In the U.K. we call them ‘rent a mob’.....professional agitators (or at least very keen amateurs), we have a few in France as well
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Israel/Hamas conflict
- Thread starter Buckminster
- Start date
"small land swaps", sure, the Palestinians know what that effectively means: Israel grabbing East Jerusalem and further valuable land in exchange for tiny stretches of worthless land somewhere in the desert.
As to the general situation: Israel has been stoking the fire for decades, yet now someone else is supposed to take care of it at his expense?
dhrivnak
Active Member
WOW, I guess that is why the Northern Ireland conflict was settled so fast (just a mere 30 years) with virtually no loss of life, since rational Christians were on both sides of the conflict. I think this has everything to do with the Israel not allowing the Palestinians to live as free people rather being treated as we treated the American Indians in the late 1800's.
Both sides trying to hold on to kill as many people as possible. Israeli government wants to drag things out and just do ceasefires to get back hostages and keep Netanyahu in power and out of prison. Hamas wants a complete cessation of the war so it can rebuild and start their terrorism all over again. Neither side wants a lasting peace.
Israel and Hamas trade blame amid little sign of breakthrough in ceasefire and hostage talks
Israel and Hamas trade blame amid little sign of breakthrough in ceasefire and hostage talks
Weird how with the increasing hate against Israel, Saudi Arabia is becoming the more "rational" nation state in the Middle East.
Israel and Saudi Arabia Are Trading Places
Israel and Saudi Arabia Are Trading Places
Since Saudi doesn’t have to have elections and can imprison who it feels like....that is a disingenuous comparison
Who knows what's true, but if this is, it means Hamas blinked first.
Hamas accepts cease-fire proposal for Gaza after Israel orders Rafah evacuation ahead of attack
Hamas accepts cease-fire proposal for Gaza after Israel orders Rafah evacuation ahead of attack
Just more stalling. Hamas has not run anything through Israel - so no clue what the conditions are.
Reminder that a big chunk of the pro-Palestinian protesters are absolute dirt-bag anti-Semites.
Now they are protesting at Auschwitz? For real?
Now they are protesting at Auschwitz? For real?
According to this article it is just half a dozen clueless protestors. While they all claim they are not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel, they protest at a ceremony commemorating the mass murder of 6 million Jews which occurred during a time that Israel didn't exist.
Pro-Hamas Activists Taunt Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day At Auschwitz
They are far from clueless....the message is loud and clear
How clueless does one have to be?
Based on the downvote I got, at least one TMC contributor seems more upset that I called out this garbage than upset at the garbage people out protesting Jews at a European death camp.
I have loads of German relatives and have visited the country several times. Was shocked the last time I went to Frankfurt for a train connection, thought I stopped in Riyadh.
UK and much of Europe has changed beyond recognition. Very soon you will see no-go zones in UK and Europe with Sharia enforced.. America should learn from Europe, but I doubt they will.
If and when I see Muslim leaders around the world condemn the genocide of Christians in Armenia and decimation of Hindu populations in Pakistan & Bangladesh, where Muslims are the perpetrators, only then they earn the moral right to demand support for Palestine cause.
The often used qualification for Gaza as an 'Open air prison' is quite strange. Quite a prison it is, where the Gazans had hospitals, schools, luxury car showrooms, beach hotels, high end restaurants, and built tens of kms of tunnels, where they were able to smuggle and build thousands of rockets and crude bombs. And don't forget millions of dollars of aid that poured in.
Oct 7th requires a firm and strong response that the Gazans should never again think of another attack. If the world wants lasting peace, then they should force the Palestinians to throw Hamas out completely, return the hostages, pledge to remove hatred of Jews from their psyche and adopt the attitude of live & let-live. Only that will bring peace.
On Hamas leadership, the less said the better. This sarcastic video drives home that point.
This is only anecdote, but I believe should give westerners pause to thinking Palestinians think the same way they do.
This is not what happens in genocides, but is what happens in matyrdom.
This is not what happens in genocides, but is what happens in matyrdom.
The Kremlin and other people who are trying to stir the pot in the west want you to believe that. There are some hard core anti-Semites among the protesters. 6 turning up at Auschwitz to be dirt bags does not mean all protesters are in agreement with them. Most of the protesters have been sold a line by a very effective PR campaign that took advantage of their lack of knowledge about the true history.
This is rather extreme. The total Muslim populations in western countries is fairly small. Germany is 5.4 to 5.7%. The Netherlands is 5%, the UK 5.8% The United States is only 1.1%. By comparison the US is 14% African American, 18.9% Hispanic, and 2.4% Jewish. The Jewish population in the US is twice the Muslim population. If you went into Compton you would think the US was majority African American, if you went to East LA you would think it was majority Hispanic, and if you went to some parts of Brooklyn you would think it was majority Jewish. In reality it's majority European descent. And a majority of the ethnic minorities are part European too.
Nobody is going to impose Sharia law in western countries. That's just rhetoric put out by people trying to scare the white population about the "other". The percentage white population in the United States is declining, and it has declined a bit in some other countries. Some people don't like this trend and they are trying to stir up fear in the rest of the white population about it.
I grew up white on the border of East LA in a predominantly East Asian neighborhood. Until college I never went to a school that was more than 15% white. There were problems, just like everywhere has problems, but there were not race wars and the only discrimination anyone ran into was from the rich Taiwanese immigrants who looked down on everyone else. There were some bad neighborhoods, the East LA projects were about 1/2 mile away and we didn't stop driving through there, but it was a "no go" area. Otherwise everyone just got along and the restaurants were amazingly good.
Islamic countries Muslim population:
Islam by country - Wikipedia
There are some countries that are Muslim and militant. A higher percentage than countries with Christian traditions which are militant, but not all Muslim populations are militant and not all militant countries are Muslim. I would argue the US was being rather militant when it invaded Iraq in 2003. In the last few years Hindu nationalism in India has been on the rise and Modi has been encouraging it to some extent.
The world has had its share of trouble from the Muslim world in the last few decades, but that is due to a militant form of Islam that in part developed because Israel was established as a predominantly Jewish country in the middle of the Muslim world. In a place where Christians from Europe invaded 1000 years ago during the Crusades. The Muslim world is having something akin to an immune reaction to what they perceive as a new Crusader kingdom in what has been their territory for 1500 years.
That doesn't make all Muslims extremists nor terrorists. Most are just trying to live their lives like everyone else in the world.
Mainstream Christians and Jews will openly criticize and police their extremist versions, which remain relatively rare and comparatively harmless. Mainstream Muslims refuse to police their extremist versions, which are active and very harmful. Few Muslims or former Muslims will speak out forcefully against the extremists — Ayaan Hursi Ali and Maajid Nawaz do. If there were more of them, the world would be a much better place as more Muslims might moderate their inclination to behead infidels.
Jigglypuff
Member
Every religion and non-religion has a problem with extremism and supremacists. At this time, one religion has a rather larger problem than everyone else. Cough.
apnews.com
Agreed. The Saudis are a dictatorship that spreads radical and terrorist Islam and pollutes the world.
Hamas did not blink. They lied to their people and got them to dance in the streets, to cynically keep keep civilian human shields in Rafah as Israel moves in, and to cynically convince the brain dead antisemites that Israel is the aggressor here.
It's not stalling. They launched rockets and murdered Jews as they made the announcement. See above. Now both land crossings are shut, even as well fed Palestinians cheer and celebrate in the streets. Useful idiots. Human shields by choice. It's a tragedy.
Palestinians celebrate in Rafah after Hamas accepts ceasefire proposal
Palestinians celebrated after Hamas said it would accept an Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal to halt war with Israel.
apnews.com
Spot on.
So I don't buy the deafening narrative that is thrown at the rest of us at every instant, "Not all Muslims are extremists. Only a small misguided ones take to extremism and violence. Islam is a peaceful religion". Superficially that is true. But the so called moderates looking the other way when their highly vocal extremist section of the population represses people of other faiths, that silence only acts as wind beneath the wings for these extremists
Take for instance Gaza. Most of the population took so much celebratory mood right after Oct 7. How is that considered "peaceful" ?
But these same 'silent' moderates will become extremely vocal and whip out the victim card the moment they perceive Islam is under threat
Europeans who think that their less than 5% Muslim population today is not a cause for alarm, should look at history in many other parts of the world. Lebanon is a great example. A even better example is India, Malaysia, Indonesia. If a community that is supposedly only 5% of the population could create such radicals and trouble, just look what might happen when they reach 10%? at 15% there is no turning back.
People who look at Palestinian-Israel conflict thru the lens of land dispute are myopic and completely mistaken. This is a clash of cultures, civilization, ideology and upbringing. Put a Muslim population right next to people of other faiths, you are going to have friction and conflict in any part of the world. This is not an opinion, but just plain historical anecdotal fact. You can see this play out at a micro level within neighborhoods of a city and also at a macro level between two nation states. In all of those cases in the end only one stands. The other will get assimilated (aka converted) or eliminated.
Islam demographic expert warns that once Muslims hit 16% of the population of your country, there is no way to stop it from becoming an Islamic nation.... | By Pushpendra KulshresthaFacebook
Islam demographic expert warns that once Muslims hit 16% of the population of your country, there is no way to stop it from becoming an Islamic nation....
www.facebook.com
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parts of an essay from Sam Harris is appropriate at this point:
Honestly criticizing the doctrine of Islam does not entail bigotry against Arabs or any other group of people. It is not an expression of hatred to notice that specific Islamic ideas—in particular, beliefs about martyrdom, and jihad, and blasphemy, and apostasy—inspire terrible acts of violence. And it’s not an expression of phobia—that is, irrational fear—to notice that violent religious fanatics don’t make good neighbors.
And while every religion has its fanatics, there is only one religion on Earth where even its mainstream members of the faith seek to impose their religious taboos on everyone else. There is only one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it—or indeed, for its own members to leave it. Only Muslims routinely fear for their lives when they decide to leave their religion—and this is true, even in the West. If you doubt this, just read some books or listen to some podcasts by ex-Muslims.
Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, or write a novel, or stage a play that makes fun of Mormonism is free to do that. In the United States, this freedom is nominally guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons don’t tend to murder their critics. They don’t start riots and burn embassies in response to satire.
When The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical in the United States, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for their faith in the program. That might have been a wasted effort: but it was also a charming sign of good humor. What is true of Mormonism is true of every other religion, with a single exception. Can you imagine staging a similar play about Islam anywhere on Earth? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of that play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. You also have to imagine Muslims by the hundreds of thousands, in dozens of countries, going absolutely berserk.
. . .
The October 7th attacks in Israel changed the way many of us think about the vulnerability of open societies. They changed the way we think about immigration and failures of assimilation. And they revealed a level of moral confusion in our universities and other institutions that is as astonishing as it is masochistic. We have people who are ostensibly committed to women’s rights, and gay rights, and trans rights, mindlessly supporting people who would hurl them from rooftops or beat them to death with their own hands. It is not a sign of bigotry to notice this hypocrisy and moral confusion for what it is.
It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without denying the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel, but to open societies everywhere.
There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the last 40 years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that to be an undercount. Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or Jews. There have been 82 attacks in France and over 2000 in Pakistan during this period. Do you want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists. You just need a wider Muslim community that won’t condemn jihadism, but pretends that the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.
When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, or the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that something has changed. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress.
The Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior.
Honestly criticizing the doctrine of Islam does not entail bigotry against Arabs or any other group of people. It is not an expression of hatred to notice that specific Islamic ideas—in particular, beliefs about martyrdom, and jihad, and blasphemy, and apostasy—inspire terrible acts of violence. And it’s not an expression of phobia—that is, irrational fear—to notice that violent religious fanatics don’t make good neighbors.
And while every religion has its fanatics, there is only one religion on Earth where even its mainstream members of the faith seek to impose their religious taboos on everyone else. There is only one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it—or indeed, for its own members to leave it. Only Muslims routinely fear for their lives when they decide to leave their religion—and this is true, even in the West. If you doubt this, just read some books or listen to some podcasts by ex-Muslims.
Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, or write a novel, or stage a play that makes fun of Mormonism is free to do that. In the United States, this freedom is nominally guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons don’t tend to murder their critics. They don’t start riots and burn embassies in response to satire.
When The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical in the United States, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for their faith in the program. That might have been a wasted effort: but it was also a charming sign of good humor. What is true of Mormonism is true of every other religion, with a single exception. Can you imagine staging a similar play about Islam anywhere on Earth? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of that play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. You also have to imagine Muslims by the hundreds of thousands, in dozens of countries, going absolutely berserk.
. . .
The October 7th attacks in Israel changed the way many of us think about the vulnerability of open societies. They changed the way we think about immigration and failures of assimilation. And they revealed a level of moral confusion in our universities and other institutions that is as astonishing as it is masochistic. We have people who are ostensibly committed to women’s rights, and gay rights, and trans rights, mindlessly supporting people who would hurl them from rooftops or beat them to death with their own hands. It is not a sign of bigotry to notice this hypocrisy and moral confusion for what it is.
It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without denying the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel, but to open societies everywhere.
There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the last 40 years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that to be an undercount. Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or Jews. There have been 82 attacks in France and over 2000 in Pakistan during this period. Do you want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists. You just need a wider Muslim community that won’t condemn jihadism, but pretends that the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.
When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, or the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that something has changed. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress.
The Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior.
