Marco:

“He spelled out that he has a strategy — and the strategy is to tell it like it is. Tell your friends the truth.”

But his strategy doesn’t seem to include telling his enemies the truth.

“One has to admire Obama’s courage.”

You have to admire the courage of a grasshopper that attacks a lawnmower, too—but you also have to deplore his lack of wisdom.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s “strategy” is just a continuation of the previous administration’s policies, couched in different words—demanding concessions from Israel and demanding nothing from the Palestinians—not even a declarative statement that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will end with the signing of an agreement.

“Obama defended his action stating that eight-years of total agreement with Israel under Bush brought no advancement in the peace process.”

Of course, the Palestinians bear no responsibility for this at all… BULLS**T!

Mahmoud Abbas got the best offer the Palestinians will ever get and refused. This action alone, on the eve of elections in Israel guaranteed that the voters would bring in a more right-wing government than Olmert’s. Obama stood by and watched, saying nothing.

“But this is a guy who has stated that Israeli society needs ‘serious self-reflection.’”

Israeli society does need some serious self-reflection—but then, what society doesn’t? Can you point to any society on the face of this earth that couldn’t benefit from self-reflection? He hasn’t had the courage to say that the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular also have a serious need for self-reflection. What differentiates between the fanatic settlers dreaming of a “Greater Israel” and the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al fanatics who dream of a “Greater Palestine”? The only difference I can see is that one group wears kipot and the other wears kaffiyehs.

Mr. Obama is supposed to be an expert on history—but he doesn’t seem to understand that an imposed peace is no peace at all. There is no historical example of am imposed peace being successful for any length of time—and each instance created worse problems than the ones it was supposed to settle.

The Versailles Treaty that ended WW I sowed the seeds of WW II with all the horrors that war entailed. Every high school graduate should have learned this, but Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to understand it.

Unless and until he learns this, he will go down in history as one of the worst US presidents ever for his policies, both domestic and foreign.

Words are cheap and Mr. Obama’s actions to date have shown no greatness.

Nuya:
I see you know how to lose friends. It’s not just telling them, but how you tell them, to convince them that they’re “doing something foolish” without angering them into doing something even more foolish. When you back someone into a corner, expect them to come out fighting.

”I also don’t associate with people who have such a great love of violence that they will be in a corner fighting instead of being reasonable.”

Then why do you defend Hamas so ardently?

When you defend the Palestinians, you also defend Hamas, whether you say so or not.

Two great evils? I have to differ with you there. There’s only one– the mentality that refused to accept the idea that Jews and Arabs could live side by side as equals.

Remember, it was the Arabs that have refused every single partition plan, no matter what the split was.

Nuya–

Your language is disgusting, if anything is.

The Arabs were just one in a long line of conquerors, and not even the latest of those– the Mamekuks, Ottomans and British all post-dated Arab conquerors in Palestine.

”The Jews” are the only inhabitants in the land with an unbroken residency of over 3,000 years in the land, yet you call Jews the invaders. What a wonderfully Orwellian imagination you have!

Sorry, not fiction, but fact.

Jews lived in Israel before the Romans came and renamed it ”Palestinae” after numerous rebellions, long before the Arab hordes boiled up out of the Arabian Peninsula to conquer most of the Middle East and North Africa and be replaced in their turn by other conquerors.

Learn some history. The Jewish pioneers who came in the 1880s found Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, Zefat, Jaffa and Gaza, among others.

The ”uninvited” ones were the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamekukes, Ottomans and British.

Since archeological evidence is less to you than a historical revisionist, it’s not even worth debating to you.

Prof. Morris has a history of writing what he thinks should have been, rather than what really was and ignoring relevant facts.

The Ottoman census of the Jerusalem sanjac (district) showed a Jewish majority from the year 1840 onwards– more than 50 years before the first Zionist congress and 40 years before the first pioneers.

This alone makes Morris a liar, but even his material is better than Ilan Pappe’s, which is often more fiction than fact.

Your own analogy doesn’t hold water with the pioneers, since they came and bought land from Arab owners, generally land considered unfertile or useless, requiring extensive clearing of rocks and brush before planting. They did not invade– they came with farming equipment and money to buy land, not with weapons to conquer it.

Even then, Arab jealousy at the achievements of these farmers wouldn’t let them leave the pioneers alone, and crops were often burned or stolen.

Depend on a single source and you’ll get distortion– read a variety of sources instead.

Answer this: I spoke of communities in towns and cities, so what is the relevance of farm ownership? The Ottomans did not allow the sale of arable land to non-Ottomans until late in the 19th century, but they did allow the purchase of urban land for homes and businesses.

“That dodge of your’s trying to claim that I only use 1 source is getting very old. I am not about to copy and paste the thousands of pages of source material and you know it.”

That’s because you haven’t read those “thousands of pages of source material”. The only thing you read is what supports your own bias and hatreds.

“My analogy is exactly right, a few Jews showed up to get a foot in the door and the rest barged in and took over.”

According to Solch, 1985, p 388, in 1850 Palestine, 630 out of 2,393 households in Jerusalem were Jewish, 200 out of 3,000 in Hebron were Jewish, 400 out of 625 in Tiberias were Jewish and 1,197 out of 2,495 in Safad (Zefat) were Jewish.

This data, based on the Ottoman census of 1845, makes nonsense out of your claim. Even if we take a minimum number of 4 persons per household (a number so low for an average family of the period that it’s highly unlikely), that gives a rock-bottom Jewish population of 10,000 Jews in Palestine 30 years prior to the first of the Zionist pioneers. The real number is more likely between 15,000 and 20,000.

For a country whose population stagnated at around 350,000 for hundreds of years, this is a considerable number, far greater than any you seem to be willing to consider.

“Ethnic cleansing and genocide is just as foul when one group does it as another. One religious state is just as reprehensible as any other. There is not a hairs breadth of difference between Zionism and Nazism.”

Yet you never mention the Arab ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab states. Is ethnic cleansing less foul when Muslims do it? The Arab states have much clearer ties to Nazism, proven by concrete historical evidence, yet you never condemn them—and they have been far more successful than any other ethnic cleansers in history—the Arab states are over 99% “Jew-free”. Even Nazi German never even came close.

Haven’t you ever heard of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the years of WW II raising Muslim SS brigades from among Bosnian Muslims? He was declared a war criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission, tried and convicted, but escaped to Egypt, where he was given asylum. The Egyptian government refused Yugoslavia’s request to extradite him for war crimes. (In addition to his having been one of the “movers and shakers” behind the Arab anti-Jewish riots in 1921, 1929 and 1936-9 before escaping to Germany when the British got tired of him in Palestine.)

Among other things, there exists a draft protocol of an agreement between al-Husseini and Adolph Hitler, agreeing that al-Husseini would be in charge of the Middle Eastern version of “the Final Solution” when Germany conquered the Middle East.

In his biography, Yasser Arafat tried to claim that he was related to Haj Amin al-Husseini and embraced his teachings, but historians have been unable to find a blood relationship between them. However, the fact that Arafat embraced al-Husseini’s anti-Jewish principles is indisputable.

Given this evidence and more like it, it would seem that the Arab countries are more similar to Nazism than any other country in existence today.

If “there’s not a hair’s breadth of difference between Zionism and Nazism”, then prove it.

Point out the mass graves, the gas chambers and crematoria of Zionism. Where are they? When did they operate? Show us the firing squads and mass executions committed by Zionists. Bring one shred of concrete proof that is not derived from Arab rhetoric or propaganda.

During their regime, the Nazis murdered over 20 million Soviets, one million Gypsies, 3 million Poles, half a million Hungarians, a million Czechs and Yugoslavs, a hundred thousand physically and mentally handicapped German citizens, more than 10,000 homosexuals and more than 100,000 resistance fighters and civilian reprisal murders in addition to the 6 million Jews of the Shoah—all for the “crime” of being “untermenschen”.

Show one bit of proof that supports your contention that “there’s not a hair’s breadth of difference between Zionism and Nazism” or drop the claim and apologize.

No rebuttal about the Arab ethnic cleansings? You said: ”Ethnic cleansing and genocide is just as foul when one group does it as another. One religious state is just as reprehensible as any other.”

Where is your condemnation for the 57 self-declared Islamic states? They all claim to be theocracies. Oh, I forgot– it’s only ”the Jews” who are ”reprehensible”... in your eyes.

Nuya, you opened the door with your comment, ”Ethnic cleansing and genocide is just as foul when one group does it as another. One religious state is just as reprehensible as any other.”

Now’s your chance to make a difference: condemn the Arab/Muslim ethnic cleansing of Christians, Bahais, Jews and other non-Muslims in their countries and prove that your opinions aren’t just a disguise for something else more sinister... You obviously have no reply, since all you can do is try to insult me.

The fact remains that Obama still has to ”tell it like it is” to other countries, too– and many of the Arab/Muslim countries have human rights records and histories of ethnic cleansing that make Israel look like amateurs, but he says nothing.

Are the Arab/Muslim countries exempt from the truth? Why the special privilege, other than the fact that some of them have oil that the US needs?

And I have news for you: Obama isn’t even telling Israel ”like it is”– he’s been waffling back and forth between bullying,”convincing” and practically pleading from the start.

”And what part of that did you not understand?”

Your continued and vehement condemnation of Israel while you ignore massacres in Darfur, police actions against minorities in China, the entire issue of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, election-rigging in Iran and its accompanying unrest, women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and much more.

Either you condemn them all or you show bias–and your bias is showing. What part of THAT don’t you understand?

You protest way too much, and your posting history does not bear out your claim.

You reserve all your bias for one target– that’s called discrimination. Now do YOU understand?

If you don’t I can send you a definition in one-syllable words.

Still copping out and avoiding the issue... Clueless is hopeless in Birmingham.

When you start condemning other ”religiously motivated acts of terrorism”, such as Hamas abuse of Palestinians and suicide bombings, Pakistanis bombing churches in Pakistan, etc. instead of justifying them as ”resistance”, maybe I’ll begin to believe you’re objective.

There’s no lack of terrorism in the world– much of it religiously motivated by Muslim fanatics... open any newspaper and start condemning.

Yes, this article is about Israel, but Israel and its actions don’t happen in a vacuum.

That’s what you don’t get, never have and probably never will.

Try to understand what ”cause and effect” mean.

I guess I was wrong– apparently, Israel does act in a vacuum– in your head.