100 homicidal home invasions

[Seth]

In the Israel/Palestinian context, it virtually does not matter any more about whether either side's actions can be justified in the historical morass of the conflict's roots. Both sides are so deeply immersed in mutual hatred that it is highly unlikely there will be anything but continuing violence from both sides. BG, your optimism here is misplaced, they are both too far gone...

You're simply wrong. Israel has been trying to make peace with Hezbolla for decades, but it will not do so given the intractability of Hezbolla and other Islamic fundamentalists that demand that Israel essentially give up all it's claims to lands Hezbolla considers to be Arab, which is pretty much everything. This is of course because Hezbolla has no interest in coming to an accommodation with Israel, it want's Israel destroyed and all the Jews dead, as it has said many, many times.

Why should Israel make any MORE concessions to Hezbolla or anyone else? Never once have any Arabs or Muslims treated honestly with Israel. Not once.

[Seth]

On Palestine.
I wonder if Seth is Jewish? He is certainly showing enormous bias.

Go fuck yourself BG, you and your idiotic "enormous bias" complaints. Of anyone here you have demonstrated as an enormous a bias regarding your favorite causes as anyone, so shut the fuck up.

He ignores totally history and puts his own twist on things.

Actually, I CITE history, whereas you pull your notions of history, just as you pull your notions about guns, straight out of your ass.

Seth
I never said that 'Palestine" existed for 1500 years. I said that the people who became Palestinians did not enter that area till after 500AD, when the Christianised Romans had already persecuted the Jews, forcing them to leave. But that land, even as part of the Ottoman Empire, was theirs for 1500 years, near enough. It was stolen off them, and they are entitled to redress.

Er, it was "stolen from them" by the Turks, who were driven out by the Brits, who turned a bunch of desert nomads into a nation on the condition that a Jewish homeland would be created in the region. The Arabs agreed to that, and then reneged on that agreement before the ink was dry, which resulted in the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, which they lost, and the 1968 Arab-Israeli war, which they also lost, so fuck them very much.

On the business of opposing oppressive governments, I reiterate. Peaceful protest is best. Take the Arab Spring uprisings. Four countries took part. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria.

Of those four, two used peaceful means - Tunisia and Egypt. Tunisia succeeded admirably. Egypt succeeded initially and then backslid with a military coup. But the peaceful methods continued, and Egypt has now had an election, and democracy is set to return. I was in Egypt myself in September, and had the chance to talk to many Egyptians. A spirit of optimism and hope pervades the country.

Good for them. Sadly, it does not always work out that way, as the Syrians will tell you.

Libya and Syria both turned to armed uprisings and they are both human tragedies of the worst kind.

Evidently they don't think so, elsewise the would be negotiating not fighting. They aren't, they are fighting because 40 years of negotiating got them exactly nowhere.

Arming the populace against the need to fight a repressive government is a horrible way to go.

You're right, it's a horrible way to go, except for every other method of fighting dictatorial tyrants, which are worse by far, as the 100 million Marxist victims will tell you.

It is an invitation to end up like Syria and Libya.

If the Syrian people had been ubiquitously armed when the military attempted its coup in 1963 Assad would never have come to power in the first place and Syria would be...well, who knows what it would be, but it wouldn't be at war with Assad. It's precisely because the Syrian people WERE NOT armed that allowed the military to stage a coup and impose four decades of heinous, murderous Socialist tyranny that the Syrian people finally decided was not acceptable, so they went to war, as is their right.

[Seth]

On Palestine.
I wonder if Seth is Jewish? He is certainly showing enormous bias. He ignores totally history and puts his own twist on things.

Seth
I never said that 'Palestine" existed for 1500 years. I said that the people who became Palestinians did not enter that area till after 500AD, when the Christianised Romans had already persecuted the Jews, forcing them to leave. But that land, even as part of the Ottoman Empire, was theirs for 1500 years, near enough. It was stolen off them, and they are entitled to redress.

On the business of opposing oppressive governments, I reiterate. Peaceful protest is best. Take the Arab Spring uprisings. Four countries took part. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria.

Of those four, two used peaceful means - Tunisia and Egypt. Tunisia succeeded admirably. Egypt succeeded initially and then backslid with a military coup. But the peaceful methods continued, and Egypt has now had an election, and democracy is set to return. I was in Egypt myself in September, and had the chance to talk to many Egyptians. A spirit of optimism and hope pervades the country.

Libya and Syria both turned to armed uprisings and they are both human tragedies of the worst kind.

Arming the populace against the need to fight a repressive government is a horrible way to go. It is an invitation to end up like Syria and Libya.

I think you overestimate how much "choice" there was by citizens, in looking at the different directions taken by, say, Libya and Tunisia. There were factors, deriving from the nature of Gaddafi's rule that meant a descent into fighting and chaos much more likely in Libya than Tunisia, whatever the wishes of the populace.

Because the populace did not have the arms with which to depose Quaddafi.

[Seth]

Here's what Cubans actually do in Cuba: They escape it:

The number of Cubans seeking to migrate to the U.S. has spiked since the two countries began working in December last year to normalize relations after more than five decades. Almost 28,000 Cubans entered the U.S. in the first nine months of the 2015 fiscal year, according to the Pew Research Center, citing U.S. Census data.

Doesn't sound like a country where the opinions of anybody but the Castros matters.

[Blind groper]

Useless arguing with Seth.
It is clearly obvious from modern examples that peaceful opposition to oppressive governments is best, as Tunisia, Egypt, Myanmar, India, South Africa, and even Botswana show. The nations that turn to armed uprisings end up with massive human tragedies, as Libya, Syria, Palestine, and so many in sub Saharan Africa demonstrate.

[JimC]

In the Israel/Palestinian context, it virtually does not matter any more about whether either side's actions can be justified in the historical morass of the conflict's roots. Both sides are so deeply immersed in mutual hatred that it is highly unlikely there will be anything but continuing violence from both sides. BG, your optimism here is misplaced, they are both too far gone...

You're simply wrong. Israel has been trying to make peace with Hezbolla for decades, but it will not do so given the intractability of Hezbolla and other Islamic fundamentalists that demand that Israel essentially give up all it's claims to lands Hezbolla considers to be Arab, which is pretty much everything. This is of course because Hezbolla has no interest in coming to an accommodation with Israel, it want's Israel destroyed and all the Jews dead, as it has said many, many times.

Why should Israel make any MORE concessions to Hezbolla or anyone else? Never once have any Arabs or Muslims treated honestly with Israel. Not once.

Israel is equally intractable, particularly in its settlement program and the way it treats its own arab "citizens" as second class. The cycle of violence and revenge has no end in sight.

[Blind groper]

You are quite correct, Jim, as long as the idiots on both sides insist on using guns and violence.

The best way to resolve these apparently intractable issues is around the negotiation table. That requires both sides to be prepared to compromise. Sadly, neither side shows any such willingness. It will take enough time for the current generation of morons to die off - on both sides.