Oh look! Israel's angered the UK...

[p_p_man]

well they've blown their chance of getting those revoked licences back now...

From today's Guardian:

"Britain and Israel in furious row as Blair peace talks are scuppered

Ewen MacAskill and Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Tuesday January 7, 2003
The Guardian

The British and Israeli governments were engaged in a full-scale row yesterday after Ariel Sharon banned Palestinians from attending a peace conference in London next week.
The conference, a pet project of Tony Blair, is now almost certain to be postponed.

Mr Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, who controls the movement of all Palestinians in and out of the West Bank and Gaza, imposed the travel ban as part of punishment measures after suicide bombings killed 22 in Tel Aviv on Sunday.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had fiery exchanges with his Israeli counterpart, Binyamin Netanyahu, yesterday morning. Mr Netanyahu further inflamed the situation by publishing extracts of the private conversation between the two men, an unusual breach of diplomatic etiquette."

and just to keep everyone's eye on the ball...

Shortsighted Sharon

Israel's ban is against its own interests

Leader
Tuesday January 7, 2003
The Guardian

The decision by the government of Ariel Sharon to stop Palestinian delegates attending next week's Middle East peace conference in London is foolish and self-defeating. By this action, Mr Sharon and his hawkish foreign minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, have once again given Israel's enemies the opportunity to portray it as as the main obstacle to reconciliation and progress.

By this action, the Sharon government again undermines the efforts of those within the Palestinian leadership who recognise that internal reform is a necessary preparation for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Indeed, by also blocking this week's meeting of the Palestinian central council in Ramallah, Israel's leadership brings into question the sincerity of its demands for such reforms. The PCC had been due to discuss a Palestinian constitution, including the establishment of the new post of prime minister.

Such a measure could, if enacted, have marked the beginning of a shift of power out of the discredited hands of Yasser Arafat, something that Mr Sharon and Mr Netanyahu have both fervently advocated.

I suppose the shortsighted, the ill informed and miles will say that you have to meet might with might. All very good and emotive Israel-Speak...

But you don't have to meet right with might as well...

Face it, Israel doesn't want peace...

ppman

ppman

 

[HeavyStick]

Political retaliation for 22 dead and 100+ wounded. Sharon should let him attend.

 

[p_p_man]

Political retaliation for 22 dead and 100+ wounded. Sharon should let him attend.

Like Bush you seem to be getting the terrorists mixed up with the genuine reformers...

Just remember one thing: Sharon doesn't want peace, and you'll get on fine...

ppman

 

[Spinaroonie]

Oh look! I don't give a fuck.

AND I'm posting in this thread.


Beat that, hotshot.

 

[Coolville]

The crazy thing is that the Israelis didn't even bother to tell the British government. They heard it on the radio. Jack Straw and Benji Netan-yahoo were shouting down the phone to each other.

god must have been drunk when he created the middle east. "Ha! Let's how they work THAT one out!" Hic.

 

[p_p_man]

The crazy thing is that the Israelis didn't even bother to tell the British government. They heard it on the radio. Jack Straw and Benji Netan-yahoo were shouting down the phone to each other.

god must have been drunk when he created the middle east. "Ha! Let's how they work THAT one out!" Hic.

And what also shows the complete contempt the Israeli Government has for anything and anyone non-jew, Netanyahu released into the public domain the slanging match between himself and Jack Straw...

And these people want to be accepted by the rest of us?

ppman

 

[Guest]

 

[Guest]

 

[busybody..]

Kill em all.....NOW!!!!!

I try not to let my emotions rule me. I try to be rational, and to act as I know I should rather than how I feel like acting. If someone insults me, I don't punch him out though the temptation may be strong. It's not really the threat of jail which constrains me, but rather the knowledge that it would be wrong.

I can't control what I feel, I can only control how I act. But what I feel is important, nonetheless, and perhaps instructive. That applies just as much to observations about foreign policy as to anything else.

With respect to the Palestinians, what I think is that they are unreasonable (to put it lightly). What I think is that they need to accept that they have lost the struggle and that to continue it at this point will make life worse for them and everyone else.

There may well have been some sort of strategy behind the resumption of the Intifada, once upon a time, but any semblance of a plan is long since gone, and the Palestinians are locked in a negative feedback loop of attacks and response that does nothing except make everyone miserable. There are no leaders who can stop it, because if the violence was not aimed at Israel then it would be aimed internally at other Palestinians. If any Palestinian leader now were to actually try to stop the suicide attacks, either he'd be murdered or else it would set off a Palestinian civil war.

It is cultural insanity. There are people among the Palestinians whose power derives from the struggle, who cannot give it up. There is no central control. They are locked in anarchy. There is a self-sustaining culture of hate now, where anyone advocating moderation is in danger of being dragged into the street and brutally murdered.

A half a loaf is better than none at all, and it's time for the Palestinians to give up on trying to push Israel into the sea and accept that Israel isn't going to be destroyed. I don't give a damn whether the deal they accept is "just" by anyone's standards; when you're the underdog you take what you can get, and right now that's their situation. What they think they want isn't possible. What is possible (or, at least, what was possible before the Intifada) was a hell of a lot better than what they've got now.

And what I think is that they won't accept that until we've occupied Iraq and destabilized Syria and Saudi Arabia and there's been a revolution in Iran and Libya has read the writing on the wall and the EU finally admits that it's been financing terrorist attacks and stops giving the Palestinians money to use as they wish, and the Palestinians suddenly find that they have no friends left. Oh, and after Arafat dies or is killed or is forced into retirement, and a few other changes such as a forced cutoff of all financial support from the Arab nations. Until that happens, they will continue their useless struggle, killing and destroying to no one's benefit, with no principle to establish and no hope of prevailing.

But once those things have happened, the Palestinians may lose heart, and then it will be possible to cut a deal with them. Isolated and alone, with no friends and the flow of money cut off and no more friendly neighbors to smuggle in weapons, maybe individual Palestinians may come to realize that what they want is actually impossible, and realize that they will have to settle for less. But until that happens, the Palestinian runaway train will continue to barrel down the track towards oblivion, with no one at the controls but a lot of people falling under the wheels. The Palestinians and the Israelis will continue to bleed for perhaps another two years.

That's what I think.

But increasingly I'm finding myself feeling as if the world would be better off if someone went in and shot every damned one of them and piled the lot in an unmarked grave. After reading about yet another Palestinian atrocity, I find myself thinking, "Fuck it. Nuke Ramallah. Then nuke Nablus. And if that doesn't help, bulldoze Gaza. And once that's done, put all fifty surviving Palestinians on a freighter, tow it out to sea, and let them become someone else's problem."

I know that's wrong. I know it could never happen, and that it will never happen, and that it should never happen, and I would never actually advocate anything like that. But what I'm finding is that every time I read about a Palestinian being killed by the Israelis, my first emotional reaction is, "Good riddance." I've reached the point where I feel nothing at all when I read about them dying. I have reached the point where I don't care at all, not even slightly, about their pain and hardship. They have ceased to be persons to me. I'm no longer even interested in hearing their side of the story.

Sometimes I read about someone's death, someone I don't know, someone far away, someone from a different country and different culture, I find myself grieving a bit; I can imagine them as a real person, and I mourn the loss of something valuable and important. I don't do that for Palestinians anymore. Emotionally, I no longer think of Palestinians as "valuable and important".

I shouldn't feel that way. I know that. But the well of sympathy I have for the plight of the Palestinians ran dry a long time ago, mostly because I know that their dire situation now is mostly their own doing, caused by their idiotic and pig-headed insistence that somehow they can return to 1947, and their embrace of what truly amounts to a culture-wide death wish. I know I should understand that they are people, but I find myself now thinking of them only as a scourge.

Others have argued that the deal offered to the Palestinians by Barak wasn't "fair". Even the sweetened deal, which Arafat ultimately turned down, wasn't "fair". I don't give a shit.

What I think is that diplomacy has never had anything to do with "fair". Diplomacy has always been about "strong". Like it or not, that's how the world works. When you're weak, you have to accept the best deal you can get, even if you think it's still "unfair", unless you have a cultural death-wish. And it seems as if they do.

If the only deal you can get is absolutely intolerable, then you turn it down. But even though the best deal the Palestinians could get wasn't as good as they might have liked, it was not intolerable, by any rational evaluation.

But the Palestinians haven't been rational for a hell of a long time. The reality is that the Palestinians are now embarked on a genocidal war. Their goal is to kill all the Israelis; the only reason they haven't done so is that they don't have the means. (If they had a nuke, Tel Aviv would have disappeared a long time ago.)

"Death before dishonor" is one thing. But "Death, just because" is something else.

It really is a question of the extent to which we should strive to protect them from themselves and their own urge to self-destruction, and how much sacrifice we should make to give them a better life which they themselves don't seem to want. Oh, they have a vision of a better life alright, but it's a delusion and they can only get what they truly want through the eradication of Israel as a nation. If, as a group, they wanted peace and a significant improvement in their situation and were actually willing to accept the continued existence of Israel, they could have peace right now. If there was a Palestinian consensus to really deal, to really end the war, it could happen in six months. But when you face a people who seem to embrace self-destruction and monomaniacally seek it, individually and collectively, do you ever reach a point where you should oblige them? When you face a group which seeks genocide, does reactive genocide become more acceptable?

I suppose not, but as time goes on it is harder and harder for me to tell myself that it is the wrong answer. In any war, there is one way to positively settle the issue, and that's for everyone on one side of it to die. Whatever else you might say about that, it is at least a final solution.

Update: A reader writes: "Gotta watch your words. The words "final solution" have a specific and chilling meaning that the Jews of Israel know all too well."

I used it deliberately. I know full well the implications of the term. The entire point of this is that my utter revulsion towards the Palestinians has reached the point that it is inspiring truly monstrously barbarous feelings about them, feelings which deeply bother me. And judging by the mail I've received so far I'm far from the only one having this reaction.

 

[bluespoke]

busybody

Well there's a first.

No screaming upper care headlines.

No fuck you if you don't agree.

I can't honestly say I agree with it all but in general it is, to me, fair comment.

Now if only the rest of your posting was tempered like this.

 

[busybody..]

BlueSpoke

Those comments were not mine. It is from a site that I read on a daily basis. I agree with the sentiments expressed.

I see that you too have not caught onto my posting style. I do what I do to arouse passion and vitriol. Elicit comments and debates.

And if YOU dont like what the FUCK I write.....Dont FUCKING read it.......OK BlueSTREAK?





























Just kidding........BTW........shame you hate me.......we agree with everything.

 

[busybody..]

Bluespoke

Here is the follow up essay to the one above,worth reading.Returning to the dispassionate voice (after abandoning it last night) I wanted to try to explain why I said this:

I am hard pressed to think of any example from history of a war of liberation which has been so ineptly run, and which has used its tactics in a fashion which has so badly harmed it. The Palestinians have set a world record for own-goals. In fact, they've retired the trophy.

But to do that I have to review the basic theory behind how terrorism serves as a low level form of warfare. The analysis is fundamentally amoral; it assumes that you've decided that you are willing to do whatever is required in order to win, so the question of whether, for instance, deliberately attacking civilians is acceptable is moot. You've already decided that it is, or you wouldn't be using terrorism.

Terrorism is a tactic which can be used by groups who are highly motivated but who number few and who have negligible resources with which to work. There is a much larger group on whose behalf they fight, but the larger group is apathetic and unmotivated. There is an enemy who occupies or otherwise dominates the friendly group. There are seven critical groups in the discussion: your combatants, the enemy's government and military, your people, their people, your allies outside, their allies outside, and everyone else in the world.

There are a number of goals that terrorism is intended to accomplish. First, you want to polarize the situation and in particular to make your people cease to be apathetic and to become committed to the struggle. By so doing you gain substantial resources, human and otherwise, which can be committed to the war. Second, you want to try to gain as much external support as possible, while eroding external support for your enemy.

Initially the primary goal of your attacks is to provoke reprisals. Your attacks will fall on your enemy (either his government/army or, more effectively, against his people), but your enemy will respond against your people because he can't find you. Your people will get angry, hate the enemy, and become active participants in the war. This gives you recruits, money, supplies, spies, safe areas, all of which are good.

Also, what you want is for the reprisals to be viewed externally as more cruel and harsh than your own attacks were, because that will make outside parties sympathetic to your cause. You gain external supporters who will provide money and weapons and supplies and who may maneuver diplomatically on your behalf. Your enemy may find his supporters becoming cooler, weakening him. They may even switch sides.

Terrorism is rarely capable of winning directly; its primary purpose is to make the situation improve by increasing your strength so that you can switch to other approaches which have a better chance of success. Most commonly, a successful terrorist campaign will eventually transition into guerrilla war.

Which means that your earliest attacks are probably the most brutal; early on you attack enemy civilians because that is most likely to cause harsh reprisals. But as you grow in strength, and as your forces become larger and better armed and more disciplined, increasingly you will attack enemy government facilities and military resources, which is how you transition to guerrilla action. Part of why this is valuable is that it preserves that all-important propaganda edge, because if you are successful in hiding your guerrilla assets then your enemy is still in the position of having to respond with attacks against your own people. It also makes you seem more legitimate in international eyes, since you've switched to fighting an honorable war.

This leads to the image of the underdogs, fighting valiantly for their freedom, attacking the oppressor's government while the government beats up on defenseless innocents – or so you would portray it in your propaganda. What you then hope happens over a period of time is that you become ever stronger and your enemy weakens, and then either a solution is imposed from outside (to your favor) or your enemy eventually gives up. You win.

I think it's apparent that I did not just describe how the Palestinian campaign has been waged. They've totally loused it up; they're doing virtually everything wrong. There has been no attempt to maintain the moral high ground; no attempt to accumulate strength, no attempt at gradually transitioning away from brutal attacks against enemy civilians. In fact, there really hasn't been any change in tactics at all. There's no sign whatever that there's even any long term strategic plan. No one seems to be in charge.

The Palestinian people have long since polarized and have come to support the struggle. That part's fine, so provoking Israeli reprisals now could only benefit the terrorists if that helped to make Israel look worse than the Palestinians, aiding them in world propaganda. They've been trying to do that, but the kinds of individual operations they've been carrying out are difficult to defend; it's hard to talk about "principled freedom fighters" when they're murdering sleeping children in their beds.

How the struggle plays, and how the two sides are viewed, varies enormously. In the Arab and Muslim nations, and in large parts of the Third World, the Israelis are automatically the villains. Those nations are pretty much firmly in the Palestinian camp no matter what.

Europe has, for various reasons, largely aligned with the Arab view of things. America has aligned with Israel. Everyone has been sending money and weapons, but to a great extent it has always been America which was the most important because we were the only outside power capable of actually imposing a solution, and even if the Palestinian attacks have played well with the Arabs, and even if the Europeans condemn them but; the attacks have almost completely demonized the Palestinians in American eyes. You will find Americans who try to argue their cause, but the majority here have little or no sympathy for them, and last year American foreign policy took a decidedly negative turn for the Palestinians when Bush refused to even negotiate with them.

None of what the Palestinians are doing makes sense in terms of a war of liberation, but that's because they aren't really fighting a war of liberation. The terrorist campaign is being targeted at Israel, but not really because of Israel. There may have been a time when the goal of the Intifada was to gain an independent Palestinian homeland on acceptable terms, but that's not what it's about now.

What is really going on is that various Palestinian factions are trying to position themselves to take power once Arafat dies. What you're seeing is the byproduct of a Palestinian power struggle. The Palestinian civil war started about a year ago.

Arafat is unquestionably the most powerful single Palestinian, for a number of reasons. He is the international face of Palestine. He is the "legitimate" head of the Palestinian Authority (at least, as legitimate as any despot ever is), and controls a vast budget much of which is manipulated for graft and patronage to maintain Arafat's influence.

Arafat leads Fatah, but Arafat's own power will not automatically devolve to Fatah after he dies. Like all despots, he fears to groom a successor for fear of coup, and there is no one in Fatah who clearly has the stature to take over and maintain the concentration of power that Arafat wields.

By the standards of any normal head of state, Arafat is preposterously weak. His budget is puny; his influence small. But he still towers over any other Palestinian leader. And he can't live forever; if he isn't assassinated, or killed by the Israelis, he will eventually die of old age. When that happens, if there is no clear dominant group then the Palestinian civil war will turn intensely violent internally; but until then, most of what's going on is attempts to gain support.

Various groups among the Palestinians are working to gain mindshare and prestige with the Palestinian Street; in localized areas, and overall with the entire Palestinian populace. Groups such as Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad all act as ersatz local governments in certain areas, providing some semblance of security, not dissimilar to how the Chicago Mobs provided security in the 1920's in the areas they controlled. But if they're going to take control after Arafat dies, they'll need substantial prestige and support everywhere and not just in their own powerbases.

As part of the process of gaining support, they do "good works", at least a little; they distribute aid to the needy and run schools and do other things like that. Some of their support is also maintained by repression, including what amount to "death squads" who murder people accused of being Israeli supporters, and less formally who take out major supporters of other Palestinian groups trying to infiltrate other powerbases. All of this takes money and they don't have a lot, but there is some and a lot of that is funneled in from outside. Some of those groups have external patrons, most notably Syria and Iran, and as always the Saudis provide great amounts of danegeld. Iraq has also been sending money and supplies, and there are sundry "charities" and other comparable activist groups around the world engaged in coming up with cash to send to these groups, with greater or lesser amounts of idealism about how it will be used. And last but not least, the EU is a huge source of support.

In theory, the EU's money is supposed to be going to support the government of the Palestinian Authority and to pay for humanitarian programs, but the reality is that the money is not monitored closely and the EU's payments are a major slush fund for Arafat and a substantial part of his power.

A lot of the rest of the money flowing in, to other groups, doesn't even have token strings attached to it, at least regarding "humanitarian use", and the various groups which receive it are using it mostly to try to gain influence among the Palestinians. And one of the most cost effective ways for a group to gain prestige is to kill Jews.

A few months ago, Israel began a policy of bulldozing the homes of the parents of any successful suicide bomber. One thing you would have expected is that the groups launching the attacks would cease identifying who the bombers were, so as to protect their families afterwards.

That's what you'd expect, but in the aftermath of yesterday's bombing, two groups tried to take credit for it. One of them actually provided the names of the two attackers, and it was generally assumed that they were really the ones responsible. And in fact, they always identify the bombers after the fact, precisely because the groups making the attacks need to have it known that they were responsible. They're not attacking Israel as such; they're doing is so that ordinary Palestinians know that they've been doing so. No group except the one actually responsible could know so soon after who the bombers were, so naming them is proof, even though that does bring Israeli retribution down on the bombers' families. (In compensation for the loss of their homes, the families receive substantial direct payments from Iraq and Saudi Arabia and possibly from other sources.)

Hamas and Hizbollah in particular have been in this business for a long time and have used it to gain strength, mostly at the expense of Fatah. Recently, Fatah started its own campaign to try to compete in Jew-killing, because it was beginning to look weak and soft and decadent in the eyes of the common Palestinian.

Of course, if Fatah itself did this and took credit the way that Hamas and Hizbollah do, then it would seriously erode much of Fatah's international standing, because at least on paper Fatah has gone legitimate. The Palestinian Authority is Fatah, and Arafat leads the movement. So they created an offshoot called the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade so as to get plausible deniability. But they're really Fatah, and everyone knows it. And they've made up for lost time.

The reason why the Palestinian terrorist campaign against Israel never coalesced into a guerrilla action is that it was never really coordinated, and never really had any grand strategy. It isn't centrally controlled, and it was never really about defeating Israel. Arafat started the Intifada, and in the early days the various groups did cooperate, and for a while I think they hoped that the unrest would inspire Israel to further sweeten the Barak proposal, but as time has gone on the fractures between them have widened, and now no one is in charge.

And it's further complicated by the fact that a lot of the overt and covert aid from outside does have strings attached: much of the money from the Arab nations and from Iran includes an obligation to keep attacking Israel. The leaders of those nations are using the Palestinian struggle for their own ends.

There are three reasons in particular why the governments of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and to a lesser extent Egypt and Jordan need the Palestinian uprising to continue to stay violent. First, they need an enemy for their people to hate. They need someone to blame. Living in a slum in Cairo? Blame the Jews. (Certainly that's better than blaming Mubarek, from Mubarek's point of view.)

They also had hoped to use the Palestinian uprising to distract the US. Even as they worked to try to make it as complicated and intractable as possible, they also demanded publicly that the US not attack Iraq or make any other moves in the Arab world until after the Palestinian situation had been settled. (That didn't work with Bush, but over the long run it's been pretty successful at keeping the US from looking hard at other Arab nations who were actually less-than-friends.)

And the final reason, and in some ways the most important, is that if the Palestinians don't end up being able to live in Israel, then they'll try to live in the other Arab nations – and the other Arab nations don't want 'em. (Several of the Arab nations have already forcibly ejected huge numbers of Palestinian refugees. They're universally despised, it turns out.)

So how do we stop the Palestinian uprising? By removing the reasons for their fight. So what are those reasons?

Ask many people that, and you'll get tales about how the Palestinians got screwed in 1947, and how they're still being screwed, and how they live in poverty and have no hope. Those things are true, but they're not the reason that the terrorist campaign continues.

There's always been a difference between why the leaders want to fight and why the individual soldiers fight. In some cases that has been quite radical, and some of the leftist's skepticism about "patriotism" is justified because it's been common for governments to wave the flag to motivate men to fight for patriotism in wars which were actually quite sordid. But the leaders' reasons for fighting are usually the most important, and that's what we have to consider here. Those reasons (the unfair plight of the Palestinian people) are part of the indoctrination that the leaders use to convince young men and women to sacrifice themselves, but it has nothing to do with why the leaders themselves continue the war.

First, the leaders are continuing to attack Israel because they're being paid to do so and they need that money. Second, they're killing Jews because it increases their chance of taking power in post-Arafat Palestine.

And the bigger and more brutal and destructive the attack, the better it plays on the Palestinian Street. That's why the bombs have gotten bigger and more destructive and why they've been going after huge and glamorous civilian targets. That's why they haven't switched, for instance, to the use of snipers to pick off Israeli soldiers at checkpoints. In a legitimate campaign of liberation, that would have been a logical development as they made the transition away from terrorism to guerrilla, from brutal attacks on civilians to more ordered attacks on enemy military and government targets. Sniper attacks killing one or two soldiers at a time don't have the cachet of a big bomb, and it is hard to prove that you were actually responsible, so it's too easy for some other group to take credit for what you've done. If you're trying to win a war, sniper attacks would be better. If you're trying to gain prestige, suicide nail-bombs are the way to go.

To stop the Palestinian attacks, those are the reasons which must be addressed, and the primary way is by cutting off foreign support. Ultimately, the only thing which will do that is a complete shakeup of the Arab world, and that became possible last year when the US became an active belligerent.

The government of Israel must respond to these attacks because its voters expect it to do so. But their response right now is distinctly muted, and that's because they know that they are part of a larger war, and that it's definitely going their way. The Palestinians are in deep trouble because the US is going to eliminate all their foreign support. On September 11, 2001, the Palestinians lost their war.

After we take Iraq, it's virtually certain that there will be a revolution in Iran, and we will be much less friendly with the Saudis and will be much more forceful in making them cease to provide money to support terrorism everywhere (such as in Kashmir, as well as with the Palestinians). Saudi danegeld will end, at the point of an American bayonet if no other way. And if Syria doesn't collapse in short order, it will definitely make reforms because it's top-of-the-American-menu for the next gulp after Iraq. The US will be much better placed thereafter to make various Arab governments offers they pretty much cannot refuse, and part of that will involve a cutoff of funding for the Palestinians.

The flow of money won't drop to zero but it will be drastically reduced, and all the competing Palestinian groups will be seriously crippled.

On the other hand, to take Iraq we need at least temporary cooperation from several Arab nations and a vigorous Israeli response now to the Palestinian attacks could derail that. So the Israeli government has been practicing restraint, because it quite correctly understands that doing so is in its own long-term best interests.

Once the majority of the funding for the terrorist campaign has been cut off (including, one would hope, from Europe) then it leaves those organizations with far fewer resources with which to do good deeds. They will still be able to maintain the terrorist campaign, though even that will be reduced (for a number of reasons).

And as the situation for the common Palestinian continues to get worse, and as he sees Arabs continue to lose everywhere, then it will become apparent that Hamas and Hizbollah and Fatah and the rest are all arguing about who sits at the head of the table in the dining room of the sinking Titanic.

With a cutoff of foreign aid, and with Israel no longer restrained once the US has conquered Iraq and no longer needs Arab support, the plight of the common Palestinian is going to take a dramatic turn for the worse in the next few months.

When individual Palestinians begin to think "A plague on all their houses" with respect to the competing groups jockeying in the power struggle, then the war will end, for that will remove the other incentive for the leaders to continue the war. If attacking Israel is viewed not as a good thing but as something that makes life worse for the Palestinians, and when such attacks are seen by common Palestinians as bad for them, then groups which make attacks will suffer and not benefit – and they'll stop.

And that's why the road to peace in Israel runs through Baghdad.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[busybody..]

Bluespoke

Here is the site http://denbeste.nu......it is worth reading on a daily basis.

www.denbeste.nu

 

[bluespoke]

Re: BlueSpoke

Just kidding........BTW........shame you hate me.......we agree with everything.

These are interesting articles and I agree with the majority of what the writer is saying.

BTW, I don't hate anyone. Nor do I agree with everything you say. My thoughts on Islam and its adherants are far distant from yours. But on the Israeli/Palestine issue we are largely in ageement.

 

[busybody..]

Bluespoke

Your views on Islams adherants are different then mine? WHY?
CAIRO (Reuters) - A new letter purportedly written by senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged Muslims to continue a "jihad" to kill Americans and other "enemies of God," an Islamist lawyer who received the document said Tuesday.



"By God, do not stop the new Muslim souls...from approaching jihad (holy struggle), represented in the killing of all Americans as they kill us," said the letter, received by lawyer Montasser al-Zayat and published in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.


Zayat confirmed he had received the letter claiming to be from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s right-hand-man through the internet on Monday and given a copy to the newspaper for publication.


"...I know that jihad against the enemies of God who kill us in all places must have a price, but this price is very cheap, whatever it is, as long as it satisfies God and will help us enter into heaven," the letter said.


Zawahri is the founder of the Egyptian Jihad group, which alongside the militant al-Gamaa al-Islamiya fought a 1992-1997 campaign to topple the government of President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites).


The former surgeon made an anti-U.S. pact with bin Laden in 1998. Their whereabouts remain unknown after a U.S. military campaign destroyed al Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan (news - web sites) following last year's September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.


Some reports say the two men are together and planning new attacks on the United States.


Zayat, a former acquaintance of Zawahri, was considered an unofficial Gamaa spokesman from 1990-1994, but says he condemns violence and that militants should make peace with the state.


He told Reuters he believed the letter was authentic, saying it had come in response to a letter he had posted to Zawahri through the internet in September. At the time, Zayat had tried to get Zawahri to participate in a seminar via the internet.


In the letter, Zawahri also said he believed it was right to halt militant attacks in Egypt. Since Muslim extremists slaughtered 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians near the southern town of Luxor in November 1997, there has been a lull in militant attacks.


Analysts say that although the government cracked down hard on militants in the aftermath of the Luxor massacre, it was not clear whether radicals had abandoned their dream of setting up a purist Islamic state or whether they were taking a breather before striking again.


__________________

 

[busybody..]

Peace starts or ends in the Mid East

not in -A-PEES-ER- London.

And there wont be any "peace" till Israel strts REALLY kicking ass in the terror camps.

 

[Guest]