On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:07, sarah blum wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Wesley Parish wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:55, WEBMASTER wrote:
> > > Do Jews Have the Right to Live Anywhere?
> >
> > I've always supported Jews having the right to live anywhere they
> > choose. But that's not the issue in Palestine at the current moment.
> > That is about whether or not a migrant population has the right to
> > oppress the people already there, to the extent that they are denied the
> > right to freedom of movement, etc.
>
> Israel is small fish to fry and its transgressions miniscule in comparison
> to the British, the French, and especially the U.S. joined now by the
> Australians and not to forget the Poles, who hosted and operated most of
> the creamatorium. The New Zealanders are in there someplace too I'm sure.
> And of course Muslims killing Muslims is no small issue on the scale of
> crimes against humanity.
Post Second World War, the Allies, now self-titled the United Nations,
discovered that the rhetoric they had employed to oppose the Axis states, had
taken on a life of their own. The "darkies" were now claiming those
self-same rights of self-government and independence, freedom from
oppression, etc, that the United Nations had proclaimed as being rights due
one because of one's humanity, not because of secondary details such as level
of culture, etc. The Second World War was the direct cause of the Civil
Rights movement in America, after all.
And in the process, as more and more colonized nations became politically
independent, they put together a set of definitions of unacceptable
behaviour. One part of that became the "International Convention for the
Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid", where the prolongation
of inhuman conditions resulting from colonialism, was condemned as a crime
against humanity. The Apartheid Convention was about the prolongation of
colonial oppression, and doesn't cover the same field as the Racism
Convention, which is about racism in a metropolitan state.
The question about Israel is does a people who suffered greatly under racism
and religious bigotry, have the right to perpetrate a regime of colonial
oppression on a primarily rural population that had had nothing to do with
the racism and religious bigotry in Europe that sparked the original Zionism.
For that matter, the Europeans who depopulated Australia - a great number of
them were convicts sentenced to transportation for the crime of stealing
loaves of bread to get alive. Or they were Irish who were transported for
the "crime" of opposing the English domination of Ireland.
If the argument that I've met too often here is right, those convicts
(political and otherwise) were justified in exterminating the First
Australians, were justified in committing a two hundred year long genocide;
after all, the land was "unimproved", no one was cultivating the land, or
mining it, or ... whatever. I could go through each of the Zionist
justifications I have encountered and ask the question of whether or not the
British were equally justified in exterminating the Australians based on
those criteria.
I'm quite prepared to do so. The only response I think I will get is the
complaint that Israel isn't Australia, so therefore you can't compare the
expropriation of Palestinian land with the extermination of Australian
Aboriginals; think again - read what is happening in Gaza and look for what
is not being said. What is Gaza but a Reservation and Ghetto writ large?
>
> Sarah
<snip>
>
> ==================
> FIGHT THE RIGHT!
> ==================
--
Wesley Parish
* * *
Clinersterton beademung - in all of love. RIP James Blish
* * *
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."
-----
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