Middle Eastern Racism

Pronounced Hair-Ron

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Yikes, no. But two friends of mine in the throes of a spectacular mid-life crisis are traversing the Sahara in a Tesla as we speak and have sent me very detailed reports from the country, confirming what pretty much everyone knows - that Mauritania is one the world’s worst shitholes.

But it’s pretty much what I could have imagined - Saudi Arabia without the oil.

Man, I’m pro-Israel but saying “peace is easy” is definitely not the case. I’ve just elaborated why Palestinians are fucked - John Dolan five years back brutally outlined the unpleasant truth why “peace isn’t within reach”

Gaza is a place that’s basically been driven insane. Imagine a strip of land about 20 miles long and five miles wide, with the sea on one side and the IDF on the other, with 1.7 million people festering in some of the world’s nastiest tenements, with no entertainment except the dream of getting a little payback on the people keeping you penned up.

And when Hamas sends a volley of these useless rockets, the IDF responds with very advanced, very lethal guided weaponry. So Israel wins? No, not at all. This is a new kind of war. We aren’t talking about Stalingrad here. This is something new. If Israel used everything it has, well
remember, Israel is supposed to have about 200 nukes. They could wipe Gaza out. They won’t. What they’ll keep doing is sticking pins in Gaza, driving them more and more insane, making sure these people have nothing to do except have lots of babies whose big ambition is to be a martyr for Hamas.

When your only requirements to having peace, a country and home to call your own and money on the ready to flood into your new country as a reward; is simply to recognize the existence of a place, in this case Israel, and renounce violence towards it and you cannot do that? My sympathies run thin. That is all that is required of the Palestinians. That has been the case for some 30-40 years. Renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Sorry, that’s pretty simple. You got to just be overrun with hate not to accept such simple terms.
Imagine if that’s all Hitler wanted? Recognize Germany’s right to exist and for it’s neighbors to not do violence against it? It’s so simple, it sounds down right silly that they cannot accept that. It’s not that they can’t stand to let the Jew win, it’s that they cannot stand to let the Jew even live.

Now if they accepted these very simple terms and Israel and the world reneged on their promises, I could see their point. But they won’t accept the fact that Israelis/ Jews have a right to live. Until they do that, screw 'em. They are victims of their own stupidity. Stupidity is difficult to reward.

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Well, then Hamas needs to step up their game if they want to keep up tactically. You shoot rockets at a country, they are going to respond with force and lots of it
 Seriously, what do they expect?
Hamas should ask their friends in Iran for more advanced weaponry if they want to keep up. Whether or not Hamas’s rockets suck is irrelevant. They shoot them randomly into Israel in order to kill people for the hell of it. They may not be great rockets, but they are not firecrackers either.

I understand the thesis that Gaza has problems, but the idea that Gaza is an open-air prison/tenament is just not true.

Remember, I used to LIVE in Gush Katif. I know Gaza. I used to ride my bike there.

There is plenty of work to be had:

There are luxury malls:

https://www.bridgesforpeace.com/2017/02/another-luxury-mall-opens-doors-gaza/

There is so much plentiful food, they are as fat as Americans:

So much so, that Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are big business there:

There are plenty of beach front luxury hotels:

Heck they even had a water park until Islamists burned it down for letting men and women commingle:

In sum, it’s not a great economy. But its really no different than any surrounding Muslim nation without a bunch of oil.

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I thought they called it:
Boy, tar, chiba, dragon, chope, He, sugar, scat, horse, china, etc


I do like me some Shawarma
 That shit is good, like I could only eat that and be happy good


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That’s what’s required of some of their leaders. The question then becomes, what do they have to gain (and lose) if there is peace?

To gain?! Wow, everything. So many people have promised them so much shit it’s not even funny.
To lose? They don’t get to kill Jews no more. Apparently, they like that way too much to give up.

I’m talking about the leadership. If our own politicians appear to be out of touch and self-serving, concerned only with their careers and re-election, then why would Palestinian leadership be any different? They send children to die after all.

You’re conflating “support” or “sympathy” with “understanding”. All players in the Middle East behave following an underlying logic and not one of them is “crazy”. You and me may find their logic, strange, repugnant or abhorrent but there’s no point denying it exists. You may as well ask the Kurds and Sunni Arabs in Iraq “why they can’t get along”

Nope. Their problem is that Palestinian Arabs were terrible fighters - they lost in 1948 when the odds were decidedly in their favor. Had they won, they pretty much would have done the same to Jews what the Turks did to the Greeks of Asia Minor.

But they lost. Usually, it’s not a big deal. Many ethnic/religious groups lost. Hell, Christians in the Middle East have been losing for the last 1300 years. If nascent Arab countries allowed them to integrate into their societies, “Palestinians” would have been just a smattering of old men with bitter memories in tea houses in Algiers and Tunis, just like Greeks of Asia Minor or French Pieds Noirs and the occasional angry youtube comment.

But they did not - they kept them in refugee camps to ensure they’re constantly fucked over and that they present a constant threat to Israel, having nothing else to do and staying in the constant loop of bitter memories and powerless hatred. Coupled that with some spectacularly bad moves in Jordan, no wonder they’re fucked.

Exactly what they’re getting - Israel hitting Gaza and killing among other civilians, ensuring that more and more kids in Gaza see Hamas as the only option in life, not to mention some pictures of dead kids for the jihadis-to-be in suburbs of Paris and Brussels to push them over the edge, as the “Palestinian cause” is the proverbial gateway drug.

You may shudder at the logic, but it’s there.

Well, that’s in line with the above reasoning - keeping people fucked up with nothing to do.

I’ve seen Gaza from afar and it looked like a shithole. I’m sure there are amenities for the wealthy, but you can’t tell me that the majority of the 1.8 million people there aren’t living in one big ghetto.

Well, that’s not exactly true, although in general Arab countries have horrible economies, oil notwithstanding . From what I’ve seen, Lebanese economy is suprisingly resilient and if I remember correctly has the highest GDP in the Arab world for a non-oil country.

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If I’m remembering correctly
 wasn’t there no nation state named “Palestine” in the 20th century?

What did the Jews really take? Besides some nice beaches and useless desert. Olive trees? They captured the whole Sinai peninsula in 1967 in a few days and then just gave it back.

There are dozens of Arab countries to live in. Let the Jews have their sliver of land damnit. They get screwed with everywhere else they go. They aren’t going back to the chambers.

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Not to mention Arabs losing in 1967 when they had a decided advantage over Israel. If 6 countries declare war on you and you end up kicking their ass and taking their land that’s as fair a hand as you can get.
Using human targets to get your way these days does not drum up much support, sympathy or understanding from me. I think the word stupidity fits. Not meaning all Palestinians, I don’t know them like that, but their leadership, is a ship to nowhere


And of course, the normal circus is to criticize Trump at every corner is totally en vogue right now, but telling the PLO to go fuck itself is not a bad move in my book.
“Act right or no money” is not unreasonable.

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Israel is perhaps the most legally established country in history. The land was granted to them by the UN. The original agreement was a 2 state solution, one Arab one Jewish. The Arabs did not accept, but the Jews did.
The Palestinians could have had their own land from the very beginning but they hate Jews so much that the cut their nose to spite their face. Tough shit, says I.

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They aren’t like us, at all, in anyway. We don’t raise our kids to hate Jews above all else in the world. They do.

Actually, things aren’t that simple - if you read contemporary accounts from Ben Gurion everyone on both sides understood that the two-state partition idea was bullshit (as it is now, mind you) and that war is the only option with a winner-take all outcome.

If the Jews wanted to survive in Palestine, they had to fight. And win. But let’s not sugarcoat history and claim that “we could have all had peace if only blah blah”

If anything, the genesis of the future Israeli-Palestine problem was actually nicely outlined by Benny Morris’ claim that Ben Gurion at the crucial moment shrank from pushing to the river Jordan and expelling the Arabs in the West Bank. After all, if you’re expelling someone do it thoroughly, an elementary lesson that every Ottoman general would have known.

It’s not nice and it may offend modern sensibilities but that’s how history plays out. One side wins, other side loses. And you don’t win by holding hands and singing.

Read up on the history and the genesis of the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

The only real roll of the dice when the outcome was up for grabs was in 1948, bitter fighting notwithstanding.

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I didn’t say us, I said our leaders.

So what’s the solution now? The PLO is a thinly veiled terrorist group determined to shit stir from now until doomsday. The Israelis are just stuck with them forever?

Do you believe that Nasser closing the
Straits was a cassus belli? Also asked to @Jewbacca.

Honestly, from a substantial number of books I’ve read about 1967 (Tom Segev 1967 comes to mind) it’s a very controversial issue. Like many Arab leaders, it’s hard to separate bluffing from delusional bravado when it comes to Nasser. Egyptians were caught with their pants down in the Sinai, that’s a fact. And from contemporary accounts it seems that, uncharacteristically there was a lot of emotion running in the IDF HQ - IIRC correctly, Rabin had a nervous breakdown of sorts after PM Eshkol famously hesitated in ordering an attack on the Egyptians, which later proved a blessing in disguise.

But Nasser wasn’t an idiot - he knew how to play the two superpowers - he has seen under his watch how the Israelis routed the Egyptians during the Sinai War, so he realized that he wouldn’t be able to threaten seriously Israel in a conventional manner. It seems, based on several analyses I’ve read, that he was more interested in securing Egyptian preeminence in the Arab word, especially after the Algerians strengthened their “revolutionary” credentials after the Algerian War.

And it’s not a coincidence that the only (temporarily) successful Arab military action against Israel, Operation Badr was had a very, very limited and specific scope and was done under the aegis of the smartest Arab leader, also a Egyptian - Sadat.

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