Stupid Settler Arguments

11 Comments

1. 

   Real History Lisa on June 4, 2009 at 8:15 pm

   The whole world wants you to move out of the house and buy one in the land the United Nations authorized Israel to have.

   I so agree!!!!!

2. 

   upyernoz on June 4, 2009 at 8:55 pm

   the stupid thing about the “natural growth” argument is that no one is pointing out that it only goes in one direction. if a palestinian family in hebron has some more kids and wants to build an addition to their house, can they seize land from kiryat arba to make room for the addition?

   if evenly applied, “natural growth” is a loser for israelis, because palestinian birth rates overall are higher than israeli birth rates. the only reason they keep bringing it up is because it isn’t evenly applied. they want to be able to naturally grow into palestinian areas, while prohibiting palestinians to grow back.

   so until they can explain why it isn’t “unthinkable and inhumane” to prohibit palestinians from enjoying the benefits of “natural growth”, i have a hard time taking them very seriously.

   • 

     Mattes on June 4, 2009 at 9:10 pm

     Meanwhile the Israelis destroy E. Jersualem homes making Arabs homeless without batting an eye.

   • 

     BooMan on June 4, 2009 at 9:15 pm

     I love their advertising.

3. 

   Mattes on June 4, 2009 at 9:05 pm

   I’m going to have to find out the stats. Room in a house…give me a break. Upper income subdivisions with pools. There are plenty of websites advertising them. I did a diary at dk on the settlements two years ago. Got troll rated plenty for criticizing the subdivisions.

   Americans are so blind to Arab suffering and there is open warfare against them, settlers are all armed:

   Settlers set fire to Palestinian field in West Bank
   By Haaretz Service

   Settlers set fire to a Palestinian field and blocked a junction Wednesday just hours after security forces re-evacuated nearby illegal West Bank outposts.

   The settlers also returned to the site of the evacuated outposts, Maoz Esther and Ramat Migron, and erected two new outposts close by.

   http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090110.html

   And this
   IDF declares Nablus area a closed military zone to keep out left-wing activists

   By Haaretz Service

   The Israel Defense Forces has declared the area around the West Bank city of Nablus a closed military zone, in order to prevent left-wing activists from entering the area, Army Radio reported on Wednesday.

   snip

   The IDF issued a statement Wednesday saying that the closure applies to all Israelis, regardless of ideology.

   The Human Rights Organization “Yesh Din” on Wednesday slammed the decision to declare the area a closed military zone, saying only in totalitarian countries are humanitarian organizations banned from areas where there is friction between the military and the civilian population.
   http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090098.html

   An East Jerusalem Story

   posted by lenin

   Guest post by Matt Kennard:

   I’ve just spent a week sleeping at the houses of the Hannoun family in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Three modest two bedroom bungalows are home to the families of the Hannoun brothers – they are part of 28 homes in the neighborhood, inhabited by over 500 Palestinians.

   As part of their illegal “Judaization” of East Jerusalem (which is meant to be the future capital of Palestine), the Israelis have told the Hannoun’s, and other families in the area, they will be evicted and their homes destroyed to make way for new Jewish settlers. A brave collection of international activists stay up to the small hours in preparation to document and resist the imminent confiscation of the homes, which is scheduled to take place in the period from now to July 19th.

   Sheikh Jarrah is situated in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when he deigns Jerusalem with his presence as the Quartet’s “Peace Envoy”. When you look out of the Hannoun’s window, Blair’s hotel is 30m away; Blair can probably see the Hannoun’s house during his morning swim. Before I contacted his spokesman he had nothing to say about the evictions. That’s one side of the valley. On the other, the British consulate peers down from its high security peak. In the full glare of our consulate and our former Prime Minister a community is being illegally destroyed.

   The Hannoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hannoun, who is leading the resistance and speaks with eloquence and calm, chain smokes his way through the evenings as he recounts to anyone who will listen what has befallen his family.

   Maher’s father was a refugee from The Nakba (or ‘The Catastophe’ as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948) when he was forced out of Nablus; his grandfather was forced out of Haifa at the same time. The Jordanian government gave them the houses in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home. The Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, is trying to use a forged century-old Ottoman-era contract to claim ownership. Like all over East Jerusalem, the Israelis have also tried to bribe Maher with an open cheque if he goes quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he said. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.”

   The Israelis tactics are what Maher calls “slow torture”, and have included arrests, bribery and violence. In 1998, after Maher refused to start paying rent to settlers, soldiers came to his house, while his mother was very ill with leukemia and took all their furniture, including the bed Maher had pleaded with them to leave so his mother could die peacefully on it. In 2002, the Israelis succeeded and eventually kicked the Hannoun’s out for four years, before they returned in 2006; in 2002 his two girls were 9 and 13.

   MORE:
   http://leninology.blogspot.com/

   Or how about this:

   Israeli army applauds itself with the removal of two checkpoints, UN discover these claims are false

   The Israeli army proudly declares on its website the removal of two checkpoints inside the West Bank to “further ease the daily life of the Palestinian population”. One day later UN workers have found the checkpoints still to be in place.

   http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/

   And this:

   UN investigator ‘shocked’ by scale of destruction in Gaza

   The head of a United Nations team investigating possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas during the Gaza war said Thursday he had been shocked by the scale of the destruction in the Palestinian areas.

   South African Judge Richard Goldstone spoke at the end of a four-day fact-finding trip to Gaza, during which his 15-member team interviewed dozens of witnesses and visited sites damaged in Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas that ended Jan. 18.

   http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090452.html

   These are just one day’s stories….there are hundreds…thousands more stories unreported in US media.

4. 

   Mattes on June 4, 2009 at 9:23 pm

   Far-right wing activists launch anti-Obama campaign

   Chanting “No, you can’t!” and waving signs bearing messages in a similar vein, nearly 200 people held a demonstration outside the US Consulate on the capital’s Rehov Agron on Wednesday evening, protesting the growing American pressure to stop construction in West Bank settlements.

   Rightists tell Obama: No you can’t!

   Speakers at the event included MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union) and Esther Pollard, the wife of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. All brought a similar message – that the American government does not have the right to dictate where Jews may or may not live within the Land of Israel.

   “Mr. Obama, we started demonstrating 16 years ago,” said Rabbi Shalom Gold, the founder of Kehillat Zichron Ya’acov in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood, alluding to the early days of the Oslo Accords. “You were in your ’30s and you probably didn’t know the first thing about Eretz Yisrael… but we’re part of God’s divine plan, we’re here and we’re staying here!”

   snip

   Esther Pollard followed, telling the crowd that her message to the US president was that “your problem isn’t with Prime Minister Netanyahu, nor is it with the People of Israel. Your problem, Mr. President, is with the almighty God of Israel!”

   snip
   Over the coming days, activists plan to hang posters throughout the country of Obama wearing a keffiyeh, flanked by the words, “Anti-Semite,” and “Jew-hater,” written in red in both English and Hebrew. Another poster published by the campaign shows Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against a background of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

   The Jewish National Front, which is backing the protests, said in a statement: “We decided to launch a campaign against the president of the United States and to say that Barack Hussein Obama is bad for the Jews.”

   “From the moment that he entered the White House, we have been feeling anti-Semitism and hatred toward Israel,” the statement continued. “We have a number of plans, among which are demonstrations in the US and protests in front of the consulate and homes of the ambassadors.”

   http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1244034988150

   Peaceful settlers send messages to their own military:

   ‘You are infected with anti-Semitism, Jew hatred’

   One letter accused Shamni of being “infected with anti-Semitism and hatred of real Jews,” and threatened to kill both the general and his children.

   Similar threats were sent by right-wing extremists during the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and the evacuation of Amona in 2006.

   “You don’t act against the Palestinians, proof that you have made a deal with the Nazi devil, which hates the Jewish nation,” another letter said, also calling IDF officers “a gang of Jews with wretched souls, reminiscent of the Judenrat.”

   The same letter went on to say that Shamni’s “hands are contaminated with the blood of uprooted Jews,” and that he “tramples on Jewish freedom” across Israel.

   “Very soon, we, the writers of this letter, will lead the nation of Israel to independence,” the extremists threatened, “and you, you wretched dwarfs, worshipers of Palestinazis, will pack up your families and leave.”

   http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244034992897&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

   American money supported settlements for decades. It’s time to take them down. All of them.

   And these are the armed settlers that have been protected by the IDF and that Arabs have had to live by for over 40 years.

   Why is it still taboo to call these settlers, terrorists?

5. 

   Quentin on June 5, 2009 at 4:46 am

   Right, the colonists need to return to their own country, Israel. What jurisdiction do Israeli courts have over land and people outside Israel, specifically Palestine? I can’t understand how so many U.S. persons and so much of the world accepts this theft and destruction as a matter of course. The land they built their houses on is stolen. Plain and simple. Leave it to Liz Cheney to evoke the baby card: Obama is tormenting poor, loving mothers and defenseless babies. As if there already isn’t a water shortage in the Middle East, the rich Californian Israelis dig a whole bunch of swimming pools for rich people. Obama has now gone out on the limb and there is no more climbing back without a horrible loss of face and political power.

6. 

   Oui on June 5, 2009 at 6:04 am

   .

   Gambling with Conflict: How a neocon casino king from California funds the Israeli settler movement

   The event, a ceremony for the presentation of the Moskowitz Foundation Prize for Zionism, was organized and bankrolled by one of Netanyahu’s closest confidants and backers, the American casino tycoon Irving Moskowitz. For over a decade, Moskowitz has funneled millions in profits from his California-based Hawaiian Gardens casino, where he has been sued for exploiting undocumented workers, into settlement construction projects in the West Bank, including Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

   Moskowitz’s imprint on the West Bank’s landscape is most clearly reflected in the expansion of the settlement called Kiryat Arba, a hotbed of Orthodox Jewish radicalism located high above the occupied city of Hebron.

   Kiryat Arba founder Noam Arnon is the recipient of the 2009 Moskowitz Prize, an honor that included $50,000 in cash. After receiving his prize before a cheering crowd of two thousand settlers, Arnon complained to me, “We think that somehow the Arabs have taken over the international media and the international mood, and they convinced the world to believe that there is a Palestinian people and these people deserve to have a Palestinian state — which is totally untrue.”

   Despite the fanaticism of Arnon and his followers, who routinely rampage through Hebron, vandalizing Palestinian homes and attacking local residents (often under the watch of the Israeli army), they are not isolated as a rogue element in Netanyahu’s political world. Indeed, several of notables stood on stage to present Arnon with his prize. They included Professor Moshe Aumann, who won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on understanding conflict through game theory, and Uzi Landau, the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure. (Landau’s party, Yisrael Beiteynu,

   See also a YouTube video report The Promised Land? – Conflict since 1948

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

   • 

     Heart of the Rockies on June 5, 2009 at 8:15 am

     Google this guy, read a bit and then ask yourself why he has not been arrested and charged with aiding and abetting terrorism.

7. 

   DaveW on June 5, 2009 at 12:59 pm

   Wow. As long as Ackerman is around, let no one say the Gops have a monopoly on deceitful and stupid. Really makes me wonder if there’s any point in having a Dem majority. It’s not even that he’s a toady for AIPAC, but that he’d stoop to an argument even FuxxNose would hesitate to embarass itself with.

   I think the first step in changing the debate is to quit using the term “settlers”, like we’re discussing Little House on the Prairie. The very kindest thing that can be said about them is that they are illegal immigrants.

   • 

     Hurria on June 5, 2009 at 1:22 pm

     Dave, the biggest toadies for Israel are often Democrats. May I present Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, and then there is Jane Harman.

     And thanks for pointing out that we really should stop using the word settlers (and settlements as well). I generally call them colonists (and colonies), but in reality squatters is a better word, though even that does not capture it adequately. The colonists are the beneficiaries of armed robbery conducted by their government.