[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

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Sorry if it's a repost. I "remember" posting it, but it's not to be found in the archives. Timely, anyway.

[Kenton]

Thanks for some of the most fascinating reading in quite some time. That's a very thoughtful analysis, your historical comparisons are compelling, and your point is made powerfully.

[Loyalist]

My ancestors had their lands and property in Georgia confiscated by a bunch of musket-toting Bible-bashing redneck revolutionaries! Then they were driven from their native soil to the harsh and barren lands of Nova Scotia! Justice demands that I receive reparations for their suffering! < /sarcasm>

[eBelasco]

The Tories formed terrorist units and plundered and raided the territories under patriot control.
The contemporary actions of a "nation" largely founded by terrorists supported by a repressive regime are not hard to explain.

[Publius]

There was in fact a concerted series of attempts to destroy the new United States that was launched from Canada shortly after the Treaty of Paris.

Sir Guy Carleton had been the most able of the British commanders in the Western Hemisphere. Thanks to the stupidity of the British War Office, he had been forced to sit idle in Montreal for most of the war. He did, however, see action against Benedict Arnold in the disastrous Quebec Campaign, which I have included as a part of a very old Publius Essay titled In Praise of Benedict Arnold.

When the fighting stopped after Yorktown in 1781 and there was a change of government in London, Carleton was moved to New York to take over the British garrison there while negotiations went on in Paris. Washington feared Carleton as he feared no other British general, and he spent two years on tenterhooks waiting for some move on the part of his opponent. Carleton sent letter after letter back to the War Office begging for permission to restart the war, but the new government turned a deaf ear to his pleas.

Once the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, Carleton and his troops returned to England where he was knighted Lord Dorchester and made Governor General of Canada.

Back in Montreal, Carleton spent the remainder of his life exciting the Indian tribes on the fluid border between the US and Canada, and he succeeded in starting wholesale Indian rebellions and wars on the frontier. But when push came to shove, he always backed away from giving full British support to the Indians. This would have caused a break between himself and the government in London, which did not want war.

Carleton almost had a success in 1790 when he opened negotiations with the Republic of Vermont to come into Canada. Washington viewed a Canadian Vermont as a British Vermont, a salient poking like a spear into the United States, with the head of the spear pointed at New York. Discretely, Washington let the government of Vermont know that this was not acceptable. Vermont was given two choices: Apply for admission as the 14th state, or be invaded and annexed. Vermont chose admission.

It was a closer call than we think.

[CaptRon]

There is an assoiciation of Loyalist who moved to Nova Scotia. Oddly enough their membership contains both my surname and my mother's maiden surname, though no one in either family claims any relatives to the North.

[My2Cents]

One problem with this analogy: Most "Palestinian" refugees never lived in what is now Israel. Most have immigrated into the territories in hopes of one day being part of the economy that Israel has successfully created. Those who are legitimate refugees, or by now, children of refugees, left because they were urged to do so by Arab nations attacking Israel in 1948, being told that the Israel would be quickly "crushed" and they could have their land back. Didn't quite happen that way.

[My2Cents]

I'm a direct descendent of Samuel Tilley, one of the Loyalist leaders who led New Yorkers to New Brunswick during the War of Independence, and still have relatives in Canada. Our family snuck back into the US when my grandfather moved to Boston in the early 1900s.