laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (11/06/83)
Mike Hodge, Do you know many Zionists? I know a *lot* of people who claim to be Zionists, but then I grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood. Either you have a very different idea of terrorism than I do, or Zionists are very different where you are than where I am, or you really shouldn't have said: A semantic person is a Jew,a Zionist is a radical terrorist using all of the tools of terror to try to achieve the goals of the Jews. I personally see very little relationship between terrorism and Zionism. Terrorism happens to be the way of war in the Middle East. I have read more than one account which says that it is the Geography of the region that makes it so conducive for terrorism. I do not know whether this is so. One thing that I do know -- once terrorism has started, it is very difficult to fight any other kind of war. This is because the relationship between the leader of a terrorist band and the government he is supposed to be fighting for (if he is supposed to be fighting for someone) is very strange. A popular fighting group may indeed have more popular support than the official leaders, or there may be huge differences between the 2 ... in any case the balance of power is terrible. The situation of alliances makes it worse. Let us assume, for the moment, that you want to fight a war with Arafat. How are you going to get him to agree to a conventional war? Read war reports from Syria. It's real hard. If you are not going to have a conventional war, and if terrorism persists despite "negotiations", do you have the right to launch counter-terrorism? Remember the outrage that was felt when the American Embassy was captured, or more recently when the Marines were killed while they sleep. Remember that the American marines who survive can go home where getting bombed in your sleep is not an ever-present possibility -- if you live in the Mid East, you can't. Terrorism is a knotty problem, then. Actually, the one thing that I have noticed that all Zionists I have met have in common is that they want Isreal to be a Religious State. As such, I am opposed to them, as I am opposed to all Official Religuous States, but that does not blind me to the problems which they are facing. And the ones I know will not condone all of the tactics used by Israel. They talk about shame a good bit as well, which I believe has more significance for them than you might expect -- for the shame that they feel is a shame agaisnt both God and Man, not just Man alone. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (11/09/83)
Laura, I don't think all Zionists want Israel to be a "Religious State".
Certainly all Zionists want Israel to be a *Jewish* state, since that's
the very definition of Zionism. But the fact is, most Jews, and most
Israelis, are not very observant of the religion. I personally like
to see indications that Israel's day-to-day life takes the religion into
account, since the religion is the basis of being Jewish, after all.
Thus, I am quite happy that buses don't run in Tel Aviv on the Sabbath.
But many Israelis (and other Jews) would disagree with me on that point.
Dave Sherman
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{allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!daverf@wu1.UUCP (11/12/83)
A Semite is someone who speaks a semitic language, not a Jew. Syrians, Israelis, Lebanese, Egytians are all Semites. How did this confusion get started, then? Jew-hating, under no name in particular, has a long and dishonorable history. A Frenchman (I believe his name was Count Gobineau), looking for reasons to hate, classified humanity by the language groupings of his day: Nordic, Aryan, Semitic. Lowest in his rankings were the Semites and, being a god-fearing Jew-hater, the Count placed the Jews in this group. Randolph Fritz