First, Thanks for taking the time to answer my post Wc..

Bush has actually re-invigorated the Cold War...he ignores the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and threatens countries who don't have Nukes while he allows negotiation with those that do (ie. North Korea).

If you are not aware of how the Israeli government encourages and supports new construction in areas that are against agreements..and in the face of international opposition.

[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

Palestinians object to Israeli construction in east Jerusalem, pointing to the internationally backed "road map" peace plan, which is the basis of renewed negotiations agreed on at the Mideast summit last week in Annapolis, Md., sponsored by Bush.

The road map's first phase bans building in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said he sent an urgent message to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking her to block the new construction.

However, Israel contends that construction ban is irrelevant. "Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the road map does not apply to Jerusalem."

The road map says the status of Jerusalem should be negotiated in the final stage of the three-step plan.

The Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now charged in a report Tuesday that Israel is not enforcing its own construction laws in the West Bank. According to the report, only 107 illegal structures have been taken down in the settlements, though 3,449 demolition orders have been issued.

Besides the settlement construction freeze, the road map also requires Israel to remove dozens of unauthorized outposts in the West Bank and obligates the Palestinians to rein in militants who attack Israel. Neither side fulfilled the plan's initial requirements, stalling the 2003 plan.
~~snip~~

This is just an example...
[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset.

The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.

The difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for. The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of every administration since Harry Truman's Israel is “a democracy”, whatever that word has come to mean.
~~snip~~

There is a Palestinian side to this issue, and it comes from the way the State of Israel was formed and has been allowed to run rough shod over the people who lived there. Their form of government may be termed 'democratic' however, their laws and way of life are not 'equality for all'...

I understand that a lot of the conflict (not all by any means) is based in religious history and claims by all three of the religions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, maybe a better answer would be to make Jerusalem an international holy city...but much of the conflict is about territory and the way the Israeli government treats the people who live there and their land grab...we only get a portion of the picture in this country...

The best chance for peace was killed by a when Yizhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli religious fanatic.

My reference to first strike is amply illustrated by history and Israeli strikes on it's neighbors..and my reference to Bush was jr's strike on Iraq..we didn't strike Iraq during the 1st Bush.

I don't have hate issues around the neoconservatives..they are people who have waited in the wings waiting for their opportunity and they found it in 9/11 and we will be living with this tremendous mess for generations.

As I said AIPAC, neoconservative policy, the Bush administration all go together...along with all the supporting agencies...

This saber rattling, and school boy insults and threats of Bush's only empowers the opposition, and if he thinks he has escaped impeachment so far then he would be assured of impeachment if he attacks Iran...

In my view Bush is a chicken hawk...his administration is full of chicken hawks and if he had a pair he'd say or do something about China's refusal to let our ships into Hong Kong harbor...I'll be very glad when he and they are gone.

In regard to religion...all radical expressions of radical religion are dangerous to world peace...all of them.

KJ






KJ

So let me see if I have this straight. The United States has no right to exert influence on an ally, Israel, a sovereign nation, with regards to their policies regarding the Palestinians.
But we are expected to exert pressure on China, who no one would consider an ally, also a sovereign nation, about who or what they allow in their territorial waters?

Anyone see a problem with this logic?

I think you left out a lot there Ronno...the answer would be NO that's not what I said...

KJ

A sovereign nation? Maybe if you accept the UN as a legitimate conference of nations. It wasn't in 1947- Who held any real power besides the U.S. and Britain? Why we support a corrupt "ally" which is of no use or importance to us to the tune of some six billion dollars a year is beyond me. I believe that as more American citizens are made aware of what animals these people are, U.S. support for this little, illegitimate piece of #### "nation" will wane. Peace will return to the region and respect for America will become the norm.

hat title-deeds do the Jews of today actually have to the land of 'Israel'? The idea that a people can possess some kind of ethnic ancestral right to a territory supposedly vacated by their forebears some millenia previously, implying a right in perpetuity, can have no legal basis. Or otherwise Americans of European ancestry, to name just one group of people, will have to pack their bags. According to Dr Alfred Lilienthal in his book [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , "The Jewish population of Palestine [what is now Israel and the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza] at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was a mere 7 percent of the 700,000 inhabitants. The rest were Muslim and Christian Arabs. At the time of the (US-dominated UN) partition vote in 1947 there were only 650,000 Jews in Palestine while there were 1.3 million indigenous Palestinian Arabs, either Christian or Muslim. Under the partition plan, 56% of Palestine was given for a Zionist state to people who constituted 33% of the population and owned about 6% of the land. These UN figures have never been in dispute."
But there is a further issue, which also (yet again!) demonstrates the fundamentally questionable foundations of Zionism.
Jews are actually not even the modern descendents of the Israel of the Biblical Old Testament:
According to both the early-20th-century popular historian H.G.Wells and the Hungarian-Jewish intellectual and author Arthur Koestler, amongst numerous others, the people known today as Jews are primarily the descendents of a Turkish tribe known as the Khazars. The Khazars have no historical connection to Palestine. They converted to Judaism between 620 and 740AD, and have no genetic connection to biblical Israel, and hence to the narratives of the Bible and the "Holy Land". Koestler actually devoted an entire book called [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. (1976) to the fact that the Jews of eastern European origin, who are known as the Ashkenazi Jews and who make up about 95% of the Jewish population of today, are of Khazar origin. In other words — virtually all of the Jews of the modern world have no Hebrew ancestry, and no ancient connection with Palestine.

rx

Let's all be clear what we are talking about here.


[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. declared during a speech at Harvard in 1968 that: “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.

On April 3, 2006 the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. announced that anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism may often serve as camouflage for anti-Semitic bigotry on American college campuses.

In 2006, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , both of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , conducted a survey on the connection between radical anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism in Europe. The study was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in August of the same year. The authors’ overall conclusion is that evidence of anti-Israeli sentiment can consistently predict the probability that an individual is antisemitic with a direct correlation between the extent of the anti-Israeli sentiment with the probable measure of antisemitism. They conclude that severe criticism of Israel does make it reasonable for the question to be raised of said criticism is actually masking an underlying anti-Semitism.

M.L. King was entitled to be mistaken now and then. After all he was a human being and not God...

The term "anti-semitic" is used by some people as synonymous
with "anti-Israeli". This is a typically Zionist smear tactic to brand
all criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. This should not prevent us
from criticising Israel, which richly deserves criticism, or rather,
condemnation, in the strongest possible terms, for its outrageous
and immoral treatment of the Palestinians and for its pernicious
influence on U.S. government and society. Only a coward would
refrain from criticising Israel because of fear of being labelled
"anti-semitic".
rx

"Hiel Hitler"

“And I will bless those that bless you and curse the one who curses you. And in you shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

You're in way, way over your head here, Jam
Jews are actually not even the modern descendents of the Israel of the Biblical Old Testament:
According to both the early-20th-century popular historian H.G.Wells and the Hungarian-Jewish intellectual and author Arthur Koestler, amongst numerous others, the people known today as Jews are primarily the descendents of a Turkish tribe known as the Khazars. The Khazars have no historical connection to Palestine. They converted to Judaism between 620 and 740AD, and have no genetic connection to biblical Israel, and hence to the narratives of the Bible and the "Holy Land". Koestler actually devoted an entire book called [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. (1976) to the fact that the Jews of eastern European origin, who are known as the Ashkenazi Jews and who make up about 95% of the Jewish population of today, are of Khazar origin. In other words — virtually all of the Jews of the modern world have no Hebrew ancestry, and no ancient connection with Palestine.

rx

Looks like I'm going to have to take 'your' blessing!' Dont know how your life is going (?), but mine's doing great!! Blessed going in & coming out, blessed in the city & in the country, blessed in all that I put my hands to, ...etc.