Population of Chechnya: 1,103,686
Number of chechens estimated to have been killed in the first and second chechen wars: 160,000
Population of the Gaza Strip: 1,481,080
Estimated killed and wounded so far between Hamas and civilians: 460 killed, 2,750 wounded
The world was mealy-mouthed when Russia killed approximately 14.5% of the entire population of Chechnya over secession. Yet, Israel is regularly attacked for its "disproportionate" response to daily barrages of missiles against its people by enemy combatants that want to destroy Israel, not break away from its control.
This is why I say that almost every single, solitary, last critic of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians is at least a closet Jew hater.
Closet Joo hater maybe a bit strong. But no doubt that the Communists get a pass that the Zionists do not.
And I say let the two sides have at it. The only way that this will be settled is when one side extinguishes the other. I for one am tired of US presidents wasting political capital at the behest of AIPAC.
And those evangelicals who prod the US to protect the political state of Israel are making the same mistake as the Jews in 30 AD.
Unless you can make a reasonable case that you were as strongly and vocally opposed, if not more so, to acts like the First and Second Chechen Wars, I can't really see how strong opposition to Israel here would be anything less than closet hatred of the Jews. That's where I'm coming from here.
Actually, EW, it won't be settled. From a Christian standpoint, this hatred goes all the way back to Ishmael and Isaac, and will continue to the end of days. The Muslim/Arab world will never live in peace with Israel. End of story.
An Idiot's Blog linked to liveblogging the conflict by Israellycool with some great comments including this one:
Number of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 = 1,308,00.
Number of Palestinian Arabs in 2008 = 10,574,521.
Israeli attempted genocide of Palestinian Arabs over 60 years = EPIC FAIL!
With due respect ... I disagree and consider your framing of the debate misinformed.
If you want a reasoned dissertation on why hundreds of nations have denounced Israel's crimes against international law, try James Petras. Here's a link:
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=29545
I'll have to schedule some time to blog about this.
With all due respect, that article is a load of bullshit. You want a real campaign of extermination, look at Russia and Chechnya. Israel has treated the Palestinians as though they were merely guilty of flicking boogers onto Israeli territory compared to the genocidal horrors that the Russians unleashed upon Chechnya for **breaking away**. The world was mealy-mouthed when the Chechens were being exterminated for seeking independence, but the world suddenly grows a spine when it comes to condemning a state that has been attacked without cause by its neighbors several times in the last 50 years with genocidal intentions upon its people.
If the Palestinians want my sympathy, it's simple. They can take up arms against Hamas. They have no problem with taking up arms and forming militias when the targets are Israelis. The fact that there is no fierce domestic military opposition to Hamas makes me entirely unsympathetic to the Palestinians as a people.
Furthermore, the Palestinians don't deserve one iota of sympathy for the fact that their attacks are getting deadlier responses. You don't wage war on a modern military power's civilian population and then go crying to mommy when they see your pathetic, 19th century weapons and up the ante with 21st century firepower.
If the Ukrainians, Kazakhs or Mongols did this crap to Russia, and the Russians responded by carpet-bombing their capitol city into rubble, I doubt you'd hear more than a "golly, that was rough" out of the UN. By all rights, the Palestinians are blessed that their neighbors are Westernized Jews, not Russians or Chinese.
From your link: [Israel's] policy of mass extermination of the population of Gaza.
And further: In the first six days of round the clock terror bombing... the Jewish State has murdered and seriously maimed over 2,500 people
Several things come to mind. This is a little over 400 a day. I would hardly call this an extermination. I would also not call it "round the clock terror bombing" unless I was also going to call the missiles and mortars being lobbed into civilian areas on a near daily basis "round the clock terror bombing"
As for the extermination... If that is what they are trying to accomplish, they might want to hire better mathematicians. At the rate of 400 a day it will take them over 72 years to do the job, assuming there are no further births.
And lets not forget that this is a retaliation, not a pre-emptive attack. Israel has been under attack for decades. Hamas and their ideological ilk are not johnny-come-lately's. That Israel has stayed their hand this long is truly amazing and is likely only due to international pressure the likes of which is never applied to other countries. I can't imagine the US not attacking in full force if a portion of say LA were suffering constant mortar attacks and suicide bombings and car bombs.
"Israel has been under attack for decades" ... and Gaza has been blockaded so that its people starve. Friendly foreigners who try to give food are driven off by armed Israelis. Ergo, Israel has been attacking with starvation.
Israel's first foreign policy decision was where to move its first combat battalions to defend its territory against unprovoked Arab aggression, which included Palestinian combatants.
By the way ... what if you're a Jew who was oblivious to Chechnya, but who knows about Israeli atrocities and thus protests against Israel?
All those hippy-dippy Jewish intellectual pacifists ... are they *all* self-hating Jews?
Most of them are precisely that.
I'm glad you've raised the "self-hating" tag. (Between that and the "closet Jew hater" accusation is foolproof, because no one can prove innocence. The identical method was used in the Salem witch hunts. Accusation of witchcraft equals guilt - anyone protesting innocence was clearly a witch.)
But let me quote a more patient source on the scholarship of "self-haters" vs. Zionists.
The stated goal of Zionism has always been and continues to be the expulsion of the Palestinians and the colonization of all of Palestine, not just the area which currently is Israel. This is a fact, not idle supposition. In his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, an Israeli Jewish historian, gives a well-documented account of the brutally orchestrated removal of Palestinians from their lands and the systematic plan for the ongoing colonization of Palestine. Pappe uses Israel’s own archives to support these facts. For those pro-Zionists who consider Pappe to be too much of a “self-hating Jew,†a term often used to slander any Jewish scholar who attempts to expose the dark underbelly of the Zionist movement, they can read essentially the same history in Benny Morris’s writings. Morris is a fervent Zionist historian who has fully acknowledged the facts of Zionist history. But he sums up his findings by saying, in effect, the ethnic cleansing was a necessary evil and his only regret is that Israel did not complete the job back in 1948.
from:
http://sudhan.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/silence-is-complicity-we%E2%80%99re-all-war-criminals-now/
I would say that plans to colonize Palestine are simply amoral, and not immoral, given Israel's predicament. I'm more of a realist when it comes to politics, which is why my opposition to colonization tends to be pragmatic, rather than principled. That's one of the reasons why I recognize the inherent danger of allowing 12M-20M illegal immigrants to settle in the United States, when most libertarians don't (they're starry-eyed idealists who think that only governments have really ever caused major harm to befall a nation).
Given the fact that the Arab response to the simple act of declaring the existence of Israel was a genocidal assault on the nascent state, I think that colonization is a mild response compared to what other states could and would have done in Israel's position. Most European or Asian nations, if suddenly back in Israel in 1948 would have responded by annexing all of the Sinai Peninsula (with no intention of returning it), annexed half of Jordan, conquered Lebanon, and pushed probably several miles past the Golan Heights into Syria out of revenge and for internal security.
The fact of the matter is that if the Palestinians destroyed Hamas, calmed down and sent a serious peace delegation, asking to have Gaza turned into an autonomous province of Egypt, and the West Bank turned into a separate country, the Israelis would give it to them. If the Palestinians promised to leave Jerusalem entirely to Israel, it would be a done deal with Likud, Kadima and Labour falling all over themselves to sign a lasting peace accord. Since the Palestinians aren't that rational, they can only hope that Israel smothers them gently in their sleep.
I don't apologize for being a cold-hearted bastard most of the time when it comes to foreign affairs. Nations aren't people, and governments are certainly not individuals with consciences. The only realistic way of looking at foreign affairs is to realize that most states will invariably behave like pseudo-Nietzschean supermen obeying their will to power, and the best thing you can do is encourage others to not provoke them into unleashing their wrath. The easiest way for the Palestinians to get what they want is to stop tolerating armed factions that launch their own private wars, especially ones where the strategy involves those factions using Palestinian hospitals, schools and other civilian targets as their bases of operation specifically to inflict civilian casualties for propaganda purposes.
By the way, Ron Paul has made a comment, and I don't think Ron Paul is a Jew hater, closet or otherwise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08gTWqWrI4M
I'm with Billiam on this one, which is the reason I don't really get in a huff about the "Peace Process", as any progress is short-lived.
While you're making your list of "closet Jew haters" you had better put Ron Paul on it.
Ron Paul called Israel's actions in Gaza "an atrocious massacre." He compared Gaza to "a concentration camp." Ron Paul called for a ceasefire, followed by changes in USA policy to end the USA "special relationship" to Israel. Ron Paul said that the USA gives Israel money and weapons "blindly."
http://ourpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/ron-paul-talks-about-gaza/
I respect Ron Paul, but if he believes that Hamas didn't create this situation, and isn't the guilty party here, then he's naive. It may surprise you, but I actually wrote an entire post on why the United States should stop giving military aid to Israel, and butt out of its affairs.