Quote:
Originally Posted by DTorrchia
Hopeless? Hmmm, I've been to numerous Indian reservations in this country. Prior to the Casino surge, THOSE places looked hopeless to me. Yet somehow they've managed to work their issues out through the court system for the last 50+ years and haven't resorted to suicide bombings or rocket attacks on civilians to get their point across.
Coming to think of....maybe THAT'S the answer. Maybe the Palestinians just need a few Mega Casinos to turn things around!!!
As the other posters above have said, the Palestinians have had their chance. The King of Jordan reached out his hand to them and it's well documented what thanks he received in return.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan
The Lebanese reached out and look at the problems the Palestinians brought that country.
You can play them up to be the "poor victim" all you want but the fact is, they have had MANY chances over the years to get a place of their own. It is their own stubbornness, greed, infighting and allowing themselves to be manipulated by the various Arab and Persian powers that have gotten them to the place they are today.
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I think you're seeing things in my posts that aren't really there.
I never referred to the Palestinian Arabs as noble, virtuous, or "poor victims" compared to their conquerers.
I'm speaking of the real world here, not melodrama, or the kind of one-sided views the US media has generated here over the last fourty years.*
The Palestinians are just as imperfect as the Israelis, but it's the Israelis who are culpable of the particular crimes of using terror and force to remove someone from their homes so they could have them for their own country. That's all.
And frankly I wouldn't care anything about the topic if it weren't for the fact that American opinion has been distorted about the issue, and our interests in the region are horribly damaged by these misconceptions.
There is no parallel between the Palestinian Arabs and the natives of America.
Sorry to all the antropologists out there, but advanced cultures can actually be doing a favor to primative ones when they conquere them, and this is the reason why the European conquest of the native Americans is not generally viewed as malignant. Personally I wish the Europeans had never granted independence to any of the present countries of Africa, for example. Every country I've been to in Africa has people who would have been much better off governed by a colonial power than their own primative despots, for whom "might is right" is the only credo known in their primative societies. I don't care what anthropoligists claim, primative societies have no institutions or values which are equivalent to the European ideals of justice, compassion, and empathy to one's fellow man.
But Arab culture is by no means primative.
The Palestinian Arabs are far worse off living as third-class citizens in Hashimite-ruled Jordan, or Lebanon, or the refugee camps in Gaza or the west bank of the Jordan river.
They're a cultured though very imperfect people like ourselves, and they deserve to live out their very imperfect lives in the homes that were stolen from them.
*For the first twenty years of Israel's existence the US media was evenhanded, but that changed. As the Palestinian leadership embraced dramatic terror tactics in the 1970s US pundits forgot about Israeli terror and crimes completely and focused only on those of the Arabs.
