I tend not to comment much on the Israel/Palestine thing. It’s been going on since before I was born, will be doing so long after I’m daisy fodder and I can’t see that anything I say will make much difference.
However, one of the little weirdnesses I#ve seen recently is indignant shoutoing from the left about Hamas and rape. Sure, fighters killed lots of people. And kids. And teens. But not rape, oh no, not that at all.
Because – well summat. Dunno what, but summat. Even to the point of insisting that as there are no first person claims of rape before or after being murdered then the claims cannot be taken seriously.
Hmm:
Hamas attackers raped women’s corpses, a UN report has found, citing “clear and convincing” evidence to support multiple accounts of sexual violence.
That’s where the switch gets flipped, isn’t it. The UN is ther fount of all that is holy about international cooperation etcetc – until right now when they’re lying lackies of the Zionists, right?
A certain type of person needs to create a victim in order to have them persecuted by YOU. They then claim that they alone love and cherish said victim and therefore they are a much better person than YOU. In order that the chosen victim remain a victim, facts are ignored being, as they are completely unnecessary…
This is my pet theory to explain the rise of “transgenderism”. People had become indifferent as to people’s sexual preferences (unless they coincided with their own) so few people beat up homosexuals. Thus a new victim was required. Presumably, someone from the NHS came up with “transgender” and lo! a new victim that most people hadn’t heard of was created.
Owen Jones is an interesting example. He was invited to see the Israeli “Bearing Witness” film. Despite sounding off about any Israeli aggression, and even condemning the Hamas violence in general, he repeatedly said that there was no incontrovertible evidence of rape. He acknowledged that there were shot women lined up with their pants pulled down, but said he didn’t count this as evidence.
This latest twist is going to be interesting. The Pally-leftists are going to have to explain this in terms of something that always happens when combat troops meet civilians (“Which is why, comrades, we can’t allow colonialism to flourish, because it just makes rape inevitable when the oppressed fight back”.) Or more likely, they will just ignore it.
The claim now is that rape (anything) is justified against settler colonisation and that’s the issue here and why it is different to the Uighurs, Iran or any other situation where Muslims are victims.
Bearing in mind that some UNRWA workers were involved in the Oct 7th attack, the UN admitting this is itself pretty conclusive. Indeed it makes me wonder what else might have occurred… You’ll note the UN also includes unverifiable claims of hurty words from Palestinian women, to add a bit of ‘balance’.
As for the left, the simple truth is that they are malignant lying cunts whose hatred for Jews is wound up in their hatred for Western Civilisation. Hence the blather about Jewish “settler colonists” in Israel, land of the Jews since time immemorial. They don’t care about consistency or honesty and can cheerfully ignore any and all evidence put in front of them. And exactly the same applies to Muslims worldwide.
I have also come to the conclusion that for many Western liberals (not lefties), the only good Jew is a dead Jew. They can wring their hands about dead Jews and bleat about peace. Actual Jews who fight back, who defend their homes and families and don’t give too many fucks about liberal opinion make liberals uncomfortable and they’d rather they laid down and died.
Evil should not be accommodated, but destroyed.
“Israel, land of the Jews since time immemorial.” Don’t be daft, the Old Testament is foundation myth, not history.
The earliest evidence for a population in Judea living according to written (Torah) law is 1st/2nd century BC.
Not that it matters: we’re not suddenly going to hand all Western Europe to the Sardinians, are we?
“dearieme
The earliest evidence for a population in Judea living according to written (Torah) law is 1st/2nd century BC.”
A mere 600-800 years later, Muhammad was born, thus proving that the land has always belonged to Hamas. Or something.
““Israel, land of the Jews since time immemorial.” Don’t be daft, the Old Testament is foundation myth, not history.””
“The earliest evidence for a population in Judea living according to written (Torah) law is 1st/2nd century BC.”
Given ‘time immemorial’ in the UK actually means 3rd September 1189, I’d say the Jews have been in Judea since more than double time immemorial. Approaching triple in fact.
@AC: if you want to adopt the crackpot notion that land belongs to anyone who can demonstrate the greatest proportion of descent from some ancient population that lived there, then the Palestinians win and the Israelis lose. Israel was set up by Ashkenazi Jews who are of about 50% Middle Eastern descent. The Palestinians are substantially more descended from the Judeans of about Jesus’s time. Moreover some of the hard nut Jews who set up Israel said as much at the time.
Me, I scorn the absurd arguments from both sides and sympathise with the poor bastards on both sides who suffer from all this. But taking sides is not for me. It’s not my fight, thank God.
If you want to adopt the crackpot notion that the Jews haven’t been continually residing in that bit of land for over 3 millenia, you should ignore both ancient coin finds and this:
“In the late 1600s, Hadriani Relandi, a polyglot who spoke several European languages, along with Arabic, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew, traveled to Ottoman Palestine. Upon his return, he wrote a two-volume magnum opus called Palaestina et Monumentis Veteribus Illustrata, which translates to Palestine and Ancient Monuments Illustrated. The book is in Latin so, if you’re comfortable with the language, you can read Volume I here and Volume II here.
If you don’t want to read the books, this post summarizes what Relandi found when he traveled through Palestine, then a far-flung outpost of the Ottoman Empire. If you read the post, the most important takeaway is that Palestine was not an Arab land; it was (and is) a Jewish and Christian land. (The post is in Greek but, if you click on “read more,” it should open a new page in English.
changed to Arabic that don’t make any sense in Arabic. In Arabic, there is no meaning in names like: Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza or Jenin, and names like Ramallah, al-Khalil (Hebron), al-Quds (Jerusalem) – they do not have philological or historical Arabic roots. So, for example, in 1696, Ramallah was called Bethel (Beit El, the House of God), Hebron was called Hebron and the Cave of Mahpel was called El-Khalil (the nickname of Abraham) by the Arabs.
* Relandi mentions Muslims only as nomadic Bedouins who came to the cities as seasonal workers in agriculture or construction.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/a_detailed_demographic_analysis_erases_palestinian_claims_to_israel.html
“… Even to the point of insisting that as there are no first person claims of rape…”
But Hamas body cams and still shot showed this, forensic evidence found traces of semen in and on victims.
Also eyewitness reports, one such, a woman hiding in bushes saw car pull up, Hamas pull women out of car, one starts raping her, another uses a box-cutter to cut of her breasts and toss to others watching then throw them around to each other.
Lefties assert that there is insufficient proof of rapes by Hamas and the UN.
To avoid double standards they should adopt the same burden of proof for convictions in UK rape cases.
“the crackpot notion that the Jews haven’t been continually residing in that bit of land for over 3 millenia”
Then point me to any evidence that a population in Judea lived according to written (Torah) law before the 1st/2nd century BC. Because that’s what we mean by “Jews” isn’t it? Western Semitic people living in the Levant who obey the laws of the Torah.
Further, point me to the evidence that the bulk of the ancestry of the Palestinians didn’t live there three thousand years ago.
You’re on a loser with this one; the evidence is all against you.
Not that it matters, only a loony would start dividing up the world in terms of who lived where millennia ago. All the non-Red Indians would have to leave the USA for a start. And, as I say, all the Bronze-Age-and -later Europeans would have to clear off and hand their land to the Sardinians. It’s a mad idea.
It turns out, not only does virulent Jew hatred exist in our society, but it’s become a Luxury Belief of our spavined ruling class.
What the actual fuck?
Ohdearimie.
Just read the article about the population census carried out by Relandi in the region whilst it was still a part of the Ottoman Empire.
Long before the modern whining about Da Joooz started up.
Historical evidence says you are barking up a tree on this one.
First Temple should be a bit of a clue
All this stuff about whose country is ancestrally whose:
Now name me one European state that is standing inside frontiers that go back a thousand years. Switzerland? England might count if it was a state. Andorra?
The oldest border in Europe is Scotland/England. (Unless anyone knows of an older one?)
It’s hard to know when it was first widely accepted de facto: WKPD suggests 1018 when after the Scots victory at Carham the River Tweed became the de facto Anglo-Scottish border. That’s true of a long stretch of the border but a bit misleading: on the west the border was much further south until William Rufus pushed it up to around its present position north of Carlisle in 1092. Then that land became Scottish again in 1135 and then English again in 1157. So I’d opine that the border’s de facto date is 1157.
The de jure agreement came in 1237 by the Treaty of York.
You have to ignore tiny adjustments at the west end (The Debatable Land) and the east (Berwick-upon-Tweed) but you’d probably have to do the like for any competitor too.
“First Temple should be a bit of a clue”
Wokeypedia reports “As of today, there is no solid archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon’s Temple, and the building is not mentioned in surviving extra-biblical accounts, save for perhaps a single fragmented ostracon that mentions a “house of Yahweh” without any further specification.” … “… Fabio Porzia and Corinne Bonnet who wrote that the context and location of the temple mentioned is not known.”
But suppose that the mythical Solomon actually existed and that he built a temple. So what? That would provide no evidence at all that people in Judea in his day lived according to Torah law. And if they didn’t they weren’t Jews. They may have been ancestors to the Jews of the 1st/2nd centuries BC but then again they would be ancestors to the present day Palestinians, and probably in much higher proportion.
If the only case you can make for present day Israel and her policies is blindly accepting the fictions of the Old Testament and then claiming that modern borders should be based on them then that’s pretty dismal.
Anyway, enough of this stuff. It’s not my fight and the arguments people put forth are too often bone-headed. But do let me know when you plan to hand over your property to the good people of Sardinia, the only western European population with a large fraction of descent from Neolithic Western Europeans, a group of peoples far, far older than even the mythical Exodus mob.
@dearieme – Palis are arabs. Have a guess where arabs originally came from. It certainly aint Judea.
Moq – Yarp.
I don’t think Israel belongs to the Jews because of first dibs or the Old Testament, it belongs to them by right of conquest. Same way the Arabs and Ottomans previously obtained the place.
And it’s the same way the United States was founded. Might makes it right, because violence has solved more disputes in human history than any other factor.
I don’t think Israel should have built settlements on Pally land, that was just storing up trouble for themselves. But on t’other, Hamas would do much worse things to Jews than Israel is currently doing to Palestine, if only they had the ability.
Given that, and the monstrous way Hamas attacked Israeli civilians like a horde of Bronze Age sea peoples, I have Net Zero sympathy for our Pally pals. If someone attacked our people like that, I’d want them nuked.
Instead, Israel is merely indulging in the sort of ostentatiously punitive expedition the Romans would have understood the necessity of. Bad luck for the Pallys, but they’re not innocent in this, they’re just less successful at the violence they started.
Anyway, as any fule kno, Jerusalem belongs to the Knights Hospitaller.
@moqi: The DNA says you’re wrong.
Your argument is basically that the English speak a Germanic tongue so they should all fuck off back to Germany. Is that right?
‘If someone attacked our people like that, I’d want them nuked.’
Tut, tut Steve. Yet again you express an opinion I agree with.
As for the Israeli-Palestinian squabble, the last Imperial troops in the Mandate were murdered about the year I was born. So I grew up during the collapse of the Empire, and naturally adopted the opinion that all the successor states were perfectly free to go to hell after their own fashion. But we certainly owed them nothing.
Which seems to be much the same as dearieme’s approach.