Gary Katz #racist

Gary Katz #racist aish.com

Just think: if Israel didn't exist, what would be there instead? Just another dusty, meaningless Arab garbage heap. All those who vilify Israel's existence act like the world actually needs another underachieving Arab/Muslim country. Yeah, like a hole in the head.

12 comments

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

Gary Katz, it seems, already has a hole in the head. As someone who lives in a Muslim country, I note that its underachievement is the product of decades of colonial occupation and local misrule. Give the people freedom from fear and corruption and a proper economic chance and they could achieve great things.

@Boromir

#1541623 is right: jihadis, like any other, fundies don't need Israel as a motivation to wage war. Modern jihadi Islam goes back to the Ottoman Empire in its struggles against the Italians in Libya and against nationalist uprisings in Kurdistan and Yemen. World War I was declared to be a jihad by the Ottomans, and jihad was also used as propaganda by the British in backing the House of Saud against the Ottomans. It backfired on the British when the Hashemites declared jihad in invading Syria in 1919 and through the years between the wars when faced with jihadi opposition from the Grand Mufti in Palestine and from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. All this before Israel existed. And let's not forget the many jihadi movements, Sunni and Shi'a, engaged in conflicts that have nothing to do with Israel.

old comment by Warren McIntosh

I'm not quite sure what the point is - I was not aware Israel's contribution to humanity has been of any particular significance, and those things it has contributed to humanity (providing a stable homeland for the Jews and giving them an international personality to protect Jewish interests) are not tied to its location in what would otherwise be a muslim state.

Actually, thinking about it I bet it would be a thriving tourist destination with great beaches and historical monuments coming out of its ass. The whole region, Palestine, Syria, Lebannon and Jordan would be an interconnected archeological/historical tourist mecca, much like Egypt. Beiruit would probably still be the vibrant, cosmopolitan "Paris of the East" that it once was, and there may well have been an awful awful lot less guns, death and misery going around.

I mean, Israel is a fait accompli, so there's nothing to be done about it beyond absolutley supporting its right to exist just like any other country while trying to rein in its more racist and extremist tendancies, but lets not kid ourselves that it was the best outcome for everyone that could have been achived.

EDIT: OK, after a quick wikipedia search I have familiarised myself with Isreli achivements in electronics, the space industry, medicine (especially stem cell research), renewable power and water conservation, and also taken note of its significant number of world class universities and nobel prizewinners (in short, a thriving knowledge economy). Leaving aside the argument that they don't need to be living in any particular spot to do this, I think it safe to conceed that there are more significant achivements on Isreal's side of the ledger than I suggested above.

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

@Warren McIntosh

On Israel's contribution to humanity, maybe this will help:

The USB flash drive, the cherry tomato, the laser keyboard, the nanowire, Pentium chips, the super iron battery, the prediction of quarks, large scale solar power generating plants, differential cryptanalysis, non-plastic-dependent drip irrigation, AOL Instant Messenger, the ingestible video camera, by far the largest number of scientific papers filed per capita, the world's best flight security system, one of the world's best disaster recovery systems and ten Nobel laureates - four for chemistry, three for peace, two for economics and one for literature.

Hope this helps.

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

@Boromir

Israel isn't European. It's a bit difficult to be European when most of your population either comes from Arab lands or is actually Arab. Then there are the Jews from Iran, Central Asia, Ethiopia etc. etc.

Would jihadis attack Western countries (particularly the US) if they weren't seen to be backing Israel?

Without a doubt. Not only did they do so before Israel existed, but they have continued to do so on matters completely unrelated to Israel. And you forget, I think, that the vast majority of the victims of jihadis are Muslim, killed in sectarian wars waged by Islamists. If you read Sayid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and other Islamist thinkers you will see that while antisemitism is part and parcel of their world view, their principal aim is the overthrow of governments in the Muslim world and the establishment of their kind of government. They believe that the governments of the Muslim world are subservient to the West and, in the case of secular anti-Western regimes like that in Syria or Algeria, to Western ideas. The point of attacking the West is to force it out of Muslim countries. But attacks on the West are a small part of their general war on those that prevent them achieving their goals, and most of their effort is concentrated on Muslim opponents.

If you want someone to blame for attacking your home city, I'd blame the Islamists themselves. If you want to blame someone Western, I'd blame the British for interfering in Egypt, Iran, Iraq - which is a British creation - and Afghanistan and giving rise to Islamism in the first place. Then I'd blame the Germans who, in the run-up to both World Wars, encouraged jihadis to serve Germany's purposes in fighting the British. Jihadism is not part of Islam; it is a political ideology dressed in the garb of Islam, much as Bryan Fischer's is dressed in Christianity. Much of the theory and rhetoric used by jihadis today originates in Berlin - owing more to Goebbels than to Muhammad - not in the Arab world.

Gary Katz #racist aish.com

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