Sick of Israeli/palestinian BS?

[mustang17]

Is it just me or are you tired of funding the war between the two?

The United States gives three billion dollars of foreign aid to Israel, the single largest recipient of US aid. Not only do we give them money, but we give them our weapons. Remember the mess when we gave arms to Iran or Afghanistan! How is this any different? Now we view them as are enemy.

Can you say beyond a shadow of a doubt that we'll never have to fight that terrorist Ariel Sharon. I'm I the only one who remembers what that butcher did in Lebanon? He tried to recreate Hitler?s work and wipe out a race of people!

It's one thing to mediate the feud between the two, and it's another to fund one side and pretend we (the USA) want a fair outcome. Let's cut the funds and support and see what happens.

The only purpose the Middle East serves is to make sure we have enough oil to run our big SUV's and Muscle Cars, besides that they are useless. I hate both sides and could care less if they kill each other, just don't do it with my money!

Please, someone tell me I'm wrong, and our money is being spent for good cause.

I thought Bush and the US people wanted to fight terrorist, not support them.

[cyberstang5.0]

I agree... I think we should just back out of there and leave them to kill themselves....

Now, if they start messing with US, or our economy, we have a duity to stop them. They have been fighting over a little puny piece of land ever sience time began. Get over it!!! It's just land! I consider Deerborn a very important piece of land ( cuz of Ford )but you see me trying to kill everybody do I can live there?

[Crazy Horse GT]

Man, you don't have a clue.

I found out just recently that I'm descended from 2 different tribes of Israal, so you hate me? Israel is our ally. The towel heads should move to Syria, or Lebanon or whatever camel - cowboy country will take them.

They got their a-- handed to them in 1948. Sharon is the first Israeli leader with some cojones. I spent a whole day with their army. Bad mo fo's! The U.S. & the da-n U.N. should butt out! Would you like another country telling the nosy USA what to do? I think not. So thanks for hating me, I appreciate it.

[mustangman65_79]

Hey, crazy horse, no need to get upset. I understand that he is talking bad about your country, but no need to get upset about it. PPl talk bad about the U.S. all the time, I try not to think too hard about it.



mustang17, I see how u feel, but put yourself in their shoes. What if the U.S. was there, and they were here. Would u want them to stop helping us? They are our ally, same as Great Britain. And they could take care of themselves preatty well. They did before we even stepped in. We pay them not to blow up the middle east. Just look at what happend to West bank.

[Crazy Horse GT]

kasper im not upset i was being sarcastic , you dont just say that you hate a whole race of people, with out knowing them, & im an american, not an ireali, just have a little jewish heritage, that's all, i also have a lot of indian-american type heritage too,so if i came on the board's & said -i hate white people what does that make me?- a dam-racist

[cyberstang5.0]

Why can't we all just get a long?

[Crazy Horse GT]

i agree cyberstang, im sick of the war in afghanistan too but, i will keep my comment's to myself, l8ter man.

[mustang17]

Hey Crazy horse,

I don't support the countries my family was from! I'm an American, I live here and I'm grateful. I'd rather deal with US problems, which are many. Sure, it's good to help other countries in need, but to fund their war? I don't think so!

Just so you know, Ariel Sharon does not have "cojones" at all. He is a convicted mass murderer! He was found responsible for killing hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon in '82. Sure he forced out the PLO, but at what cost?

I really hate both of the leaders, not the people.

I don't understand how the US can work with either side. They say they want peace and still blow each other up. I hate the fact that both sides are killing each other, only the US gives one tons of money and the other gets nothing. Still think we can broker peace? I don't.

What were doing is not working. Lets try cutting them off and then see how long it takes to work a peace agreement.

[Mr 5 0]

Mustang17:

You wrote:

Please, someone tell me I'm wrong, and our money is being spent for good cause.

Yes, you're wrong, our money is being spent for a good cause.

Here's why.

There are 350 million Arabs surrounding less than 6 million Israelis on a sliver of land that the Israelis have made productive and habitable over the past 50 to 75 years. The Israelis are fighting for survival. Not land, not oil, not power. To say we fund the state of Israel because of 'oil' is to totally misunderstand the mid-east situation at this time in history.

It's easy to dismiss this seemingly endless conflict as a bunch of strange people who don't matter to us having a war we shouldn't have to care about.

Actually, we do that in Africa. There have been many bloody, horrible civil wars in Africa over the past ten years and the U.S. has done little to intervene other than to send humanitarian aid, which was stolen and wasted. So, yes, the U.S. is quite capable of ignoring messy situations when the countries involved don't have an impact on America in any substantial way. Feel better now?

Unfortunately, the mid-east is mostly comprised of dictators, kings and millions of Muslim fanatics who do matter to us, very much. Israel is a tiny democracy in a sea of despots and we choose to support democracy. We've done so since we recognized Israel as a sovereign nation 13 minutes after they declared themself so in 1948. You could say that the U.S. and Israel go way back. We also agree that Israel has a right to exist, something the Arabs - violently - disagree on.

Yet we try to maintain decent relationships with the Arabs (we send hefty humanitarian aid to the Palestinians all the time) and we do send Israel 5.5 billion in aid every year, half of it for military aid, most of which comes back to us when the Israelis buy our weapons. Money well spent. It's also helpful to note that Israel has never asked for U.S. troops to help them in their various conflicts with the surrounding Arab states. They are quite willing to go it alone in that regard, to their credit.

The U.S. also funds 'moderate' Arab states like Eqypt (1.3 billion in 2001) and Jordan (75 million the same year). We do this, partly as a reward to those Arab countries who have signed peace agreements with Israel and partly to maintain a working relationship with them and to be able to act as a broker in the ongoing disputes between the Arab-supported PLO, er, sorry 'Palestianian Authority' and Israel.

Oil is a part of that, for sure. Tell the Democrats that next time President Bush wants to drill on one tiny section of a deserted Alaska plain in order to at least begin to decrease our dependence on foreign oil and the Democrats kill the bill that would allow this to happen, crying about 'the environment' in a frozen wasteland that no American will ever even come within a thousand miles of.

Yes, we do need oil, but not simply for those SUV's you despise so much (or high-performance Mustangs, either). Industry runs on oil, my friend. Many American homes are heated with oil, too. Did you forget that? Oil products are used in thousands of industries as lubricants and the list goes on. It's more than SUV's...a lot more.

Frankly, if it was 'just about oil', all the U.S. would have to do is abandon Israel (they have no oil) and the Arabs would be overjoyed and probably cut oil prices way down in appreciation - as they destroyed Israel and the hated Jews. No, it's not that easy.

It's also about disputed land; the much-touted 'occupied' Palestinian territories on the West Bank and Gaza. Try to stay with me now, this gets involved.

These areas were originally part of Israel and were seized by Jordan in the late 1940's, shortly after Israel was granted statehood by the U.N.
They were used by Eqypt and Jordan as a launching site for troops and missiles in the 1967 war, instigated by the Arabs, not Israel, incidentally. When Israel defeated the Arabs in that war, they held those strips of land and they have been in dispute ever since, but this fiction of them being 'occupied' as say, the U.S. occupied Germany and Japan after World WarTwo is false. Unfortunately, it's been repeated so many times by the Arabs and their supporters over the years that many people accept it as a fact. It isn't. The fact is that these lands are in dispute and until there is a viable peace agreement with the Arabs and the Israelis, they remain in dispute.

Mr.-Chairman-General-whatever Arafat could have had a peaceful resolution in 2000 at the Camp David summit but Arafat not only rejected a generous peace offer from Israel, one that gave him 98% of what he had been demanding, including the West Bank and Gaza but part of the 'holy' city of Jerusalem , too. Arafat's response? He walked out of the summit and began a terrorist war against Israel that is still raging.

The Palestinian 'refugee' problem is mostly due to the Arab countries refusing to accept a Palestinian-Israeli state in 1948, which was what the U.N. offered. They refused, the 'Palestinians' fled to neighboring Arab states (mostly Jordan and Syria) and five Arab countries declared war on Israel, instead. They lost. The ''Palestinians" (Jordanians, mostly) were then refused as immigrants by Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries and herded into 'camps' by their Arab 'benefactors' on the disputed areas of land and told that someday Israel would be defeated and the Jews pushed into the sea. The 'Palestinians' are still waiting. I put 'Palestinians' in quotes because there never was an actual country of 'Palestine', but a country that was called Palestine and ruled by other nations over the centuries. There was never a Palestine President or government of any kind.

It's a sham of course and these people are simply being used as pawns by the Arab states to attack Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorists acts. Did you know that Arafat is an Eqyptian, not a ''Palestinian"? Make no mistake, Arafat is responsible for thousands of deaths of mostly civilian Israelis from his terrorists over the 35 years he's been the head of the PLO. He wants 'peace' with Israel as much as you want cancer.

The United States has always supported democratic Israel while attempting to reason with the intransigent Arab states. Oil is important but frankly, we could bomb most of the mid-east into smithereens and take over the oil fields if we were not a reasonable people. We are a reasonable, compassionate people.

We don't want a war but I believe that a war has been thrust on us by the Muslim fanatics and those who support them, which is most of the mid-east countries with the exception of Turkey and now, by force, Afghanistan and to a degree, Pakistan.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a side-show, in fact. It may never be totally ended. In the meantime, America supports Israel, a democracy that asks nothing from it's neighbors but to live in peace. The liberal media has taken the slant that since Israel has the army and the weapons, they must be the villians here. Wrong.

Israel is simply attempting to survive, not conquer, a distinction missed by many. It's an important one. If the Israelis wanted to conquer the Palestinians, they could do so in hours, not days. They don't want those little strips of land the Arabs like to call 'occupied'. The Israelis don't want to kill - they want to survive - and America helps them do that, against what would be otherwise impossible odds. 350 to 6 odds in fact.

Your question about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and if we may have to fight him some day is absurd. Calling him a terrorist is also a stretch, but now, everyone is a terrorist, I suppose. It's becoming an overused word, like 'Nazi' once was. Anyone you don't like is a 'terrorist'. Right.

Mr. Sharon was Israeli defense minister in 1982 when a Lebanese Christian militia allied to Israel killed hundreds of civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. He didn't 'attempt to wipe out a race of people'. Where did you get that bit of slander? Al Jazeera TV?

Arab apologists and political enemies of Sharon and Israel are attempting to charge Sharon with 'war crimes'. It's bogus. Get some facts straight before you make wild accusations based on Arab propaganda. By that ridiculous 'legal' reasoning, America, President George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell could be accused of 'war crimes' for heading Desert Storm, the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. I'm certain some civilians died in that brief conflict. It gets looney very quickly, doesn't it?

Any national leader or Defense Minister (Sharons' title in 1982) can be accused of 'war crimes' if any civilians are killed or, let's be honest, if we don't like the side that won the battle or the war. Bull. Most of this 'Sharon is a terrorist' crapola is being used to deflect criticism from Yasser Arafat, the true terrorist, who spoke at the United Nations with a pistol on his hip and preaches 'Peace' in English and 'Kill the Jews' in Arabic. No one with any intelligence is fooled by the smokescreen attempting to shield Arafat by smearing Sharon, who may not be a saint but if you want to compare body counts, Arafat wins handily and for the wrong reason. The Israelis want to live, in peace if possible, Arafat wants them to die - because they are Jews. No land will appease him, no agreement will be honored. He wants Israel to be destroyed. We choose to help Israel defend itself while attempting to remain at least partially open to Palenstinian grievences, which Israel tried to address at Camp David in 2000, but Arafat chose to ignore and wage a terrorism war on Israel, instead. Some 'leader'.

In any case, if you subscribe to the World Court-style legal mumbo-jumbo, you'll buy anything any leftist Arab apologist tells you, which I'm beginning to believe you already have. That would be a shame. You can find fault with Israel but to attempt to portray them and their leaders as some kind of bloodthirsty murderers is flat-out Arab propaganda and you really should know better.

Prime Minister Sharon is 74 years old and will retire in two years when his term of office expires. You see, Israel has elections, not 'kings' like Jordan and Saudi Arabia or dictators like Iraq or mullas running a theocracy like Iran. Learn the difference.

Your basic contention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all a crock is naive and badly uninformed - or misinformed.
Israel is our ally and our friend. The Arabs have oil and little more and they are not, by and large, our friends. September 11th, 2001 proved that once and for all. Maybe you missed it on the news. Afterward, the Palestinians and other Arabs danced in the streets in celebration. No Israelis danced in the streets to celebrate 3,000 dead Americans to my knowledge, but yet some people would attempt to paint both groups as equally useless to U.S. interests in that region. That's quite naive, at best.

America is in a war on terrorism and that will include many of the Arab states before it's all over. Islam is a major threat to the West as it's used to feed hatred and terrorism and terrorism is funded by states like Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born.

Make no mistake, we're in a real war and naive statements about Sharon and Israel being 'terrorists' don't help and simply show a complete lack of knowledge about the dangerous situation in the middle east.

I suggest you do some homework and try to understand the moral and practical imperative driving President Bush and the United States as it stands behind him in the war on terrorism. Don't be distracted by Arab apologists who spout 'occupation', 'Sharon is a terrorist' and other nonsense unsupported by the facts, which are readily available if you take the time to look.

The answer to your original question: "is it just me..."?

Yes, it's just you, but then, I'm sure that once you've educated yourself a bit more you'll see that and drop the bumper-sticker slogan mentality about a very serious subject that deserves a bit more thought than you've probably given it. I hope so.

[Crazy Horse GT]

Thanks Mr 5 0. I couldnt have said all that, but I can say this:

In 1982-83 when my ship was off the coast of Beirut, I met many of the now- dead Marines, blown up by an arab suicide bomber. Some of those Marine's I'll never forget!

Why did they die? Because they were Americans - the only reason - who supported Israel. Israelis let us dock in their country, re-supply & even helped after we bombed the he-- out of Lebanon. Ii was there. 1991, I was in Iraq. Why? Once again Iraq invaded Kuwait. Who does the U.N. call upon - as usual? the USA.

Why? Arab terrorist action's again. I was there, were you? Excuse me if I don't whine like Bill Clinton over monkey-boy Arafat & his terrorist goon's. Not meant as a flame but just the way it really is.

If Clinton hadn't started his 'peace process' maybe none of this would be happening, Yes, I'm sick of hearing about it all the time, but the Palestinian's are allied with the same people who brought you the WTC bombing drive thru thank you

[Unit 5302]

Quite frankly, I can't believe how dumb people can be.

The United States government has NO right to even open their mouths. Are we or are we not blowing up "terrorists" in Afganistan? Israel doesn't have the right to go and take care of it's terrorists though. The damn suicide bombers have been killing Israeli's for YEARS. Not once every 5 or 10 years. Every fricken day.

You think the Twin Towers was something? They aren't anything. One catastrophic event compared to living every single day having your friends killed, sometimes right in front of you. Over and over. Day after day, year after year. A single event like the Twin Towers can be put behind most people, especially those not directly affected. 5 years of living in fear every day is a little harder to deal with. The last poll of American's showed less than 40% are concerned about a possible terrorist attack. Take that poll to Israel and find out how it looks. The US and UN should butt out and allow Isreal to blast those arabs into bits.

I'll keep this short because my extreme lack of tolerance for stupidity would have me rattling off insults shortly.

[Mach 1]

Thats a good point you bring up Unit, and I was wondering the same thing. Why dont we just let Isreal have at them? Its time to bring it and settle this once and for all.

It will never be settled though, because you dont need any courage, money, or brains to be a terrorist suicide bomber, which is what thier "weapons systems" consist of, and you cant take that away from them. I guess if we occupy the land we could, but the US will never do that.

I guess the US doesnt want to get drawn into a another conflict that might end up involving our personnal, and would rather have peace? But again, will there ever be peace? Doesnt look like it.

Accept this way of life(terrorism), or go balls to the wall and start taking names over there. I guess it will end up in a peace settlement eventually, and the "terrorists" will continue thier "suicide bombings" like the cowards they are.

Such is life. Get used to it. I dont see an easy solution, thats for sure.

[Crazy Horse GT]

Thanks Mr 5 0, Unit & Mach 1.

That's what I was trying to get across. I've been to Israel 4 times. It's unreal to see people out shopping with a rifle slung over their shoulder, but that's how they have to live - in constant fear every day.

Screw the towel head terrorists.

aaawww, nevermind.

[mustangII460]

I quit trying to understand foreign policy long ago. Thats why we vote for people to do just that.

I spent alot of time in several sandbox's. These people think so differently its not funny. They figure if their barefoot, its because their God wanted them to be, (No big deal to them.) We would not miss TV if we never had it.

Most of these people have no education. Without this one difference it is almost imposible to deal with someone, anyone. All they know is force or threat of it. When they try to go head to head with a modern country such as ours, they lose. There not playing major leage ball, they never make it to bat.

Israel is way ahead of it neighbors from or help. Israel continues to be the only stable spot as a result. That alone is in our best intrest.

Long story short.

God Bless The U.S.A !!