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hpslugga

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Posts posted by hpslugga

  1. 18 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    Israel says it will not negotiate with Palestine until they recognize it. If I were head of the Palestinian Authority I would get on TV and announce “we recognize Israel’s right to exist, and have for 30 years”. Or tweet it. I wonder why Abbas has not done that

    Israel does not want to negotiate with them at all and they've made their intentions on that known since their response to the Jarring Mission in 1971, and that was made very clear again in their response to the Algiers Declaration. They acknowledged Arafat's willingness to acknowledge Israel's existence, but then the demand turned into "they have to recognize our creation as legitimate," since they knew no self-respecting Palestinian would ever do such a thing. What you pointed out as some sort of principled pre-condition is, in reality, goalpost moving. Even if they were willing to put that in paper literally, since apparently the Algiers Declaration doesn't satisfy you, some other excuse will crop up as it always does. I'm sorry, but there's ample evidence to support that. And it has nothing to do with the fact that it's "just Israel" or "Jewish" or whatever; it has to do with the fact that the US gives it massive aid and ideological cover in the international arena, and they're behaving like any other beneficiary would. If our support was for the Palestinians, I've not doubt the roles would completely reverse and for the same reason that has nothing to do with race nor religion or anything like that.

    As to Abbas, again, he's a retched collaborator that does what the US wants him to do, namely act as a lazy and corrupt despot who couldn't be moved to shed a single tear for even the most extreme instance of plight by "his people." You seem to think that he's some sort of charismatic leader that has the support of the Palestinians. He isn't. 

  2. 2 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

    I'm against a Palestinian state because I'm not at all confident they want to run an actual country. 

    That's not up to anyone but them to decide. That's the issue.

  3. Who else is a party to the conflict as it pertains to 242, and with whom else do the Palestinians need to insistence on being put "on equal footing?" Bangladesh? Again, you're just making excuses.

  4. 9 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    They specifically left recognition of the Israeli state out of their Declaration of Independence. Something Arafat said in a speech is not an official recognition 

    It says ""The need to convene an effective international conference on the subject of the Middle East problem and its essence, the question of Palestine, under the auspices of the United Nations and with the participation of the permanent members of the Security Council and all parties to the conflict in the region, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, on an equal footing, with the provision that the said international conference shall be convened on the basis of Security Council resolutions 242"

    SC242's article 2 section C clearly states "For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area"

    If you're making a claim based on 242 with no additional qualification (i.e. he never said "except for this or that part"), you're by definition recognizing the "territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area," not just Palestine. That should have been a logical corollary. I guess I expect too much when people have an apparent compulsion to make excuses.

  5. 4 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    Has Palestine officially recognized Israel’s right to exist?

    They've been doing that since 1988 when Arafat outlined the implications of the Algiers Declaration.

  6. 12 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

    So fozz is your opinion Israel does not have a right to exist?

    Quote

    They haven’t. Why should they?

    Because that's what they're legally entitled to, and it's rather shocking that you don't see the very brazen contradiction between those two sentences. That's how their "right to exist" is defined under international law, which is what created their country in the first place. People who hold views like yours like to yammer about the "antiquity" and "irrelevance" of the UN, and they do so very selectively. They bray like sanctimonious asses whenever AI or HRW condemns Hamas for using indiscriminate weaponry, but when it comes to GA and SC resolutions either condemning Israeli human rights violations or the issue of Palestinian self-determination, suddenly "they're irrelevant! We should get out!" It's typical postmodernist spinelessness and hypocrisy: "all truth is relative...except for this one!!!"

    Israel certainly has the right to exist within the borders of 1967 (well it's actually the right of self-determination, but that's semantics), including the Western portion of Jerusalem and there can also be, to quote UNSC 242, "minor and mutual adjustments" along the Jordanian border in the southeast (it was irregular at the time of the drafting of the map). And you should notice, I take that very seriously. I stand firmly against BDS' position that "all 7 million Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to Israel" because doing so would shatter the Jewish/Hebrew/Israeli/etc demography of the country. I acknowledge that, and I therefore reject it and I prefer the line "just settlement of the refugee question" as a guide in future negotiations. In other words, I'm of the position that the refugees should be compensated monetarily, but that's where it should stop.

    Since you scoff at the borders of 1967, you are effectively saying "Palestine has no right to exist." Well if that's your position, fine, but just know that you have no right whatsoever to demand that anyone respects Israel's right to exist. When you talk about Israel beyond its 1967 borders, you're not talking about their rights and you're not talking about their legal entitlements. You're just talking about what they want, and that's a totally separate question. Palestine's right to exist is defined by the very same international law as the whole of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza, and the whole of East Jerusalem. 

    That bolded sentence I just typed is completely, 100% uncontroversial. Why? Because in the International Court of Justice's 2004 advisory opinion, they unanimously agreed on that very fact. The issue at hand was the legality of the so-called "separation wall," and the court repeatedly noted its illegality in the portions that lie between the Green Line and the West Bank. The Green Line is the border. That's the law, and not one justice in that opinion disagreed on that point. And of course someone is going to read that and play the anti-Israel or anti-Semitism card, fully ignoring that 1) one of the justices was the US Justice, a Czech-born Holocaust survivor named Thomas Buergenthal and 2) another justice, Rosalyn Higgins née Cohen is also Jewish. So the two Jewish judges from two of the five permanent UN members, not 3rd-world-judges-with-anti-US/Israel/Jewish-axes-to-grind, both agreed on those points. 

    If you're unwilling to acknowledge that, then answer this: does Egypt have an obligation to give back the Sinai to Israel? If no, why?

    • Like 1
  7. 6 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    Israel will still want the status quo in a few decades. They don't want a two state solution. They will never let the Palestinians occupy the same space as Israel among the world's nation states. Permanent second-class status for Palestinians benefits Israel. 

    Israel does not want peace. It's banal in its simplicity.

    Well they do want peace, but they want it on their terms.

  8. 21 minutes ago, Hank Scorpio said:

     

     

    While I'm aware this is an Onion posting, it's not a stretch from reality. Read "Breaking the Silence," which is a recount of Operation Cast Lead based on what IDF soldiers told to the interviewers. In fact, just Find/Search the word "insane" and see how many times that word comes up in the context of a sentence that reads, in one variation or another, "we used insane amounts of firepower." One soldier likened it to using a magnifying glass to burn ants. Another likened it to a Playstation game...

    ...but you'll also notice that they keep referring to the fact that they rarely, if ever, actually saw with their own eyes any Hamas militants and that there were no real battles...soooooo, why the "insane amounts of firepower," again?

  9. 9 minutes ago, zork said:

    Sure, but if you understand what type of power you can wield it can make decisions that affect your outcome easy.  The Palestinians have been manipulated into near continuous fools errands for decades with the Intifadas(Arafat et al) and then the Hamas leadership failures.  That history has soured, and rightly so given the suicide bombing behaviors, fair dealings of peace for decades to come.  Israel won't forget and they shouldn't.  

    The Palestinians should lay down their arms, their rockets, live in peace and police their own to do the same if they want to have any chance in the future of a stable land to raise their children.  I don't expect that to happen so the war will continue on and on and on and on.

    Sure

  10. 1 minute ago, zork said:

    Parts of the wall were started in 2002 which was clearly a time when suicide bombers were very frequent guests from the Palestinian areas.  The wall has proven quite effective, certainly not perfect, at keeping out or limiting the suicide bomber strategy effectiveness.  War sucks.

    Again, 80% of it is built in Palestinian territory and it encases the very illegal settlement blocs, which is why the ICJ unanimously agreed that those portions of the wall are “ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law.” To act as if that’s not the purpose is to ignore reality.

  11. 20 minutes ago, zork said:

    Israelis get to vote in PA leadership elections?  Israelis help write the Hamas charter documentation?  They build walls/fences to keep the suicide bombers out.

    They build walls to encase settlement blocs. 80% of that wall in the West Bank encroaches on Palestinian territory. That has jack shit to do with suicide bombers.

  12. Quote

    If Israel really wanted war with Palestine, Palestine would be no more.

    Israeli expansionism isn't that ADHD. Like someone else said, the status quo favors their aims long term. They don't need to wipe Palestine out in a single instant. They certainly could, and they're choosing not to do it, but that doesn't make what they do justified as the end result, long term, is functionally no different. When Arafat and the PA made that declaration in Algiers in 1988, Israel responded just months later by stating "there can be no additional Palestinian state [the implication being Jordan already is/was a Palestinian state] between Jordan and the Sea." Or you can go by the words of the "great man of peace" Shimon Peres when he said that a Palestinian state "will never happen," or an official from Netanyahu's first admin who said "If Palestinian sovereignty is limited enough so that we feel safe, call it fried chicken," or as Sharon put it, "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."

    Again, they're in no hurry to grab the entire country right now. As they see it, they're doing just fine by installing a settlement bloc here and a settlement bloc there.

  13. On 5/14/2018 at 11:18 PM, Iconoclast Texan said:

    What is the endgame for the Palestinians?

    Self-determination. They've been saying that since January of 1976 when we vetoed a Security Council resolution that the non-aligned countries brought forth and would have given them that had we not vetoed it. We vetoed a similar resolution in 1980 and have since vetoed every single time it came up in the General Assembly, all of this despite the fact that there's an overwhelming international consensus in favor of granting them this. 

    Quote

    What are the Israelis supposed to do with the West Bank?

    Completely ignoring the reprehensible impropriety of that question, as Israel has not a stitch of legal entitlement to the West Bank whatsoever, those terms are clearly written and have been for over 50 years. This is neither rocket surgery nor brain science. 

    Quote

    They pulled out of Gaza

    They occupy Gaza externally. When they say they "pulled out," all they really did was withdraw settlers/settlements and relocated them to the West Bank as settlements rapidly increased after the so-called "Gaza withdrawal." And the withdrawal was not a charitable act, either. They pulled out because Gaza was trending towards uninhabitability. For example, the drinking water is 90% unfit for human consumption. Most of the arable land is gone. But more relevant to your point, the IDF still monitors who can enter/exit, they have the blockade in place, they control the airspace, etc. That's not a real "pullout" in any meaningful sense. Again as Cameron put it, that's an "open-air prison," and since that's the case, one has to know that there's a warden, and it sure as shit isn't Hamas.

    Quote

    and their reward was Hamas taking over control and being assaulted by hidden tunnels and rockets.

    1. Hamas didn't "take over," they won in an election that every single international monitoring agency (and it was one of the most heavily monitored elections in history) called "free and fair." Hamas won the election in 2006 because contrary to your apparent perception, Fatah is a group of retched collaborators, and the Palestinian population knows it full well. We aren't as well informed about it because we don't live there. We live in a country whose mainstream media espouses ridiculous talking points like "Saeb Erekat is smart" and "Mahmoud Abbas is a moderate," and we're all just supposed to nod in agreement and not burst into hysterical laughter. And that's not at all to defend Hamas. Hamas is a reprehensible organization. But that's how bad the opposition was, more on that later.

    2. As to the issue of rockets, that's hardly a justification for what Israel regularly does to them (mowing the lawn). It's a severely overblown issue off of which even Israel continues to stooge itself. In its so-called "Operation Protective Edge," the MFA reported that over 7,000 rockets and mortar shells were fired and only 1 house in Israel was destroyed. That's because they're not "rockets." They're enhanced fireworks. In fact, Theodore Postol (the MIT professor that exposed the fraud of the Patriot Missile Defense system during the first Gulf War) gave Israel's so-called "Iron Dome" an efficacy percentage of about 5. That is, he estimated that Iron Dome deflected around 350 projectiles which is about half of what the MFA claimed (721, IIRC). Either way, that's a quibble between 5-10%. 40% of the "rockets" were basically duds, meaning they landed in the border area where there was no Iron Dome (because that's only located in major urban centers). And that's not even to excuse the very act of firing such fireworks, but ask yourself a question: what would the United States do if the Zetas fired such primitive weaponry from Nuevo Laredo into Texas? Well they may respond rather strictly, but one thing they very likely wouldn't do is launch airstrikes/drone-strikes/Marine raids/etc to such an extent that it would yield over 100,000 civilian casualties, but that's what Israel did when you adjust the numbers per capita. 

    3. Like I said, even Israel stooged itself off its own propaganda. When they were trying to scare the living shit out of its citizenry about the tunnels and rockets, people fled and tourism took a nose dive. The MFA then toned down their rhetoric and in some cases would tell people that "everything's OK, you're not being targeted, etc." In fact, Michael Bloomberg went over there shortly after Protective Edge and said that Israel is "safe, and a great place to visit." That's not what you say when you visit a land that's being bombarded by rockets and tunnel crawlers. You say something like that when it's...not experiencing those things.

    Quote

    I don’t understand why Fatah doesn’t get their fucking house in order and prove to the world they are a legitimate partner for peace

    Again, they're filthy collaborators that only look out for themselves. That may appear to be a "legitimate partner for peace" if the two sides were the whole of Israel and the leadership of the Palestinians, but that removes the Palestinian people entirely from the equation, and I'm sorry that you apparently believe this, but Fatah/The PA couldn't be bothered to give two shits about the Palestinian people. They know that and that's why they enjoy very little popular support. 

    Quote

    and can run an effective government serving the needs of their people.

    There's not a shred of evidence to support that claim. They don't even know what those "needs" are and are only concerned about their own wants.

    Quote

    If they did that, then the Palestinians would put the Israelis in the unenviable position of being the modern equivalent of the South African apartheid government which had no legitimate leg to stand on.

    They're already in that position and they have been for some time. If you read Avner Yaniv's rendering of the buildup to Israel's aggression against Lebanon in 1982 (where the PLO was headquartered), you'll notice that one of the prime movers of Israel's decision to do that was, to quote him, Arafat's "peace offensive," meaning his reaching towards negotiating the diplomatic settlement that they'd been seeking for the previous 6 years. The fact that Hamas is in the equation now is irrelevant because they have not at all rejected the principles of the 1988 Algiers Declaration.

    There are a myriad of other facts and factors to review, to be sure, but the point is Israel (and the US, if you think it through) has been in a relatively cornered position since 1976 and it's just been excuse after excuse and lie after lie as to why this conflict hasn't been settled, despite the fact that a very broad international consensus supports the very framework of such a settlement, for 51 fucking years. 

    • Like 4
  14. 48 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    Yeah it is, you can be a dick and do what you just did or you can discuss a point of view that you may think is 100% black and white and recognize your opinion on the matter doesn't make it so.

     

     

    You haven’t said one remotely correct thing in the course of this useless back-n-forth, so you’ll pardon me if I tell you that I attach as much value to a comment like that as I do to the dust in my car.

  15. 30 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    The world is on to Israel's shit. 

    In fact, we’re only 1 of 7 countries who isn’t. None of this bullshit would be happening if it weren’t for our unprecedented level of cover that we give.

    • Like 1
  16. 1 minute ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    No I'm following, I just don't agree with your point. Regardless of your belief in a deity.

     

    That’s nice

  17. You’re either just flat out aren’t following, trolling, or just throwing around terms which you haven’t the foggiest idea of what they mean. To be a deist is not the same as believing that you are a deity.

    And again, for the third time, atheism isn’t about the lack of a commitment to one or another established, Abrahamic religion. It has to do with the lack of belief in an omniscient anthropomorphic immortal. When you command your subjects to behave as if you are that supreme being, you lose any and all right to call yourself an atheist.

    Or, to put it another way, the definition of atheism is not “there is no god...except for me!!!” 

  18. 49 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

    Israel could put them in concentration camps and people on this thread would cheer them for it.  

    If you go by the words of David Cameron, i.e. a conservative former PM of the UK (not exactly known for their solidarity with the Palestinians), Gaza is an "open air prison." 

    But yes, the more general sentiment of what you said is correct. I once saw a debate between Norman Finkelstein and Benny Morris. In the middle of Finkelstein's demolition of Morris, Morris had the fucking nerve to interrupt him when he was listing "chickens" as one of the items that cannot get through the illegal blockade by saying "THEY'RE HAMAS CHICKENS!!!"

    This is the world we live in, folks: where dickheads like Benny Morris can argue that fucking chickens are a security threat to Israel because they're associated with Hamas, and only a handful of people burst into hysterical laughter upon hearing such a farce.

  19. 2 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    They were atheists, they may have set themselves up as gods/dictators for life but they weren't practicing a religion no matter how much you or anyone else wants to try and spin it.

    When you turn yourself into a god, you therefore obviously believe in a god (I cannot believe that I'm having to explain this to a presumed adult in 2018) and that completely nullifies claims to atheism. The fact that you continue to fail to understand this in no way mitigates its reality. You just want so badly for your first 3 words to be true, and you cannot for the life of you understand why it isn't.

    And again, you seem to think that the rejection of the Abrahamic religions is what constitutes an atheist. You are wrong. Atheism isn't just the lack of a religion. It's the lack of belief in a supernatural, anthropomorphic supreme being. Deism, for example, isn't exactly a "religion" in your sense either, but it sure as hell isn't atheism.

  20. 8 minutes ago, Orca of Peace said:

    74 before today and they've executed 41 so far today and that will climb to double certainly. 

    Or as their leadership refers to it, "mowing the lawn."

  21. 6 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

    You need to read Mein Kampf, Hitler believed he was acting according to God’s will. 

    He also once said “Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” That's exactly and precisely 100% the polar opposite of atheism.

     

  22. 42 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

    Mao and Stalin say how you doing.......

    The genocidal despots of the 20th centuries, by and large, constructed societies that suggested that they themselves were gods, just like the Korean leadership still does to this very day.

    Atheism isn't merely a rejection of Abrahamic religions. Atheism is a doubt/skepticism/lack of belief in any supernatural, anthropomorphic immortals, especially ones who involve themselves in human affairs.

    Regarding, Stalin, to quote Hitchens:

    "for Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. “How many divisions,” he famously and stupidly inquired, “has the pope?” (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, “More than you think.”) Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this “revelation.”) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his."

    Or to quote Gentile

    "The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader.  After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity. "

    As to Mao, he was born and raised in a Buddhist family as a Buddhist, and Buddhism was in fact perhaps the only religion that was more or less protected during his so-called Cultural Revolution. Yeah they persecuted people of other beliefs, but they all but literally turned Buddhism into the state religion. Hardly an act of atheism, especially given a line he uttered in the waning years of his life. When asked of his health, he said "I have had a cough for some days. It is time to go to heaven. It seems that I am summoned to meet the good god." Again, hardly the confession of an atheist.

    I won't even go into North Korea because their religious fanaticism should be self-evident. So I stand by what I said...that line about "atheists are the biggest killers" is self-serving horseshit that's concocted by religious people in order to deflect any criticism against religion on similar grounds. If religion really is, as it's defined, "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods," then I'd suggest that people like you should man up and own this bullshit instead of copying-and-pasting fairy tales from The Land of Make Believe and Pretend.

    • Like 2
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