TradeSurplus
Jay Random wrote ...

Jay Random
TradeSurplus wrote:

TradeSurplus
Russ wrote ...

Russ
You've just described virtually the entire world.

TradeSurplus
No I haven't. I've just described virtually all the great powers of the world because power is necessary for both colonization and genocide. Virtually all the great powers of the world have committed state

sanctioned

murder and attempted genocide. That doesn't make it right.

Jay Random
So have virtually all the small powers, & the powers that no longer exist. They lived by the sword, & when a nation came along that had more military power, they perished by the sword. Outside of the high Arctic & Antarctic, there is hardly a square inch of the Earth's land surface that has not changed hands by conquest. You yourself live on stolen land. Whom are you going to give it back to?

TradeSurplus
A common cry of the colonizer, "Everyone else did it. We're not so bad." It's not true though. Many nations and cultures arise on the land their ancestors occupied and never attempt to move beyond. Take the French for example. The Celts were colonizers, the Romans were colonizers, the Franks and all the rest were colonizers. However, the French are not Celts or Romans or Franks, they are a new people and culture formed from a complex mixture. They did not colonize France. As it happens the French were among the worst colonizers of Africa and Asia but that's the trouble with picking a well-known nation as an example. Crushing other nations and people is a good way to become well known. Being crushed isn't. A better example might be the Irish. Again, the Celts were colonizers, the Vikings were colonizers and the Normans were colonizers. The Irish people emerged from all those ancestors to form a new culture and a new nation.

This new culture is not a colonizing culture, there are no oveseas Irish colonies or former Irish colonies.

The fact that the brutal and evil leaderships of two factions failed to agree because of one point does not make their terrorism or their colonization right. While the evil bastards on both sides go about their business, their people on both sides suffer. The West should not give legitimacy to either side by supporting either terrorism or colonization. Aid and support should be discontinued to both sides until the leaders

stop

committing their destructive acts or until the people choose new leaders, i.e. until the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks on civilians and the Israelis stop the settlements. There has to be some morality in foreign policy or we might as well go back to the great power, national interest politics of the last century.

Jay Random
By your logic, for a Jew to move into your neighbourhood is morally equivalent to your killing a Jew in his own neighbourhood. Settlement !>>genocide.

TradeSurplus
By my logic? I said colonization is bad therefore I said it is morally equivalent to all other bad actions? Is that the strawman you are trying to erect? "Shoplifting is bad therefore it is morally equivalent to mass murder" Are those the words you want to put into my mouth?

I made the point, very explicitly, in my previous post on this thread that colonization was _not_ as bad as genocide. It is still tremendously evil. There are many other crimes that are not as bad as genocide, they are still crimes and should be opposed.

Jay Random
As for `brutal & evil leaderships': Israel is the only functioning multi-party democracy in the Middle East. The Israeli people _elected_ those leaders. Nobody elected Arafat, whose brutality has exhibited itself chiefly in the repression of his own people. Again, your claim of moral equivalence is belied by the facts.

TradeSurplus
Israel's leadership is brutal and evil. The fact that it is elected doesn't make it less brutal or evil. The fact that still more brutal and evil leaderships exist in the region neither lessens nor excuses the evil of Israel's leadership. And drop the "moral equivalence" strawman. I'm not going to argue against figments of your imagination. Evil is not made less evil just by being in the presence of a greater evil. Saruman is evil. The fact that he is less evil than Sauron does not make him a good guy. Substitute "Israeli leadership" and "Arab leadership" for Saruman and Sauron respectively and you can see what I am actually arguing, rather than your own strawman.

Trade.