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| 5/31 |
| 2005/3/2-3 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Israel] UID:36481 Activity:very high |
3/2 Interesting writeup on how Palestinian terror is fundamentally
flawed, and must be abandoned.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/022805A.html
\_ " If the possession of an enormous stockpile of nuclear
weapons does not make you a sovereign state, it is
difficult to say what would."
\_ Who is right and who is wrong? Here is something for you
good Christians to memorize:
good = Christians > Jews > Other Religions > Muslims
In another word, Christians are always right. Any question?
\_ Can't argue with the article, huh?
\_ The whole article is filled with so many distortions and outright
falsehoods that it is not worth bothering with. I suppose you
think that the Palestinians should just all leave or die
and give their land over to the Settlers. Because if they
did not defend themselves, that is what would have happened.
had not defended themselves, that is what would have happened.
But I cannot argue with his conclusions, no matter how error
filled and fallacious his argument is.
\_ You don't need a whole article.
If your side has suicide bombers blowing up civilians, you're
on the wrong side. This is debatable, but if you try to debate
the legitimacy of suicide bombers blowing up civilians, I'd say
you were also on the losing side of the debate.
\_ If you are on the side of people taking other people's land
and tearing down their houses, you are on the losing
side of the debate.
\_ If the two sides are: Blow up civilians with suicide bombers;
and assassinating the leaders of those responsible for
the bombings with innocent lives (including children) lost
in the assassinations, and demolishing the homes of innocent
people who are related by blood to the bombers -- guess which
side is the losing side?
\_ Both sides.
\_ Okay. But let's say you didn't have to ally yourself
with a side. Let's say you were judging which side
is worse. Which would it be?
\_ The PA is automatically worse because their goal
of destroying Israel is, and always has been,
fantasy. If they had stated asked for a two
state solution, they would've had it years ago.
\_ The point is, if your side has suicide bombers
killing civilians with the goal being to kill
as many civilians as possible to help your side,
you're on the wrong side.
\_ Sooo... we have 2 different reasons why PA
is worse than Israel. Will none stand
for the Palestinian cause?
\_ Maybe as soon as they stop with the
organized suicide bombers blowing up
civilians.
And you know, who knows, that might happen.
\_ The PA's goal has not been the destruction of
Isreal for at least a decade now. What is your
excuse for assassinating the Palestinian
leadership and blowing up their civic institutions?
Oh yeah, you have no one to negotiate with. What
a dumbass argument. You kill all the leaders
of a group and then castigate them for not
having any leaders. It is hard to imagine
a more immoral policy.
\_ Which group are you talking about? The
Palestinian people as a group or a subgroup
within in?
\_ PA stands for Palestinian Authority.
\_ The question is, does the PA support
suicide bombing?
\_ Certainly not today. The official
stance of Arafat was that he was
opposed to them after 1982(?), but
others think that he secretly supported
them. A claim like that is hard to
refute or prove, either way.
\_ Did Israel assassinate Arafat;
or other PA leaders not associated
with groups that support suicide
bombing?
\_ If the leaders being assassinated head a group
which supports suicide bombers, it's not a bad
idea to kill them.
If the leaders being assassinated oppose
suicide bombing, it's a pretty bad idea to kill
them.
\_ Why not simply arrest them and bring them
to trail? Why the need for extra judicial
killing guaranteed to have collateral
civilian casualties?
\_ Why the need for suicide bombings against
civilians which are guaranteed to have
civilian casualties?
Why not simply protest the occupation
and hold demonstrations?
\_ Which is better, being blind or being deaf? Either
way, you lose. Better/worse here is semantics at
best, trivialization more like. Suicide bombings are
terrible and reprehensible; so's land grabbing.
Neither justifies or excuses the other.
\_ I doubt it. You're the one who's arguing
semantics. Clearly, suicide bombing is worse
in this case.
\_ Land grabbing is worse, cause the motivation
is greed.
\_ "Land grabbing" in general is bad.
In the specific context of punishing the
other side because they won't stop using
suicide bombers -- suicide bombing is
clearly worse -- and it should be obvious
that the primary motivations are punishment
and (perhaps) protection, not greed.
\_ The land grabbing obviously came first.
And is it worse to kill civilians via
suicide bomber or rocket from a
helicopter? They seem equivalent to me.
\_ Okay, you land grab from my people.
I start blowing up your people with
suicide bombers. I think the second
part is worse. A much more sane
response is anything not involving
suicide bombers.
The Man is going to screw with you and
your livelihood. However, you are
strengthening The Man by using suicide
bombers.
Killing civilians from a helicopter
!= killing civilians from a helicopter
as a result of their being innocent
bystanders while targeting the
leaders of suicide bombers;
Killing civilians from a helicopter
~= killing civilians with a suicide
bomber
\_ If your argument is that using
suicide bombers is impolitic,
you have no quibble with me.
If your argument is that the
Palestinians do not have the
same right to self-defence that
everyone else in the world has,
then we are going to have to
agree to disagree.
\_ "right to self-defence" does
not include suicide bombing of
civilians with the intent to
kill as many civilians as
possible
\_ How do you feel about the
bombing of the King David
Hotel by Irgun?
\_ I am not answering your
question directly, but can
say: If Irgun existed
today, and planned suicide
bombings in 2005 with the
intent to kill as many
civilians as possible, the
leaders of Irgun should be
killed.
\_ Why does it matter so
much to you what the
method of delivery is?
If it is wrong today,
it was wrong in 1946
and visa versa, in
my opinion.
\_ Anyways, thanks
for arguing with me.
This has led me
to think more about
Nagasaki. |
| 5/31 |
|
| www.techcentralstation.com/022805A.html TCS 1 THE PALESTINIANS' MOMENT OF TRUTH The Palestinian people stand at a critical moment in their history. They can rally behind the efforts of their new leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to brin g an end to the Palestinian tradition of terror, or they can continue to give their support to those who are pursuing a fatal and futile fantasy -- a fantasy that has cost the lives of thousands of innocent men, wome n, and children, both Israelis and Palestinians. The fantasy in question is the fantasy that one day the so called "Zionis t occupation" will end. And the reason it is a fantasy can be easily det ected in the phrase "the Zionist occupation." The state of Israel has long since ceased to be a Zionist project. Like i t or not, Israel is a historical fait accompli, a state as real and genu ine as any that has ever existed in history. If the Israeli people could have been run out of the area, they would have left long ago. That is why the Palestinian people have only one realistic choice before them : they must work in every way possible to eliminate the terror virus tha t was permitted to spread among them under the leadership of Yasser Araf at, especially now when the Palestinians at long last appear to have a l eader who is trying to bring an end to Palestine's reign of terror. But in order to bring about this desperately needed change, not only must the Palestinian peo ple cease to show sympathy with their indigenous terrorist organizations , so too must Westerners, both in Europe and in the United States. Sympa thy with the Palestinian people is in order, but not sympathy for the in stitution that has held them back from all progress toward a genuinely r esponsible civic polity. For that is what terrorism has become among the Palestinians -- it is the ir peculiar institution, the way slavery was the peculiar institution of the American South in the nineteenth century. For, like the slave syste m, terrorism, deployed as a means of achieving political goals, ends by poisoning the society that permits it to flourish in its midst. The only group that draws any advantage from its use are those who are ruthless enough to use it. Like slavery, it corrupts whatever it touches, and is of value only to those who live off it. Like slavery, it appears to be a n institution that can only be destroyed by those who are willing to use extreme and drastic measures to eradicate it. And, lastly, like America n slavery, Palestinian terrorism has its defenders, many of them decent and well-intentioned individuals. In what follows I will try to explain why these individuals are mistaken in extending their sympathy to organi zations like Hamas and other "militant" Palestinian groups. Well, if he had lived today, he would have had to put up with something even worse than cant in defense of savager y, and that is cant in defense of terrorism. But what would have been gu aranteed to push him beyond the limits of his patience would have been t he Western school of cant that, for over a half century, has been employ ed to defend and apologize for one particularly brutal, pointless, and p olitically self-defeating forms of terrorism: Palestinian terrorism. What makes Palestinian terror uniquely privileged among all other forms o f terror, even among those people who find other form of terrorism unacc eptable? And why do so many well-meaning people in the West observe a do uble standard when it comes to the terrorism used by the Palestinians an d the terrorism used by al Qaeda? That such a double standard exists is hardly a matter of dispute. The Bus h administration proved this point some time back by its condemnation of the Israeli government's killing of the Hamas leader, a man whose life had been dedicated to perfecting terrorism as a weapon to be used agains t innocent Israeli men, women, and children. And where the Bush administ ration condemns an Israeli action, it is fairly easy to imagine what the rest of the world's attitude on such a question would be. To attempt to provide the answer to this question, I have identified thre e distinct sources of cant in defense of Palestinian terrorism, each of which may be summed up in the stock phrases that usually spring to the l ips of those who are engaged in the process of defending or apologizing for Palestinian terrorism. They are: The "cycle of violence" The "legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people" The "Zionist occupation" My reason for spending so much time dissecting the cant surrounding Pales tinian terror is simple. I am convinced that the West shares much, if no t most, of the blame for the most startling fact of our epoch, namely, t he political triumph of Islamic terrorism. If the word "triumph" sounds premature or alarmist, ask yourself what nat ion state has had the impact on the geopolitical world order that the Is lamic terrorists have had in the last half century. Without a navy or an air force or an army, without any of the paraphernalia of a normal nati on state, a handful of terrorist organizations have managed to seize the center stage of world affairs, and have been deciding the fate of natio ns. They have all but shattered the international system of alliances up on which the Pax Americana depended; they have turned many of our former allies into current enemies; they have rallied fifth columnists within every Western democracy, including our own, to champion the cause of rad ical anti-Americanism; they have seduced the progressive Left into defen ding the most reactionary regimes in the world. They have turned one Eur opean election to their own purposes, and have thereby acquired a techni que that can be all too easily applied to other elections, raising a que stion of the survivability of parliamentary democracy in the face of fut ure coordinated terrorist strikes. They have put the governance of the U nited States on permanent hold by putting the fight against terrorism on top of our national agenda, where it will remain as long as the terrori sts are willing to act to keep it there. In short, it is the terrorists who are calling the shots. How did the vast power of the West, and the enormous benefits of the Pax Americana, fail to defend us against the demon of t errorism? We sympathized wit h the plight of the Palestinians, and for good reason; but we let this s ympathy get the better of our judgment. When the Palestinians first used terror, many liberals argued that this was a legitimate way for a subje ct people to defend themselves, and we cited what seemed to be analogous conduct on the part of anti-colonialist revolutionaries, like the Alger ian nationalists -- or indeed, like the American patriots who fought to shake off the yoke of England. The operative motto was, "One man's terro rist was another man's freedom fighter." Today, in the era of the war on terrorism, this motto has become a source of uneasiness and confusion. On the one hand, many of us want to declar e that all forms of terrorism constitute an unmitigated evil; yet, on th e other hand, it is impossible to avoid noticing that some acts of terro r have successfully been used in order to bring about desirable politica l change. Were the Spanish who rebelled against Napoleon in 1808 terrori sts? And what about the Germans who tried to blow up Adolf Hitler with a bomb -- they failed in their mission, but would their success have been wrong? Or the Algerian nationalists who wanted France to stop ruling th em, and who used a systematic campaign of terror to bring about their na tional liberation? For better or for worse, one man's terrorist quite often is another man's freedom fighter. The Algerian nationalists were terrorists to the Frenc h, but freedom fighters from the point of view of the nation state that their terror brought into being. This fact, however, has nothing to do w ith moral or cultural relativism; nor does it give us permission to call someone a freedom-fighter merely because he enjoys blowing people up. R ather, the Algerian experience reflects a particular set of historical c ircumstances familiar to us from antiquity, namely, the struggle of one people to acquire independence from the control of ... |