israel/palestine questions Rating Options

[brooklyneast05]

i'm going to put this in debate, just because i figure there is the possibility of one breaking out. i'm not posing a debate though, just wondering if anyone here can shed some light that i can comprehend.

basically, i don't really get the deal with Palestine and Israel. i've never been in a history class that really addressed it so i've always been confused about all of it. it's frustrating to me to see stuff all over the news and feel like i don't have an opinion one way or the other becuase i don't get what is going on. i've been reading about it, but it's still confusing as hell.

i keep reading stuff that basically just says how they Palestinians got kicked out of their home, and they are pissed and want their land back. well...that doesn't seem that irrational to me. i would too, of course not enough that i'm ok with my kids and future generations dying over it but you know. so i guess lots of the stuff i read, i sorta agree with the Palestinians. then when i say that, people are like "NO, THEY ARE WRONG, ISRAEL IS OUR ALLY, NOT THEM. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT"

so i guess i wanna know what i'm talking about. why do we favor Israel in this mess? am i just completely missing something in not understanding why Isreal is right and the Palestinians are wrong?

[Reidar]

^ The various humanitarian treaties that your country adheres to disagree.

oh please. if our "moral character" is purely genetic (which is an argument i sympathize & agree with almost entirely), than our so-called "moral character" would fail to resemble anything, philosophically, moral. morality, if not a choice, if not characterized by normative language, if not metaphysical, fails to be anything substantial or universally binding. you said i would demonstrate a "moral ineptitude," such a deficiency could only exist if morality was an objective quality independent of our own personal wills & sentiment.

in short, you first comment denied relativism while your "rebuttal" affirmed it.

No, you're breaching the analytic by supposing it to not equal what its own definition conscripts it to be. If the qualifier, "moral character", does not entail morality in any sense or context of the word, then it isn't moral character to begin with. And to be inept, morally, is not to subscribe to relativism because the inherence of morality is, once again, an innate universality. Somebody who is inept intellectually is not compromising the scientific physiology of their brain. By the way, comrades and friends, moral character is not genetic. Morals are not imprinted in the nucleotides of the gene, or the totality of the gene complex. The perpetuation of altruistic behavior is, which is why I said that it's the conscious form of simpler and hereditary altruism. Morality as a universal trait is precisely what makes it objectively interwoven with the fabric of our characteristics.

uhmm. no? imperialism has many benefits and many incentives. although the warriors of the crusades were told they were fighting for their lord god... that doesn't necessitate that their lords designed them to fight for that sole reason alone, or for that reason at all. might as well say that since the soldiers in iraq were told & motivated to fight by fears of terrorism, than that there exists no other plausible explanation for the primary cause of the fighting - an order from up high.

you are oversimplifying the situation like a two year old. if we can agree that religion is socially constructed, by denying middle eastern religion its socio-political roots, and by isolating all motivation to purely spiritual explanations, you're completely missing the foundation of the islamic mentality. notice that islam, in america, and in many other places all over the world, is completely & perfectly peaceful in practice. since religion is pliable to society & especially for those that wield it for political ends, we must interpret religious behavior on a larger socio-political scale. you're making sweeping generalizations and for it, completely missing the point.

Quite the turnaround here (and I think it odd that you've apparently had arguments with two-year-olds before to have a point of reference). If the incentives are so impossible to pin down, then you had even less ground to claim that "the people pulling the strings are far more concerned about politics than they are any number of virgins in the sky." Certainly not, because "imperialism has many benefits and many incentives", right?

I'm here to your rescue. In reverse order, you're now concurring with me that "their politics are not apportioned from their faith", but under the guise that I've somehow missed noting the influence of one on the other when, in fact, I had to point that out to begin with. And that there exists no other plausible explanation for the primary cause of the fighting? Yes, that we might as well attribute to the "primary" incentive is obvious. Whatever dissenters you're trying to account for don't make up the primary cause, or else they wouldn't be dissenters with their own (apparently unknown, which you paradoxically know) motives to begin with. Imperialism does not have a multitude of enticements. It cannot by definition of what constitutes an "empire" possessing a centralized drive to unite the varying components qualifying it in the first place.

People practice Islam, as well as Christianity, peacefully because they treat the scripture as a word buffet, picking and choosing what to take into practice and what to ignore. Osama bin Laden was not skewing the text of the Qur'an in citing "words of justification" for the attacks on New York, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali can tell you. It is stated without equivocation that dissidents from Islam are punishable by death. It wasn't so "completely and perfectly peaceful" when many mainstream Muslims, some in my own family, called for the fatwa on Salman Rushdie to be carried out for his crime of writing a novel, or when the main offense of Muhammad's depiction in a Danish cartoon was the infidelity of the publishers, not the infringement upon free speech rights. I actually have an unfair prejudice in arguing any of this with someone who hasn't grown up under Islam, hasn't read the Qur'an or the hadith, and doesn't really understand on a first-hand basis many of the relevant factors at play, but I'll grant you some leeway.

consider the CIA's involvement with al qaeda and operation cyclone in afghanistan during the soviet war. the islamic extremists didn't seem to have an issue with U.S. aid then...? maybe you're just not looking at the whole picture kid.

sure, there are fanatical extremists, that devote themselves entirely, but, still, most of these persons are informed by leaders who, often & arguably, have larger political aspirations. further, there are, many more islamics who are perfectly peaceful. this is, arguably, still a result of their enviroment. just as christians several a century and a half past could read the same exact passages & figure the bible supports the enslavement of black people.

RELIGION IS SOCIALLY CONTROLLED. SO, INVESTIGATE THE SOCIETY, NOT THE TEXT, BECAUSE THE SOCIETY SUPERSEDES THE TEXT, ALWAYS, & BEYOND APPEARANCES.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the American support of the mujahideen, not only doesn't account for the strictly defensive posturings I just refuted, but it also speaks nothing about any disconnect between the soldiers and the political motivations of the higher-ups, which is what you need to substantiate. YOU SEE, THEOCRACIES, AND THE CULTS OF THEIR PREMISE, ARE BUILT UPON THE SCRIPTURE AS A FOUNDATI---I'm sorry, I've just realized how much that instantly instills the desire to discount whatever is attempting to, ironically, be emphasized. Rather, it should be pointed out that you're again separating the politics from the religion, and no amount of vagary or speculation along the lines of, "We don't really know their incentives" can render that a valid distinction. Religion is not socially controlled - it is the control.