Obama’s Pastor Urged Divestment from Israel, Called Zionism, Racism
by Bill Levinson
We remind our readers that Jeremiah Wright’s accusation that Israel created an “ethnic bomb” to kill Black people and Arabs was first exposed at IsraPundit. Now we bring you more fresh revelations of anti-Israel hate speech from Barack Obama’s pastor of 20-plus years. With regard to the following, the United Church of Christ has ties to the Sabeel Ecuminical Liberation Theology Center, which refers to the creation of Israel (NOT the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the creation of Israel) as the Nakba or “catastrophe.”
- The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have livedbecause of Zionism.
The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won’t make the press either, however.
Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., July 2005
Twenty years after the divestment strategy concerning South Africa worked, a similar strategy has been proposed by members of the United Church of Christ as it pertains to Sudan and to Israel! Even the State Legislature of Illinois has agreed with the divestment strategy as it pertains to Sudan. The rest of the nation, however, still has money as the primary concern, so that divestment strategy has not been heavily endorsed across the denomination or across the nation.
When it comes to Israel and divesting from banks and businesses that are heavily invested in Israel, until the Palestinian problem has been resolved amicably for both sides, you can throw that out of your mind! Nobody is trying to hear what we are saying in terms of divestment from Israel.
…In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just “disappeared” as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.
Jeremiah Wright, Trumpet Magazine, August 2005
Well this guy is Obama’s mentor and has been his pastor for 20 years. I am waiting to hear what the National Jewish Democrat Committee says about this and I am waiting to hear what the other left wing “Jews” have to say about this. Let’s face it, any Jew that supports Obama must care less about the welfare of the Jewish people than they do about secular partisan politics. The jig is up.
Comment by geigergag — April 18, 2008 @ 1:51 pm
The National “Jewish” Democratic Council will have absolutely nothing to say about it.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 18, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
Keep up the great work you’re doing, Bill.
Comment by Laura — April 18, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
Bill -
The divestment story is at least a month old. I hope you’re not really claiming that these are “fresh revelations.” Here’s one story that mentions Wright and divestment from American Thinker:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/another_obama_advisor_with_ant.html
The bottomline is, this isn’t news. What I read here was exactly what I thought of Wright before.
This continued “guilt by association” smear campaign is entirely in keeping with your desire to be at the front of this McCarthyism. If Wright or Farrakhan were running for President, you’d be in business.
To expand your fan club beyond Laura your tone needs to change. To be honest, I’m tiring of debate if all you want is a bullhorn, instead of listening, and adjusting your language. I find myself doing that with Ted and the other Bill.
Comment by mlevin — April 18, 2008 @ 5:27 pm
McCarthyism = accusing someone of being a Communist because he was seen in the same room with a Communist, or a similar context. I am quite familiar with the concept. Cartoonist Herblock even accused McCarthy of doctoring photographs (what we now call photomanipulation) to put people into pictures with Communists.
Obama was not (unlike Bill Clinton, who was photographed shaking hands with him) merely seen in the same room with Jeremiah Wright. He has been a member of Wright’s church for more than 20 years, and he has brought his family to listen to Wright’s hate speech. That is not a McCarthyite photomanipulation, it is an accepted fact.
Obama was not merely seen in the same room with Al Sharpton, he is on record as praising and endorsing him and his organization. If someone had praised and endorsed Joseph Stalin or Nikita Krushchev while posing arm in arm with him, it would not be “McCarthyist” to suggest that said person might in fact be a Communist.
Obama did not merely appear behind a lectern with “MoveOn PAC” on it, he solicited and accepted MoveOn.org’s endorsement. That is not “guilt by association.” It suggests that Obama is sympathetic to MoveOn.org’s goals and vice versa, which means he is not someone I want in any position of public trust or responsibility.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 18, 2008 @ 6:01 pm
Bill -
This sounds like you, my friend! It doesn’t have to be based on just fleeting contact between individuals - any exaggeration of the scope of endoresement is tipping your hat to McCarthy. I’m going to quote from an earlier post of mine, because I think it’s relevant here:
Comment by mlevin — April 18, 2008 @ 7:29 pm
Surah 17:100 – “Man is ever niggardly!”
Surah 47:38 – “Among you are some that are niggardly. But any who are niggardly are so at the expense of their own souls.”
Tell that to Obama and Reverend Wright!
The “N” word is in the Koran!
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 18, 2008 @ 7:40 pm
Actually, ISRAEL is the only nation on earth allowed to be racist!
It’s okay to LOVE YOUR RACE, but in order to overcome their feelings of worthlessness and inferiority, they have to compensate for lack of self-love or self-esteem by attacking God’s Chosen People.
As a Gentile sinner who came into the Camp of Israel by the BLOOD OF THE MESSIAH, RACISM is not in my vocabulary, although ARABS are my least favorite people on earth - and working with one has only proven to me just how many dirty liars there are among Arabs - however, I don’t blame ARABS for their hostility - actually HATE goes back to Satan’s HATE of the God of Israel - then Satan’s HATE working through Islam - and then HATE working through historical and modern CATHOLICISM whose priests use a vibrating, glowing dildo god to shove up everyone’s butt to give a peaceful massage to all those hurting ass holes [donkey holes censored].
No, RELIGIOUS PLURALISM is not the answer, for the God of Israel will not be worshiped beside or before any god. It doesn’t matter if you are black, white, red, yellow, green, brown, or Barney the purple dinosaur!
The God of Israel CREATED ALL RACES from every land and we all share this one reality in common: THE GOD OF ISRAEL CREATED ALL RACES, therefore, RACISM IS STUPID.
However, Obama’s Pastor is a RACIST who, like Louis Farrkhan, leader of the Nation of the False Prophet Muhammad, incorrectly interprets GOD’S COMMANDS FOR ISRAEL’S EXCLUSIVE CALLING AND ARRANGEMENT. Like Catholics use replacement theology and condemn Israel of being RACIST in the same terminology Muslims use (which can only be applicable to them), Obama’s circus uses the RACE CARD to draw the sympathy of voters who feel that they have been discriminated against.
APPEALING TO PEOPLE’S FEELINGS OF INSECURITY is how the great tempter attracts others - as the recent MORMON CULT PROVED.
Democrats and terrorists are experts at deflecting attention away from themselves by accusing others for that which they themselves are guilty of.
For example, when Masonic Democrats condemn “Christian” Republicans, they will verbally condemn “Christian” Republicans as all being a bunch of Masons. It is hypocrisy extreme!
In all actuality, it is the Islamic Middle East who are RACIST and RELIGIOUSLY INTOLERANT.
In reality, it is the Catholic Church who is RACIST by promoting a two-state solution against the WILL OF THE GOD OF ISRAEL!
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 18, 2008 @ 7:52 pm
Bill, Jonathan Tilove’s article came out today in the Newhouse papers about blogs on the Obama site and our debate with Israpundit:
http://www.newhouse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48772&Itemid=94
Comment by mlevin — April 18, 2008 @ 10:40 pm
Sunstart:
The word has nothing to do with black people. It’s an English word that means miserly. Has nothing to do with the “N” word. They are etymologically unrelated, just sound similar. The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology says ‘niggardly’ originated back in the 1300’s from the words ‘nig’ and ‘ignon’, meaning “miser” in Middle English. Do at least do a casual search online before you make such claims.
Comment by mlevin — April 18, 2008 @ 10:49 pm
sunstartmf33
(1) Your comment is not particularly relevant to this thread.
(2) “niggardly” is unrelated to the N word, as Mlevin said. The N word is from Niger (Latin for Black), but niggard is from Northern Europe and has no Latin roots.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 19, 2008 @ 12:59 am
Re: “Sharpton has done plenty of good things for his community, and I’m sure if Obama was endorsing him - he was endorsing his virtues, and not his prejudices. So Sharpton’s sins are now Obama’s.”
Obama might have been endorsing his virtues, but suppose a Republican praised the head of the Ku Klux Klan (at a Klan meeting) for community activities unrelated to the Klan’s less savory activities. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t crucify said Republican. From what I understand, the KKK does perform community service and similar work when it is not out spewing hatred of Black people and, in the bad old days, lynching them.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 19, 2008 @ 1:02 am
Bill -
While I agree with your general point, this is apples and oranges! You have to look at the main mission of these two. Sharpton and what he stands for and the KKK are not even remotely in the same ballpark. One has been an civil rights activist for disadvantaged groups trying to get equal rights, the other is a group that according to Wikipedia is “best known for advocating white supremacy while hidden behind masks and robes…(and in the past) used terrorism, violence, and lynching to intimidate and oppress African Americans.” Agitating for equality and agitating for supremacy are not qualitatively or morally similar.
We’d crucify the said Republican because KKK’s primary mission is supremacy, and the reduction of rights of other groups. Is Sharpton’s mission to make African-Americans the dominant racial group in the US at the expense of whites and Jews? No. Endorsers of Sharpton are endorsing his lifetime of work to reduce discrimination against groups that face that problem in the US. They are not endorsing his sins. He used to be homophobic and now actively works against eliminating that in the black churches. There’s more good in people than bad, even people you accuse of hatred. I would say the same of KKK members, but that whole movement has a mission that promotes discrimination and is anachronistic. The same cannot be said about Sharpton’s movement and works.
Mark
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 1:48 am
Mark: for for information:
Sharpton’s résumé is at least as vile as Duke’s.
1987: Sharpton spreads the incendiary Tawana Brawley hoax, insisting heatedly that a 15-year-old black girl was abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He singles out Steve Pagones, a young prosecutor. Pagones is wholly innocent — the crime never occurred — but Sharpton taunts him: “If we’re lying, sue us, so we can . . . prove you did it.” Pagones does sue, and eventually wins a $345,000 verdict for defamation. To this day, Sharpton refuses to recant his unspeakable slander or to apologize for his role in the odious affair.
1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin’s funeral he rails against the “diamond merchants” — code for Jews — with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, “No justice, no peace.” A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting “Kill the Jews!” and stabbed to death.
1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Freddy’s white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. “We will not stand by,” he warns malignantly, “and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” Sharpton’s National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy’s are spat on and cursed as “traitors” and “Uncle Toms.” Some protesters shout, “Burn down the Jew store!” and simulate striking a match. “We’re going to see that this cracker suffers,” says Sharpton’s colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy’s, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.
If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but the fringe. But far from being spurned, he is shown much deference. Democrats embrace him. Politicians court him. And journalists report on his comings and goings while politely sidestepping his career as a hatemongering racial hustler.
When Sharpton came to Boston for example, the news coverage was uniformly upbeat. The Boston Herald noted the “joyous singing and thunderous applause” that greeted the “civil rights leader,” whose “energetic visit left many enthusiastic about his presidential bid.” The Globe announced the arrival of “the colorful and controversial 48-year-old community activist” with a story listing the places and times of his public appearances. The only allusion to his ugly record was a vague quote from a local minister: “He obviously has a lot of history and controversy to overcome.” That was quickly countered by Sharpton’s own self-description as a man known “for my fights against racial profiling and discrimination.”
Well, that isn’t what Steve Pagones or the family of Yankel Rosenbaum or the loved ones of those who were burned alive at Freddy’s Fashion Mart know him for. As they can testify, Sharpton is a vicious liar and a dangerous bigot. As a matter of moral hygiene, his party and the press should be able to say so, too.
Comment by yamit82 — April 19, 2008 @ 2:51 am
You make an interesting point about the Ku Klux Klan and Republicans. You might find their history in the 1920’s complicates your example.
From one of my unpublished papers, on why Calvin Coolidge deserves a high average presidential rating by historians instead of low average by being bracketed between Harding’s scandal and the Great Depression. I declined my professor’s suggestion to turn it into a new biography:
In the 1920’s, the Jim Crow South was still solidly Democratic, and ‘dry’. The Southern Democratic Senators effectively filibustered away every attempt at a federal anti-lynching law, a law that President Coolidge actively supported. The fear of federal legislation and the 1923 Supreme Court decision in Moore v Dempsey made Southern Democratic governors more attentive to curb mob violence after 1923. These Southern Democrats were in an uneasy coalition with the northern Catholics, ‘wets’, and immigrants in the industrial urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Of the 14.5 million immigrants to the U.S. between 1901 and 1920, 60% were from Russia, Italy, Austria, and Hungary, overwhelmingly Catholic and Jewish. Language and religious differences aroused serious Nativist resentment, culminating in the restrictive quotas of the Immigration Act of 1921.
KKK membership in 1920 was about 2,000, but by 1925, membership had swelled to between three and six million of a total population of about 108 million. Membership was “primarily small business owners, merchants, professionals, skilled laborers, and land-owning farmers” in states like Indiana, Maine, and Oregon. This revival was still based on white supremacy, but the “venom was directed toward immigrants, Catholics, Jews, socialists, agrarian radicals, organized labor, urban machine politics, big business, vice, and immorality.”
The new Klan was more urban than rural, with the “greatest appeal in states that were actually experiencing a [three-way interaction] combination of population growth, manufacturing increase,and agricultural [land value] decline.” The northern Klan, including the governor of Maine, was nominally Republican, as were northern African-Americans, whose numbers had grown substantially after 1919, another uneasy coalition.
The resurgent Klan was the central campaign issue of 1924. Calvin Coolidge is usually disdained as a friend of the Klan, but Coolidge tactfully condemned all unlawful acts, and defused the anger of the Klan by letting them believe he represented them. In one campaign speech, reported on August 24, 1924 on page 1 of The New York Times: ‘Coolidge will Act on Klan Challenge’: Coolidge was quoted,
“The Federal Government ought to be, and is, solicitous for the welfare of every one of its inhabitants. There should be no favorites and no outcasts: no race or religious prejudices in Government.” On September 6, 1924, Coolidge said “America is a large country. It is a tolerant country. It has room within its borders for many races and many creeds…if we want to get the hyphen out of our country, we can best begin by taking it out of our own minds.”
After winning the Presidency in his own right, with the votes of that uneasy coalition of politically active NON-southern Klan members and northern African-Americans, Coolidge addressed the American Legion Convention in Omaha, Nebraska on October 6, 1925, emphasizing his call for unity:
“The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. …By tolerance I do not mean indifference to evil. I mean respect for different kinds of good. Whether one traces his Americanisms back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are now all in the same boat.”
Quotes about the 1920’s Klan: Rory McVeigh. “Structural Incentives for Conservative Mobilization: Power Devaluation and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1925″, Social Forces, Vol. 77, No. 4 (June 1999), 1461-1496..
The two parties fracture and regroup, and it’s not who appears to have the biggest tent, it is usually the one who offers a vision of an ideal America (Henry Adams) and a ‘deep connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of the people.’ (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)
It seems uneasy and uncomfortable coalitions are still with us. So are the descendants of those Klan members of 1924.
Comment by Birdalone — April 19, 2008 @ 3:13 am
Mark: Sharpton and Jackson are dueling over who will be the nation’s best-paid race hustler, a lucrative occupation. For example: According to the Wall Street Journal, the owners of the Word Network, which is devoted to running black church services, pay Sharpton and Jackson roughly $10,000 per protest to demonstrate at the headquarters of cable operators that don’t yet carry Word. A Sharpton-led protest in March 2002 prompted a St. Louis operator to begin carrying the cable network.
Sharpton referred to Jews as “diamond merchants” during an uprising in the Crown Heights area of New York, and said, “If the Jews want to get it on If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
The Democratic Party’s anti-Semitism problem
By Edward Alexander
Special to The Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001999939_alexhtmlander09.
the Brawley hoax was merely one of the early chapters in Sharpton’s long career as a peddler of racial grievance. Consider his response to the 1989 case of a white female jogger who was raped and beaten nearly to death in New York’s Central Park by a gang of at least 30 black and Hispanic teenagers who later acknowledged that they had specifically set out to target a white woman. Fracturing her skull with a lead pipe and mutilating her face with a brick, the assailants left the woman for dead. She lost three quarters of her blood in the attack and was so badly mangled that even her boyfriend was able to recognize her only by a familiar ring on her finger. When investigators later asked one of the attackers why he had tried to smash the victim skull, he candidly replied, “It was fun.” A multiracial jury convicted several of the defendants on the basis of their own confessions. But Sharpton, who served as an adviser to the boys’ families, said the defendants had been framed by a racist justice system. At one point during the trial, he escorted Tawana Brawley into the courtroom in an attempt to illustrate the alleged inequities of that system. “Those boys aren’t guilty for what happened to the jogger,” Sharpton said. “This is just like the old Scottsboro Boys case.”
The relentless Sharpton even traveled to Israel to search for the driver who had run over Gavin Cato. When angry Israeli onlookers taunted Sharpton with shouts of “Go to hell,” he replied: “I am in hell!
The Boycott of Freddy’s: The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers,” Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly told passersby, “Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.”
One wonders why Al Sharpton’s apparently delicate sensibilities—as evidenced by his current snit over Imus’ comments—were undisturbed by the incessant, ugly rhetoric that accompanied the Freddy’s boycott. Equally inexplicable is how someone with Sharpton’s professed abhorrence for racial insensitivity could have spent so many years as a strong supporter of the late Khalid Abdul Muhammad, whose vulgar diatribes against whites were too incendiary for even Louis Farrakhan to condone.
Mr. Muhammad, who publicly referred to Jews as “slumlords in the black community” who are busy “sucking our [black’] blood on a daily and consistent basis”; who said that Jews had provoked Adolf Hitler when they “went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped”; who said that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should “kill the women,…kill the children,…kill the babies,…kill the blind,…kill the crippled,…kill the faggot,…kill the lesbian,…kill them all”; who praised Colin Ferguson, a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters (killing six of them) in a racially motivated 1993 shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train, as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw”; who advised blacks that “[t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes”; who told a Donahue television audience in May 1994 that “[t]here is a little bit of Hitler in all white people”; and who characterized black conservatives as “boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger.
Comment by yamit82 — April 19, 2008 @ 4:59 am
Mark: Collective responsibility along with collective punishment are part and parcel of the jewish tradition and Law. Defending evil and not disassociating with evil and evil people is no less an offense according to Jewish Law and tradition. If you Obama guy is in association with those that are just plain bad and evil people, and does not disassociate himself both from those individuals and their ideas then we must assume that he is in agreement with both and is at least to be condemned for that.
Our Pesach
Pesach commemorates the emergence of a Jewish nation as a political entity. Scores of other peoples joined the Exodus, forever depriving Jews of genetic singularity and redefining the nation in religious and political terms.
The founding of modern Israel closely parallels the Exodus, except that Zhabotinsky lacked the miracle-working powers of Moses and could not convince the Jews of European bondage to flee the imminent extermination. The Hebrews doubted their destiny already on Sinai and wished to return to death-spelling Egyptian bondage; the Jews who barely escaped the Holocaust seek to emigrate from Israel. Hebrews accepted a pagan cult and worshipped a golden calf; the Jews accepted Arabs in Israel and worship the ethnic-blind democracy; Jews three thousand years apart adhered to Judaism only moderately. Following the scouts’ advice, Hebrews shrunk from fighting for Canaan; following the wise leftists, Jews shrunk from annexing Judea and Samaria. Hebrews saw the divine fire-cloud daily; Jews saw no lesser miracles of military victories in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Neither had availed them of their doubts.
Moses set the ultimate precedent when he killed the Egyptian for merely beating a Jew. Moses exceeded “an eye for an eye” on tactical level, but reestablished the reciprocity of damages on a macro level. His action shows that enemies of the Jews are collectively liable, and each of them could suffer for others’ offenses. Moses killed the Egyptian not for beating a Jew, but to punish an enemy for depredations of other Egyptians against the Jews. Moses’ example guides Israel in dealing with Arab enemies.
Moses launched a terrorist campaign against Egyptian civilians on the divine command, from crops’ destruction to annihilation of civilian firstborn. Israel followed through with the example, and launched hostage taking (of Jordanians by young Arik Sharon) and aircraft hijacking (of Syrian passenger jet to exchange for Israeli POWs).
Amalekites were naturally upset by a huge number of Hebrews entering their domain. The Hebrew purpose of building a state which infringes on Amalek’s sovereignty violated the Amalekites’ rights. Hebrews did not evaluate a reasonable compromise of integrating Amalekites into the Jewish state. Courageous freedom fighters from among the Amalekite tribes continuously attacked the Hebrews. For a long time, Hebrews were not sufficiently strong to stop the insurgency – but remembered the damage. In the last echo of Exodus, Saul exterminated the Amalekites and the prophet Samuel personally cut down their king Agag. It would be nice to see a chief rabbi of Israel hacking Abu Mazen to pieces.
Comment by yamit82 — April 19, 2008 @ 5:29 am
In a criminal case the state must prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”. In a civil case one must prove their case on the balance of probabilities. When deciding between candidates, one might reject a candidate for less than the balance of probabilities.
Say for instance, the circumstantial evidence suggested Obama was 25% likely to be like the people he associated with, why take the chance on him.
Mark, are you saying we don’t have the right to reject Obama because of his associations over the past twenty years or that we shouldn’t hold them against him. Are you saying we don’t have the right to reject him because of the cut of his jib or for any other thing that turns us away.
Comment by Ted Belman — April 19, 2008 @ 6:31 am
MLevin wrote,
I would say that marching around a Jewish-owned store (Freddy’s Fashion Mart) while yelling racial and anti-Semitic epithets like “white interloper” (from Sharpton personally), “Don’t give the Jew a dime” (one of Sharpton’s lieutenants), “bloodsucking Jew,” “cracker lover,” and “see that the cracker suffers” along with an arson threat would constitute “intimidation and oppression,” and subsequent exercise of the arson threat would constitute a hate crime. Isn’t this exactly what the KKK did when a Black person moved into the “wrong” neighborhood or tried to open a business there? How about “Kill the Jew,” as shouted by Sharpton’s mob when it murdered Yankel Rosenbaum? That’s two hate crimes that can be chalked up to Sharpton’s followers.
Remember that Don Imus lost his job for his stupid “nappy headed hos” remark even though no Black women were beaten or killed as a result. Al Sharpton still has his radio show even though eight people (seven at Freddy’s, not counting the perpetrator who then took his own life, plus Yankel Rosenbaum) died in hate crimes in which Sharpton’s hate speech played at least an indirect role. Furthermore, Sharpton has never tried to make things right with the numerous people he has harmed. He never apologized for the Tawana Brawley scandal. He and his National Action Network never tried to help the families of the Crown Heights and Freddy’s Fashion Mart hate crime victims.
Ted is absolutely right. The standards of proof in the court of public opinion are much lower than they are in a court of law, although one must of course make a convincing case–as we have done here. The “Wall Street Journal Ethics Test” says simply, “If you wouldn’t want to read about it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, don’t do it.” (Obama, by the way, got his church on the front page of the WSJ in exactly this context due to his misuse of tax exempt church resources to promote his campaign.) If you don’t want to have to explain why you are posing arm in arm with a known racist and anti-Semite, and there are several such pictures of Obama with Sharpton at the National Action Network last year, don’t do it.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 19, 2008 @ 9:45 am
Yamit - your using scripture to defend what is just logically unfair doesn’t hold water with me. Collective responsibility and punishment are specious rationalizations for violence against innocent people. Go after the criminals of some criminal act, the guilty ones, not those who share a culture with the guilty ones, or personally know the guilty ones.
Ted - yes, you have every right to turn away from someone like Obama because of a “feeling” based on his associates even if you can’t quite find an objectionable statement from him. You even have the right to share that unease with others, as long as things aren’t being stretched. Where I have an issue is when people take breathtaking liberties with the truth, scope, proportionality of endorsements, and practise public slander to “create” that evidence that isn’t there. They focus entirely on the sins of the associates and acquaintances, and talk as if these views are close to that of the candidate. Is that fair? Is that a true measure of a man?
Bill L - You’ve made a “convincing case”? Let your peers decide that please. Sharpton is drawn to a camera like a moth to a flame, and he takes up causes that overlap with his interests - and sometimes he gets burned for his enthusiastic support of people who turn out to be less than kosher or truthful - he probably feels stupid about it, but has too much of an ego to say he’s sorry. Kind of like Clinton and Iraq. If Sharpton said these things (the protest) while he was in his radio job (I’m not sure whether that’s the case) he should have lost his job like Imus. Absolutely. That he didn’t is the fault of the owner of the radio show, not Obama. Now although most of the racist things that you mention were by Sharpton’s associates, followers and others at that protest, as the leader (I assume) of it he should have set the tone. That he allowed such chants or didn’t upbraid those who did utter them within his earshot (I assume) indicates a tacit support from him. If Obama did the same thing - with his supporters/advisors saying racist things, and he did nothing to denounce those statements - you’d have a case. He hasn’t shown any tacit acceptance of hate speech, or of even calling Hillary a “monster” in an off-record comment. That’s how anti-hate he is. His whole bearing is the antithesis of hate - sometimes I feel he shows too little passion. And your posts chant the word “hate” and “hatred” like some automaton. And see what you’ve done now. You’ve spent time insinuating that the hate speech of people at a protest that Sharpton once led somehow is Obama’s view, because he’s praised Sharpton’s civil rights work. That’s two degrees of separation from the candidate. And it’s a waste of my time.
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 10:46 am
Ted - the Bush administration used this technique (that Bill is employing) very successfully to gin up public support to invade Iraq. Though they never actually claimed Saddam was behind 9/11, they would talk about 9/11, and in the same speech, or even the next sentence, talk about Saddam. In the minds of people who are not as smart as you, a causal link was created, and Saddam, the despot though he was, was further tarred and feathered with the sins of 9/11. A majority of the US public thought that Saddam was also behind 9/11, a provably false statement. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0701-05.htm, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security_bt/102.php) And nobody cared to inform our public that Saddam, a secular Baathist didn’t particularly care about Osama’s Wahhabist orthodoxy. It wouldn’t fit into our nice jingoistic narrative.
I am not arguing its effectiveness in hurting Obama, which I know is one of your objectives; Feel free to employ it, tacitly or overtly on Israpundit, if you’re ethically ok with it. I wouldn’t be. I believe you’re not entirely comfortable with it given your comments to Tilove, and you have a brand that would be better served by a higher level of discourse. You set the tone for the site.
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 11:11 am
Yamit:
I have no fondness for Sharpton. Or admiration. I have seen him on a couple of shows, and he seems to have a good sense of humor. Based on the quotes many of you have mentioned, I’d say he has/had a grudge against Jews. It doesn’t make him all that uniquely evil - especially among African-Americans, whose relationship with the Jewish community has never been a warm one. Most of the audience here at Israpundit chants, albeit not on TV, how evil Arabs and Muslims are. How is that morally superior to Sharpton? In both cases there is a penchant for collective blame - blame a group for the actions of an individual.
I believe in judging people by who they are now, than who they once were. Sen. Robert Byrd was once a KKK member. I believe in calling a spade a spade. But I believe in holding people responsible for their own actions, not of their associates. I believe each person has good in him as well as unsavory characteristics. I believe that we can see and praise the good that people do. And most of all, I believe in proportionality, and have little patience for those who violate that. They are doing a disservice to society. I do not believe in - fear-induced or hatred-induced guilt by association.
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
Mlevin wrote,
Suppose a Republican praised community work by a Ku Klux Klansman whose followers once screamed the N word (while under the Klansman’s supervision and leadership) at a Black-owned store, after which the store was burned down by a white supremacist. I think you would say something very different. To answer your question, Sharpton’s “white interloper” came when a mob under his leadership and supervision was screaming racial and anti-Semitic epithets at a Jewish-owned store. Sharpton has never apologized or taken any identifiable measures to make things right with the white people, Jews, and Hispanics he has harmed. (One of the victims of the Freddy’s hate crime was Hispanic.) Until he does, he must be regarded as an unrepentant racist and anti-Semite who taints anyone who chooses to associate with him as Obama and John Kerry have done.
(1) You cannot deny that Arabs and individuals who identify themselves as Muslims are responsible for most of the violence in the Middle East. The hijackers who murdered 3000 people on 9/11 were not chanting “Shma Yisrael,” “Hare Krishna,” or “Jesus Saves.” Furthermore, most of the violence that is perpetrated in the name of Islam is done TO people who identify themselves as Arabs and/or Muslims. Your camp complains that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Almost all of them have been killed by self-proclaimed Muslims who think Sunnis or Shiites are the wrong “kinds” of Muslims. The mosques that were blown up were destroyed by self-proclaimed Muslims, not the Armed Forces of the United States. Women who are stoned to death for mostly imaginary crimes in places like Iran also are Muslims.
(2) How are our statements morally superior to Sharpton’s? As far as I know, Jews have never proclaimed and acted on an intention to throw all the Negroes into the sea. White people don’t enter Black neighborhoods with suicide bombs surrounded by poison-tipped nails, nor do white people break into Black schools to machine-gun the students. Arab countries, and individuals of Arab nationality, have done all those things to Israel.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 19, 2008 @ 2:27 pm
Analogy:
Husseini:British elites of the 1920s as Sharpton:US elites of the modern day
And it sure looks like BO is just a more polished presentation of every bit of racial/ethnic division that fascist elites have always deployed. And he has Brzezinski’s seal of approval, so all indications are that this is the case.
Some would say that blacks that embrace worthless hatemongers like Sharpton and Wright, thus doing what their masters want them to do, are actually tremendous uncle toms. The media (which is government manipulated as JI and FGW prove) and US political elites just love Sharpton–for he is the antithesis of MLK.
Comment by jrob — April 19, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
Bill, really suggest you stop using Republican and KKK in the same sentence per my research on the resurgent northern KKK as THE major campaign issue in 1924.
Yes, it’s unfathomable how Al Sharpton has maintained any shred of political influence, but Sharpton’s worst offenses came during the Giuliani administration.
The New Yorker ran a profile of Sharpton that exposed his anti-semitism, cannot remember when. Subsequent to that profile, Sharpton has toned it down in public.
Still don’t agree with the guilt-by-association argument, as it disqualifies everyone from the U.S. presidency, except maybe a new Genghis Khan.
Has anyone ever suggested an Arab Christian ‘buffer zone’ in the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Southern Lebanon?
Today, I tossed that idea to a friend who is an israpundit fan, and this friend thought it an intriguing idea, logistics of mass relocations notwithstanding.
It seems Arab Christians from the Coptic minority in Egypt to the 400,000+ Iraqi Christian refugees, including the remaining Palestinian Christians - my historical and geographic research is still very weak on this - it increasingly seems the Arab Christians are missing from the dialog.
Comment by Birdalone — April 19, 2008 @ 3:21 pm
Biralone
Maybe that’s because they are being oppressed and killed by the Muslim’s.
Comment by Ted Belman — April 19, 2008 @ 3:31 pm
Ted wrote, “Maybe that’s because they are being oppressed and killed by the Muslims.”
Sort of like Al Waleed bin Talal’s statement, “There are no Christians in Saudi Arabia.”
If it were up to Hamas, there would be no Arab Christians in that part of the Middle East either, unless they paid the jizya (dhimmi tax) for the privilege of breathing.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 19, 2008 @ 3:50 pm
Bill -
No, I wouldn’t. Imagine Sen. Byrd, a former Klansman, in that position. And then imagine he played that role you outlined. And then he went on to do other things with his life. I would denounce his role in that episode, and depending on his current politics, I would maintain an appropriate “approval/disapproval” of him. Now if hypothetical Republican Mr. X shows up and says nice things about the nice things Byrd does, I wouldn’t blame Byrd’s racism in that episode on Mr. X.
I condemn the disingenuous expansion of culpability from the individual to the group in ALL cases.
I’m not sure calling someone a “white interloper” is all that scary. African-Americans of his generation have a lot of anger in them, because they faced discrimination (and lost opportunities) in their formative years. The same is true for Jews and other groups that have ever faced discrimination. With Wright - we see flashes of that anger against “white America.” There is also another lever to adjust by: where a certain group stands in the socioeconomic strata. Does the group have an influence that is lower than what their numbers in the population indicate? One would say it’s true for blacks and most hispanics in America. Is it higher? One would say it’s true for whites, Asians, Cuban-Americans and Jewish people. Any group that is in a underrepresented minority. Power matters. A protest by a bunch of black people against a white person is seen as less threatening than a bunch of white people protesting a black person - because of these larger social dynamics, and because of the historical allusions. It isn’t fair to the individual, but these people are treated diffrently. I don’t know whether you’ve seen Rob Schneider in “The Animal”, but a white mob there, eager to kill “the beast” backs off apologetically when they are told the beast is a black guy.
I am no apologist for Sharpton - and have no appetite for his tactics. He should have apologized for things he’s said that have hurt people - especially when he has played group politics, by unnecessarily turning something into a crusade against a group. You say he has never apologized. My point was that “unrepentant racism” is also what I see in many posts here. Are you willing to apologize for them?
Don’t tell me there are “reasons” for it. Racists always find reasons to justify their dislike of another group. Comments that generalize - ascribing an individual’s actions to a whole group are unfair, and frequently racist.
We have more blood on our hands than they do. Individuals locked in the middle of a civil war, when survival is at stake, and people are seeing blood, are not without blame. But those who have greater power and influence, have greater responsibility. In Yugoslavia the leaders set in motion the ethnic hatred and conflict, where neighbors who had lived peacefully next to each other were killing each other. I hold them responsible, rather than the ordinary people. Rwanda was similar. The bloodletting in Iraq was triggered by our invasion of Iraq, cheerleaded by the US neocons (unfortunately most of them were Jewish), and more quietly by Israel which saw Saddam as a threat. If we hadn’t done it, Saddam would have gone on his merry despotic ways, summarily executing a few guys a month (his mass killing days were behind him). Terrible? Yes. Worth hundreds of thousands of people dying to stop that? No.
I also blame those religious leaders in Iraq who could have done something to prevent the civil war - but we started the whole thing. Let’s say we were to discount intra-faith bodycounts, and who should be responsible for those carnages - and just look at the “clash of civilizations” inter-faith bodycounts:
We have killed more innocent Muslims from collateral damage of our bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel combined than all the innocent Israelis and Americans who have been killed since 2000 by Muslims attacking us. Just do the math:
Direct collateral damage in Afghanistan from US bombs ~5,000 by end of 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1740538.stm
This is a 2002 number - the likely number exceeds 10,000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_%282001-present%29
Iraq invasion: 1,033,000 dead, with about 93,000 from aerial bombardment. “48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_Iraq_War_casualties (9% of the 1,033,000 is about 93,000 dying from just aerial bombardment)
Palestinians killed by Israelis minus Pals who were subjects of a targeted killing: 4,719 - 230 = 4,489. (the furthest this number can go down to is 2168, if we eliminate those taking part in “hostilities” which I guess can include rock-throwing. I think the number should be kept at 4,719 since on the Israeli side we are including soldiers.)
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp
Innocent casualties on the “Judaeo-Christian side”:
Israeli soldiers and civilians killed by Pals: 1,044 (soldiers are included because it was hard to discern the number for the Pals)
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp
Sept 11 kills by AQ: 2,998 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_attacks
2003 attacks on Istanbul synagogues: 57 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Istanbul_bombings
2004 Madrid bombings: 191 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_March_2004_Madrid_train_bombings
2005 London bombings: 52 dead
Let’s say we also include the Western soldiers killed:
Coalition deaths in Afghanistan: 723
Coalition deaths in Iraq: 4,350
I’m sure I’ve left out a few - feel free to add them in and adjust. I’m sure you can quiblle with some of the classifications, but -
TOTAL Number of innocent Muslims killed by direct Western action (mostly aerial bombardment) since 2000: Over 100,000 dead.
TOTAL Number of innocent Christians and Jews killed by action of Muslims since 2000: Between 9,000 and 10,000.
That’s 10 X. Who’s the bigger terrorist?
Killing of innocent civilians is terrifying. We have caused more pain to Muslim civilians than Muslims have caused to Jewish or Christian civilians. That is not disputable. I believe this same analysis, taken back 25 or 50 years will show the same thing. I don’t think our religions are violent by nature, but I think our devaluation of human life that is not like our own is evident. We have murdered more innocents under the guise of collateral damage than they have. The Islamic world, at least since 2000, hasn’t caused us more terror than we have caused it. Is Islam really more violent a religion than ours?
Stick to the issue. I was talking about racist statements and how they are never acceptable. It wasn’t about what Jews have ever done to anyone. White people have lynched blacks and enslaved them before. For whatever reason, Sharpton feels aggrieved and wanted to say racist things about a certain group. You feel the same way too. That’s why I don’t see how you are morally superior.
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 5:21 pm
Hah - I forgot to bold the punchline:
TOTAL Number of innocent Muslims killed by direct Western action (mostly aerial bombardment) since 2000: Over 100,000 dead.
TOTAL Number of innocent Christians and Jews killed by action of Muslims since 2000: Between 9,000 and 10,000.
That’s 10 X. Who’s the bigger terrorist?
Comment by mlevin — April 19, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
26. Ted Yes, I know Arab Christians are increasingly oppressed, targeted, and killed by extremist Islamists who choose terror. I assume there is also increasing friction between non-political muslims and Arab Christians in some countries. Most of the Arabs I meet are Christian, and almost all of the Indians I meet are Catholics from Kerala, or Sikhs. Very hard to be a religious minority in most countries, regardless of the dominant religion. (Increasingly hard to be a Jewish woman in America - usually because of the splits between Jews. A woman with no family is a pariah to most Jews, and a woman without a job or money a pariah to the other Jews)
That is why I asked whether anyone has considered including Arab Christians in a different approach to somehow, someday resolving Israel’s need for post-1948 defensible borders. I am vaguely aware of American Evangelical Protestant interest in Israel, but most Arab Christians are not Protestant denominations.
While I am not confident in Pope Benedict’s leadership qualities, it would seem this is something the Vatican could tackle, especially in a future resolution for Jerusalem and the West Bank. The thought of buffer zone (protectorate of Switzerland?) of Arab Christians came from what little is known of the kingdom of Khazaria as a Jewish buffer state between emerging Islam and the Byzantine Empire 700-1000AD. Helped that the Khazars were also strong militarially.
ok, I owe Tom Clancy his share of inspiration for the idea of Vatican and Swiss involvement. The Iraqi bishop recently kidnapped and murdered reported into the Vatican hierarchy. Other sects are independent or related to Eastern Orthodoxy. Perhaps the Armenian church could show some leadership.
And, massive relocations are a real problem.
Another source of inspiration was what William Dalrymple recently wrote in the New York Review of Books about the recent Pakistan elections where the nationalist ANP prevailed in the Northwest Fronteir and FATA) (Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008, A New Deal in Pakistan By William Dalrymple
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21194)
“… In the election, Asfandyar’s ANP (Northwest Frontier) routed the Islamists (MMA), demonstrating that contrary to their image as bearded bastions of Islamist orthodoxy, Pashtun tribesmen are as wary as anyone else of violence, extremism, and instability. Now the ANP is talking of extending the Pakistani political parties into the troubled northern tribal areas that are federally administered and act as the buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan:…
(where) the electorate judged the MMA on its record, and threw it out for failing to deliver. There is a clear lesson for US policymakers here. The parties of political Islam are like any other democratic parties: they will succeed or fail on what they deliver. The best way of dealing with democratic Islamists, if Pakistan’s experience is anything to go by, is to let them be voted into power and then reveal their own incompetence—mullah-fatigue will no doubt quickly set in. Besieging Islamist parties that have come to power through a democratic vote, as the US has done with Hamas, or allowing local proxies to rig the vote so as to deprive them of power, as happened in Egypt, only strengthens their hand and increases their popularity….”
Pakistan’s Pashtuns are not Arab, and their Islam, while orthodox Sunni (Wahhabism emerged from the Pashtuns in the 18th century - migrating with the haj), Pashtun Islam also has syncretic influences from Sufism (saints and music) from earlier ages, so Dalrymple’s comparison is weak, but nevertheless, worthy of some consideration. ANP priority is to convince Pashtuns that their tradition of hospitality (Pushtanwali) does NOT include outsiders like Al Qaeda. Good first step.
As to Mark Levin, you can indulge the irresponsibility of youthful expression, but, indirectly, he has a point - military actions are not the only solution to every problem. Still, Mark never saw what I wrote to Tony Wicher in our first email exchange week of April 3, 2008 where Wicher was comparing the Chinese oppression of Tibetans to his “Israeli oppression of Palestinians”: Birdalone wrote to Tony “last time I checked, Tibetans weren’t strapping on suicide vests and blowing up school buses of Han Chinese schoolchildren - Buddhists are smarter than that” I was already being verbally assaulted by a few pro-Tibet fanatics for defending the Chinese when Tony entered the group email exchange. The pro-Tibet guys attacked me for suggesting understanding Chinese cultural norms, like the importance of saving face in negotiations, and added that China had been a rare safe haven for Jews escaping the Nazis in the 1930’s when America’s State Department was refusing to fill open visa allotments for German immigrants because they were Jewish - a stain in American history.
Whatever you think of Jimmy Carter - he apparently made some good points to Hamas, which, like Hezbollah, has to decide whether they want to be legitimate politicians, or despised terrorists. Watch what Moqtada Al Sadr does, because he may be able to influence Hezbollah in Lebanon, where memories of Musa Al Sadr still hold weight with southern Lebanon’s Shi’a. I don’t assume Iran’s Ayotallah pulls all the strings - money can’t buy real loyalty. Khomeini’s 1979 revolution was based on an unwieldy coalition that is not holding up. and, what’s his name isn’t delivering on services so the 2009 Iran elections could be as interesting as those in Pakistan.
This is why I stay in near seclusion, reading Central/South Asian history - no personal emotional involvement.
History has so many threads to either weave, or unravel.
Comment by Birdalone — April 19, 2008 @ 9:19 pm
mlevin,
Your post leaves out the crucial question of who exactly is the beneficiary of these Western actions. Jared Israel has studied this and there is no doubt: the more violent sharia factions are the beneficiaries. And you do not count the thousands of Serbian Christians bombed by the West (acting as NATO), for the sole benefit of violent Islamists.
Western action is more accurately assessed not by ‘Mostly Muslims are dying! Thus this must be our pro Israel policy in action!’, but rather by ‘who is benefitting? What kind of governments are being established after the fact?’.
You are living in a nonexistent world where people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Zalmay Khalilzad toil for the Jews, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Comment by jrob — April 19, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
jrob:
I don’t think that matters at all. Those who act, think their actions are ultimately benefitting themselves. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking that action! Whether or not other groups benefit, intentionally or unintentionally, is not their primary concern. It’s self-interest.
the more violent sharia factions are the beneficiaries.
I don’t disagree with that. But that was not what prompted the US to invade. They’ve ended up empowering Iran, something they never intended to do.
And you do not count the thousands of Serbian Christians bombed by the West (acting as NATO), for the sole benefit of violent Islamists.
As I pointed out clearly, I was listing inter-faith bodycounts for the purpose of this analysis. Christian-on-Christian or Muslim-on-Muslim violence was not included. The West didn’t bomb Serbia to help “violent Islamists” - I presume you mean Bosnians or Kosovars - they did so because they couldn’t stomach ethnic cleansing among white people in the heart of Europe - especially after the concentration camp photos of emaciated men became public.
No. What do you mean “is assessed by”? I was clearly saying “this many innocents have been killed by this side or that side” - that’s it. None of this “more accurately assessed” stuff - that’s just trying to change the subject from something that is uncomfortable to face. There is no “interpretation” involved here, no spin. A side launches an incendiary device that kills civilians innocent of any violence. Then we count up how many to see which side has caused more innocent deaths. Which ‘group’ ends up benefitting in a geopolitical sense is an interesting issue, but unrelated - and it usually isn’t the intended beneficiary. Who benefits doesn’t the lessen the pain of the dying or those who mourn for the dead.
Comment by mlevin — April 20, 2008 @ 12:44 am
Birdalone -
Yes - I don’t think all secesionist or independence movements are cut from the same cloth. Cultural preferences play in too. Buddhism has a peaceful, non-martial history, so for the pro-Tibet movement to take on a violent turn would not be lionized by Tibetans or Buddhists. That is not the same for largely peaceful cultures like the Hindus who do have war heroes in mythology - so under certain circumstances, like in Sri Lanka, the Hindu Tamils practise suicide bombings as a tactic for indpendence. The same goes for Muslims, especially since martyrdom has an exalted place in the culture.
I don’t think it’s about being “smart”. I’ve often wondered why the Palestinians don’t conduct a Gandhian-style nonviolent movement that becomes an international embarrassment for Israel. Then someone told me they did adopt Gandhian tactics (although it did include rock-throwing in addition to nonviolent actions) during the First Intifada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada). It didn’t bring anything other than Oslo, which then broke down over time. Which led to the Second Intifada, which was decidedly violent.
I think the methods that resistance movements employ is not a function of intelligence, but a function of these things: (1) available weapons - violent or nonviolent, (2) diplomatic influence, visibility in the media and the pressure that puts on the “occupier”, (3) cultural norms as to what actions are within acceptable limits, (4) the severity of the occupation - whether that comes from cultural hegemony, physical freedom, dignity, political rights, etc. These conditions vary tremendously from one movement to another, so what is socially acceptable in one setting is not in another.
Comment by mlevin — April 20, 2008 @ 1:08 am
Mark. In your response to me you wrote
First of all I take great care to make certain that “things aren’t being stretched”. If you are suggesting that Israpundit is guilty of doing the things you set out in your second sentence in the quote, you better give examples or don’t suggest it.
What all his friends and associates we name have in common is that they are far left. We conclude that Obama is too. That’s enough reason for middle of the roaders to reject him. The people who support him are those that don’t know that he is, or those that embrace him because he is. You are in the latter group.
To my mind, his world says more than his words uttered in an election.
Comment by Ted Belman — April 20, 2008 @ 5:06 am
Mark.
You have to educate your self on Serbia. The Serbs were the victims. Do a Historical Investigative Research to learn the truth.
Your numbers in #28 are wrong. 100,000 is a lie. Check it out.
But that’s not the point. Your focus is to narrow and gives no context. You leave out how many people Hussein was killing yearly. Why so?
Now Israel may kill more Arabs that Arabs kill Jews. That statistic is irrelevant. Israel is entitled to kill as many Arabs as is necessary to stop Jews from being killed. I am talking about in collateral damage and not intentionally targeting civilians.
Your supreme value, I think, is peace though you apparently favour humanitarian intervention as in Serbia. You allow Arabs to kill in pursuit of a value but you deny the Jews the right to have a value. In the real world people fight and die and kill for values, be they country, land, independence or kin.
You support independence movements no matter what violence they employ but you do not support Israel’s independence movement. Judea and Samaria belongs to the Jews. If you want to argue its Palestinian land, make your case. Israel is not stealing it from them. They are attempting to steal it from the Jews.
If I have you wrong, perhaps you could advise whether you reject all violence and if not then when you endorse it and to what extent.
Comment by Ted Belman — April 20, 2008 @ 5:33 am
Birdalone. You obviously are erudite and write beautifully.
Not many people would share this view.
Your idea about a Christian buffer is a non-starter. Lebanon was created for the Marionite Christians and it served as a buffer. Look what Arafat did to it in the Seventies and eighties and what the Shiite Hezbollah have done to it since. The Christians in Bethlehem and the territories are emigrating in droves and the Copts in Egypt are being persecuted.
What are you talking about.
Comment by Ted Belman — April 20, 2008 @ 5:44 am
[quote]I don’t think that matters at all. Those who act, think their actions are ultimately benefitting themselves. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking that action! Whether or not other groups benefit, intentionally or unintentionally, is not their primary concern. It’s self-interest.
the more violent sharia factions are the beneficiaries.
I don’t disagree with that. But that was not what prompted the US to invade. They’ve ended up empowering Iran, something they never intended to do.[/quote]
Like Ted said. You need to read Francisco Gil White and Jared Israel’s articles on these issues. There is a certain mythology that Zalmay Khalilzad toils on the behalf of the American people–he does not, he toils on behalf of the US ruling elites. Brzezinski openly admits to funding and supporting Mujahedeen fighters as far back as 1979. This is US policy, and it is very pro-Islamist, which is why there is no ‘democracy’ being spread, unless you count the spread of sharia law to be ‘democracy’.
And there is ample evidence, not propaganda, that confirms that the US had every intention of strengthening Iran and weakening Iraq. Albright spoke of this as far back as 1998, and Khalilzad has written articles on this. Your analysis is based on the mass media propaganda, but there is a whole other world that entails what actually takes place, and analysis of mass media around the world. And the latter tells a very different story.
Also like he said: Serbia was not the aggressor and was not ethnically cleansing anyone. The atrocities that are attributed to the Serbs were actually being done to the Serbs. Read some of Julia Gorin’s blog: http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=1497
Once you learn the truth about Yugoslavia, these State Department lies start melting away, and the real objectives become much more clear. And they are hardly ‘pro Israel’ or ‘pro Zionist’.
Comment by jrob — April 20, 2008 @ 6:54 am
36. Ted: Thank you Ted, for enjoying my writing. Jonathan Tilove is encouraging me to write a book or play about my experience in ‘Obamaworld’.
I preferred writing about the economy when I still had a career, and when that industry still had one trade journal in publication. Henry Kravis shut that one down in March 2002, which was the second time Henry Kravis cost me my livelihood through one of his leveraged buyouts. I tend to boycott anything or anyone supported by Henry Kravis (and by Carly Fiorina for almost destroying a great company, HP), so I guess I am also guilty of playing the guilt by association card.
Re: Arab Christians. You need to include the ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Christians, a seriously underreported story. Which is why I wonder whether the idea of an Arab Christian buffer zone on the West Bank has the chance of a new start. 400,000+ is a lot of displaced Christians. Whether they can establish a safe haven near Mosul under Kurdish protection is still uncertain.
In MY imagination, Moqtada Al-Sadr honors the legacy of his father’s cousin, Musa al-Sadr, and encourages the Shi’a of southern Lebanon to move to Basra, with better future economic opportunity. The Iraqi Christian denominations that are compatible with those in Lebanon, resettle in Southern Lebanon. The Sunni Palestinians on the West Bank change place with the Egyptian Copts. Palestinian Christians return to their homes on the West Bank and develop the tourist industry. (Egypt gets help with food aid and agricultural development in general). Golan Heights becomes a protected, independent watershed authority. Syria’s relationship with Lebanon becomes an issue separate from Israel.
And, while I redraw my imaginary map, the Sunni tribes of western Iraq, who were never part of the Ottoman Empire, those Sunni tribal become part of Saudi Arabia or Jordan, depending on tribal affiliations.
Of course, I’d rather be drawing my imaginary maps of Kurdistan and Pashtunistan, and changing the dialog about those areas, and Tibet, and Kashmir, to what is closer to the truth: water. And changing the U.S. fear of a rising China military to the fact that Russia has far more to fear once the Chinese seek to retake the Siberia stolen from them in the 19th century.
Almost 50% of voters usually don’t vote. When I ask, people tell me their vote doesn’t matter, that there is no difference between the two parties.
I believe my vote is a privilege, but I am getting tired of my vote not counting because the Democrats in The Bronx (where I have voted since 2001 when I had to start living off my savinsg at age 49) discourage voter turnout to protect incumbency. If I was well enough, and could qualify, I would emigrate to a country where people are valued, not disposed of.
If Calvin Coolidge or Dwight Eisenhower (don’t go near Suez - no one is perfect and I do know my history) were running for president, I’d be happy to vote for him, but I regularly invoke their ghosts to slap these post 1976 faux-Republicans. Susan (and David) Eisenhower’s endorsement of Obama meant a great deal to me, but it is Obama’s own words on the economy and nuclear non-proliferation that earned my vote on Feb. 5. Some of his supporters are like Wicher, and they make it really hard for me, and for Obama, because those people are NOT supporting Obama with their personal words and using MyBO as platforms for ideas that conflict with Obama’s positions. But many, many more of my Obamaworld Friends make it seem the 50% of us who are not ideologues finally have a voice.
Ted, the ONLY thing I believe should be carved in stone are the Ten Commandments. Everything else should be up for discussion, especially what it actually means to be left or right, liberal or conservative.
Comment by Birdalone — April 20, 2008 @ 11:04 am
Mark Levin (#28) wrote,
If I were surrounded by angry Black people who were calling me a “white interloper” for entering their neighborhood, I would consider it reasonable to fear for my life and safety. Same for a Black person who was surrounded by angry Caucasians calling him a “black interloper.” That is exactly what the Ku Klux Klan did when a Black person moved into the “wrong” neighborhood or tried to open a business there. Sharpton’s followers shouted things even worse, like “bloodsucking Jew” and “cracker lover.”
It seems to me that Yankel Rosenbaum and the seven victims of the Freddy’s arson are just as dead as any Black person who was ever lynched by the Klan. The actions of Sharpton and his followers went beyond a protest. Sharpton’s words included hate speech, and his followers’ actions culminated in violent hate crimes every bit as evil as a KKK lynching.
Do you consider denunciation of militant Islamic culture as racist? I emphasize repeatedly that a behavioral choice or politcal movement is not a race. In fact, when I attack MoveOn.org and my.barackobama.com for “anti-Semitic” content, I do a lot of thinking when I see only the word “Zionist” (even though it, and “neo-con,” is often code for Jews in general). Zionism is a political position, and it is not “anti-Semitic” to attack a political position (even if it is one with which I agree). On the other hand, when someone like Tony Wicher says “Zionist thought police” and then quotes Desmond Tutu’s “Jewish lobby,” it is clear that he is no longer referring to a political movement. If someone says that Israel does not have a right to exist, I classify that as a reprehensible geopolitical position (an attack on a fellow democratic nation) as opposed to an anti-Semitic one unless the speaker adds something that obviously refers to Jews.
I certainly do not ascribe Sharpton’s behavior to all Black people. My position is that Sharpton and his followers are to Black people what the Ku Klux Klan is to white people. Both entities consist of the absolute dregs of the societies they claim to represent. In fact, Obama insults Black people by acting as if Sharpton represents them and can get their votes.
See above. “Neocons” is often code for “Jews,” but I don’t treat it as such–unless the writer adds, “unfortunately most of them were Jewish.” Yes, Saddam was throwing people into plastic shredders while his son Uday kidnapped women, raped them, and then tortured them to death for his personal entertainment. Any civilized nation would have been justified in turning Saddam & Co. into worm food. We did not know that his overthrow would lead to the chaos it did, and the blood of which you speak is on the hands of the terrorists who exploited Saddam’s overthrow.
Your own data shows that 9 percent of the fatalities were from American weapons, because we are the only ones with the means of delivering aerial bombardment. Furthermore, the bombs were doubtlessly aimed at legitimate military targets. 20 percent of the fatalities were obviously caused by terrorists (the enemy) because they are the only ones who use car bombs. “Another blast/ordnance” = roadside bombs planted by terrorists. While the U.S. uses small arms to engage terrorists, most of the gunshot fatalities are almost certainly due to terrorists killing Iraqis.
Not for lack of trying on both sides; we try to avoid harm to innocent people, and they go out of their way to cause it. We try to avoid casualties to innocent bystanders, but it is difficult when terrorists disguise themselves as civilians while using civilians for cover. They try to cause as much harm to civilians as they can, e.g. by machine gunning students in schools and setting off bombs in shopping malls, synagogues, and even hospitals.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 20, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
Birdalone wrote,
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith) was an eminent Sinologist and Sun Yat Sen’s godson. Here are some examples (all available through the Advanced Book Exchange).
* Far Eastern governments and politics: China and Japan [by] Paul M.A. Linebarger, Djang Chu [and] Ardath W. Burks (Van Nostrand political science series)
* Government in Repulican China
* The China of Chiang K’Ai-Shek: a Political Study
* Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese republic (this one by his father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger)
* Far Eastern Governments & Politics: China & Japan
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 20, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Mark Levin wrote,
It wouldn’t be an international embarrassment for Israel, because Israel could then teach the Palestinians how to turn a desert into a garden (as the Israelis themselves have done), Palestinians would soon be wealthier than Arabs in oil-rich nations, and Gaza would become a major trading partner with Israel.
Henry Ford, my favorite role model (with the exception of anti-Semitic material he published and then retracted, along with his support for Prohibition) proposed the only realistic way to achieve world peace. He said that world peace consisted of men wearing collared shirts instead of kerchiefs around their necks, and women wearing hats instead of shawls. He meant that industry can create so much wealth that no one would want to steal from their neighbors. Japan, which has few natural resources other than coal, is among the world’s richest nations because of its industrial base.
From a personal and professional perspective, this is what I really want for the Palestinians and indeed everyone on earth. The truth is, unfortunately, that the Palestinians were GIVEN greenhouses in which to grow food for consumption and resale, and that the first thing they did when they took over Gaza was to smash and loot the greenhouses. The Palestinians also demolished perfectly good synagogues that they could have turned into mosques, schools, hospitals, or housing. Even the Ottoman Empire, despite its nasty reputation for conquering its neighbors, turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque when it took Constantinople in 1453. It is hard to see how one can make any kind of peace with a society that destroys every good thing that is given to it, while spending foreign aid on explosives instead of basic necessities for its own people.
Comment by Bill Levinson — April 20, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
40. Bill - thanks for the political references for East Asia, but I read history - and not political history - for Central and South Asia. I am a student of historical Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and what used to be called Hindoostan, then India, now also Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Ottomans, Monghols, Silk Road outside of China, with forays into parts of Russia and the Middle East before 1920. Though I did enjoy Sterling Seagraves books on the Chinese diaspora, and am tempted to move onto the Vikings next. The Vikings are so cool - shows how pure terror can evolve into democracy over 1,000 years.
You shouldn’t let Henry Ford off so easily for disseminating the Protocols to a global audience. Why do you think a Pakistani newstand clerk in the Bronx blames Kashmir on the Jews in 2002? Google ‘Protocols’ - living on, thanks to Henry Ford.
You ARE absolutely right about the Palestinians in Gaza being insane to destroy those greenhouses, etc. And three more suicide bombers at the Gaza crossing to try to create the illusion of a humanitarian crisis of their own making? Especially paradoxical since Sunni Islam rejects martyrdom - that is one reason why Sunnis consider Shi’a heretics - that Shi’a fixation on martyrdom. You can solve the paradox of Gazan Hamas. That should work out well for everyone.
Actually, the United States DID know the chaos that would follow if the Iraqi Army, outside of the Republican Guard, were to take their guns and not get paid. The State Dept covered that quite well in their planning documents. General Shinseki was forced to retire for warning of this. and so on and so on Unfortunately for the neo-cons, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld + Scoot and Dick Cheney will take full blame in history for bungling this war.
Bill, you sound just like Condi Rice saying ‘no one could imagine anyone flying planes into the WTC’, when Tom Clancy wrote the book in 1997 with exactly THAT scenario, except the building was the U.S. Capitol - that’s how Jack Ryan becomes President.
Is that enough attention?
Comment by Birdalone — April 20, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
Mark:
Yea well, maybe but you never addressed the culpability of Sharpton in the murder of Jews and an Hispanic! Nor that I have demonstrated that he is a racist charlatan, you dodge the issue and use adolescent sophistry to to cover positions you can’t defend.
Les try this one on for size and see if you can comprehend:
Adam was right to taste the apple. His was a pure rational analysis, not free will: the talking serpents are credible. Moses likewise believed a talking burning bush (not that Bush).
Humans are automata. Decision-making is series of electric impulses in our brains. All fleeting influences are reflected in physical processes: serotonin levels, voltage, etc. Humans, theoretically, are fully predictable, but complexity defies predictability. A predictive machine must model every particular brain – including animals - and factor for every remotely relevant event. How remote? Think of Bradbury’s butterfly; the conditioning event could be ages apart from the current decision. Israeli relations with Egypt stem from the mass migration which took place thirty-five centuries ago. The prediction machine must know everything that ever happened and delve deep inside the brains. The machine would have to be omniscient — any lesser knowledge only allows for probabilistic modeling. Free will is the inherent incalculability of human decision-making, a function of complexity error. The more complex a system is, the less it is predictable, the more it is said to possess free will.
Societies aren’t necessarily more complex than their components, humans. In physics, uncertainty increases towards the micro-world while the universe is fairly predictable. The uncertainty of components combines in systems, but they also cancel each other. At election day, each individual’s mood is unpredictable, but statistics can estimate the overall mood of society. If societies consisted of equal components, they could be modeled with a high probability.
But people in societies are not similar; some are way more influential than others. America invaded Iraq entirely because of one man, Bush; had he wanted to attack Iran instead, his acolytes would have reinforced that opinion. Iran entered the nuclear race because of one man, Ahmadinejad; before him, nuclear research was latent. In the long run, trends prevail: a few men made Russia a communist state, but after decades the country habitually re-dressed itself as a Slavic empire. Democracies with a four-year election horizon don’t concern themselves with century-long projects, planning only for the short term. It is the short term, however, that cannot be planned either in economics or politics. Certainly, most Islamic countries will have nuclear weapons by 2100, but Ahmadinejad’s reaction to sanctions and Bush’s reaction to Ahmadinejad’s remain uncertainty.
Political bureaucracies rely on procedures and quantifiable methods. The Soviet Union possessed more tanks and nuclear warheads than NATO, and therefor was declared a threat. Western politicians could neither comprehend nor explain to the public a subtle, non-quantifiable thing: the Soviet gerontocracy was cowardly and wouldn’t risk its comfortable position in a major war. The Soviets allowed themselves to be dragged step by step into what promised to be a minor war in Afghanistan, but would have never attacked the US. In politics, major decisions often rely on intuition, but intuition doesn’t look good in secret briefs and public policy announcements. Bureaucracies play it safe – and wrong – and stick to the numbers; thus the senseless Cold War where neither side imagined attacking the other.
Rationally, Iran won’t nuke Israel. One or two nuclear explosions won’t kill a statistically significant number of Jews or devastate the country, while retaliation will be overwhelming. Syria needs rapprochement with the world community, not the Golan, and shouldn’t start a Hezbollah-style war over the Heights. The Palestinians want safety and economic development, have enough land, and will live in peace with Israel.
All of that is rational. None of it is true.
Comment by yamit82 — April 20, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
Ted #34:
Ok - I have plenty of people to respond to…damn, I wish I was getting paid for my time on Israpundit!
I did take off for the afternoon..
Yes, you do - and I wasn’t referring to you. I was referring to other posters on Israpundit, like Bill Levinson, whom you endorse enough to allow his “stretchy” posts on Israpundit. And I’ve already commented on such stretching by him elsewhere on Israpundit. Here was what I said in comment #7 to to http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=757 which harped on hatred in a way that just seems 180 degrees from Obama’s cool, calm orientation to problem solving:
Check out Colbert’s “circle” video (satirizes the guilt by association thing):
http://www.jewcy.com/post/obama_endorsed_hamas_only_six_degrees_hitler
Then you said:
It’s quite reasonable to think that if someone’s close associates and friends are liberal - he is too. But he does have some right-wing conservative senators as friends too. But your point is dead on - that we can guess that despite what he says in public - his overall political stripes should be similar to the average of his closest advisors. But I don’t think it gives us enough insight to predict particular policies, even though it’s a fun parlour game for us. Those who think he is on the whole “too far to the left” for their comfort shouldn’t vote for him. Many people view him as more centrist than his small voting record suggests because he doesn’t appear doctrinaire to them - in his take on issues, his articulation of how to solve them, etc.
You’re right that I support him because I see him as more liberal than McCain or Clinton. But that is not enough for me - I like that he is not for affirmative action for rich blacks (not being doctrinaire) and that he has the best shot of repairing our global reputation - which as you know, is my “thing.” I don’t think you’d disagree that Obama is the likeliest candidate to improve US reputation among all nations. This isn’t scientific, but:
http://www.whowouldtheworldelect.com/
Newsweek article on this issue: “If The World Could Vote” (I think the author miscalculates Clinton’s support vs Obama’s in Europe)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/84504
Comment by mlevin — April 20, 2008 @ 9:46 pm
Ted, for #35:
Quoting Wikipedia: “They were characterised by bitter ethnic conflicts between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, mostly between Serbs on the one side and Croats, Bosniaks or Albanians on the other; but also between Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and Macedonians and Albanians in the Republic of Macedonia. The conflict had its roots in various underlying political, economic and cultural problems, as well as long-standing ethnic and religious tensions.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars
While it was a complex war, with atrocities committed by all sides, most of the indicted individuals are Serbian - just eyeball the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ICTY_indictees
I checked it out. And I detailed my logic. It is based on other entities and studies - not me. Why don’t you look at the sources I cite, and tell me which one you quibble with and why. If you have estimates from alternative sources with similar credibility, I’d be happy to readjust my estimates. I want to be accurate.
Because I wanted to focus on Islam vs Judaeo-Christian kills in this analysis. Intra-group gets messy. More on that below.
Saddam, by most accounts I’ve heard, could be blamed for about a million deaths. But almost all of that ended in 1991; there was no humanitarian casus belli of a genocidal level beyond the normal authoritarian tortures and killings after 1991:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam%27s_Iraq#Documented_human_rights_violations_1979-2003
And for much of that time he wasn’t an enemy of major powers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam%27s_Iraq#Collusion_of_foreign_powers_in_Saddam-era_human_rights_abuses
But if we did go intra-Islam, we’d have to include the Sunni-Shia violence deaths in Iraq, which are probably 70-80% of the 1 million Iraq deaths.
Judaeo-Christians win the kill totals big in the 20th century, beating Islam hands-down. Think of Stalin (~20 million), WWI (20 million), WWII (72 million) which were mostly intra-Judaeo-Christian kills - this group killed well over 50% of “its own” among the roughly 200 million deaths from war in the 20th century. Once again, the question arises - are the adherents of Islam really more violent than Judaeo-Christian adherents? The empirical evidence doesn’t support it. Quite the opposite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_deaths_and_atrocities_of_the_twentieth_century#Matthew_White.27s_estimates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_deaths_and_atrocities_of_the_twentieth_century#Milton_Leitenberg.27s_estimate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
No, it is relevant, even if you want to brush it off as such. We come from different philosophies. You evidently believe that a Jewish life is worth many Arab lives. I don’t. I believe they are equal, and I believe not to think so is racist. That may be the source of many of our disagreements.
The responsibility for the euphemistically clinical term “collateral damage” belongs to the entity whose incendiary device kills the victim. From an earlier post of mine I address this issue of collateral damage and “intentionality”. Whether it is an act of ommission or commission, it is our act, and it is cowardly to pretend otherwise:
On to how we kill. We have a healthy tolerance for “collateral damage” as long as the shrapnel killing and maiming comes from a high-tech bomb released by a “courageous” pilot from up on high, and not from some virgins-on-the-brain suicide bomber who is let’s say acting on some considerable risk to himself. Why? We take moral stances on the method of killing, while conveniently ignoring the balance of bodycounts, pain and suffering those actions cause. We say that the collateral damage (in effect, collateral killings/murder) of our actions to civilians was “unintended” as opposed to a suicide bomber’s explicit civilian targeting - and that our action took 10 innocent lives is far more moral than the 10 innocents the suicide bomber or IED-maker killed. Why? Did the pain we cause any less? No. When we greenlight an action and consider the collateral damage acceptable, we are essentially saying I am willing for 10 innocent people to die in the hope that I’ll get my bad guy - when you make the lives of others expendable, it is not different than murder. We mask our terrorism/violence behind the sophisticated veneer of civilization - a higher threshold for collateral damage.
No, my supreme value is not nonviolence but valuing lives equally (outside of personal friends and family). I believe in the use of force to kill (more on that below) in certain cases - whether that’s Arabs, Jews or others doing the killing. I know what happens in the “real world” and what I am saying isn’t contradicting that. People should fight and die for what they believe in, their families, etc - to get equal rights, and basic human rights. As opposed to supremacy. Their pursuit of rights shouldn’t devalue the lives of another group.
No. I support self-determination everywhere, even if that results in balkanization. I don’t believe violence is the best way to achieve it, but I think it is understandable under extreme circumstances, if normal life and basic human dignity is impossible.
The West Bank “belongs” to the Jews? I am sure you know more about the history than I do, but most independent observers don’t see it that way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank#Status This appears more complicated than I thought - where Israel is seen as an “occupier” by most entities, including the UN Security Council, and even “belligerent occupier” by some, but yet the only party that may have a legal right to it. Weird. But politically that won’t be tenable - since the Quartet’s Road Map has already promised a Palestinian state there.
Ok - as to when I support violence:
Personal
1) In personal self-defense or that of others - if a specific individual threatened me or another person physically, I would injure or kill that person, depending on the severity of that threat. I’d probably act in a way that would hold up in court as having caused injury or death because of self-defense - but that wouldn’t be a primary consideration when the adrenaline is flowing.
2) If my survival is very questionable, because I have no food or resources, I may kill someone else so I may live. Cold, I know, but self-preservation is an instinct we have for a reason.
State/group:
As to a state or group’s use of lethal force, I would support it if
(1) The land under its protection (according the population that lives there) was invaded by another entity with lethal force, OR
(2) Conditions for its people have become so dire that it needs to acquire additional resources so its people may live, OR
(3) Its action will clearly, to a majority of people on earth knowledgeable about the situation, result in saving more lives than it kills over the predictable future, and that all other non-violent, diplomatic and covert actions have been exhausted or will not work. You extend it to all people on earth so it irons out the sectarian preferences by averaging them out, and including others who don’t really care about either side in the conflict. You test for knowledge of events/evidence, so that the opinion isn’t being based on provably false assumptions. (like “CIA believes that Saddam was behind 9/11″) Active genocides and pogroms would fall under this category. While this might seem like a clunky rule of thumb - a simpler approximation of it might work. A way to assess this might be polls/surveys run in various countries, that test people’s knowledge of facts about the situation as well as their opinion. Something akin to this happened prior to the Iraq invasion, where it appeared only 10-20% of people outside the US were for it. If you include Americans, it was still much lower than 50%.
I haven’t put enough thought into this to make it watertight or operational in a hot situation, but, I think you can see the principles and decision-making philosophy behind what I consider legitimate use of lethal force.
Let me put it to you starkly - if I was given the responsibility of killing 1 million people, if it would save 1.2 million people (and those were my only two choices) I would do it, if I knew nothing else about them. But I would have to be close to 100% sure that there was no third option that would save more lives. I would also kill myself if I could save those people.
Now if I knew more details about them, then it would become tougher - and it becomes a bit like Noah’s Ark, or the million “chosen” people in “Deep Impact” - but I wouldn’t have a religious preference for who gets to live. The considerations would be utilitarian. This is a very very hypothetical situation, but you get my point.
Comment by mlevin — April 21, 2008 @ 12:26 am
I’ll respond to the other comments tomorrow or the day after…time to sleep!
Comment by mlevin — April 21, 2008 @ 12:41 am
mlevin wrote:
The word has nothing to do with black people. It’s an English word that means miserly. Has nothing to do with the “N” word. They are etymologically unrelated, just sound similar. The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology says ‘niggardly’ originated back in the 1300’s from the words ‘nig’ and ‘ignon’, meaning “miser” in Middle English. Do at least do a casual search online before you make such claims.
Comment by mlevin
RESPONSE:
Sorry you are so misinformed. Actually, an Islamic Arab pointed out these Koranic verses and verified that “niggardly” is a racist jargon. NIGGARDLY is the same exact context as “nigger” and was intended as such. You’ll have to verify this with the KING FAHD translation of the Koran.
It is not my claim, nor do I need to “search online” like you do to get your information. Arabs and blacks did not get along during this translation and during the 20th century were still viewed as slaves of Islam. You need to quit getting your translation from the internet and go directly to the source! You are so misinformed. Sad.
NIGGARDLY is NIGGER and that is the Islamic context. No doubt the new Koran will edit this out.
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:38 am
Bill Levinson is RIGHT ON!
Finally a man of honor, intelligence and honor!
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:39 am
Bill Levinson is a man of honor, intelligence, knowledge - and a TRUE Believer!
Thank you for your wisdom Bill - excellent responses and homework! I have some things to learn from you!
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:40 am
The real issue in the BATTLE OF THE RACES has to do with a few realizations:
REALITY #1 - Darwin’s theory of evolution invites RACISM and Hitler followed EVOLUTION to replace Creation believing: ONLY THE STRONGEST AND MOST FITTEST SURVIVE. Versus ALL TRIBES being created by the God of Israel, man evolved from lower forms of life, therefore, some are not as evolved as others and must be slaves.
REALITY #2 - The God of Israel created ALL RACES and ALL LANGUAGES, therefore we all have ONE CREATOR/ONE GOD IN COMMON. However, the DEVIL, God’s Adversary, made up ALL RELIGIONS. Yes, all religions lead to the same god - the god of hell. The Catholic Pope is smiling, unknowing he is on his way to the lake of fire - unaware that his religion leads straight to hell. Same is true of those who pride themselves in Islam - it leads to Satan.
REALITY #3 - The God of Israel’s goal is to HEAL our corruption by false religions by offering us ONE WAY to come into the Camp of Israel so that death can pass over us - ONE MESSIAH, ONE LORD, ONE GOD. Yes, HEAVEN has UNITY among all races, as racism does not exist in God’s Kingdom. May the shed blood of the Messiah cover us so that death can pass over us - THUS THE PASSOVER.
REALITY #4 - THE PRIDE OF COMPETITION over MONEY, LAND, PROPERTY, and POSSESSIONS has ruined God’s message to the human race about PEACE, LOVE and UNITY and the devil has done his best to make sure we never follow Heaven’s will.
REALITY #5 - Men have a penis and women have a vagina - May chauvinists and femi-nazis accept this fact and overcome their gender biasness. The BATTLE OF THE SEXES is stupid also, in addition to racism.
REALITY #6 - Yes, LOVE YOUR ENEMIES who are deceived by false religions, but if they plot your demise, then action must be taken to humble them and you must LOVE YOUR ENEMIES by sometimes fighting against them, rather than letting them treat you like a door mat.
You will never find enough HUMILITY in the Catholic Pope to let himself become a DOOR MAT for the State of Israel and his door mat Christianity is NOT THE GOD OF ISRAEL’S WILL - yes, conquest through LOVE and PEACE, but not without a good fight in the defense of ISRAEL’S NATIONAL SECURITY!
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:49 am
Yamit 82 wrote:
Rationally, Iran won’t nuke Israel. One or two nuclear explosions won’t kill a statistically significant number of Jews or devastate the country, while retaliation will be overwhelming. Syria needs rapprochement with the world community, not the Golan, and shouldn’t start a Hezbollah-style war over the Heights. The Palestinians want safety and economic development, have enough land, and will live in peace with Israel.
RESONSE:
The Kingdom ‘braces for nuclear war’
Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:42:39
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=49572§ionid=351020104
Saudi Arabia is reportedly preparing to counter any ‘radioactive hazards’ which may result from a US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants.
Popular government-guided Saudi newspaper Okaz recently reported that the Saudi Shura Council approved of nuclear fallout preparation plans only a day after US Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Kingdom’s high ranking officials, including King Abdullah.
As a result of the Shura ruling, the Saudi government will start the implementation of ‘national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following expert warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors’.
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:53 am
More Iranian Threats; Israel’s Reacts Iran’s Deputy commander-in-chief Mohammad Reza Ashtiani said in a speech today that if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear reactors, it will be ‘wiped off the map of the universe’, echoing the many similar threats uttered by Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad.Israel has now requested the hook-up to the American BMEWS for early warning to defend itself against Iranian missile attack. The system operates from three global centers - the US Thule Air Base in Greenland, where the 12th Space Warning Squadron is located; the Clear Air Force Station in Alaska and the British RAF long-range radar station at Fylingdales, Yorkshire, in England. This is the third time Israel has been connected to the BMEWS. The first was in 1991 before the first Gulf War and the second in 2003 before the US invasion of Iraq. US military sources interpret the request as signifying Israel’s sense of the need to prepare for an Iranian missile attack in the not-too-distant future. Such an attack could develop from a US or Israeli strike against Iran, or any war situation involving Israel, Syria or Hizballah. Tehran might also stage a pre-emptive strike if early intelligence was received of an impending US or Israeli attack on Iran, Syria or Hizballah.These sources stressed that Iran could even decide to lash out against Israel after the event in reprisal for an American assault, not necessarily on its nuclear sites but on Revolutionary Guards bases involved in directing, arming and training militias for attacks on US troops in Iraq. In such a contingency, Tehran could decide to hit back at US bases and strategic sites in the Persian Gulf and Middle East at large, including Israel.The hook-up to the US early warning system will give Israel a better chance to prepare its Arrow and Patriot missile defense systems - and the US to prepare its own Israel-based Patriot batteries - in time to ward off an Iranian missile attack. The BMEWS would start beaming data on an incoming Iranian missile at the launching stage and before it is airborne.
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:54 am
Sorry Yamit 82, you are also misinformed - poor smuck. Why don’t you go kiss the Catholic Vatican’s hand?
Comment by sunstartmf33 — April 21, 2008 @ 9:55 am
a3d06e305153…
a3d06e3051536b7cfcf2…
Trackback by a3d06e305153 — May 10, 2008 @ 6:09 pm
[...] It is also worth reminding our readers of Jeremiah Wright’s call for divestment from Israel. The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism. The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won’t make the press either, however. Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., July 2005 [...]
Pingback by Jesse Jackson: Obama Will End Zionists’ Control of U.S. Foreign Policy | Grizzly Groundswell — October 14, 2008 @ 2:39 pm
[...] It is also worth reminding our readers of Jeremiah Wright’s call for divestment from Israel. The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism. The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won’t make the press either, however. Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., July 2005 [...]
Pingback by Jesse Jackson: Obama Will End Zionists’ Control of U.S. Foreign Policy « The Husaria — October 14, 2008 @ 2:40 pm
[...] It is also worth reminding our readers of Jeremiah Wright’s call for divestment from Israel. The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism. The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won’t make the press either, however. Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., July 2005 [...]
Pingback by Israpundit » Blog Archive » Jesse Jackson: Obama Will End Zionists’ Control of U.S. Foreign Policy — October 14, 2008 @ 2:41 pm
I like the God of Israel’s divestment plan from Israel’s enemies, as described in the Torah and the Prophets a lot better.
All the God of Israel needs is a few good men and women to serve his cause - and those who divest from Israel will be forever cast away from Israel’s God, by their own choosing. Muslims have just a little while longer to bury their heads in the sand like Ostriches when they bow to their dirt god, while turning their backs to God’s Mountain - where a GOLD DOME rests over a barren rock - absent of a Jewish Temple and representative of the democratic aspirations to destroy the God of Israe and His people from the face of the earth - therefore, Earth must live with their choice to betray the Israelis with a kiss - but those of us who know our God that whether by human intervention through countless King Davids rising up to defend Israel, such as our brave U.S. soldiers have done in the defeat of Sadaam Hussein, or divine intervention through storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, ozone layer depletion, solar flares warming the earth, famines, fires, floods, etc., the MODERN EGYPTIANS are no match for Israel’s God and the Book of Revelation reveals that the same plagues that fell upon Pharoah for exercising his pride against Israel will fall upon the entire beast kingdom in the last days - but let’s remember that God WAITS because He doesn’t want to condemn, but to save souls willing to place their trust in Him before HE closes the final curtain with His loud and deafening return - and until our NEW EARTH is given to us by His Grace, we must endure the plagues of Revelation breaking out against God’s enemies - which will sometimes be self-inflicted by their own choosing - historical and future reality for Israel is that ISRAEL’S GOD WILL FIGHT FOR THE FAITHFUL and we all have God’s promise that DIVESTMENT from Satan’s world will come soon - the world who opposes and hates the God of Israel on behalf of angry gods who don’t exist - Obama’s gang will soon realize the SECRET OF THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULLS as their alien god carries them to the lake of fire - while those whom the God of Israel will be refined under their cruel oppression in a different manner. God bless and support the saints during these evil days.
Comment by Michael Sunstar — October 14, 2008 @ 10:32 pm