"sophomoric know-it-all who has all the answers and thinks me The Enemy"
Joe
I was born almost exactly six months before the secret Wannsee Conference took place, where the Nazis first sat down and carefully planned the murders of up to and probably more than ten million human beings (we tend only to remember six million of them nowadays)
The events coming from that conference affected my and my family's lives - for me, it meant I didn't get to know the man who was the greatest and most important influence on my life and thinking until I was about ten years old - my father.
He and his parents cared enough about their fellow human beings to take to the streets when they learned what was happening in 1930s Germany, he went to Spain because of those events, was wounded, captured and persecuted and mentally tortured for the period of his captivity
When he returned home, he found himself with an MI5 record as a "premature anti-fascist", blacklisted from a promising career and condemned to Eternal Damnation by his/your Church (luckily, he had shaken off the spiritual bogeymen that your church had saddled him with in his youth)
He passed on to me in the 15 years I knew him up to his death, a deep concern about how human beings treat each other.
The events of Europe in the 1930s and 40s have formed a large part of my thinking throughout my life, and were added to by the Jewish People I knew and befriended in the four years I lived in Manchester
You came back from Israel with and anodyne picture of what was happening in Israel, berating us for not having been there and telling us we would like it if we went - completely at odds with my own interpretation of the events there.
You have been both dismissive of those who didn't accept your rose-tinted picture and abusive towards the arguments we have put forward, refusing to respond to any of them - you still haven't done so.
You complain about being abused, yet you have done your share of abusing.
You moved gradually from your rosy, uncritical picture of Israel, to fence-sitting and now you appear to be edging into maybe a rational discussion (nobody is asking for surrender - just an exchange of ideas and experiences)
Your complaining about being whacked by both sides is, in my opinion, the result of your shifting position - unfortunately that's the way arguments are conducted on this forum (guilty as charged on that one)
What concerned me most is that someone who I respect (while disagreeing with strongly on some subjects) took the position you did on so obvious (to me anyway) a massive abuse of humanity - a repetition of history where the victims have become the perpetrators.
I apologise if I have overstated my case - put it down to a poor upbringing - but please don't reduce my concern for something that has occupied a large part of my life and thinking to an academic study ("some sophomoric know-it-all")
It's a little more than that, to me anyway
Jim Carroll