Posted on 02/19/2006 2:44:18 PM PST by Alouette
The Hamas team had not laughed so much in a long time. The team, headed by the prime minister's advisor Dov Weissglas and including the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discussion with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on ways to respond to the Hamas election victory. Everyone agreed on the need to impose an economic siege on the Palestinian Authority, and Weissglas, as usual, provided the punch line: "It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die," the advisor joked, and the participants reportedly rolled with laughter.
But Weissglas' wisecrack was in particularly poor taste. Like the thunder of laughter it elicited, it again revealed the extent to which Israel's intoxication with power drives it crazy and completely distorts its morality. While masses of Palestinians are living in inhumane conditions, with horrifying levels of unemployment and poverty that are unknown in Israel, humiliated and incarcerated under our responsibility and culpability, the top military and political brass share a hearty laugh a moment before deciding to impose an economic siege that will be even more brutal than the one until now.
The proposal to put hungry people on a diet is accepted here without shock, without public criticism; even if only said in jest, it is incomparably worse than the Danish caricature. It reflects a widespread mood that will usher in cruel, practical measures. If until now one could argue that Israel primarily demonstrated insensitivity to the suffering of the other and closed its eyes (especially the stronger classes, busy with their lives of plenty) while a complete nation was groaning only a few kilometers away, now Israel is also making jokes at the expense of the other's suffering.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
They would rather kill Jews than eat.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
Welfare assistance has always degraded the recipients. Palestinians are the biggest welfare experiment in history, and have predictably overpopulated and failed to establish anything but a thieving political class. Let them hang on their own petard. It is the kindest thing that can be done.
Statistics would indicate that the economic conditions of "Palestinians" improved during the years of the "occupation." As surely as night follows day, "Palestinian" self-rule will mean a giant step backward, because the Israeli mitigation factor is no longer available to them. Maybe the Palis and their allies should have realized the economic down side of a "Palestinian" state before demanding one.
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The case on their humanity, or the humanity of Islamists - hasn't yet been made..
Semper Fi
Terrorist leaders, if they are lucky and escape justice, often become default statesmen. Thus the late Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra'ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini, which somehow reduces to “Arafat,” was President/Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a fictitious government.
The Palestine Liberation Organization is a terrorist gang. Arafat and his suicidal followers wanted their own country.
But these Arabs do not want just any piece of land out of which a homeland would have to be laboriously carved. Instead the Arafatians want the tiny postage stamp size country of Israel. They want a ready-made, plug-it-in-and-turn-it-on, modern country handed to them on a silver, if bloodied, platter.
The conflict, it seems to me, is that while the Israelis are willing to share the modern nation they alone created, the Palestinians want it all and, like Hitler, wants to kill off all the Jews. Understandably, the Israelis are resisting such a final solution to the Palestinians’ “Jewish problem.“
President Bush favors a plan to form a Palestinian State. I have news. There already is a Palestinian state, it’s called Syria. Syria’s population is largely Palestinian.
If the Palestinians now living in Israel and in refugee camps in Lebanon want their own homeland so bad why don’t they simply go home to Syria? Answer: because the Syrians won’t have them. The one thing Arabs seem to hate more than Jews and Americans is each other.
If not Syria surely room could be found somewhere in the thousands of empty square miles that make up the sparsely populated Arab world. Why not give the Palestinians an unused corner of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, or Libya and let them go to work and build their own country?
In ancient times when Islamic hordes swept the Jews out of what is now called Israel the land was a bare desert. Over the centuries it remained an arid wasteland until the Jews began to return to their ancestral home. In the last century, and especially since the Jewish state gained independence in 1948, the Jews worked a miracle.
Almost overnight, while scattered Arab tribes lived a primitive nomadic existence, Jews built cities, farms, skyscrapers, universities, airports, hospitals, schools, hi-tech industries, and the infrastructure it takes to make a modern state.
Such progress is viewed with envy by those who have advanced very little in the last two thousand years. It’s a classic example of the have-nots wanting what the haves have worked for and earned.
The question of who has prior claim fades away as the car bombs begin to explode.
Let their arab brothers feed the palis. Oh, that's right--those are the people who put them into this situation to start with--and they are not about to bail them out now.
" If Palestinians are starving, how is this Israel's fault? Hamas says they want to starve. "
Perhaps they check with Arafat's wife. She's could easily feed the whole bunch of Palestinians with all of the money she has tucked away. Money that was suppose to support them, but instead went into a black hole for Arafat and his buddies.
Didn't we learn from the Terri Schiavo case that starvation leads to euphoria? The Hamastanians should be grateful.
There has never been a democracy anywhere in the Islamic world.The December 15 election results paved the way for Parliament to convene. But elections do not matter in the Middle East. Democracy is only used in the Middle East during elections. After the election is over, a tyrant is elected ... an autocrat or a theocrat. It's always the same scenario. There is no such thing as a moderate Islamic state---- the US is trying to establish something that's never been established before. The reality is that the naive Road Map to Peace is full of potholes and any of our nation-building efforts in the the Palestinian area are unlikely to create a mini-America, and more likely they will create a mini-Iran.....with our tax dollars.
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