even obama does not truly believe that talking with these organizations is useful, he is just pandering to his base that continued to call for more negotiations with iraq before the war...the same group that called for negotiation with every aggressor in history.
general obama's " pandered base" appears to believe him no matter what he says, based on the posts on WM
and you choose to believe things that make your case and disregard anything he says that doesn't, 6721, so what's your point? and aren't YOU the one that constantly nails people's asses when they pretend to tell you what Obama was thinking when he said things? are you going to do the same to general, or do you let that slide since it fits your agenda?
France has a HUGE MUSLIM PROBLEM. If they could help with some kind of peace settlement in the Middle East, then maybe the sweet Muslim youth back in France would stop rioting and burning millions of Euros worth of property.
It's hard to come up with an argument in favor of negotiating with a group whose creed is to kill as many civilians as possible.
Care to compare the innocent civilians death toll in the U.S. versus those killed in Iraq so far? That's not the point, though. Negotiating with the other side is not appeasement or aiding the enemy. It is necessary. Didn't Kennedy negotiate with Kruchev? Reagan with Gorbachev? Etc.
There is a difference between negotiating a treaty or arms accord between two nations who are on essentially equal footing militarily and power-wise in the 60's and 80's the way the US and the USSR were, and talking with terrorist organizations like Hamas and two bit dictators like Ahmadinijad and Chavez.
I understand that dead is dead and that relatives and friends of the deceased are unlikely to care whether the entity that initiated the killing did so purposely or not. However, "Well, we don't mean to," is meaningfully distinct from "Yeah I killed [x number of people], and I wish it would have been [x +y]." As an example, the federal criminal law and that in, I would imagine, every single state in this country makes this distinction. Thus, I (and every state and the national legislature) would disagree with you that that argument is merely for the schoolyard. Israel is under constant attack and threat of attack from people who live among civilian populations for the purpose of jeopardizing those exact civilians. The Israeli government has a right, and indeed a duty, to protect its people, including killing aggressors that threaten them. That some civilians will die in some of these attacks is unfortunate in the eyes of the Israelis in general, but it is the very goal of the Hamas operatives who hide among them. This is because those deaths give Hamas a false moral ground upon which to stand and shout about its women and children being murdered. All the while, they are planning the next Bar Mitzvah party or bus or coffee shop to attack in the hopes that they maximize pain and suffering. So Israel is faced with one of three alternatives. The first is untenable and I would argue has a zero percent chance of happening; they could resort to killing civilians intentionally. Next, it could stop hunting down terrorists because doing so is likely to imperil innocent people. The fallout from this is that its civilians are going to be attacked at a higher rate, and there may actually be more bloodshed than in the current state of affairs. This consideration could be minimized if there were even a scintilla of evidence that Hamas wanted anything other than the destruction of Israel, but that just is not the case. Finally, Israel can (and does) attack its aggressors while trying to minimize collateral damage. Attempting to avoid needless casualties is inherently superior to intentionally maximizing them. Minimizing misery is a better policy than encouraging it. In order to protect its citizens, Israel must go after the people that threaten them. And as long as every reasonable effort is made to respect civilian life, those times when that respect is not manifested in pinpoint precision lie at the feet of Hamas. Thus, to get back to the original post, until Hamas shows itself to be a reasonable and rational organization, there is simply no reason to envision positive results coming from formal relations with them. As long as they are in the game of maximizing death, they are not playing by the same rules as we are, and they do not warrant serious diplomatic attention.
Federal criminal law for individuals is not a standard used for nations. In fact, it's a parallel just barely a notch above the schoolyard notion of good guys and bullies. You also ignore the part of my post which says that in addition to accidental civilian casualties we have policies that aim suffering and death at civilians. So does Israel. So do most nations involved in international conflict. The quaint notion of our innocence is a delusion. As I said, I can live with some of the things we do and must do in the interests of the country, and I try not to sugarcoat them. You speak of Israel as though they are a long established nation being invaded. That's not the case.
There was fighting back and forth between the Arabs and Jews throughout the century. That is precisely why the United Nations was brought in. The idea that Fondren espouses that there was a land of Palestinians simply handed over to Jews is a simplistic myth. At about 1900, the majority of Jerusalem was Jewish. There were Jewish settlements in Palestine throughout the centuries. Tel Aviv was founded on a largely desolate beach 100 years ago. Because the Jews settled mainly along the coast, and had settlements in Northern Israel going back centuries, the United Nations decided to make these parts a Jewish state and the rest an Arab state. To be really fair to the Jews, they could have given them control of Western Jerusalem, but they didn't even do that. The Arab nations decided that no Jewish state should exist, no matter how large or small. The Jews defended themselves and won. How did they accomplish this if according to Fondren they didn't even exist already? What, on the day that Israel was created did the United Nations suddenly transport them from outer space??? Today many espouse the belief that the Jews were European invaders. The truth is that most Israelis came from the Middle East and North Africa, though the Zionist movement began in Europe. Throughout the 20th Century, new borders were drawn across the Middle East as the European nations relinquished control over the area. What was so horrible about the existence on a tiny Jewish State? Oh right, I mean unless you subscribe to racial and religious hatred. The Jews come from all over the world. There is no place on earth you can say they are more indigenous to then the land from which they originate. What other place do they have to call home? The Jews did not deny Arab nationalism. They agreed to co-existence side by side. The Arabs said no and started a war that is still not over. They refuse to acknowledge that all the hardships the Palestinians have encountered - displacement, occupation - have been a direct result of this war that they started. At some point you have to acknowledge that there are two peoples in the that land - with their own language, culture, and history - that both deserve their own state. Just because one of the two peoples are lesser in number does not make them less deserving of statehood. If you want to perpetuate myths, hatred, and bloodshed, then go back to a previous century where you belong.
