BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)

Subject: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: GUEST,Lorelei
Date: 16 Aug 01 - 07:54 PM

From the Washington Post

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: kendall
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 05:49 AM

It's interesting that he didn't mention Sheron going into a Muslim holy place knowing it would have serious repercussions. It's also interesting that there was no mention of the Israelis responding to thrown rocks with bullets. Far more Arabs have been killed than Israelis.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: GeorgeH
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 10:35 AM

If that bit of bigotry constitutes sense I'll stick with the general nonsense . .

George

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 11:04 AM

The Lorelei of the German saga is a beautiful woman with a deadly magic, a sure way to perish for everybody who listens to her.

A fine name for somebody who only wants to see a new pro-anti Israel flame war.

Come, follow me, come follow me, was her cry.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: M.Ted
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 11:17 AM

Good point, Wolfgang--very, very good point!!

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 11:40 AM

And here, I hope, is a song by Heinrich Heine about her.

I couldn't find an English transaltion on the net, French, Italian yes, but not English - but babelfish will give an idea of what the German means.

I can't think of any other freshwater mermaids.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 11:51 AM

Lorelei (with an English translation)

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: M.Ted
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 12:37 PM

I had been meaning to look this up--thank you for posting it!

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: catspaw49
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 12:42 PM

Thanks from me too.

Spaw

Subject: Israel
From: Joe Offer
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 01:01 PM

I think the Krauthammer article is frightening. All-out war against the Palestinians isn't the solution, but it seems that Sharon is seeking ways to justify doing just that. Peace is the only way to come to a lasting resolution of the problem. Israel needs a leader who has the courage to break the horrible cycle of retaliation.

I'll post the Krauthammer article here because links have a habit of disappearing.
-Joe Offer-

---

Mideast Violence: The Only Way Out

By Charles Krauthammer




Thursday, August 16, 2001; Page A25

This cannot go on.

Massacre at a Tel Aviv disco: 21 teens dead, dozens maimed and wounded. Mass murder at a Jerusalem pizzeria: 15 dead, more than 100 maimed and wounded. Suicide bombing at a Haifa cafe: 20 injured. Daily gunfire, drive-by shootings, mortar attacks. And endless incitement from the official Palestinian media, whose TV kids' show features the song, "When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber."

This cannot go on. No country can sustain what Israel is sustaining: one massacre of Columbine proportions after another.

The diplomats prattle about how there is no military solution to this conflict. Tell that to Yasser Arafat. He began this war a year ago after rejecting Israel's offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Why? Because with this terror campaign he intends to bring a bleeding, demoralized Israel to its knees, ready to surrender, the way it surrendered last year to Hezbollah when Israel unilaterally abandoned its Lebanese security zone in the face of guerrilla war.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is flailing about for a strategy. He has tried three. After the disco bombing he did nothing, hoping that world sympathy would bring outside pressure on Arafat to stop. Arafat's ensuing cease-fire was as worthless as the 68 cease-fires he signed while terrorizing Lebanon a quarter-century ago.

After the pizzeria massacre and cafe bombing, Sharon ordered brief, entirely bloodless incursions into PLO territory. A momentary pinprick.

And finally, he has ordered the deliberate targeting of those directing the terror campaign. But counterterrorism cannot stop the war. The war comes from the top. The relative calm that Arafat imposes when cornered or fearful, especially immediately after a terrorist attack, demonstrates (to even the most naive) who is running the show.

There is only one way this war will stop. The scenario would go like this:

A lightning and massive Israeli attack on every element of Arafat's police state infrastructure -- the headquarters and commanders of his eight(!) security services, his police stations, weapons depots, training camps, communications and propaganda facilities (radio, TV, government-controlled newspapers) -- with a simultaneous attack on the headquarters and leadership of Arafat's Hamas and Islamic Jihad allies.

Arafat has given Israel war; he will now receive it. He either flees (as he did Jordan when trying to overthrow King Hussein in 1970) or is deported back to Tunis (as he was from Lebanon in 1982).

Israel does not reoccupy Palestinian cities. Israeli troops stay only the few days necessary to (1) begin building a wall of separation between Palestinian and Israeli territory and (2) evacuate the more far-flung Israeli settlements.

With a new border consolidated, Israel withdraws.

In the current bloodshed, not a single suicide bomber has come from Gaza. Why? Because there already is a wall separating Gaza from Israel. Palestinians have lobbed mortars over it, but it is difficult to send suicide bombers through it. Such a wall built between the rest of Palestine and Israel is the only way to ensure the reduction of violence that everyone claims to want.

Strike and expel. Abandon settlements and consolidate lines. Build the wall. And then? And then wait.

Wait for a Palestinian generation that will sign a peace treaty that it intends to live by. That really accepts a Jewish state as its neighbor, that really forswears violence. These are all explicit, written promises given by Arafat at that lachrymose festival of deception and delusion, the Oslo peace signing on the White House lawn in September 1993. He violated every single one.

Israel might have to wait decades for a genuine "peace partner." When that day comes, the wall comes down and the New Middle East dawns. But until then, a lightning campaign to disarm the enemy and enforce separation is the only way.

Will Sharon do it? I am doubtful. His government still depends on the very Israeli left that trusted Arafat and brought Israel to its current crisis. But if he won't, then the next government will. There is no other way for Israel, short of national suicide.

The real question is: Will the Bush administration stand in the way of the only way out? The signs are not good. When Israel responded to the pizzeria massacre by taking over a few empty PLO buildings -- no injuries, no deaths -- the State Department denounced this as an Israeli "escalation." Imagine how panicked the State Department will be at the first sign of a serious Israeli attack.

For America, stopping Israel would be foolishness in the extreme. We have one overriding objective in the area: nonviolence. Washington has no idea how to get there. Israel does.

We must allow Israel to defeat terrorism. If we do not, we are sentencing the region to endless war -- and ourselves to endless crises.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense!
From: JenEllen
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 01:02 PM

Thanks Wolf, my thoughts precisely.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 17 Aug 01 - 01:41 PM

Cheering on the fighting from a safe distance is a bit sick, whether it's Ireland or Palestine or wherever. There's a time when it makes a lot of sense for outsiders to try to explain and discuss some horrible conflict. And sometimes on the Mudcat we have managed to do that, even about thgose two topicds.

But that's not what that article was doing. I think that, if we start off from that article at this time, we are rapidly going to descend into the kind of infighting we've sometimes had on the Mudcat about these things, and that won't help anybody.

As the saying goes, if you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem.

I think talking about the kind of sirens you don't get in a war zone makes more sense right now.here is another page I found about the one Heine wrote about, with another translation, and more about the young lady.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: M.Ted
Date: 18 Aug 01 - 12:57 PM

Joe, you did what I usually do, posting the actual article--I have to confess that I didn't do it here on purpose, because I was hoping this thread would quietly vanish--

I belong to a mail group that has spent the last two months discussing this issue, and has been nearly destroyed by the effort--I was hoping to avoid the virtual blood shed here.

I guess it was a bit naive to think that we could sidestep this discussion for the simple reason that the conflict is increasing in intensity on both side, and there is a good reason to believe that there are imminent plans for a military escalation--how could we not talk about it? How can we even set limits on the discussion?

I have great sympathy for both sides--How can we not care about Israel? we were taught to see Israel as the phoenix, sprung from the very real ashes of the Holocaust--but we never discussed the fact that, to create Israel, a whole population was disenfranchised and sent into exile--now we are compelled to discuss it, because they, and their descendents, remain disenfrachised, and in exile--

They idea that a decisive military action is possible is questionable, at best. A larger war would be almost inevitable, and it is unlikely that it would another "Seven Day War"--Iraq would play a central role, since the American embargo is not popular in the Middle East, and an act of war would make it easy for Islamic nations to open the doors to Iraq again--In exchange, the Iraqi rockets would again bombard Israel--

So let the discussion begin, as it will, and as it must--unfortunately, even Kevin McGrath, who is often acts both Mudcat's sage and it's conscience, has no clear bearing on this, and the dark clouds are only beginning to form--

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: Peter T.
Date: 18 Aug 01 - 01:26 PM

Please let this thread pass (just a request). Everyone else who would like to write "please don't keep this thread going" you don't have to, I have done it for you, so give us a break, and this will hopefully pass out of sight.

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 18 Aug 01 - 09:25 PM

It seems to me that this will be a rehash of previous threads. One comment only from me and I will post no more. The Palestinians are so frustrated by the loss of their land, with 2 1/2 million or so still in refugee camps, that suicide bombers consider their actions the only possible response. The United States supports Israel, and most of the rest of the world just looks on. Arafat and his people can do nothing to stop the violence perpetrated by people with no hope. Outside policing by the United Nations could be a help but it is doubtful that Israel would permit it.

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: GUEST,JB
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 01:59 PM

So, finally a man with sense!

What a load of crap!

Once again the history books are are obviously being ignored.

I would classify him as a mass murderer.

No wonder this guy has been listed as a wanted war criminal.

Take in him first, give him his fair trial and then maybe one can talk of peace.

JB

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: toadfrog
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 10:40 PM

HEY GUEST! WHETHER OR NOT I HAPPEN TO AGREE WITH YOU, I WOULD CLASSIFY YOU AS A GODDAMNED TROLL, TROUBLEMAKER, OR WHATEVER. WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE WHO WANT TO STIR UP FIGHTS ALWAYS CONCEAL THEIR IDENTITIES?

Subject: RE: BS: Finally, Someone with Sense! (RE: Israel)
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Aug 01 - 05:25 PM

Israel offering terrorism for terrorism

Tanks and missles for suicide bombers and stones. I pray for both sides.