As Violence Escalates in Mid East

Interesting perspective from an internet message board.


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"I can understand also why there are Palestinian sympathizers in this country. Americans had their national origin as the under dogs, the poor masses yearning to be free"


I think we all recognize that the true "Americans" were the native indian underdogs which settlers crushed, killed and sequestered onto reservations particularly when native american indians resorted to terrorist tactics to try to protect the land that was first theirs. If anything, I would imagine palistianian sympathy arises out of some sense of guilt for past transgressions.


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"I can understand also why there are Palestinian sympathizers in this country. Americans had their national origin as the under dogs, the poor masses yearning to be free"


I think we all recognize that the true "Americans" were the native indian underdogs which settlers crushed, killed and sequestered onto reservations particularly when native american indians resorted to terrorist tactics to try to protect the land that was first theirs. If anything, I would imagine palistianian sympathy arises out of some sense of guilt for past transgressions.

If they could.


Guilt presumes you are doing something the other guy wouldn't, or nobody else would.


But there is no religion on Earth that dicates giving away land as a gift.


Land has always been, and can only be, won by blood, between people who are commercially incompatible.


Ken Hamblin put it best when he extended Wolfgang Pauli's idea to say that two cultures cannot occupy the same space at the same time. I would simply modify that to say when at least one of the cultures is non-capitalist, meaning where land rigths are not transferred in auctions, are they incompatible.


Trust me, in the end the indians would have lost all their land anyway. They could never have paid the taxes.


The problem with things that are given as gifts, or are dependent on someone else's generosity, is that they are always eventually taken away. Using Ottosen's language, nobody humors a freerider for long. The only way to get land, in the absence of auction, is through victory. Both are methods for ending conflict.


eLROY

I don’t see how the perceived guilt of Palestinian sympathizers for past transgressions would play a greater role than responsibility for current ones, if one acknowledges the truth of what I would defend as self-evident facts: Two nations have legitimate claims to the same land and rejectionist on both sides wish to deny all rights to the other. Common sense requires some form of mutual accommodation, instead of racist oppression by one side based on fears that the other would do the same if it had the upper hand. During the last 30 years there has been widespread consensus for a “two-state solution.” The chief impediment to this solution has been Israel’s insistence on maintaining control over the Palestinians in the form of tyranny (taxation and law-making without representation), military occupation, control over roads and transportation, natural resources (especially water), and the transplanting of colonists, a process Israel dramatically accelerated during a “peace process” purportedly designed to lead to Palestinian sovereignty. This remains Israel's position today, after forty years of widespread and brutal human rights abuses, including extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate use of deadly force, arbitrary arrest and detention, collective punishment, and general intimidation and humiliation, all amply documented by Amnesty International and other respected groups. Israeli rejectionism has been financed and likely been made possibly only by lavish U.S. support, and the result is what we see now.


All Americans who believe in accepting responsibility for their actions, regardless of which side they instinctively sympathize with or how they see particular issues, acknowledge that the situation of the Palestinians stems directly from the actions of their own government, which in a democracy means actions of themselves.


Against these facts we see one ubiquitous reply: the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians to gain political or military advantage is an abominable crime. I agree with this statement, but I don't believe it's genuine when it's limited to Palestinians, and is made by those that refuse to apply the same standard to the U.S. or Israel. (In other words, I believe that objections to Palestinain terrorism are invoked by people who don't really care about it -- some of whom encourage and silently welcome it -- but invoke humanity's objections to it in order to pursue unrelated ends). The current Prime Minister of Israel, for example, has directly supervised the killing of more innocent civilians than all Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists in history. (In the Lebanese invasion, 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese were either killed or wounded from 4 July 1982 through to 15 August 1982, 40 percent children, according to Third World Quarterly [Volume 6, Issue 4, October 1984, pp. 934-949], figures that are widely accepted in Israel and elsewhere). Sharon's crimes in turn pale by comparison to the U.S. destruction of civilian centers during WWII, Korea and Vietnam, and support and supervision of state terrorist and paramilitary terrorist operations in Central America, South America, Timor, Turkey and elsewhere, just to mention fairly recent history. When you mention these events to those that find Palestinian terrorism the paramount issue, you get a lecture on the necessity and worthiness of the cause (or sometimes the then-perceived worthiness of the cause, implying certain mistakes that we should be trusted to make no more). When Palestinians lecture about their cause when the topic is suicide bombings, they're derided as animals with no concern for victims. Overall, the so-called anti-terrorist argument isn't much of a reply, but when it's all you've got, you've got to say something.


On the other hand, you mentioned "Americans had their national origin as the under dogs, the poor masses yearning to be free."


As in "huddled masses yearning to breath free?" Emma Lazarus penned those lines in 1883, and they resonated with Americans responsible for the then-current U.S. atrocities against Indian resistence to the expropriation of their country. The contradiction between abstract sympathizing with the oppressed while supporting tremendous oppression would appear to remain vigorous. Anyone who’s sick of maintaining it vis-a-vis Isreal and the Palestinians might be interested in the link below.

Keeping this somewhat civil, isn't this really about what's moral or immoral? I choose to leave guilt out of it for now. Are you implying that it was OK for the european settlers to massacre the native americans because it was inevitable that they would lose their land in the end? If you are implying that, then I think you're way off the mark.


Should land be won? Is it not reasonable to assume that they who found it first should get to keep it?


Trust me? Not a chance, buddy!


Given as gifts? Who gave the Idians their land in the first place? If they indeed did get it as a gift, is it morally acceptable for us to come in and confiscate it?

Why do you bother to throw these soft balls at the hardcore Anti-semites and racists? The response will be just garbage that states Palestinian suicide bombers are peaceniks, the Israelis are servants of the great Satan, and the USA is the great Satan.


What do you expect from indivduals under surveillance by the Office of Homeland Security? Just leave the topic alone, and these warped fools will go away.

"If the time should come when our people in Palestine usurp the place of the local population, the latter will not yield easily"


-Ahad Ha'Am, 1891


"[Our leaders] find it unpleasant to recall and are incensed at those who remind them that there is a nation in Palestine which is already settled there and has no intention of leaving. In the future, when this illusion is entirely obliterated and the stark reality is seen with open eyes, they will certainly understand the magnitude and importance of this quesiton and how much we shall have to work in order to come as close as possible to a solution."


-Ahad Ha'Am, 1914


"And the leadership [of the Palesinians] will pass to the moderate groups who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as guarantee against Arab displacement or equal rights for Arab citizens or Arab national integrity. And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees so that both peoples can live together in peace like good neighors."


-Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 1923

"they who found it first should get to keep it"


That is an example of a moral. Like an alien species, it first hitchhiked its way to the American continent inside Western Christian European skulls.


Indians didn't have so much morals, more just habits and rituals. Did Indians even have writing, or printing presses? I mean, if there had been a Native American Moses or Edmund Burke, would anybody have had any way to learn about what he was saying?


So far as gifts, every moment we "could" take it away but choose not to is a gift.


Moreover, giving a "private-property right" to a savage is about as useful as giving a bicycle to a jellyfish.


The Indians were free to obtain private-property rights via the same path as any European immigrant.


If they had wanted private property, they certainly didn't have to wait for us to show up to institute it. Far from understanding the notion of private property, I'm not sure if indians even were aware of gravity when we showed up, or knew which way was up.


eLROY

You seem to have placed European settlers on a higher moral plane than the Indians. What is your justification for doing so? The Indians had their own language and culture, so any Moses's or Burke's were not needed. They were getting along swimmingly without any printing presses, although I'm not sure about the written word. That argument is bunk.


In your third paragraph you go so far as to imply that the Native Americans were no more substantial than a herd of Bison. Do you really believe that? What information have you collected that backs up your assumption?


As far as the Indians not grasping the concept of gravity, or knowing "which way is up", how would you explain the history of the Europeans coming to the shores and needing the Indians to save their sorry asses?


Maybe the Indians understood the concept of gravity, just not the gravity of the appearance of the white man on their shores. If they did, perhaps they would have allowed the settlers to freeze and starve to death, rather than getting them through the winter, and thus insuring their own demise.