| Brood Brother |
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Joined: Sun Feb 16, 2003 4:43 pm
Posts: 7258
Location: Sacramento, California, USA
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Hi Gary,
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | I've never heard of the Christian Science Monitor being referred to as 'mainstream media' before! |
It probably shouldn't be, but on my Internet news headlines, Yahoo has a thing for putting up CSM. Since I already know what the political stance is at CSM, I rarely read it. I can't get an objective or even semi-objective view of news from CSM. It's a broken record.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | You didn't answer my question, though: Do you think that Sharon's new party will win, or will Likud or Labour take over? EDIT: I see it now... |
I think Sharon will most likely stay in power. The opposition isn't organized enough. There might be an upset, but I don't think it is likely.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | As a side note, I should perhaps clarify the general opinions of at least many Irish people who would have an opinion on the subject (and we watch plenty of BBC as well as RT?!). |
Well, most of the Irish are already skeptical of BBC! LOL :-)
At one time the Irish were pretty strongly pro-Israeli, but things are slowly changing under the misinformation barrage.
Personally I've always like the Irish penchant for discussing politics. Some of my father's family lived in Ireland for awhile after they left the UK.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | On the one hand, people here are not anti-the State of Israel. |
I tend to agree.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | Given that we have a large Catholic majority in Ireland, and have had a fair bit of Vatican influence in the past, we still at least tried (and have more successfully established in recent years) to separate the notion of Irish identity from the profession of Catholicism. While it was arguably de facto for many years here, it was never de jure, and modern Ireland makes no such religious distinctions for its citizens - as much as we can make it, anyway. |
The Vatican makes some pretty strange statements at times. I still don't know what to think of the new Pope.
Early in his investiture he made a big show of praying for the victims of terrorism, but he "accidentally" left out the victims in Israel. The vatican made some political statements at that time that were variously withdrawn and restated several times.
I sometimes wonder if the Vatican is straight on what their line is.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | What I would see is that in a state which is based around the notion of a specific religious identity, it is understandable that minorities in that state may perhaps feel that while they carry the same passports as their neighbours, there might be a sense of alienation - minor, but still perceptible - in a state which self-consciously defines itself as tied to one particular faith. |
The funny thing is that the official relgions of Israel are Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You can freely worship any religion in Israel.
The Arab-Israelis, citizens of Israel, don't want to leave for anything. They know that their quality of lfe is far better than just about any Arabs except for the Princes of Saud, all 5,000 plus of them.
When Israel was founded in 1948, the founding address specifically invited the Palestinian-Arabs (Just called Arabs then, the term Palestinian at that time only referred to Jews) to join in the bounty of Israel. The ones who did live well today. Many own good businesses... very often trucking.
The rest were confined to refugee camps run by UNRWA and weren't allowed to lead real lives by order of their host countries, which wanted to keep those people as political pawns. ?
and a parallel issues that doesn't get discussed are the many Jewish refugees from the Arab world. Their plight is regularly ignored and there were slightly less of them displaced than the Palestinian-Arabs.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | What Irish (and other European) people would have an issue with would be the rule in the Palestininan Territories. |
Yes, it's so much easier to blame Israel for all of the problems than to actually deal with them.
The PA is thoroughly corrupt. It is also gutless. It refuses to stand up to the terrorists in its midst.
And the terrorists know that if they enact token social service programs, that they can call themselves humanitarian agencies and be regarded as such by much of the world that doesn't verify to whom humaitarian aid is sent. Then they collect money and buy weapons and never do more than a token effort for the poor Palestinian-Arab families who need the help the most. HAMAS has been playing that game for at least twenty years and probably more.
*** Did you hear about the greenhouses in Gaza? ***
A group of wealthy philanthropists bought them and decided to donate them to the PA so that the Palestinian-Arabs would have some businesses and jobs. When Gaza was turned over to the PA, the mobs looted the place and the greenhouses are now unviable. They'll need millions of dollars of repairs before they'll be operable yet. And those greenhouses were a free gift, a hand-out without strings. Gone now...
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | In a country like Ireland which has a long memory of British rule, and an all too contemporary problem with sectarianism in Northern Ireland, many in Ireland sympathise with the effect that the occupation is having on many Palestinian families. |
I feel for the poor Palestinian-Arab families all of the time. I wish better for them.
I hope that they eventually through off their cruddy government and get something better. Interestingly enough, for all of the faults of the Israeli government, polls of Palestinian-Arabs frequently cite Israel as the most competent and least corrupt government in the Middle East.
When Gaza was turned over to the Palestinian Authority, a very large percentage of Northern Gaza Arabs voted to secede to Israel. They had petitions with thousands upon thousands of signatures. They were turned down for politcal reasons.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | What we see in Ireland is that the entire Palestinian people are being tarred by some with the brush of terrorism due to the actions of Hamas (and trust me, we're no fans of them!) and that the Authority is being hampered in its attempts to exercise its authority in the region. |
I agree with you there.
The Palestinian-Arabs are not all terrorists. There are plenty of hard-working Arabs who just want to be happy and raise their families in peace. I've met with them. Some of them were my neighbors.
However, they don't protest against the violent fundamentalists who lord over them any more than most Iraqis protested against Saddam Hussein. I understand why, but until someone takes a stand and is backed up by his community, the violent fundamentalists will rule.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | | We know all too well that treating every political group in a particular community as the enemy, ignoring the moderates by reacting to the extremists' provocations, gets you nowhere (thirty years and three thousand dead in Northern Ireland can attest to this). |
Well, there aren't too many moderates. That's one of the big problems. The moderates have been persecuted and killed off for many years. Most of the rest of them have left the country to live abroad. So what you have left is mostly the disparate poor and the violent extremists such as HAMAS.
Abbas was the best they could find for middle ground and he is essentially a Holocuast denier in one manner or another. Sometimes, I see hope that Abbas and the PA can make the transition towards peace as the Irirsh groups have done somewhat successfully. The I see them refusing to stand up to their violent compatriots and letting their greenhouse gifts get trampled.
It doesn't give me a lot of hope for them.
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| Quote (Nerroth @ 22 Nov. 2005 (23:49)) | The problem we see is that there are some who don't accept that yes, we do want to see an end to terrorism too, but that we believe that giant barriers and overwhelming military force are not the answer - and that transition periods from war to peace through negotiation and compromise are hard, complicated, drawn-out, fraught with controversy, but eventually worthwhile.
Gary. |
I tend to agree.
However, what I don't want to see is a "peace" built upon injustice and lies... like what happened in the former Yugoslavia.
The West painted the Serbians as demons in that war and supported the Kosovars and Croats as saints. The reality is that the Croats committed attrocities just as bad as anything Milosevitch did and both the Kosovars and Croats were being supported by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That wqsn'[t the picture that got sold to the West though. We got a black and white fairy tale.
Real justice requires compromise and it comes from the parties involved. It can't be imposed from the outside. It can be helped by outside donors, but not imposed. As the old saying goes "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
In the same manner, we can prop up the Palestinian Authority as a "real" government, but until they start attending to their people's needs, they'll be just another bunch of mafia thugs who subvert the world's humanitarian aid into Swiss Bank accounts for their own personal enrichment. The PA, for instance, still can't get at all the aid money Arafat squirreled away... and that's the money he hid well enough that the victims of terrorism can't seize the money in their successful law suites against him. The PA was almost bankrupted early this year when a court ruled against them and nearly seized all of their US assets.
I want peace too, but a real peace not based on injustices. Those kinds of peace never last... not in Ireland... not anywhere.
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Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.
P.S.
Gary, I don't care about having the last word, but let's switch back to talking about gaming. If you want to discuss this further, let's do it off the boards, please.
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?I prefer Hispanic or Asian cuisine ! 
