Higgly

And did this happen in Palestine? Provide your reference.

Mythology of ignorance? http://www.answers.com/Queen%20Noor You are sloppy Higgly...... Right. Hussein is dead. His wife (Noor) is no longer Queen. His son is King and his Palestinian wife is queen. Get your facts straight.

If Jean blocks an election, her ass is grass, and so is the position of GG. She needs a constitutional crisis before she gets anywhere near that sort of thing.

Exackly. Likewise the Brits (well I guess we could describe them as Anglicans!). Anybody remember the Opium Wars and the sacking of the National Library of China? The loss to the world was monumental and all they did was burn a bunch of 'paper'. ...the Confucians, the Taoists, the Animists.... Watch for my thread on Israeli mythinformation. Talk about "viscous conflicts" (sic). The world needs a steady and penetrating gaze. Enough of gauzy haze and rose coloured glasses.

Good one!

Given your propensity for referring to Moslems as goat-herders, Argus, we can only conclude that you are a liberal.

Yeah that's right. Clinton had ol' Osama in his sights. Clinton is right when he said he tried to get Osama and failed, but at least he tried. The first thing Bush turned his attentinon to when he got into office was finding some way to invade Iraq. This is before 9/11. I saw a replay of the interview and I thought good for you. Somebody finally gave some back to those hacks who run Fox. He stood up for himself and looked damned good doing it. I'd say his public image has gone up a notch or two for it.

I think there is a good chance that he is going to end up in jail like his buddy Radler. The US Attorney General seems to have him by the balls and if he gets convicted, his chances of regaining his citizenship go to zero.

The census provides valuable information to the government and to the private sector that helps them make decisions about running the country and their businesses. I think it is a good thing and feel it is worthwhile to take a few moments to help us understand ourselves as a country.

I had some trouble figuring out where this belonged but ultimately it will be a decision made by a Federal cabinet Minister, if not the PM, so I am putting it here. Conrad Black renounced his Canadian citizenship so he could become a British Lord. The reason he had to renounce was that there is a formality which says any Canadian who is offered a British title must get permission from the Canadian government of the day. Black, who had been kicking the bejaysus out of Chretien through the National Post, was not able to get his blessing and so had to chose between one and the other. He chose the title and renounced his Canadian citizenship. The Brits laughed at him and referred to him as 'Lord Almost' in the press. Anyways, do you feel Black should be given back his Canadian citizenship?

Paying down the debt is a good thing. As for the Liberals, Remiel's the only one who remembers it right. It was the Conservatives under Mulroney who multiplied the debt by running huge budget deficits in successive years. It was the Liberals who whipped the federal finances into line and started to pay down the debt. It is always a joke to see right wingers harp about left wing spending. In both Canada and the US (Clinton), it has been the right who has done the most damage to the national treasury (look at Bush - see where the US dollar is going) and it has been the left who have brought it back into line.

Rue the fact that would would draw conclusions about me based on a pseudonym says a lot about how deep your thought processes run. That's fascinating Rue. Would that include the Rothschilds? Well that's interesting Rue, but my point pertained to modern history. I guess I expected you were referring to something other than the Nazi/Axis regime. Nobody is going to argue this with you, certainly not me. Throughout modern history, Russia and its satellites were communist countries Rue. Nobody was allowed to own land. You had better provide a reference for this Rue. The father of persecuted French army officer Alfred Dreyfus owned a house. None of the problems that you describe, whether exaggerated or not, were the fault of the Palestinians. The Palestinians did not cause the Holocaust. They did not cause the Tzarist pogroms. They did not apply the dhimmi laws to deny Jews the ownership of their land. The Palestinian Arabs, right up to the time of the British, were subjects of the Ottoman empire, just like the Jews. They did in fact, live in relative peace with the few Jews who were in Palestine for centuries. The Palestinians do not deserve the fate that has befallen them as a result of the creation of Israel . And finally there is your comment about people like me. You know nothing about me, but I will tell you this. I am someone who is sick and tired of the constant flood of mythinformation which comes from Israel and its apologists about what has happened and continues to happen in the Middle East. I will make every effort to keep guys like you honest.

Of course we have all of this on your authority alone do we? I don't see any references to back up your claims, although I have cited Wikipedia, which covers the the dhimmi laws in some detail, including the observation that for the most part the Arab world stopped applying the laws in the early 1800s. Again there is no mention of the dhimmi laws forbidding the ownership of homes by Jews and the Wikipedia entry points out that in Tunisia during the period for which the dhimmi laws were applied, Jews owned many fine homes. I also see no mention of these laws being applied in Palestine. I find your suggestion that this should be justification for what has been and is still being done to the Palestinians risible and in fact a sign of desperation. You are right about one thing Rue. In the absence of any evidence to back up your claims, we won't be discussing them again.

In fact modern historians have come to the conclusions that is was the Israelis who were the difficult ones and that the Arabs - the Jordanians, the Egyptians and the Syrians - did make honest efforts at peace following the 1948 war. This nonsense about the Arabs refusing to agree to peace terms is just Israeli mythinformation. More mythinformation. The Syrians offered to take 300,000 Palestinian refugees in exhcnage for water rights on the Sea of Galilee. Israel refused. In fact Israeli intransigence blocked peace settlements at every turn. Jordan has absorbed many Palestinian refugees. The Queen of Jordan is a Palestinian. Once again we have one of Israel's apologists (that's you Dancer) demanding that other states take responsibility for a problem that Israel created.

I didn't realize these figures had become so grossly inflated. That the fact that 1948 is selected as a baseline gives a clear indication that what persecution did occur was retaliation for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs being driven from their homeland by Jewish forces. I suspect that the numbers here are inflated by the following factors: 1) Israel would see this as a counter-weight to claims about Palestinian refugees. Here we have, once again, the Palestinians being held accountable for actions totally out of their control 2) the fact that the claims to having fled are antecdotal and based on claims made by Jews arriving in Israel and not subject to objective international audit 3) many of the numbers would include Jews who, like those from many other parts of the world, immigrated to Israel because they saw it as their new homeland where they would be part of a majority. Particularly since Israel was so close at hand. Clearly, like the Palestinian refugees, the fault for this lies with Israel for causing the refugee crisis in the first place and so the reponsibility for compensation should likewise rest with Israel. Well let's just have a look at Israel's history in Lebanon, shall we? First it is important to note that the Zionists and early Israeli governments have been smacking their lips at the prospect of getting their hands on south Lebanon for some time. The first Israeli invasion of Lebanon started in 1978 with the intention of rooting out the PLO who had been conducting terrorist operations from the refugee camps in South Beirut. Altogether between 1973 and 1978, 105 Israelis had been killed in this way. The invasion culminated in the full-scale bombing of Lebanon in 1982 and by the time the Israelis had left they had killed over 15,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, as well as 2,500 Palestinian refugees who had been left defencless by the departure of the PLO. During the bombing campaign, Lebanon was more or less completely destroyed. During much of the time that the PLO was conducting its raids into Israel, Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war, and any suggestion that it should bear responsibility for the relatively small number of Israeli deaths caused by the PLO to the point that Israel's actions were justified is psychopathic. Then we have the second and more recent invasion. Again, a small number of Israelis are killed and the entire country is bombed into tiny pieces. Again only an psychopath would consider this an appropriate response. This sort of gross over-reaction on the part of Israel to every incident is not new. Consider the Qibya massacre of 1953. A small group of armed Arabs crossed the Israeli/Jordanian border near Qibya and murdered an Israeli womand and two children. The government of Jordan pledged that it would ctach and punish the culprits. This wasn't good enough for the Israelis though. Ariel Sharon was sent with a squad of soldiers by Moshe Dayan across the border to the village of Qibya where he massacred 69 villagers, two thirds of whom were women and children. This sort of psychopathic over-reaction has been a constant feature of the IDF not by accident, but by intention and part of an openly discussed "Iron Wall" strategy for dealing with the Arabs. Yes indeed. For such extreme and murderous over-reaction, compensation should indeed be paid. No, there is no difference when it comes to the death of innocent bystanders. As for someone deserving to be killed I would say that it takes more than an army uniform and paid informer to make that decision. I went to the link you supplied and see they provide today's date as being October 26, 2006, so I had to take a moment to figure out whether that was supposed to be a myth or fact. In any case, when I saw your post I thought you must be referrring to some sort of long-standing status quo during which Arabs had done these things. Instead you are referring to the years after 1948 during which there was a failure to come to a peace agreement. In fact modern historians now agree that the Jordanians, and King Abdullah in particular, had tried valiantly to come to an agreement with the Israelis, including guarantees for freedom of access and worship but were stonewalled by the Israelis, and most particularly, Ben Gurion, whose attitude throughout was "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too." Talks afailed ultimately because Ben Gurion refused to compromise on anything and finally decided that it wasn't worth the effort to come to any terms with the Jordanians who he saw as a weak puppet state of the British. He instead placed more iportance on coming to some sort of understanding with the Egyptions, although the Israelis managed to completely sabotage this as well. I am going to start another thread concerning the mythinformation Israel and its apologists constantly spread about 1948 as there are a lot fo things that need to be set straight.

I am not going to argue this with you Rue. Go to Wikipedia and try to edit the entry for dhimmi to add your comments about Jews being forbidden from owning land and see how far you get. If you can get that into the Wikipedia entry and make it stick, I will believe you. Name the country and the time Rue. In which country did this happen and when? I asked you this before and you didn't answer. Actually I said article 29, but I believe it should have been 49. Why don't you look it up for us? We are talking about settling on conquered land not defending yourself from attack. If you want to start another discussion about that, then put up a post, but don't start getting footloose on my points. I know a hell of a lot more than you would be comfortable with Rue. Watch what you say with me. Mass migration by Jews was not allowed by the Turks, just as any country would not permit mass migration of one people willy-nilly onto its territory. Mass migration did not start until the British Mandate. Get your facts straight. The hell it was. It was administaered by the British throughout the Mandate period. The Jews set up their own organizations for education and social welfare, but not until later; the British always controlled immigration, land allocations, policing, what have you and made the rules everybody lived by - both Jews and Arabs. To say that there was a systematic effort to drive out the Jews is self-serving BS. All of the eruptions of violence were in response to specific incidents. The Arab revolt you refer to came about as a result of an incident at the Western Wall - always a sensitive spot, where Jewish religious leaders put up temporary structures in defiance of British requests not to do so. There was British Commission which studied that revolt and it decided that the Balfour Declaration had been a mistake. Arab agitation was above all, the result of the Arabs finally waking up to the fact that the Jews intended to turn all of Palestine into a Jewish state, in spite of the fact that the Jews had given many assurances to the contrary to just about everybody and downplayed their true intentions. You neglect to mention that at the same time many Arabs were being killed by Jews. Your mention of Haganah leaves out Irgun and the Stern gang who in fact were responsible for most of the deaths of British troops - to the point where the British were referring to them as terrorists (oh my!) and putting out wanted posters for some of them - for example Itzhak Shamir. Not only did Irgun and the Stern Gang murder British troops, but also European diplomats who came to try to negotiate a truce and in one case a gang of Irgum terrorists went to Cairo and assassinated a diplomat. The majority of Arabs who fled Palestine did so because they were driven out by Jewish forces. Palestinian refugees from Haifa and Jaffa report that they were driven out by mortar and sniper fire coming from the Israelis. Menachem Begin's memoires (later censored) state that Ben Gurion personally gave the order to drive out over 60,000 Arabs from towns like Ramle. No, Israel now had a state almost twice the size of what it was before. It had taken most of what was assigned in the UN partition to Arabs. I will try to come back to the rest of your fantasy tale later Rue, right now I have something to attend to.

Well that's not bad but I would put security in the hands of UN Peacekeepers and administration in the hands of the special UN sub-committee to be made up of representatives of all of the groups who reside there. This would not only be the Jews, Christians and Moslems but also the Armenians, what have you.

No problem. Go back to the dark ages when it happened and argue with the Huns, the Gauls, the Vandals and the Romans. Well in fact the government of Israel is apparently keeping a tally of all the Jews who have been forced to leave their homes in Arab lands and they are having problems coming up with a total equal or even close to the number of Arabs who were driven out of Israel. I'm not sure you want to get into compensation for damages caused by Arab states since that might open the door for compensation demands for the damages caused by Israel - for example bombing the entire country of Lebanon into rubble - twice. With respect to compensation to Israelis for family members killed, you might want to remember that the number of Palestinians killed by the Israelis is more than 3 times that of Israelis killed by terrorists. And this is just during the two intifadas. Well you know I keep wondering why it is that the Palestinians are being held responsible for the polcies of all of the Arab countries in the neighbourhood. Takes the idea of collective punishment to a new level, no? In any case, there are also Arab countries who do recognize the state of Israel. The Church of the Nativity, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, what have you would not still be there if what you say is true. The Turks had 600 years to destroy them. Israel will always put its security over the rights of Christians and Moslems and to my mind that means they are the least ones to be trusted with the place.

Not sure what your argument is intended to be here but I am guessing you are obliquely countering my point by saying that since there are still Arabs living in Israel, then they couldn't have been driven out. The fact that all of the Arabs were not driven out does not mean that hundreds of thousands of others were not driven out. If that is not what you meant then what did you mean? In any case you raised the 'full civil rights' of Israeli Arabs. This is another piece of mythinformation promulgated by Israel and its apologists. In fact Israeli Arabs do not enjoy full civil rights. Consider Israel's policy regarding land use. All state land is administered by the Jewish National Fund which is mandated to reserve the use of the land 'for Jewish benefit'. The JNF is not permitted to lease or sell land to non-Jews. It is in fact technically illegal for a non-Jew to stay overnight on state land. And then we have immigration policy in the form of the 'Right of Return' law. Any Jew from anywhere in the world has the right to settle in Israel and take up citizenship. A policy which produces a stady flow of Jewish immigrants, and guarantees a perpetual Jewish majority in the electorate. These immigranst are given loans on very generous terms and generous tax breaks as well as special consideration for housong (almost all in illegal settlements on Palestinian land). This different treatment extends to the way Israeli Arabs are treated in society. Consider what happened when Ariel Sharon took his little waddle out onto the grounds of the Dome of the Rock. Israeli Arabs demonstrated to protest his presence. Eight of them were shot dead in the streets by the IDF. Contrast this to the treatment Jewish settlers received when they protested their removal from settlements in Gaza. Oh the wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The shredding of garments! Soldiers crying and pleading. Settlers crying and pleading. Settlers were standing on roofs and throwing heavy objects down on the soldiers. How many were shot? Here again you are not addressing my point. I said nothing about Jews accepting inferior status. My point was that Rue's statements concerning the ownership of land by Jews under the dhimmi laws were wrong. This is a ridiculous exaggeration and it is not worth a response.

Rue, a lot of what you say is not true but you appear to be one of those people who believes that if he says the same thing over and over and over again, and to enough people, that it will come true. You are a lot like Israel and the mythinformation campaign it constantly conducts about its own history. Your idea that the Jews have rights going back before the Moslems and Christians is wrong. The Jews and the Arabs have lived on the land side by side back to the dawn of recorded history. The fact that the Arabs later became Moslem or Christian is immaterial. The Arabs did not flee because they were told to by the Arab League. They were driven out by shelling from Israeli forces acting under orders from Ben Gurion to clear the Arab towns and villages. The Palestinians had no choice in being absent from their land. They were driven off of it and not allowed to return. Your idea that they gave up the right to their land because of this is like saying that if a thief takes something, and you are not able to get it back within a certain period of time, then it belongs to the thief. The laws of dhimmi do not forbid Jews from owning land. Jews are not prevented from owning land in Arab countries. No European country forbids Jews from owning land. Not now, nor at any time in modern history. Article 29 of the Geneva Conventions forbids the settling of conquered land. When Israel took lands outside of that mandated by the UN partition proposal (which it agreed to), it was in violation of the Geneva convention. Now that Israel is building settlements in land taken during the last war, it is doubly in violation. I do not see anyone here saying that the Jews should not have a country, just that the Palestinians should have one as well and be compensated for the loss they suffered as a direct result of the creation of the state of Israel.

Harper's comments about supporting the troops are basically intended to make it clear he wants everybody to shut up and salute. He is trying to suppress debate.

I watched the CNN interview of Ahmadinejad. He thinks the UN is controlled by the US. Which UN Agency was this? The way it works is they fund projects, they don't just hand out money for bumper stickers. If this story is true, my guess would be that somebody misappropriated funds from a legitimate project for the purpose. I doubt that a UN agency would put through a project with the purpose of printing up bumper stickers. The UN is a forum for communication. If you kick out China and the other countries you mention, how are you going to talk to them? Koffi is retiring; you won't have him to kick around any more.

One aspect of the decriminalization bill put forward by the Liberals was that it would include not only small amounts of pot, but also the growing of one or two plants. Would tend to put a dent in the dealers' market. With respect to marijuana being a gateway drug, the thing that leads to harder drugs is not the marijuana, but the dealer who sells it. He also has a whole bag of other drugs he would love to have you buy, and most especially if those drugs are addictive. I say take the sale of marijuana out of the hands of the dealers and then go after them for the really harmful drugs like cocaine, meth, heroine, what have you. Even the RCMP and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police were in favour of the decriminalization bill although they quibbled over the amounts. I watched the RCMP witness to the committee studying the bill on CPAC and he said they were in favour of it because busting potheads was wasting too much of their time and the penalties were overkill.

Do explain that analogy? The troops in general are firefighters but the troops in Afghanistan are criminals, i.e. firebugs, for participating in a mission? No the troops are firefighters and the firebugs are the politicians. Nobody has pointed out that it was in fact CHretien who first put Canadian troops in Afghanistan and Martin who first sent them to Kandahar. Harper got into it because he extended the mission, something the Liberals did a number of times as well. I doubt that there are many, if any, people in Canada who do not support the troops. The mission is another matter. In a democratic society, debate about political decisions is not only inevitable, but essential to the proper functioning of the democracy. Any attempt by a leader to suppress that debate has to be viewed with some suspicion.

There is an interesting piece in Saturday's Globe and Mail by John Polanyi - former University of Toronto Chemistry Professor and Nobel prize winner. He says that the war in Afghanistan is being lost to a large extent because US forces have been busying themselves destroying the poppy crop and punishing farmers who grow and harvest the poppies. As a result, the Afghanis are seeing the US forces not as liberators, but as oppressors. According to Polanyi, one third of Afghanistans GNP comes from the drug trade. He also says that most of the opiates coming out of Afghanistan, both legal and illegal, are used in the west. His idea is that the poppy farmers should be left alone but that their product should be funnelled into the legal drug trade, and that the price of opiates should be lowered so that they can be used more widely by the medical establishment in the developing world. I thought it seemed to make a lot of sense.