All your Israel are belong to us.
 

I am more interested in the responses I see here than I am in the Israeli/Hezbolah thing.  Just goes to show to me that a LOT of people in the country are just too ignorant and illiterate to be allowed to have opinions on world politics
 

i feel the rising problem with the israel country has been a world matter and should not be delt lightly in the world matters. The Bush admistrative should get off the butts and get to work on helping one of our only allies in the arabian penninsula ( Kuwait and Israel). So ending on this matter, Israel is getting the shit bombed out of it and the world doesnt have a slightest care. the world sucks
 

israel is trying to get rid of this terrorist group... now the u.s isnt the only powerful country fighting terrorism....its a good and a bad thing
 

Why can't we all just get a longneck, and agree to disagree
 

If people have nothing intelligent to say, they should say nothing. If you read from any true book on history, the Jews have been 'defending their land and right to own that land' for THOUSANDS of years from civilizations that don't even exist any more. It is amazing that Jews have survived so many wars throughout the times. They are sick and tired of their soldiers being kidnapped. Suicide bombers blowing up stores. If the Palestinians dropped all their guns and viloence, there would be peace with Israel. If the Jews dropped their guns, they'd simply die. The Jews have given the Palestinians every opportunity to have land for peace and the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel. What more can the Jews give them? Hezbollah thinks they can keep sending rockets into Israel? Let's see how long that lasts. Let Iran keep funding them. Israel will go as long as they want to. Israel is on the map for good. It's neighbors can try what they want. They have all failed in the past. They're welcome to repeat it. There is a reason the Jews have survived and it's those same beliefs that will keep them going.
 

Ross makes some good points. Nice to see some intelligent comment amongst all the "nuke 'em all" dickhead comments. I can't agree with that statement about the Jews and palestinians dropping their guns though. It's pretty clear that there are extremists on both sides and sadly, many of them are armed and in a position of power. There's no black and white, just different shades of grey and right now it is Israel who is responsible for the majority of the murder of innocents that's going on over there.

The radio has just announced another 55 Lebanese deaths. There will be hundreds of grieving family members and friends with a very good reason to hate Israel. I imagine that some of them will now, for the first time, be prepared to die in a suicide bomb attack against israel and its allies. Yesterday, they were probably just normal kids, checking their myspace.

You can't fight terrorism with superior firepower. In fact, you encourage it.

I wish I knew how you fight terrorism. At least, I wish someone knew.

 

firstly, theres no way to attack terrorism until it is defined. is israel's killing of 400-500 lebanese and gazans terrorism, or is hizbullah's rockets hitting haifa and other towns? or are they both?
according to the standard assumptions about it, isnt some terrorism caused by poverty? extremism or fanaticism or hatred, but all of it grounded in some injustice. the popularity of a terrorist group sometimes comes from the poverty and desparation of those they are claiming to fight for. so couldnt real democracy, real efforts to alleviate poverty and underdevelopment help to fend off some of this socalled terrorism?

 

The Indispensable Condition of Peace

Only when the initiators of force learn that their actions lead to their own destruction, will peace be possible in the Middle East.

By Onkar Ghate

As Israeli soldiers reenter Gaza and bomb Lebanon, and Israeli citizens seek shelter from Hezbollah's missiles, the world despairingly wonders whether peace between Israel and its neighbors can ever take root. It can--but only if America reverses course. 

To achieve peace in the Middle East, as in any region, there is a necessary principle that every party must learn: the initiation of force is evil. And the indispensable means of teaching it is to ensure that the initiating side is defeated and punished. Decisive retaliatory force must be wielded against the aggressor. So long as one side has reason to think it will benefit from initiating force against its neighbors, war must result. Yet this is precisely what America's immoral foreign policy gives the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Hezbollah reason to think.

Israel is a free country, which recognizes the rights of its citizens, whatever their race or religion, and which prospers through business and trade. It has no use for war and no interest in conquest. But for years, Arafat and the Palestinian authorities, with the aid of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and other states, sought not to learn the conditions of freedom, but to annihilate the only free nation in their midst: Israel. Did the United States demand that the Palestinian leadership be destroyed?

No. Clinton invited Arafat to dine at the White House and Bush declared that peace requires Israel to give in to its aggressor's insistence on a state.

Worse still, as part of the "two state solution" announced in 2002, Bush demanded that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. In 1967 Israel captured the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip after yet another attempt by Arab nations to annihilate it. To give back any of this land--as Israel has done in the face of international pressure--teaches the Arabs that they can launch wars against Israel with impunity. If they at first do not succeed militarily, they need only continue issuing threats against Israel and arming more suicide-bombers--and eventually the land they lost in a war they initiated will be returned to them. They can then start the process anew, as they have since Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza.

In order to move toward his "two state solution," Bush championed elections in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, which predictably brought Hamas and Hezbollah into government. Terrorism, Bush is thus teaching the killers, is the means to political power.

The reason peace eludes the Middle East is therefore not difficult to discern. The lesson President Bush is conveying to the Arabs and Islamists--that the initiation of force is practical--is a continuation of the lesson America's foreign policy has been teaching them for decades. The Egyptians seized the Suez canal from the French and British in 1956--and we demanded that the Europeans not retaliate. Israel had the Palestinian terrorists surrounded in Lebanon in 1982--and we brokered their release. Many Arabs idolized a terrorist for hijacking airliners and murdering civilians--and we poured money into his regime, hailed him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and demanded that Israel enter into a protracted "peace process" that consisted of concession after concession. What possible conclusion could the Arab world draw but that the initiation of force is practical? So long as they have grounds to believe that, war is inescapable.

If we truly seek peace, we must reverse this perverse lesson. We must proclaim the objective conditions of peace. This means declaring to Arab nations that Israel, as a free country, has a moral right to exist, that the Arabs and Palestinians are the initiators of the conflict and that aggression on their part is evil and will not be tolerated. And it means encouraging Israel not to negotiate and compromise with its current assailants, but to destroy them.

Only when the initiators of force learn that their actions lead not to world sympathy and political power, but to their own deaths, will peace be possible in the Middle East.

Dr. Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

 

Dr. Onkar? I'd rather trust Dr. Phil. This kind of menatlity just doesn't work and certainly doesn't fit into my definition of objectivism. It's like telling a child that the way to stop being bullied is to hit back. While it sounds like a nice and perhaps even just solution, it can only lead to more violence. Chewbacca is right. The world needs to look at removing the real causes of terrorism- oppression, poverty and intolerance. We need to create a world that doesn't need fundamentalism or extremisim in any religion. Sorry if I sound like a bit of a hippy but I refuse to take sides on this when my TV shows me images of both Jews and Muslims burying their dead every day.
 

Youre absolutely right, the child should just give up his lunch money every day, until the bully wants his bike, and then give that to him, until the bully wants his car, and then give that to him.  Well, you can see where this is going. 

 

If someone pulls a gun on me, I kill them with my gun; simple as that.  If a country or organization operating within the boundaries of a country initiates force against a free country, that country has every right to defend itself by whatever means necessary.

 

When a man or a group of men abandon reason as their means of knowledge, and rely instead on faith belief with the absence of proof there is no possible negotiation. 

 

A man who breaks into your house cannot be reasoned with; he must be destroyed. 

 

A religious group that attacks your country must be destroyed as well.

 

Oppression and poverty do not a terrorist make; Usama bin Laden did not come from poverty, neither do many terrorists.  Many people in the West are impoverished, but do not strap bombs to their chests and walk into schools. 

 

You were right on one part, however: intolerance is a major cause of terrorism.  Islamic fascists are intolerant of everything other than Islamic fascism, and we should remove that cause.  The only way to do that is to destroy them.  To tolerate their actions and beliefs is detrimental to civilization, and only gives credence to their actions.

 

Terrorism is a consequence of faith and true belief in religion.  While all religion that exists could give an excuse to mutilate innocent people, Islam doesnt make it hard nor did Christianity during the dark ages. 

This isn't about Jews vs. Muslims; it's about a free country versus Islamic Fascism.  Why is it such a big deal for one country that isn't Islamic to exist on the west side of the Middle East?  Why cannot Isreal simply be without the threat of violence?  Almost every conflict on Earth today has something to do with Muslims; it's not a simple coinsidance.

With the pacifist, compassionate mentality, Skywalker and the Rebels would never have defeated the Empire; Vader would never have killed the Emperor; the New Jedi Order would have never defeated the Yuuzan Vong - force cannot be defeated with words; yelling at a gun yields no results.     

 As an aside, you are in no way an authority on Objectivism and have no claim to create a definition; Dr. Ghate is, as he was hired by Rands intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff. 

If I may, I recommend a book entitled The end of faith by Sam Harris.  Although he is not, in any way, an Objectivist, he has assembled a great work against religion and faith.   

 

 

I stand by what I said. Returning to the playground analogy (and I can claim authority here as an ex primary school teacher), the child who tries to hit back will almost invariably make the situation worse for themselves as the aggressor realises that they can get a reaction. The solution to playground bullying is far too complex to summarise here but involves changing the culture and mindset of all in the playground- bullies, victims, teachers and onlookers. That was the point I was attmpting to make.

I agree that sometimes there comes a time when a person or country needs to take up arms to defend themselves but what you advocate goes well beyond self defence.

Destruction of a faith sounds a bit fascist to me.

Finally, and I hope Chewbacca doesn't mind me saying this, Star Wars is fantasy and to apply the morals of the films to the current situation in the Middle East is hardly a credible argument.

 

I love Israël; it feels like home!
Home is where the heart is...

Apparently you do not need to be Jewish or Arab at all,
and btw; according the Bible will the chosen people loose their role by doing their actions: a new elite originating from every nation and tribe will be selected by the Spirit and the election has already begun. Nobody knows anything exactly, and nobody dares to be absolutely sure of the amazing as it passes the edge towards insanity.


Our mind is often not as strong as it could be...

Or maybe I'm just suffering some European fever and am gonna search for the holy grail?!