originally posted by MycroftArafat did not invent terrorism. What he has done is made a career of terrorism that spans fifty years, and continues today. He, and others like him, have created a culture of terror among Muslim countries (as well as some non-Muslim countries) where murdering random civilians is seen as an acceptable way to advance political change. This culture is so prevalent, that a couple of 14 year-old girls in Morocco have seen it as a way to give meaning to their lives.
Arafat has indeed been involved with terrist crimes, as were the founders of Israel. There was no mention of Arafat specifically in the article you cited. In the absences of such a direct connection and in the face of the specifically stated alternative connection in the article, if we follow your argument some might argue that the IRA used Menachim Begin as a role model for their terrorist activities.
see these children as a personal tragedy within a cultural tragedy. The authors of these tragedies are the clerics who justify this martyrdom, the Osama Bin Laden’s, who organize financial backing and “spiritual” guidance, and the Arafat’s who promote new and greater butcheries and keep them in the media spotlight, gloating over the blood they spill.
I agree it is a personal tragedy and a tragedy for the Middle East. Perhaps we might gain some insight by studing more closely what drives them to give up their lives and what if anything provides the clerics their justification for the crimes.
You want to argue that maybe these girls took their inspiration from 12th century Jewish militants? Go ahead, but if you’re honest, you will recognize the contribution Arafat has made in creating this culture of death.
I recognise the possible contribution of Arafat and modern leaders of Israel and the Tiger Tamils and the IRA and historic terrorists and Manuel Noriega and the Hashashim and the contras and the terrorists who attacked the people in East Timor. Like me, you have provided no direct evidence for your claim so I guess my alternatives might be as possible as yours or they might not. I just am not as sure as you appear to be, particularly in the face of the stated reason in the article you cite.
When the U.S. backed Bin Laden, he was struggling against a Soviet invasion, and even that’s been called into question. Does it change anything that the U.S. may have backed him once? I don’t think so, he still is what he is.
That the USA supplied Osama Bin Laden I believe is a very germaine fact. The US involvement was rather more interestinging than you indicate. The following is from
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0210-07.htm.
The United States began secretly arming Islamist rebels fighting the leftist government of Afghanistan in July 1979. According to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the decision to aid these fundamentalist militias was based in part on the hope that it would provoke the Soviets to invade, which they did that December. U.S. support for Islamist rebels dramatically increased in the coming years, with 80% of the aid going to the Hekmatyar faction, the most extremist of the seven major mujahadin factions fighting the Soviets and their Afghan allies. The reason for wanting to encourage a Soviet invasion and to support the opposition group least likely to compromise was the hope that the Soviets would be bogged down in a debilitating counter-insurgency war, which would thereby assist America’s Cold War aims. Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, but U.S. support for Hekmatyar continued and a coalition of mujahadin groups ousted Afghanistan’s leftist government in 1992. Not satisfied with the Islamic coalition government that resulted, Hekmatyar forces shelled the capital of Kabul, killing thousands of civilians and making a stable government impossible. Out of the ensuing chaos rose the Taliban militia, which seized power in 1996 and imposed a theocratic fascism upon the country.
The mujahadin were therefore not exactly great examples of democratic respect when the US supplied them. The USA has a history of supporting terrorist groups, as did the USSR, as did many other countries.
Hussein and Noriega, that’s the rhetorical sleight of hand I accused you of earlier. United States support of third world dictators is a different subject, I don’t have to defend United States cold war foreign policy to condemn terrorism. If you want to state that the United States has blood on its hands, I will agree with you. I vote for the candidates I think are least likely to support such policies.
Far from being a sleight of hand, of a rhetorical or any other form, this point was made specifically because it is very much at the heart of this debate. The US and Israel have both (as well as many other countries) supported and/or carried out terrorist acts at times they considered to be appropriate in their histories. Unfortunately other people may have taken a lead from that and supported terror at what they also consider to be appropriate times for them.
My understanding is that Gerry Adams has turned the IRA away from violence and has turned in a lot of their weapons, that the remaining militant factions are splinter groups that don’t recognize Adam’s leadership. You sound closer to the situation; maybe you can fill me in on the details.
Unfortunately the IRA remains in control of weapons dumps they claim have put out of use. The weapons have not been destroyed and much of the population fear that they could be put back into use in a short time - though possibly not in 45 minutes. Adams and McGuiness have been the front men using those weapons as bargaining chips in getting the IRA's political aims realised. Not unsurprisingly, the other side of the equation and many ordinary citizens feel threatened by this situation, particularly when in Oct 2002 and in the wake of the devolution crisis and calls for the IRA to disband, the IRA issued a statement announcing that it was suspending talks with the decommissioning body. Weapons removal is not merely an issue for the IRA. It also is still a real concern with many Loyalist terror groups.
The U.S. government has overthrown two governments as a response to one terrorist attack, the British helped. If you want to compare, my opinion is that bulldozing some homes is pretty mild by comparison. Given that our response to foreign terrorism is so extreme, I bet we will develop some pretty stiff ways of dealing with domestic terrorists if we have more experience with them.
The British helped in Iraq recently, essentially against the wishes of the British people. The conclusion many have come to is that Blair decided to help Bush invade Iraq in advance and whatever the evidence, in order to advance his post prime ministerial career. As a major supporter of Blair, pre-Iraq 2, I look forward with interest to him vacating his office as soon as conveniently possible and going to live in America where he can be showered with what he appears to hanker after - namely medals from George W. Bush and jobs with large payments for life from the rubber chicken circuit in the USA. In my opinion, those medals will be awarded for his valour in the face of the British people. Unfortunately that was not what he was elected for.
Recent history doesn't actually support your thesis here. The fact is that the family homes of Timothy McVeigh's relatives remain unbulldozed, as do the family homes of the American Taliban's relatives - (cf the frankly dodgy treatment of those untried people in Guantanomo Bay). Those direct examples show that what Sharon is doing to innocent Palestinians is never likely to happen within the US.
Personally, I have no sympathy if the family home of a suicide-bomber gets bulldozed. If they raised him/her, they had a hand in making him what he was. At the same time, I agree that if the wrong home gets bulldozed, that’s an injustice, but it doesn’t invalidate the policy.
I am saddened that you see so little problem with collective punishment. Apart from being illegal within the USA, your thesis is also factually incorrect. In Northern Ireland many terrorist sympathisers came from within families bitterly opposed to terrorism. Did you call for the Unabombers family homes to be bulldozed because they presumably made him what he was, or McVeigh's family - after all according to your thesis they made him as well?
If you took your argument to its logical conclusion, one would ask why aren't the families of all murderers also given the death penalty or at least have their houses razed to the ground? According to your thesis they are also culpable. Why aren't the family of the Enron criminals who supported the Republican and Democratic parties also jailed because they presumably had an impact on those particular crimes. I seem to remember that Bush's children broke the law by illegally drinking alcohol. Should George W. Bush be put in jail for their crimes? It does not make sense. Collective punishment is an affront to decent norms. When it is carried out, experience all around the world, including in Northern Ireland, shows that it generates deep ill will and yet more terrorists - as Sharon very well knows.
You have to understand that policies like that are born in frustration. They try to negotiate and get nowhere. A peace agreement is signed, and then the Palestinian-Arabs ignore their obligations under it. Other measures against terrorism get just as much criticism…so what are they supposed to do? The family of a suicide-bomber gets a cash prize of three to five thousand dollars plus a monthly pension of $100. That’s a lot of money in a region where the per capita income is $1700 per year. Some kid blows himself up at a bus stop, and the next day Palestinian-Arab TV shows an interview where his mother says how proud she is and that it’s her third son to “martyr” himself in that way. Bulldoze their house? Hell yeah! That’s mild!
I understand frustration only too well. A relative of mine was blown to pieces for the crime of employing people of both religions. I did not believe that the appropriate response to that was to murder innocent children when targetting a suspect. I do not believe that an appropriate response to that is to bulldoze the houses of innocent people.
One of the characteristicsics of a decent democratic state is it's ability to stick to the rule of law in the face of provocation. If a democratic state does not stick to decent norms, on what basis can it demand others do what it won't? That is when terrorists win over democracy. It is not only those in the Middle East who get rewarded for terror. I understand that the American Taliban negotiated a lesser sentence for himself and has started a post graduate degree course where as his co-accused get put in a legal limbo. The USA must be ashamed of its much vaunted legal system when it won't even give suspects an internationally respected fair trial. At least Bush isn't using them and their families for target practice as Sharon is doing in Palestine.
You have to ask yourself, what would it take for Israelis to go in and start arresting people? How would the Palestinian-Arabs react to that? How would the Palestinian Authority react to it? Do you think it wouldn’t be condemned as a provocation?
While it would no doubt be regarded as provocative I think that arresting people and putting them through a fair trial is a lesser provocation than killing innocent children while assassinating suspects. As such, I think the response would be not as aggressive. Because I do not suscribe to the 'Sharon is stupid' argument, I believe that he understands that quite well.
If I thought that were a viable solution, I’d support it. I don’t think it is, so that leaves us with the either the Palestinian-Authority doing it, or the Israelis targeting them in military strikes. Since the Palestinian-Authority won’t do it and won’t even try to think of ways it could be done, that leaves us with the situation as it is now.
I believe your analysis fails to provide for all the range of options open to Sharon. There are many alternative options, of which the one discussed immediately above, is merely an example.
In the long entrenched situation in Palestine and the wider Middle East a long term solution is necessary. This, I believe, should encapsulate both military and political components and contain aspects of ground giving by men of vision on both sides. Unfortunately the vision of both Arafat and Sharon is lacking, so what should be done? Perhaps, like Northern Ireland, the most powerful authority needs to act in the best interests of all its citizens in a fair and equitable way under the law over an extended period of time. This will eventually lower support for the terrorists because, despite continual provocation (such as when Israel was attacked by Scud missile in the first Gulf war and it diod not respond), the major power is seen to be acting in a democratic and lawful way by the immediate population and the wider world.
I am not naive enough to believe that terrorists will ever be cleared from the world but the rump can be dealt with by vigorous, lawful and fair military and police action, characterised by an absence of the collective punishment that is currently fuelling the aggression, which both Sharon and Arafat seem to want or be unable or unwilling to prevent.
Yes and no. It’s common that when I get involved in these discussions and I condemn Palestinian-Arab terrorism for someone else to say, “Oh yeah? Well this Israeli government official was involved in x activity 60 years ago.” That’s a red herring. The only purpose of saying something like that is to imply that since everyone is bad, then nobody is any worse than anyone else, which isn’t true.
With respect - not at all. The purpose of drawing that comparison is to to point out that the leaders of Israel demonstrated to others around the world that terrorist activity can work. That it happened some time ago is irrelevant. It still happened within living memory and it was still terrorism.
What interests me is time bar implicit in your reply. You have already referred to the history of Arafat over a period of fifty years yet all of a sudden you say to mention something 60 years ago is a red herring. Can I suggest what's a red herring for the goose is a red herring for the gander? That is if you want to take all terror properly into account.
If we attack some groups for terrorist activities then we should attack all terrorist activities. That is at the very core of my arguments. All terrorists are wrong, not only the ones you don't like.
The argument is def9nately not that because one group was bad everyone else can be bad. THe argument is very much that things can be turned round but only if all sides, not just one, get their act
I will also add that you need to look at how you use the word “Palestine”. Right now, there is no place called Palestine. In the days of the British Mandate, the word referred to the region that is now covered by the Gaza Strip, Israel, the West Bank, and the nation of Jordan. “Palestine” as in Palestine Liberation Organization means Israel.
I agree that I have not defined what I mean by Palestine. I however use it deliberately to show that I believe there should be a palestinian state that is not subject to an apartheid wall. In essence I mean that area which I believe should be part of a separate Palestinian state. That area does not wholly lie within Sharon's apartheid wall or the Palestinian ghetto he seems intent on creating by carrying out internationally unacceptable attacks on innocent people and using the response he appears to want and incites ( however wrong it is), to justify more land grabbing. My definition of what Palestine should be is possibly very close to what Colin Powell believes it should be.
I’ve mentioned before that the PLO was formed in 1964, three years before Israel took the West Bank from Jordan. This is important because many people assume that the goal of the PLO is/was to liberate the West Bank, but it’s not. When the organization was formed, the West Bank was already under the control of the Palestinian nation of Jordan. Their goal is/was to liberate Israel (called Palestine) from the Israelis (Jews).
I simply believe that the state of Israel has every right to exist on the land that is internationally recognised as theirs and I believe in their right to defend that land under the law.
Jenin was a battle. Jenin was a refugee “camp” that had been turned into a terrorist training camp. Buildings were bulldozed there because they had been mined with explosive booby traps.
There we disagree, as with so many other things it seems. If Sharon was so happy with what he did I wonder why he stopped international observers observing events? A British ex-military observer reportedly concluded that the destruction was way above what the military action demanded. The UN criticised Palestinian groups for using civilians as shields. It also criticised the IDF for the same thing.
At the time, Jenin was big news because after the Israelis went in, the Palestinians claimed there was a massacre, that the Israelis had killed some 800 civilians. This was later proved false, but as with many lies, people have a tendency to remember what they heard first, even if it’s corrected later.
Some people might. I have seen documentaries which went into detail about what happened. This showed that a number of civilians were killed - some of them shot in the back. As an example of what happened in Jenin the following comes from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2102081.stm
The Israeli army has apologised for causing the deaths of six-year-old Ahmad Abu Aziz and his 13-year-old brother Jamil, but said the tank crew opened fire to deter Palestinians breaking a curfew and approaching them.
However, the footage shows a tank firing the first of two shells, at close range, at a group of civilians who are running away.
The dead boys' father, Youssef Abu Aziz, told the BBC that they had gone outside to buy chocolate, thinking the Israeli curfew imposed on their city had been lifted.
The Oxford Compact English Dictionary defines massacre as amongst other things 'murder (esp. a large number of perople ) cruelly or volently.' In Northern Ireland the killing of 14 unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday is regarded by many as a massacre. I understand that over 23 non-combatant civilians were killed at Jenin.
As for the marriage thing, every nation claims the right to limit immigration and citizenship. While the law is controversial, I have to point out that it doesn’t prevent anyone from living together, it just prevents them from living together in Israel
As I said, an apartheid law and part of a process of collectively ghettoising a group of people. The apatheid regime in South Africa also forced married couples to live apart within the same country.
I’ve read about the IRA, it’s history. What I never understood is the exact nature of these grievances that justified 80 years of bloodshed. As near as I can tell, the northern Irish got pissed off when England granted sovereignty to the rest of Ireland but not them. Can you tell me more?
The IRA still has arms dumps under its own control and it withdraws cooperation with the international inspectors when it wishes. That is very much current events.
If I was to tell you the story in the depth it deserves it would strain the patience of most here and after doing so many would not agree with me. In itself that is perhaps not very different to the situation in Israel.
To speak only a little about the complexity of the start of the 'Troubles' - like almost every country in the world Ireland as a whole was subject to massacre and land grabs by different groups at different times and in the North a proportion of the tension stems from the propinquity of groups long on memory and short on forgiveness (an unfortunately ubiquitous aspect of human behaviour). After partition, some rights, such as fair employment, were denied to a proportion of the population over many years. Cities were also gerrymandered. This prevented one side from being able to elect their fair share of representatives.
These problems resulted in growing demands for equal civil rights and produced an active but essentially peaceful civil rights movement. The then police service did not always protect every part of the population with equal fervour. Burntollet Bridge was a major example (see
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/northernirelandassembly/story/0,9061,581745,00.html for more details) when the police allowed 'ultras' or men armed with weapons to attack a peaceful march without intervening as they should. Calls for protection for other attacks were not immediately met by the IRA, who were nicknamed 'I Ran Away' after another episode
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/northern_ireland/2001/provisional_ira/1969.stm In fact it was the British army which was welcomed by the nationalist community in Belfast as their protectors in the earliest days of the troubles.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/gcsebitesize/history/ni1965_85/3army_test.shtml.
The 'Troubles'then took their sorry downward spiral after that with many comentators, who were unwilling to take the time to understand the true situation, characterising events simply as a religious argument. While this was indeed an element of the mix, there were many other aspects, some of an ancient historical tribal aspect of which the partition of Ireland was a major factor for the IRA and some others. The historical aspect can be seen in many ways, including the fact that battles, one of which took place in the late 1600's, are still commemorated on a yearly basis.
