Israeli airstrike into Gaza kills fighter

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I dunno, rkzen. Pierce's position is not easily distinguished from antisemitism, and antisemites invariably try and draw over themselves a veil of anti-Zionism.

I can't see it for sour owl shit. He's compromised, and terribly.

To be a good human being, one should be in sympathy with the democracy there, not the un-democracies. The undemocracies are inherently oppressive, and they insist upon being at feud with the chosen people. Stupid and destructive. No one should sympathize with such.

It's also too much to expect for anyone to be civilized in war. Were you Israeli, would you submit to what the Arabs explicitly have in mind? Of course not. Thus, there is no point in further discussion. You either support the people of decency, or you fail to, and whore along with the indecent! Something I never do, and thus I'm on the side of the angels. Join me there, and give up all this fascistic bull.

[duck_duck]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

and antisemites invariably try and draw over themselves a veil of anti-Zionism.
.

I was wondering about that. It seems the term anti-zionist is just a more PC way of saying anti-semite.

[Ibby]

NO! nonono, duck2, dont start listening to UG.

Trust me. Just don't.
Anti-zionism means you think that the jews have no more right to kick people off their land for their own country than the christians or the sikhs or the bokonists do.

Note that I'm not saying I'm an anti-zionist -- or a pro-zionist either.

[TheMercenary]

The whole anti-zionist movement is a ruse. Anti-semites, anti-zionists, anti-settlement, they are all sheep from the same flock. People like to quote anti-zionists who are Jews as if that bolsters their argument. It is no different than the varied views we have in this country over any issue that people like to argue over. The most vocal anti-zionists are often traced back to some serious conspiracy theory groups who are wrapped up in Illuminati stuff and fears about Jewish domination of money, diamonds, the world, or whatever. Read it all with a grain of salt....

[Happy Monkey]

What's a Zionist, then?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

What's a Zionist, then?

Look it up, your fingers broken?

[Happy Monkey]

No, I want your definition. If Anti-Zionist has all those connotations that don't rise from the name, what's a Zionist?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

No, I want your definition. If Anti-Zionist has all those connotations that don't rise from the name, what's a Zionist?

Look it up. Make up your own definition. Everyone does it, so can you. Or you can just keep looking til you find one that suits you and refutes one position or supports another.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Better you should listen to someone with fifty years of world experience, over half of which has been spent studying and opposing despotism -- it's why I'm a libertarian in spite of any naysaying the likes of Kitsune or Radar can come up with -- than to two callow youths, one of college age, the other not yet out of high school, who are in the perfect demographic to be seduced by fascism's blandishments -- this type of philosophy has kid-appeal. Heck, I've been in the world longer than both of them put together, and I've a good memory of what undemocracy has wrought over the last century. It's good memory, but the memories themselves aren't nice.

Nondemocracies don't stop misbehaving, and defending and rationalizing the misbehavior is merely disgusting.

Here's a little something citing the fascist model the Baathist Party uses. Some more from the same source right here.

Academic Anatol Lievin gives ammunition to several views of the conflict in this interview, which I will quote one paragraph from in support of my understanding of things:

Now, that is not saying in any way that the Ba'ath regime in Iraq was not a savage and at least would-be totalitarian one. The Ba'ath are a mixture of communism and fascism. They're ultra-nationalists. They're national socialists, if you will. But it's also a modernizing ideology, like communism and fascism. It's all about developing the state as a modern state with modern armies, but also with modern services to the population. And above all, from its inception, Ba'ath nationalism, like Nazism or fascism, by the way, or communism, were savagely anti-religious. The leading founding ideologue of the Ba'ath was a Christian, Michel Aflaq, and like his equivalents in Europe, he hated the world of religion because he saw it as precisely hampering progress, dividing the nation. The most savage repressions by the Ba'ath in the past were not just of Kurds and not just of Shias, but also, based in Iraq and Syria, precisely of religious fundamentalist groups now allied to al Qaeda.

He does however offer something for just about everyone on that page alone, and I suppose on the other pages of the interview as well. It ought to be interesting reading.

It should also be noted that the Ba'athist record on providing those modern services isn't very successful. It takes big piles of nice capitalist capital to make a successful socialist regime, and the best way to make a small fortune in socialism is to begin with a large one.

A little reading on what Zionists themselves say of Zionism will help, I'm sure, to cut down on inaccurate statements.

[TheMercenary]

Here you go:

A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/86/Z0018600.html

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Ibram

Anti-zionism means you think that the jews have no more right to kick people off their land for their own country than the christians or the sikhs or the bokonists do.

This point of view utterly ignores a historical fact: the Jews were in Palestine centuries before the current batch of competitors were. The Bible's account is in some considerable measure confirmed by other sources, such as Roman Imperial history, of which sources it appears Ibbie knows nothing. There's archaeology, too, of which Ibbie ought to know something.

Note that I'm not saying I'm an anti-zionist -- or a pro-zionist either.

Of course you're not; you're afraid of being tarred with the antisemitism brush.

I am NOT. (Makes me happy.)

But you, little bro, have got a taint, and I'm not talking about the one back of your balls. It's up to you to get rid of it.

Originally Posted by Ibram
Anti-zionism means you think that the jews have no more right to kick people off their land for their own country than the christians or the sikhs or the bokonists do.

No... it means there is no god, no one said that Jews deserve shit more than anyone else. That they get to steal shit from anyone else, that they already own, because the magic sky pixie said so. That is what anti-Zionism is.
It means the Palestinians deserve to protect themselves and retaliate exactly as much as Israel and Israel does not deserve arms and funds from the US more than any other nation.
It means Israel is not fucking special, never has been and never will be. Religion needs to be ignored.
As a true libertarian, we need to stay out of it and never should have been involved in the first place.

[Griff]

Just to be clear, UG is a Neo-Con not a libertarian. I'd hate to see the young people get confused. I wonder if the neo crowd is going back to their Trotskyite roots? Having destroyed the GOP, maybe they want to squish the tiny LP as well.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

What propaganda? --asks Pierce from his ostrich pose.

Well, we could start with something the Holocaust Museum has to say about The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (let this title stand for the several it's been published under -- try the Wikipedia entry for a summary) :

Meanwhile, the forgery has found traction in much of the Middle East. Televised dramatizations of The Protocols have appeared on Egyptian television in October-November 2002 and on Al-Manar (Hezbollah) television in 2003. The latter version included scenes depicting Jews draining the blood of a Christian child as an ingredient in matzah (unleavened bread consumed by observant Jews during the Passover holiday; the actual ingredients are flour and water only).

In 2003, the manuscript library at Alexandria, Egypt reportedly displayed an Arabic edition of The Protocols as an example of a Jewish holy book.

In 2005, Iranian booksellers displayed copies of The Protocols and The International Jew at the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair, the world's largest.

The tragedy of The Protocols, Greene says, is that "a piece of propaganda that nurtured anti-Semitism during the Nazi period is still doing the same today."

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Actually, the great difference between Griff and Radar and myself is that I'm not a pacifist. They object to that. I ignore the objections.

I simply cannot be a pacifist; it's not a sustainable philosophy of life.

That Griff and Radar can't understand a libertarian who isn't a pacifist is not -- not directly anyway -- my problem. I don't think people who are that into freedom should be narrow-minded about it, for this seems to me exclusive of any possibility to be into freedom.

Griff, where the hell are you getting this "Trotskyite roots" idea?

Rkzen, when you understand that it's truer to libertarianism to promote, defend, and support the more libertarian society against the less libertarian, then I think you'll be a real libertarian. Otherwise, what you've got is passivism, to coin a term.