Saturday, February 6, 2010
Just saying. According to a new Pew poll [h/t: Citizen Wald], compared to other Arab populations, the number of Israeli Arabs who support Hamas or Hezbollah is lower...but "lower" is a relative term:
A survey conducted May 18 to June 16, 2009 by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project also finds limited support for the Lebanese Shia organization Hezbollah.1 While most Palestinians (61%) and about half of Jordanians (51%) have a favorable view of Hezbollah, elsewhere opinions are less positive, including Egypt (43%) and Lebanon (35%). As with many issues in Lebanon, views of Hezbollah are sharply divided along religious lines: nearly all of the country's Shia Muslims (97%) express a positive opinion of the organization, while only 18% of Christians and 2% of Sunni Muslims feel this way.
Meanwhile, Turks overwhelmingly reject both groups -- just 5% give Hamas a positive rating and only 3% say this about Hezbollah. There is also little support among Israel's Arab population for either Hamas (21% favorable) or Hezbollah (27%). Outside of the Middle East, many in Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria are unable to offer an opinion about these groups...
21%? I suppose you could describe that as "little"...if you wanted. Is it? So...about 1/5th of 1/5th of the population of a state supports the destruction of the state by an outside genocidal force. In American terms, that would be like 12 million people supporting Al Qaeda (and to get more of an equivalence, you have to imagine a far stronger more immediately threatening Al Qaeda, so there is in fact no exact corollary).
And yet they carry on with a vigorous, and often rancorous, democracy. Amazing.
Oh the Joys of Muliculturalism!
The great thing about this is that the Israeli Left can exploit this group, and champion their rights and interests, stoke their resentment via Leftwing media propaganda to gain power in Israel, and do damage to Israel and Israeli Jews.
Been happening for years.
Vietnam would be a corallary, where millions of Leftists (more than 20 % of the country) supported our enemies...and wanted the US to lose. Iraq would be the latest of that proud Leftist tradiition. They are now trying to turn from Afghanistan in the same manner, but have a bit of work to do, because they used Afghanistan as "the Good War" to hammer Iraq with. Also Obama and the Democrats were elected so, its much better not to stir bad feelings against them, while they do their domestic damage to the US.
Oh fer pete's sake EV.
You really don't get what Israel is about or for that matter - where it is - do you?
Let me spell it out: multiculturalism in Israel is not "leftist" it is inevitable given the mixture of peoples there.
This is not just the indigenous Arabs and Jews but the immigrants from all over the world who came to build the state and make aliyah - there are Jews from the Americas, Russia, Europe, all over the Middle East, Central Asia, Ethiopia, Yemen - even India.
The Arab population is similarly diverse - some are Palestinian, some are Druze, some are Bedouin, there are Circassians and other ethnic minorities; some are Muslim, some are Christian, and they are all over the economic map. Some serve in the army, some are doctors, some are farmers, same with the Israeli Jews.
Also, there are immigrants from Vietnam, refugees from the Sudan, there are Buddhists; the world headquarters of the Ba'hai is in Haifa.
I think this speaks well of Israel and the strength of its democracy and you are wrong to degrade the Israeli people or try to make the complexity and richness of its population out to be something bad.
After all - it's really a lot like America.