We have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads. -Moshe Dayan

SwingingJohnson

I always loved Michael Moore's answer - the Jews should've been given Bavaria 60 years ago. Take the land from the people who took from them.

Some delectable things come from the UK.

I am however saving one of my favorite bottles to toast the centenial of the Balfur Declaration.

What a windfall!

The BBC however, hea...only mildly annoying.

Somacandra

Arabs in Israel are full citizens, can vote (have representatives in the Knesset), and have full religious freedom.

If true, this is genuinely news to me. I understand there were some Supreme Court cases that have been arguing this, but I did not realize that this had been granted. If you could point me to some documentation, I would be much obliged, and happy to see this having been abandoned.

All this arguing and back and forth has been worthwhile if I've been able to actually convey some beneficial information to someone open minded enough to want to know it. Although I'm sure we'd disagree in good faith about many other things, you've genuinely made my day. You would be amazed at the amount of misinformation about Israel propogated out there. People of good will don't know the facts anymore and that's a shame.

Titled quite tellingly:

'PM defends Arab MKs [members of knesset]after Lieberman calls for execution'

Following Lieberman's attacks, Olmert came to the defense of Arab MKs and said he has no doubt that all members of Knesset - Jews and Arabs together - act in the interests of Israel.

Just prior to the swearing-in of the new government, Olmert said, "Let's not cross those certain lines that we tend to cross in the intensity of debate. We don't have 'more patriotic' and 'less patriotic' here. I don't see people who love the State of Israel more or less.

"We cannot take the debates between us into the realm of fiery extremism, impatience and intolerance. The time has come to talk without incitement and without violating the law," Olmert said.

czarangelus: No... how many thousands of people do you think would die in an attempt to evacuate Palestinians?

Oh, so yo support the oppressive regime in Jordan that crushed the Palestinian fight for freedom in 1965 (and in 1970? because the only reason there isn't a Palestinian state in Jordan is not that the Palestinians did not want it. They very much did. But I guess you know better than them.


Somacandra: did know that there were Israeli-Arab Knesset members, but I have in the past heard those very same members complain that being an Arab in Israel is a form of 'second-class citizenship.' This was a number of years ago, though. Times may have indeed changed.

They are better represented in the Israeli Parliament than US blacks are represented in Congress. Though that's not saying much.

equusdc: Egypt is still around...

That is something I wondered about... I know the land is still their but what happened to the ancient Egyptians? Wasnt that culture destroyed by the Romans or something? I don't know if anyone in Egypt still worship Ra and Osiris but I doubt it.

wolfy

You are right. That clip was absolutely hysterical. Wow.

Asteron: Wasnt that culture destroyed by the Romans or something?

Yes, after Rome became Christian.

UVbLue: Furthermore, alienchickenpie, FDR cut immigration in 1939 to almost zero, because, you guessed it, we had just gotten out of the Great Depression.
The Mandate=British Mandate of Palestine, which included modern-day Israel, the disputed territories and modern-day Jordan. It had little to do with economic reasons, as the jews in the area were ready to accept the new immigrants.
Uncle Karl: They should end the occupation and end the illegal encampments. Then if the violence continues, and it will, build the wall. If that fails, and it may, then attack those doing it with the help of the government that controls that land.(they should have done that with Lebanon). If the other government refuses then declare a formal war against the nation the attackers are in and do the whole war thing.

The whole war thing is the exact thing that happened in Lebanon. Hizballah was stirring up crap, the Lebanese governmet was unwilling to stand up to them, for obvious reasons. Israel did the whole war thing, ended up thrashing the country from the air and signed the cease-fire just as the IDF started the major ground operation.
With current military technologies, I don't think it's possible to fight such a war without severely disturbing the civilian population. If you tried, you'd lose more of your own soldiers than civilians you wanted to save. When you try to choose a middle approach, you end up with something like the American presence in Iraq, which has the worst from both worlds.
The most annoying thing about rocket attacks is the fact that they can't be prevented by simply building a high wall and locking the gates. Until someone comes up with a laser that shoots them down, the only way to stop them is to attack the launch sites and workshops, which are more often than not civilian infrastructure.

Fark me, If I had a Genie tomorrow and he gave me three wishes..
Right after I got the information for the cure for cancer and cheap, pollution free power, Id ask for peace in the Mid East.

The Genie would probably tell me to ask for something easier, like "what's the meaning of life"

Wow, lots of Tatsuma posts again. She must live here! As for the subby, whats with the BBC hatin? =P

shipud: Oh, so yo support the oppressive regime in Jordan that crushed the Palestinian fight for freedom in 1965 (and in 1970? because the only reason there isn't a Palestinian state in Jordan is not that the Palestinians did not want it. They very much did. But I guess you know better than them.

No, I'm saying that it would be impossible under current conditions to move the Palestinian people to Jordan without extreme violence. That's all.

Asteron
I agree completely. That is why I did not suggest handing them cash. That would be like giving a bum money. If Israel was going to do these things for the Palestinians. They would hire Palestinian workers but have to oversee it themselves. This would also limit the ability of anyone who wanted to kill Jews at the job site.

The Palestinian leaders have been in recent memory as crooked as every other third world tin pot dictator. If an actual campaign would be made to rebuild the economy of Palestine then it would have to be closely monitored.

Somacandra: I'll check the thread later, Blindman, to see if you've pointed me to any sources. Thanks!

You can easily find it, straight from the horse's mouth:

The electoral system in Israel

Basic Law: The Knesset

dvedis: Wow, lots of Tatsuma posts again. She must live here! As for the subby, whats with the BBC hatin? =P

Tats is male I am pretty sure. Former Canadian, future Israeli, intends on serving in the IDF? His bio is something like that....

Uncle Karl

Thats your justification for allowing illegal immigration? $4 bag of oranges? I would gladly pay that and more if it means keeping out illegals who kill americans and clog up our jails, schools, and hospitals.

Pxtl

SwingingJohnson

I always loved Michael Moore's answer - the Jews should've been given Bavaria 60 years ago. Take the land from the people who took from them.

You do of course know that the palestinian leadership actively supported Hitler during WWII and had meetings and agreement proposing to build death camps in the middle east following its conclusion. This is not conspiracy theory it's all readily available information about Arafat's relative the Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem (a war criminal hiding in Egypt) and his fellows. A man whom Arafat repeatedly called a hero, incidentally.

But this is an aside, because as I've said the british recognized that there was a jewish majority in areas with legally purchased and developed land, with its own functioning social and administrative bodies already... which is why their proposed partition was dreamed up to begin with.

This sensible partition was shelved early on (when much sorrow could have been avoided) due to arab aggression and resistance to any jewish state in the middle east, regardless of its composition and that the land owned by jews at that time was all legally acquired from voluntary sellers.

Wow, lots of Tatsuma posts again. She must live here!

Tats is a girl?

3boys: Thats your justification for allowing illegal immigration? $4 bag of oranges? I would gladly pay that and more if it means keeping out illegals who kill americans and clog up our jails, schools, and hospitals.

A conservative willing to pay Americans $20 an hour to do jobs that Americans won't do for $3.50 an hour? Unconceivable.

alienchickenpie
Israel should have either secured the support of the Lebanese government or declared war on the state of Lebanon. The half-assed thing they did played right into Hizballah's hands.

Uncle Karl

BlindMan
In places where people are actually poor crime rates are very high.

True, but suicide bombing rates are typically low.

Gaza wouldn't have any problems if they got rid of all those mexicans there.

3boys
I would gladly pay those prices as well. But suggest it in front of a bunch of conservatives, and they will cry and cry about the economic impact of paying enough to get an American to do distasteful work.

Americans will do nasty work they just expect to be paid well to tolerate the conditions.

shipud

Yes, after Rome became Christian.


...about 250 years after Israel became Roman.

BlindMan
Most of those places are not occupied territories. The Palestinians do not have tanks. So what do you expect?

Not defending it, just not surprised by it.

BlindMan: True, but suicide bombing rates are typically low.

Not for long. What happens when La Raza or a united coalition of Los Angeles gangs picks up on the tactics used in Iraq and decides to start a war of liberation of their own?

Uncle Karl:
Finding someone to oversee anything in Palestinian areas is difficult though. I'm sure they would want a muslim country to do it but I would only trust moderate ones like Turkey, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait... I think those are moderate.

You hardly hear about anyone but Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia...

Egypt is fine but I don't think they like Palestinians much either.

Asteron
I don't know if anyone in Egypt still worship Ra and Osiris but I doubt it.

Few people in Italy worship Jupiter...what's your point?

Tats has tits?

/who knew?
//anybody got any nekkid pics of them?
///post on boobies, lol

Uncle Karl: Israel should have either secured the support of the Lebanese government or declared war on the state of Lebanon. The half-assed thing they did played right into Hizballah's hands.

Yeah Israel really f(*&ed things up with Lebanon. Hezballah played that pretty well. I hope they will return the soldiers one day.

BlindMan
Yeah Arafat's relative was a bad person. Dubya's grandpa was a banker for the Nazi's.

Also there were Jewish groups that capitulated with the Nazi's in exchange to get people to move to Israel.

No one should be made to pay for the crimes of their father.

Asteron

Finding someone to oversee anything in Palestinian areas

Howsabouts the Palestinians?

czarangelus: A conservative willing to pay Americans $20 an hour to do jobs that Americans won't do for $3.50 an hour? Unconceivable.

Dude, you were so promising when first welcomed into the Fark family. When did you become suck a plick?

czarangelus
Not for long. What happens when La Raza or a united coalition of Los Angeles gangs picks up on the tactics used in Iraq and decides to start a war of liberation of their own?

Ummmm....no. Chicanos aren't going to go suicide bombing anyone to give California back to Mexico. You lose the thread.

/Chicano

equusdc: Few people in Italy worship Jupiter...what's your point?

I was arguing the ancient Egyptians (at least those who conquered Canaan or whatever) like the Romans are no long around. Is that culture still present? I dont know how much relation their is between modern and ancient Egypt.

equusdc: Howsabouts the Palestinians?

They did a bang-up job in Gaza.

Asteron
I would want a completely neutral party to do it. The Swiss. They were so neutral in WW2 they made money off of both sides.

Actually a totally non-involved nation would be best. Maybe some sort of a the Palestinians get to pick any nation not on some list and the Israelis get to make the list of nations they do not like. With a limit of 1/3 of the nations on the planet is the most they can ban.

Sloth_DC: Dude, you were so promising when first welcomed into the Fark family. When did you become suck a plick?

You're just mad I got in a stinging blow on modern conservatism I think. It's not my fault your party is full of oligarchs, knaves, and cryptofascists. Me, I want to pay Americans $20 an hour to do $20 an hour work rather than take advantage of the poverty and misery of Hispanics to better myself in the world.

Uncle Karl: Yeah Arafat's relative was a bad person. Dubya's grandpa was a banker for the Nazi's.

Profiting from doing business with assholes is not the same thing as allying with assholes because you want to be an asshole, too.

muck4doo: Ummmm....no. Chicanos aren't going to go suicide bombing anyone to give California back to Mexico. You lose the thread.

Today, no. But what about in 10 years? 20 years? 40 years? Demographics are changing, and a great deal of human conflict comes from shifts in demographics.

The BBC pro-Israeli? Is the Pope Jewish?

~Martin Walker


THE OFFICIAL REPORT for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestine-Israeli conflict found predictably that there was "was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias" but then went on to list a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favour of Israel. (Simply unbeliveable. ~HBL)

This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC's greatest hits - or perhaps misses - remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a "hero" and "an icon" and concluded that the corrupt old brute was "the stuff of legends".

There was Orla Guerin's unforgettably inventive spin on the story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes".

There was the disturbing case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were "waging the campaign shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people". Pressed for an explanation, the subsequent BBC statement said: "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."

There was the extraordinarily naive coverage of the London visit of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, the predominant imam of Mecca, to open London's largest new mosque. He was described as a widely respected religious figure who works for "community cohesion", and a video on the BBC website was captioned "The BBC's Mark Easton: 'Events like today offer grounds for optimism'."

The BBC must have missed his sermon of February 1, 2004, that said "the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels . . . calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers . . . the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs . . . These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption . . ."

These are isolated examples, but they stick longer in the memory because they are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians. So it was startling to read the report for the BBC governors finding so much bias in favour of Israelis. This was based largely on the quantitative content analysis done by outside researchers which found "significant differences across BBC news programmes and services in the allocation of talk time".

The detailed survey found disparities (in favour of Israelis) in the amount of talk time given to Israelis and Palestinians, and that "Israeli fatalities generally receive greater coverage than Palestinian fatalities".

The methodology of the survey may be a complicating factor. The period analysed went from August 2005, the time of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and January 2005, when Ariel Sharon had his stroke and the Palestinians held their elections. The greater use of Israeli voices in this period seems reasonable when the big stories were the domestic political implications for the settler movement of the Gaza withdrawal and of Sharon's eclipse. And given the media-wise presence of the Peace Now movement and Israel's lively democracy, much of that nominally "Israeli" talk time would have been highly critical of the Sharon Government.

Moreover, the terms of reference of the report that the BBC governors commissioned excluded both the BBC World Service and the international TV channel BBC World, although it did include the BBC website. This excluded a large fraction of the BBC's international coverage along with the often more detailed coverage that the World Service provides.

It is important to consider the context of the report's finding that Israeli deaths tend to get more coverage is that the Israeli victims are overwhelmingly and deliberately civilians, targeted at random. The Palestinian fatalities vary widely. Some are killed in internal feuds between Hamas and Fatah, and some are executed as "collaborators", some are terrorists caught in the act and some are the victims of Israeli targeted killings. These tend to be the ones that result in the tragic collateral killing and wounding of civilians and children. And it can be difficult for journalists, even those with the resources and exemplary bravery and professional persistence of most BBC reporters, to establish which is which in time for a news report.

The report on which the governors will now rely to develop new guidelines for BBC coverage tends to skate over some of the professional problems that make even-handed reporting difficult in Gaza and in the West Bank. Journalists have been kidnapped and cameras stolen, and their sources are often intimidated.

By contrast, Israeli politics are easily followed in Israel's free press, where critics of the occupation and of Israeli military tactics abound and where the Israeli media does sterling work, including the kind of combative investigative reporting that is virtually unknown in the Palestinian press.

There is one piece of good news. BBC reporters will henceforth be allowed to use the T-word to describe "relevant events, since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies".

But even here BBC reporters will be faced with a tricky dilemma, since the report goes on to say: "While those immediately responsible for the actions might be described as terrorists, the BBC is right to avoid so labelling organisations, except in attributed remarks."

So think of the poor hack on deadline in a flak jacket trying to remember whether to say some crazed Jihadist killer was "a terrorist from Hamas" rather than "a Hamas terrorist" while squeezing more historical background and more Palestinian talk-time into the news report. It's amazing that the coverage is as decent as it is, and that most of us in the business concede privately that, for all its flaws, the BBC still does a better job that any other news organisation on Earth.



Martin Walker is the Editor of United Press International


The media is THE weapon of the worldwide jihad and the BBC is ever so helpful. At least you know what you're getting with Al-Jazeera.

I hope the UK enjoys its coming dhimmi status. It should be 'jolly good'.


/suck it libs
//Total Fark stud

A note about Arab-Israelis.

Anyone who denys that they are not discriminated against, is living in a fantasy land. I have lived in Israel (for seven years) and have seen discrimination against them. Moreover, my grandparents who rented out their apartment (they moved to Canada) to two female Arab students, were asked by their neighbours to stop the renting of the apartment. And to my great displeasure (I critized them), they didn't renew the lease. To give context, my grandparents' apartment is in Zfat, which is a very conservative city.

However, the discrimination against Arabs is hardly a unique problem in Israeli society. As Russian immigrants, Ethiopean immigrants (they might actually be treated worse than the Arabs) and Magrhab immigrants are constantly discriminated.

Still, Israel makes an effort to correct these sins. And there has been much progress in terms of stopping discrimination. This is not a problem unique to Israel (having been an immigrant in Canada, I have also been subject to job discrimonation based on my accent and name as well as teachers telling me not to speak Russian in school because "you are in Canada now").

So, yes, Israel has discrimination problems against their Arab citizens. Most Israelis are ashamed of these acts. Moreover, the civil rights that Arabs and other minorities recieve in Israel, are not even on the same universe as the civil rights that are aforded to their neigbhour's Arabs.

equusdc
Or you could buy them weapons directly!
No there would have to be some outside oversight.

czarangelus

"decides to start a war of liberation of their own"

If you think LA gangs are going to unite for a higher cause you are, indeed, a fool. They are interested in controlling the drug trade first and foremost. They aren't interested in doing good for their community, would they really be selling crack if they did?

Also, the ghetto is an example of economy induced crime and violence, as opposed to the religious/social violence seen in the arab world, not just the occupied territories.

When a person kills another for controll of a lucritive drug trade, that is for economic reasons.

When one faction assasinates the children of a member of a rival faction in order to send a message, there is no good economic reason.

Because the gun rules, whoever is the most armed calls the shots. When the ones calling the shots are heavily armed religious fanatics, there is a big problem. These are the seeds of civil war, armed factions with no regard for human life vieing for controll.

Killing each others children has nothing to do with Israel.

nothing at all

czarangelus: You're just mad I got in a stinging blow on modern conservatism I think.

You think wrong.

It's not my fault your party is full of oligarchs, knaves, and cryptofascists.

Speak for yourself, you clearly don't know what my party is.

Ifni, what bastard philosophy classes have you been taking to twist you so badly?

Uncle Karl: Israel should have either secured the support of the Lebanese government or declared war on the state of Lebanon. The half-assed thing they did played right into Hizballah's hands.

Lebanon wouldn't support anything like that, it makes no sense for them. Israel is Lebanon's enemy, moreso that Hizballah. Hizballah pretty much owns South Lebanon, as well as a considerable portion of the parliament, and many Lebanese citizens look up to it as the ones who fought Israel in the '80s and acted as a charity (the classic combination). If the Lebanese government stood up to Hizballah, they'd start a civil war, and lose it.
As for declaring war on Lebanon, what difference would it make? (there should be a complicated tense from hell for this speculative situation, I forgot it) It'd add more targets, increase the killing and distract the IDF from the main problem. Lebanese military posts were attacked mainly when they served Hizballah interests.