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Peanut butter ass Shaq Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael booooze lime pole over bench lick:
However, Egypt and Jordan (Israel's neighbors, both Islamic nations) have both-signed non-aggression treaties.
Non-aggression treaties that they've broken dozens of times, both in person and my arming and inciting "palestinian" fedayeen to fight on their behalf.
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Also keep in mind that even countries who'd rather Israel didn't exist but harbor no direct plan to attack (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc) are more concerned with the Palestinian situation than they are with wiping Israel off the map.
The "palestinian" situation is what they're doing to wipe Israel off the map. There IS no palestine or palestinian people. The land of Israel was completely legally obtained from the islamic Ottoman Empire. Syria, Iran, and Egypt only tell the scattered muslim refugees that they are palestinians and that Israel is their land because doing so makes it easier to convince them to strap bombs onto their children and send them into crowded markets.
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In fact, in that area of the world it's generally only Iran's President who outwardly does such definitively insane things like deny the Holocaust and declare his desire to wipe Israel off the map.
Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Iran all collectively declared war on Israel almost the instant it was founded. The governments of Egypt, Syria, and Iran all still deny Israel's right to exist.
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By all indications, the populace of Iran doesn't want that; they don't even like Ahmadinnerjacket that much.
This is actually true, but doesn't matter because Iran is a theocracy, not a democracy. In Iran, the office known as the president is more akin to the american vice-president. The highest office, commander-in-chief, and pope-like high theocrat is the Grand Ayatollah, currently Ali Khamenei. The president cannot so much as take a poop without the Ayatollah's consent. It is a sure bet that everything Crazy Mahmoud says is mirrored by Iran's prime religious leader, and if he believes it then what the people think doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
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Syria doesn't want that, save for it's own kooks. The only GROUPS of people who want Israel gone are extremist groups, and elements of the Iranian government (Ahmadinnerjacket and his Republican GoonSquad, for instance).
The only groups of people who want Israel wiped off the map are every islamic group of people in the middle east with any military or economic power.
Well, except Iraq, lol!
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but Israel has no concept of balanced reciprocal response.
Anybody who talks about balanced, reciprocal response in a war is either pushing an agenda (the UN) or a complete fucking idiot.
When a rogue nation is trying to kill you, you obliterate them or they will come back endlessly and incur more losses on both sides than there would have been if you ended the fight with an overwhelming show of force. This has been common knowledge among anybody who hasn't been drinking the peacenik kool-aid for most of the 20th century.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your post, I think you see where your error is by now - almost everything you've heard about the middle east is either out and out false or warped beyond any resemblance to reality. Half the things you've said here are contradicted by any given encyclopedia, let alone current events periodicals. All I can suggest is that you find a somewhat less biased source for your world news. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 09-28-2007 at 09:14 PM.
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Nobody really understood why Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael wrote:
First off...In fact, in that area of the world it's generally only Iran's President who outwardly does such definitively insane things like deny the Holocaust and declare his desire to wipe Israel off the map. By all indications, the populace of Iran doesn't want that; they don't even like Ahmadinnerjacket that much. Syria doesn't want that, save for it's own kooks. The only GROUPS of people who want Israel gone are extremist groups, and elements of the Iranian government (Ahmadinnerjacket and his Republican GoonSquad, for instance).
Yes, many ordinary Iranians are moderate and may even respect Americans or Israelis though they may dislike our current government - just like how many Americans like Iranians but despise their government. Unfortunately, the nation of Iran is currently under the totalitarian control of the Ayatollah, Ahmadinejad, and his "Republican GoonSquad", so their agendas are what is played as Iran's agenda.
Many Iranians are fairly apathetic about the Israeli situation anyway. The Palestinians are a totally different ethnic group - why should they care? (Of course, this is an anecdotal impression I've gotten from Iranian immigrants talking about what Iran is like - and they obviously may be more liberal than other Iranians. I don't claim to be an Iranian expert either lolzerpan).
By all indications, most Iranians don't like their current situation, but their sentiments don't carry any weight since the radical 'elements of the Iranian government' hold all power. The country is just as much a danger regardless of what its civileans think.
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Mr. Parcelan stopped staring at Deedlit long enough to write:
Tread carefully.
It's a politics thread and I'm talking politics. I'm not bashing Jews. I'm bashing the policies of a country.
And I never said that the nations around Israel are without blood on their hands. But the problem is that while governments and extremist groups cause problems, it's not necessarily the people of the countries stirring things up. The fact that ANYONE in the Middle East has anything resembling a normal job would suggest to me that they have better things to do than arm themselves to go blow up Israel. And yet it is these same people holding down jobs, making a life for themselves that Israel has a history of bombing indiscriminately. Yes, terror cells hide behind civilians, but we cannot allow that to be a good reason to indiscriminately bomb civilians back to the stone age. They did it in Lebanon, they have done it to the West Bank repeatedly. Aiming to take out one guy in an area populated by innocent civilians and killing thirty of them isn't collateral damage. It's wanton negligence. And Israel is constantly using that mentality. And it hasn't worked. Ever. Israel has to be practically manhandled by the United States into vying for a two-state solution these days.
When the United States went after Saddam, we made every possible effort not to hit civilian targets at random, even though we knew that Saddam and his cronies were likely hiding amongst the populace. Make no mistake, I have NO problem with exercising military force if I think that it's being used with the best intelligence available and with judicial reckoning of necessary force. But blowing up the house to kill the cat is NOT a good proposition.
Likewise, Israel's as bad as the rest of the Middle East when it comes to idiotic saber-rattling. Oooo scary. None of those countries are going to invade Israel because Israel is believed to have nuclear weapons. But Israel, rather than using that nuclear deterrant mentality wisely, relies heavily on heavy-handed brinksmanship that it then relies on the United States to get it out of. And it's getting old. We can't get much in the way of other diplomatic assets in the area because we're constantly siding with Israel, when Israel is often just as guilty as everyone else there.
I'm not saying we should betray Israel, but bloody hell, it's about damned time that whole conflict settles up one way or another. Force diplomatic resolutions.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael who doth quote:
And I never said that the nations around Israel are without blood on their hands. But the problem is that while governments and extremist groups cause problems, it's not necessarily the people of the countries stirring things up.
You keep saying this, as if what the people thought meant anything.
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And yet it is these same people holding down jobs, making a life for themselves that Israel has a history of bombing indiscriminately. Yes, terror cells hide behind civilians, but we cannot allow that to be a good reason to indiscriminately bomb civilians back to the stone age.
Yeah, we kinda can. In fact, we have to, or else we'll all be killed.
Nobody is advocating killing civilians, but war is BAD, and the aggressors set the terms of the conflict. Using civilians as a tactical advantage in a war in the first place is where the evil lies - not in denying that advantage as carefully as is possible. You bandy the word "indiscriminate" about a whole lot, but you don't seem to know about how Israel has repeatedly rejected plans to carpet bomb the Gaza strip, which for a time was the new breeding ground for suicide bombers, for fear of killing too many innocents and instead built a multi-million dollar wall.
If you actually learn about the policies of Israel, there really isn't a damn thing indiscriminate about them.
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They did it in Lebanon, they have done it to the West Bank repeatedly. Aiming to take out one guy in an area populated by innocent civilians and killing thirty of them isn't collateral damage. It's wanton negligence. And Israel is constantly using that mentality. And it hasn't worked. Ever. Israel has to be practically manhandled by the United States into vying for a two-state solution these days.
Again, everything you've said here is pretty much completely incorrect, and I have to wonder if you've gotten all your information from some virulently antisemitic organization and nowhere else.
Israel has actually ceded land that the muslims have asked for and all they did was use it to launch more rockets and suicide bombers at them. Yeah, a lot of people died in Lebanon and Syria and the West Bank, and as long as people who want to mass murder jews keep hiding among civilians, a lot more people will die. Again, the crime is in involving them in the first place. Given a choice between risking their civilians and risking your own, any idiot would choose the civilians among the enemy, particularly since their ranks are drawn from them.
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Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael was naked while typing this:
It's a politics thread and I'm talking politics. I'm not bashing Jews. I'm bashing the policies of a country.And I never said that the nations around Israel are without blood on their hands. But the problem is that while governments and extremist groups cause problems, it's not necessarily the people of the countries stirring things up. The fact that ANYONE in the Middle East has anything resembling a normal job would suggest to me that they have better things to do than arm themselves to go blow up Israel. And yet it is these same people holding down jobs, making a life for themselves that Israel has a history of bombing indiscriminately. Yes, terror cells hide behind civilians, but we cannot allow that to be a good reason to indiscriminately bomb civilians back to the stone age. They did it in Lebanon, they have done it to the West Bank repeatedly. Aiming to take out one guy in an area populated by innocent civilians and killing thirty of them isn't collateral damage. It's wanton negligence. And Israel is constantly using that mentality. And it hasn't worked. Ever. Israel has to be practically manhandled by the United States into vying for a two-state solution these days.
When the United States went after Saddam, we made every possible effort not to hit civilian targets at random, even though we knew that Saddam and his cronies were likely hiding amongst the populace. Make no mistake, I have NO problem with exercising military force if I think that it's being used with the best intelligence available and with judicial reckoning of necessary force. But blowing up the house to kill the cat is NOT a good proposition.
Likewise, Israel's as bad as the rest of the Middle East when it comes to idiotic saber-rattling. Oooo scary. None of those countries are going to invade Israel because Israel is believed to have nuclear weapons. But Israel, rather than using that nuclear deterrant mentality wisely, relies heavily on heavy-handed brinksmanship that it then relies on the United States to get it out of. And it's getting old. We can't get much in the way of other diplomatic assets in the area because we're constantly siding with Israel, when Israel is often just as guilty as everyone else there.
I'm not saying we should betray Israel, but bloody hell, it's about damned time that whole conflict settles up one way or another. Force diplomatic resolutions.
If Israel didn't care about civilian "collateral" in the West Bank, there wouldn't be any civilians in the West Bank.
Israel doesn't target militants to scare the Palestinians into peace- they aren't Nimrods. They're doing it for reasons of security.
The reason why nobody in the Israeli government has thought of a better way to target terrorist groups in the occupied territories without harming innocent civilians is because there really isn't a better way.
Israel's options are extremely limited. I'm sure that if there were a way for Israel to protect itself without garnering international condemnation, it would leap at the opportunity.
But nothing of the sort will likely ever present itself.
The surrounding nations no longer use standing armies against Israel because they all saw the futility of it- none of the Arab states were going to defeat Israel head on, even if they were to strike in tandem. Allowing small militant groups to fulfill their goals in a roundabout way is just more practical.
I'm not suggesting that Israel has always acted with utter efficiency (indeed, its history is rife with miscalculation, violence and tragedy), but to assume that "wanton negligence" is the Israeli rule of the day is foolish.
And since when has Israel been crying to the US for help? I was under the impression that it was the US who was more interested in the Israel than vice versa. In several cases, the US has kept Israel from achieving a decisive victory (Suez Crisis, Yom Kippur War) NOT because Israel begged the US to- but because of the US' own worries (in those two cases, the USSR).
I do agree, however, that the conflict needs to be resolved sooner rather than later. It certainly isn't hopeless- everything that could potentially be asked of Israel as part of a permanent peace (ceding of territory, withdrawal of soldiers, withdrawal of settlers), Israel has shown itself capable of doing, if not with total Israeli public support.
