Escalation of Hostilities in Middle East

Re: # 94
[...Guess Hindus are obsessed with Muslims! ...]

what`s wrong with that?...

Always remember that arab muslims are special and have many more rights than shitty indian muslims. They are the master race and the sooner everyone in the world realizes it, the better things will be.

How does it matter if indian muslims (and many other indians) are poor, uneducated and live lives of misery? All this is the hindu indian goverments fault and has nothing to do with muslim causes.

History will record with astonishment from this period that while Saudi Arabia and Iran were among the richest countries of the world. trumpeting and braying their leadership for everyone to see, they did almost NOTHING to help their muslim friends in the poor countries. Not a single institute of technology, not a single centre of learning, not a single book publisher of general learning, no funding of primary education initiatives, no investment in industry outside petrochemicals, ZERO.

oh, i am sorry, of course, they do fund extremist madrasas and they also fund jihadis. How could I forget these noble acts? They also occassionally gift one military dictator or the other with a little cash or oil.

sometimes I feel for the bedouins.... I mean, these guys are literally sitting on gold mines - yet the are poor, illieterate, oppressed, backward, suicidal, massacre each other for nothing.....live like instects with no contributions towards anything....

And then they get bombed by the jews on slightest pretext.... but there is nothing they can do about it... 4 million jews with no oil vs a billion faithful with all the wealth in the world... still no match.... jews are bombing the sh!t out these fools.... pretty dramatic, ain`t it?

Here is a request : on Chowk UP I have started a thread for eliciting votes (not opinions please) on the outcome of this war. I would humbly request all of you guys to participate it this. This will give us insight into the real breakdown of sympathies (on a larger scale), and also if the participants on Chowk are far sighted to see outcomes of international events.
Thank you

#92 by tahmed32

Well, what I have to say to these contentions is with a lot of incredulousness at how far the limits of reason can drift when the horizon shifts due to goggles of prejudice.

You say I should substitute Hamas for Palestinians in my sentence because Hamas is only one of the political parties and Fatah has other views. First, how does democracy work? The majority opinion is thought to be fully representative, otherwise there would be chaos and anarchy. Hamas won the elections and represents the majority. I didn`t think I would be doing this explaining ....

Secondly, it is incorrect to say Fatah`s view is any different as far as the 1967 borders are concerned. At the time of Camp-David, there was only PLO (Fatah) under command of Arafat, and the agreement for which Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin won the 1994 peace prize was eventually rejected. Hamas was just a small grouping at the time mostly doing social work in Gaza and only gained influence precisely because Arafat was accused by his own party of betraying its agenda, and Rabin got assassinated by jews on why he offered even that 84% back. Arafat continued to be marginalised after that till his death.

... it lacks a leader like Jinnah who had the brains to realize that politics is the art of the possible and accepted what he himself called a ``moth eaten Pakistan``...

Do you really see an analogy here? Between circumstances of the creation of Pakistan and that of the proposed Palestine?

Muslims had the choice not to create Pakistan at all and remain in undivided India as its citizens at par with other groups. Palestinians living inside what is now Israel never had that choice.

Palestinians who remained inside the land occupied in 1948, are still classed seperately from Israeli Jews and those with passports as an Israeli “domestic” issue, like say British citizens of Pakistani origin or Germans of Turkish origin, not as part of Israel. I.e. officially second class citizens. They lost even that choice after Deir Yassein early-on in 1948 and remained in camps in West Bank which at that time was part of Jordan. After occupation by Israel in 1967, it still wasn`t annexed due to the large Palestinian population and Jordan too formally gave up its claim on the territory in 1988. That territory was never part of Israel to begin with, and Jordan`s claim lifted in favour of a homeland for the Palestinian refugees.

Were Indian Muslims first massacred and kicked out and THEN forced to accept a moth-eaten Pakistan? Or did they accept the final Partition plan willingly when they could have refused and still remained proper Indian citizens? As indeed 150 million of them still are?

As for Jinnah, I don`t want to start another Jinnah/Gandhi controversy here and invite Mantolives in the fray, but as per Ayesha Jalal, the theory to which I subscribe with to some extent, that Jinnah never really wanted to divide India, but was brinkwalking for greater leverage in an independent and undivided India which got out of hand and he was outmanoeuvred by Patel/Gandhi, ending up with a moth-eaten Pakistan.

Comparing Pakistan with Palestine is comparing apples with oranges.

Cheers!

#94 by lucknawi

LoL to that ....... they even clean a lot of Arab toilets ......you know ... airports etc ....

Victor Davis Hanson : Strange War. Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists

Sum up the declarations of Hezbollah’s leaders, Syrian diplomats, Iranian nuts, West Bank terrorists, and Arab commentators — and this latest Middle East war seems one of the strangest in a long history of strange conflicts. For example, have we ever witnessed a conflict in which one of the belligerents — Iran — that shipped thousands of rockets into Lebanon, and promises that it will soon destroy Israel, vehemently denies that its own missile technicians are on the ground in the Bekka Valley. Wouldn’t it wish to brag of such solidarity?

Or why, after boasting of the new targets that his lethal missiles will hit in Israel, does Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (“We are ready for it — war, war on every level”) now harp that Israel is hitting too deep into Lebanon? Don’t enemies expect one another to hit deep? Isn’t that what “war on every level” is all about?

Meanwhile, why do the G-8 or the United Nations even talk of putting more peacekeeping troops into southern Lebanon, when in the past such rent-a-cops and uniformed bystanders have never stopped hostilities? Does anyone remember that it was Hezbollah who blew up French and American troops who last tried to provide “stability” between the warring parties?

Why do not Iran and Syria — or for that matter other Arab states — now attack Israel to join the terrorists that they have armed? Surely the two-front attack by Hamas and Hezbollah could be helped by at least one conventional Islamic military. After promising us all year that he was going to “wipe out” Israel, is not this the moment for Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike?

And why — when Hezbollah rockets are hidden in apartment basements, then brought out of private homes to target civilians in Israel — would terrorists who exist to murder noncombatants complain that some “civilians” have been hit? Would not they prefer to lionize “martyrs” who helped to store their arms?

We can answer these absurdities by summing up the war very briefly. Iran and Syria feel the noose tightening around their necks — especially the ring of democracies in nearby Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, and perhaps Lebanon. Even the toothless U.N. finally is forced to focus on Iranian nukes and Syrian murder plots. And neither Syria can overturn the Lebanese government nor can Iran the Iraqi democracy. Instead, both are afraid that their rhetoric may soon earn some hard bombing, since their “air defenses” are hardly defenses at all.

So they tell Hamas and Hezbollah to tap their missile caches, kidnap a few soldiers, and generally try to turn the world’s attention to the collateral damage inflicted on “refugees” by a stirred-up Zionist enemy.

For their part, the terrorist killers hope to kidnap, ransom, and send off missiles, and then, when caught and hit, play the usual victim card of racism, colonialism, Zionism, and about every other -ism that they think will win a bailout from some guilt-ridden, terrorist-frightened, Jew-hating, or otherwise oil-hungry Western nation.

The only difference from the usual scripted Middle East war is that this time, privately at least, most of the West, and perhaps some in the Arab world as well, want Israel to wipe out Hezbollah, and perhaps hit Syria or Iran. The terrorists and their sponsors know this, and rage accordingly when their military impotence is revealed to a global audience — especially after no reprieve is forthcoming to save their “pride” and “honor.”

After all, for every one Israeli Hezbollah kills, they lose ten. You are not winning when “victory” is assessed in terms of a single hit on an Israeli warship. Their ace-in-the-hole strategy — emblematic of the entire pathetic Islamist way of war — is that they can disrupt the good Western life of their enemies that they are both attracted to and thus also hate. But, as Israel has shown, a Western public can be quite willing to endure shelling if it knows that such strikes will lead to a devastating counter-response.

What should the United States do? If it really cares about human life and future peace, then we should talk ad nauseam about “restraint” and “proportionality” while privately assuring Israel the leeway to smash both Hamas and Hezbollah — and humiliate Syria and Iran, who may well come off very poorly from their longed-for but bizarre war.

Only then will Israel restore some semblance of deterrence and strengthen nascent democratic movements in both Lebanon and even the West Bank. This is the truth that everyone from London to Cairo knows, but dares not speak. So for now, let us pray that the brave pilots and ground commanders of the IDF can teach these primordial tribesmen a lesson that they will not soon forget — and thus do civilization’s dirty work on the other side of the proverbial Rhine.

In this regard, it is time to stop the silly slurs that American policy in the Middle East is either in shambles or culpable for the present war. In fact, if we keep our cool, the Bush doctrine is working. Both Afghans and Iraqis each day fight and kill Islamist terrorists; neither was doing so before 9/11. Syria and Iran have never been more isolated; neither was isolated when Bill Clinton praised the “democracy” in Tehran or when an American secretary of State sat on the tarmac in Damascus for hours to pay homage to Syria’s gangsters. Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists; that was impossible during the Arafat fraud that grew out of the Oslo debacle. Europe is waking up to the dangers of radical Islamism; in the past, it bragged of its aid and arms sales to terrorist governments from the West Bank to Baghdad.

Some final observations on Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no longer a Soviet deterrent to bail out a failed Arab offensive. There is no longer empathy for poor Islamist “freedom fighters.” The truth is that it is an open question as to which regime — Iran or Syria — is the greater international pariah. After a recent trip to the Middle East, I noticed that the unfortunate prejudicial stares given to a passenger with an Iranian passport were surpassed only by those accorded another on his way to Damascus.

So after 9/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can’t.

Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.

Re: # 94

Kinda similar to Muslims complaining about Westren hypocricy and then lining up in droves to drive their taxis, clean their toilets, isn`t it?

Re: # 102

Actually....it is mainly the subcontinental muslims, whether from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, who do the menial work or janitorial in Arab countries.

The Arabs generally look down upon their fellow muslims from the subcontinent.

Why does one country invade another?

The answer is simple: because it can.

Israel has invaded and occupied Palestine, because it can. USA has invaded and occuppied Iraq, because it can. It has not invaded and occuppied North Korea, because it cannot. It is trying to assess, at the moment, whether it can invade and occupy Iran. Or whether it can`t.

This has been true throughout history, regardless of the religion, ethnicity or type of govt. fo the invading party. When and if a country can invade another and occupy or bomb it, it is not too difficult for it to create reasons for doing so. Not that it matters. As the rest of the world debates the reasonings, and as the citizens of the invaded country demand human rights, the invading country does what it wants.

So the moral of the story is that if a country wants to survive with its dignity intact, it has to ensure it is strong enough to not get invaded. This can be done through economic strength (Malaysia, Japan, etc.), military strength (Pakistan, India, North Korea, Russia, Israel etc.) or through alliances (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Luxemborg, Japan, Singapore etc.).

Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, etc. have none of the above. So they can and will get invaded as and when it suits Israel to invade them. The reasonings for the invasion will in the end just be topics for news channels and living room conversations.

India and Pakistan regularly take each other`s fishermen, civilians, border smugglers as prisoners. They used to shell each other across Kashmir on an hourly basis. But they haven`t invaded each other across a border (recognized by both) for 35 years.

Why not? Because they can`t.

Re: # 94

``Guess Hindus are obsessed with Muslims! ``

What to do ? Your Holy Quran is very clear I can be killed or should be killed, merely because I am a hindu. A muslim who does not kill me, an idol worshipping polytheist, is not doing his duty as per the Holy Quran and risks not getting an entrance into heaven.

So cant help obssessing about you people. I mean for god`s sake you lunatics want me dead.

zeemax #101 I really dont think we are comparing apples and oranges when we compare the creation of Pakistan vs the creation (or rather, non-creation) of Palestine. This has do with being practical - and nothing to do with grievances. Everyone has grievances. I have my grievances. You have grievances. The potted plant in my house has grievances.

The issue is being practical, getting the best deal you can get, and moving on. That is what Jinnah did in 1947. That is what Jinnah would have done if he had been the palestinian leader rather than these cuckoos they have who have for 50 years been trying to push israel into the sea without any clue to the consequences - and accomplished nothing in the meantime.

The issue is therefore not morality (and that issue is not black and white anyway, regardless of what one beleives. and after lobbing 1600 katyushas at israel, killing and kidnapping their border guards, at a time when israelies had unilaterally freed Gaza and was moving to free most of west bank, after sending other people`s children as suicide bombers while their own children sat in paris - as was the case with arafat - the palestinian leaders and hezbullah are hardly anyone to talk about morality).

The issue is that of being realistic.

And it is not realistic to say that Jinnah was outmaneuvered into accepting Pakistan, as you say. That is just bending common sense to make an argument. And you know....you and i are having a discussion among friends. Not an argument. :-)

O ye who believe! seek help with patient perseverance and prayer; for God is with those who patiently persevere. And say not of those who are slain in the way of God: ``They are dead.`` Nay, they are living, though ye perceive (it) not. Be sure We shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your toil), but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere, Who say, when afflicted with calamity: ``To God We belong, and to Him is our return``. They are those on whom (Descend) blessings from God, and Mercy, and they are the ones that receive guidance.

The Heifer 2:153 - 157