Is this appropriate to say to Jews?

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No, probably not all of them, but you can`t ignore the fact that there is a LOT of anti-semitism among Muslims. Not just Palestinians.
I have gone to schools with many immigrants. I have known tens and tens of Muslims, and with only one exception, they have ALL said directly that they hate Jews. In general. After a suicide bomber had gone off in Israel, a Somalian guy said with shiny eyes: "At least 20 Jews were killed!"
I know quite a few Jews and I know several of them receive a lot of threats from Muslims, directly and in letters. Simply for being Jewish. Some have also been beaten up for the same reason and most of them do not dare press charges. There are Jewish children who are not allowed to go out alone because Palestinian youth have threatened to kill them. In one instance a nine year old boy was told by the police that he should not go out alone because they could not vouch for his safety.

The majority wants peace? Actually a poll from the West Bank in the 1990`s showed that 80% of the Palestinians suppoorted suicide attacks against civilian targets in Israel.

I think the western world grossly underestimate the collective hatred in Muslims.
Last week there was a pro-Israel demonstration here in Oslo. It was peaceful and calm until a group of immigrants and extreme left people attacked them, firing fire works, throwing rocks and yelling anti-semitic slogans. The same minded people had "fun" later on shooting fire works into shops (in which there were people) and broke windows and did a lot of damage.
How come it always is this group that lose control?

After suicide bombers do their descpicable deed, be it in Israel, USA, UK or India, you don`t generally see that kind of overreaction among non-Muslims. But one little provocation against Muslims and the entire area ignites. The caricatures of Mohammed is a very good example. Sorry, but I don`t see any reason to threaten people on their lives or go on a vandalism spree because of a drawing! The secular world has fredom of speech and we cannot allow fanatics to jeopardise that. Which is what we do when experts (politicians, psychologists and the like) commence their quest for explaining, understanding and explaining away this kind of behaviour.


MR BOGAN wrote that the protests should be against Israelis for electing that government. Well by that logic I guess there should also be room for protesting against the American people for electing and even reelecting a president who has started 2 wars and is ignoring environmental issues, and against the Palestinian people for electing Hamas, which is a terror organisation.

I'm Jewish, and these things don't really offend me. But they should, shouldn't they? Well, that's the sad truth. The reason I'm not offended by these sort of comments because I'm used to it. There's so many anti-semitic feelings in the US. I used to know a guy in high school, and when he found out I'm a Jew he never talked to me again. Maybe that's a bit too extreme of an example, but my point is, there's always going to be the occasionally *very* racist person. Anyone on here who's a minority of some kind has probably learned to brush it off by now.

To gain a better understanding of WHY a poll in the 1990's would have such a result, I suggest you read the book "A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village" by Helen Winternitz. Helen was a journalist who decided the Palestinian side of the story was being given short shrift -- too much of the myth that Palestine was "a land without a people" when Israel was first established. Too little about the real people who had lived in settled villages for centuries. Starting in 1988 she lived for a year with rural Palestinian families (mostly in the village of Nahalin which had been in the same place for hundreds of years) sharing meals and farm chores with them. The following paragraphs are from her introduction:

"I happened upon Nahalin in early 1987. Hidden in mountains near Bethlehem on the West Bank, the village seemed almost indifferent to the larger politics of the region. The Palestinians of Nahalin lived quietly. Shepherds took their flocks up the rocky slopes around the village; peasant farmers tended their vegetable plots near the village springs and plowed the terraced strips of land on which their groves of olive and fruit trees grew; women washed the stone floors of their small homes and cooked copious meals for their large families; and children went to school. The villagers could almost pretend to live as their ancestors had, long before the modern day crisis between Arab and Israeli.

"These villagers were ordinary Palestinians -- not those who were exiled or who were notorious for hijacking airplanes or who were reduced to the status of refugees. These were Palestinians who had stayed home and avoided much of the endlessly intricate turmoil of the Middle East. [several paragraphs skipped]

[During the year she lived with them] "The villagers of Nahalin, although seemingly removed from much of what happened on the West Bank, were, inevitably, drawn into and surrounded by the crisis. Piece by piece, the Israelis were building their settlements on Nahalin's traditional pasturage and farmland. The Israeli settlements were on the ridges looking down upon the village. In the most elemental way, this scene summed up the Palestinian dilemma. It explained the Palestinian anger that has so traumatized the world."



Believe me, I have spent many hours standing on street corners holding a sign (or peace flag) to protest the folly of putting in the Oval Office a silver-spoon-in-his-mouth son of an oil man (whose father got rich dealing with Nazis), and who had the political acumen of a village idiot. If you had started such a protest, I would have applauded. But the voters in the US finally woke up when this idiot's policies helped destroy their pension funds.

Re Palestine and Hamas -- US and Israeli policy are responsible for making Hamas popular. Think about it, if you were being bullied into a state of desperation, being pushed out of your home and forced to scrabble for existence, surrounded by armored soldiers with shiny US weapons, and no one anywhere else in the world seems to hear your cries of protest and screams of grief, wouldn't you root for the one guy who's got your back? -- even if that one guy is a butchering thug? Current Israeli actions will only serve to make Hamas popularity stronger (their recruitment levels must be sky-rocketing.)

I have nothing against jews as a religion or as a "people", but I very much dislike the state of Israel. Moreover, I hate how a stupid little corner of the desert influences our (American) foreign policy so heavily.

What is happening in Israel is the surrogate struggle between civilization and barbarism. Since the U.S. won't take an explicit stand it aids the side that does. In a sense Israel is fighting our battle and Israelis are bleeding. Eventually the war will come to us (as it did on 9/11) and we will have to fight and bleed also. By the way - if we lose our children shall dwell in the Shadow of the Mosque for hundreds of years. Is that what you want?

"Welcome back to the fight, Mr. Blaine. Now I know that our side shall win" -- Best line from Casablanca

ruveyn

What is happening between Israel and Palestine is the struggle that inevitably happens when one civilization decides another civilization is nothing more than a group of backwards brown-skinned people who don't have the same rights as other humans. "The path of oppression leads always to war." I don't know where you live, but imagine that you have a nice big yard where you have been growing vegetables and raising chickens for fifty years. You depend on those vegetables and chickens to put food on your family's table. Then one morning you wake up and find that a house has been built in the middle of the garden, and a wide road has been bulldozed through the chicken coop. No one asked you for permission. No one paid you for that land or your lost chickens. No one is trying to find a way to replace the food you can no longer grow. In fact, the house builders would be happy if you starved to death. But if you get angry about it, you are called barbaric.

Race has nothing to do with it. The Israelis signed a peace treaty with Egypt and the Egyptian are just as "brown" as the Palestinians. The issue is this: Palestinians (or some of them) keep on trying to kill Israelis and the Israelis fight back. The Israelis are mostly Jews who are not in the classical European Ashkenazic mode of suffering degradation without fighting back. The Israelis do not suffer their tormentors gladly and fight back effectively. Once the Palestinians realize that their current course is futile they may learn to live in peace (not in love, mind you) with their Israeli neighbors. If that happens peace will break out so fast it will make your head swim.

ruveyn

Ruveyn, you really need to read this article by Starhawk:

http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activi ... 12-08.html

I'll put in two excerpts here:

***

I read that in the the war Israel lost 10 troops and 3 civilians to rocket attacks. Where as there has been over 1300 gaza civilian deaths so far.

What ever government is in Israel it should be declared a barbaric terrorist organization.

Yes

Seconded. My Kuwaiti Muslim roommate in college is fiercely anti-Semitic, as are most all Muslims I've met. All the Jews I know, on the other hand, are generally amiable, tolerant people who are perfectly willing to get along peacefully with the Muslims (and anyone else) so long as they aren't getting any death threats.

I'd bet that very few of the Jews you have met are members of the Zionist faction of the Israeli government. (Do they have relatives in Israel?) And that many of your Muslim acquaintences have close relatives living in Palestine or neighboring countries. There is a reason for the hate, and it did not originate in religion.

Just take, for example, one of the ways the Israeli govt. deals with waste management. In some areas they don't bother to build waste treatment plants -- they just pump the raw sewage onto Palestinian land. Nice neighbors, right? And that wall they are building that cuts through the middle of towns? Its placement is frequently dictated by the location of the water aquifers under the ground. Water for the Israelis, none for the Palestinians. Evidently some people who survived the Warsaw ghetto have decided to try it out on Gaza.

A government's policies cannot be judged by the niceness of a few individuals you meet (who were probably raised in other countries anyway.) If that were true, we could just send Oprah on an international tour and the whole world would love the USA.

Note to fellow Aspies: I was using some sarcasm within my original post.

Well... yeah... they should, actually. And not even because you're Jewish.



European Jews brushed it off in the 1930s.

Reductionism, anyone?

Israeli Jews whose families emigrated from Europe and the United States are often Caucasian, but those who emigrated from Asia look Asian, and those who came from Ethiopia are coal-black. Spanish Jews look Spanish, South American Jews look South American, and Arab Jews look Arabic. The same principle goes for any other region of the world, since the Jews have spread everywhere. Color is not at issue; Jews come in all shades of the rainbow. Israeli citizens do dislike being blown up, I'll give you that. But generally, they don't hate Arabs or Muslims for who they are, which is the major difference. Israeli Arabs and Muslims have full rights as citizens, and serve in every field including government and parliament (Knesset). That obviously didn't come about from any Israeli hate for Arabs and Muslims, now did it?

Yes, how dare Israel not lose more lives! Is that the substance of your complaint? That the casualties weren't equal on both sides?



O-kay....

Last edited by Ragtime on 19 Jan 2009, 3:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.