I/P: post-semitism in the desert of the deal

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > I/P: post-semitism in the desert of the deal

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

An Ethiopian man was tased near his home by police in Ramle, for allegedly resisting arrest. Police claim they were called in to deal with an altercation.

:nws:

This is a video of the incident, taken by a neighbor :nms:

The neighbor yells at them, asking them why they're doing this. She asks her kid to stay away, but the kid comes and looks towards the end. Says that the neighbor should send it to the mayor, and that s/he wishes someone would kill those policemen.

According to this post put up on the Facebook wall of well-known reporter Danny Adeno Abebe on his Facebook page (Hebrew), written by the tased man, Yaakov Sahelo, the cops tased him for "resisting arrest", then dropped him off at a hospital and left without charging him. The comments express quite a bit of rage.

This ties in to a pattern of police brutality towards the Ethiopian community, which resulted in protests earlier this year.

# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:42

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 02:34

Ultramega: Jul 9, 2004

Goddamn, that guy's screams are earsplitting.

# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:54

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

team overhead smash posted:

A few hundred. 50,000. Well your tendency to view arabic people as inherently violent is an issue you should deal with.

50,000? Do you mean to say that only 1% of the Palestinian refugee population would take advantage of a right of return? There are five million Palestinian refugees, compared to the three million or so Syrian refugees that Europe is currently throwing a fit about.

Anyway. It looks like Obama's getting a little less polite about the Iran deal opposition, now that he's got the votes he needs - he's stating openly that Israel is more powerful than Iran, and suggesting that Jewish members of his administration have been accused of being anti-semites. I imagine Netanyahu must be pissed.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4696451,00.html

quote:

WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama continued in attempts at reassuring critics over a recent nuclear deal signed with Iran, telling the Forward in an interview published on Monday that Israel, the US and Gulf States would maintain military superiority over the Islamic Republic for decades to come.

The president said even after the nuclear deal ends in a decade, "They would still be subject to what's called the additional protocol - a whole range of inspection mechanisms that are in place so that we would know if they were dashing for a bomb."

Obama said that future presidents will retain a military option to deal with a nuclear Iran, saying, "They will still be a military power that is far weaker than the United States - and for that matter, will be weaker than Israel."

Obama was asked in the interview with the major Jewish-American publication whether it hurt him personally when people say he's anti-Semitic.

"Oh, of course," Obama said. "And there's not a smidgeon of evidence for it, other than the fact that there have been times when I've disagreed with a particular Israeli government's position on a particular issue."

The president added, though, that he's "probably more offended when I hear members of my administration who themselves are Jewish being attacked. You saw this historically sometimes in the African-American community, where there's a difference on policy and somebody starts talking about, 'Well, you're not black enough,' or 'You're selling out.' And that, I think, is always a dangerous place to go."

Obama didn't mention any specific critics or targets by name.

Asked to whom the president was referring, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Monday mentioned former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's charge that the nuclear deal was like "marching the Israelis to the door of the oven," a reference to the Holocaust. Earnest added: "It's certainly not the only example of the kind of political rhetoric that certainly the president and others find objectionable."

Obama's Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who is Jewish, was heckled this summer at a Jewish-themed conference in New York when he defended the nuclear deal and spoke of the administration's support for Israel. Dan Shapiro, the US ambassador to Israel, has received "threatening letters related to the Iran deal," according to a US official, who was not authorized to discuss the issue and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Obama, in the Forward interview, said that while those who care about Israel have an obligation to be honest about what they think, "you don't win the debate by suggesting that the other person has bad motives. That's, I think, not just consistent with fair play; I think it's consistent with the best of the Jewish tradition."

Secretary of State John Kerry, the chief US diplomat in the negotiations with Iran, is to make a speech in Philadelphia on Wednesday on the importance of the agreement to US national security, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Monday.

On a lighter note, Obama was asked about his bagel of choice.

He described himself as "always a big poppy seed guy." As for toppings, he added: "lox and capers OK, but generally just your basic schmear," referring to a smear of cream cheese.

On top of that, American media seems to be buying it. Forward, in commenting on that interview, made the kind of commentary Netanyahu doesn't want to see in American Jewish media:
http://forward.com/news/320094/in-historic-interview-with-the-forward-barack-obama-speaks-to-american-jews/

quote:

It occurred to me that whether these answers are convincing also depends on the context with which we view Iran. Thanks to the rhetoric of those opposed to this deal � and, in many instances, to any deal � Iran has ironically grown in stature in our minds, as a nation with the singular ability to threaten our way of life and Israel�s very existence as a Jewish state. And those who don�t see it as the embodiment of evil are ridiculed as naive or ignorant.

But some perspective is in order here. I�m reminded of an interview my colleague Larry Cohler-Esses conducted on his groundbreaking trip to Iran last month . A member of the Revolutionary Guards Corps was baffled when Cohler-Esses told him that Americans feared the Guards� fierce military reputation.

�America is a rich country with advanced technology, a huge army, enormous size and a large population,� the guard said. �Iran is a small country with a small army, much less developed technology and much poorer. Why would Americans be afraid?�

# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:50

Dance The Mutation: Jul 27, 2011

VitalSigns posted:

"You effete Westerners"
*begs for billions in military aid to fight dudes with piss bottle rockets*

*checkmate Zionists*

Broken Mind posted:

Which part of what he said is delusional? Tripoli seems to fall in the "some of the countries that did are way too hosed up right now to spare any money or accept any immigrants (for example, Iraq)".

Also, it is rather rude to call Israel a region without morality (which you have to be saying because otherwise you did not respond to the moral claims about Israel's behavior).

The entire premise of the idea is delusional. No Mizrahim is going to go back to those war-torn poo poo hole countries. Yet, you expect hundreds of thousands of people to overflow a developed country.

Here's a shocking idea. I don't think there is any morality in killing 2000 civilians in the July war. However, the only way Israel will exist in the region is to show all the other lunatics that Israel is more crazy than they are and does not care. I'm not optimistic at all. If people want to engage in peace with Israel, then by all means, engage in peace, it's going very well for Jordan and Egypt. However, Gaza is not interested in peace. Bombing Gaza isn't going to help bring peace forward but you know what? gently caress Hamas. I'm sure half of you support Hamas though ("they are a just providing civil services!! Israel is an Apartheid country!!" I straight up looked at some of your post histories and saw references that claims Hezbollah was fighting a defensive war in 2006...)

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

It seems you are again missing the point that people won't be forced to go anywhere, only that be allowed to do so if they want. You can stay right where you are, so don't pretend that leaving Tel Aviv is a reason for opposing an IP peace deal.

And if "effete Western intellectuals" is the best posting you can come up with it doesn't seem we are missing much.

I oppose the "right of return" and this forum's even more delusion bi-directional right of return. If either or is an absolute condition on your idea of peace, then there will never be peace. No one wants to leave Tel Aviv. The issue is that most Jews don't want a bunch of Arabs to come into Tel Aviv.

By the way man, you're missing a portrait of Che Gueverra above your Al-Aqsa gun.

Main Paineframe posted:

No, I never said they'd do that. I said that the option might very well open up for them to choose to do so, if they wanted. If I put too much focus on the fact that they probably would not, as many Mizrahi emigrated to Israel willingly and have little desire to return, then somebody would be calling me an anti-semite and accusing me of trying to minimize and excuse the involvement of Arab countries in the Mizrahi exodus from Arab countries to Israel. That's why so many people try to draw a false equivalence between the Mizrahi and the Palestinians - so they can claim that it's anti-semitic to support a Palestinian a right of return without supporting the same for the Mizrahi, even though Mizrahi Jews typically don't want a right of return.

That's also why hyperbole and claims of racism should have so little place in an I/P debate - it pushes people to dance around facts to avoid clashing with too many hyperbolic narratives, since narratives tend to derail things and run off with the conversation.

Maybe the problem is the right of return itself? Maybe it's time to move on and consider other options. As long as Israel is a Jewish majority Jewish country, the right of return is not an option.

team overhead smash posted:

It is a right to return, not a duty to return. The right to return allows people to stay in the country that has become their home and receive compensation rather than returning to their historic country of origin. Is is pretty much unequivocally better for your family to have the right of return than to not have it.

Yeah, it's unequivocally better to have a bunch of hostile Arabs flood the country and the Iranian government will reimburse the Persian Jews for the traumas they went through in 1979. Oh wait, that's not politically correct of me to generalize people. All of the Arabs are peaceful and kind and loving to Jews and want to join with the Jews and build Israel together in a form of bi-national brotherhood where Israel will be a total success story with no civil war (never mind that the Arabs themselves can't even live with each other: see Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, etc.).

Main Paineframe posted:

Why do you think that only angry Palestinians would use a right of return? Or do you just think that all Palestinians are angry? Either way, there's already plenty of angry people who have no desire to behave civilly in Israel - so many, in fact, that they're streaming over the border into the West Bank where they have more freedom to act uncivilly against Palestinians.

I've never seen a single Palestinian "refugee" (keep in mind, they weren't born in Palestine) that has expressed reasonable views in person or in writing. Please find me 10 counter-examples of Palestinian refugees expressing positive and reasonable views of Israel. I have met Palestinians that actually live in Israel or Palestine that are far more reasonable than the "refugees". Also, just so we're clear, my definition of refugee does not get passed down generation by generation. I am not a refugee of Libya or Poland.

As for the uncivil people in Israel, you've got me. Seriously gently caress those people. If I was the dictator, I'd order the army against them. I consider them more of a threat to Israel than the Arabs. I'm sure we can agree on that.

team overhead smash posted:

A few hundred. 50,000. Well your tendency to view arabic people as inherently violent is an issue you should deal with.

You have data to back this up or any sort of source? Here is one lovely article with no data: http://972mag.com/sentenced-to-life-at-birth-what-do-palestinian-refugees-want/86902/

I think every Palestinian that is not in the USA or Europe would go back. Every Palestinian across the Middle East would go back and that's millions. Why would any Palestinian stay in Lebanon where they have no citizenship when they could go to Israel?

Yeah, you're right. I'll leave in ideal land where people aren't violent and it's just a few bad apples that caused the Second Intifada. Where do you live? You would have no problem walking around anywhere in Israel but you'd have a lot of problems walking around most of the Middle East. Why is that???

Ultramega posted:

No I think the real reason you stopped posting is because so many posters were so quick to dismantle your bullshit viewpoint. I think it's dogshit how your family was treated by the libyans and that doesn't give their descendents(you)some unassailable moral authority you can invoke whenever someone brings up how awfully palestinians get treated. Like, do you even comprehend the amount of suffering that is meted out to the populace of the occupied territories? Also lol at you resorting to the ad hominem, 'effette western intellectuals' line; presumably since you're part of the proud working class tradition of sephardim, right? Or am I assigning some untrue value to you, a stranger, as well?

Also that too. But you've proven beyond doubt you're the type that allows generalizations to inform your actions, so.

I have a job (don't worry, I donate some money to AIPAC

). It takes a long time to reply to you all. You people think you're so righteous but talk is cheap. It doesn't give me moral authority. The point of bringing it up is to remind you just like the Palestinians always remind everyone else that these things happened. Just as the Palestinians were displaced, so were tons of Jews. Consider it a India / Pakistan population transfer. Stop pushing an idea that will never work. A lot of my family has found great success in Israel in blue collar industries despite being brown. I am in the USA. I studied statistics, computer science, and quantitative biology. I call you effete because you people believe in a "right of return to Libya". That is why you are effete. The fact that you even consider such a proposition shows how out of touch your ideas are.

Can't wait for the replies.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:00

kustomkarkommando: Oct 22, 2012

Dance The Mutation posted:

This is basically why I stopped posting here. You people are delusional. My family really is going to leave Tel Avi:

and go back to Tripoli:

Your position is not morally courageous or righteous but typical of people who apply some broad sweeping morality to a world and region with no morality. You try to pretend in this thread that Israel and Palestine is some tiny vacuum in the Middle East but it is not. This conflict is part of a broad web of events that sweeps the Middle East. Ignoring how Arab countries act and treat their own citizens because "we are talking about Israel and Palestine" is so foolish. Most of you have probably never been to Israel but the people who are not Ashkenazi geniuses and can get jobs as software engineers in the Bay Area are not going to give up this land that their families built on without a fight and are not going to accept a short sighted solution forced upon them by effete Western intellectuals.

While the violation of human rights is the norm rather than the exception in most of Middle East's Arab ruled states, the spotlight remains on Israel. The accussation of racism are a most effective part of a campaign to play on liberal guilt and to condition hatred for Israel. While it is true that there are many things wrong in Israel, the facts are sensationalized and distorted. A cheap political campaign to get well-meaning (though not as well-informed) white liberal votes, is being run by using the Jewish ``Zionist regime'' in Jerusalem as a unifying issue.

Once vibrant, the Arab ruled states have now disintegrated into a political, social and economic nightmare. Under colonial rule, these states produced 95 percent of their own food. Today, despite their richness in natural resources and manpower, these countries increasingly have become beggar states.

Many of these states had one man one vote - but historically, only once. Those one-time elections were followed by one-party rule, or military dictatorships. In many countries it is practically impossible to vote the top leaders out of office. Any opposition always somehow just seems to disappear. The people are absorbed by the institutions of the ruling party.

There are few checks on arbitrary action by rulers, and corruption generally prevails because some of the major guarantees against public malpractice - a strong opposition and a free press - are largely absent. Such is the case with Obama's friend King Salman, who's family has been in power in Saudia Arabia since independence. He actually claims to have 100 percent support in his country.

There are endless lists of human rights violations - mounting atrocities of Arabk against Arab. Political prisoners are tortured in Syria. There are 200,000 to 300,000 people behind barbed wire in Jordan. Escaped Iranian detainees tell of torture - in some cases until death. The list goes on and on, and yet it never seems to get the attention of the media or the anti-Israel campaigns.

Why is Israel so harshly condemned while completely different standards apply to the rest of the Middle East?

Looking at the facts of the Middle East, is this the ``freedom,'' the ``democracy,'' the ``decent life,'' ``a better life for the people of Palestine and Israel'' that critics of Israel have to offer?

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:18

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

Dance The Mutation posted:

*snip*

Your country is an arrogant little puppet-state that's able to pull off its bullshit because of that "effeteness". Should the mask fall off the beast, everyone will be free to admit that you've been bluffing on one pair of queens, in a no-limit game. Just as long as we're saying evil, semi-nonsensical things with a smile.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:21

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

Effectronica posted:

Your country is an arrogant little puppet-state that's able to pull off its bullshit because of that "effeteness". Should the mask fall off the beast, everyone will be free to admit that you've been bluffing on one pair of queens, in a no-limit game. Just as long as we're saying evil, semi-nonsensical things with a smile.

My understanding is that he is not an Israeli citizen, so it's inappropriate to call it "his country".

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:23

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Dance The Mutation posted:

I oppose the "right of return" and this forum's even more delusion bi-directional right of return. If either or is an absolute condition on your idea of peace, then there will never be peace. No one wants to leave Tel Aviv. The issue is that most Jews don't want a bunch of Arabs to come into Tel Aviv.

The bi-directional right-of-return is something commonly brought up by people who oppose a Palestinian right of return, saying that because Mizrahim don't get a right of return, Palestinians shouldn't get one either. I don't think the Mizrahim want a right of return, but if it's a question of fairness I see no problem with it being on offer! If you disagree with Mizrahim having the same rights as Palestinians, that's fine with me, it's not like I care what you think of Arab Jews, but you shouldn't blame us for coming up with the idea of giving Mizrahim the same restitution that Palestinians would get. It's people like Netanyahu who suggested such a ridiculous thing, in attempts to blame right of return supporters of having a double standard; I'm just saying that if that's what they really want, who am I to say no to it?

quote:

Yeah, it's unequivocally better to have a bunch of hostile Arabs flood the country and the Iranian government will reimburse the Persian Jews for the traumas they went through in 1979. Oh wait, that's not politically correct of me to generalize people. All of the Arabs are peaceful and kind and loving to Jews and want to join with the Jews and build Israel together in a form of bi-national brotherhood where Israel will be a total success story with no civil war (never mind that the Arabs themselves can't even live with each other: see Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, etc.).

Ah, gotta love that casual racism. There are plenty of Arabs who are, in fact, peaceful. Just as there are plenty of Jews who are, in fact, violent. There's thousands of attacks against Palestinian lives and property in the West Bank every year.

quote:

I've never seen a single Palestinian "refugee" (keep in mind, they weren't born in Palestine) that has expressed reasonable views in person or in writing. Please find me 10 counter-examples of Palestinian refugees expressing positive and reasonable views of Israel. I have met Palestinians that actually live in Israel or Palestine that are far more reasonable than the "refugees". Also, just so we're clear, my definition of refugee does not get passed down generation by generation. I am not a refugee of Libya or Poland.

Have you looked? It's trivial to find if you bother to look (it's not as if "elderly mothers sitting in a refugee camp in Lebanon" are exactly a hotbed of terrorism and violence), so I'm not really interested in entertaining your ignorance.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:23

Dance The Mutation: Jul 27, 2011

kustomkarkommando posted:

While the violation of human rights is the norm rather than the exception in most of Middle East's Arab ruled states, the spotlight remains on Israel. The accussation of racism are a most effective part of a campaign to play on liberal guilt and to condition hatred for Israel. While it is true that there are many things wrong in Israel, the facts are sensationalized and distorted. A cheap political campaign to get well-meaning (though not as well-informed) white liberal votes, is being run by using the Jewish ``Zionist regime'' in Jerusalem as a unifying issue.

Once vibrant, the Arab ruled states have now disintegrated into a political, social and economic nightmare. Under colonial rule, these states produced 95 percent of their own food. Today, despite their richness in natural resources and manpower, these countries increasingly have become beggar states.

Many of these states had one man one vote - but historically, only once. Those one-time elections were followed by one-party rule, or military dictatorships. In many countries it is practically impossible to vote the top leaders out of office. Any opposition always somehow just seems to disappear. The people are absorbed by the institutions of the ruling party.

There are few checks on arbitrary action by rulers, and corruption generally prevails because some of the major guarantees against public malpractice - a strong opposition and a free press - are largely absent. Such is the case with Obama's friend King Salman, who's family has been in power in Saudia Arabia since independence. He actually claims to have 100 percent support in his country.

There are endless lists of human rights violations - mounting atrocities of Arabk against Arab. Political prisoners are tortured in Syria. There are 200,000 to 300,000 people behind barbed wire in Jordan. Escaped Iranian detainees tell of torture - in some cases until death. The list goes on and on, and yet it never seems to get the attention of the media or the anti-Israel campaigns.

Why is Israel so harshly condemned while completely different standards apply to the rest of the Middle East?

Looking at the facts of the Middle East, is this the ``freedom,'' the ``democracy,'' the ``decent life,'' ``a better life for the people of Palestine and Israel'' that critics of Israel have to offer?

I wasn't sure if this was a copy / paste or not but I checked out your post history to verify. I'm glad that I've touched a nerve that you talk about me in another thread.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:25

Dance The Mutation: Jul 27, 2011

Absurd Alhazred posted:

My understanding is that he is not an Israeli citizen, so it's inappropriate to call it "his country".

Edit: I am wrong. Sorry.

Dance The Mutation fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:25

kustomkarkommando: Oct 22, 2012

Dance The Mutation posted:

I wasn't sure if this was a copy / paste or not but I checked out your post history to verify. I'm glad that I've touched a nerve that you talk about me in another thread.

I have been found out!

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:28

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

The Nixon strategy of looking like a violent, mentally unbalanced psychopath a)only works for individual human beings, unless you're dealing with racists, b)failed to work the last time it was tried, and c)is self-defeating, because if it looks like the Israeli government is irrational and ready to start WW3, that just makes reenacting Masada all the more reasonable a proposition.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:29

kustomkarkommando: Oct 22, 2012

Dance The Mutation posted:

I wasn't sure if this was a copy / paste or not but I checked out your post history to verify. I'm glad that I've touched a nerve that you talk about me in another thread.

To explain the joke that is a marginally edited version of a famous editorial defending late-stage South African Apartheid, many of the arguments you've made in your last posts (the failure of Arab states to manage themselves, fear of being flooded with a vengeful hateful people, appealing to the development of Israel as a testament to it's superiority) are almost verbatim repetitions of arguments deployed by South African apologists in defence of white minority rule.

I found the similarity remarkable.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:38

Dance The Mutation: Jul 27, 2011

Effectronica posted:

Your country is an arrogant little puppet-state that's able to pull off its bullshit because of that "effeteness". Should the mask fall off the beast, everyone will be free to admit that you've been bluffing on one pair of queens, in a no-limit game. Just as long as we're saying evil, semi-nonsensical things with a smile.

See, I'd rather you just be honest. Instead of arguing on the internet with people who pretend they really love human rights more than they hate Israel, I'd rather just argue with people on the internet who express their true opinions. Tell me, what's going to happen when the mask falls off the beast? What would have happened if the Arabs won any of the wars?

Main Paineframe posted:

The bi-directional right-of-return is something commonly brought up by people who oppose a Palestinian right of return, saying that because Mizrahim don't get a right of return, Palestinians shouldn't get one either. I don't think the Mizrahim want a right of return, but if it's a question of fairness I see no problem with it being on offer! If you disagree with Mizrahim having the same rights as Palestinians, that's fine with me, it's not like I care what you think of Arab Jews, but you shouldn't blame us for coming up with the idea of giving Mizrahim the same restitution that Palestinians would get. It's people like Netanyahu who suggested such a ridiculous thing, in attempts to blame right of return supporters of having a double standard; I'm just saying that if that's what they really want, who am I to say no to it?

Ah, gotta love that casual racism. There are plenty of Arabs who are, in fact, peaceful. Just as there are plenty of Jews who are, in fact, violent. There's thousands of attacks against Palestinian lives and property in the West Bank every year.

Have you looked? It's trivial to find if you bother to look (it's not as if "elderly mothers sitting in a refugee camp in Lebanon" are exactly a hotbed of terrorism and violence), so I'm not really interested in entertaining your ignorance.

Yeah, I've looked. It doesn't exist. Please prove me wrong and entertain my ignorance. You can call me racist all you want. You can go to Yemen or Iraq and walk around all the peaceful people there while screaming how racist Dance The Mutation is. Try it out.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:40

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

Dance The Mutation posted:

See, I'd rather you just be honest. Instead of arguing on the internet with people who pretend they really love human rights more than they hate Israel, I'd rather just argue with people on the internet who express their true opinions. Tell me, what's going to happen when the mask falls off the beast? What would have happened if the Arabs won any of the wars?

What would happen is that the US starts treating you like a subject nation rather than an ally. So when you gently caress up and sink an American ship, that brings violent reprisals. When you attempt to maintain an independent nuclear arsenal that's not under our thumb? Blood flows in the streets and bunkers until they're under American control. Empires maintain power through the implied threat of violence, and Israel is a province of the American empire. What has kept this violence from slaughtering the innocent and the guilty alike is a series of delusions, in the form of "effeteness"/"queerness", the intrusion of the feminine world into the masculine one. So, let's all hope that that never happens, because I am an unenlightened fool who yet believes that Israelis and Lebanese and Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians are all human alike. Maybe you dream of such violence.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:47

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

These people sure are angry that we're ethnically cleansing them, so it's too dangerous not to finish the job now!

# ? Sep 5, 2015 00:47

Dance The Mutation: Jul 27, 2011

kustomkarkommando posted:

To explain the joke that is a marginally edited version of a famous editorial defending late-stage South African Apartheid, many of the arguments you've made in your last posts (the failure of Arab states to manage themselves, fear of being flooded with a vengeful hateful people, appealing to the development of Israel as a testament to it's superiority) are almost verbatim repetitions of arguments deployed by South African apologists in defence of white minority rule.

I found the similarity remarkable.

Wow, you got me! I walked right into your trap! Zionism = Racism = Apartheid. Checkmate. Let's pack it up boys and go back to Poland and Yemen, DND has won this one. I am defending an advanced nation state against a bunch of less advanced nation states that regularly threaten to annihilate it, cynically take advantage of people like you to highlight "racism" in the country and so. I want Israel to remain a majority of Jews and to maintain a Jewish character. You could honestly use that same argument if I was defending any European or Asian nation state to retain it's ethnic majority and character. Everyone in this thread except a small minority want Israel to absorb a ton of Arabs and lose that character. If I argue against that, you will label me a racist.

By the way, Israel is not South Africa even close. You can pretend and scream apartheid until you are blue in the face but it's not. Apartheid is over and that's good but please, that didn't turn out well. Why don't you try an experiment in heterogenous population mixing in one of the many Muslim countries like Lebanon (wait, didn't it used to be heterogenous?????????)

Effectronica posted:

What would happen is that the US starts treating you like a subject nation rather than an ally. So when you gently caress up and sink an American ship, that brings violent reprisals. When you attempt to maintain an independent nuclear arsenal that's not under our thumb? Blood flows in the streets and bunkers until they're under American control. Empires maintain power through the implied threat of violence, and Israel is a province of the American empire. What has kept this violence from slaughtering the innocent and the guilty alike is a series of delusions, in the form of "effeteness"/"queerness", the intrusion of the feminine world into the masculine one. So, let's all hope that that never happens, because I am an unenlightened fool who yet believes that Israelis and Lebanese and Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians are all human alike. Maybe you dream of such violence.

You accuse me of dreaming in violence, the irony. Bloods flowing throughout the middle east buddy, but we're arguing in a thread about how evil Israel is

Lebanese and Palestinians are people yeah, I just think it's best if Israel and the Palestinians were completely divorced for few generations then we can start talking about bi-national states.

VitalSigns posted:

These people sure are angry that we're ethnically cleansing them, so it's too dangerous not to finish the job now!

I know!! Let's let a ton of these angry people into the country that fought the war against their grand father's 50 years ago!! This can't go wrong at all because in America we don't kill each other over ideas and beliefs!!

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:05

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

Dance The Mutation posted:

Wow, you got me! I walked right into your trap! Zionism = Racism = Apartheid. Checkmate. Let's pack it up boys and go back to Poland and Yemen, DND has won this one. I am defending an advanced nation state against a bunch of less advanced nation states that regularly threaten to annihilate it, cynically take advantage of people like you to highlight "racism" in the country and so. I want Israel to remain a majority of Jews and to maintain a Jewish character. You could honestly use that same argument if I was defending any European or Asian nation state to retain it's ethnic majority and character. Everyone in this thread except a small minority want Israel to absorb a ton of Arabs and lose that character. If I argue against that, you will label me a racist.

By the way, Israel is not South Africa even close. You can pretend and scream apartheid until you are blue in the face but it's not. Apartheid is over and that's good but please, that didn't turn out well. Why don't you try an experiment in heterogenous population mixing in one of the many Muslim countries like Lebanon (wait, didn't it used to be heterogenous?????????)

You accuse me of dreaming in violence, the irony. Bloods flowing throughout the middle east buddy, but we're arguing in a thread about how evil Israel is Lebanese and Palestinians are people yeah, I just think it's best if Israel and the Palestinians were completely divorced for few generations then we can start talking about bi-national states.

I didn't accuse you. You need to learn how to read effectively if you're going to be anything other than the sort of crude racist people don't believe exists anymore. Or maybe that's my "trap", trying in vain to turn you away from dreams of stasis and changelessness. But life will still go on, within or without you.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:10

kustomkarkommando: Oct 22, 2012

Dance The Mutation posted:

Wow, you got me! I walked right into your trap! Zionism = Racism = Apartheid. Checkmate. Let's pack it up boys and go back to Poland and Yemen, DND has won this one. I am defending an advanced nation state against a bunch of less advanced nation states that regularly threaten to annihilate it, cynically take advantage of people like you to highlight "racism" in the country and so. I want Israel to remain a majority of Jews and to maintain a Jewish character. You could honestly use that same argument if I was defending any European or Asian nation state to retain it's ethnic majority and character. Everyone in this thread except a small minority want Israel to absorb a ton of Arabs and lose that character. If I argue against that, you will label me a racist.

By the way, Israel is not South Africa even close. You can pretend and scream apartheid until you are blue in the face but it's not. Apartheid is over and that's good but please, that didn't turn out well. Why don't you try an experiment in heterogenous population mixing in one of the many Muslim countries like Lebanon (wait, didn't it used to be heterogenous?????????)

You are advancing an argument that Arabs are an inherently barbarous people who know only violence, I find that to be despicably racist and would challenge any person advocating such an opinion about any race.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:11

Xandu: Feb 19, 2006; It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.

Interesting op-ed in the times on all the militant American settlers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/israeli-terrorists-born-in-the-usa.html?smid=tw-share

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:43

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Dance The Mutation posted:

I know!! Let's let a ton of these angry people into the country that fought the war against their grand father's 50 years ago!! This can't go wrong at all because in America we don't kill each other over ideas and beliefs!!

Look we have mistreated the blacks so long that we can't stop now, they're too mad

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:48

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

VitalSigns posted:

Look we have mistreated the blacks so long that we can't stop now, they're too mad

I'm pretty sure if anyone is ethnically cleansing Palestinians in Syria, it's the Syrian government, Hezbollah, ISIS, etc, rather than Israel.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:53

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

Are we sure dance the mutation isn't a migf parachute? Has he posted about Chicago at all? This feels familiar

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:57

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Are we sure dance the mutation isn't a migf parachute? Has he posted about Chicago at all? This feels familiar

I really don't think that ascribing parachute status to people with views you don't like is any more conducive to an interesting discussion than when everybody too Zionistesque was dismissed as a paid Israeli government shill.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 01:59

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I'm pretty sure if anyone is ethnically cleansing Palestinians in Syria, it's the Syrian government, Hezbollah, ISIS, etc, rather than Israel.

I guess those Palestinians just magically appeared in Syria one day, how mysterious

E: come on, are you really going to bat for the guy claiming that resentment from past human rights violations justifies ongoing human rights violations. And do you think pretending the Nakba didn't happen is the way to do that.

E2: Complaining that Syria is getting a pass and mean Americans are ganging up against Israel is tiresome. Which country is receiving billions in foreign aid, and which country has been threatened with sanctions and bombings. The US has been calling for the leader of which country to step down? I really don't think you actually want America to apply the same standards to your country that we do to Syria.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 02:03

Broken Mind: Jan 27, 2009

Dance The Mutation posted:

The entire premise of the idea is delusional. No Mizrahim is going to go back to those war-torn poo poo hole countries. Yet, you expect hundreds of thousands of people to overflow a developed country.

Here's a shocking idea. I don't think there is any morality in killing 2000 civilians in the July war. However, the only way Israel will exist in the region is to show all the other lunatics that Israel is more crazy than they are and does not care. I'm not optimistic at all. If people want to engage in peace with Israel, then by all means, engage in peace, it's going very well for Jordan and Egypt. However, Gaza is not interested in peace. Bombing Gaza isn't going to help bring peace forward but you know what? gently caress Hamas. I'm sure half of you support Hamas though ("they are a just providing civil services!! Israel is an Apartheid country!!" I straight up looked at some of your post histories and saw references that claims Hezbollah was fighting a defensive war in 2006...)

First, we are discussing what people are allowed to do or have the right to do, not whether or not they will act upon those capacities. There is no way to move from "the Mizrahi don't want to go back to where they were kicked/fled from" to "therefore, the Palestinians should not be allowed to return to where they were removed from". That is like a vegetarian trying to claim that no one should eat meat, but only on the grounds that it is because they personally don't want to.

Second, you acknowledge that bombing Gaza doesn't help the situation, yet support it anyway because of one group that exists inside of it? Your callous disregard to the innocents killed because "gently caress Hamas", when it doesn't even further the peace process is quite frankly appalling.

Next, why are you claiming that Israel is crazy or a lunatic?

Edit: Spelling

# ? Sep 5, 2015 02:14

Fuck You And Diebold: Sep 15, 2004; by Athanatos

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I really don't think that ascribing parachute status to people with views you don't like is any more conducive to an interesting discussion than when everybody too Zionistesque was dismissed as a paid Israeli government shill.

If it walks like a migf and posts like a migf... and the fact that you think their posting is "conducive to an interesting discussion" is pretty telling, considering the posts.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 02:16

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Broken Mind posted:

First, we are discussing what people are allowed to do or have the right to do, not whether or not they will act upon those capacities. There is no way to move from "the Mizrahi don't want to go back to where they were kicked/fled from" to "therefore, the Palestinians should not be allowed to return to where they were removed from". That is like a vegetarian trying to claim that no one should eat meat, but only on the grounds that it is because they personally don't want to.

Or a Kentucky county clerk not wanting to issue marriage licenses.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 02:24

Neurolimal: Nov 3, 2012

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

If it walks like a migf and posts like a migf... and the fact that you think their posting is "conducive to an interesting discussion" is pretty telling, considering the posts.

The only thing it's telling of is that he wants an active thread that meets D&D standards.

No matter how tiresome it may be to debunk the same arguments. It looks better for pro-equality posters to address pro-apartheid posters' arguments, than to lump them all into one big boogeyman pile.

AA has already shown that he will punish posters who argue disingenuously so as to accuse other posters of being bigots or start a pointless looping argument, so there is no reason not to engage new posters.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 03:20

Kim Jong Il: Aug 16, 2003

VitalSigns posted:

I guess those Palestinians just magically appeared in Syria one day, how mysterious

E: come on, are you really going to bat for the guy claiming that resentment from past human rights violations justifies ongoing human rights violations. And do you think pretending the Nakba didn't happen is the way to do that.

E2: Complaining that Syria is getting a pass and mean Americans are ganging up against Israel is tiresome. Which country is receiving billions in foreign aid, and which country has been threatened with sanctions and bombings. The US has been calling for the leader of which country to step down? I really don't think you actually want America to apply the same standards to your country that we do to Syria.

Except for years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, anti-Zionists championed Assad and Hezbollah as heroically resisting Israel, with the majority of that having nothing to do with the 2006 war. This is also comically ignores how both groups engaged in mass butchery, including killing more Palestinians than Netanyahu, Shamir, Begin, or Sharon could even dream of.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 04:24

Baloogan: Dec 5, 2004; Fun Shoe

Neurolimal posted:

AA has already shown that he will punish posters who fail to regurgitate the d&d hive mind mantra. Or because he has blood coming out of his whatever.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 04:31

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Kim Jong Il posted:

Except for years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, anti-Zionists championed Assad and Hezbollah as heroically resisting Israel, with the majority of that having nothing to do with the 2006 war. This is also comically ignores how both groups engaged in mass butchery, including killing more Palestinians than Netanyahu, Shamir, Begin, or Sharon could even dream of.

Excuse me Stalin killed more people, so that means everything Lebanon, Syria, and Israel have done is fine.

OK but seriously "No Assad is the evil one, Israel is only Assad-Lite" is a puzzling defense of Israel.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 04:41

Panzeh: Nov 27, 2006; "..The high ground"

Dance The Mutation posted:

You accuse me of dreaming in violence, the irony. Bloods flowing throughout the middle east buddy, but we're arguing in a thread about how evil Israel is Lebanese and Palestinians are people yeah, I just think it's best if Israel and the Palestinians were completely divorced for few generations then we can start talking about bi-national states.

A divorce would be fine if it was a divorce as in a real palestinian state and not one bisected by settlements with its borders, foreign policy, and tax collection controlled by Israel.

That's not much of a divorce.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 05:08

SyHopeful: Jun 24, 2007; May an IDF soldier mistakenly gun down my own parents and face no repercussions i'd totally be cool with it cuz accidents are unavoidable in a low-intensity conflict, man

Kim Jong Il posted:

Except for years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, anti-Zionists championed Assad and Hezbollah as heroically resisting Israel, with the majority of that having nothing to do with the 2006 war. This is also comically ignores how both groups engaged in mass butchery, including killing more Palestinians than Netanyahu, Shamir, Begin, or Sharon could even dream of.

Hey your "B-B-BUT SYRIA" shtick had returned! Finally run out of deflections and had to dust it off eh?

# ? Sep 5, 2015 05:39

The Insect Court: Nov 22, 2012; by FactsAreUseless

VitalSigns posted:

OK but seriously "No Assad is the evil one, Israel is only Assad-Lite" is a puzzling defense of Israel.

It's less a defense of Israel than an indictment of the motives and reliability of anti-Zionists who foam at the mouth when Israel kills a few hundred Palestinian civilians during a war with Hamas but shrug when Syria and Iran kill tens of thousands of innocents just next door.

But no, it's not an effective defense of Israel. It's potentially a useful remedy to the hysterical charges that the Zionist Entity is a monstrous Nazi Apartheid terror colony, but the sort of people who have bought into that sort of delusion aren't likely to be persuaded by rational argumentation anyways.

Main Paineframe posted:

That's also why hyperbole and claims of racism should have so little place in an I/P debate

Claims of antisemitism should have little place in an I/P debate because antisemitism should have no place in an I/P debate. Given that is hardly the case now, and given the willingness of many anti-Zionists to tolerate or ignore antisemitic fellow travelers or to traffic in barely disguised antisemitic tropes without the least bit of scrutiny or self-awareness, then perhaps instead of whining that, say, BDS is being accused of antisemitic then perhaps you should be insisting that BDS make a clean break from its antisemitic elements.

The Insect Court fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 06:24

Kim Jong Il: Aug 16, 2003

VitalSigns posted:

Excuse me Stalin killed more people, so that means everything Lebanon, Syria, and Israel have done is fine.

OK but seriously "No Assad is the evil one, Israel is only Assad-Lite" is a puzzling defense of Israel.

It's not a defense of Israel per se. I get saying Assad is unspeakably horrible and moving on. There was a significant cadre who insisted until the civil war started that Israel was far worse than Assad and Hezbollah, and there remain a much smaller group who still do.

# ? Sep 5, 2015 06:54

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Kim Jong Il posted:

It's not a defense of Israel per se. I get saying Assad is unspeakably horrible and moving on. There was a significant cadre who insisted until the civil war started that Israel was far worse than Assad and Hezbollah, and there remain a much smaller group who still do.

Sure and there is merit to this when you're talking to an Assad apologist, all right. But bringing it up out of the blue and ascribing pro-Assad views to anyone who talks about restitution for people suffering from Israel's war crimes is just a deflection.

Much like how in US politics anyone who criticizes American torture policies is immediately tarred by the right as an apologist for Al Qaeda/Saddam/ISIS/whoever else, you must hate America if you're talking about waterboarding when ISIS is beheading people.

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 08:23

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Dance The Mutation posted:

By the way, Israel is not South Africa even close. You can pretend and scream apartheid until you are blue in the face but it's not. Apartheid is over and that's good but please, that didn't turn out well. Why don't you try an experiment in heterogenous population mixing in one of the many Muslim countries like Lebanon (wait, didn't it used to be heterogenous?????????)

Israel doesn't need to be South Africa to be an apartheid nation. In addition, Israel's colonialism in the West Bank is more heinous then anything South Africa ever did.
http://i.imgur.com/L86hXg4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/gyKWqo3.jpg

Zionists are White South Africans in 1990, white Southerners in 1965, French Algerians in 1960, defending a nation and a system that has long since lost any semblance of morality in its conduct. In fact never really had much of it to begin with. Remember that every time you post in defense of racial supremacy and try to deflect it by saying "but other countries are bad too!!!" :qq:

EDIT: Lol at the assumption that there are no heterogenous Muslim countries

DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Sep 5, 2015

# ? Sep 5, 2015 11:15

Zulily Zoetrope: Jun 1, 2011; Muldoon

The Insect Court posted:

Claims of antisemitism should have little place in an I/P debate because antisemitism should have no place in an I/P debate. Given that is hardly the case now, and given the willingness of many anti-Zionists to tolerate or ignore antisemitic fellow travelers or to traffic in barely disguised antisemitic tropes without the least bit of scrutiny or self-awareness, then perhaps instead of whining that, say, BDS is being accused of antisemitic then perhaps you should be insisting that BDS make a clean break from its antisemitic elements.

How would you like to see an I/P debate be structured, given that your definition of anti-Semitism includes claiming that Palestinians are indigenous to Palestine and that indiscriminate slaughter of civilians is bad even when Syria exists?

# ? Sep 5, 2015 12:30

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 02:34

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Dance The Mutation posted:

Yeah, I've looked. It doesn't exist. Please prove me wrong and entertain my ignorance. You can call me racist all you want. You can go to Yemen or Iraq and walk around all the peaceful people there while screaming how racist Dance The Mutation is. Try it out.

Five seconds with Google and I was able to find no plenty of articles interviewing Palestinian refugees who just want to live peacefully in their homeland - something you claimed you had looked for and couldn't find.

http://972mag.com/sentenced-to-life-at-birth-what-do-palestinian-refugees-want/86902/

quote:

dust the humiliation off his clothes and shake hands with his captor.

The Palestinian refugees I spoke to are not willing to shake hands with their captors – at least not if another Palestinian is watching. Pride is the last thing they still own, the tenacity typical of those who have nothing to lose on one hand, and no hope of gaining anything on the other. But what I learned once the conversations became private is that many of those refugees would just like to live in peace with dignity, and for that they are willing to give a pardon that has never been asked of them. In fact, pressured with a thousand hypotheses of restitution, acknowledgement of guilt and requests for forgiveness, almost every Palestinian I spoke to is ready to shake that proverbial hand and finally start a life that has been kept suspended ever since they were born.

“If there’s peace, I’m the first person ready to go back,” says 75-year-old Adnan Abu-Dhubah, his determination looking unsteady on the wooden stick he uses for a cane. There is no handle on the stick, and with the weight of his body his palm is branded with a square wound. Mr. Abu-Dhubah has known little else than life in a camp. He is one of 30,000 refugees in the Gaza camp in Jerash, Jordan, living in squalid conditions, walking through mud and sewage every day. Like most poor people, Mr. Abu-Dhubah looks older than his age. But time inflicts a heavier load on Palestinian refugees, because unlike other poor people they are denied the most precious and immaterial of all commodities: the hope to overcome one’s condition. Palestinian refugees are sentenced to life at birth, and for many of them even a winning lottery ticket wouldn’t be enough to buy the right to own property, or enough education to become a lawyer or a doctor. Most of the 5 million refugees registered with UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in five different host countries live in similar or worse conditions, permanently deprived of most rights ascribed to the citizens of any country. There are more than 70 professions denied to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, for example, and over 80 of them in Jordan. In neither country can they work even as a taxi driver, for that would require a driver’s license and most of them cannot legally possess one. In Lebanon, even the materials necessary for building a refugee shack are regulated by law – bricks and a proper roof are too permanent, and thus illegal.

“The one who put us in this position is Israel – not Jordan, not Lebanon or any other Arab country. The Arab countries have not stood by us, it’s true, they have not fulfilled their duties towards the Palestinian, but I don’t want to mix the blame here,” says another resident of the Gaza camp, 40-year-old Faraj Chalhoub, father of eight children.

That is yet another catastrophe almost exclusive to the Palestinians. Because their expulsion is illegal under a number of international laws, and because such injustice has never been rectified, some countries fear that by accepting the refugees as citizens they would be helping Israel ‘erase the evidence.’ In their exceptionally miserable condition, Palestinian refugees are the poster-children of their tragedy, the living proof of Israeli crimes and the indelible evidence that will stay exposed for everyone to see until they are allowed to return.

“I wish I could go to smell the air of my country and die,” says 70-year-old Massioun, the wife of Mr. Abu-Dhubah, herself also using a wood stick as a cane, this time with a makeshift handle. All her brothers and sisters live in Palestine and they’ve been separated since 1967. Like all refugees in Jerash, Massioun is a victim of what they refer to as Nakbatein, or two catastrophes: her family was expelled twice, first from the village of Barbara in 1948, and then again from Gaza in 1967. Of the more than 2 million refugees registered in Jordan with UNRWA there are about 120,000 who suffered the same two Nakbas, and none got Jordanian citizenship, unlike the refugees who came in 1948.

...

In one of the houses I entered in Jerash, I was received by a very old couple sitting on the floor. They sleep, eat and sit every day on the cold and humid cement. The woman, who thinks she is older than 80, cares for her blind husband despite having a back that is completely bent forward, incapable of straightening up. She doesn’t show much interest in an interview, and whenever she hears the word Palestine she sobs. But she made good use of my presence by holding my arm so I could help her stand up off the floor and go to the toilet. She fights that battle every day, a constant struggle to overcome the minimum human necessities we perform without a thought. But that daily hardship does not diminish her desire to go back. It just keeps it alive. She tried to tell me about the time when she and her family were expelled, after their neighbors were killed. But her story was interrupted every five words by her breathing – words and breath would not come simultaneously – and in between them she would moan in pain, holding her stomach.

...

“The old will die, the young will forget.”

This maxim has been mistakenly attributed to David Ben-Gurion, but who said it is less relevant than who thinks it. And many right-wing Israeli politicians do. They hope Palestinians will not be as persistent and righteous as the survivors and victims of the Holocaust and their relatives were in seeking restitution and reparations.

When it comes to restitution, those two peoples are worlds apart. Unlike Palestinians, Jews have been extremely organized and unyielding in their claims for compensation and justice. Almost 70 years after the end of WWII, associations like the World Jewish Congress are still demanding changes in Germany’s laws to facilitate the recovery of art and utensils from Jewish property stolen by the Nazis. Austria, Holland and France have already worked in that direction, according to the WJC President Ronald S. Lauder. As recently as July 2013, the Associated Press reported on $1.3 billion paid by Swiss banks to the heirs of Jews who owned dormant bank accounts. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors are paid monthly stipends by the German government. And in May of 2013, the German government announced it was committing $1 billion for the home care of Holocaust survivors around the world. The deal was reached between the German Finance Ministry and another Jewish fund for victims of Nazi crimes, the Claims Conference. A keyword search on the Haaretz (one of the best-selling Israeli dailies) website shows an average of three articles every day with the word Holocaust in it.

Such a sense of justice seems to strike Israel as a victim, yet never as a perpetrator. But the orchestrated resolve for seeking WWII restitution has been inspiring Palestinian victims of the Nakba. They are educating themselves and establishing new institutions to preserve their history, to lobby for justice and to demand legal and financial restitution.

...

But while they have some help for survival, refugees say they believe they have none for their return. Of the more than 40 refugees I asked “who is fighting for their right,” the answer was practically unanimous: no one. They don’t trust the Palestinian Authority and do not believe Hamas has any real power. “No one represents the Palestinian people. Abu Mazen works for the Americans. Hamas can’t do anything. The Palestinians represent themselves, there’s nobody. Fatah doesn’t do anything either,” says Mr. Chalhoub. For Mr. Kathem, the PLO needs to be revived. Another refugee in the Gaza camp who withheld his name said Abbas “sold the Palestinians to the Israelis.” Hani Jaber, a 39-year-old taxi driver who is both a refugee and a Jordanian citizen, at least trusts somebody: “I’m not religious, but Khaled Meshaal is a logic man, he is good. Until now Mahmoud Abbas didn’t do anything for us, the Palestinian people. I don’t care if I am 48 or 67,” he says, referring to the refugees as most of them do, by the date of their exile. “What about us, the people outside? I didn’t vote. My right as a refugee is to choose my leader.” On that, every refugee seems to agree: they should be given the right to vote and be directly represented.

They all concur on their demands too. When asked what their main wish is, they start with the same answer: to go back to their houses, the properties they owned and lived in at the time of their expulsion. Confronted with the possibility that such thing may be impossible, they choose to at least live in their village, and get financial compensation for their losses. More often than not, the answers would include the end of Israel. But here is where something quite surprising and very conspicuous would happen, almost invariably. After talking about the horrors committed by Israel and the need for justice and sometimes revenge, almost everyone, with one single clear exception, agreed that if Israel stopped “occupying our land, killing and humiliating our people, stealing our water, and respected our rights, we could live in peace. Perhaps even together.” That quote, exactly as it is written, was said by someone who preferred not to reveal his name because he was afraid of “looking weak.” He didn’t look weak. He looked, instead, just tired.

http://www.dw.com/en/reem-the-palestinian-girl-who-asked-merkel-the-tough-questions/a-18591858

quote:

An encounter filmed in the northern German city of Rostock between a tearful Palestinian refugee girl from Lebanon and the German chancellor has fueled a debate over Germany's asylum policy. Fourteen-year-old Reem, who has lived in Germany for four years, told Chancellor Angela Merkel her family faced deportation.

The conversation was part of a youth dialogue held in the city, in which students got the opportunity to talk to the chancellor about their goals and dreams for the future.

Reem was born in the Lebanese village of Ba'albeck to Palestinian parents. In 2010, she came to Germany to undergo a major operation to treat cerebral palsy, which she has suffered from since birth, and then went back to Lebanon.

Following another operation in Düsseldorf, she and her family moved to Sweden for half a year and requested asylum there. The family, however, was sent back to Germany since under EU rules the first country where a person enters the EU must process asylum applications.

Reem has lived with her family in Rostock since 2011 and attends the Paul-Friedrich Scheel School in the city. Her father had once worked as a welder, but without a residence permit, which he does not have as an applicant for asylum, he cannot be employed. Their asylum application has not yet been decided, Reem said.

"I also have goals just like everyone else," she said in the conversation with the chancellor and 28 other pupils. "I want to study, that's my desire. But it's really unpleasant to watch how others can enjoy life, while I can't do the same myself."

Explaining why she was happy to be living in Germany, Reem said she had experienced enough war and uncertainty in her life.

"It feels much safer here," she told German public broadcaster ARD on Friday. "The fear that once had is still inside me, but as long as I'm here it is getting better."

The 14-year-old has two younger siblings and many hobbies such as writing stories, meeting friends, baking and learning languages, she told German public children's TV channel KIKA. She speaks Arabic, English, German, some Swedish and said she wants to learn French.

"My greatest wish is to work as a teacher or as an adult interpreter," she told KIKA.

During Wednesday evening's discussion Reem told Merkel in fluent German that her family had a temporary stay on deportation back to Lebanon, but no one could tell them how long it would last.

"I am here now, but I don't know what my future looks like, because I don't know if I can really stay," she said.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/ref-halsell.html

quote:

It is predawn, and Sameetha has overslept. Bashir, her husband, calls her. He speaks in Arabic: “Come on, you’ve overslept. Get dressed. Make my coffee. I must be off to work.”

I do not understand the Arabic words, yet I understand his tone, gestures, and the diurnal pattern: Bashir rises early; Sameetha wants to sleep.

Bashir, forty-eight, thinks his job important. For three decades he has lived in the refugee camp, and he has been out of work as often as not. Now, through a United Nations agency, he has a porter’s job. With a protective leather pad on his back, he hoists and carries steamer trunks, huge bags of produce, or pieces of furniture. As a one-man moving van, he earns the equivalent of fifty dollars a month.

Sameetha and Bashir are the parents of five children, the youngest named Nahla. Meeting Nahla, who is sixteen, I at once feel an affinity for her. Like Kareemi [a young Palestinian woman, who Halsell stayed with several times], she is tall and slender and has dark hair and dark eyes. Unlike Kareemi, she is painfully shy, turned in on herself, even furtive, like an animal in a cage. About her there seems to be the humility that comes with knowing you are living in a very limited space belonging to others who are more powerful than you.

I come to know Nahla in this way. I am visiting Bir Zeit campus and mention to one of Kareemi’s professors, Lisa Tariki, that I would like to live awhile in a refugee camp. “No problem,” she replies. “We have many students here who live in refugee camps.” And she introduces me to Ahmad, twenty, a scholarship student, who is Nahla’s brother. It came as a surprise to me that Palestinians from refugee camps were at Bir Zeit. Until then I had somehow imagined all the refugees were removed from the mainstream of life, perhaps like Indians on United States reservations whom we Anglos for so long kept hidden from sight.

I talk with Ahmad, and he agrees at once that I will be welcome in his family’s home. About a week later we meet in Ramallah. We walk along streets crowded with Arab Palestinians, looking into shop windows filled with TV’s and even commodes, and I realize anew that the world is divided between those who can buy and those who cannot. Then we board an ancient bus and after a fifteen-minute ride get out on the outskirts of town and walk a short distance to the camp.

Entering the refugee camp, I feel I am entering some medieval ghetto. I walk along a narrow alleyway, skirting an open sewage ditch. I pass tens of dozens of one- and two-room houses, each leaning on the other for support. I am in a ghetto without streets, sidewalks, gardens, patios, trees, flowers, plazas, or shops—among an uprooted, stateless, scattered people who, like the Jews before them, are in a tragic diaspora. I pass scores of small children, the third generation of Palestinians born in the ghetto that has almost as long a history as the state of Israel itself. Someone has said that for every Jew who was brought in to create a new state, a Palestinian Arab was uprooted and left homeless.

We enter the door of a dwelling, not distinguishable to my eyes from hundreds of others like it, and I see two women on their hands and knees, both in shirts and pants, scrubbing a concrete floor. They rise, one somewhat laboriously, as she is heavy with child, and the other, the mother of Nahla and Ahmad and other sons, a woman made old before her time by endlessly making do in a makeshift home, a home that is only this room with a concrete floor and blankets stacked against the walls for beds. And, for a toilet, a closeted hole in the floor. Nahla has never known the convenience of a tub or a commode, nor do any members of her family enjoy that greatest of all luxuries, a room or even space into which one can for an hour or a few moments of each day retire, and in solitude meld mind, body, and soul.

The United Nations provides funds to meet basic needs, such as medical clinics and schooling. But no one has extended the kind of help that would allow people like Sameetha and Bashir to somehow help themselves, to somehow propel themselves into a bigger space, a fuller life. Americans, for example, annually give five hundred and twenty-eight dollars per capita to Israelis and three dollars per capita to the Palestinians.

“We are only seven,” Nahla comments the first evening, as we sit on the floor. Members of the family-in addition to Nahla, her parents, and her brother Ahmad, include her eldest brother Zayid, twenty-four, a construction worker, and his wife, Rima, nineteen, who is nine months pregnant. Nahla has two other brothers, Abdul and Salah, who are not at home. She does not tell me immediately, but in time Nahla says they are both in Israeli prisons.

Living with Nahla and her family, I am astonished both by their poverty and also by their will to survive under the weight of being a people without a political party, a government, a land, a people without an identity and without a promise for tomorrow. I learn they unite through the shared experience of exile. Once Nahla introduces me to an old man in the alleyway near her home, and she tells me he is the head man of the camp, having once been a village mukhtar in the area of Lydda. Her parents and others like them from Lydda wandered from camp to camp until they found this old man, their mukhtar, and other friends from home and then they set up the same kind of community, as best they could, that they had known before the 1948 war that disrupted their lives.

I sit beside Nahla listening to her read her English lesson. On the sides I hear a cacophony of radios, loud voices, and wailing babies. Nahla, like every child in this camp, is handicapped in her attempts to study. Moreover, Sameetha constantly asks Nahla’s help in household chores. She has no time to think or plan a future outside the camp.

“I feel buried here,” Nahla tells me. “I know there is a world out there”—and her eyes seek space beyond the ghetto walls.

Nahla’s family does not own a television set, but hundreds of camp refugees do, and Nahla sees, in regularly rerun Hollywood movies, luxurious homes with carpeting and bathrooms and kitchens, and a thousand amenities missing in her life.

For so young a person, she seems uncommonly perceptive about human nature and the unnaturalness of the crowded conditions in which she lives.

“My brothers knew when I began my period. Living so close, none of us is ignorant about the changes in our bodies, about life,” she confides, adding that often she must undress before Ahmad and that he trains his eyes not see, psychologically, what in truth he sees. “Once, removing my dress I deliberately studied his face. I saw that his features did not change. I knew he was ‘not seeing.’” Only in this way, she explains, does each member of the family give the other a sense of space, of living in a room of one’s own.

Nahla hopes to go beyond the nightmare of her parents’ past. And she has one dream—to continue her education, and then—her eyes widen at the possibility—to leave the camp and get a job. I ask casually, What kind of job? And then I realize I am thinking of Nahla and her future as if she were living in America, in a land that still provides alternatives. But I am in Nahla’s world, where as many as three generations are born in a cramped room, and their only alternatives are to survive or not survive.

Also, I am in a world where women have traditionally never left home, and those who work outside the camp are liberated only to the point of being “free” to labor in Israeli factories and return to what is too often called woman’s work.

I watch Sameetha, seated cross-legged on the concrete floor, mixing flour and water, and kneading dough into flat, round, pizza-sized loaves. She has only a hot plate, no oven. She must send the loaves outside her home to be baked.

For meals, we sit on the floor around a low table. We do not use spoons, knives, or forks. At each meal, Sameetha distributes freshly baked bread loaves, the main staple at all meals. I place my loaf on my lap, tear off a chunk and use it to spoon spicy crushed chickpeas with garlic sauce. I lift small bits of food such as olives, eaten at most meals, with the fingers of my right hand. Sometimes we eat sliced cucumbers seasoned with mint and mixed with thinned yogurt. Most frequently, we dip chunks of bread first into a bowl of olive oil—a big staple in the diet—then into another small bowl of thyme.

Once, we are all sitting on the floor, eating. Sameetha brings a pot of hot tea. As she bends to serve, Bashir inadvertently turns and hits the pot, sending the boiling tea pouring down Sameetha’s thighs. She screams, curses, and slaps Bashir, who cowers like a beaten animal.

“Get the paste!” Sameetha shouts to Nahla, who runs to a small cardboard box of possessions and returns not with a medication but with the only salve they have, a tube of Crest toothpaste. Sameetha, still grimacing in pain, lifts her skirt and Nahla applies the paste.

After supper, Sameetha sits on the floor before an old sewing machine with no legs. She motions to a space beside her on the floor, and she shows me how she changes a bobbin, threads the machine, and turns its wheel. She is using these gestures to tell me that the storm—with her angry unleashing of words and her blow at Bashir—is past, and she and her husband will continue to care for the family and continue in the way they know to survive, and that her striking out at Bashir was her desperate attempt to hit not him but the fate that had brought them to this level.

Often Sameetha conveys a hatred for Bashir. Or rather, a hatred for what life has done to him. In more than three decades, Bashir, who looks twenty years older than his age, has never been able to find himself, which is to say he has never been able to find a means to extricate himself and his family from the slough of poverty and despondency in which they seem mired. He comes home from his porter’s job looking demeaned, brutalized. He reminds me of a bewildered Navajo Indian I once saw in a crowded city. Separated from his land, the Navajo lost his sense of Indianness, his sense of self. Now Bashir, separated from his “mother earth”—an expression both the Navajos and the Palestinians repeatedly use-feels orphaned, alien, lost.

I meet other men who feel brutalized by living in the camp. They talk of their villages where they “grew up and laughed.” Laughter is only a remembered experience. Ibrahim, the baker is an example.

I accompany Nahla, with a tray of pie-shaped dough, to a small shop where refugees pay a few pennies to get the dough baked. I find myself in a cramped, dark room with a low ceiling. The room is filled with smoke and seems like a dungeon. Ibrahim, a stooped, dark-skinned man of about fifty who seems at the end of his tether, says he starts work at 5:00 A.M., finishes at 7:00 P.M. and bakes about a thousand loaves a day.

“I am on my feet all day, my legs ache, and my head aches from the smoke, fumes, and heat. I work fourteen hours a day to make enough to feed my family. My health, perhaps also my mind, is breaking from the strain. The camp produces one generation after another of people who are trapped.”

Is he training his eldest son, I ask, to take over as baker?

“I am trying to teach him to get out of this camp!” he bellows, as if I have hit his sorest nerve. His eldest son is named Fouzi. He is seventeen and has been invited to Russia to study art.

“Wherever he goes,” Ibrahim says, “I am glad to see him escape from the camp.”

Walking back to her home, I ask Nahla: Is Ibrahim a Communist?

“I don’t know. The Communists reached in to help him,” Nahla replies, adding, “Many Israelis claim that if we recover a portion of our Palestine we will create a Communist state. But I do not think so. We are Muslim, and there is a big difference between the beliefs of our religion and Communism.”

One morning I walk with Nahla to her school, and she shows me several of her classrooms and takes me to the office of one of the administrators, a Palestinian in his late fifties, who invites me to stay for a coffee. Nahla leaves us, and the administrator begins by telling me he earned degrees in Boston and Chicago universities, and that he was a teacher “in Palestine” before the creation of Israel.

“This is one of ninety-four schools for thirty-five thousand refugee children on the West Bank,” he tells me, adding that West Bank and Gaza refugee schools, as well as all Palestinian refugee schools in the Middle East, have for three decades been operated by the UN Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA).

“Overcrowded classrooms are our worst problem. We have not been permitted by Israeli authorities to build new schools since they occupied the area in 1967. Our school population, now more than one thousand in this school, has more than doubled. Consequently, we have to use our schools on double shifts.

“Censorship is another problem,” he continues. “We made a list of 117 textbooks we think necessary for the elementary and preparatory cycles. But the Israeli government censored 42 of these. As a result, our students in several courses must rely entirely on classroom lectures.

“About ninety percent of our resources come from voluntary contributions by governments,” he continues. “The remaining ten percent is provided by the UN. The Arab countries saved us from bankruptcy in 1979 when Saudi Arabia provided the money we needed at the last minute. But the Arabs believe that the refugee camps were created by the West, and that the Western countries must finance UNRWA.”

The administrator pauses to sip his coffee, and I glance around his office, bare save for his desk and three chairs. I see no wall docorations, no photographs, diplomas, or books. What, I ask, does he need most? It is a perfunctory question, and pencil poised, I await a perfunctory answer, such as, We need more books. But he is done with discussing school needs as such.

“Our freedom! Our freedom!” he replies fervently. “We are a people exiled and held under the yoke of tyranny. We number nearly four million. Three million of us now live in exile—in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Persian Gulf countries, and in scattered groups throughout the world. Only six hundred thousand of us remain in that part of Palestine that became Israel.

“About half of the Palestinian people living outside Israel are still considered refugees, and about twenty percent continue to live in refugee camps. In our refugee school, I see the psychological effect of the prolonged stays in camps: an atrophy of initiative, an increased tendency toward passivity and fatalistic attitudes. It seems contradictory to say our young students are passive, with loss of self-confidence and increased dependence, and at the same time to say that they have mounting drives of vengeance. But their hatred builds on their lack of freedom. Israel forcibly produces a generation of tongueless people, and we will, in the end, speak with fire.

“For thirteen years, the Israelis have chosen not to hear us and not to see us. An Israeli premier, Golda Meir, said ‘There are no Palestinian people.’ But ignoring us does not make us go away. Nor will the Israelis prevent our attaining national independence. Since Israel became a state scores of nations have won national independence, including some that number no more than a few hundreds of thousands. No power on earth can stop a people from throwing off foreign rule, once they have made up their mind to do so. Israel with all its guns and power will not stop us.

“The Israelis give two reasons for not allowing refugees to return to their homeland,” the administrator continues. “First, the Israelis say the Palestinians who returned home would create a problem of security in case of war with the Arab states. But Palestinians within Israel are peaceful and quiet compared with Nahla and the thousands like her trapped in refugee camps. The Palestinians within Israel do not wish to be punished or expelled. The refugees such as Nahla, however, have nothing to lose. She will risk life itself to escape.

“The Israelis say, as the second reason why they will not permit Palestinians to return to their homeland, that to do so would make Israel bi-national and they don’t want that. They want the state to remain Jewish. The Zionists from the beginning, although they themselves were secular, wanted a totally Jewish state. This is why they felt forced to drive out the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. And that is why they rejected the Palestine Liberation Organization’s solution of a democratic state in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims would have equal rights.

“High school students are among the most politically active in the West Bank,” the administrator says. “In America, high school students, even college students, are not politically aware, especially nowadays. Here, on the contrary, students are the most vocal group. The high school students are much more numerous and more visible. Teenagers originate almost all the demonstrations and protests. They are very politically aware, and the teenage girls, particularly, are always out demonstrating.”

Nahla, he continues, helped stage a demonstration on the school grounds. “It was at the time of the arrest by the Israelis of the mayor of Nablus, Basam Shaka. She and other teenagers marched near the school one day carrying a placard stating, ‘We are Palestinians. We must be free.’

“Six armed men who spoke Hebrew—later identified as religious zealots from a nearby Jewish settlement—jumped from a car and chased them onto the school grounds. They fired their pistols and rifles around the students who were in class.

“The assailants chased Nahla and the other girls from the school into the refugee camp and began throwing stones at women and children who were outside their homes. They even threw stones at one woman who was holding her six-month-old infant in her arms. She ran into her house, but the attackers threw stones through her windows and fired shots into a water tank on the roof.

“The civilian religious zealots left. Then Israeli soldiers carrying guns rushed onto our school grounds and arrested Nahla and other teenagers and kept them in jail for two days.”

Later, when I ask Nahla about the arrest, and whether she and her family have felt humiliated about her having been in jail, she replies, “No. Nowadays it is kind of a badge of honor.”

That evening, Nahla and I walk with Rima—her face chalk white—to a nearby clinic, where Rima gives birth to a boy, who she names for her husband, Zayid. Rima returns home the next day. There are only 293 hospital beds available for all the refugees in all the West Bank camps—one for every thousand. And there is only one doctor for every ten thousand refugees.

Zayid looks like all newborn babies, amazingly small and fragile. Yet Rima and the other members of the family insist I hold him and join them in their celebration. They all accept another mouth to feed as a marvelous gift of God. And where will this life end?

Bashir and Sameetha had come to the camp as teenagers, had married, had five children, and had now become grandparents of a child born in the camp. And would the child in two decades foster more children in this same camp?

We in the West are easily critical of those in refugee camps who have many children. Such families have few amenities and forms of recreation save perhaps, the finest of all—building a family and surviving through the strength of that family. The diaspora of the Jews and their suffering in ghettos did not destroy their families. Neither has the diaspora of the Palestinians and their suffering in refugee camps destroyed the strength and unity of their families.

Nahla learns poetry by heart, and one evening she quotes a poem by a Palestinian, Tawfiq Zayad, as expressing her determination to live, free of occupational forces.

As if we were a thousand prodigies
Spreading everywhere
In Lydda, in Ramallah,
In the Galilee...
Here we shall stay,
A wall upon your breast,
And in your throat we shall stay,
A piece of glass, a cactus thorn,
And in your eyes,
A blazing fire.

The walls of the room have one decoration, a calendar with a drawing of olive trees. Nahla takes the calendar from the wall and translates its Arabic inscription:

I believe in a tomorrow.
And in the struggle;
I have faith in olive trees.

She explains the olive tree represents the future and the past of the Palestinians. “The olive tree has strength because of its long, tough roots. Our Arabic literature mentions the olive tree as the cure of all diseases, and in the holy Koran, the Prophet Muhammad says, ‘Take care of the holy olive tree; from it you will gain your benediction.’ The color green and the olive trees represent our future. We have roots here. This we know is our homeland.”

That evening Bashir tells a story he must have repeated many times. The year is 1948.

“We were about fifty thousand Palestinians living in and near Lydda [near the present Tel Aviv airport].

“The fighting rages around us, and we saw the Israelis advancing. We heard shouts and an Israeli soldier told us they were ordered not to leave any Arab civilians at their rear-to leave no one in or near Lydda. The Israeli soldiers at gun point drove us out.” The decision to drive out the Palestinians, he adds, had been taken by David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel’s founders and its first prime minister.

“We were all villagers and none of us, none of the people like my mother and father or anyone in my family, had ever owned a gun, nor did I know anyone who was a soldier. We had nothing to do with the war or the struggle of the European Jews to find a homeland. Yet we were being collectively punished.

“I was same age as Nahla—sixteen—and I remember the armed Jewish soldiers encircling our home and firing shots and shouting in Arabic that they would kill us if we did not leave at once. Yet no one obeyed; it was as if we felt ourselves tied to our soil. Soldiers dragged women by their hair, and my father shouted he could not leave his garden, his trees, and a soldier knocked him to the floor. I had a pet lamb, and I ran to hold the lamb. I was not thinking of my mother or father or our home but of that small animal.

“I watched families fleeing as from a fire, and soldiers shot around them and over their heads, driving them like cattle. Soldiers pushed us out of the house with their guns. We soon found ourselves among thousands of women and children. Some old men could barely walk and mothers carried babies in their arms, and led small children. The children were crying and begging for water, all of us fleeing we knew not where. No one was given time to collect even the necessities, no food or provisions. I mindlessly grabbed my baby lamb, and another neighbor boy carried a pigeon. On the first day of the march I lost my little lamb. Others carried a chicken, a blanket, or a sack of flour that represented their entire possessions on this earth. My mother begged to return to her village to recover her small stove, her few heirlooms, but she was forced to keep moving. On the third day I saw my mother fall. I thought she had fainted. I felt her heart and she was dead. Then later, my father died. The other Palestinians dug holes in the ground and buried first my mother and then my father. I saw many old people and children fall and die because of the heat and exhaustion.”

He sighs deeply, and goes on, “One day we were Palestinians living in Palestine; the next day we were Palestinians driven from a land called Israel.

“We were tens of thousands kicked out by force, our villages destroyed. Even the Jews admit there is not a single Jewish village in their country that is not built on the site of an Arab village. They built the Jewish village of Nahala on the Arab village of Mahloul, and the Jews built Gifat on the Arab village of Jifta.

“The drove us out, they bulldozed our homes, and they built new villages.

“In 1948 I lived in one of about six hundred Arab villages in the part of Palestine that was taken by Israelis. My village was one of about five hundred bulldozed and destroyed. Now you will not find more than one hundred Arab villages in the part of Palestine taken by the Zionists. The Israeli leaders admit they did this. They are not ashamed. They do not try to undo what they did to us. They justify their acts and glorify them.”

Once again he speaks of his family’s farm and admits he was never able to find himself, “living on a slab of concrete. I tried—but I failed. Now my spirit is gone.”

He looks to Nahla as he talks, wanting her to understand his burden and hers. Bashir knows he is spent by life, but he says, “Nahla, you, and others like you, will make the struggle."

# ? Sep 5, 2015 13:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > I/P: post-semitism in the desert of the deal

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