Bill Maher Should Stick To Dick Jokes
Bill Maher is a funny comedian, only not as funny as he thinks he is. He’s also not as smart as he thinks he is, nor as “edgy”. In his most recent column at The Huffington Post, he boasts about how for once he supports Dubya because Bush gave the green light for Israel to bomb Lebanon and to kill Palestinians in Gaza. Why does Maher think this is a good thing?
Because according to this marvel of intellect, Palestine never really existed and the Arabs aren’t handling the Palestinians with “maturity”. Aside from kissing Arianna Huffington’s ass and posing as a bold commentator who says the unspeakable, the column has one message: If you’re on the receiving end of ethnic cleansing, just go quietly like sheep to slaughter. I guess that’s the “mature” thing to do.
Just when it appeared that Maher couldn’t be any more fatuous, he blames the sorry lot of the Palestinians on… the Arabs! It wasn’t the Arabs who drove Palestinians from their land in 1948 by murdering and terrorizing them. It wasn’t the Arabs who invited squatters from the four corners of the globe to colonize the West Bank and Gaza, and it’s certainly not the Arabs who are at this moment carrying out a campaign of piecemeal ethnic cleansing to purge all Palestinians west of the Jordan River. Yet in Maher’s Wonderland, it’s the Arabs’ fault. If this sort of logic were applied anywhere else one ethnic group was purging another from its homeland, it would be greeted with scorn, contempt and ridicule. Even other Muslims aren’t shit on in this manner by smugly stupid commentators like Bill Maher. I don’t remember apologists for Serbian ethnic cleansers saying “Why don’t those Bosnian Muslims go live in Turkey or Iran? If they’re refugees, it’s all because other Muslims won’t take them in.” Only Israel’s fanwhore apologists are so shameless.
The notion that the ethnic or religious group being purged never really existed and is being childish for not laying down like kicked dogs is an old one and is all too familiar. It’s the same idea in the head of whites who killed all those pesky Injuns and Meskins and stole their land. It was also prevalent among the Boers who colonized South Africa, as well as the British who did likewise in Australia. It was even the mindset of the English and Scottish who pulled a train on Ireland. In all these cases, you see an ugly game of Three Card Monty being played:
Card #1: The people slated for ethnic cleansing are killed off, run off or harassed to the point where they give up and leave or fight back. If the latter, it is taken as proof that those people are savages.
Card #2: The place is colonized, usually with the dregs of the sponsor’s society: Criminals, outcasts and other undesirables who are truly desperate are deposited in the newly acquired lands. This has two effects. First of all, these colonists are like cornered animals with no alternative but to stay since they aren’t exactly welcome back home. If they could hack it in their homeland, they would still be there. Second, it allows their homeland to dump all sorts of undesirables elsewhere.
Card #3: The MYTH is created. There never were very many of those people, and they were a bunch of savages anyway. They were primitive and childish. Besides, they have all that other land. Why can’t they just go live with their kindred peoples? If it weren’t for us, none of this would have ever been built.
It was from this depraved mentality that you had smug whites claiming that North America was empty before the railroads and shopping malls. Never mind all those states, cities, counties, rivers, lakes and mountains with Indian names. It’s from this steaming pile of horseshit that you heard Afrikaaners claiming with a straight face that there were no blacks in southern Africa before the Boers arrived (This kind of crude racism was so pervasive that when ancient ruins in North America and Africa were found, it was assumed that lost colonies of white men built them, or maybe Martians: anything was more plausible than the idea that dark-skinned people built them). And it’s from this open sewer of bigotry that you get the ravings of imbeciles like Joan Peters.
Joan Who?
Back in 1984 (perfect timing if you ask me), crank pseudo-historian Joan Peters wrote a book called From Time Immemorial, which claimed that there were no Palestinians. Even though the book was exposed by Norman Finkelstein as one of the biggest and most laughably inept frauds ever printed, and every reputable Israeli historian dismissed the book as nonsense, Israel’s more ignorant/ shameless/ dishonest groupies in the U.S. lapped it up and still do to this day, including apparently Bill Maher, syndicated columnist Mona Charen and Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz. In fact, Dershowitz was such a fan of the book that he plagiarized large sections of it for his own apologia for ethnic cleansing The Case for Israel, even copying Peters’ misquotes. For more, check out Norman Finkelstein’s excellent book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
Why Arianna Huffington, who usually doesn’t suffer fools, gives both Maher and Dershowitz column space on her website to cough up their agitprop furballs is beyond me. I do have a theory, though:
The way the readers pummel Dershowitz in their responses -to the point of reducing the Nutty Professor to a whimpering pile on the floor- is quite amusing. Maybe she enjoys watching him squirm and whine.
In the case of Bill Maher, she is a friend -and friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Maybe she thinks that every minute he spends typing out such smugly ignorant nonsense is one less minute he can spend getting liquored up and driving under the influence. Whatever it takes to keep a drunk from behind the wheel.
I like Bill Maher and watch his show on HBO when it’s on, but that column surprised me. I know the guy’s half-Jewish, but I never figured him for an Israel apologist. For all his posturing about how Bush’s main agenda is bombing brown people out of existence, he sure as hell seems to like the idea himself. He even acknowledges that the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on an exodus in 1948 were refugees, i.e. people forced out of their homeland.
Even if I agreed with everything else he said, I’ve never once associated Israel with the word “restraint” as he seems to. And for a guy who professes to hate neo-cons, he doesn’t seem to realize just how joined at the hip they are with Zionists.
Comment by Damien Sorresso — 21 July, 2006 @ 9:43 am
The political tide has been against Dubya since May of last year and is overwhelmingly against him now. Bill Maher is just reverse pandering to prove he’s a brave soul standing up to the crowd. The problem is, Maher isn’t very brave. Nobody in my lifetime has ever been persecuted or blackballed for being too much of a fanwhore for Israel. No politician that I can remember has lost an election for being too friendly to Israel. Quite the opposite. Being for Israel right or wrong is about as risky as opposing lost luggage at the airport.
Being “edgy”, like being “cool” has to come naturally. If it’s feigned, it’s easily detected. This smarmy piece by Bill Maher is phonier than John O’Neil’s toupee.
Comment by Jason Peppers — 21 July, 2006 @ 2:37 pm
The Bush Administration is blaming everything on Hezbolla.
Israel has our full support of course. The damn Arabs and Palestinians are just causing trouble again.
Those terrorist bastards! There is violence…because of Hezbolla.
This ethnic cleansing shit is sickening.
Comment by Chris S — 22 July, 2006 @ 2:02 am
I have repeated this ad nauseum online…I disagree with your count on this and come closer to Bill Maher.
1) Yes, the dumping of the jews in palestine after WWII was illegal, irresponsible, and stupid. That said, 6 million jews, very few of whom were even alive when all that happened, aren’t going anywhere. And I challenege you to say with a straight face that the area should just be a single country under Palestinian control…unless you want to see real ethinic cleansing. As for the palestinian refugees, my understanding is that in an attempt to get their people to rise up against the jews being dumped in the area (read: massacre them), the palestinian leaders sometime in the 1947/1948 timeframe got on the radio and sent out a message about how the jews were coming to kill the men and rape then women (not that, from what I’ve read, the jews were doing nothing of the sort). The palestinans fled rather than rising up to fight, and the jews just kind of took over. Granted, if I really want to get into this argument with you, I’m going to have do some citation.
2) The current situation. Let’s see. Israel withdrew from lebanon and gaza, territories they took in armed conflicts that they didn’t start with no concessions and no promises from the other side. They publically state they’d be perfectly happy with a functioning palestinian government (as long as that government isn’t out to kill them), they were leaving lebanon alone, and they weren’t bombing or killing anyone. Contrast this with the palestinans electing, democratically, a group that they know wants to kill everyone in Israel, and lebanon headed in more or less the same direction with hizbollah. The citizens of those countries are democratically empowering groups that want to attack israel. That says to me that those citizens are, basically, inviting war. So why am I supposed to feel bad when they get one?
3) I am sick and tired of hearing how israel is being “unrestrained” and “ethnically cleansing” palestine and lebanon. Bullshit. I’m in the military, I know exactly what our capabilities are and what their capabilities are. If they were fighting an un-limited, WWII style fight, or attempting to “ethinically clease” anyone, there would be tens of thousands of palestinians and lebanese dead by now, not hundreds. People have forgotten what total war means, and they don’t even realize the shear killing capacity of modern equipment. Israel is being extremely restained in their responses. And its hard for me to believe that people don’t seem to mind the suicide bombers and the rockets targeting at civilians for the purpose of killing civilians, but very much mind jets dropping bombs targeting rockets that kill civilians simply because the owners of those rockets put them, purposefully, in civilian homes. There are days that the dark side of me wants some modern power to execute unrestrained warfare against some non-modern power for just one week to remind everyone what it actually looks like. Because, trust me, Israel is keeping the gloves on.
Comment by qkslvrwolf — 25 July, 2006 @ 3:46 pm
Just because the 6 million Jews aren’t going anywhere doesn’t mean that Israel has to ghettoize the Palestinian population and aggressively expand its borders as it has historically done. Israel has never intended to be content with the territory given to it. It wants everything.
Do you really buy that load of bullshit? Hundreds of thousands of people just voluntarily got up and left their homes for nowhere in particular? They were forced out by Israel, and anyone who chose to remain got a bullet with a side order of “rape my wife” for their trouble.
So Israel waged purely defensive wars that just happened to increase their territorial holdings? Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds? Israel has a deep history of ridiculously disproportionate response any time an Arab soldier sneezes in its direction. And this was happening well before the UN recognized Israel’s borders. The Deir Yassin massacre took place more than a month before Israel was declared a nation. The borders the UN recognized had already been won through military expansion, and there was no terrorist provocation then. So please, don’t expect us to believe that Israel has never used military force to expand their territory completely unprovoked. Their original borders were predicated on such action. Or do you believe that Hitler’s “living space” excuse was a perfectly legitimate reason to annex Austria and didn’t actually constitute aggressive expansion, too?
Israel publicly states a lot of things. In reality, they use the slightest provocation to aggressively expand their territory. Anyone with an ounce of historical understanding can see that Israel is full of shit when it says that it’d be “perfectly happy” with anything less than complete control over the territories they seized in 1967.
You have a warped definition of “restraint”, as do most Israel apologists. According to you, Israel is “restraining themselves” as long as they’re not carpet-bombing Palestinian territories en masse. But back in reality, we look at whether a response is disproportionate to its stimulus, and if it is, then the responder is not restraining himself. Two soldiers get captured and held hostage, and the only reasonable response is to begin a sustained bombing campaign? How the fuck is that going to help? They basically signed the death warrants of those soldiers with their response.
Israel is just using those soldiers as another excuse. They’ve already said that they’ll end up occupying Southern Lebanon. Yet another “defensive action” that just happens to result in more territory for them.
Yes, they’re “keeping the gloves on” if they’re not nuking places left and right. Tell me, if a guy got brutally beaten by a cop during an arrest, would you casually dismiss any accusations of disproportionate use of force as long as the officer didn’t shove a plunger up the guy’s ass and then shoot him in the head? Or maybe whenever a Mafia boss has a guy’s knees broken for not paying protection, he’s exercising “restraint” because he didn’t order the guy killed.
As to people “not minding” the suicide bombers killing Israeli civilians, nice strawman, asshole. Like all the other Israeli apologists, you equate criticism of Israel’s heavy-handed methods with a de facto endorsement of Palestinian terror tactics. The fact remains that when you ghettoize and racially segregate a society, you invite hostility, and the minorities will resort to extreme measures to try and win their freedom. It’s not right, but it’s not exactly surprising either. France and Britain had to go through the same thing when they occupied the Middle East. Invaders came in to occupy, and then the invaders acted shocked and abhorred when the populace (who had no standing military left) fought back using terror tactics. Now Israel acts surprised at the Palestinian’s terror tactics when they quarter off Palestinians in “Occupied Territories”, make them second-class citizens in their apartheid “Jewish state” and insult them by offering joke peace deals like the Oslo Accords.
Terrorism isn’t a problem you solve by massive bombing campaigns. You have to eradicate it from a culture, and to the dismay of the Bush administration and military wankers like you, that means actually being patient, making compromises and recognizing cultural differences. I know that doesn’t sound as cool as “HUHUHUHU LETS JUST BOMB TEH SHIT OUTTA ‘EM!!!”, but no one ever said that the correct course of action was the easiest one.
Comment by Damien Sorresso — 30 July, 2006 @ 6:57 pm
“Just because the 6 million Jews aren’t going anywhere doesn’t mean that Israel has to ghettoize the Palestinian population and aggressively expand its borders as it has historically done. Israel has never intended to be content with the territory given to it. It wants everything.”
Give me a break, dude. If they wanted everything they’d have a hell of alot more territory than they do now. And you still haven’t expalained why, if they’re expanisionist, they’ve bothered to withdraw from any territory at all. Do you have any concept of how badly they beat all their neighbors every time their neighbors have come after them? I also would like to see some relevant citation of this “ghettoize”ing that you’re claiming they’ve done. The only places I’ve ever seen claim that have been “anti-zionist” sites that want to evict all jews from the middle east. So if you can show me something relevent, I’ll buy it.
So. Clearly we’ve had different lessons in history. So tell you what, you link me to your version, and I’ll read it and see if its acceptable. I’m reading wikipedia right now (and I know, I know, its wikipedia and its possible its been competely taken over by the zionists, but hey..its a good start). From what I can tell, the initial fighting began in late ‘47, starting with three seperate arab attacks on jews. It went on from there. In every account that I’ve read of deir yassin today, it was an attack in an attempt to break a “siege” on jeruselem, and there seems to be pretty decent evidence that while casulaties were high, it wasn’t any sort of deliberate execution and there wasn’t much in the way of specific and terrible atrocities. Not saying it was a good thing, I’m just saying that I’m failing to see how it was really that different from the shit the arabs were doing at the time. Both sides seemed to be fighting a bit dirty, and hey, the arabs got back at those dirty jews 4 days later with the hadassah medical convoy massacre. So, from my point of view, it was a nice little tribal conflict where no one was in the right.
Later, there were definitely evictions, the worst being about 60000 people from Lydda and Ramla. Yes, it was wrong, but at the time, the jews were fighting arab forces from every surrouding country and were protecting their supply lines. Its no excuse, I know, but shit happens in a war. Of course, if the Arabs had been pushing the jewish forces back they would have been perfectly content to just leave any jewish civilians they found where they were and treated them with the utmost respect…
Oh, and as for the no terrorist provocation thing, bullshit. Arab’s had started with marketplace bombing and the like in the 20s. The British, in control of the region at the time, were allowing a large influx of jews who were fleeing persecution in other parts of europe. They started attacking jews at that point, and I can find no references of retaliations by jews at that time. In the 30’s the Arabs revolted, and were basically crushed (in a brutal 30’s fashion) So, I guess that was the start of the classic arabs attack and the jews crush them disproportionately.
“So Israel waged purely defensive wars that just happened to increase their territorial holdings? Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds? Israel has a deep history of ridiculously disproportionate response any time an Arab soldier sneezes in its direction. And this was happening well before the UN recognized Israel’s borders. The Deir Yassin massacre took place more than a month before Israel was declared a nation. The borders the UN recognized had already been won through military expansion, and there was no terrorist provocation then. So please, don’t expect us to believe that Israel has never used military force to expand their territory completely unprovoked. Their original borders were predicated on such action. Or do you believe that Hitler’s “living space” excuse was a perfectly legitimate reason to annex Austria and didn’t actually constitute aggressive expansion, too?”
Its called insurance. And no, it isn’t stupid. When you’re surrounded by enemies who have a bad habit of attacking you without provocation. The 50’s suez war seems pretty damn close to what’s currently going on, with arab forces picking at israel’s flanks, and israel getting more and more intense in their responses. Then france and britain got israel to just attack the sinai so that they could reopen the suez. Again, i’m not really seeing a moral high ground here from either side. The UN set up a peace keeping force in the middle. Later, as the 60’s rolled around, syria kept shelling israeli towns along the border, and israel was under pressur to stop it. So they pressured the peacekeepers to leave. On May 30, egypt, syria, jordan, and lebanon were all being massed on israel’s borders, and the egyptian president was speaking about how their objective in the coming war was to annihilate israel. A couple of days later, Iraq joined that alliance. The next day, the Israel’s preempted. Still, given the amount of forces being mobilized on their border and the stated intention of those forces, I don’t think this case really goes against Israel.
Yada yada yada. Long story short, both sides tend to be pretty aggresive, but I’ll be honest…I’ll give the edge to Israel. Generally speaking, they have either been attacked, or attacked into a force that was preparing to attack them. I know you feel differently and I must be wrong because..um…you said so.
You’ve got a pretty piss-poor understanding of basic defense if you can’t see why israel wants to have defendable borders. In the initial configuration of israel, one successful attack could’ve split the country into halves to be destroyed at leisure. Israel’s expantions have been strategic..they want defensable borders. I’m sorry you’d rather have them easy to wipe out. I mean, none of their neighbors are aggresive or have ever attacked them, so why do they need to be able to defend themselves, right?
I’d like you to explain to me how proportional responses serve as a deterent to anything. I mean, Israel could’ve just gone and grabbed a six or eight hizbollah militants (everyone who is talking about israels disproportion always fails to remember the israelis that got killed in both the capturing raids), but I’m not sure an organization that sends suicide bombers would really give a shit. See, here’s the problem with this whole situation. These aggresive organization, hizbollah and hamas, have wide spread support among the populations. They get funding, people, whatever, and then they go attack israel. Then they return and hide among the population. A “proportionate response” doesn’t really give them any pause in doing more attacks. That kind of loss is acceptable to both them and their supporting population. So how do you get them to stop? I agree its not by using a military campaign against their country of origin. I think you coudl probably undercut support for them by just killing 30-50% of their supporting population, but that’s not an option. Not for any sort human being, not in today’s politic climate, nothing. However, I also don’t agree that just letting them kill 6 or 10 or 20 Israeli’s whenever they feel like it is a particularly good solution, either. If the only goal of these groups was to “free south lebanon” or ’set up a palestinian state in territories’, it would be a lot easier to talk to them. But how do you really negotiate with a group whose only goal is your annihilation? Honestly. Tell me. I admit, I don’t get it.
As for teh cop thing, nice strawman, asshole. If the guy that is getting “brutally beaten” tried to knife the cop, or shot another cop, and gets the shit beat out of him during his arrest, then so be it. Nothing happens in isolation, and you seem to be looking at this as if the only thing that happened was x. You appear to not care that the people attacking israel want to kill everyone in Israel, or that Iran is more or less making noise with the same idea, or of the years of civilian casualties Israel has put up with. Like I said, I don’t see any reasonable options for Israel, but I also don’t see much reasonableness in the entire situation. And I also see Israel trying to be patient and make some compromises by with drawing from lebanon, withdrawing from gaza, and not getting anything in return. How much do you expect them to give up before they stand up for themselves? What would be reasonable?
Terrorism isn’t a problem you solve by massive bombing campaigns. The best way to get rid of terrorism would be to spend all the money we’re spending on fighting wars on alternative energy, get the fuck out of the middle east and let them tear themselves to pieces, and to institute Fair Trade practices that ensure that we only buy products and use resources that have been produced with reasonable working conditions and fair wages. Thats how we could fix terrorism.
On the other hand, though, I just don’t see how you can expect to just not respond to attacks on your citizens. I really don’t. I also don’t think you’re being reasonable with regards to the Israelis. I might even go so far as to call you a “hizbollah apologist”. Especially because there is no way you can make your “ghettoize” argument with hizbollah. they’re in lebanon and not under Israeli jurisdiction.
I don’t know if you’ve remember any of my other comments, but I am a long way from a Bush supporter, and I spend a lot my time at work and in the military arguing with people around me when they’re stupid about shit or quoting fox news. So, pardon me when I tell you to get off your fucking high horse, because I usually agree with you and you could at least be reasonable enough to remember that you’re not talking to some neo-con ann coulter quoting fucktard. I do happen to believe that when you’re dealing with unreasonable people, you sometimes have to be unreasonable to get their attention.
Comment by qkslvrwolf — 31 July, 2006 @ 11:24 am
They withdrew from Lebanon temporarily, genius. Notice how they’ve positioned themselves to occupy the Southern part, using this “two of our soldiers were kidnapped” situation as an excuse to bomb Lebanon and as a pretext for occupation. Israel has a history of expansion; the fact that they withdraw when occupation becomes inconvenient doesn’t change that fact.
And there’s also this quotation.
Are we hitting “Duh” territory yet? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …
So three terrorist attacks, and Israel just happens to wind up with 70% of the territory initially allotted to the Palestinians under the UN partitioning plan? Don’t you get it? These “defensive actions” all just happen to increase Israel’s territorial holdings. Who started the war is irrelevant. More than that, the Palestinians made their intent clear not to give the land to Israel since the original plan was comically unfair. Jews got the majority of the land even though they were less than 10% of the original land owners. Of course the Palestinians were angry.
4 or 5 dead attackers and hundreds of dead villagers, and it wasn’t a “deliberate execution”? There’s a reason it’s called the “Deir Yassin Massacre”.
Except that the Arab countries don’t take money from the West and don’t claim to uphold Western values. Israel claims the moral high ground, and they have a vastly superior military.
Of course Arabs started marketplace bombing. They had vastly inferior military strength and were being invaded by Western powers. The only type of tactic they had left after occupation was terrorism. How would you feel if foreign occupiers suddenly diverted refugees into your home town and told you that you’d better make room for them?
The situation is a clusterfuck, but Western conquest was absolutely the catalyst. And since the West supports Israel and supplies it with huge amounts of military hardware, Arabs make a connection between the attitudes of the West and the attitudes of Israel.
Israel out and out seized that land. There was no actual provokation from the neighboring countries; they were massing troops on their borders with Israel and throwing fiery rhetoric. Wouldn’t you if you were witnessing a neighboring country’s expansionist tendencies?
Oooh, an Arab leader rattling his sabre. Clearly, an invasion was imminent. Except that Israel didn’t repel any invaders. They invaded and took land during this preemption. If it was purely defensive, they would have repelled invading Arab troops back into their borders. They certainly had the military might to just sit on their borders and repulse the Arab states without any trouble.
I feel differently because Israel has a history of “defensive operations” that just happen to increase their territory. You call it “insurance”; I call it expansionism. By the way, if this was really insurance, one would actually expect it to be effective. The history of that region should show pretty clearly that said insurance was completely useless in preventing future attacks.
If Israel really wanted to be left in peace, they might have tried going for a more fair land deal instead of the grossly unfair one that enraged the Arabs and sparked so many hostilities. Israel basically robbed land from the Palestinians and then acted surprised and victimized when the Arabs tried to take back their lands and drive out people they saw as invaders. Everything they’ve done is consistent with an expansionist state that just happens to have better PR than its enemies.
Their neighbors (Egypt and Sinai) attacked them in an attempt to get their land back which Israel annexed in 1967. It’s purely circular. Israel shorts Palestine on the partitioning and inflames them. Israel then “defensively” expands its territories because the Arabs are pissed off. No matter which way you slice it, Israel and the sponsors of that ridiculous partitioning plan hold the majority of blame.
Oh yes, because invading and shelling them has worked so well. Have you been following the news in Lebanon, specifically Qana? Explain to me how slaughtering dozens of women and children helps get two captured Israeli soldiers back. You seem to equate “proportional response” to “being a pussy”. Israel’s first solution is to bomb something. How exactly they’d negotiate is a matter for diplomats, but it should be pretty fucking obvious that negotiation is preferable to dead children. Israel simply went for the latter.
And I see that you utterly failed to refuse my analogy. You simply said, “Well the situation isn’t exactly the same, so I don’t have to address it.” It is possible to resist arrest without actually putting the officer in danger, and brutal beatings during such arrests and suppressions are a matter of historical fact. Look at how British soldiers in India suppressed the peaceful dissidents.
Israel put themselves in this situation. Frankly, I don’t have a whole lot of pity for a nation that has the military support of the entire Western world and still calls itself a victim. They’re like Christians in America; they have all the power, yet when people tell them they can’t take the extreme actions they’d like to, they cry “OPPRESSION!!!!”
Energy is only part of the problem. Oil is what makes us have to put up with the Arab nations’ bullshit. But take that away, and all you do is invite Israel to start expanding even more aggressively. If the Arabs’ oil vanished tomorrow, everyone in the West would suddenly stop giving a shit about them and just let Israel do whatever it wanted.
And to be honest, the governments in that region almost deserve that fate. Everyone knows that they’d be just as oppressive of Jews as Jews are of them, were their places reversed. The two sides deserve each other. But only one side has billions of dollars in military hardware being donated to it by the American taxpayers annually. With great power comes great responsibility, or did you not watch Spiderman?
And you’ve taken that argument completely out of context (easy to get away with when you don’t quote your opponent’s words). I brought up the Palestinians’ ghettos to illuminate the motivations behind the Palestinians’ tactics, not in any relation to what was happening with Hizbollah.
Comment by Damien Sorresso — 31 July, 2006 @ 7:55 pm
The bit about the Arab radio broadcasts was debunked more than 40 years ago by Erskine Childers, who examined the radio archives of the British (who monitored all radio traffic in the region) and found that there were no Arab broadcasts inciting Palestinians to leave.
Comment by Jason Peppers — 31 July, 2006 @ 10:37 pm
I meant to take that back when I found a couple of decent sources to read up on the region. What *did* happen, as far as I can tell, is that both sides exaggerated what happened at Deir Yassin for their own reasons. The palestinians did to try and drum up their people to fight, the Israeli’s did to try and scare the palestinians. Either way, it wasn’t any worse than the hospital ambush that happened a week later.
I’ll come back later and talk about the rest later, I have to go play some sports. Thank you for answering me in a tone that doesn’t assume I’m a neo-con.
Comment by qkslvrwolf — 1 August, 2006 @ 4:02 pm
Please try and keep the post length reasonable and use paragraphs and the “blockquote” tag to do quotations. My eyes got worn out just picking through your last post because everything was in huge blocks of text with no easy visual way to distinguish quotations from what you were writing.
Comment by Damien Sorresso — 1 August, 2006 @ 8:43 pm