Higgly

I see. And how about those industries that produce something a little bit more liquid than paper?

Under the 'you heard it here first' category..... The CBC is reporting an interview of Tony Blair by David Frost that is being broadcast on Al-Jazeera in which Tony Blair admits that Iraq has been a disaster.

Here's a suggestion, Argus. Go to Google. You do know what that is, don't you? Enter the terms "Iraq refugee Syria" and see what you get. You will report back to us, won't you, Argus?

Come, come Rue. Can we not all have our lands expropriated for the greater good? Wasn't the Sultan's land registry a de facto statement of ownership? Why else would his subjects submit to it? And didn't the British re-write land deeds based on the Turkish registry? Admit defeat Rue. Israel is built on stolen land.

Thanks for your input. What is a social security card ? Have a nice day.

Yes they do. Accept no substitutes. Any idiot can create and edit a Wikipedia entry, and many have....

No.

The central issue is the land registry. Everything else is politics.

So do I. I also admire those first nations people who fight for just compensation for what was taken from them.

I think you will find that the Chinese have a pretty strong sense of how to keep the oil flowing in those countries. China has been doing quite a bit in Africa lately, no doubt because they see its vast wealth and lack of development as an opportunity.

It never fails that whenever there is a discussion of the current conflicts in the Middle East, I read the same misrepresentations over and over ... Oh I so know how you feel... The usual version we see repeated on these posts over and is the version of Arab refugees fleeing from the Palestine Mandate before and during the 1948 war as Jews stole land. This version has been repeated so many times it is for some of you considered the starting point and absolute fact. Maybe because it is true. The fact is The State of Israel was created by the United Nations and it was NOT created out of Palestinian lands. It was in fact created out of the Ottoman Empire. The ottoman empire disappeared when the British conquered Palestine. However, the Ottoman land registry did not, meaning that those who held valid land titles under the Turks, had their ownership honoured by teh British. There were no "Palestinians". This is a term created in 1963 by the Palestinian Liberation Organization an umbrella group of factions organized by Egypt and Syria. Yawn. Prior to 1949, there were Arabs, Christians and Jews living in the REGION of Palestine.Many of those Arabs considered themselves in fact Syrians. And the Jews living there considered themselves...? The fact is, it was not until only after the first World War I what we now call Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were created by the British and French as puppet colonies. These nations like the nations in Africa and many other places in the world were artificially created and in this case from the Turkish Empire by the British and French because they defeated Turket in WW1. And so to your point about the Ottoman Empire! Jordan was created on about 85 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland. You have it backwards here actually. The Jewish homeland was to be in Palestine, which is why both he British and the UN drew up partition boundaries giving only part of it to the Jews. The Paris conference enshrined the Balfour declaration which said that the Jews shall have a homeland in Palestine, not that all of Palestine shall become the homeland of the Jews. Britain lied to the League of Nations when it misappropriated the land and turned it into Transjordan. This is a fact that those who spew the usual anti-Israel bias simply ignore. In what way? When Britain took 85% of Palestine away, on a deliberate misrepresentation, there was no out-cry and the British simply lied to the world and got away with it. No Jew was allowed in Jordan or allowed any rights in Jordan. But again, this is simply ignored by the anti-Israel revisionists. Again, you are going to have to elaborate on this mis-representation. The fact is and remains that two-thirds of Jordanian citizens are Palestinian Arabs but they are ruled by a monarchy that the British installed and in fact a minority of Hashemite followers run the country. Interesting you should say this since one thing I have read over and over in these forums is that the Arabs don't care a fig for the Palestinians and have refused to take them in. What you are doing here is following the 'facts on the ground' approach so popular with Israelites. For example, by creating illegal settlements, Israel assumes ownership by virtue of 'facts on the ground' even thought he whol enterprise is entirely illegal, not to mention immoral. Jordan has been just as much an enemy of Palestinian Arabs as Israel, unlike Israel which was created by the UN, Jordan was created by the British. So Jordan has taken many of them in as citizens but it is their enemy. Interesting. In 1947, once the British lied, and seized 85% of Palestine leaving very little land left and far less then what the League of Nations proposed for Jews, the UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 15 percent of the Palestine Mandate. So it is absolute b.s. to continue the lie that Israel stole land from Palestinians. In fact if anybody did it was the British and by creating Jordan not Israel. Again with this lie. Explain please. The League of Nations had no such plans. The 1919 Paris conference merely enshrined the Balfour declaration. Israel did in fact steal land from Palestinian Arabs and continues to do so to this day. In fact the UN mandate proposed a State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. Jews were willing to accept that. It was the Arab League NOT Israel that rejected this. If you look at the original state proposed for Israel it was tiny. In fact it completely ignored many areas of land that historically Jews had a legal claim to. However the typical anti-Israeli revision of History suggests Jews stole land from Palestinian Arabs. This is b.s. if one actually takes a look at the land we are talking about. The fact is Israel from 1949 to 1967 is less then 20% of all Palestine. Well let's see. The partition required Arabs to abandon land assigned to the Jews - land they had lived on for centuries. The Jews on the other hand had just arrived in the previous 20 years. A pretty rum deal if you ask me. No wonder they turned it down. The Arab refugees at the time which numbered around 725,000 people fled not because a bunch of Jews shot at them or chased them. That is a ridiculous, idiotic, simplistic explanation and insulting to anyone who nows what happened. The fact is the vast majority of Arabs vacated what was 1949-1967 Israel without ever having seen a Jew or engaging in any disputes. They fled because they were told to. They were advised to leave by the Arab League who told them the war would be over very quickly and then they could return. Had these Arabs stayed, and not fled because of listening to the Arab League, history would have taken a far different course. Instead, we constantly have to listen to the lie that they left because Jews chased them out. Most were driven out by shelling, mortar and sniper fire from Jewish forces. Ben Gurion famously gave the order himself that drove over 50,000 Arabs from their homes. Others fled for fear of massacre - there are a number of documented cases of massacre. In any case, this is immaterial. Just leaving a war zone does not present a de facto case for giving up your land. The key ingredient here was that once the Arabs left, Israel closed the borders and refused to allow them back. It then passed the abandonment laws in 1950 which was basically a smoke and mirrors justification for land theft If the Arab League and to be precise, Gamal Nasser the dictator of Egypt, and the dictators of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and the monarchy in Saudia Arabia did not reject the concept of a non-Arab state in the Middle East, Israel would have simply been a tiny country, and Palestinians would have either created their own nation or the Gaza and West Bank or would have joined Syria or Jordan or Lebanon. All of the Arab leaders tried to negotiate a peace with Israel but Ben Gurion was completely intractable. Nasser gave up after Israel sent terrorist agents into Cairo to blow up mailboxes and theatres in an attempt to destabilise his government. The others eventually gave up as well after a number of vicious and murderous attacks by the likes of Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan. The fact is rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Morrocco and Kuwait started by invading Israel once it declared itself a tiny nation pursuant to the legal mandate given it under international law by the UN. Israel was created legally. The attack against it, to wipe it out was clearly illegal. The fact is that the Jewish forces greatly outnumbered the Arabs. In fact prior to and during the beginning of the war Israel repeatedly asked the Arab League for peace and history is what it is - led by Nasser, one Arab leader after the other called for the anhilitation of Israel, and in their speeches engaged in the same anti-semetic references the Nazis engaged in. Nonsense. Ben Gurion did everyhting he could to make a peace treaty impossible. Peace with the Arabs was a low priority for him because he believed in dealing with the Arabs by military might. Israel made little effort at peace and in fact plotted to overthrow Nasser as well as to conquer Lebanon. Former Nazi SS and Gestapo officers openly lived in Damascus and ran its secret police. The Arab League allowed themselves after World War Two to be influenced and controlled by first the Nazis and then the Soviet Union also blatantly anti-semetic. The fact is they lost in 1949 and have been revising history ever since. Hey, Werner von Braun went to work in the US Space program. If the Russians were so anti-semitic, why were they the second nation (after the US) to recognize Israel in the UN? History is what it is depsite some of you trying to pretend otherwise. Had there been no war to destroy Israel and no invasion by Arab armies there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948. I doubt it. The Zionists were plotting to take all of Palestine by military might from the earliest days. This wsa the Iron Wall strategy of Jabotinsky et al.. Now you want to accuse Israel of stealing and expropriating land -its b.s. During this war, Israel acquired additional land which is called de facto possession under international law, precisely because when the Arabs refused to enter a peace treaty, Israel had to fight and defend itself and in the process the international law allows a country tannexation an aggressor's land during and after a conflict. Unfortunately just calling it bs will not make the ugly stain go away Rue. You can pretend all you want this does not exist in international law as a concept but it does. In this case the land Israel ended up with in 1949 in fact was legally taken from Turkey. Israel in fact offered to return land the land it had acquired during the war in exchange for a formal peace treaty and the Arab League told Israel to stuff it. This offer was made during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in 1949. The Arab League made it clear they preferred to maintain a state of war in order so they could wipe out Israel. You want to be careful about quoting international law because it calls for conquering parties to respect the land registry of the people who live on the land. This is what Israel did not do and this is why Israel has stolen the land. In any case, Israel has been trying to wipe out Lebanon for years. What the anti-Israel revisionists also ignore is that after the 1949 war, Israel passed laws allowing Arab refugees to re-settle in Israel if they signed a form in which they renounced violence, swore allegiance to the state of Israel. Had they done that, the irony is, they would have become Israeli citizens with full equal rights and within 10 years have constituted the majority in the country and the State of Israel as we know it today may have taken another direction. What kind of citizen can you be in a country that it run by and for the benefit of a group to which you do not belong? Arab-Israeli citizenship is a sham. Nobody builds housing for Arabs in Israel. All of Israel's domestic policy is geared towards ensuring a Jewish majority. That is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy. In fact, 150,000 Arab refugees chose Israeli citizenship. None died. None were persecuted. All had the right to own land, vote, go to school, and receive medical care UNLIKE how Jews were treated in Muslim countries where they were forced to live under an apartheid system known as dhimmitude. This is why it is so fruitless to discuss these things with you Rue. As I have pointed out a number of times, the dhimmi laws have not been enforced since the early 1800s, and yet you keep grabbing at this like some sort of comfort blanket as though you think that if you say it over and over often enough, it will becom etrue. Jews were never offered a similar option to become citizens of Arab states after 1949 which makes the Arab League complete and absolute liars when they say they simply wanted to leave in peace with Jews and their only problem was a Jewish state not with Jews living in the Middle East. In fact between 1948 and 1949 the Muslim world expelled 900,000 Jews, seizing their property. 700,000 of these Jews had no choice but to move to Israel making the accommodation of other Arabs a moot point. First of all, the numbers you quote are self-serving and compiled by Israel as a poker chip against the day when it will be held responsible for what id did to the Palestinian Arabs. Secondly, many Jews were not driven out, but chose to go and live in Israel. The discriminatory behaviour which directed at others was a direct result of what the Arabs saw going on in Palestine and was a tit-for-tat response by Arab society. The Arab League not only deliberately created Arab refugees as a tool to keep fighting Israel, but it compounded the situation bt creating 900,000 Jewish refugees. If you read the speeches of Nasser and the Leaders of the Arab League you will see that they could have cared less about Palestinians. KIng Hussein of Jordan was in open civil war with them trying to prevent them from taking over Jordan. Speeches by all the Arab League members made it clear none of them would take in Palestinians. They deliberately left them homeless as a tool and a pawn to pressure the world into ending Israel. An extraordinary bit of fact manipulation here. The Arab league did not create he Palestinian refugees. Israel did. Are you saying that Hussein should have just given up Jordan to th PLO? How about Ariel Sharon trying to drive the PLO out of Lebanon - he tried to talk Arafat into going back to Jordan because he (Sharon) wanted to destabilize Hussein. Even Arafat wasn't dumb enough to fall for that stunt. The dialogue from the Arab League after 1949 called for the destruction of Israel not peaceful coexistence. Nasser's speeches, the speeches from the regimes in Iraq abd Syria, called for the murder of Jews world-wide and the complete detsruction of Israel. In 1963, the PLO was created and its 1964 congress called for the destruction of Israel and killing Jews world-wide until this was achieved. Sort of like some of the things the Zionists were saying about the Palestinian Arabs, don't you think? It was not Israel that caused the Arab refugee problem, nor Israel that obstructed its solution. Pretend all you want the Arab world were victimized by Israel but the fact is it was the decision of the Arab League to refuse citizenship of Palestinians and using them as a pawn to fight Israel, that caused the problem. Wrong. Nasser's open hatred of Palestinians as well as Jews and Israelis is there for anyone to read in his speeches. It is there in the speeches of then Defence MInister of Syria Assad and King Hussein. In fact when the PLO was formed, it split into numerous factions precisely because the majority of these factions were not interested in following Fatah and Arafat and creating a Palestinian nation. All they were interested in was destroying Israel. Most wanted to join with Syria. Syria controlled most of the splinter groups. Fatah the largest, run by Arafat was in fact never accepted by Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or Tunisia and he was expelled from Lebanon, Tunisia, and Jordan precisely because they considered him as much of an enemy as Israel. Amazing. Simply amazing. What I would for once want the anti-Israeli revisionists to explain is why when they accuse Israel of misappropriating land they ignore the Jewish refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Let me once hear Myata or Figleaf in their one sided comments, state that these Jews were in fact peaceful citizens and forced at gun-point to flee with nothing. Let me hear them once be honest and discuss how their property was stolen and never given back. Well, Rue, it's funny that those Jews lived peacefully for so long in those countries and then all of a sudden, in 1949, attitudes towards them suddenyl changed. Why do you think that might have been? This is the part of the story revisionists deliberately ignore and I am sick of the double standard from people who do not bother to take the time to acknowledge history and the fact that this was NOT a one sided conflict. Actually, Rue, the ones you should be worried about are the ones who have taken the time, because it is not a pretty picture. Finally let us get something straight. Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced there in 1948 by Nasser and his Egyptian troops under order to shoot to kill if they tried to leave. Nasser ordered that they were not allowed Egyptian citizenship or passports. Arafat until he died wrote about what the Egyptians did in his biography and never forgave the Egyptians. OK Rue. Let's say an economic disaster were to befall some country. Let's pick Mexico. Would you expect another country - say the US, to start handing out American passwports to everyone who started walking north? Good luck with that. Finally it is absolute b.s. to argue as the revisionist anti-Israelis do, that those displaced by Israel now total over 5 million and have the right to return to Israel. Under international law , if you are born into a refugee population that has been resettled and living in exile YOU DO NOT HAVE legal status as refugees. The Arab League has created this noightmare by refusing to allow these people citizenship or in the alternative denouncing terrorism, accepting Israel's existence, and calling for a Palestinian state. Again with the international law. That same law obliges Israel to honour the land registry Rue. Strike three. As for evil Israel, it has 12 Arab Israeli representatives in the Israeli Parliament, Arab Israeli judges sitting on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court, and and many Arab Israelis have obtained Ph.D's and teach in Israeli colleges and universities. In the Arab world this does NOT exist in reverse. Gee a whole twelve. More to the point, instead of misrepresenting Jews as having misappropriated Arab property-let us be frank and honest- the vast majority of Palestinian property has been stolen by fellow Palestinians or Arabs O brother.

Well maybe, but they've already had their hands slapped once when they try to buy their way in. They also have been doing major deals with Nigeria and Venezuela, to name a few.

I see Omert didn't bother to wait for the dust to settle before he went storming into the white house (his limo drove right up the the front door, no less) to make sure George Bush remembers who it is who is really sets US foreign policy in the Middle East. Imagine being able to get a meeting with the president of the United States on short notice right after his party has just gotten its walking papers in both the Senate and the Congress. Omert was in the same line-up as Pelosi. Just incredible.

Both Iran and Syria are already exerting influence inside Iraq, whether Blair and Bush want to acknowledge it or not. Syria is dealing with a major humanitarian catastrophe as Iraqi refugees stream across the border vowing not to go back. I imagine Iran is doing the same. Both countries have stake in seeing things settle down, and may very well be better positioned to exert some sort of constructive effort than either the US or the Brits. Blair's finger-wagging and Bush's pouting will achieve little.

Have we got that on tape? If not, maybe we need to sweat him a little more...

Joel Osteen, a capitallist redligioso...

There is severe discrimination against Catholics and (Chinese) Buddhists in Indonesia. The country does not hae ties with Israel. The prosecution of the Bali bombings was a joke. It has many if not all of the hallmarks of a theocracy. I have no argument with your criticism of Indonesia. But they don't condemn Muslims to death for converting to Christianity. No, they just kill Christians in batch lots for being Christian. Excuse me? Examples please.

In fact they have. The settlers are armed with AK-47s and Uzis. From their positions in settlements on hills overlooking Palestinian farms, they have murdered Palestinian farmers in their olive groves on a number of occasions. How many have been brought to justice? Higgly once again put up or shut up. Specifically indicate the murders you are referring to. Your comments are a fabrication-I insist you provide specific examples of these murders . You wouldn't ask the question how many have been brought to justice if this was true. No one doubts the presence of Israeli settlers in the West Bank are an obstacle to peace but you trying to paint this as a one sided invasion of the West Bank is absolute b.s. For that matter, I would suggest before you lecture anyone on the status of the West Bank, you understand that legally the West Bank belongs to no one. It does not belong to Jordan, Palestinians, Israel, Turkey, etc. It has no status so your legal analysis is b.s. No one Palestinian, Jew, Arab, Christian, what-ever has a legal right to it yet. This is what is under dispute and has to be settled. Under international law, it belongs to no one. It was illegally annexed by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 and since 1967, Israel under inernational law, had the right to annex it as a defence to terrorist attacks being launched from it into Israel proper. The fact is it needs to be part of the Palestine state, but for that to come about, The Arab League and in particular Jordan have to agree to that and they have to be able to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist factions from using it to launch terrorist attacks. You can pretend all you want Israeli settlers are killing Palestinians but that is absolute b.s. The fact is many of these evil Israeli settlers have also ben killed. It is not the one sided episode you paint it as. The West Bank belongs those who held legal land titles under the Turks and Brits. The Geneva conventions demand that occupying powers respect the land registry. As for the murdering settlers do your own research.

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

Why, have we fought terrorism before? You don't know any more than I do...I think. So can you explain why you're so sure that's the best way to go? Besides, you seem to be confused.... equating fighting back with acts of terrorism? So now, when you hit back....that's now defined as terrorism?" Too bad Nasser is gone. He could give you a good argument here. How would you feel about going to a movie or dropping a letter in a mail box if you had to worry about an Israeli terrorist blowing you up? How would you feel about staying in the King David Hotel if you had to worry about Itzhak Shamir blowing you up? Your hands are not clean Betsy.

Wow. Just wow.

Palestinian women do not wear burqas Betsey. Get your facts straight.

At last. Common ground.

In fact they have. The settlers are armed with AK-47s and Uzis. From their positions in settlements on hills overlooking Palestinian farms, they have murdered Palestinian farmers in their olive groves on a number of occasions. How many have been brought to justice?