Max Blumenthal interview on Israels double standards

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I overheard two people I know pretty well years ago in a conversation that was rather odd. In particular, one of them told the other that the United States is the lost tribe of Israel. I guess he must consider everyone in the United States to be Jewish regardless of ancestry.

And why not?

Just to be clear, I have been playing the devil's advocate.

What makes you think that the Palestinians will ever be capable of being reasoned with? The Israeli government provides for them in many different ways and treats their injured and sick, yet they have not shown any degree of willingness to actually have a peaceful coexistence. They will not be satisfied with anything except supremacy. If you look at their rhetoric, they don't want a two-state solution. They want it all. They don't want compromise. They don't want your infidel humanist ideas about compromise or reason.

They continue to stir up unrest throughout the Levant. They are genuinely at the center of it. It's entirely because of their grandstanding that the Syrians are in a state of civil war. It is entirely because of their grandstanding that Islamic State militants are systematically murdering people in Iraq on a scale not seen since World War II. They are at the center of it. The Palestinians are at fault for it. Their refusal to even ponder compromise is causing instability throughout the world.

In one swift strike, we could drive a stake into the heart of this, once and for all. If we just demonstrated that we have been pulling our punches and trying to avert mass killing, rather than just being too weak or frail, then it just might shake some sense into these ret*ds in the Levant region, once and for all.

We had to do something drastic to get the Japanese to see reason. If we had not dropped the Atom Bomb, we would have had to conduct a mass invasion that would have gone on for years and cost many more lives. They would have fought to the last man for their emperor.

When you are dealing with fanaticism, it is not compassionate to be soft. It only prolongs the misery of a pointless conflict.

How about the Palestinian Christians? From what I understand, they are solidly middle class, are quite reasonable, and are essentially caught in the middle between the Jewish Israelis and the other Palestinian groups.

A Palestinian friend of mine told me years ago about how indigenous Palestinian Israelis are despised by both their own government and the governments of most middle-eastern Arab nations. Thinking this odd, I asked why the Arab nations wouldn't invite Palestinians to migrate to them and become their citizens over time. He laughed and explained that, since the partition years, some Arab nations consider Palestinians too "stupid" to even keep their nation (which became Israel). During that time, scapegoating and stereotyping of Palestinians began to take hold in Arab opinions. He equated it to the same way that Americans denigrate "Hillbillies" and "Southerners." So, that is why those nations don't care about the inhumane treatment of Palestinian Israelis by their government.

Palestinian Christians are indeed quite intelligent and business savvy, but they are hated by their Palestinian cohorts, other Arab nations and the Israeli government, and are victims of hate crimes that go largely unreported by western news media.

The ones in Israel have been moving toward disowning their fellow Arabs, they're so embarrassed of them.

First off: killing a whole population because their leaders (and a lot of their supporters) are batcrap crazy is not ethical. The Allies could not reason with the Nazis either, but they didn't go full genocide on the Germans. Not even on the Japanese, they dropped two bombs to show them that they could destroy every city of theirs, but they stopped after the point was made. Today both Germany and Japan are peaceful and prosperous places. People are not intrinsically barbarians and savages, that is a cultural thing and it can change. I also don't understand why you single out the Palestinians. Groups like ISIS consist of many ethnicities.
And threatening to kill all of them will not work on fanatics, they are willing to go down with the ship. I have no problem with dopping a few bombs on the nutjobs (they want to die? Fine with me), but you can't extend this to a whole population.
I'm not too hopeful that the Israel/Palestine conflict will be resolved though. Or that the militant fundies will go away anytime soon. When do all these people realise that they have already lost? At least the people of the Axis powers in WW2 knew they had lost utterly and they consequently reinvented themselves.

Well, perhaps if we just soaked Gaza Strip with just a little teensy bit of napalm, the rest of Levant would get the point that we're not kidding around, and they would go back to being the world's center of civilization and enlightenment, which they were for thousands of years before the Mongols threw them into this ongoing funk.

Do you realize how much trauma it took to shake my ancestors into reason? They lost a third of their population to a single plague, among other trials. Cultures may change, but it's often enough under the brute force of natural selection. My ancestors didn't change in a vacuum, and I doubt the Levant will, either.

Because they have unique political significance. If we just hit them hard enough, the rest of the Levant would get the picture.

Well, that's why I don't think that peace and compromise is going to work on the Palestinians. Palestinian Muslims will either fight to the last man, or they will, if allowed to, commit more hideous and cruel ethnic cleansing than we could imagine doing against them. Otherwise, this conflict will stretch on indefinitely, continuously inflaming passions in the Levant.

It would seem to me that if the Israeli Jews really wanted peace, they would be pushing for the growth of the middle class among the Palestinians. Give them a reason to want peace instead of having nothing to lose.

Yet, from my rather limited knowledge on this subject, that doesn't actually seem to be the case at all.

Now I'm curious who your ancestors where and what plague it was
Most of our ancestors would be regarded as savages by today's standards, but these people were just as smart as we, they just had the bad luck to be born in ignorant societies.

Medieval Europe. My ancestors spent several centuries behaving like idiots, and when they finally got the gumption to invite freethinkers back into their society, they took the knowledge and power associated with our efforts and used it to wipe out most of the native population of the continent on which I presently reside, meanwhile decimating a mature and relatively enlightened civilization in doing so.

Our esteemed colleague has this strange idea that this has some stunning impact on my ability to think for myself or to form rational, informed judgments. In the end, it doesn't matter where I am from or what my beliefs are. He will find a pretext on which to try to dismiss the validity of my views. His type are all the same.

I still live in Europe (Netherlands). I don't think it was disease, it was our ancestors realising that they were oppressed by the clergy and the nobility. Today the churches and nobles are both marginalised and have little political power. The Thirty Years War was a horrible war that had many causes but feudalism and religious tension are among them. At least 1/3 of the population of Germany died there. Quite a bloody continent, good thing they didn't have nukes back then.

Didn't William of Orange do some good there? I am still unclear on the details of the story behind that man. Dutch history gets vaguely positive but sort of "not really wanting to go there" treatment in American history courses.

As to the eternal conflict can anyone tell me if there are other people
who use suicide bombs strapped to themselves to kill innocent people
or if it's only Muslims that do this? I'm sure there are sects which don't
do this but I can't remember any high religious court or person coming
out against this with a religious declaration of any kind.

I believe it was the thousands of innocents killed and maimed in Israeli
coffee shops by Palestinian bombs that turned Israel permanently against
Hamas and it's supporters. I am old enough to remember, each time civilians
were killed in this manner, how Palestinians would jam the streets to celebrate
with their strange high warbling cries of victory celebrating the deaths of innocent
coffee drinkers (the same way they cheered when the Twin Towers fell).

Should the Israelis forgive this travesty, even knowing suicide bombing and other
suicide attacks continue today (despite the best efforts at stopping the flow of weapons
and explosives from Gaza)? They will not. They should not. Not until this endless war
promoted by the Muslim leaders of Hamas and supported by Muslim Palestinians is ended.

Well, there were the Japanese Kamikaze pilots during World War II.

Actually, I have interacted with several racists who - though I might not agree with them - I have found more reasonable than you; so-called cognitive elitists or separatists or whatever. I don't usually see them calling for "the world" to support the extermination of some group they don't like.

I've seen several Zio-nuts make the sick claim that since Israel could wipe out the Palestinians and hasn't yet this obviously shows that they're the good guys. You have simply taken this a few steps further. It looks like now it's dawned on you that calling for the Palestinians to be wiped out isn't a great way to drum up support for your favourite country, so you're now claiming it was all just rhetoric. How pathetic. Your attempt at guilt tripping and projecting is even more ridiculous.
(Boo hoo, poor persimmonpudding - he only called for the Palestinians to be exterminated after all - how dare these inhuman "antisemites" object to that!)

Lies.

Lies.

Lies.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you you're wrong here because I personally would dismiss your posts on this thread as psychotic regardless of whether you "think for yourself" or not, and regardless of your background.
I speak of you consuming Zionist propaganda because I believe that to be the case, and I asked you about your background because I was curious - not that I really expect much truth from you at this stage.

You were looking for a pretext on which to disparage the legitimacy of my views, which you were trying to pull on another person here. You have about the same attitude toward "Zionism" that McCarthy's ilk had toward communists: if you didn't like the same flavor of pudding as they did, they were certain it was part of a sinister communist plot developed right at the heart of KGB headquarters. Surely, they thought, you could never disagree with them of your own initiative.

Did it not occur to you that I was taking a type of devil's advocate position? My actual position is much more moderate than most, but you seem to be arguing with extremists who are not present in the conversation at all. I provided you with a handy picture of a real giant, so perhaps you can learn to distinguish them from windmills.

I have gotten sick, to near the point of overcoming the resistance to nausea related to my cholinergic-dependent Tourettes, of people like you painting the "racist" label onto anyone who doesn't tow the line with your own views. Your outright contempt and intolerance toward anyone who thinks differently from yourself is morally appalling to me.

In general, my actual views tend to be largely sympathetic with those of the relatively "dovish" Israeli Labor Party if you must know.