🚀 go-pugleaf

In ba.general Merlin Dorfman <dorfman@green.rahul.net> wrote:
> In ba.general Al Smith <invalid@address.com> wrote:

...

>> If the Arabs stepped out to avoid getting killed in a war they 
>> knew was about to begin, they should have been allowed to return 
>> to their own land, and their own houses, after the fighting 
>> stopped. There's no way to argue otherwise. Blow as much smoke as 
>> you want. Makes no difference to the truth.

>      Many were.  Others decided to "wait it out."  Their brother
> Arabs decided they made better propaganda in squalid refugee camps
> than if they were peacefully resettled in other Arab countries, as
> the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab/Muslim 
> countries were peacefully resettled in Israel.  And no law,
> tradition, or anything other than your twisted sense of "ethics"
> says that the Arabs "should have been allowed to return," 
> especially given the ongoing state of war between Israel and the
> neighboring Arab countries.
>      Do you shed tears for those Jews who were expelled from Egypt,
> Iran, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, etc.?  Are you pressuring the
> Arab/Muslim countries to allow them to return and restore their
> confiscated homes and other property?
>      And are you ready to turn your home over to the Indian tribe
> that owned the land before the European immigrants (who certainly
> were not invited by the Indians to come to America) expelled them?

     There has been no follow-up to the above points, which perhaps is 
not surprising since there really is no good response.  But maybe it's 
disappointing in that they were sort of "trick questions," designed to 
smoke out possible true motivations.  While it is certainly possible to 
disagree with the policies of the government of Israel--I disagree with 
quite a few of them myself--when Israel and the Jews are held to higher 
standards than anybody else, and behavior towards the Jews is tolerated 
that would not be tolerated if directed at others, you have to wonder.
     In a way it's unfair that the legacy of centuries of European anti-
semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, was a Jewish state in the Middle 
East.  It would be better if Europe could just get over it, but it's 
clear that even now it hasn't.  It's also unfair that so much of the 
world's oil, or at least the easily recoverable oil, is located in the 
Middle East--a more equitable distribution would be better.  If it 
weren't for those two things, the civilized world could leave the Middle 
East to its preferred 12th century life style and not care what is going 
on there any more than we care about what is going on in Fiji.  But, as 
my boss says, we have to deal with the world as it is and not as we 
would like it to be.