vimothy
yurp
Come on, read what I said (twice), something like "The UK supported "Israel" before it existed". I put the quotation marks around Israel to show that I did not literally mean the country of Israel (because it didn't exist), just in case that wasn't clear I said "before it existed", twice - you can't come back and say "that wasn't support for Israel, it didn't exist then".
Yes, but so does Western (UK) support for the thing that was to become Israel (not Israel though - it didn't exist before it was founded). For example the Balfour Declaration of 1917 - did I mention that?
The Balfour Declaration was the (pretty racist, IMO) British solution to the nagging Jewish problem. Send 'em to Palestine! It doesn't equate to support for Israel.
Did the Balfour Declaration cause the rise of Islamism in the Mid East? That's a big leap.
In any case you ignored the two examples I gave: the British turning back the Exodus 1947 and the anti-British bombing campaign of Jewish terrorists during British mandatory rule of Paletine. The Jews fought the British on anti-colonialist principles. If the British supported "Israel" before it even existed, how do you account for this?
True, support wavered and there were various acts of parliament to restrict the number of Jews heading in to Palestine but these were never enforced so they were hardly that important. The Balfour Declaration is still used by someas the legal justification for the formation of the state of Israel and is argued about to this day.
Er... see above
Oh yeah, something else which should be born in mind: how do we account for the massive influx of Middle Eastern Jews into Israel in the '50s?
Even if no-one had ever coined the phrase 4GW the UK government would still have been supporting Israel before it existed as I said above. It was not relevant to the simple fact I gave.
It wasn't supporting Israel. And any way, are you seriously saying that the Balfour Declaration is the cause of Islamism? Arab anti-semiticism? Arab anti-Western sentiment?
All these Islamic radicals who supposedly rue the formation of Israel because it denied the Palestinians self-determination - don't you find it strange that they have nowhere else in the Middle East done anything to further the cause of democracy? If the Palestinians are oppressed, what of other arab countries?
Re 4GW, your perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict obviously impacts upon how you view the WoT. Indeed, this thread surely demonstrates that fact. How nuanced is the picture you've built? Who supplied you with the infomation you used to build it? etc
You certainly have to hand it to the Israelis that from when they began entering Palestine from the end of the last century (er one before that I mean) they outwitted the indigenous Arabs at almost every turn.
There have been Jews in Palestine a lot longer than that.
I suspect that people wear the one t-shirt over the other because in their lifetime Israel has been superior and it has used that superiority to oppress the Palestinians in ways that most people do not find acceptable.
I suspect that if there were that much rational behind it, people would not be waving Hezbollah banners around.
Furthermore, though more controversially I suspect, people also don't wear Israel t-shirts because they would say that when the Israelis were the underdog they were the invaders in a country that was already extant. People have less sympathy with a weak group of invaders than a weak group of people who no-longer have a country because that group of invaders proved stronger than they appeared.
Palestine was an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, not a country in its own right. Throughout the region there are ethnic and religious groups being exploited and denied political representation. Why don't people go and protest about, say, the lack of a Kurdish homeland?
The US mcsoldiers took the pictures at Abu Ghraib, they appeared on US tv - what did Islamists have to do with it?
Who profits?
They may have sought to do so but Israel made it very easy for them by doing just that. You're not really suggesting that all those civilians didn't die are you?
No of course not, I'm not a monster. I don't think I'd be here thinking these thoughts if I didn't hope for a better life for people in the Middle East.