Jewish Space Lasers
- Thread starter goldfan83
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My Jewish wife says that if you talk about the space laser you get space lasered
Apparently if you’re a Palestinian who talks about the Israeli’s forcing innocent people from there homes in the middle of the night, to an American news network, you get exiled from your home on the middle of the night.
You may not know this, but asking Jews to answer for every action that the Israeli government takes regardless of whether or not they are Israeli is a classic form of anti-Semitism.
When did they anyone ask Jews in general to do that? I have no qualms with American Jews other than the ones that blindly support the actions of the Israeli’s despite the severity of the crap that the Israeli’s are doing to the Palestinians right now.
By the way, Palestinians are also culturally defined as Semitic. Taking one side or another between the two tribes is not anti Semitic.
By the way, Palestinians are also culturally defined as Semitic. Taking one side or another between the two tribes is not anti Semitic.
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For a long time it has been riskier socially to disagree with Israeli policy than with US policy. Disagreement with US policy is not unAmerican, but disagreement with Israeli's policy makes one an anti-semite? Too often the answer is "yes". Israeli internal politics are vigorous and diverse, but one rarely sees opposing views in the US.
You responded to a joke about my wife and space lasers, which has nothing to do with the state of Israel, by complaining about how terrible Israel is. Jews are mentioned so you have to complain about Israel. They're not related and yet you make the connection. It's not "they" asking Jews in general to answer for it, it's you with your response. I understand it's likely unintentional but the ADL would tell you it fits the definition.
FWIW I was always partial to general Sherman's theory of war, so if I were Israel I would have leveled everything a long time ago and gotten it over with.
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I didn’t intend to say anything about your wife (honestly didn’t even read it that closely).
When you’re talking about space lasers though, given the current state of the Israeli government’s targeted missile tactics and the fact that the Israeli government is run almost exclusively by people of Jewish faith, I tend to think of the Israeli’s not your wife... because your wife doesn’t have space lasers... but the Israeli’s have something a bit similar.
The ADL can go F themselves. They’re bought and paid for. My mom was with (for about ab10 year marriage engagement), a German man who was of Jewish and Catholic descent. He lived through the Holocaust in Germany. His mom was in Dachau, his Catholic dad was in a labor camp. They had the scars to prove it, He was hidden by monks, and barely got any food in a basement of a monetary. He was a child, who watched another little Jewish girl die in his arms from malnourishment.
He hunted Nazi’s later in his life for US intelligence and he was also one of the nicest, kindest men in my life who cared for me very much when I was a young child.
I am about the farthest person from anti-Semitic that exists in our country. I know what he and his family went through. I love him like a father. Coincidentally, what his family went through looked strikingly similar to what the (majority) Jewish military in Israel is now doing to their non-Jewish countrymen. The problem I have isn’t with Jews because they are Jewish... it’s with people that are conducting horrific injustices against innocents for greed and hate. I don’t care if you’re a Communist, a capitalist, or a fascist. I don’t care if you’re a bhuddist, a Jew, or a Baptist. If you conduct atrocities in the name of Blind and undeserved hatred, I will always speak out against you. The saddest thing about the Israeli’s is that they should know better because of their ancestors’ history.
I would say the same thing about the Chinese Muslim population who the Chinese are mutilating. That doesn’t mean detest all Chinese people because they are Chinese. Nor do I stereotype that all Chinese people have committed atrocities against Muslims... but their government has... and if they support the government then I don’t support them.
As far as General Sherman goes... his March to the sea accomplished little in the grand scheme of things. It only made the South hate the north that much more vigorously and gave them an excuse to point to when asked about the south’s incivility to slaves. Militarily, it didn’t accomplish much.
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Im not going to get into good guys versus bad guys. The history is that area is far to complicated to really dive into that quagmire. I will say this....a country or group within a country fires rockets into a populated area of another country the attacked country is almost always going to respond with greater force. In the case of Israel, such a response was a certainty. Those responsible for the attack knew full well what the response would be and wanted the same. Let’s not be naive, this is exactly what those who fired the initial rockets expected and wanted imo.
I lay the blame equally on the israelis and the palestinians. When one kicks people out of homes repetitively and one bombs in response, at one point or another I begin to blame both sides. Same thing as Ireland. There are no good guys after awhile, in these type of disputes. It takes leaders from both sides being ready to make a deal nobody is happy with. Everybody has to to be tired of the same battle being waged for years for it to work though. At this point both sides are too entrenched in their anger to be tired of it. It doesn't help that Iran goad's the situation along, and funds the opposition. There needs to be a true populist movement where people from both sides are angry and tired enough, to start working apart from their leaders, and together with the other side. That's the only way I see a solution.
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I get that no matter who I mentioned there you would have argued against it, but in arguing about Sherman's scorched earth tactics you miss the point. It's not about that. What he got right is there is no way to make war nice, so there is no use pretending. If you do it just prolongs the conflict. Military response should always be disproportionate to the point of being crippling to your enemies, and concern for your enemies' non-combatants should be secondary to eliminating their capacity to wage war against you. Israel plays PR games that it can't win because it feels like it has to. I just think they should go end the war by conquering the people who want to genocide them.
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Which side are you referring to. I think large segments of both sides wouldn't be opposed to genocide in some form or fashion. That's the nature of their anger, fear, & hatred towards each other. I think there is a larger faction of Israeli's that believe a brokered peace is the right way, than a smaller faction of Palestinians who believe the same. But if Israel were to 'conquer' them that doesn't resolve the problem. Their will always be a resort to lone wolf terrorism, even if the palestinians are 'conquered'. The only peace I see is a brokered peace, and that is a long way from happening. That's why I think Israel plays PR games, they see that too. As well as the fact that other countries have factions involved in the battle.
If hamas and the people who elected them wanted peace they could have it this second. If they quit nothing would happen to them. There is proof of this in the fact that Israel gave back the Gaza strip for nothing and provides its inhabitants water, electricity, and often medical care. If Israel and its people put down their weapons there would be an actual genocide. From Hamas' charter:
“The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
There is no comparison and as long as Hamas rules (and crucially, as long as the population elects them) there will be no peace.
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There will never be peace in that region until countries like Iran, Syria, etc...make peace with Israel and vice versa. Those countries use groups like Hamas as their proxies in dealing with Israel. Taking actions they would never dare conduct out of fear of retaliation.
There are no easy answers in the Levant. As Oklahomans, we should understand better than anyone the historical dynamics behind expanding settlements after peace treaties and policies requiring military force to police arbitrary boundaries that restrict distinct cultures from their historical homes.
Israel bears many similarities to apartheid era South Africa. Indeed Christians, what few are left, are taxed at higher rates on certain income, cannot live in certain areas, and discrimination in housing and transportation is official state policy under certain circumstances.
At some point, these types of restrictive and discriminatory policies will lead to violence that cannot be contained domestically. If so, violence of that nature may evolve again into regional conflict. Israel has been lucky and has had the advantage of US technology in conflicts past. Looking forward, it’s not hard to see a situation where we’ve also supplied their enemies and Israel could be on the brink of collapse. The pressure to weigh in on the side of Israel may be enormous but the conflict at that point may be futile and we may just pass, given the growing anti-Israel lobby in the Dem Party. At that point, you could see a radical shift geopolitically as France and Saudi Arabia and some of our other allies wonder just how reliable we are. We are dangerously close to painting ourselves in a corner where our two choices are back Israel in a losing war for domestic political reasons that devastates our diplomatic position with others in the region or refusing to help and alienating our allies around the world. Hopefully Joe has a handle on it.
Israel bears many similarities to apartheid era South Africa. Indeed Christians, what few are left, are taxed at higher rates on certain income, cannot live in certain areas, and discrimination in housing and transportation is official state policy under certain circumstances.
At some point, these types of restrictive and discriminatory policies will lead to violence that cannot be contained domestically. If so, violence of that nature may evolve again into regional conflict. Israel has been lucky and has had the advantage of US technology in conflicts past. Looking forward, it’s not hard to see a situation where we’ve also supplied their enemies and Israel could be on the brink of collapse. The pressure to weigh in on the side of Israel may be enormous but the conflict at that point may be futile and we may just pass, given the growing anti-Israel lobby in the Dem Party. At that point, you could see a radical shift geopolitically as France and Saudi Arabia and some of our other allies wonder just how reliable we are. We are dangerously close to painting ourselves in a corner where our two choices are back Israel in a losing war for domestic political reasons that devastates our diplomatic position with others in the region or refusing to help and alienating our allies around the world. Hopefully Joe has a handle on it.
For the sake of argument let’s say I agree with your framing of Israeli domestic policy and that there are reasons to empathize with the violent outbursts of those living in Gaza and the West Bank. Should I then also empathize if Israel begins indiscriminately firing rockets into Iraq and every other country in the Middle East. After all, Jews were expelled from these countries and can never return to their historical cultural homes because it would be certain death. Even in cases where they survive they would be subject to discriminatory policies much worse then anything found in Israel.
Not that simple. Jordan controls the water supply to Israel. The King has made it clear if they pull something off like that, he’s going to shut the water off.
I condemn violence in all its forms. And I certainly don’t empathize with those that advocate for it. There’s millions Palestinian refugees, multiple generations, waiting in Jordan, for 75 years to return to their homes. Nearly all of them have never thrown a rock, much less a bomb. Many of them were turned out of their homes and lands by Western military power. Western nations that felt that repatriating Jews from Europe was a good idea for reasons that have nothing to do with the Holocaust. Jews who had no legal right to the lands and no historical connection for 2,000 years except the claim that their God divined their right to a homeland. The Jews immediately began violating the terms of the original settlement and began expanding further into the West Bank. Using terror tactics on the British snd the Arabs they now condemn. Expansion that continues to this day. The random murderous acts of a few desperate and foolish young men manipulated by zealots and their feelings of hopelessness doesn’t invalidate the feelings of millions that maybe the State of Israel has no legitimate right to occupy territory deeded into your family farm for ten generations. If 10,000 people showed up in a boat at the Port of Catoosa and announced they were moving into Osage County because their relatives lived there 2,000 year ago and began killing everyone and firebombing their property that spoke out against it, I would imagine folks in Pawhuska and Tulsa would be pretty upset about that. They might even let folks from Hominy move into place down by the Arkansas river and launch rockets into Osage County from time to time.
Or put another way, the land was lost in a world war, an international governing body decided who should govern it, the legitimate governing body then chose to relocate Jews there, people were violently displaced just like in every other middle eastern country under mandates in the period, this group of people chose not to resettle to their own detriment, and now though they wish genocide they are relegated to impotently shooting rockets indiscriminately into civilian populations.
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As far as I can tell it was Great Britain that decided on Israel, and all their allies just went along with the UK. I think Britain would have thought twice about that decision, if they knew that 75 years later it would cause this much strife, with no end in sight.
The problem I have isn't the rockets from either side as that's become tit for tat and it's hard to tell who's starting it. My problem is kicking peaceable Palestinians out of their homes for no reason other than to seize them for the use of non Palestinians and destroying Palestinian businesses. It's racist slurs on jewish Israeli shirts, and slurs chanted at football matches. We've seen things like that happen before in a certain European country. It's cheering outside of burning mosques etc... I know that none of the Arab entities surrounding Israel have been anything close to neutral with the Israeli's, but considering the Israeli's were given the land they now occupy by the allies post WWII, I expect them to behave with some semblance of humanity, even when their enemies don't. They are a people with legitimate and long lasting scars, and I completely understand their desire to defend themselves from those creating violence, but there is a limit to that understanding and they are far surpassing it.
There have been times in the not so distant past, that Jews Christians and Muslims coexisted in certain countries. It can happen again if some of the sides decide to stop sending hellfire from the heavens. Somebody has to be first. Somebody has to be the bigger man.
I'm not the one advocating genocide / war crimes on either side, Mr. Sherman.
Indeed, the land we now call Israel was 22% Christian in 1949. It’s now 2%. Christian demographics in Syria and Lebanon are largely unchanged during that period. There are five times as many Christians today in Syria as Israel. Bethlehem was 82% Christian in 1949. It’s less than 10% now, as Jewish resettlement policies have displace Muslims from elsewhere and forced them into ethnic neighborhoods in Bethlehem. Predictably, Christians began to leave.
Genocide eh? Definitely didn’t say that. Maybe all this nazi and Jew talk got you hot and bothered?
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I can sympathize with the Palestinians being forced from their homes. I can hope that Israel will change its policy. A policy with which I disagree. I can also recognize that Hamas is a terrorist organization acting in part as a proxy of the Iranians in its bombing of Israel. In this instance I have seen no evidence that Hamas wasn’t the party to start the rocket fire. As I said above, Hamas knew exactly what Israel’s response would be and wanted the same. As long as the likes of Iran, Syria, Lebanon are at war with Israel there will never be peace in Gaza or Israel for that matter
The Brits were also the root source of the split in Ireland. The treatment of the Irish in the 19th century was as bad Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Except the Palestinians were on the winning side! Again, if at the end of World War Two, Churchill turned to FDR and said, we really should allow 100,000 people to move to the Oklahoma Panhandle. They claim they want to and it has no use and nobody is really using it. There’s plenty of room out there and nobody wants it and the folks already there have said they will make room for them. Then within weeks twice that number show up and within months multiple times that number start moving into Woodward and the outskirts of Enid and setting up there own governments, displacing farmers by force, and threatening local federal officials, you’d be concerned. When the Brits try to help us and they start getting burned alive, bombed out of their hotels in OKC, and personally blackmailed, you’d probably not look to the Bible to justify that behavior. When the Brits do nothing except leave and half of OKC is ruled by another government that forbids your participation, you might be asking yourself, why aren’t they still in the panhandle, who let them in here in the first place and how do we make them leave my grandmothers house, she’s 76 and shouldn’t be living in a tent in Wichita Falls?
And they take over Oklahoma City, which is filled with your native Oklahomans, they say that they will let them stay in the city of they pay excessive taxes, but the new western Oklahoma government restricts their ability to travel outside of Oklahoma City, refuses for a long time to fund their schools, and then starts making changes to the existing Protestant churches in Oklahoma. In the meanwhile, they start taking the newly impoverished Native Oklahomans to court (a court made up of only the encroaching inhabitants as arbiters) to try and use land rental agreements that are more than a century old to prove that the land should actually belong to the new inhabitants rather than the people who have actually lived there for a century and were previously understood to own the property. The new inhabitants start to demolish your Grandma’s house so they can build luxury apartments for their families. Meanwhile the people living in Norman are pissed that their relatives are being forcebly displaced and treated unequally by the new inhabitants government....
The Sooners in Norman start to carry out minor attacks of military defenses of the new western inhabitants... but then one of the new comers decides to kill 29 people in a Baptist church near downtown Oklahoma City and the folks in Norman take that as their cue to start attacking civilian targets as well as military ones.... and so the war between OKC and Norman begins.
You do know that Hamas was funded by Saudi and Egypt for a long period of time as well? Saudi was still funding them even when the US asked them not to via donations routed through Egypt. It’s not just enemies funding them. It’s Allies or ‘neutrals’ as well. They don’t want the other tribe of Sunni’s / Shiites to have all the influence in that region.The only minor rocket attack are the ones directed at other people.
Hamas (Iran) knows exactly what it’s doing here and is getting the desired and predictable result.
Also, in my analogy, when I said minor attacks, I was speaking about when that conflict really began to escalate in the 80’s / 90’s since then both sides have escalated things drastically, though the Israeli’s have killed vastly more Palestinians with our American weapons than the Palestinians have with suicide bombs / rockets.
This analogy makes me have less empathy for them because I know my choice wouldn’t be to wallow in misery in Wichita Falls for 75 years. Palestinians are not the only group of displaced people. It was the way of the world forever and happened to millions of others in the same era. Resettle like everyone else and get on with your lives. Ain’t getting the land back anymore than Mexico is getting Texas back
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We give them a lot of money to be our “allies” or remain “neutral”. Not sure I would ever consider bought countries a true Allie. Nevertheless, neither are an Allie to Israel or even neutral. Behind closed doors both would like to see them wiped off the face of the earth.
Right but that logic undercuts the Zionist view of “right to return” too, doesn’t it? Why do the Jews need to move back, shouldn’t they just move on too?
For the record, the issues in the Levant are emotionally charged and there are no easy answers. I take neither side.
I do understand that both sides have compelling arguments.
But I’ve been to Israel and I’ve been to Palestine several times. Not just the parts they take Christian tourists to either. Places where people on one side or the other wanted to point guns at me and several actually did.
No right thinking person can look at the walls, the open air prisons, and the history of cutting off power, water, and food to cities numbering in the 10,000s and say they are fighting terrorism. You cannot say it is democracy. We support plenty of governments that aren’t democracies, but my point is that Israeli politics are very complex, the issues apparent to any visitor are rarely discussed here, but for decades the discussion here in the US is simplistic and not focused on solutions. At some point that needs to end but it cannot right now for fear of being called an anti-Semite on social media. We are in a really bad place as a country.
It’s difficult to have a nuanced argument on the issue if you have not been to Israel. If you have been, I’d be curious where you went, where you didn’t, and where you couldn’t go.
There’s morally charged verbiage here that bakes in a framing that just doesn’t fit to me. It’s a war zone, and a country that is forced to live in a perpetual state of war is going to be ok with things they otherwise wouldn’t be. US citizens are comfortable with me doing things in Afghanistan and policing towns that they wouldn’t be ok with me doing in France. “Open-air prison” strikes me as devoid of context and activist language that strips out the nuance you say is needed.
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Gaza: The world’s largest open-air prison
More than 50 years of occupation and 10 years of blockade have made the lives of 1,9 million Palestinians living inside the Gaza Strip unbearable. That is why they now are protesting and risking th...
www.nrc.no
Gaza: The world’s largest open-air prison
More than 50 years of occupation and 10 years of blockade have made the lives of 1,9 million Palestinians living inside the Gaza Strip unbearable. That is why they now are protesting and risking th...
This supports my contention that it’s loaded language devoid of nuance and pushed mainly by activists
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