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The_Conservative
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
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 Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Of course I don't think the Palestinian and Iran leadership are innocent little choirboys. |
With all due respect, that is not consistent with the positions you tend to take on this message board. And I recall your once telling me that the Palestinians were analogous to helpless, wide-eyed, innocent children. |
You have completely invented the 'wide-eyed innocent' part!
I made an analogy to compare the strength and power of the two parties. It's like a fight between a toddler and a full grown adult. The Palestinians are weak and effective, like a toddler faced with a full grown man. |
Most toddlers don't have rockets nor do they shoot them into towns on a regular basis.
Poor analogy...it doesn't even begin to compute. |
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The_Conservative
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 6:41 pm Post subject: |
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Anyways I'm off now, my train is leaving. I hope that in the next two days you'll have time to point us to ONE link from reputable mainstream sources such as TIME, Newsweek, The Economist. After all you've had time over the LAST two days to make 16 posts.  |
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contrarian
Joined: 20 Jan 2007
Location: Nearly in NK
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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My argument may be simplistic that is simply because the Palestinians are simple minded barbarians,
Just in today;s news. It seems that some insurgent group in Iraq tutned two mentally handicapped wome into remote control bombs. That is simple minded barbarism. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 8:27 pm Post subject: |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 8:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| You have completely invented the 'wide-eyed innocent' part! |
Yes, that is true. I do not feel I mischaracterized your views, though. If I did, I apologize.
This is the substance...
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| ...an analogy to compare the strength and power of the two parties. It's like a fight between a toddler and a full grown adult. The Palestinians are weak and ineffective... |
The Palestinians compensate, as those possessing inferior conventional forces have always done, with guerrilla tactics and by cultivating a victim-mystique and developed their propaganda accordingly. It is not such an uneven fight. Consider the military stalemate; consider that elements within the American govt press the Israelis to cede ground to the Palestinians on multiple fronts.
Further, the Palestinians have succeeded in drawing the Israelis out, again and again, and provoking them to overreact and strike out, hitting many unintended, civilian targets, for decades. This has hurt the Palestinians, of course. But it has caused far more damage to the Israelis: it exacerbates internal and external debates and it undermines their moral position in world affairs. As it is, they more or less have the United States govt and the United States govt only as an ally; all others, to differing degrees, including most if not all in American academia, distance themselves from Tel Aviv.
I would not describe Israel's position as so strong, then. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 12:54 am Post subject: |
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again.
| Quote: |
Clinton bemoaned Arafat's 'colossal error' in saying no again
WASHINGTON (AFP) Nov 11, 2004
Yasser Arafat's biggest mistake may have been to reject a peace deal brokered by the United States in 2000, which would have given him much of what he had demanded for the Palestinians for four decades.
Former president Bill Clinton called the late Palestinian leader's move a "colossal error" that led to the election of the hawkish Ariel Sharon as Israel's prime minister and put the peace process back by years.
In a statement extending his condolences for Arafat's death, Clinton said he regretted that in 2000 Arafat had "missed the opportunity" to create a Palestinian nation, adding that he prayed "for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace."
Clinton made his final move in December 2000 and January 2001 -- in the last weeks of his presidency -- to bring together Arafat and the Israeli prime minister of the time, Ehud Barak.
The two had already held marathon talks at the US presidential retreat of Camp David in July of 2000.
Under proposals that Clinton persuaded Israel to broadly accept, 94-96 percent of West Bank would be given to the Palestinians along with some land from Israel.
Israeli forces would have withdrawn from Palestinian territories over three years with an international force put in place and sovereignty over Jerusalem would have been divided. Israel would have kept enough land for 80 percent of its settlers and other security rights.
The Israeli cabinet agreed. Clinton wrote in his memoir "My Life" that "It was historic: an Israeli government had said that to get peace, there would be a Palestinian state in roughly 97 percent of the West Bank, counting the swap, and all of Gaza where Israel also had settlements."
But despite US pressure, Arafat could not bring himself to agree.
"Arafat said no again," Clinton wrote, adding how he closed the negotiations with a great sense of frustration and sadness.
But he felt that even then Arafat was ailing.
"At times Arafat seemed confused, not wholly in command of the facts. I had felt for some time that he might not be at the top of his game any longer, after all the years of spending the night in different places to dodge assassins bullets," he wrote.
"Perhaps he could not make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman."
Clinton believed that Arafat would not even agree the broad parameters of the deal because he did not want to be seen conceding anything.
And the president expressed his anger to the Palestinian leader in virtually their last meeting.
"Right before I left office, Arafat, in one of our last conversations, thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was.
"'Mr Chairman', I replied, 'I am not a great man, I am a failure and you have made me one'." Clinton said he warned Arafat that his actions would lead to the Israeli people turning to Sharon as leader. And Sharon was elected a few weeks later.
Nearly a year later Arafat said he was ready to negotiate on the basis of the Clinton deal.
"Apparently Arafat had thought the time to decide, five minutes to midnight, had finally come. His watch had been broken a long time," said Clinton who predicted that the final peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians will look a lot like the accord he negotiated at Camp David.
Arafat's defenders say the Palestinian leader felt as though he was being trapped into the accord by Israel and the United States, or that it was an attempt to isolate and weaken the Palestinians.
Robert Malley, who was an advisor to Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs, and Hussein Agha, a Palestinian official, wrote in a 2001 article that Arafat believed there was not a strong enough guarantee that Barak could deliver the deal.
They said he felt that accepting the accord risked moving international attention away from legitimacy given by United Nations resolutions demanding that Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories and settle the refugee issue.
"Fixated on potential traps, he (Arafat) could not see potential opportunities. He never quite realized how far the prime minister was prepared to go, how much the US was prepared to push, how strong a hand he had been dealt," they wrote.
"Having spent a decade building a relationship with Washington, he proved incapable of using it when he needed it most."
All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041111063236.cwedy0ge.html |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 4:30 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| You have completely invented the 'wide-eyed innocent' part! |
Yes, that is true. I do not feel I mischaracterized your views, though. If I did, I apologize. |
You might do well to contemplate Manner of Speaking's words to you:
| Manner of Speaking wrote: |
| No. What's going on here is that you are listening to yourself think instead of reading what I wrote. |
He's so right. You do this all the time. You can't just debate facts and what-have-you. Time and time again you have to invent another poster's position or even their emotional state. You deal with your own inventions, suppositions and assumptions instead of carefully reading what someone has written, and basing their position on that alone.
I did a search and found the post you keep harking back to, from more than 6 months ago: http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php?p=1217971&highlight=toddler#1217971
NOTE TO ALL: The following post is 7 months old. It's already been debated. I'm done with it. Don't bother trying to drag me into a discussion about it. I posted it only so that Gopher may practice his reading comprehension.
| Way way back on Wednesday 18th June 2007, Big_Bird wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
Big_Bird: nowhere in your scolding of BJWD, above, do I see any recognition that the Palestinians, occupied or not, have played their part in making their own bed.
You also go far beyond your earlier, alleged stance: that you merely wanted to balance the pro-Israeli press by getting "the other side's" worldview and story out. Here you merely fault and blame Tel Aviv for each and every thing.
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To me, the Palestinians are just jetsom and flotsam floating on the tide. They have no control over their destiny, whatever they do. In the initial years of the occupation, they did not resort to violence. The IDF found it very easy to control them. There was no organised resistance. Much good it did them. Only, sadly, when they did resort to terrorism did anyone start taking notice of them. Up until then, the Israelis had had a free hand. Then, in the early 80s, when Arafat decided to eschew violence for diplomacy, the Israeli government panicked and did everything they could to get the PLO to violate the ceasefire. The PLO held strong. They were trying to change their tact and employ diplomacy, but moderation in your enemies is a very inconvenient problem - it puts you in the very uncomfortable position of having to find new excuses not to negotiate. So the Israelis felt forced to find a pretext for war. They finally found a pretext to break the ceasefire with the PLO, when another terrorist organisation led by Abu Nidal (in fact a rival of the PLO, that some say was in the pay of Israel) tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. The war in Lebanon was openly hailed in Israel at the time as a war to keep the West Bank. Later we had the Oslo talks. Initially these seemed very promising, as it was assumed negotations would take place along the lines of 'land for peace,' i.e. giving back the territories in return for the Palestinians agreeing to peace. However, it was a joke. The Israelis doubled their settlement builing during this time, and made life even worse for the occupied population. All the time, a quizling PLO were assisting them, controlling and enabling the dispossession of their people in return for gaining their own priviledges and lining their own pockets. The ordinary Palestinian became more impoverished, and the Israelis tightened their stranglehold on the territories. The Olso agreements were, frankly, an absolute disaster for the Palestinians.
Basically, the Palestinians are damned whatever they do. I laugh when you say they made their own bed. That suggests they had some kind of power, however small to affect the outcome of this occupation. They don't. They can play nice and just lay back as they are ****ed in the bottom, or the can fight back and be ****ed a bit more roughly up the bottom. And those are their only 2 choices.
While Israel is backed by the world's only superpower, they can do as they please.
| Quote: |
| The Palestinians are just nice guys who finish last, according to you. Some of us dispute that. |
Well I say bollocks to that. I don't think the Palestinians are any nicer than anyone else. But pretending they are in a bed of their own making is a bloody joke.
The Palestinians are like a small toddler, trapped in a room and putting up a fight against a huge adult man, 6 foot 5 and weighing 300 pounds. They haven't got a cat in hells chance of changing the outcome, if the big guy wants to steal their candy bar. Nothing they can do will change the outcome. And believe me, the Israelis never had any intention of not going after that candy bar.
I also have to wonder how you, Gopher, would have reacted if you were a Palestinian under occupation. |
There is no mention of 'innocence.' The implication of it is all of your own making. My analogy was intended to describe the impotence of the Palestinians, not their innocence.
| Gopher wrote: |
This is the substance...
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| ...an analogy to compare the strength and power of the two parties. It's like a fight between a toddler and a full grown adult. The Palestinians are weak and ineffective... |
The Palestinians compensate, as those possessing inferior conventional forces have always done, with guerrilla tactics and by cultivating a victim-mystique and developed their propaganda accordingly. It is not such an uneven fight. Consider the military stalemate; consider that elements within the American govt press the Israelis to cede ground to the Palestinians on multiple fronts. |
It is not an uneven fight? Count the dead and wounded on both sides, and tell me it is not an uneven fight. Examine the terrible squalor the Palestinians endure, and tell me it is not uneven. I can't believe your nonsense!
The military stalemate? The Israelis have gained more and more illegally confiscated land for Israeli use in the last few years. Haven't you been paying attention? No, actually. I don't think you have.
What has the American govt pressed the Israelis to cede ground on? Please be specific. And, importantly, how much have the Israelis ceded, if at all?
| Gopher wrote: |
Further, the Palestinians have succeeded in drawing the Israelis out, again and again, and provoking them to overreact and strike out, hitting many unintended, civilian targets, for decades. This has hurt the Palestinians, of course. But it has caused far more damage to the Israelis: it exacerbates internal and external debates and it undermines their moral position in world affairs. As it is, they more or less have the United States govt and the United States govt only as an ally; all others, to differing degrees, including most if not all in American academia, distance themselves from Tel Aviv.
I would not describe Israel's position as so strong, then. |
They have the United States and right now, that's all they need. With that ally alone they are able to continue annexing land from the territories and dispossessing the people of their homes, natural resources and freedom. The US practically bankrolls their occupation. I believe you know next to nothing about Palestinian military tactics, and are merely assuming they're following the same practices as some other situations you've looked at. The more I read you write on this conflict, the more it becomes apparent to me you are ignorant and uninformed. I do not know why you are so keen to participate then. It seems to be because of some strange emotional fixation you have with people who do not accept Washington's position on the affair, rather than from any real knowledge or interest.
And I have just wasted nearly 2 hours of my time trying to write this post. For every few words I've typed, I've had to change a nappy or break up a fight, or soothe a wailing baby or deal with a toddlers wilfull demands. And for what? You wont take in anything I've written. You wont address my questions satisfactorily. You'll just "listen to yourself think" a little more.
Why don't you just stick to WMDs and Iraq. Wasn't that the point of your thread? |
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postfundie
Joined: 28 May 2004
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 5:03 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
They have the United States and right now, that's all they need. With that ally alone they are able to continue annexing land from the territories and dispossessing the people of their homes, natural resources and freedom. The US practically bankrolls their occupation. I believe you know next to nothing about Palestinian military tactics, and are merely assuming they're following the same practices as some other situations you've looked at. The more I read you write on this conflict, the more it becomes apparent to me you are ignorant and uninformed. I do not know why you are so keen to participate then. It seems to be because of some strange emotional fixation you have with people who do not accept Washington's position on the affair, rather than from any real knowledge or interest.
And I have just wasted nearly 2 hours of my time trying to write this post. For every few words I've typed, I've had to change a nappy or break up a fight, or soothe a wailing baby or deal with a toddlers wilfull demands. And for what |
Always the victim....if you don't like it then don't write....if you don't waste two hours portraying the Palestinians as infants then the world will be a better place.....just get them to stop launching rockets into Israel from Gaza and things will be much better. Stop complaining about Israel and instead convince the Palestinians to spend money not on guns but on an education system that is secular in nature. Then things will get better there. Continue to dance and call people ignorant but it won't end until they give up their kill the Jews mentality..you know this is true |
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contrarian
Joined: 20 Jan 2007
Location: Nearly in NK
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 6:47 am Post subject: |
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The Palestinians, as I have said, are the authors of their own misfortune. After 1967 and 1973 they were in shock. They tried living "peacefully" for a time but soon reverted to the same old sense of enitlement and the whining.
Their whining to the characters of wildy hyperbolic threats, The all nor nothing mentality of continued reliance on a failed religion and ethic of being unbeatable deasert warriors who were doing the will of Allah. This coupled wth the "catastrophe" of 1948/49 seems to have put them into a self-destructive and suicidal condition.
But at its best that relatively peaceful interlude was just a continuation of the their terrorism on a lesser scale. This terrorism had been in place since the 1920s under Haj Amin al-Husseini the Mufti of Jerusalem, advisor to and fellow traveller of Adolph Hitler.
Arafat himself was part of the al-Husseini clan, just a chip off the old block. The sad thing is that every time the push the envelope and resort to terror and war, they lose more territory.
The reality of this world is that there is a price to pay for losing wars, particularly wars that you started.
We have digressed from the whether or not Bush of Saddam Hussien lied about WMDS. But now we may be seeing a little more truth. Some of their excesses are now coming back to haunt them. Nearly a hundred dead in a couple of blasts in a pet market and the inexcusable use of two retarded women as guided missles, just may come back to haunt them. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 9:27 am Post subject: |
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I read your post and listened to what you said.
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Time and time again you have to invent another poster's position or even their emotional state. You deal with your own inventions, suppositions and assumptions instead of carefully reading what someone has written, and basing their position on that alone. |
I understand you are angry and emotionally-invested in the Palestinians (just as Manner of Speaking is angry and emotionally-invested in the antiwar position). Still, this goes too far.
I understand your position on these issues clearly enough -- and I have not mischaracterized you, at least not to the degree you claim here, that I invented your position out of whole cloth. More often than not, you make the Palestinians' and everyone else who hates Israel's case here. And emotionally. Everyone has a right to find and articulate their position on this or that issue. But we should also be self-conscious about our positions.
Further, I do not share your passion for this subject, Big_Bird. My objection mostly revolves around what I see as your and others' uncritically accepting and repeating the Palestians' helpless-victim mystique and propaganda and especially your accepting and repeating Tehran and Hezbollah's propaganda position vis-a-vis Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict -- especially where you fault Israel and Israel alone for each and every incident and war that has ever taken place there. You seem to ridicule me for reminding you that the Israeli-Hezbollah War 2006 ended in stalemate where you apparently see another devastating Israeli victory. But stalemate it was.
In any case, perhaps we ought to avoid discussing this question in the future. It is a divisive issue to say the least.
And as far as sticking to the WMD issue. You will see I tried to do that in the first two pages or so. Most posters, Manner of Speaking chief among them, demonstrated a puerile inability and unwillingness to treat a simple, narrow, isolated question (and accept its answer's consequences). Further, I am coming to understand that any and all discussions treating modern Middle-Eastern affairs will always degenerate until they reach this point: the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the angry shouting matches it entails. This thread went in that direction long ago. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 1:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| You seem to ridicule me for reminding you that the Israeli-Hezbollah War 2006 ended in stalemate where you apparently see another devastating Israeli victory. But stalemate it was. |
Not only do you struggle to correctly read other's posts, you struggle to read and comprehend your own writing!
You didn't say anything about a stalemate between Hezbollah and Israel:
| Gopher wrote: |
| The Palestinians compensate, as those possessing inferior conventional forces have always done, with guerrilla tactics and by cultivating a victim-mystique and developed their propaganda accordingly. It is not such an uneven fight. Consider the military stalemate; consider that elements within the American govt press the Israelis to cede ground to the Palestinians on multiple fronts. |
As usual, you just make things up as you go along.
| Gopher wrote: |
| In any case, perhaps we ought to avoid discussing this question in the future. |
Yes, especially as you have no real interest in trying to make sense of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and merely see it as a platform to indulge in self-righteous nonsense about other posters. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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Very well. Edited for clarification.
| Gopher wrote: |
| The Palestinians and their allies compensate, as those possessing inferior conventional forces have always done, with guerrilla tactics and by cultivating a victim-mystique and have developed their propaganda accordingly. It is not such an uneven fight. Consider the latest military stalemate; consider that elements within the American govt press the Israelis to cede ground to the Palestinians on multiple fronts -- start with W. Bush's most recent suggestions and move backward. |
I wish I could convince you that I am merely aiming to show you what I see. But I feel I am only succeeding in further antagonizing you and that is not my intention, Big_Bird. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 5:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| I wish I could convince you that I am merely aiming to show you what I see. |
What you see? Or what you look for? |
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