For the record few things get me so angry as the blinkered fools who think of the State of Israel as anything other than the murderous, fascistic, evil imperialist power which it is. I don't like getting involved in these political threads and I by and large let all those IRA debates wash over me rather than get all wriled up by them and saying something stupid.

I don't intend to let this one slide.

Irsael is illegally (under international law) occupying and settling the land which it robbed from Palestinians in 1948). The state of Israel has been imposing a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing for 51 years. The State of Israel allows it to be legal to torture and inter without trial Palestinians. The State of Israel bisects Palestinian enclaves and embargoes them all round with barbed wire to destroy the economy and make these communities commercially ruined. The State of Israel consistently breaks the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties with the willing help of the USA (also in violation of treaty). The same USA which conscistently vetos as a permament member of the UN Security Council every resolution which denounces the evil being perpetrated in that part of the world. As a non-American I can only conclude the American Jewish vote is bigger than the American Arab vote as there seems to be no sense of morality there.

BUT HERE'S WHAT GETS ME SOOOO VERY VERY ANGRY:

The only reason the state of Israel exists is because of the collective beneficient guilty consciences of the immediately post-war international community (especially in western Europe) which felt a great deal of shame and embarassment about the atrocities committed during Hitler's Third Reich and their relative inaction to prevent them. Yet Israel, a state which owes its political life to the international community seems to revel in a complete disregard for the international law and the western traditions of democracy and human rights which those nations thought they were fighting for from 39 to 45 and whom thought that they owed to the World's Jews.

I have lived in Palestine and as a Scottish guy who's parents are from Nationalist Derry and understands that situation well I can tell you all that was never anything done at Bloody Sunday or Loughall or Eniskillen or any of Ireland's "troubles" that come even remotely close to the organised, co-ordinated, state-sponsored evil brutaluity which is done every day in Ramallah and Hebron and other places.

I have seen mothers screaming as they hold dying children shot only a few years old shot by Israeli conscripts. I could give you chapter and verse accounts of gang-rapes, murders, tortures, murders perpetrated by Israeli soldiers. I don't intend to turn this little comment of mine into a series of anecdotal horror stories but the tradegy is these are not anecdotes, nor incidents, nor events, these are the realities of everyday life.

AND HERE'S THE OTHER THING THAT GETS ME SOOOOO VERY ANGRY:

This isn't like Northern Ireland, this isn't like the Spanish Civil War, this isn't like Vietnam. This is a subject which is open to neither debate nor discussion nor understanding. There are not however hard you try to look "two sides to the story" here. This is a very clear case of one lot of innocent humans being pretty much entirely in the right and another being pretty much entirely in the wrong. I say "pretty much" because when anyone lives ion a society like that it can make them do some pretty stupid things, and some pretty stupid things have been done on both sides.

I'm not a cheerleader for Hamas or Black September or the PLO. I'm not someone who is in favour by and large of the senseless and indescriminate (if only it was indiscriominate) waste of God's greatest achievement - our humanity. And it's for that very reason I pray every day that the international community organises itself to take a real stand for the innocent souls who die in the State of Israel every day.

I'm not here to start a debate, and I don't want to turn this into a long argumentative thread. I just wanted to say my piece.

I feel I am done.