rio wrote:
Personally I don't like to bring the Holocaust into it at all on either side. I'm not one to call what they are doing to the Palestinians a "holocaust", as I think it is destructively hyberbolic and extremely loaded with historical meaning. Plus, they are not systematically trying to wipe out a race or religion, they are just being extremely violent and reckless to a vulnerable group of people and causing the loss of lots of innocent life.
Don't really know much about whether the Israeli government is invoking the holocaust at all (although it wouldn't surprise me that much if some of them were), but there are pro-Israeli articles such as the following link which use the historical memory of it to justify what's going on, which I find extremely distasteful and manipulative. The guy who wrote it had family who survived Bergen Belsen, so obviously it means a lot to him, but IMO that doesn't change the fact that your using something like that to justify (or at least try to minimise disgust at) violence agaisnt civillians.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 461544.eceQuote:
Anyway, yeah, Rio is a master debater...
"You may be a cunning linguist, but I'm a master debater"
Thanks for the kind words, dudes.
Agreed. Sure, I know that there'll always be some people that try and capitalise off it, from what V was saying it seemed like actual Israeli government spokesmen were using the Holocaust as an excuse. Which they're not, as far as I know.
And I voted for you too Sirrah! an excellent debater.
In other news,
buck fush:
Quote:
Israel's Olmert: Rice embarrassed over UN vote
JERUSALEM – Israel's prime minister said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was embarrassed by orders to abstain from voting last week on a U.N. truce resolution for Gaza that she helped arrange.
Israel had argued that the Security Council measure calling for a halt to the Gaza fighting — which passed Thursday in a 14-0 vote with the U.S. abstaining — was unworkable because it did not guarantee Israel's security.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he called President George W. Bush to seek an abstention from the U.S., a key Israeli ally at the United Nations.
"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. "They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me."
Olmert said he argued that the United States should not vote in favor, and the president then called Rice and told her not to do so.
"She was left pretty embarrassed," Olmert said.
A senior U.S. official in Washington disputed the account.
"The plan had been all along, as agreed by the secretary and the president, that if all of the pieces fell into place, we would abstain," the official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
"The government of Israel does not make policy for the United States," the official added.
The approved resolution called for "an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza."
Rice said later that the United States "fully supports" the resolution but abstained because it "thought it important to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation," referring to an Egyptian-French initiative aimed at achieving a cease-fire.
Still, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said he was surprised by the U.S. abstention.
"We were told that the Americans were going to vote in favor," he said Friday, a day after the vote.
But when Rice came in to the Security Council chamber, she informed the Saudi foreign minister with an apology that she would abstain and would clarify later that the U.S. supported the resolution nonetheless, according to Malki.
"What happened in the last 10 or 15 minutes, what kind of pressure she received, from whom, this is really something that maybe we will know about later," he said.
Bummer. Bet it rains, too, I always seem to finish work these days just as it starts raining.
