🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26138@life.ai.mit.edu>, gwydion@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Basalat Ali Raja) writes:
|> One cannot help but ask...  Israel is the only democracy in the middle
|> east?  How many of the Palestinians whose very lives and destiny are
|> directly controlled by the Zionist government in Jerusalem have had a
|> chance to vote against or in favour of this government?
|> 
|> Spare me the lawyer's answers, that these people are immigrants, or
|> refugees or whatever.  They have been there for generations, in many
|> cases much longer than their Jewish neighbours who CAN vote.  And yet
|> you claim that Israel is a democracy?  Only if you accept as a
|> corollary that the Palestinians are not human.  Will you do that?

This is utter  crap.  All Arabs that live in Israel proper can
vote and there are Arab members of the Knesset.   This means
that Israel is a democracy in  every sense of the word.

de.moc.ra.cy \di-'ma:k-r*-se-\ n [MF democratie, fr. LL democratia, fr. Gk
   de-mokratia, fr.] de-mos + -kratia -cracy 1a: government by the people; esp
   : rule of the majority 1b: a government in which the supreme power is
   vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a
   system of representation usu. involving periodically held free elections

In what sense is Israel not a democracy?  Only in the sense that it
does not allow the advocacy of the violent overthrow of its 
government.
 
The United States has a similar prohibition.  In fact, here we call such
advocacy treason.

dan