force a nebulous semi-national group to stop fighting them. The Palestinians never negotiate in good faith - they've made a fool out of at least 2 US Presidents who though Yasser Arafat's word was any good, amongst innumerable other "Cease fires" that had lives measured in hours. Israel shouldn't negotiate in good faith either. Anything they give up at this point, until the Palestinians completely surrender and take actual steps as a people to stop supporting and hiding their "militants" is simply a freebie given to people that have no intention of ever adhering to a permanent settlement.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So Israel is oppressing your grandmother now?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Much the same claim could be made about putting a rocket artillery launcher on a school. BOTH sides are using human shields. One is just more blatant about it.

I don't care who was there hundreds or thousands of years ago if that's what you're referring to. At the time the Zionist movement kicked off in the late-19th century, there were very few Jews in the region of modern-day Israel. Sure, the "Palestinian people" didn't exist as a nation (let alone a nation-state) with a collective sense of identity, but the "Palestinian people" in the form of actual, you know, people, certainly did, and their sense of identity was Muslim, middle-eastern/levantin, etc. It sure as **** wasn't a European Jewish identity.


Actually, no, that wouldn't be within their legal rights. As for their moral rights, I strongly disagree, but hey, YMMV. I know you have a "might makes right" philosophy.

Talya: "Israel wants to live with the Palestinians in peace."
- RD: Many do. Many others just want the Palestinians to hand over their land without a fight, which isn't the same thing.

Talya: "The Palestinians want to kill every last Jewish man, woman and child."
- RD: Yes, many of them do. Many others just want to destroy Israel, and hate Jews as an emotional backdrop to that. And a goodly number would be content to just get on with their lives, though I'm sure most of them would still hate Israel and Jews generally. Fifty years of occupation and abuse will tend to do that to people.

Talya: "Israel tries to minimize civilian casualties."
- RD: Not really. They don't set out to maximize civilian casualties, but they also don't go much out of their way to minimize them. And that's on top of the actual targeting of the civilian population for non-lethal reprisals (e.g., economic restrictions, travel bans, home demolitions, land seizures, mass arrests, curfews and relocations, and so on).

Talya: "The Palestinians not only try to maximize Israeli civillian casualties, but they intentionally place their own civillians in harms way so they can scream about Israeli attrocities. Their outright, publicly stated goal is the complete genocide of the jewish people."
- RD: All true.

Talya: "They will never stop the violence until they achieve that goal. There is no negotiating with these people. There's no possible peace. Peace will only come when Israel finally gets fed up and bombs the areas flat and reclaim them for future use."
- RD: Nope. If Israel ceased to exist and most of the Jewish people left the region, you wouldn't see Palestinians going out of their way to kill Jewish people in other countries anymore. Of course, step one of that process would kind of involve the deaths and flight of millions of Israeli Jews, so it's not exactly much of a consolation.

Talya: "There's no comparison. Israel has now, and always has had, the moral high ground here."
- RD: Depends what you mean by moral high ground. They're no doubt infinitely better than Hamas, but they are no where near up to the standards of a modern, first world democracy. They're basically at the level of Apartheid-era South Africa at this point. Not sure I'd refer to that as "the moral high ground".

How is this philosophy any different from, say, the philosophy behind various strategic bombing campaigns in the past that are now widely viewed as war crimes? Under this logic, the bombing of Dresden was not a war crime, but was in fact completely justified, because Dresden was supporting the regime.

It was completely justified, and was not a war crime. In point of fact, a lot of the "war crimes" after WWII were nothing more than victor's justice, ex post facto law, and a rather absurd inculsion of the Soviet Union on the panel of judges, while excluding (for example) Canada, who had far more business being there.

The Allies were remarkably fair by the standards of victor's justice, but that's still what it was. The idea of "the laws of war" was intended to prevent acts of brutality that served no military purpose, but they were by and large obsolete even when written based as they were on an era when there was no such thing as a strategic attack or weapon at all.

As used today, they're a political tool for people to ***** about the actions of parties one doesn't support deliberately. In the west this is particularly noticeable among liberals that ***** about the "crimes" of the western Allies in WWII, but are suspiciously silent on the actions of the Soviet Union who were, far far worse than the US, Great Britain, or Canada. War crimes are always a matter of selective outrage and political opportunism dressed up as morality.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The bombings of Dresden, nor even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not war crimes. They were legitimate strategic decisions during a war.

We haven't had a real war in so long we forget what that's like. War is not nice.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Since when is my stated "late 19th century" thousands or even hundreds of years ago? The current palestinians are descendants of unwanted castoffs from neighboring arab countries that were basically exiled to palestine to try to counterbalance the growing jewish population during the Zionist movement.



Sure it would. The land is legally part of Israel. Israel created the separate Palestinian areas, not the Palestinians. Nobody forced it upon Israel, nor did they bow to international pressure. The problem is that the Palestinians were not integrating with the Israeli population, and Israel created the separate Palestinian areas as an attempt to placate the palestinian people and forge a peace. This attempt has failed, and has instead created a relative safe area for groups like Hamas to carry on their nefarious goals.


Again, no. The land already belongs to Israel. Israel has handed it over to Palestine without a fight, and then takes international pressure when they occupy it again because people are using it to stage rocket attacks on their own population. Israel has no interest in the land, except to the extent it's filled with terrorists.



They absolutely do. Because if they responded as they would be justified in doing with regard to response to the attacks, there'd be no palestinians left alive on that land.


(1) That's not an option. Israel is there, they will always be there, and any group that opposes them being there is going to get rightly wiped out. If the Louisiana Cajuns started bombing the rest of America, saying they were there before the Americans were and the americans should be driven into the gulf of mexico, what would America's justified response be?
(2) If the state of israel picked up and left the middle-east today, do you really think that would bring peace? Palestine would become just another fundamentalist jihad-loving hotbed of terrorism and they'd soon be at war with the rest of us.




Not even close. They've shown far more restraint than the UN in former Yugoslavia, or NATO in Afghanistan -- this despite the fact that Israel is fighting a defensive war entirely within their own borders.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Practically no one in Israel wants or realistically expects this. They just see no other solution, either. The only real solution is for the Palestinians to capitulate and "hand over" their land as a group, in order to become Israeli and hold onto it as individuals.

In fact, the idea of ethnic ownership of land is something we shouldn't back up at all. We did it in Kosovo, and that turned around to bite us in the *** when Russia decided to do it to Georgia and then Ukraine.



How is "destroy Israel and hate jews as an emotional backdrop" functionally different from "kill all the Israelis?" What do you think would happen if they were in a position to do something about it?

Practically all of them want to destroy Israel. They haven't suffered "fifty years of occupation and abuse" - they've brought it on themselves. They are continuing a war when they are in an untenable strategic position and have been for fifty years. This would be like claiming the invasion of Japan was some sort of abuse if they had continued fighting in the face of repeated atomic bombings.



Israel does try to minimize civilian casualties because they realize the political advantage of such casualties to Hamas and the Palestinians. The Palestinians don't care about civilian casualties because they are in no danger of actually being wiped out and know that those casualties are politically advantageous. Your idea that they "don't try to minimize them" reveals an idealistic and unrealistic expectation for what happens when modern weapons are put to use on an enemy that insists on fighting in an untenable position while using a civilian population as human shields.

"Targeting the civilian population" means "targeting people who are pretending to be civilians but are really the logistical arm of the actual fighters". These are the people that are feeding, sheltering, and hiding the "militants" and pretending to be innocent civilians to the naive.



And yet, using your own population as human shields and publicly calling for the extermination of people and attacking them despite a totally untenable position somehow means you're being "occupied and abused"?



And somehow this absurd scenario mitigates the actions of the Palestinians in any way?

What's worse is that it would make terrorism everywhere much much worse because they would have an example of it succeeding beyond their wildest dreams! This is what you and other liberals don't get - every time you defend "innocent people" caught up in attacks on "Extremists" you are unintentionally doing exactly what the terrorists want. You are excusing their actions, and allowing their support structure a moral fig leaf to hide behind just because you don't SEE that support structure carrying AK-47s. It is amazing that allegedly "informed" people constantly allow themselves to be exploited this way. You are at the mercy of far more ruthless people than you and don't even realize it.



No, they are nowhere close to that. They pretty much are up to the standards of any other democracy - other democracies are just not having to deal with what they're dealing with. Look at our own situation - Mexicans are not shooting rockets into Texas and Arizona. They're just sending illegal immigrants, and so we haven't invaded Mexico to put a stop to it. If the cartels were firing unguided missiles into McAllen and Brownsville, things would be totally different - and we are a country of 300 million, with plenty of space, not a 10-mile-wide neck right in the center.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

A) Eh, there was a fair bit of violence on both sides prior to 1948, not to mention the implicit force of British colonial authorities imposing a peace while the early Jewish arrivals established themselves. B) It's not an arbitrary line. It's the moment in time when actual Palestinian people came into conflict with actual Jewish people over the establishment of modern-day Israel. I don't care much about the "collective rights" or "historical claims" of either side; I care about disputes arising between actual individuals and states. C) I agree it's water under the dam. Israel is a fact, and the Palestinians are just going to have to accept it. I just bristle at the idea that Israel's actions are somehow justified or defensive in nature because "the Jews were there first".


Sure, it's "defensive" in the same way that Soviet control of the Eastern Bloc was "defensive".


Actually, I agree that this is exactly what's happening. Israel is pursuing a de facto policy of slow motion annexation, and they're doing it for both ethno-nationalist reasons and for strategic/tactical reasons that go beyond the conflict with the Palestinians who happen to live in those territories (i.e., to reduce Israel's vulnerability to a bifurcating attack in a future war).


I fundamentally disagree with that moral philosophy, DE. Nation-states should not wage war like psychopaths.


My reference to the growth of the ultra-orthodox vote was in relation to my earlier statement that "religious extremism" was on the rise and Harris' claim that Israel is not particularly motivated by such extremism. That said, there is a great deal of overlap between the ultra-orthodox vote and the "bomb the Palestinians into oblivion" vote.


Yeah, don't hold your breath, man. Also, "totally eradicat[ing] the threat" if the Palestinians don't accept total defeat sounds a lot like a call for genocide.

Anyway, I'm going to bow out of the conversation at this point. Have to get back to work and then I'll be traveling for a few days. I must say, I am surprised and disappointed we weren't able to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue today.

I've had **** to do lately. Khross and Elmo were going at it on a slow day for me.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I don't see what that has to do with anything, and this highlights the arbitrariness of it all. The Jews were there thousands of years before the Arabs, and are anchored there by the Temple remains. While I'm not normally a fan of keeping ancient disputes going, the fact is that the Palestinians claim its "their land" because they were there before the modern Jews, but then want to ignore that the Jews had it way before that. After WWII a Jewish homeland was absolutely necessary, and there was no other logical place to put it.



That conflict wouldn't have happened without other, prior events. That's what makes the line arbitrary.



It isn't defensive in nature or justified because they were there first; it's justified because they have no other realistic options to deal with Palestinian violence, and the rest of the world has found it convenient to do nothing either, because no one wants to be a target for Islamic extremism.



From the Soviet perspective, it was. The Soviets had been invaded, severely, twice in the 50 years prior to the formation of the Warsaw Pact, and saw NATO as an aggressive move. That reation was unbelievably self-centered and further marred by their own aggressive actions in WWII and general attitude afterwards, but they really did believe that a Western attack was likely - and they are not a tiny country in a very weak geographical position.



They are not doing it for ethno-nationalist reasons, or rather those reasons are entirely irrelevant if they exist. They took the territory intending to trade it for a peace treaty which never worked out and now they're essentially stuck with it. Any nationalist sentiment they have is essentially a non-issue because without it the strategic issues and the history of the refusal of the arab powers to negotiate its return would remain.



Its not a moral philosophy, and nations are not people. You can't blame "Israel" for doing what it needs to do in its national interests, then turn around and separate the Palestinians into "innocent people" and "militants". There's an incredible double standard there. It is not "Waging war like a psychopath" to understand that your enemy is hiding among a civilian population that is supporting them.



Orthodox Judaism is notable for not actually being terribly extremist. As for bombing the Palestinians into oblivion, if you were constantly getting attacked by an intractable enemy that has no chance to win but insists on slaughtering your people just because they can't let go of the idea that sooner or later Allah will give them a win, you might be pretty inclined to start bombing them into oblivion, too.



If a group chooses to fight to the last man in an untenable position, it is their own fault if they get wiped out. At any time the Palestinians can end it by simply not fighting any more. They can turn out their militants and refuse to tolerate them in their communities. Israel is nowhere near annihilating all the Palestinians and won't be any time soon at current rates. If the Palestinians insist on fighting to the point of annihilation, they've committed genocide against themselves.

One cannot simply put on the trappings of oppression, continue to fight from an untenable position, committing pointless attacks against a civilian population, and then complain your own civilian population is being attacked when you hide amongst them. If the world isn't going to do anything about the refusal of the Palestinians to adhere to negotiated peace, then they have no business criticizing what Israel does about it. I'm not really optimistic about the Palestinians having a sudden epiphany, but it is what it is.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This exact same argument could be used to justify the actions of Palestinian terrorists.

This exact same argument could be used to justify the actions of Palestinian terrorists.[/quot
Yes, in regard to their stated goal of "eliminate Israel and take the land for the Palestinians" they have to other realistic options than "keep fighting".

The problem is with that goal. If they changed their goal to something more reasonable like "live peacefully in the land we've got" or "come to an amicable agreement with Israel" they wouldn't have that problem. If you set absurd goals, your options to achieve them will necessarily be limited.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So Sam Harris is taking a lot of flack from Liberal types for his "Islamophobia." (Sam Harris considers religion in general to be problematic, he doesn't single out Islam except from the standpoint that it teaches and promotes violent extremism more than any current major religion. You can't seriously dispute this without making yourself look like a moron.) There was an altercation on Bill Maher not long ago between Sam Harris and Ben Affleck.

I have to say, I'm not posting here to talk about the content of the altercation. I'll provide a link to that information if you are interested. What I'm going to quote is the gracious and respectful way Sam Harris genuinely treats people on other sides of a debate from himself, and the respect for human intellect in general that he shows rather than focusing on those who disagree with him as "idiots."

Source


This makes far more sense than the oft-stated nonsense that celebrities should shut up about political issues. Hell, the people who suggest celebrities should shut up about political issues are, themselves, spouting off about political issues and just taking issue with the fact that the celebrity in question they disagree with, and has a wider audience than they themselves do.

I want to say I've been reading a lot of Sam Harris, and I often disagree with him...STRONGLY. More often I agree with him. But regardless, his arguments are always well thought out, logical, and very rational. A person can be rational, and still wrong. (And of course, he spends much more of his time thinking this through than I do, so I have to admit when I disagree, the odds are that I am wrong, and i just don't realize it.) The point is, that he isn't arguing ideology. He's not arguing us vs. them. He's not arguing with an agenda. He's arguing points based on reason and logic and rationality alone. His respect for logic and rationality is something I want to emulate.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █