It haisnt ended hamas and it just made them more determined to do attacks.
It always goes like this.
Hamas does a bombing kills some people, Isreal comes back and then kills a Hamas leader or militant, Then Hamas swears revenge and does more attacks and then isreal strikes back and again and again the process restarts.
I think more can be gained from helping palestine instead of just isreal, the U.S has not been neutral in the conflict always siding with Isreal and its not how you act as a moderator.
The Terrorism hasint helped palestine its done nothing but mark them as savages, but we must have sympathy for them they have sufferd more then Isreal , More palestinian civilians have died then jewish.Most of them still dream of having their land that was once owned by their families for centuries back. I think more needs to be done to hand back their land so that peace can begin.
alien space marine Wrote:It haisnt ended hamas and it just made them more determined to do attacks.
It always goes like this.
Hamas does a bombing kills some people, Isreal comes back and then kills a Hamas leader or militant, Then Hamas swears revenge and does more attacks and then isreal strikes back and again and again the process restarts.
I think more can be gained from helping palestine instead of just isreal, the U.S has not been neutral in the conflict always siding with Isreal and its not how you act as a moderator.
The Terrorism hasint helped palestine its done nothing but mark them as savages, but we must have sympathy for them they have sufferd more then Isreal , More palestinian civilians have died then jewish.Most of them still dream of having their land that was once owned by their families for centuries back. I think more needs to be done to hand back their land so that peace can begin.
The Palestinians are savages. The reason more Palestinian civilians die is because Palestinian civilians usually aren't civilians at all. They are just as likely as anyone to be a murder-bomber. They train their children to be murderers, raise them from birth to hate Israel. I say, fuck the Palestinians. I might have felt sorry for them objectively, but specifically targeting innocents is a sure indication that those people aren't mature or intelligent enough to deserve a nation of their own. How many times Israel was willing to compromise, I've lost count. That group of thugs do not desire peace or compromise, they want to destroy Israel completely and kill as many Jews as they can in the process. They are a poor man's Nazi Germany, and there's no way I could affect any sympathy for such a cause. When they want to wise up and stop murdering, then I'd warm up to compromise. Until that happens, if it happens, I say to Sharon and Israel, "Happy Hunting, hope the next baby-killer screams".
The Terrorism is evil , Though Isreal could never possibly defeat it, I wont shed a tear for Dead Hamas militants. Not all the Palestinians are blood thirsty some want peace , Abu Abbas the former prime ministry who atleast tried to stop the violence and succeeded in having a 2 month truce,But Arafat stabed him in the back so he resigned.
If Isreal gave back the land and the palestinians still kept bombing them, Then yes just go ahead and wipe them out.
Killing their leaders won't help. All it does is puts in a new, probably even more violent, replacement and makes the Palestinians more angry! Seriously, I think that Israel is more in the right, and that they have the right to defend themselves, but they are NOT helping calm the situation. It takes two sides to make peace and in this case neither side's leadership wants it. Sharon isn't exactly a peacemaker.
But what can be done? In this case I don't see anything. Neither side wants peace. The Palestinians have demands that can't be met (people pushed out of Israel be given back their lands), and the Arabs have made it so the Palestinians would not be integrated (as in they have not tried to mix the Palestinians into their own peoples -- they keep them in camps, in poverty, which naturally become hotbeds for anti-Israel terrorists... the Arab nations around Israel don't want peace either or they'd recognize that these people will be there forever and would integrate them. (summation: yes the Palestinians are suceptible to becoming terrorists, but it's at least as much the faults of Egypt (to a lesser extent, for some time now), Jordan, Syria, Lebanon...
But Israel has unreasonable demands too... they simply cannot keep so many settlements well inside what is now seen as Palestinian territory! And this wall is a flashpoint issue as well...
Oh, Weltall... you show one of the more interesting things of recent history: far right American Christians are the Jews' best friends. In any other time before this it's that group that would be the most virulently anti-Jewish...
The thing is, Israel has tried for peace so many times. Wasn't it Yitzhak Rabin (or was it his successor) who was prepared to make incredible cessations to the Palestinians, and Arafat refused them all? The Palestinians and their neighbors do not want to co-exist. Frankly, Israel has always been the side more likely to negotiate and compromise, and all it has earned them is repeated intifadas. I don't blame them for not wanting to try anymore. It got to the point where they realized the only way to solve this problem is end the threat.
About the Christian/Jewish relationship, it's a good point. I never bought into the main Christian beef with Judaism anyway, blaming them for the death of Christ, sadly, for centuries people did. It's just that, for two thousand years the Jews have been hunted almost constantly and persecuted. They finally get their Promised Land, for which they probably have the oldest valid claim, and everyone around them wants them dead still. Those people need friends, and for the life of me I cannot understand why even in America so many people consider them terrorists and support the Palestinian cause. In a culture, both American and, to a greater extent, European, of increasingly-oppressive political correctness, hating Jews is still tolerated.
As a recap, seems the Palastinians are angry at Isreal for taking the land from them. The Isrealites are angry because from their viewpoint, they took it BACK from them due to it being their's long before Palastinians claimed it. Palastinians however counter that the Isrealites abandoned it at the time.
Really, in the end if you go chronologically, Isreal wins, but they did ditch the land and leave it open for others, so that's something. Honestly, with such a thing, an entire leadership needs to be dismembered and the people left to simply merge. Which one? Well, obviously neither one would ever willingly submit to such an easy solution. That's just the problem.
Ditch the land? No, the Romans scattered the Jewish nation... 70 AD was the date mentioned, right? There was yet another revolt, Rome came in, flattened Jerusalem, etc...
Oh, and the Palestinians WERE kicked off their land... but if they want to live a more healthy existence they'll at some point have to admit that they won't be getting Israel back. Well, more important than them is the leaders of those nations... THEY have to admit that Israel is here to stay and have to make serious efforts to integrate the Palestinians into their societies -- something, as I said, that they still are not doing after so many decades. Only with that will the Palestinian anger get lessened... but of course they don't want that, they want Israel destroyed in some illogical fashion...
But as I said Israel is hardly blameless. Executing leaders, attacks on terrorists that often kill civilians, etc.. yes, it's in self defence, but it's also a very good way to get the people you are targeting very mad at you. Given their situation, ANYONE in the place the Palestinians are in would be outraged! And given their history, trying for peaceful settlement just isn't very likely.
Oh, I agree -- Israel is more willing to try peace than the Palestinians, overall. Sharon, though? Nah, he's not very interested in true peace. He just wants the Palestinians away... note the wall... he's a hard-liner, after all. He, like the Palestinians, doesn't want to compromise much. And in situations like this, you need to make compromises...
Quote:About the Christian/Jewish relationship, it's a good point. I never bought into the main Christian beef with Judaism anyway, blaming them for the death of Christ, sadly, for centuries people did. It's just that, for two thousand years the Jews have been hunted almost constantly and persecuted. They finally get their Promised Land, for which they probably have the oldest valid claim, and everyone around them wants them dead still. Those people need friends, and for the life of me I cannot understand why even in America so many people consider them terrorists and support the Palestinian cause. In a culture, both American and, to a greater extent, European, of increasingly-oppressive political correctness, hating Jews is still tolerated.
It was only after WWII that America started to like the Jews... up until then, the prevailing attitude was towards anti-semitism. The Holocaust? There were rumors for years of the Nazis doing bad things to Jews, and Jewish groups wanted action, but America didn't care much, not until we saw them ourselves... Roosevelt didn't exactly press to go after Nazis for their persecution of Jews, and on that note (unlike his feelings that we should be fighting the Nazis to help Britain, which went against the other prevailing sentiment, isolationism...) he was in step with his time... bad, from a modern perspective, but it was just normal then. Same with racism against plenty of other groups, like Asians...
Ah isolationism... What other country learned the hard way that such a philosophy isn't exactly a good one?
Jesus prophecy was that Isreal was gonna be destroyed by the Romans tens years after his death.He said the jewish people would be continually attacked by the Devil and his agents untill the day of armegidon.Since most of the jews rejected Jesus, God had riped apart the holy holies in his own temple in Jeurusalem and no longer protected them.Since the jews once represented God, satan would take it out at them.
DJ, it's not like isolationism has gone away...
Go Israel! They're doing a better job killing Islam extremist terrorists then we are! The whole world should support Israel...and they've got such a great military. We should have them join us in Iraq (they probably would jump at the opportunity). Sure, all the other Arabs countries would be furious---but hey, we're America!
If isreal joined all hell would break lose, People would acussed them of trying to exspand there territory and there would be less cooperation with iraqis.More terrorist groups would rush to Iraq then they already are.
Quote:but hey, we're America!
:D
Quote:but hey, we're America!
That isn't even remotely funny. It's sad and depressing.
We ARE America, and we ARE the most important and best nation in the world. Deal.
if we didnt exist tomorrow the entire world would collapse
except for trees and animals and bugs..... and stuff like that
plus muslims aren't related to humans
OOOOOOO SNAP *flicks ob1's penis*
Oh, sure, we are the biggest and most powerful, but even we cannot ignore what the rest of the world wants! If this whole Iraq situation has told us anything, it's obviously that unilateralism is a terrible policy!
It means they should wise up and do things our way. If they did, there'd be no war. I mean, we became the strongest nation in history in a mere two and a quarter centuries, and they're still ass-backwards after six thousand years. Obviously, someone's doing something right and someone's not.
I would have laughed if I didn't think that you were serious...
Laugh all you want, it's still a fact.
Did you know that the middle eastern countries have more money going in and out of it than any other country in the world? And yet they dont build roads for their towns or update thier hospitals which are still using the same equipment from the 60's. It's because all of that money goes in to two or three pockets and is used to make their palaces larger. It's a rediculous state of affairs. The entire middle east region is corrupt and coreless, it only stays afloat because of war and hate for other countries. You may want to sound all PC and love your neighbor and that's fine, we need more of that. But tell it to them, not us. The only thing we care about is buying the oil off them. They are a world based on war since the begining of time and it will not stop until one religion is king there.. and anyone who practices something else is either dead or dying. Then you'll see peace in the middle east; and then you'll see it crumble to its hollow core.
A Black Falcon Wrote:I would have laughed if I didn't think that you were serious...
Okay. We do things right. That's why America is on top. That's why Americans are the wealthiest, happiest people in the world. We're productive and creative. We're not perfect but we're closer than anyone else is. We do things the way they should be done. The nations who are closest to America are those that emulate our way of doing things the closest.
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have, to paraphrase The Onion again, "6000 year old civilization now a 'developing nation'". They do things wrong. They fuck up more than we do. Their way of doing things doesn't work. That's why they're poor and pissed off.
Now, I know you have a deep-seated resentment for America, and the military and capitalism, and how we sometimes get ahead by stepping on others. Get over it. That's the way people do things. That's human nature. There will always be winners and losers. America is very much a winner in the grand scheme of things, and unlike you, I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt about it. The people who hate America claim to hate us because we're belligerent and unilateral, and to some extent, that's correct. But the real reason we're disliked is because you and I live like kings, while people in other nations can't feed themselves. You and I live like kings because we're priveleged and lucky enough to live in the greatest nation in the history of the world, and we do because our nation plays the great game and wins far more often than not. People in other nations dislike us because we win in this game, and even more because they lose. They are jealous of our lifestyles and our riches, and at the same time they envy us for having them. Their societies are ancient and look every bit as old as they are. Those people were not lucky enough to live here. Some of those people want to destroy America's greatness rather than try to build their own. These people are stupid. These people are our enemies, and they will not win, because they play the game all wrong. Hopefully they will realize their futility sooner as opposed to later and cut the bullshit. These people need to look at what America does, and has done. They need to see exactly how this nation and it's people operate, and do their best to imitate it to the letter. If everyone did, this world would be so much better off.
Quote:Did you know that the middle eastern countries have more money going in and out of it than any other country in the world? And yet they dont build roads for their towns or update thier hospitals which are still using the same equipment from the 60's. It's because all of that money goes in to two or three pockets and is used to make their palaces larger. It's a rediculous state of affairs. The entire middle east region is corrupt and coreless, it only stays afloat because of war and hate for other countries. You may want to sound all PC and love your neighbor and that's fine, we need more of that. But tell it to them, not us. The only thing we care about is buying the oil off them. They are a world based on war since the begining of time and it will not stop until one religion is king there.. and anyone who practices something else is either dead or dying. Then you'll see peace in the middle east; and then you'll see it crumble to its hollow core.
Massive and not completely true overgeneralization. Many Arab nations ARE spending a lot on improvements... roads, schools, airports, etc... they have the cash so they can and do. Oh, sure, a lot of it goes to the sheiks... but there's just so MUCH money that they can afford to spend good sums on improvements. As much as they should? NO, probably not. And they should be considering the future more -- in 50 years the oil will be mostly gone and they'll either have to adapt, somehow, or go back to living in tents...
As for the war there, both sides are obviously not moving and SOMETIME they'll have to have some kind of 'peace'. They don't have to like eachother, of course (witness the Greeks and the Turks, they still dislike eachother after thousands of years but haven't really fought since the founding of Turkey in the 1920s...), but some kind of peace IS possible. It just takes both sides to make some sacrifices. When they are ready to do that, it will come... unfortunately, that might take some time.
But your assertion that only one religion can ever be dominant is wrong. Witness the US! So many hard-line religious types and they spend most of their time not attacking each other but other groups... despite numerous differences.
Quote:
Okay. We do things right. That's why America is on top. That's why Americans are the wealthiest, happiest people in the world. We're productive and creative. We're not perfect but we're closer than anyone else is. We do things the way they should be done. The nations who are closest to America are those that emulate our way of doing things the closest.
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have, to paraphrase The Onion again, "6000 year old civilization now a 'developing nation'". They do things wrong. They fuck up more than we do. Their way of doing things doesn't work. That's why they're poor and pissed off.
Now, I know you have a deep-seated resentment for America, and the military and capitalism, and how we sometimes get ahead by stepping on others. Get over it. That's the way people do things. That's human nature. There will always be winners and losers. America is very much a winner in the grand scheme of things, and unlike you, I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt about it. The people who hate America claim to hate us because we're belligerent and unilateral, and to some extent, that's correct. But the real reason we're disliked is because you and I live like kings, while people in other nations can't feed themselves. You and I live like kings because we're priveleged and lucky enough to live in the greatest nation in the history of the world, and we do because our nation plays the great game and wins far more often than not. People in other nations dislike us because we win in this game, and even more because they lose. They are jealous of our lifestyles and our riches, and at the same time they envy us for having them. Their societies are ancient and look every bit as old as they are. Those people were not lucky enough to live here. Some of those people want to destroy America's greatness rather than try to build their own. These people are stupid. These people are our enemies, and they will not win, because they play the game all wrong. Hopefully they will realize their futility sooner as opposed to later and cut the bullshit. These people need to look at what America does, and has done. They need to see exactly how this nation and it's people operate, and do their best to imitate it to the letter. If everyone did, this world would be so much better off.
Happiest? Entirely subjective, and you aren't exactly a good arbiter to be deciding that! Most peoples would say they are happy, I think...
Other than that. Look, it is obviously true that we are the most powerful nation in the world. But with power comes responsibility. Running around blowing people up will get us NOWHERE. If you think that we are impregnable, that it's impossible that our power could ever fall (though it'll almost certainly take quite some time), go as the British if they thought in even the 1940s that their empire would begin to dissolve within the decade... or how about Rome?
Oh, sure, we're still really strong. But as things like Iraq and Afghanistan prove, not to mention Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq ('91), Bosnia, etc, etc... our power alone will not meet what our goals should be!
I, as I have said many times before, am a strong supporter of peacekeeping... sure, we can't be the world's police everywhere, but since we have the power I'd say it's our responsibility to try our best to do that. Overthrowing governments? That should not be done much and only with international support.
I just cannot understand how you can think that we should not care about the rest of the world. It makes absolutely no sense especially given the lessons history keeps giving us. Iraq is a PERFECT example! If we'd waited for the UN to do its job Sadaam may well still be there but he'd be like he has been for years now... without much power and being forced to cooperate with the UN. Oh he was a terrible leader but it's not our job to destroy governments... and when we do we BETTER BE READY. In Iraq we were utterly unprepared for reconstruction and it shows, very painfully.And when mixed with Bush's idiotic hatred for the UN... it made a bad situation infinitely worse. Oh, Bush asks for foreign troops.. but think about it. What sane, powerful (to differentiate it from weak 'allies' we have like Poland and Bulgaria) nation would send its men to fight and die in a nation for NOTHING? And that's what Bush is offering France, Germany, Russia, Spain... nothing. A very, very small piece of the contracts pie. No say in the political side. Essentially nothing. Why in the world would they ever agree? It'd be a monumentally stupid decision for one like that... now the weak nations I can understand, they want to stay on the US's good side... but France and Germany? They are doing what is best by staying out without a strong UN mandate in Iraq.
Oh, and how people like you keep attacking the UN when it is so blatantly obvious that it succeeded brilliantly in the sanctions and inspections of Iraq during the time between the wars is completely beyond me.
About why we are hated. Jealousy? Well yes I'm sure that's part of it. That certainly is a major human emotion. But that would only provide some of the hatred... our actions provide the rest. And when we act like we have the last three years, anyone in most of the rest of the world (and particularly the Middle East or the anti-war parts of Europe) who DOESN'T hate America must not care much about politics, because we have followed a set of policies that have destroyed all of the world's goodwill and turned it into a fierce hatred. I just don't see why you can't see that being fiercely hated is a BAD THING! It causes very serious problems for our policies, creates insecurity, and when it gets really bad fans the flames of violence against us. We cannot simply occupy the world, you know! As Iraq (and Afghanistan) proves we can't even reform one nation's government when it's bad... yet you want to not just make even more nations hate us even more but probably attack them TOO? It'd be a nightmare that I don't know if we could escape for many, many years... people who think like you are probably the greatest long-term threat to global peace there is.
You misunderstood lazy. He was saying the only way for the CURRENT way they do things to result in peace is for only one religion to be there at all, and then THAT TOO would just crumble to the dust because of how hollow that peace would be. He was making a point that they can't have peace and can't survive the way they are now and are infinitly DOOMED to obscurity unless someone steps in and does something. Essentially, they need a spanking from a more mature "parent" nation and then brought up again.
Quote:You misunderstood lazy. He was saying the only way for the CURRENT way they do things to result in peace is for only one religion to be there at all, and then THAT TOO would just crumble to the dust because of how hollow that peace would be. He was making a point that they can't have peace and can't survive the way they are now and are infinitly DOOMED to obscurity unless someone steps in and does something. Essentially, they need a spanking from a more mature "parent" nation and then brought up again.
He said that they were wasting their money. I said that they weren't all doing that. Look at Qutar for proof of that fact.
Now, what I would say about the Arabs is that Islam as it is is stuck in a pre-modern mindset. Look at their societies. Religion isn't just something they do, it's a huge factor in their government. Religious leaders have huge power. Rights are limited to nonexistant. In many ways it really is like the middle ages... funny, when you think about it, given that in the European Middle Ages the Islamic world was the light in the dark room, the ones with all the knowledge and scholars...