That's what they Believe: I cannot Believe It!
I was trying to explain to supposedly well exposed and well knowledgeble people form the US the Lebanon perspective of the situation from under fire. At first, I thought they were not well aware of the conflict. Instead, I realized that by complaining, I was attacking their well rooted beliefs. An American might not know the name of his president, but he/she knows Israel. After a while, one realizes that this struggle is not merely between Right and Wrong. Someone (Zionists) are incredibly capable of camouflge.
I'm not sure how many American share the views of this particular American, but I have reason to doubt there are plenty of ignorance, and those ignorant "folks" have no reason to doubt or to question their beliefs.
This is a summary of the beliefs based on real quotes (Read More).
I'm not sure how many American share the views of this particular American, but I have reason to doubt there are plenty of ignorance, and those ignorant "folks" have no reason to doubt or to question their beliefs.
This is a summary of the beliefs based on real quotes (Read More).
posted by Fadi @ 9:17 PM
12 Comments:
Enriqueta,
We cannot deal with present suffering without addressing past injustice. Tis also better to learn one's own history before asking others to forget theirs.
May I recommend the following for your reading pleasure:
"Thy Will Be Done", The Conquest of the Amazon, by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett ...
Charlotte is an old Daily Star hand from the way back and I think you might want to puzzle on some of what the book has to say before you begin commenting on the injustices perpetrated in the name of religion ... Just a recommendation ...
Here is a short synopsis:
http://www.cephas-library.com/church_n_state_rockefeller_and_evangelism.html
"Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?" Matthew 7:3
Dear Enriqueta,
These are not my words. These are the words I received, especially : can't israel by judged on higher standard.
I am as confused as you are. I was just trying to relay the kinds of comments I receive from well informed or moral people for the US. This is not a call of hatred, just a recount of the allegations some people profoundly believe in. This is not a matter of preconception, or of ignorance,it's more into blind fanaticism from all sides. There seems to be no common ground, even a moral ground to start with. That's exactly what I'm trying to say, we stand on completely opposite sides that no common grounds are found. I can spell this out over this blog, I've been into chats and arguments with several israelis who are profoundly more in touch with reality than with people who sit three oceans away passing judgments, and while they do that, they affect other people's lives.
Fadi,
My comment was not directed to your post (which I found a bit difficult to understand syntactically), but rather Enriqueta's comment and some of the postings on her blog ...
"Maybe though we could as we do in the states have enough common respect to hold back on the bombing and killing randomly.."
did i read you correctly?
"maybe you would like to help the lebononese or your fellow citizen in America begin interfaith dilougues."
!!!
E, my dear, do you live on the moon?
"Hope the kids of the future and there peers some day might make better choices?"
honey, we are the children of 1978-2000, we were ready to forget because we don't want to keep going back in history FOREVER like you say, and now what?
"Extemism is never going away on any side"
that's just not true. extreme reactions either come out in result of extreme immediate injustice (http://lebanonheartblogs.blogspot.com/2006/08/israeli-apartheid-striking-parallels.html) or is the result of mere racism and hate (which is not the case for HA, maybe for Israel it is and hence the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and in the south).
i don't know how i go on arguing. i don't know how anyone could still argue knowing, and have seeing, the consistent pattern of israel's aggression and injustice.
you've been hanging out on this blog for a while as you say, forget about our own perspective, if you have read some of the articles, quotes from the mouths of israeli generals and leaders that directly condemn them and that show that this is about greed and expansion, that the arabic leaders in many instances in the past did not even want to go to war with israel, that israel is the aggressor, you would by now change your tone a little bit. though the voice of moderation as you claim, you haven't.
do you really ask a child who lost his whole family in the war to be open-minded?
do you want to say with full conviction that if what was done to lebanon, was done to israel, israel would forgive?
israel claims that lebanon needs to be punished because its south is occupied by its people, pretty much. people who should not have reacted to the israeli occupation of lebanon. so israel should occupy our land and not us.. basically.. you know.. kinda like Gaza and the ghettos here and there in the west bank wherever there's no jewish only settlement.
we're asked to forgive as we're being bombed and the palestinians killed, kidnapped, tortured and bombed, while they haven't forgotten the holocaust that somebody else did to them.
israel is like an severely abusive step-father who claims that he's justified because when young his uncle abused him.
Enriqueta,
This will sound rude, so I apologize, BUT:
I second and third almost everything Mirvat said and would add that neither the Lebanese nor anyone in the Middle East need lessons from the United States or anyone else about co-existence, tolerance or moderation.
Your calls for "moderation" are patently offensive and borderline racist. I encourage you and your circle of influence to learn more about the history of the societies where you are operating. Otherwise I fear you are a bit like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Freedom of religion and conscience are also great ideas, but few in the world live on some Aristolean plane or in some American suburb, instead we live in a world where religions often serve as the spear-carrier for the advance of empire and grist for the mill of political upheaval.
I would not come into your house and tell you to change your behavior. No, instead, if I was motivated by humility and charity, I would wait to be invited in and asked to help. Even then, my first instinct would be to learn why things are as they are before I begin to compare your situation with mine and offer advice or criticism.
I am glad you are involved in helping innocents, but calls for interfaith dialogue are arrogant, ignorant and disrepectful in the extreme. If you are truly interested in "dialogue," I recommend some time at the library so that you can learn about the peoples you say you care so deeply about.
Otherwise, your "sympathy" for the Lebanese is condescending and shallow to the extreme and seems born of some selfish psychic need rather than the selfless love of the other.
And again, I apologize for my rude tone.
PS: You seem a person of good will, so I propose that you use your energies, talents and sympathies to ensure that your government(s) is/are not supporting policies that place the societies you say care so much about under siege. Such efforts would contribute to the "moderation" you seek.
>>that's just not true. extreme reactions either come out in result of extreme immediate injustice (http://lebanonheartblogs.blogspot.com/2006/08/israeli-apartheid-striking-parallels.html) or is the result of mere racism and hate (which is not the case for HA, maybe for Israel it is and hence the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and in the south).<<<
So, just to be clear about this, Hassan Nasrallah did not say:
"If the Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide", as reported in the New York Times, May 23, 2004, p.15, Section 2, column 1?
And Hassan Ezzedine did not declare that Hezbollah's goal has nothing to do with Sheba'a but is to "liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine" and that Jews "could go back to Germany or wherever they came from", as reported in the New Yorker on October 14, 2002?
Did we all just imagine Nasrallah's apology for the death of two Israeli Arab children, clearly saying that his only intention was to kill jews?
Or is it just that in your world none of that is racist, or extremist?
For anyone wondering why arab arguments get short shrift in America, there's your answer. Too many of you argue like this. Too many of you use clearly inapplicable hyperbole ("ethnic cleansing in gaza"??!! There are more Palestinians in Gaza now than 10 years ago, and if Israel's goal was "ethnic cleansing" then - at the rate Palestinians are dying - they will reach that goal sometime the next millenium [but only if the palestinian birthrate drops dramatically]). Too many of you refuse to criticize the murderous thugs who annoint themselves your defenders. Too many of you are willing to riot when a newspaper prints cartoons of Mohammed, but stay utterly silent when Muslims kill each other in Iraq or Arabs engage in true ethnic cleansing in the Sudan.
And this has the cumulative effect of making it very hard to take your claims seriously, staggering as they are under the weight of all of the nonsense and hypocrisy you yourselves have loaded upon them.
This war was a pointless and bloody mistake by Israel, not because they began it, but because they refused to truly fight it, to engage in a massive ground assault from far earlier in the war, which would have meant more Israelis dying but fewer Lebanese civillian deaths, and would have given them a real chance to damage Hezbollah, instead of just Lebanon.
But you know what? Hezbollah was launching rockets at civillian towns, announcing that it was doing it on purpose, and loading the warheads with shrapnel to maximize civillian deaths. But people like Mirvat still can't muster the decency to criticize them, to consider that maybe there is a real problem with Hezbollah.
You know whose arguments I pay attention to? Ramzi's. Ash's. Raja, over at the lebanese bloggers. Sandmonkey. Loli. Mustapha. Firas. And others like them.
The people who have demonstrated that they are actually willing to apply what they demand of others to themselves, the ones who when they speak I can see the logic of their thought process, even if I don't agree with it, the ones who take the time to avoid hyperbole and propaganda, and actually have reasonable and reasoned discussions (though Mustapha's Litani conspiracy theories were a bit much).
But the "Israel is always the aggressor [even if arab armies/militias attacked first, because, well, the Israelis were going to attack anyway and they just want more land]" crowd? Just so much empty air whistling by - for me, and for many Americans.
"If Americans knew"? Americans know; they just can tell the difference between propaganda and argument.
Anny,
He does represent Americans either ... At least not ones who actually read what has been written by Israeli journalists and historians ...
in response to Akiva, I like to quote Arundhati Roy (Come September) describing the sheer racism that the palestinian people are subjected to:
"In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said, “What are Palestinians? When I came here [to Palestine] there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts". Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them “grasshoppers" who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people."
and of course more was said since then, so do you think Arabs would take it on the chin, or "make a real effort not to exist"...
Akiva, I wonder wether you listen to those people who you elected to represent you, or wether they do represent you indeed...
akiva, read my reply to Jenny's comment on the post 'how should you talk to your friends about israel' that's in response to your extremism accusation, as for the racism part gus covered that.
there's a severe reversal of cause and effect in your logic, "But the "Israel is always the aggressor [even if arab armies/militias attacked first, because, well, the Israelis were going to attack anyway and they just want more land]"
read this:
from Alan Hart's artice, "The Lebanon War, a Post-Mortem Israeli Militarism and the Necessity of a One-State Solution"
"In conversation with Israel's three most important ambassadors to the West, Dayan explained why he was totally opposed - whatever the pressure from the West - to the idea that Israel should abandon its policy of reprisal attacks. They were, he said, "a life drug." What he meant, he also explained, was that reprisal attacks enabled the Israeli government "to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army.
Put another way, what Dayan really feared was the truth. He knew, as all of Israel's leaders knew, that Israel's existence was not in danger from any combination of Arab forces. And that was the truth which had to be kept from the Jews of Israel. Dayan's fear was that if they became aware of it, they might insist on peace on terms the Arab regimes could accept but which were not acceptable to Zionism. Among those present when Dayan explained the need for Israeli reprisal attacks as a "life drug" was the Foreign Ministry's Gideon Rafael. He reported what Dayan told the ambassadors to Prime Minister Moshe Sharret-in my view, and with the arguable exception of Yitzhak Rabin, the only completely rational prime minister Israel has ever had. And we know from Sharret's diaries what Rafael then said to him: "This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!"
And this is regarding the only war where the arabs were accused of being on the offensive. you know the rest, you know the endless excuses on the part of israel that paved the way for others wars.
you claim israel does not intend to expand when Netanyahu speaks against what you say, read his plan in 1996 for the 'New Middle East' he describes very well the intentions of the israeli government to expand its wars.
To criticize nasrallah would be like criticizing mandela, mandela had to resort to violence eventually in reponse to a regime very much like yours. yes it's not about shabaa, it's about palestine. the roots of the problem have to be addressed.
i do not follow double standards and i do want what for the others what i want for myself and accordingly,
i do not wish for the jews to live, as the muslems do now, persecuted in the world because of the zionist-funded propaganda.
i do not wish for the jews to be expelled of a land which they loved, cultivated, shared with neighbors and with other cultures, where they lived in peace and never hurt anyone.
i do not wish for the jews to be bulldozed, bombed, starved, humiliated, thrown in jails, terrorized every day, shot at, hacing rocks thrown at them by settlers, being subjected to the most dehumanizing insults and conditions.
do you also not wish all this for us? well do something about it then because 'as you claim you know' it is happening.
I second anny with the fact that the lebanese bloggers do not represent lebanese people, not even a minority of us.
israeli pretty much said in response to the civilian casualties in lebanon, well it's war.. deal with it.. halotz said the lebanese population will be severely punished, ramon asked for the south to be turned to a sandbox. the ambassador to the UN said, every child who will sleep in a house knowing that there is a weapon in the next room, might as well not wake up. your rabbis said it's ok to kill women and children in this time of war. and you focus on nasrallah's lack of sympathy to the dead in noth israel.
you know what.. at least we don't insult you with our fake sympathy.
and saying that we spread propaganda is just ridiculous and silly...
"the behavior of man who is today is moving to push men and women of faith who do not believe in his out of there homes with threats of death."
who is telling these things e?
gosudarynya, thank you for your comment, don't worry nobody is falling for the american propaganda and the neocons' agenda is pretty well understood by now even among many americans.
the opinion of the vast majority of lebanese is reflected on this site.
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