Wednesday, May 12, 2010
You gotta be kidding: Israel marks 43-year rule of Arab east Jerusalem. Who's writing this stuff, Hassan Nasrallah?
The sunset-to-sunset Jerusalem Day celebrations kick off with an open-air concert by US funk band Kool and the Gang and feature a ceremony at Ammunition Hill, the site of one of Israel's fiercest battles with Jordanian forces...
Kool and the Gang! Groovy! AFP might want to note that "East" Jerusalem only became "Arab" through the ethnic cleansing of its Jews by the Jordanians with the liberal application of dynamite and bullets. Sure, but it's the Jooos that are making a major hurdle to peace.
Good posts on the subject by Omri and Elder.
Fortunately, someone in Israel knows which way is up: Netanyahu: We will never divide J'lem
Excellent post on the day from Robert Avrech: Jerusalem, Eternal and United
Meanwhile, A.I. decries the horrendous treatment of treasonous spies. Glad I finally got that logo off my car...
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100512/twl-amnesty-tells-israel-to-stop-harassi-3cd7efd.html
Talk about Big Lies...
Old City's Wailing Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism.
Just curious, what could they possibly think of as other "holiest sites"? Rothschild & Sons investment bank, perhaps?
Come on Sophia, get away from those polarizing wings and get back to the center, where moral and cultural equivalence dictates that you equally weigh the ravings of hatefilled leftwingers and genocidal Muslims, with the state of Israel. Truth doesnt matter, only balance. Dont be so divisive.
A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
City Journal
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
EV, truth doesn't have a wing.
The facts are the facts. Therefore the phrase "Arab East Jerusalem" constitutes a prejudicial stance that doesn't take history a recent as 1948 into account.
I'm sure you're aware of this. I'm not on the wings here, AFP is.
So why are you busting my chops here?
On the other hand - given that neighborhoods, Arab and Jewish are intertwined throughout Jerusalem and some are very old Arab neighborhoods and much of the Eastern sector of Jerusalem is majority Arab, and that Jerusalem is a hot button issue in terms of peacemaking, I think some realism on the part of Israeli policy makers would be advantageous.
I also think it would be wise to avoid needlessly provocative gestures as well as harming Arab residents and citizens.
That's just common sense isn't it?
Meanwhile though I think Olmert offered some of Jerusalem to Abbas so the Palestinians could have a capitol there and he was refused - hasn't this also been part of other peace offers, also refused?
Ev the article on the Soviet archives is interesting, not least because of what it says about certain Brits but also, because of Soviet manipulations in the Middle East and the long history of Russian antisemitism, all of which continue to affect the Middle East today.
People should study this more.
Sophia, some people have been aware of these things for ages. Just because Leftwingers despise the truth, doesnt mean that meeting them in the middle is desireable. I stand with the truth. If that is divisive and polarizing, then so be it.
Xerxes: There will be no glory in your sacrifice. I will erase even the memory of Sparta from the histories! Every piece of Greek parchment shall be burned. Every Greek historian, and every scribe shall have their eyes pulled out, and their tongues cut from their mouths. Why, uttering the very name of Sparta, or Leonidas, will be punishable by death! The world will never know you existed at all!
King Leonidas: The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, even a god-king can bleed.
Provocative gestures like rebuilding the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City, replacing the centuries-old one destroyed by the Jordanians, along with many other Old City synagogues and desecrations of Jewish graves and other atrocities and ethnic cleansing. They really got their panties in a twist over the dedication of the new Hurva, a low-key event that should have been celebrated by Jews the world over, calling it a provocation.
Or the provocative gesture of planning additional apartments in the overcrowded Jewish neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, near the grave of Shlomo haTzadik.
The reality is there is only one Jerusalem, not an East Jerusalem and a West Jerusalem. And it's only since Jordan's 19-year illegal occupation of the eastern Jerusalem ended that people of all faiths have access to their holy sites.
There will be no peace until the Arabs accept the facts: Israel is a Jewish state, established by the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. The State of Israel exists as a matter of historic justice. It is there by right, not out of expiation of (White Christian) European guilt for the Shoah and not out of indulgence or forbearance by the Arabs. Jews are inidigenous to the land of Israel and have lived there continuously for millenia and have been the majority in Jerusalem for 150 years. During their diaspora, they never lost their attachment and sense of national connection to their land.
Until then, the Arabs and their allies in Europe, and unforunately, in the White House, recognize those facts and state them in plain, unequivocal language in both English and Arabic, there is nothing that Israel can or should do by way of further pointless, fruitless gestures for peace or confidence-building measures. Nothing. Period. Full stop.
Once they recognize the facts and accept Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, then, and only then, does it begin to make sense to talk about sharing arrangements or joint administration of parts of certain Jerusalem neighborhoods. Only after they accept the reality of the Jewish Palestinian state of Israel does it make sense to talk about borders and land swaps with a possible, future, demilitarized Arab Palestinian state.
Nappy I'm not talking about Hurva.
I'm talking about things like this:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/washington-diarist-mean-streets
Please read the whole piece.
Or building an Islamic Cultural Center on Ground Zero, Nappy.
Rejecting a Toothless Dialogue aka Dialogue My Foot
Today, we Christians must take note that many of the public dialogue forums held worldwide, in which “commonalities,” “solidarity” and “cooperation” are invoked, have not contributed to a better understanding of the Christian faith. In publications from Islamic countries, in concord with Islamic source texts, Christians are still condemned as “polytheists” or “infidels.” The Christian belief in the most sacred Trinity is misrepresented. We Christians believe in Father, Son and Holy Ghost, not in Allah, Isa and Maryam!
We Christians are not “people of the Book.” We are “people of Jesus Christ.”
We think of ourselves as “Christianoi” — “those who belong to the Messiah, as it was expressed for the first time in Syrian Antioch in the time of St. Peter, the first of the apostles.
There must be no Islamic prerogative of interpretation about the Christian faith. It would dramatically contradict the basic principles of dialogue as just delineated.
It is even more destructive when one partner to the dialogue is deemed unworthy of protection as a person or a subject in a common regime. This point is mostly omitted, but it cannot be denied that such an attitude is set down in numerous
Koranic verses.
snip
To this day, Muslims have not distanced themselves from such Koranic statements in any conference I know of.
We are also quite far from the second possible goal of the dialogue.
One could also set a more modest goal for the dialogue. “The path is the goal” is a not-infrequent stylish motto. If at the time a goal of perception cannot be realized, the dialogue is justified by the fact that people are dealing peacefully with one another as long as they are speaking and abjure violence as long as they are sitting together at the conference table.
But even this hope proves deceptive.
As we are speaking of dialogue here, Christians are being persecuted for their beliefs in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia, the lands of the Arabian Peninsula and many other countries. Muslims are emboldened to overreaching violence by calling upon the authority of their sacred writings.
snip
This problem brings us to our third question, about the partners to this dialogue. The question can be formulated differently. Who speaks for whom and with what authority and degree of representation? And who distances himself from what and with what responsibility and gravity? What Islamic dignitary has rejected the demand of head-of-state Gadhaffi that all Muslims enter into jihad against Switzerland? How does it happen that in the parliament of EU candidate country, Turkey, Christians are called “infidels” and in Turkish religious publications Christians are described as second-class human beings? What sense does it make to speak about dialogue with representatives of Al-Azhar University in Cairo who, on other occasions, describe terror attacks as justified self-defense?
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2010/05/rejecting-toothless-dialogue.html#readfurther