This is the Arab-Muslim mindset when it comes to negotiations - you get nothing, we get everything, if that’s not acceptable we fight. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat.
1. Speaking of Churchill, here's what he wrote in 1899 -
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
The fact that he even used the term "Mohhamedan" shows that he was completely clueless, and as Rabbi Slifkin shows, he would be clueless two decades later.
Charlie Hall, Mohamedan" or "Mohamadean" was the usual way to reference Muslims in the UK to not so long ago. See a few references in the hertz Chumash for example. It was still in use when I was in high school in London in the sixties. Although the history books were older, of course. It was never thought of as a pejorative even by Moslems back then.
It was not the usual way to refer to black people. (One of the usual, respectable words back was actually "African." There was the usual treadmill of political correctness over the next century to "Colored" to "Negro" to "black" and on and on, going back and forth a lot.) It was actually considered deeply offensive even in the slave-owning South. When Huckleberry Finn came out there was a huge outcry, not from black people, who were pretty much sidelined by then, but from proper whites who felt the constant use of "n-----s" was low-class. (Not racist- they couldn't have cared about that. Low-class.) Of course, that's the whole *point* of the book: Huck and pretty much every white character in the book are white trash. (And the blacks who use the word are low-class as well, of course.) That Huck rises above it to become close friends with an escaped slave is *the* major plot point.
In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara- a slave owner!- uses the word and immediately regrets it.
"Mohammedan" is *nothing* like that.
Back in the 1800's "Jew" became an offensive word and "Hebrew" was substituted. No one would ever use "Hebrew" today, but that doesn't mean someone using it in 1900 was an anti-Semite.
Provide some evidence that it has a slur aspect to it you're the only person I've ever seen bring it up as a negatory malevolent attribute as if anything to do with Islam has any positives but you're picking this mountain to dwell on as relevant when it's an interchangeable term
He could have used "mussulman" or "Turk". Had he lived another couple decades he would have offended you with the term "Moslem".
But, hell these people are not real muslims. They don't submit to שבע מצות בני נח, they cast off that (relatively) light yoke and instead follow the (alleged) teachings of Muhammad (who didn't live up to his name) who himself violated the שבע מצות בני נח.
They are thus Mohhamedans, they are not muslims. Calling them 'muslims' is either flattery or heresy. But it's certainly not clueless.
Please don't tell me that you're dismissing his entirely rational point just because he's using a word that was perfectly acceptable and widespread then, and shouldn't be all that offensive even today.
But hey, here's more classic Churchill:
"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."
The only real mistake there is that Gandhi was an *Inner* Temple lawyer. Considering Gandhi's, um, *complicated* attitude toward the Jews, I'm not willing to cut him much slack.
That word has never been acceptable any more than the N word has been acceptable to be used for Black people in the US.
Gandhi actively tried to sabotage the war effort against Nazi Germany and Japan. He deserves no slack. He had actually been marginalized during the 1930s and used the war to make himself relevant again. He is only revered today because he became a martyr. Bose was even worse, an actual collaborator. Churchill's portrayal of Nehru isn't particularly flattering either. The real sort of hero was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who did after some initial hesitation urge Muslims to volunteer to fight the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese. And they did so in droves, forming a disproportionate fraction of what became the largest all volunteer army in history. Unfortunately he died just a year after Pakistan happened; had he lived another decade that country might be in much better shape.
Churchill, of course, was even opposed to "Leghorn" becoming "Livorno." That doesn't mean he was prejudiced against, um, Ligurians.
There might be some other reasons Pakistan isn't in as good shape as India. Know what the two countries with *by far* the highest rates of cousin marriage in the world are? Hint: They're right next door to each other.
And much of Christianity was at the time ferociously resisting the strong arms of science, particularly in the UnitedStates (which Churchill also didn't understand). Some of our Rabbis are resisting science to this day.
You and Churchill don't appreciate the humongous influence that religiously conservative Protestant Christianity had and still has. Churchill didn't understand it either. He was very comfortable with patrician Anglicans like Franklin Roosevelt -- they would attend church together! Such conservative Protestantism isn't much of a thing in the UK except formerly in Wales and to this day in Northern Ireland (with bloody consequences in the latter).
Science in Christian countries flourished at the time, despite Christianity. Science in the Muslim countries died in the 12th century, and has never recovered since
That said, China had a chance to come back. China under Yuan and early Ming rule had dominated trade and economic life in general everywhere east of India and would replace any ruler that wasn't compliant, but in the 1420s the Ming Emperor decided to do a China First policy. It withdrew from the rest of the world even though it had the most powerful navy ever built, and it literally built a wall. Before then, (Comparisons to the US today are obvious.) By 1644 Chinese people weren't even ruling the country anymore. Oh, and the wall was easily breached -- someone on the inside opened the gates. Specifically, one side in a civil war asked outsiders to intervene against the other side. (Comparisons to how the Romans took over Eretz Yisrael are obvious.)
Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, famously remarked that he was willing to take a state “even if it's the size of a tablecloth.” The problem with the Palestine people is they want all or nothing. They are not willing to create a stated no matter how big or small. Their desire is to destroy a state first then think later, if at all.
"And they have repeated the same patterns of behavior."
And the Jews- who of course were also coming at this like good, liberal Europeans- not only made that initial mistake- mistakes, in fact- but have also kept repeating them for a hundred years.
The Divine Right of Kings Europeans had been doing that long before the liberal Europeans. They did so in order that they could stop massacring each other in the name of God to the tune of tens of millions.
Obama was rightly mocked he pushed back against criticism of Islamic terrorism because Europe "used to" have religious wars in the past also.
RIGHT NOW we are dealing with large parts of the Muslim world that are savage, barbaric, religiously fanatic, and that place zero value on human life. Nobody cares what Christian Europe was doing 300 years ago. Your knowledge of history is obscuring good judgement, not facilitating it.
No, it was civilized and advanced Europe that murdered six million Jews. The Muslim world was never civilized nor advanced, apart from some tiny windows in the Middle Ages in areas far from the Arab heartland.
Civilisation to rationalise and advanced technology were essential to execute the large scale murder. It was not in spite of, but the result of. All high ranking Nazis except the boss attended the finest protestant and catholic schools, they were smart people. Simple brutes end up getting tired of murdering.
By "liberal" of course I mean modern. Bear in mind that the pre-modern European monarchs had one big advantage: They were dealing with, well, other Europeans. The mistake was, and is, thinking that the rest of the world is the same.
You can't have it both ways. Right above you said they had *stopped* massacring each other. We are talking about the age of Zionism, not the Thirty Years' War.
I am all in favor of modern morality and international law. I am just not in favor of hamstringing myself with it when dealing with people who don't believe in it and use it only for their own purposes.
You are entering in the middle of a conversation. Nachum believes that we can follow Biblical morality as expressed in the Torah wrt the war with Midyan.
No, the ones to be admired are those whose strategy is "tit for tat". Not the ones who refuse to ever compromise, and also not the gullible ones who offer repeated concessions even when the other side is unwilling to make any concessions of its own.
Unlike the Zionists though, Churchill was a colonizer who was trying keep his empire from crumbling as it soon did. I'm not sure why the Arabs were wrong for resisting any compromise offered by him. The Jews certainly didn't want a compromise continuation of British rule. And if it was the Jews under GB who were being asked to allow Arab immigration for everyone's benefit, do you really think that they would have taken it? There are plenty of examples of Palestinian leadership making the awful decisions if their goal was as much sovereignty and prosperity that they could get (the launching of the second intifada being perhaps the worst of the bunch), but is Arab resistance to an actual colonial occupier really a good example of this?
The British weren't occupying anything, considering that the entire area had been Ottoman (not Arab) for four hundred continuous years right up until the British showed up, had not been under any sort of Arab rule for many centuries even before the Ottomans took over, and had never been under any sort of local Arab rule. Furthermore, the local Arabs never really tried to have an independent state until 1964. Why only then? Guess.
Your attempt to be dan l'chaf zechut of those who murder our babies with their bare hands is frankly shocking. Perhaps not surprising, but shocking.
I wrote "local" for a reason. The Arab Revolt took place in the Hejaz, not in Israel. And of course it was touched off by World War I, for European interests. (Heck, the *flag*- still in use, in one form or another, by a lot of Arab countries- was designed by a Brit.) I refer you to a little-known movie called "Lawrence of Arabia," which travels all over the Middle East *except* Israel, and is all about Western powers manipulating the Arabs (or not).
I don't know what "dan l'chaf zechut" you are talking about what relevance this has in any way. Nothing I said had anything to do with morality and changing your analysis based on who comes out looking good or bad is just intellectual dishonesty. I'm also doubly confused, because your position is that western morality is fake and we should to back to ancient morality with wars of genocide and enemies taken as slaves. If so, why would somehow be bad if the Arabs were intransigent and self-serving: that is exactly what they should to by your lights, not cater to some English niceties.
I believe G.od is on the side of justice, and that jews believing He was with them no matter what have been sorely disappointed countless times in Tanach alone.
Right, Amalek must be destroyed. Shaul HaMelech had mercy on their king and H' took the kingship from him. Sometimes mercy is not the answer and war is. H' is a God of mercy and war, not just mercy.
David & Charles always leaned to the left however much. You and Nachum always leaned to the right however much and weren't too keen on their (D's & C's) takes.
In the apolitical realm you liked his comments.
This would be similar to a Chareidi who likes posts here about politics but not about Chareidim.
2. As for the post itself, you are falling into the fallacy that Muslims are [prone to agrrements and treaties. Muslims never intend to sign a peace agrrement, and when forced to do so, never intend to keep it. It goes way back to Muhammad, that signed a peace agreement for 10 years, and then broke it two years later. Following his footstps, Muslims "sign" peace agreemts only when they are too weak to keep on fighting, and then break it when they think they are strong enough. That's how Arafat OCM explanied his willingnes to sign the accursed Oslo accords. Nobody in the Muslim leadership never intended to sign and come to an agreement, because Israel is dar-al-harb, meaning it was under muslim rule (following the 638 invssion), and therefore must be conqured again
The only reason is because the Turks lost World War I. I'm not sure why you feel a need to attribute our successes to people who had to be dragged into things and not, say, to the good guys.
What he didn't predict, and probably couldn't have foreseen, is that even 90 years after he began screaming about this most Israelis would still be living in denial as to the root of the problem - to the extent that many of them would be demonizing the only community that has been hard at work all these decades dealing with this problem.
So how to explain this mentality? A rational person would realize better to give up something to get something rather than give up nothing and get nothing.
הנחה שנייה היתה, כי קיים הבדל גדול בין המניעים שלנו למניעים של הערבים. אנחנו נלחמים על קיומנו והם נלחמים על כבודם בלבד, וברור שמלחמה על הקיום מבטיחה עוצמת יתר לעומת מי שנלחם על כבודו בלבד...במלחמה זאת נתגלתה אמת אכזרית, כי מלחמה על הכבוד אצל ערבים זהה לחלוטין למלחמת קיום אצלנו..
Today there are almost as many Palestinian births per year as Jewish births (in Israel) and it seems they hope to utilize the strategy of הפרד ומשול to supress Charedi fertility and win the demographic war.
I suggesr reading "The Iron Wall" by Jabotinsky. Of course the arabs did not believe they had any duty to relinquish what they considered already theirs, and the most extremist zionists knew it full well.
I'm happy we have a state, I dislike its policies. And yes, Jabotinsky was a respectable person, though extremist. Not like some actual fascists we have today in our own government.
As I said, though not a fan of his by any measure, I do not consider him a fascist, so I don't know why it would matter what others said back then in this conversation. Unless of course you do agree with them, which would be rather odd.
This is the Arab-Muslim mindset when it comes to negotiations - you get nothing, we get everything, if that’s not acceptable we fight. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat.
The "complex problem" is discussed countless times throughout Tanach. It can't be helped if one willfully refuses to see.
And hello to all those whose judaism never got more sophisticated than junior school
Sophisticated meaning what?
Meaning... they don't say (effectively), 'you see Joshua just killed them all? We should do that too.'
Then give me some unsophistication. They're usually the right ones.
Last week's parsha, for example.
1. Speaking of Churchill, here's what he wrote in 1899 -
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.
The fact that he even used the term "Mohhamedan" shows that he was completely clueless, and as Rabbi Slifkin shows, he would be clueless two decades later.
Charlie Hall, Mohamedan" or "Mohamadean" was the usual way to reference Muslims in the UK to not so long ago. See a few references in the hertz Chumash for example. It was still in use when I was in high school in London in the sixties. Although the history books were older, of course. It was never thought of as a pejorative even by Moslems back then.
And an N word was the usual way to reference Black people in the US. Doesn't make it right -- or inoffensive.
It was not the usual way to refer to black people. (One of the usual, respectable words back was actually "African." There was the usual treadmill of political correctness over the next century to "Colored" to "Negro" to "black" and on and on, going back and forth a lot.) It was actually considered deeply offensive even in the slave-owning South. When Huckleberry Finn came out there was a huge outcry, not from black people, who were pretty much sidelined by then, but from proper whites who felt the constant use of "n-----s" was low-class. (Not racist- they couldn't have cared about that. Low-class.) Of course, that's the whole *point* of the book: Huck and pretty much every white character in the book are white trash. (And the blacks who use the word are low-class as well, of course.) That Huck rises above it to become close friends with an escaped slave is *the* major plot point.
In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara- a slave owner!- uses the word and immediately regrets it.
"Mohammedan" is *nothing* like that.
Back in the 1800's "Jew" became an offensive word and "Hebrew" was substituted. No one would ever use "Hebrew" today, but that doesn't mean someone using it in 1900 was an anti-Semite.
Provide some evidence that it has a slur aspect to it you're the only person I've ever seen bring it up as a negatory malevolent attribute as if anything to do with Islam has any positives but you're picking this mountain to dwell on as relevant when it's an interchangeable term
Charlie, you are way off base. Think about the relationship bettween the UK and Arabs in WW1 before and after
And still today
He could have used "mussulman" or "Turk". Had he lived another couple decades he would have offended you with the term "Moslem".
But, hell these people are not real muslims. They don't submit to שבע מצות בני נח, they cast off that (relatively) light yoke and instead follow the (alleged) teachings of Muhammad (who didn't live up to his name) who himself violated the שבע מצות בני נח.
They are thus Mohhamedans, they are not muslims. Calling them 'muslims' is either flattery or heresy. But it's certainly not clueless.
Right, I forgot about "Turk." Or "Moor," for that matter.
I only became fully aware recently of the "Moslem" thing and since then have striven to use it. I never stopped writing "Koran."
"The Moslem World" was the first Islamic newspaper in America. The word was okay back in 1893.
he meant Muslims, and he wasn't clueless. He was 100% correct, understanding the Muslim much better than Western leaders today
Please don't tell me that you're dismissing his entirely rational point just because he's using a word that was perfectly acceptable and widespread then, and shouldn't be all that offensive even today.
But hey, here's more classic Churchill:
"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."
The only real mistake there is that Gandhi was an *Inner* Temple lawyer. Considering Gandhi's, um, *complicated* attitude toward the Jews, I'm not willing to cut him much slack.
That word has never been acceptable any more than the N word has been acceptable to be used for Black people in the US.
Gandhi actively tried to sabotage the war effort against Nazi Germany and Japan. He deserves no slack. He had actually been marginalized during the 1930s and used the war to make himself relevant again. He is only revered today because he became a martyr. Bose was even worse, an actual collaborator. Churchill's portrayal of Nehru isn't particularly flattering either. The real sort of hero was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who did after some initial hesitation urge Muslims to volunteer to fight the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese. And they did so in droves, forming a disproportionate fraction of what became the largest all volunteer army in history. Unfortunately he died just a year after Pakistan happened; had he lived another decade that country might be in much better shape.
Churchill, of course, was even opposed to "Leghorn" becoming "Livorno." That doesn't mean he was prejudiced against, um, Ligurians.
There might be some other reasons Pakistan isn't in as good shape as India. Know what the two countries with *by far* the highest rates of cousin marriage in the world are? Hint: They're right next door to each other.
And much of Christianity was at the time ferociously resisting the strong arms of science, particularly in the UnitedStates (which Churchill also didn't understand). Some of our Rabbis are resisting science to this day.
They weren't resisting science, *some* of them were resisting some scientific *theories*. There's a difference.
Churchill was actually quite an expert on the United States. He was in fact half American. A good portion of the Bronx is named for his family.
You and Churchill don't appreciate the humongous influence that religiously conservative Protestant Christianity had and still has. Churchill didn't understand it either. He was very comfortable with patrician Anglicans like Franklin Roosevelt -- they would attend church together! Such conservative Protestantism isn't much of a thing in the UK except formerly in Wales and to this day in Northern Ireland (with bloody consequences in the latter).
What, the Founders were religiously conservative Protestants? Who was? Not even the Confederate leaders were.
Churchill had a good solid appreciation of American history. He even wrote books on it. Won the Nobel Prize for them (among others).
Science in Christian countries flourished at the time, despite Christianity. Science in the Muslim countries died in the 12th century, and has never recovered since
I would say 13th century, with the Mongol terror. They did the same thing to China. Neither the Middle East nor China has really recovered.
The Mongols *ran* China.
They also never got close to, say, Morocco or Muslim Spain.
But yeah, it's always someone else's fault.
That said, China had a chance to come back. China under Yuan and early Ming rule had dominated trade and economic life in general everywhere east of India and would replace any ruler that wasn't compliant, but in the 1420s the Ming Emperor decided to do a China First policy. It withdrew from the rest of the world even though it had the most powerful navy ever built, and it literally built a wall. Before then, (Comparisons to the US today are obvious.) By 1644 Chinese people weren't even ruling the country anymore. Oh, and the wall was easily breached -- someone on the inside opened the gates. Specifically, one side in a civil war asked outsiders to intervene against the other side. (Comparisons to how the Romans took over Eretz Yisrael are obvious.)
Proving that intelligence is not always everything. :-)
Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, famously remarked that he was willing to take a state “even if it's the size of a tablecloth.” The problem with the Palestine people is they want all or nothing. They are not willing to create a stated no matter how big or small. Their desire is to destroy a state first then think later, if at all.
"And they have repeated the same patterns of behavior."
And the Jews- who of course were also coming at this like good, liberal Europeans- not only made that initial mistake- mistakes, in fact- but have also kept repeating them for a hundred years.
The Divine Right of Kings Europeans had been doing that long before the liberal Europeans. They did so in order that they could stop massacring each other in the name of God to the tune of tens of millions.
So you're defending primitive and brutal Arabs because Christian Europe was once primitive and brutal? Not quite following.
Christian Europe was more primitive and brutal than the Muslim world within the lifetimes of some folks who are reading this.
Untrue, and also irrelevant.
Obama was rightly mocked he pushed back against criticism of Islamic terrorism because Europe "used to" have religious wars in the past also.
RIGHT NOW we are dealing with large parts of the Muslim world that are savage, barbaric, religiously fanatic, and that place zero value on human life. Nobody cares what Christian Europe was doing 300 years ago. Your knowledge of history is obscuring good judgement, not facilitating it.
Shocking Holocaust Denial
No, it was civilized and advanced Europe that murdered six million Jews. The Muslim world was never civilized nor advanced, apart from some tiny windows in the Middle Ages in areas far from the Arab heartland.
Civilisation to rationalise and advanced technology were essential to execute the large scale murder. It was not in spite of, but the result of. All high ranking Nazis except the boss attended the finest protestant and catholic schools, they were smart people. Simple brutes end up getting tired of murdering.
Nowadays the Europeans don't need to murder. They can just watch.
They had been doing what?
By "liberal" of course I mean modern. Bear in mind that the pre-modern European monarchs had one big advantage: They were dealing with, well, other Europeans. The mistake was, and is, thinking that the rest of the world is the same.
The worst Christian vs. Christian genocides were in what is considered Early Modern Europe -- 16th and 17th centuries.
You can't have it both ways. Right above you said they had *stopped* massacring each other. We are talking about the age of Zionism, not the Thirty Years' War.
Meaning the (putative) Arabs in the post are the ones to be admired and emulated.
Why, because they're consistent in their evil? Consistency is not in and of itself a good thing.
Because they are (supposedly) consistent in jettisoning modern morality and international law which you yourself disdain.
I am all in favor of modern morality and international law. I am just not in favor of hamstringing myself with it when dealing with people who don't believe in it and use it only for their own purposes.
You're being silly. You know damn well what morality is and how inadequate international law (as interpreted by the power that be) is in upholding it.
You are entering in the middle of a conversation. Nachum believes that we can follow Biblical morality as expressed in the Torah wrt the war with Midyan.
He might not know either.
Emerson famously agreed.
No, the ones to be admired are those whose strategy is "tit for tat". Not the ones who refuse to ever compromise, and also not the gullible ones who offer repeated concessions even when the other side is unwilling to make any concessions of its own.
Unlike the Zionists though, Churchill was a colonizer who was trying keep his empire from crumbling as it soon did. I'm not sure why the Arabs were wrong for resisting any compromise offered by him. The Jews certainly didn't want a compromise continuation of British rule. And if it was the Jews under GB who were being asked to allow Arab immigration for everyone's benefit, do you really think that they would have taken it? There are plenty of examples of Palestinian leadership making the awful decisions if their goal was as much sovereignty and prosperity that they could get (the launching of the second intifada being perhaps the worst of the bunch), but is Arab resistance to an actual colonial occupier really a good example of this?
The British weren't occupying anything, considering that the entire area had been Ottoman (not Arab) for four hundred continuous years right up until the British showed up, had not been under any sort of Arab rule for many centuries even before the Ottomans took over, and had never been under any sort of local Arab rule. Furthermore, the local Arabs never really tried to have an independent state until 1964. Why only then? Guess.
Your attempt to be dan l'chaf zechut of those who murder our babies with their bare hands is frankly shocking. Perhaps not surprising, but shocking.
Huh? The Arab revolt started in 1916.
I wrote "local" for a reason. The Arab Revolt took place in the Hejaz, not in Israel. And of course it was touched off by World War I, for European interests. (Heck, the *flag*- still in use, in one form or another, by a lot of Arab countries- was designed by a Brit.) I refer you to a little-known movie called "Lawrence of Arabia," which travels all over the Middle East *except* Israel, and is all about Western powers manipulating the Arabs (or not).
And the term Palestinian a few years earlier.
Don't conflate premature nascence with ubiquity.
Not in reference to Arabs, who didn't adopt it until decades later.
Wrong. It was Arabs who created the term in late Ottoman times.
I don't know what "dan l'chaf zechut" you are talking about what relevance this has in any way. Nothing I said had anything to do with morality and changing your analysis based on who comes out looking good or bad is just intellectual dishonesty. I'm also doubly confused, because your position is that western morality is fake and we should to back to ancient morality with wars of genocide and enemies taken as slaves. If so, why would somehow be bad if the Arabs were intransigent and self-serving: that is exactly what they should to by your lights, not cater to some English niceties.
Except I believe that God is on my side. Who do you believe God sides with?
I believe G.od is on the side of justice, and that jews believing He was with them no matter what have been sorely disappointed countless times in Tanach alone.
Yup, justice for murdered babies.
Justice and vengeance are two very different things.
Right, Amalek must be destroyed. Shaul HaMelech had mercy on their king and H' took the kingship from him. Sometimes mercy is not the answer and war is. H' is a God of mercy and war, not just mercy.
And, of course, you know who Amalek is so you can decide genocides.
Amalek does not exist anymore as a people.
David & Charles always leaned to the left however much. You and Nachum always leaned to the right however much and weren't too keen on their (D's & C's) takes.
In the apolitical realm you liked his comments.
This would be similar to a Chareidi who likes posts here about politics but not about Chareidim.
2. As for the post itself, you are falling into the fallacy that Muslims are [prone to agrrements and treaties. Muslims never intend to sign a peace agrrement, and when forced to do so, never intend to keep it. It goes way back to Muhammad, that signed a peace agreement for 10 years, and then broke it two years later. Following his footstps, Muslims "sign" peace agreemts only when they are too weak to keep on fighting, and then break it when they think they are strong enough. That's how Arafat OCM explanied his willingnes to sign the accursed Oslo accords. Nobody in the Muslim leadership never intended to sign and come to an agreement, because Israel is dar-al-harb, meaning it was under muslim rule (following the 638 invssion), and therefore must be conqured again
The only reason that the Palestine Mandate could happen was that Kemal Atatürk approved the Treaty of Lausanne.
The only reason is because the Turks lost World War I. I'm not sure why you feel a need to attribute our successes to people who had to be dragged into things and not, say, to the good guys.
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
― George Orwell
The Turks may have "lost" WW1, but then rejected the Treaty of Sevres. They then won a war with Greece and played hardball at Lausanne.
Regardless, there was no way they were holding on to *anything* to their south.
They weren't interested in anything not having a Turkish population.
he wasn't muslim....
He was
There are theories. But regardless, he certainly wasn't very religious.
Thank you, Ribbono Shel Olam.
Now, if we had only not thrown back in His face the wonderful gifts He has given us on a silver platter multiple times over the last 75-80 years...
Who is "we"?
Queen Victoria.
Ben Gurion too predicted this.
https://www.academia.edu/12088627/David_Ben_Gurion_and_the_demographic_threat_His_Dualistic_Approach_to_Natalism_1936_1963
What he didn't predict, and probably couldn't have foreseen, is that even 90 years after he began screaming about this most Israelis would still be living in denial as to the root of the problem - to the extent that many of them would be demonizing the only community that has been hard at work all these decades dealing with this problem.
https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/gaza-wins-and-losses/comment/87182509
It is truly tragic.
So how to explain this mentality? A rational person would realize better to give up something to get something rather than give up nothing and get nothing.
Because you're thinking of "things" as land etc. But another huge "thing" is honor. Compromise is losing honor.
הנחה שנייה היתה, כי קיים הבדל גדול בין המניעים שלנו למניעים של הערבים. אנחנו נלחמים על קיומנו והם נלחמים על כבודם בלבד, וברור שמלחמה על הקיום מבטיחה עוצמת יתר לעומת מי שנלחם על כבודו בלבד...במלחמה זאת נתגלתה אמת אכזרית, כי מלחמה על הכבוד אצל ערבים זהה לחלוטין למלחמת קיום אצלנו..
-יהודה עמיטל ,תשל"ד
So he wanted to give them land so they would have their honor? One would think the best thing to do would be to deprive them of their honor.
If you read and listen to what they say (such as at Palquest - or this famous statement https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/383672-arafat-had-said-that-the-womb-of-the-palestinian-woman) their long-term plan was always to outbreed the Jews and thus delegitimize them. Ben Gurion realized this early on https://www.academia.edu/12088627/David_Ben_Gurion_and_the_demographic_threat_His_Dualistic_Approach_to_Natalism_1936_1963
If not for the Charedim they probably would have succeeded https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/gaza-wins-and-losses/comment/87182509 (though the collapse of the Soviet Union and the way the Muslim countries pushed the Jews to Israel also helped)
Today there are almost as many Palestinian births per year as Jewish births (in Israel) and it seems they hope to utilize the strategy of הפרד ומשול to supress Charedi fertility and win the demographic war.
I suggesr reading "The Iron Wall" by Jabotinsky. Of course the arabs did not believe they had any duty to relinquish what they considered already theirs, and the most extremist zionists knew it full well.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot
Good for the "extremists," then. Unless you never wanted a state.
I'm happy we have a state, I dislike its policies. And yes, Jabotinsky was a respectable person, though extremist. Not like some actual fascists we have today in our own government.
Oh, they called him fascist. They (in that case including Albert Einstein himself) called Begin a fascist.
So the likelihood is not that they were wrong back then, but that you are wrong today.
Fascism is not so clear-cut. People who called him a fascist back then could not fathom to what lows the far rights would steep later.
That's what you people always say. Some of us have memories, though.
As I said, though not a fan of his by any measure, I do not consider him a fascist, so I don't know why it would matter what others said back then in this conversation. Unless of course you do agree with them, which would be rather odd.