🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <15hpt4INN4g0@agate.berkeley.edu>, dan@jonas.berkeley.edu (dan graves) writes:
> 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

Well, according to the above definition every country in the middle east (except
the kingdoms) are democracies.
Lebanon conforms to that rule.
Syria conforms to that rule.
Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Lybia, Iraq, Yemen etc...

If the president stays the same then that does not mean that it is not a
democracy.

So the conclusion is that if ISRAEL is a democracy it is not the only one rather
it was superceeded by many democracies.

Really why do people keep repeating the slogan "Israel the only democracy" ? Is
it because they want to lie to Americans and convince them that their taxes are
protecting the "only democracy" because if Israel was not the only democracy then
how would the US administration justify all this aid ?


rached