zaterdag, februari 24, 2007

 

Afraid to leave your home....

"Everyone here is disgusted by what's happening in the Gaza Strip," said Shireen Atiyeh, a 30-year-old mother of three working in one of the Palestinian Authority ministries. "We are telling the world that we don't deserve a state because we are murdering each other and destroying our universities, colleges, mosques and hospitals. Today I'm ashamed to say that I'm a Palestinian."

Ayman Abu Khalaf, a 40-year-old businessman, said he was seriously considering moving with his family to Jordan because of the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the PA territories.

"The situation is very dangerous and many people are afraid to leave their homes," he said. "I'm very worried about the safety of my children. There are many armed gangs and everyone is afraid. If the situation does not improve, I will take my family and go to Jordan. This is not the Palestine we want to live in."


Further to our 'conversation' Nobody, in my previous posting in the comments section:

do you still think that the overall mentality of the Palestinians in respect to their children is one of not caring? Have you ever tried to look beyond the facade of the media and propaganda and short video clips on tv and public-opinion scoring organizations showing groups of children wildly passionate throwing stones at soldiers and conclude that 'the' Palestinian parents must be a special sort of parents letting their children go out to harm's way?

More and more as we get to actually HEAR from those 'hidden' Palestinians - in Dutch called 'the great grey mass" because they are never given the chance to relay the real thoughts existing in day-to-day life and their opinions - don't you agree that there are way more connecting elements existing between the 'sides' than those separating them?

I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm not looking for castles in the air. I'm not trying to hold on to a SHRED of hope. I'm trying to encourage to look unabashed at your fellow human beings and admit that there's nothing wrong with their basic instincts as protecting parents, but for only a small amount of seriously twisted people anyway.....

.... and not fall into the trap extremists set for everyone to believe in and the media is so profoundly working on to enforce...

AlGhaliboon:
is an extremist. Don't take her/his superficial 'we' 'you' game as speaking for people he/she pretends to 'represent' - he/she doesn't represent the Palestinians, but only her/his very own ideal and that of the group of people that is evenly selfish as he/she is.

Tse.

link:


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359774215&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Comments:
"Ayman Abu Khalaf, a 40-year-old businessman, said he was seriously considering moving with his family to Jordan because of the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the PA territories."

Good. More of them should leave.
 
More and more as we get to actually HEAR from those 'hidden' Palestinians - in Dutch called 'the great grey mass" because they are never given the chance to relay the real thoughts existing in day-to-day life and their opinions - don't you agree that there are way more connecting elements existing between the 'sides' than those separating them?

tsedek ..i am originally from jerusalem ... my best friend is arab.. we are friends to the point that some people have asked us if we are brothers because we always go together even though we don't look similar ... even after i moved to tel aviv i see him every weekend and at least once during the week when he drops here....

and i know many people from his family both from jerusalem where his father family from and from beit lehem where the family of his mother lives ...

and i know very well a few other arabs from east jerusalem who live or work in the jewish sector...

.. i spent a whole year in 1994-1995 living among this grey mass in the territories... living means sleeping in a beduin tent, chatting in the morning over a cup of tea with a village mukhtar ... at that time i even used to speak a kind of broken arabic that i picked up from these people ...

do you really think that i have no idea what kind of talks this grey mass is having between themselves in their kitchens ?
 
i can even tell you what kind of talks they have ... it was enough for me this interaction with them in 1994-1995 to understand already that Oslo will collapse ( i was originally an oslo supporter) ... these people are not rational human beings as israeli peace loonies think .. and most of the israeli peace theories about the palestinians were wrong because these people dont live in the same reality as we do ... there is very little that they see eye to eye with us...

it's a deeply psychotic culture whose mentality i would define as a non stop paranoia ... i am not surprised that wherever their dictators lose a grip on them a slaughter starts ... since one just cannot be that paranoid and not to get himself into troubles with everybody around ....
 
i dont mention that from your post it's impossible to understand what point you are trying to make ... that the palestinian society, from top to bottom, is deeply unhappy about the clashes and consider it a shame ? we know this .. do you think you surprised somebody with this ? both hamas leaders and fatah denounced it ... as abu mazen put it - our weapons should be directed against the occupation (means us) and not against each other ..

so what kind of new voices from this grey mass you have discovered here ? that they are ashamed to be palestinians ? they should have been ashamed to be palestinians when they were bombing our cafes and buses (thank you, fence) ... not now ...
 
they say all kinds of things .. but at the basic level it is not even violence that is a problem with these people ... but their absolutely warped perception of the reality .... violence is the smallest of all problems with the arabs...

i was from a rational wing of the peace camp .. not universal brotherhood but rational approach... like you know you cannot beat us , we know we cannot defeat you .. lets be rational, divide the land and salamat...

of course when in 1995 you discover that these people still massively believe that saddam hussein defeated the US during the first gulf war, it comes out that this whole approach just does not work ... it may be clear to us that we are in a no win - no win situation but you can no longer be sure that it's clear to them ...

i had no illusions after our withdrawal from lebanon how they would interpret what they saw on the tv .. in fact i met a palestinian from east jerusalem at that time who just came back from jordan and told me that his relatives there are simply about to start packing their stuff to go to israel as they assumed that israel was finished ... some israelis might fail to capture the connection between barak's botched withdrawal from lebanon and the second intifada but not me as i got the idea of how their brain works in 1994...

it goes without saying that the israeli beduins with whom i was living claimed that line 5 and other bus attacks at that time were carried out by the mosad .. never mind that one of them served with the IDF before ... and no .. it was not for my israeli ears as i saw them discussing everything along the same lines in arabic which at that time i could understand ...


in short it's a regular arab insane conspirazoid bullshit ...the same one you see on their blogs ... litani river ... no jews hurt in 9/11 attacks ... only that when you live among them, you comprehend that this is their world .. this is what these people live and breath ... and its on a massive scale ...

it is a sick and mentally retarded culture that keeps people in the state of a permanent paranoia ... whatever they do after this - suicide attacks, nuclear bomb , whatever.. nothing will surprise me ... and of course their attitudes towards violence of their own people is very ambivalent to say the least ...
 
its for the same reason that all of your theorizing about having an alternative , giving a chance is bullshit ... because you are thinking as an israeli .. but they don't .. they simply dont see the situation as you see it .. they see it through the eyes of their own culture

they are more preoccupied with israeli plans to destroy al aksa mosque or to drain territories of water to kill them through dehydration .. when you read in newspapers about these inter clan feuds when they are fighting clan against clan, it is more or less the same thinking only in application to each other .. the carnage that goes in iraq is also basically the result of the same thinking only applied this time to the sunni shia thing ..
 
should i say that because my best friend is arab i should continue to confront this shit now every single week .. lets say the last year we spent working on the idea that israel is a superpower because its a hub of drug trafficking mafia ... i dont mind the fact that princess diana was killed because she was pregnant from an arab lover and similar bullshit as i consider this nonsense of a secondary importance right now..

iraqpundit by the way has a post recently that perfectly summarizes my experience with these lunatics "Saddam Was Not Executed"

so if you though that al ghaleboon is a kind of extremist you are wrong ... this idiot is a massive voice of sanity and common sense by the palestinian standards .. maybe in lebanon he is more like a mainstream but in the west bank and gaza they would pay him money to teach them sanity
 
"they simply dont see the situation as you see it .. they see it through the eyes of their own culture"

Nobody, you're exagerating.

Granted you know a couple of Palestinians and lived among us, but *I'm Palestinian* and I believe you are magnifying certain things beyond their scale.

You are painting an entire people with the same (crooked) brush.

"in 1995 you discover that these people still massively believe that saddam hussein defeated the US during the first gulf war"

Who believes that? I haven't met a single Palestinian who does. Are we talking about the same Palestinians here? You need to separate rhetoric from what people really believe.

Nobody, I'll be the first to criticize Palestinians and you know it.

There are a lot of rational people out there, unfortunately they do not form a coherent "block" or organization. But to claim that ALL Palestinians have the same distorted vision of reality is a gross generalization.
 
"in 1995 you discover that these people still massively believe that saddam hussein defeated the US during the first gulf war"

Who believes that? I haven't met a single Palestinian who does. Are we talking about the same Palestinians here? You need to separate rhetoric from what people really believe.


nizo .. i dont have really time to follow this thread as i am moving to another apartment ..here is one time reply to you ...

its obvious that i knew more than a couple of the palestinians.. i dont know whats so particularly strange about what i said as i saw more or less the same thing replayed during the second gulf war .. i dont know what al jazeera was showing to the arabs and other muslims but in barcelona where i was at the time the pakistanis were absolutely sure that the US is massively losing to saddam .. on the day when on the tv there was this statue of saddam toppled to the ground the silence was total .. then the owner of the restaurant said - it cannot be ..something is wrong here .. its not iraq...

the first gulf war ended without US entering iraq and so the outcome was not that obvious which left many palestinians wildly hallucinating about its outcome ...i dont know for how long you ve been away from the territories but the widespread belief there is that whatever the US does it is to take control of the arab oil ... lets say it's a conviction of more than 90% of them ... the point the palestinians were making to me at 95 was that if the US indeed defeated saddam as the western media claimed howcome they did not go to iraq to take control of the oil fields ...

maybe i exagerated when i said that they believed that saddam defeated the US but many of them were pretty sure that the media underreported casualties inflicted by saddam on the US and the perception was that the outcome of war was far from clear with saddam retaining much of its military might .. otherwise , they argued, why the US did not take over the iraqi oil fields .. after all, they said, they did not go there to liberate kuweit...

about the western and israeli media they were telling me all kinds of wild theories .. for example ... during the first gulf war about 40 scuds hit israel with several reported to have landed in gush dan .. gush dan is a densely populated area ...each scud carries half a ton of explosives ... it's impossible they argued that when such rockets hit a city there would be not hundreds of dead and wounded... howcome israel reported only 2 or 3 people dead from the scud attacks ??? basically they believed that there were numerous casualties but the israeli media was not reporting them ... i heard similar theories not only from muslim palestinians but from christians too and occasionally from israeli arabs ...

basically these people mistrusted the western/israeli media and lived in their own virtual reality which only very remotely resembled the world i and other israelis live in ..

i will try post more when i finish packing my stuff
 
by the way nizo

if you think that its so unreasonable to suggest that saddam hussein can beat the US then i challenge you to explain to me what the palestinian leadership was doing in baghdad during and after the first gulf war .. at the time i dismissed the idea that arafat's alliance with saddam could be based on expectation that saddam would defeat the coalition and somehow liberate jerusalem for the palestinians ... though i could not find better explanation

after 1994-1995 i no longer found this idea ridiculous...
 
hey Nobody,
I hope your move goes smoothly.
I'm not going to negate a single thing you say, how about that that? My argument with you is about the scale or proportion of Arabs who do "hallucinate" as you say.

First of all, the lack of touch with reality comes from a feeling of helplessness and the need to create an alternative reality. It's extremely problematic of course, because these people do not move forward.

That many Arabs are conspiracy theorists, absolutely. But there are many as well who are fed up with conspirationalist way of thinking. My father, who is now semi-retired used to head a major Arab daily in his day (he's now a mere columnist). From my young age, I was exposed to the inner workings of an Arab newspaper and with the daily "shall I publish this or not" conundrum. Judging from my exposure to the medium and interaction with the readers, I got the impression that people aren't as prone to the conspiracy theory rubbish as some think. For example, when an Omani newspaper published that there were no Jews killed in the 9-11 attacks, my father wrote in his paper that it was rubbish and the feedback he got was in line with what he wrote. His paper (I can tell you privately which one) also regularly translated and publishes excerpts from Haaretz and Y.Acharonot and not all of it is Amira Hass stuff...

This isn't to cast doubt on the validity of your anecdotes, but rather to show you an alternative reality exists, based on my set of anecdotes and my exposure, my experience has been that people who make surreal claims such as "Saddam is still alive" are automatically cast out as stupid in any serious discussion.
 
"if you think that its so unreasonable to suggest that saddam hussein can beat the US then i challenge you to explain to me what the palestinian leadership was doing in baghdad during and after the first gulf war"

What made those leaderships side with Saddam wasn't necessarily the fact that they thought he would win the war. It was fair to predict at some point that he would withdraw and war would be averted. I clearly remember those days, there were many theories going around that everyone would seek an arrangement and that Iraq would withdraw before the January deadline.
-AND-
There was no way of knowing if war did occur, how far would the US go in destroying Iraq's army. Some logically claimed that the US wouldn't want to see a completely castrated Iraq so as to keep Iran from getting too comfortable in the region.

Furthermore, those leaderships sided with Saddam because of many reasons, namely to win "Arab nationalism" points, or more because they had dealings with the despot behind the scenes.

In essence, it was a gamble since no one really knew how far the US would go, rather than them really believing that Saddam had the capability to defeat the Americans.
 
nizo .. i dont have time to properly keep this thread going... just some points ...

i dont claim that all arabs believe this nonsense ... from my experience it was the mainstream on the territories at that time .. i doubt that the situation is much better now ...

the problem of course is that we are talking about something that is very difficult to quantify .. yet i remember polls a couple of years ago which claimed that the majority of the saudis believe that 9/11 attacks were staged by mossad or cia ... i remember some polls taken in another arab/muslim countries with similar results ...

i would think that by now the situation has changed and probably the majority come to terms with the fact that 9/11 attacks were indeed suicide attacks by muslim extremists ( a huge step forward when you see on the tv a plane flying into a building) ... so i assume that now they would argue that maybe the attacks were carried out by muslims yet the US simply took advantage of this to try to take over the iraqi oil fields ... how to counteract this kind of thinking i have no idea ...

regarding saddam hussein you say :
There was no way of knowing if war did occur, how far would the US go in destroying Iraq's army. Some logically claimed that the US wouldn't want to see a completely castrated Iraq so as to keep Iran from getting too comfortable in the region.
this is exactly what happened with a side result that by the end of the war the PLO was seating in baghdad shunned now not only by the west but by the arab world too... a big thank you go to shimon peres who catapulted them out of baghdad right into gaza with his oslo process ...

so if arafat was betting on that the US won't go into iraq after saddam and will prefer to leave him in power, then he was right .. but then this is precisely the reason why they ended in this shit in the first place..

frankly this is not the only time when the PLO took strange decisions.. by far the most amazing one came when the PLO sent a congratulation telegram to the leaders of the anti gorbachiov putch which lasted only 2 or 3 days before its leaders were arrested and thrown into jail ..the putch was so short lived that some countries were late to publush official reaction as it was already over .. but the PLO of course did not waste its time to put its bet on another wrong horse ..

that's why i believe that this bizarre conspirazoid way of thinking not only is not confined to the arab street and the arab underclass .. i am pretty sure that it's practiced all the way up to the palaces of saudi kings, the executive committee of the PLO and to the sheikhs of hamas and islamic jihad..
 
my move was a total mess by the way

and it continues

;)
 
i should add that, and you probably noticed it, most links on my blog are to arab blogs that i consider like sane and normal .. most of them ... but in real life i ve never met a palestinian or israeli arab with normal and sane political perspective ...honestly... it was mostly conspiracy theories ... in the best case they were very leftists .. actually i know one person .. but he is no indication ... he learned hydraulics engineering in south korea and married an israeli woman .. they split later ...

israeli media does not cover well the palestinian politics .. but from the bits of information i do have i think they have one guy who was their finance minister .. i think his name is salam fayyad or something .. i think he used to work for the world bank before .. though i have no idea what his political program is about i assume that it should be the palestinian version of normality ...

i saw in beit lehem many posters of him and his team from the last elections ... apparently he was campaigning very strongly but i think that in the end he got just a few seats because these assholes vote only either for hamas or for fatah ... but i guess that in terms of modern and sane politics he is the man over there
 
being killed in a rival between muslims dont make you a shahid, right? killed in a battle with jews however,.......
 
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