Israel

True.

 

I believe that the concept is quite popular and some people are fanatical about it. I personally don't believe in a creator or god, that's why I deliberately spell it with a lower case "g".

 

I get that Helen but my point was if one side fire rockets into a residential area and the other other side retaliates you can’t say one has done worse than the other.
By our standards it’s nonsensical but thankfully we don’ t have fanatics over here that have that kind of ordinance.
Personally I would just bulldoze the lot and rehouse the people somewhere better, leaving a big buffer zone it’s hardly a desirable place to live and it would be cheaper in the long run.
But then again I’m not a religious fanatic.

 

Would have to disagree on both points here. I'm not sure what the Palestinians are supposed to do when they are at best the victims of apartheid. When your history, your land and all your hopes and dreams are taken from you there will always be some who resort to violence. The violence is a direct result of what Israel have constructed.

I lived in Korea for a few years and follow the conflict closely. Whilst Trump's initial pasification of the northern regime did help, albeit with some bizarre motives, there was no follow through from the US. The Korean premier Moon Jae-In has had a much better effect with his 'sunshine policy'.

The South and the US still hold their joint military drills every year - where they simulate invading North Korea. The North still responds every year by testing ballistic rockets. The only difference is the media reaction. Instead of 'Mad old Kim Jong-Un launches completelety unprovoked rocket attack on the sea', we've had 'covid'.

 

I think it’s more to do with the Balfour declaration after the 1st world war which promised to give the Jews a homeland. The homeland was Israel and was planted in what was then Palestine after WW2. I can’t remember the dates but I think that’s the gist of it. So, it wasn’t god, it was the good old British government!!

 

Whilst this is true to an extent. Sykes-Picot and Balfour have been the bigger issue in destabilising the region.

 

If you don’t believe in god then how can you blame god?

 

Trump kept a lid on it my arse he moved his embassy to Jerusalem and like Netanyahu called it the capital of Isreal, where Jerusalem was a shared city as both as religious Monuments, Temples, and Mosques. Trump was one-sided and always backed the far-right zionists because of money being given to him and his party by Jewish lobbyists. "like what Dodgy Dave Cameron has just been doing"

 

Oil has been the cause of trouble in the middle East and still.is.

 

Gaza is a ghetto. It’s existence is under control of an occupying authority. There is no freedom of movement and a sea blockade of the port prevents access and egress for trade. The population in the ghetto are oppressed and the oppressor is Israel. Older Israelis know all about ghettos. They should know better.

 

The South and the US still hold their joint military drills every year - where they simulate invading North Korea. The North still responds every year by testing ballistic rockets. The only difference is the media reaction. Instead of 'Mad old Kim Jong-Un launches completelety unprovoked rocket attack on the sea', we've had 'covid'.[/QUOTE]

seriously... if you were the other side of a border to a mentally unhinged lunatic ( albeit with the best golf hadicap ever ) wouldn’t you want to demonstrate that you wouldn't roll over for your belly tickling if he got out of bed the wrong side one morning and decided he wanted to expand?

 

seriously... if you were the other side of a border to a mentally unhinged lunatic ( albeit with the best golf hadicap ever ) wouldn’t you want to demonstrate that you wouldn't roll over for your belly tickling if he got out of bed the wrong side one morning and decided he wanted to expand?[/QUOTE]
Absolutely. However to flip that around if you put the UK in North Korea's shoes for a moment. Imagine your two biggest enemies, say France and Germany hosted full on war drills every year on your border with the purpose to simulate an invasion of the UK. Wouldn't you agree that firing the odd rocket out to sea to say 'don't mess with me' is a reasonable response?

The issue is how this is repoted in the media over here, the context is never given, we just hear that North Korea is firing rockets again and that Kim Jong-Un's dad was good at golf. They make it headline news every single year and it's a complete non-story.

 

seriously... if you were the other side of a border to a mentally unhinged lunatic ( albeit with the best golf hadicap ever ) wouldn’t you want to demonstrate that you wouldn't roll over for your belly tickling if he got out of bed the wrong side one morning and decided he wanted to expand?[/QUOTE]

This year we had 2 big birthdays, 25th wedding anniversary and daughters graduation within 2-3 months. Pre-covid, the plan was for a big holiday to celebrate and South Korea/Japan was high on the list (Seoul, train to Busan, ferry to Japan then train towards Tokyo to fly home). One of the most popular tourist trips from Seoul is to the DMZ and to see the tunnels that the North Koreans built as a means to invade the South.

 

Oil has been a cause of trouble, but only for the last 100 years or so, the trouble has been going on there for 2000 years.

 

Another part of the world screwed over by the good old British Empire - making promises to the Jews while getting the Arabs onside to overthrow their Turkish rulers with no intention of setting them free at the end, then finally running away once the violence started.

 

This year we had 2 big birthdays, 25th wedding anniversary and daughters graduation within 2-3 months. Pre-covid, the plan was for a big holiday to celebrate and South Korea/Japan was high on the list (Seoul, train to Busan, ferry to Japan then train towards Tokyo to fly home). One of the most popular tourist trips from Seoul is to the DMZ and to see the tunnels that the North Koreans built as a means to invade the South.[/QUOTE]
Would be an awesome trip Scoff! I've taken that ferry from Busan to Fukuoka many a time in various drunken states.

I actually work in travel, planning trips to that part of the world. If you need any tips just message me!

 

Let me make myself clear. It is other people's fanatical devotion to their god which causes the trouble. I'm not talking about a beardy bloke in the clouds but the concept which drives some people to do evil things because their holy book (the word of god) tells them to. It's all ****** made up millennia ago as a way of trying to make sense of a mysterious world and used by the people in power to control the masses.

Thus ends the sermon according to Brush. If I have offended anyone then I am truly sorry but my view of religion is just as valid as yours, there is no ultimate proof either way but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on my side, all you have is faith.

 

I don' think 'Trump kept a lid on it'- this is a choice to escalate made by Netanyahu in order to hold on to power after the March elections, opposition parties were about to try and form a government, and along comes this new "crisis", what a co-incidence, nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with Netanyahu keeping his corrupt ass out of jail.

 

We would do well to reflect on our complicity in everyday forms of violence and dispossession, and our callousness before the spectacle of suffering. Maybe our own everyday culture of cruelty and heartlessness should make us sit up and think?. In an economically stagnant world that offers a dream sold by the West of individual empowerment to all but then has no realizable way for people in other countries to attain political or economic change, is it any wonder they either turn to God or other forms of comfort/conflict?
In case you hadn't notice society without belief in God has been tried on numerous occasions, and hasn't tended to work out too well. The savagery of French Jacobinism, the clinical heartlessness of classical socialist eugenics, the Nazi movement, Stalinism - all the grand utopian projects of the modern age that have directly or indirectly spilled such oceans of human blood - are no less result of the Enlightenment myth of liberation than are the liberal democratic state or the vulgarity of late capitalist consumerism or the pettiness of bourgois individualism. The most pitilessly and self-righteously violent regimes of modern history have been those that have most explicitly cast off the vision of God and sought to replace it with a more "human" set of values.

 

About 3 years ago the Israeli Government passed a law stating that the only people with a right to self - determination in Israel are Jews. This effectively formalised the position of Arabs/Palestinians as second-class citizens. Very much like the Nuremberg laws in 1930's Germany. The Israeli state is a racist state and treats the minority as inferior. Gaza is little better than a concentration camp. With Jews encouraged to evict Arabs from their own homes as happened recently in Jerusalem its no wonder that from time to time Palestinians kick off! What the hell are they supposed to do? They have no support apart from the occasional resolution from the UN. Violence is appalling of course but as I say what do they do when they live in an apartheid regime?