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"Those are my principles, if you don't like them... well, I have others.”

Happy F*cking Birthday!

Israel: keeping the Nazi tradition alive. Happy genocide day.

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"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me." -Martin Niemöller

"Proudly violating the Geneva Convention since 1967"

Ha!

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quote:

Be Careful What You Wish For Israel’s doom would be bad news for Europe. By Mark Steyn Almost everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don’t recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic fancies don’t come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don’t fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: “Is Israel Finished?” Also the cover story in Canada’s leading news magazine, Maclean’s, which dispenses with the question mark: “Why Israel Can’t Survive.” Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map-makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years — Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second) and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region. On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 — and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that’s because it’s uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: Their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohammed Atta coming at you through the office window. Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. “Aaron Lazarus the Jew,” wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to The Prisoner Of Zenda, “had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but” — and for Jews there’s always a ‘but’ — “since Jews then might hold no property…” Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic, and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews’ enemies acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist.” Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis? Since Israel marked its half-century, the “right to exist” is now routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region’s presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus. During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in the Times of London: “The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion - held not passionately but with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was” — which lets you know how he would argue it if minded to. Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: “Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.” Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it’s a “stain of shame” or just a “mistake” is the merest detail. Aaron Lazarus and every other “European Jew” of his time would have had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen’s designation. The Jews lived in Europe for centuries, but without ever being accepted as “European”: To enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state, and now they’re reviled for that, too. The “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt. The Western intellectuals who promote “Israeli Apartheid Week” at this time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist delegitimization. The talk of a “two-state solution” will fade. In the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less incendiary but demographically decisive sense. Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state — Jews and Muslims — from Jordan to the sea. And even those who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they’ll be unable to argue against it. Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of “evenhandedness” in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will be long gone a decade hence. The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the reasons for Israel’s doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much of the rest of the west, Israel has the advantage of living on the front line of the existential challenge. “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” wrote Eric Hoffer, America’s great longshoreman philosopher, after the ’67 war. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.” Indeed. So happy 60th birthday. And here’s to many more.

For Israeli Arabs, anniversary marks 60 years of sorrow
By Ethan Bronner
Thursday, May 8, 2008

JERUSALEM: As Israel toasts its 60th anniversary in the coming weeks, rejoicing in Jewish national rebirth and democratic values, the Arabs who make up 20 percent of its citizenry will not be celebrating. Better off and better integrated than ever in their history, freer than the vast majority of other Arabs, Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens are still far less well off than Israeli Jews and feel increasingly unwanted.

On Thursday, Israeli Independence Day, thousands of Israeli Arabs will gather in their former villages to protest what they have come to call the nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, denoting the dispossession of Palestinians associated with Israel's birth. For most Israelis, Jewish identity is central to the state, the reason they are proud to live here, the link they feel with history. But Israeli Arabs, including the most successfully integrated ones, say a new identity must be found for the country's long-term survival.

"I am not a Jew," protested Eman Kassem-Sleiman, a prominent Arab radio journalist with impeccable Hebrew whose children attend a predominantly Jewish school in Jerusalem. "How can I belong to a Jewish state? If they define this as a Jewish state, they deny that I am here."

The clash between the cherished heritage of the majority and the hopes of the minority is more than friction. Even more than during the huge half-century festivities a decade ago, now the left and the right increasingly see Israeli Arabs as one of the central challenges for Israel's future, one intractably bound to the search for an overall settlement between Jews and Arabs here. Jews fear ultimately losing the demographic battle to Arabs, both inside Israel's borders and in the larger territory the nation controls.

Most say that while an end to its self-definition as a Jewish state would mean an end to Israel, they equally say that failure to instill in Arab citizens a sense of belonging is dangerous because many Arabs promote the idea that, despite its 60 years, Israel is a passing phenomenon.

"I want to convince the Jewish people that having a Jewish state is bad for them," said Abir Kopty, an Israeli Arab advocate.

Land is an especially sore point. Across Israel, especially in the north, the remains of dozens of Palestinian villages sit partly unused, scars on the landscape from the conflict that gave birth to Israel in 1948. Yet some of the original Arab inhabitants and their descendants, all Israeli citizens, live in packed towns and villages - often next door - and remain barred from resettling the vacant areas, while Jewish communities around them are urged to expand.

One recent warm afternoon, Jamal Abdulhadi Mahameed drove past kibbutz fields of wheat and watermelon, up a dirt road surrounded by pine trees and cactus, and climbed the worn remains of a set of stairs, declaring in the open air: "This was my house. This is where I was born."

He said what he most wanted now, at age 69, was to leave the crowded town next door, come back to this piece of uncultivated land with the pomegranate bushes planted by his father and work it, as generations have before him. He has gone to court to get it.

Mahameed is no revolutionary and, by nearly any measure, a solid and successful citizen. His children include a doctor, two lawyers and an engineer. Yet, as an Arab, his quest for a return to his land challenges longstanding Israeli policy.

"We are prohibited from using our own land," Mahameed said as he stood in what was once Lajoun, then a village, now a mix of overgrown scrub and pine trees surrounded by the fields of Kibbutz Megiddo. "They want to keep it available for Jews. My daughter makes no distinction between Jewish and Arab patients. Why should the state treat me differently?"

The answer has to do with the very essence of Zionism - the movement of Jewish rebirth and control over the land where Jewish statehood flourished 2,000 years ago.

"Land is presence," remarked Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has studied Bedouin culture. "If you want to be present here, you have to have land. The country is not that big. What you cede to Arabs can no longer be used for Jews who may still want to come. Israel is here as a haven for them."

A Palestinian state is widely seen as a potential solution to tensions with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, but any deep conflict with Israel's own Arab citizens could prove much more complex.

Many Israeli Arabs express solidarity with their Palestinian brethren under Israeli occupation. Some others praise Hezbollah, the Shiite organization whose militia fought off Israel in Lebanon in 2006. Some Arabs in the Parliament routinely accuse Israel of Nazism.

Meanwhile, several rightist rabbis have issued rulings forbidding Jews from renting apartments to Arabs or employing them. A majority of Jews, according to polls, favor a transfer of Arabs out of Israel as part of a two-state solution, a view that a decade ago was considered extreme.

Arabs here reject that idea partly because they prefer the certainty of an imperfect Israeli democracy to whatever system may evolve in a shaky Palestinian state. That is part of the paradox of the Israeli Arabs. Their anger has grown, but so has their sense of belonging.

In fact, the anxious and recriminating rhetoric on both sides may give a false impression of constant tension. There is a real level of Jewish-Arab coexistence in many parts, and the government has recently committed itself to affirmative action for Arabs in education, infrastructure and government employment.

"We know that they need more land, that their children need a place to live," Raanan Dinur, director general of the prime minister's office, said in an interview in which he declared that Israel must urgently end the discrimination. "We are working on building a new Arab city in the north. Our main goal is to take what are today two economies and integrate them into one economy."

Still, there is a concern that time is short.

Mahameed and his fellow villagers will arrive at the Supreme Court in July with the goal of obtaining 20 hectares, or 50 acres, of their families' former land that sits uncultivated except for pine trees planted there by the Jewish National Fund.

Their story is part of a larger one: After the United Nations General Assembly voted in late 1947 for two states in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish, local Arab militias and their regional supporters went on the offensive against Jewish settlements. Zionist forces counterattacked. Hundreds of Palestinian villages, including Lajoun, were evacuated and mostly destroyed, the nakba.

Palestinian Arabs became refugees in Lebanon as well as the West Bank, which Jordan occupied after the war, and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt occupied. But some, like Mahameed, stayed in Israel, taking refuge in other towns and villages. They were made citizens and were promised equality but never got it.

Those who had left or been expelled from their villages were not permitted back and spent the next 60 years watching their lands farmed or built upon by newcomers, many of them refugees from Nazi oppression or Soviet anti-Semitism.

In 1953, the Israeli Parliament declared about 120,000 hectares of captured village land to be state property for either settlement or security purposes.

Mahameed and his 200 fellow complainants all live in Um el-Fahm, an overcrowded town near their former land. "Our claim is that since the land has not been used all these years, there was no need to confiscate it," said Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, a Haifa-based group devoted to Israeli Arabs' rights.

Bishara lost that argument in the district court, which agreed with the state that the planted pine trees around Lajoun and a water treatment plant there constituted settlement.

It is not hard to detail the gap between Arabs and Jews in nearly every area - health, education, employment - as well as the gap in government spending in each sector. There are three times as many Arab families below the poverty line as Jewish ones, and a government study five years ago spoke of the need to remove "the stain of discrimination."

In the prime minister's office, Dinur has taken a strong interest in the issue and has met several times with Arab leaders. He says it may be possible one day for some Arabs to return to their native villages, but only as part of a larger process of integration, progress and regional reconciliation. Otherwise, he said, Israeli Jews will fear that the Arabs' goal will be to take back all the towns and villages lost in the 1948 war.

Others interested in the area agree.

"Anything that seems to be aiming to reverse the process by which the land was made primarily Jewish will produce great fear here," said Sarah Kreimer, who has worked in Arab-Jewish coexistence for 25 years. "The fear is that of losing the Jewish state."

For many Israelis, the challenge posed by their Arab population cannot be separated from what they see as the risks in the region: the increased influence of Iran, even though it is not Arab; the growth of Islamic radicalism; the concern that another war in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip is not far away.

Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Institute, a research group in Jerusalem, said that when the army prepares for war it includes in the plan how to handle the possibility that Israeli Arabs will rise up against the state.

Many also believe - and here Jews and Arabs seem to agree - that without a solution to the Palestinian dispute over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, internal tensions will not abate. And given the pessimism about the peace talks with the Palestinians, the forecast does not look bright.

The argument many Arabs make is that Israel's founding was a great injustice foisted on them that now should be rectified. Jews here disagree profoundly and say Israel is the rectification of a historic set of injustices committed against them.

Abdulwahab Darawshe, a former member of Parliament and the current head of the Arab Democratic Party, sat recently in his office in Nazareth and said: "No matter what happens, we will not leave here again. That was a big mistake in 1948. Yet our identity is becoming more and more Palestinian. You cannot cut us from the Arab tree."

Asked his plans for Israeli Independence Day, he said, "I will take a shovel and work the land around my olive trees."
Airstrike kills Palestinian

An Israeli airstrike killed at least one Palestinian militant in Gaza on Wednesday, Reuters quoted medical workers as saying in Gaza.

The Islamic Jihad, a militant group, said that one of its members was killed and that six were wounded in the strike near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis.

An Israeli Army spokeswoman said that an airstrike had targeted a group of Palestinian militants who were spotted by soldiers operating in the area. Israel frequently carries out airstrikes and raids in the Gaza Strip, which it says are aimed at curbing cross-border rocket fire into southern Israel.

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=12649761

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Originally posted by Krypton Their story is part of a larger one: After the United Nations General Assembly voted in late 1947 for two states in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish, local Arab militias and their regional supporters went on the offensive against Jewish settlements. Zionist forces counterattacked. Hundreds of Palestinian villages, including Lajoun, were evacuated and mostly destroyed, the nakba.

it's all israel's fault.

Great article Krypton.

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Those who had left or been expelled from their villages were not permitted back and spent the next 60 years watching their lands farmed or built upon by newcomers, many of them refugees from Nazi oppression or Soviet anti-Semitism.

''Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.'' President Harry Truman

Its a sad indictment of humanity to see a people who have endured such hardship, pain, and suffering become brutal oppressers themselves when they find themselves in power. I guess the founders of Israel sadly having known only terrible injustice, and oppression against the Nazis and Soviets will find themselves unconsciously ruling in the same way that they have been taught.

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Originally posted by tathi Its a sad indictment of humanity to see a people who have endured such hardship, pain, and suffering become brutal oppressers themselves when they find themselves in power. I guess the founders of Israel sadly having known only terrible injustice, and oppression against the Nazis and Soviets will find themselves unconsciously ruling in the same way that they have been taught.

Persecution isn't unique to Jews, they (not everybody obviously) just make a big deal out of it... and expect the rest of us to give them carpe blanche. Or else you're an antisemite, even if you're a real semite unlike like kazzarian converts who don't have a drop of semitic blood in them.

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"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me." -Martin Niemöller

Everyone keeps forgetting that Israel is a throroughly European country. I just don't want this detail to be overlooked when discussing the US-Israel relationship. I would venture to say, Israel's relationship with Europe is actually stronger than with the US, when you consider the # of Israeli tourists/workers there, the trade that goes on, the culture etc.

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"The favorite American pastime is not baseball, it's moral crusades."

Happy Birthday Israel!