< Galloway / Sky News
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- vespa0
I can only implore you read up on this scumbag and what he stands for and who he associates with.
Political naiveté is no excuse.
Cactus
(Aug 8 06, 06:30)Cactus i agree with 99% of what Galloway says in the sky broadcast we are discussing.
Please tell me what you disagree with, i'm not trying to fight with you, i'm just unclear as to what you are saying.
i had a read of the observer article you linked just then and i must say i strongly disagree with the comparison between Galloway and Mosely the anti-semitic Fascist leader.
Criticising the Israeli government does not make you anti-semitic. This argument keeps getting used as a way for the international community to overlook all of the human rights abuses that the Israeli govt perpetrates with US and UK backing.
- Crouwel0
????
- Crouwel0
fuck that was supposed to be arabic.
- Cactus0
I can only implore you read up on this scumbag and what he stands for and who he associates with.
Political naiveté is no excuse.
Cactus
(Aug 8 06, 06:30)Cactus i agree with 99% of what Galloway says in the sky broadcast we are discussing.
Please tell me what you disagree with, i'm not trying to fight with you, i'm just unclear as to what you are saying.
i had a read of the observer article you linked just then and i must say i strongly disagree with the comparison between Galloway and Mosely the anti-semitic Fascist leader.
Criticising the Israeli government does not make you anti-semitic. This argument keeps getting used as a way for the international community to overlook all of the human rights abuses that the Israeli govt perpetrates with US and UK backing.
vespa
(Aug 8 06, 07:45)Since you seem genuinely interested, I depise Galloway for making common cause with radical Islamists. I feel this is pure poison for the left, and the European body politic in general.
I certainly don't agree with all Israeli policies but I don't want to see them 'liquidated" either. criticism of Israel has gradually become demonisation. Israel is an ‘apartheid state’, a ‘colony’, Zionism is racism. Now it is not at all uncommon to hear the most deliberately hurtful, provocative and malicious false charge of all – that the actions of the Jews of Israel are comparable to those of the Nazis who exterminated six million Jews ( a view which is music to the ears of holocaust revisionists). Gross distortions of the history of Israel and the Zionist movement are widely circulated and by no means exclusively on the far left or the far right.
The demonisation of Israel has been spread on the British left most prominently by the Socialist Workers Party, a group who do not support a two-state solution but instead call for a single Palestinian state – the end of Israel. Along with extremist Islamist groups they have quite successfully turned the genuine humanitarian and internationalist solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians into a hateful campaign of vilification against the whole notion of a Jewish state. Instead of fantasy-Bolshevik sloganeering we now have the parroting of the rhetoric of the most reactionary of Islamist movements in the Middle East. The terrorist group Hamas, despite a charter which contains the most explicit examples of Nazi-style anti-semitism and despite a policy of deliberately targeting civilians, are now considered fighters against oppression by large sections of liberal and left opinion.
The conflict has been transformed into one between ‘good people’ (Palestinians) and ‘bad people’ (Israelis or Zionists). The only Jews who seem able to avoid the broadbrush of guilt are those who agree that the Israel should surrender and be abolished, people routinely described as ‘brave’ without any explanation of what makes such a position, with its potentially calamitous outcome for Israelis, courageous.
Added into this poisonous mixture are the old claims of the existence of secretive but powerful Jewish ‘lobbies’, the notion of the cabal of Jews as the dark masters controlling the ‘puppets’ who rule over us in politics, the economy and the media. It is little wonder then that we are seeing the reappearance in some parts of Europe of old-style anti-semitism. What few would have predicted is that so much of this racist propaganda is coming from the left.
If "we are all Hezbollah now" then ephatically count me out.
http://moonbatmedia.com/ceasefir…
- vespa0
Thanks for taking the time to answer, Cactus, sorry about the delay, i've been out tonight and just got back.
I too hate how Galloway comes across as inciting extremism, i distrust him instinctively on a personal level but no-one else seems to say the facts as he does, no matter how distasteful his manner. I actually resent him for championing things i believe in, i dislike his manner that much.
Re the Israeli "apartheid state", i've only come across this phrase recently and on consideration i have to wonder how else the situation can be described?
Please tell me it's untrue, the stories i've read about Palestinians having no passports (like the invisible pre-1969 aboriginal citizens of Australia, where i'm from), therefore can't travel without Israeli authority, can't attend university without Israeli authority, can't go to hospitals without Israeli authority, different standards of health, education and mobility. How is this division of people based on race NOT comparable to apartheid?
I've never lived in the region so i fully accept that my knowledge is from reading. Please tell me it's otherwise, because the situation i've described above cannot be considered to be just.
I hope this article isn't offensive, it was an emotional read for me but i just want to know more, really.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/southa…
p.s. i have many jewish and israeli friends and am not criticising ordinary israelis, i'm totally NOT anti-semitic, i used to be in a band where everyone was israeli except me and they were awesome musicians (even if the music was a bit boring haha but i'm not sure that was anything to do with being israeli)
- jevad0
Both are owned by Murdoch
- kingjulien0
Cheers to vespa and Cactus for the engaging conversation, and for demonstrating civility on an issue that is quite controversial.
If you're interested in this stuff, I found the following article extremely well-written.
- lowimpakt0
as seen as we are posting articles.
this is from Haaretz - it is a printable version of the original article
- KuzII0
http://www.aftenposten.no/mening…
God's chosen people
Jostein Gaarder, Aftenposten 05.08.06
There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.
We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep at its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.
Limits to tolerance
There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.
We call child murderers 'child murderers' and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!
Unscrupulous art of war
We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe's deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.
We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.
Without defense, without skin
May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.
We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.
They celebrate their triumphs
We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as "fitting punishment" for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.
For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.
The retribution of blood vengeance
We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
He said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: "Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose."
Compassion and forgiveness
We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.
Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.
Israel does not listen
For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay in the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all -- then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: "And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?" We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.
We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.
The USA or the world?
Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: "May God continue to bless America." A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: "Why does the President always end his speeches with 'God bless America'? Why not, 'God bless the world'?"
Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: "Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?" It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God's chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.
Calm and mercy
We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.
Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!
Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.
- Cactus0
I too have never been to the region nor am I a Jew.
And no doubt, racism towards non-Jews exists in Israel as it does in most societies around the globe. Both Russian and Ethiopain Jews have had problems integrating into the Israeli society. Israeli Arabs, from what I've read, also suffer similar forms of discrimination but to frame this treatment as "apartheid" would be, in my opinion, a gross distortion based on a political agenda.I looked for some unbiased info on the subject (not very easy) and found this:
http://www.honestreporting.com/a…Compare this albiet imperfect record, to the Islamic nations surrounding Israel where the rights of Christains and Jews are serverely restricted and are, in some cases, persecuted. I won't even go into gender and sexual preference issues.
- cosmo0
I want to see that guy duke it out with cock face O'Reilly.
- KuzII0
In a democratic context, citizenship is a legal relationship between the individual and the state whereby the state recognizes the fundamental rights of the citizen and undertakes to guarantee him/her equal access to the civil, political, economic and welfare resources. Citizens in a democratic state would have equal standing in the course of law, equal access to the political process - such as the right to vote and be elected – they would have equal access to land and water resources, and so on.
When there isn't universal citizenship that is equitable to all, democratic values are compromised in a serious way. A quintessential illustration of this is Apartheid South Africa, where 87% of the territory of South Africa was reserved under law for white citizens only, and denied from non-white citizens.
The situation in Israel is comparable, and I'm not talking about popular xenophobia, but rather a situation regulated by an act of parliament where 93% of the territory of the State of Israel - and I am not referring to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - is reserved under law for Jewish citizens only. If the apartheid distinction in South Africa was between white and non-white, the apartheid distinction in Israel is between Jew and non-Jew. Or specifically, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is essentially a conflict between a settler-colonial state and an indigenous population dispossessed by the colonial project. Scores, and I mean SCORES, of historical Palestinian-Arab villages have been turned into parks and picnic spots amongst other "making the desert bloom" Zionist projects.
What you see in the prison-state of Gaza and the Palestinian territories in the West bank surrounded by large Jewish settlements, is directly comparable to the Bantustisation in apartheid South Africa, where the Zulu population were housed and restricted to small Bantustan enclaves.
From its birth the Zionist project was tied to ethnic cleansing and emptying of Israeli lands of Arab populations. 1 million were expelled to the Gaza strip and 4 million into the West Bank. The seperation wall being built is consolidating this long term process of ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, last month (maybe in June) the Israeli Supreme Court upheld a new law which states that if an Israeli Palestinian marries a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza (even if they are refugees of the 1948/1967 expulsion processes), that marriage is not recognised by the state of Israel. These practices are designed directly to counter what Ariel Sharon called the "demographic time-bomb". i.e, Arabs are breeding faster than Jews in eretz Israel/mandate palestine.
- KuzII0
Book by an Israeli Jew on how "apartheid" Israel really is:
- KuzII0
sorry, 3 million, not 4, ended up in the West Bank post-1967, through mass deportation etc..
- vespa0
Hi Cactus
sorry about the late reply again, got caught up in work...
interestingly i read an article yesterday about an Arab Israeli family who got injured by a Katyusha rocket and were treated in an underground Israeli hospital. Online seems to be an abridged version but in yesterday's paper version the family went into more detail about how well they'd been treated by the Israeli hospital staff.
http://news.independent.co.uk/wo…but law based on racial discrimination is disturbingly institutionalised in Israel. Amnesty International reports the following on an Israeli High Court law upheld on May 14 this year "which explicitly denies family rights on the basis of ethnicity or national origins":
http://web.amnesty.org/library/I…Regarding your point:
-------------------------
I looked for some unbiased info on the subject (not very easy) and found this:
www.honestreporting.co...
Cactus
(Aug 9 06, 02:02)i've just looked up Honest Reporting and they are a pro-Israeli media watchdog founded by Aish HaTorah, an orthodox Jewish outreach organization "with its headquarters in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the government of Israel awarded it a coveted piece of land."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hon…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ais…What made you think they were unbiased, besides the name?
As kingjulien said, it's good to engage serious discussion on such a difficult issue. Everyones links are helping me to understand more. Although kingjulien i had to block all the neo-conservative ads from my vision as i read your link!
- KuzII0
kingjulien has been talking out of his ass on this issue for a whole month.
The fundamental wrongs of Israel are fucking obvious. There's no debate. You lot are like "ooh, you have to look at it from both sides, they're all as bad as each other." Whatever. Miolosevic's Serbia was ideologically doing the exact same thing, and it never had the same level of apologists.
I guess being a Jewish state you can get away with just about anything.
- vespa0
kuz i'm trying to participate in non-inflammatory discussion.
I don't have a pre-formed opinion because admittedly i'm probably not as widely read on the topic as you. I'm trying to see both sides in order to understand.
But yes, Israel's further invasion of Lebanon this morning seems incredibly inflammatory.
There's a protest on Saturday in Hackney - Unconditional Ceasefire Now Demonstration, 1pm corner Balls Pond Road/Kingsbury Road.
- vespa0
correction: Israel has announced that it will invade Lebanon within 2 or 3 days, and expects the operation to last for a month.
- paraselene0
kuz, don't lower the tone! i am learning a lot from this thread, from cactus and vespa and you yourself. please don't get it deleted. it's a refreshing, grown up debate and i would like to see it carry on.
carry on.
- soda0
"it's a refreshing, grown up debate and i would like to see it carry on.
carry on.
paraselene
(Aug 10 06, 02:13)"I have obviously just arrived at the wrong place!
Excuse me, I thought this was Newstoday...x