I opened up a reply window before the thread closed but when I tried to post it couldn't get through. Ok..... so now it's back.
Well, one of my friends a long time ago in his adolescent days said, the solution to the middle east is to nuke it off the face of the planet.
Frankly, I too nowadays feel like saying "can we nuke them and forget about it?". It would save American's a ton of money.
Yeah, it's the good old "kill them all, let God sort them out" strategy.
That is exactly how racism starts, with historical revisionism.
No need to apologize. We all understand where you are coming from. As a philosopher I can clearly see your racism, even when it is heavily veiled.
Racism is a combination of a number of things leading to unequal and malicious attitudes towards a group of people. I don't think it is fair to call someone "racist" if they don't demonstrate hatred, condescension, discrimination or prejudice towards that group. I don't believe that the person you accused of racism actually demonstrated any signs of racism.
How can a person be racist if they were formerly inclined to show sympathy to a particular group or to understand such sympathy? A racist person generally doesn't care. The attitude of the racist is that the group they hate or discriminate against do not deserve sympathy at all. The group they despise are subhuman. Do you really think this is the attitude of the poster to which you are responding?
People who change their minds about supporting Israel are not racist. The fact that they previously supported Israel indicates that they considered the country and its people to be human beings worthy of the same level of dignity. What turns them away from supporting Israel is the actions of its armed forces.
Is it racist when people choose to oppose and not support a country because of the probably unethical actions of its military? You may have noticed that over the last 12 months I have made some rather anti-American comments. I expressed my disgust over the USA's many social and economic problems. I said how I thought Americans were idiots for letting this happen to their country. I directed my disgust not just at its government and military, but also its people.
Of course, I can't be racist because Americans aren't a race. They are a nation and I say they're a nation of idiots. But that is besides the point..... I do not believe that expressing disgust at America makes me a malicious person. I am disgusted not because I hate America, but because I expect more from a superpower nation.
How could Americans let their public education system go down the toilet? How could they let manufacturing move overseas? Why can't they make radical changes to the way they do business to compete with foreign manufacturing firms? For a country that has the most powerful military, for a country that put people on the moon, this is a real shame. To me it seems like a deck of cards that could collapse at any moment because Americans set up such a shoddy system. America is in decline because its people aren't as smart as they used to be. It's just like in the 2006 movie, Idiocracy. There are less university graduates in science and engineering each year. The country is experiencing a brain drain.
It's a big country and I could never fathom all the things that make it what it is, but it makes me cringe every time I hear or read about social, economic, educational or behavioural problems. More people are having sex and losing their virginity at a young age and eating junk food than ever before. There is more obesity. Jamie Oliver, a foreigner had to go over there to start a food/diet revolution because Americans couldn't reform their own eating habits on their own. The USA is starting to live on junk food and very soon this junk food nation could become a junk people nation.
No I am not a malicious person for saying these things about America. I am not spewing hatred. It is sympathy that makes me say these things and I believe that the same people who start to oppose Israel who were formerly supportive do it out of sympathy. How could Israel do this to itself? How could Israel sabotage its relationship with the international community by allowing its armed forces to be "so irresponsible" in dealing with its adversaries, whether they are Palestinians or people on the border? Why is Israel shooting itself in the foot?
Personally I think the situation is far too complicated for me to decide whether to support or oppose Israel based on its actions. I never really kept up with all the news surrounding Israel. There were too many things happening.
Some people accuse Israel of committing "genocide." Some people accuse anyone who opposes Israel of racism. I think both of these attitudes are extreme. Genocide is a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire race. You deliberately target a particular group for extermination. Racism is where you treat a certain group of people as subhuman and less deserving of the level of dignity offered to normal human beings.
The people who support Israel think Israel gets too little support. Those who oppose Israel think it gets too much. How do you make judgments on that? Is there a numerical value I can assign to the level of support Israel receives? If by my method of determining the amount of favouritism Israel receives I get a positive value I could say Israel gets too much support. If I get a negative value I could say it gets too little. But how do you calculate this numerical value?
Everybody who wants to decide whether Israel's actions are justified tries to rationalise their thinking, but it's never treated as a mathematical problem. It's not a numbers game. People can't agree on the level of favouritism Israel receives. There is no objective measure on that.
In saying that there is no objective measure, that there is no numerical scale of favouritism on which everybody can develop a consensus, I am saying that there is no absolute measure of Israel's moral and ethical status. It's relative.
This is why I can't decide what to do with Israel. People will come up with reasons for supporting and opposing it and there's no way of deciding which arguments carry more weight. This is one of those situations where you get a so-called "political, ideological pendulum." If you think one side gets too much support, you go for the opposition. You try and push the pendulum back into the middle. Basically, people just decide to support what they think is the weaker side and nobody knows which side is weaker.
Is Israel a victim, an underdog or an oppressor? I can't decide.
