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2006-05-14 Britain
A British Teachers' Union Weighs a Boycott of Israeli Teachers
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Posted by ryuge 2006-05-14 03:31|| || Front Page|| [11132 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Same crap they pulled last year. A worse lot of TRANZI "leadership" can only be found at the head of the California Teachers Union. It's impossible for the rank and file to remove them and they are speaknig totally for themselves and not the rank and file.

Typical of your leftist anti-semitism and hate of Israel.
Posted by SPoD 2006-05-14 04:40|| http://sockpuppetofdoom.blogspot.com/]">[http://sockpuppetofdoom.blogspot.com/]  2006-05-14 04:40|| Front Page Top

#2 I see that the British: who've invented the blood libel and also were the first European country to expel its Jews (except Jewish doctors, of course; are continuing with their pround traditions.
Posted by gromgoru 2006-05-14 05:39||   2006-05-14 05:39|| Front Page Top

#3 To compare the 'Britain' of 1290 with the country as it exists today is disingenuous at best.

These asswipes in the hyper-leftist teaching unions are *not* indicative of the country as a whole.
Posted by Tony (UK) 2006-05-14 06:11||   2006-05-14 06:11|| Front Page Top

#4 our own Teacher's Unions are as messed up here. But this trend is troubling.
Posted by 2b 2006-05-14 06:15||   2006-05-14 06:15|| Front Page Top

#5 In the meantime genocikde continues in Soudan without those nazis telling anything about it. Why?
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-05-14 06:21||   2006-05-14 06:21|| Front Page Top

#6 Because
1) the victims are not from the arab Master Race(tm)
and
2) the perps are not jooooooooooos?
Posted by anonymous5089 2006-05-14 07:11||   2006-05-14 07:11|| Front Page Top

#7 "British academics are at the forefront of educational cooperation in the Middle East."

Yeh riiiight ! And Im really sure you are appreciated . Perhaps they all ought to go over there and get a cup of realism , as well as feel the love from ANYWHERE in the ME .
Did Ken Bigley , that muppet Christian Group , Terry Waite and countless others fare well over there :) nahhh

All hot air and bravado by a bunch of narrow minded , short sighted , obnoxious , self centred , guardian reading , sycophantic warped worms ..


If they had an ounce of intelligence then they would be supporting Israeli lecturers .. and learning from them
Posted by MacNails 2006-05-14 07:30||   2006-05-14 07:30|| Front Page Top

#8 My own (limited) experience doing business in the middle east left me with two conclusions:

The Israelis I dealt with were, by and large, arrogant and often duplicious sons of bitches.

The Palestinians were worse.

I have significant reservations about the way the Israelis have dealt with Palestinians. It's a mistake to gloss over the Israeli contribution to the conflict.

That said, the Palestinian corruption, terror tactics and general sense of entitlement is disgusting, dangerous and must end.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 07:39||   2006-05-14 07:39|| Front Page Top

#9 It's a mistake to gloss over the Israeli contribution to the conflict.

Who's glossing? To any rational observer Israel has a measured, argeaubly too measured, response to every Paleo action.

anon, I'll suggest you are confusing your personal experiences with geopolitical imperatives.

By way of comparison Singaporean Chinese businessmen used to really piss me off, but it didn't make me think Malaysia's anti-Singapore actions were justified. In fact I thought they were a crock.
Posted by phil_b">phil_b  2006-05-14 08:00|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]  2006-05-14 08:00|| Front Page Top

#10 To any rational observer Israel has a measured, argeaubly too measured, response to every Paleo action.

Bulldozing houses is collective punishment, which I don't consider measured.

But yes, I understand the problem ... how to respond to terrorism that strikes out of a population. Israel could perhaps have dealt with that, decades ago, by insisting that the world community hold the Palestinian leadership to account for such actions.

The problem is that most countries decided that the creation of Israel and its ratification at the UN was a huge mistake. Britain was pretty anti-Zionist the whole time they had the Mandate, but no definitive solution was reached. And that set the stage for the whole mess over there.

Don't get me wrong: I think we should support Israel and I do support Israel. But I also think that many of its supporters do gloss over the moral issues involved in bulldozing homes and assasinating people via missiles that inevitably hurt bystanders.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 08:46||   2006-05-14 08:46|| Front Page Top

#11 Frigin unions. Yes I belong to one, because like the teachers I have to belong in order to work. Too bad they don't make membership optional or that would be an end to them.
Posted by Cyber Sarge 2006-05-14 09:25||   2006-05-14 09:25|| Front Page Top

#12 #3 To compare the 'Britain' of 1290 with the country as it exists today is disingenuous at best.

Perish the thought Tony. Perish the thought. The British people of the 20/21th century are friends of Israel. Wide their Palestinian Mandate policies and their current role as Paleo advocates to USA.
Posted by gromgoru 2006-05-14 09:50||   2006-05-14 09:50|| Front Page Top

#13 "Israel could perhaps have dealt with that, decades ago, by insisting that the world community hold the Palestinian leadership to account for such actions."

Israel has to make the world community hold Palestinians accountable for terror? Why is that Israel's responsibility? Does Palestine have any responsbility at all in this conflict?

No matter your experiences with Israeli businesspersons, anon, the mindset at top, which does accurately reflect that of the majority "world community", is what gives Palestinians license to continue terrorist acts-it relieves them of any responsibility for solutions in the conflict. It is rubberstaped, eternal victimhood. This is how terror is sanctioned-in the world commmunity. They must be so proud of the human splatter their weak thinking delivers.

I guess it is up to Israel and the US to point out that excusemaking for terror will not stand, as the "world" seems unable or unwilling to come to that conclusion themselves. My money is on unwilling.
Posted by Jules 2006-05-14 10:10||   2006-05-14 10:10|| Front Page Top

#14 Israel has to make the world community hold Palestinians accountable for terror? Why is that Israel's responsibility?

The issue of responsibility is pretty muddy here. Israel as a nation was created by fiat in the mid-20th century, in part as a result of increasing activities by the Zionists who believed that the land their ancestors held nearly 2000 years prior was theirs by right.

Maybe they're right, maybe not. And certainly the Arab population in the area wasn't making much of the place. And certainly the holocaust under the Nazis raised the stakes tremendously.

But the reality is that the modern state of Israel was in some sense imposed.

As were a whole lot of other states in the area which are ALSO pretty problematic. Gertrude Bell pretty much defined the borders of Iraq, for istance, and she wasn't even a British official with that authority .... she held it de facto. Her decision to favor some of her Arab friends over others means that the borders of Iraq don't and didn't correspond to natural ethnic or religious boundaries either. The difference from Israel is that in the creation of Iraq there were no largescale migrations that formed the basis of the new government and that shifted the nature of the population significantly.

Lots of grievances in the middle east. Tangled, tangled webs of hatred, wrongs done, more wrongs done in revenge / opposition .... it goes on and on.

I have little truck with the Palestinian leadership and much of the population at this point. But before we just write them off and raise up Israel as the blameless victim in this mess, step back and look at how we got to this point. There is blame on both sides ...

It is certainly true that Israel has often tried to find a compromise to the conflict. Dyan's decision not to expel all Arabs after the 6 day war is a good example -- but note that the land they were invited to remain in was significantly larger than it had been before the attack in 1967. And it was (by definition) infinitely bigger than the non-existent state of Israel a century prior.

It is also true that the Palestinians have, by and large, refused to work equally hard to find a compromise. And have resorted to terror attacks again and again.

But then, so did the Zionists against the British under the Mandate, albeit to a lesser degree and mostly against military/government officials ... they being the majority of Brits in the area at the time.

It goes around and around. Again, yes, I support Israel. But it's pretty obviously not a black and white, one side is all good and the other side is all bad, situation there.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 10:45||   2006-05-14 10:45|| Front Page Top

#15 Again, what responsibility do Palestinians have in this conflict? What one responsibility have they satisfied?
Posted by Jules 2006-05-14 10:49||   2006-05-14 10:49|| Front Page Top

#16 What is wholly unfair is that no paleo academics have condemned suicide bombing that I know of. And no paleo institutions or academics are being boycotted.

that's why this thing smells of bias.
Posted by PlanetDan">PlanetDan  2006-05-14 10:52||   2006-05-14 10:52|| Front Page Top

#17 Did the British invent the blood libel? They had it, but so did Germany and Russia.

I hope any of these union members who come to the US and any US groups supporting them get indicted for cooperating with the Arab boycott of Israel.
Posted by Eric Jablow">Eric Jablow  2006-05-14 11:03||   2006-05-14 11:03|| Front Page Top

#18 What one responsibility have they satisfied?

What responsibilities do you think they have?

And what responsibilities has Israel not satisfied?

Look: absolutely, the current Palestinian government is a bunch of crooks and thugs. At this point there's little to be done except to beat them into submission.

But we got to this point via a history in which Israeli hands are not entirely clean or free of responsibility for the use of violence to impose their state on the land they now hold. Refusing to acknowledge that at all is willful blindness IMO.

I haven't a clue how this will play out. It's hard to see how it can resolve short of genocide of one or the other group. But before everyone cheers on the nukes that will obliterate all annoying Palestinians and their ilk, be very sure you all have taken a full reckoning of the situation.

Ahmadinajad had one thing right (and I will dies of shock at agreeing with him): the Israeli / Palestinian tragedy is the result of European actions, starting with the Roman explusion of the Jews 2000 years ago, through anti-Jewish prejudice that persisted for centuries, to the Dreyfus affair that lead many to decide that Jews needed a homeland of their own to avoid persecution, to the the hamfisted actions of the British under the Mandate.

And then on to the back and forth ever since.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 11:07||   2006-05-14 11:07|| Front Page Top

#19 They have a responsibility to want peace more than martyrdom for their children. They have a responsibility to work in good faith towards a resolution of this crisis. Two biggies, both of which they have failed on for decades.

Your desire to want to even out blame, though it may come from an impulse to be fair, is neither fair or helpful. It doesn't make you evenhanded; it is frontloading a bias to support your political view, which is that Israel was wrongly created. You cannot answer the question I posed, twice, because it never occurred to you that Palestinians might have a responsibility to shoulder in this crisis.

No one is saying that Palestinians are only to blame, that an Israeli never did anything against a Palestinian that was wrong, but it defies logic and senses to assert that each party is equally to blame for the violence and ongoing impasse...or that all blame rests entirely with Israel.

If there is to be hope, it will start with the mothers of Palestine choosing life for their sons instead of martyrdom, followed up by a real, non-taqqiya based proposal from the Palestinian government on borders and negotiations. It will also include a recognition that Israel will exist in the Middle East as a Jewish state-the only one in the world. A rather small sliver of concession from both Muslims and Arabs, whose own recent mistreatment of Jews wipes out any centuries-old folk tale of fairness to peoples of other religions.
Posted by Jules 2006-05-14 11:49||   2006-05-14 11:49|| Front Page Top

#20 "But the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, a group which advocates a boycott, says on its Web site (www.bricup.org.uk) that Israeli policy, including the construction of a so-called security barrier, "is making everyday life, to say nothing of teaching and research, ever more difficult for our Palestinian colleagues."

Umm. NO. Its the Hamas and Fatach guys withthe bombs, rifles and killing that are making live difficult for paleostenians.

These dumbf**ks cannot even connect cause to effect, and they are supposedly TEACHING?
Posted by Oldspook 2006-05-14 12:00||   2006-05-14 12:00|| Front Page Top

#21 Anon, what responsibility do Egypt and Jordan have for the current mess? After all, THEY'RE the ones that created "Palestine". Remember that the West Bank and Gaza were NOT independent until after the Arabs attacked Israel (again) and (again) got their butts kicked. Then they just walked away from any responsibility for that misbegotten hell hole.
Posted by AlanC">AlanC  2006-05-14 12:16||   2006-05-14 12:16|| Front Page Top

#22 Hate to rain on the parade folks but f*cking teachers unions here in Caliphornia ain't too far behind the dangerous fools in Britian.
Posted by RD 2006-05-14 12:18||   2006-05-14 12:18|| Front Page Top

#23 Jules said


If there is to be hope, it will start with the mothers of Palestine choosing life for their sons instead of martyrdom, followed up by a real, non-taqqiya based proposal from the Palestinian government on borders and negotiations.


That cannot happen. The root of the problem is not the aspiration of Palestinians for state (lets just remember that they didn't protest when Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians gobbed the non-Israeli parts of Palestine and that before 1967 they said Palestine was part of Great Syria), the root is the Islamic doctrine that Muslims in general and Arabs in particular are a master race. In that persepective while Muslims are allowed to consuer non-Muslim land, every conquest by non Muslims is illegitimate. Let's remember what bin Laxden said about the liberation of East Timor, what a Saudi big cheese said about the Spanish reconquista (unjust) and that the Hamas is in this moment teaching to Palestinian schoolkids that once Israel is wiped out they will have to reconquer Spain. It also applies when non-Arab Muslims are opposed to Arab Muslims: it is perfectly legitimate to steal lands from Sudanese Black Muslims or from Kurds but they oppose to restitution of Kurdish lands and never accepted Turkey and Iran ownership of Arab lands. Until Palestiniand stop considering themselves as a master race, ie until they are unislamized, there will be no end to the conflict.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-05-14 12:28||   2006-05-14 12:28|| Front Page Top

#24 Anon, you'd better get an encyclopaedia out and look up the history of Israel.

Though the borders were defined mid-20th C, the area was not simply land the Jews 'once had 2000 years ago'.

There were a number of jews who lived in the region and always have been throughout the last 2000 years.

More recently there were 3 main waves of jewish immigration, one in about the 1890s, one in the early 20th century then another in WWII as jews fled the holocaust.

It is a myth there were no jews there for 2000 years, get your facts right.

It is also a myth the land was 'stolen' from the palestinians.

The first wave of jewish immigrants in the 1890s were predominantly European jews - zionists - (the dreaded term) who wanted to make a homeland.

They started BUYING, yes paying for, land from arab landowners.

The arabs were like feudal lords. They had peasant tenants who lived on their lands often farming olive trees.

The European jews legitimately bought the land but they did not understand that they did not own the trees, just the land.

So when they kicked the arab tenants off, as was their right now as owners, the arab peasants got really pissed off they weren't allowed to harvest their olives.

This was a fault of different traditions and lack of communication on both sides.

But don't pretend the land was stolen it wasn't.

In addition a lot of the land given to Israel when created was barren desert on which nobody lived. Through hard work and ingenuity the jews made the desert bloom.

And let's not forget where the palestinian refugees come from.

The second Israel was declared a nation, the surrounding Arab states declared war on it.

In the ensuing war the palestinians fled after rumours were spread the evil jooos would massacre them. Plus they were simply frightened of the war.

If the arab states had not attacked there would not be a problem now.

also let's not forget the British partitioned settlement of British Mandate Palestine so no jew could settle east of the Jordan river.

They said that area was for Muslims only. Like India and Pakistan, BMP was partitioned. Jews west, Muslims east.

So they are all palestinians, just jewish palestinians and muslim palestinians.

And the Muslim palestinians have a homeland: JORDAN
Posted by anon1 2006-05-14 12:32||   2006-05-14 12:32|| Front Page Top

#25 JFM nails it IMHO.
Posted by anonymous5089 2006-05-14 12:32||   2006-05-14 12:32|| Front Page Top

#26 Jules, you are attacking a straw man.

I never said Israel and the Palestinians have "equal" blame, nor am I trying in any way to be "even handed".

I'm just calling it the way I see it, the way I saw it when I was there and the way I read history.

JFM, you're absolutely right about the fascist demands of the Islamacists. But until the last few decades the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was less about those claims than about general tribal conflict over who would own land.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 12:34||   2006-05-14 12:34|| Front Page Top

#27 JFM: "That cannot happen."

It could, but I agree, it won't. Islam stands in the way-it drives out reason.
Posted by Jules 2006-05-14 12:39||   2006-05-14 12:39|| Front Page Top

#28 anon1, you're attacking other straw men.

I did not say that there were NO jews in Palestine prior to the Zionist movement. There clearly were. But they were a relative minority and culturally they were similar to their Arab neighbors.

And I didn't use the word "stolen" re: land. I did say the STATE of Israel was "imposed". And it was.

The arrival of the European jews changed things a good deal. You're right about that.

Re: desert blooming, it's true. I got to know a leading sabra and heard a lot of that history first-hand.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 12:40||   2006-05-14 12:40|| Front Page Top

#29 Here in the states: mixed good and bad news, libtards and paleos.

2003, States Put Up Fight,To Defeat Divestment Push

January 08, 2005 divestment, Israeli occupation

DIVESTMENT REBOUNDS ON PALESTINIANS

Back in July 2004, the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the USA (PCUSA) resolved to consider divesting the church's assets from American firms allegedly profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The resolution provoked angry reactions both within and outside the church. Opinion polls showed that a decisive majority of church members opposed the move.
Posted by RD 2006-05-14 12:57||   2006-05-14 12:57|| Front Page Top

#30 Imposed, shmimposed. Most of the modern borders in the world were imposed, a trend starting at the beginning of 20th century. Nobody is bitching about that much, but imposition from joooos, no, that can't be tolerated.

Could we say double standards? I knew we could.
Posted by twobyfour 2006-05-14 13:14||   2006-05-14 13:14|| Front Page Top

#31 Tell that to the Irish. Or to half the countries in Africa, where Europeans did the same thing they did in the middle east: created a massive mess in the form of countries that had more to do with European administrative districts than with local history, ethnic or religious identities.

And no, I am NOT devaluing what the British in particular tried to bring to their colonies. Just noting that, counter to feelings on the part of some, Israel isn't the only situation where the imposition of national borders is deeply resented and has caused ongoing problems.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 13:31||   2006-05-14 13:31|| Front Page Top

#32 "...Europeans did the same thing they did in the middle east: created a massive mess in the form of countries that had more to do with European administrative districts than with local history, ethnic or religious identities."

Agreed-colonialism left a mess. But if these borders hadn't been imposed, what effect on both borders and people would we have now in the ME? Though you may be correct that "indigenous" leaders would have been more sensitive to local history, ethnic and religious identities, is it possible that they might have left a different kind of "mess" behind? How many Jews would have lived through it-perhaps less than lived through the Holocaust? Would there be left standing anywhere in the ME a single synagogue?
Posted by Jules 2006-05-14 13:54||   2006-05-14 13:54|| Front Page Top

#33 No big deal, just the British Teachers Union trying to make their membership 'Juden Frei'. Then they can all get together and sing the 'Horst Wessel' song.
Posted by DMFD 2006-05-14 13:57||   2006-05-14 13:57|| Front Page Top

#34 Though you may be correct that "indigenous" leaders would have been more sensitive to local history, ethnic and religious identities, is it possible that they might have left a different kind of "mess" behind? How many Jews would have lived through it-perhaps less than lived through the Holocaust? Would there be left standing anywhere in the ME a single synagogue?

I don't know. I don't have any easy answers. But as anon1 pointed out, there was a minority jewish population in "Palestine", as in a few other predominantly muslim countries in the region. They had their synagogues, IIUC. How much of the current situation is the result of Ashkenaz zionists tilting, not only the deomgraphics but also the cultural/political climate? Again, I don't know ... but I've had conservative, observant sephardic Israelis pose the same questions in my hearing.

It seems to me the world (and the Israelis and Palestinians) really only have a few choices about moving forward. One is the cling to the old hatreds and angers. G*d knows there are enough of those to fuel generations of war, if it doesn't go nuclear.

Another option is to try to define a single, "just" solution and impose it once and for all. See #1 above.

Or ... people could decide to start from where things are today and try to make them better. Obviously, that would mean the muslims would have to accept a permanent Israel ... and that's a big nut to swallow. But it also means Israel would need to make some adjustments and accept some facts on the ground as well.

In the 50s, Menachem Begin dismantled Irgun, but he also led the push to refuse German reparations for the holocaust. How much better might we have been if some sort of tentative reconciliation had occurred at that point, if Begin and other hardliners had not vetoed some sort of peace with the new generation of Germans?

Hard to tell. But one reason I support Israel today is that its current leaders, including Sharon, made some attempts to find a way forward.
Posted by anon 2006-05-14 14:10||   2006-05-14 14:10|| Front Page Top

#35 there was a minority jewish population in "Palestine", as in a few other predominantly muslim countries in the region.

Some of those Jews had been living in North Africa, Irak and Iran since Babylonian occupation of Israel (ie over a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs) in fact if you have read the "Acts of the Apostels" it is those Jews who are visited by Peter and Paul.

Also the last surate in the Koran ends with a calling to draw Jews and Christains out of Arabia and Muhammad spent most of its post-hejira life battling and exterminating the Jewish tribes of Arabia.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-05-14 15:28||   2006-05-14 15:28|| Front Page Top

#36 Anon

The Palostines handed out sweets and celebrated after 911.

At that point they lost all right to any humanity.
I consider them lower then pond scum on the evolutionary scale with that response.

They don't count any more. I couldn't give a damn what happens to them. FOAD is my view.
Posted by 3dc 2006-05-14 22:09||   2006-05-14 22:09|| Front Page Top

#37 Sure are a lot of complicated explanations. I think a big part of the leftist swoon over the Pali cause has to do with the replacement of Soviet paymasters with Arab petro sheiks. When it comes to Lefties, always, always, follow the money.
Posted by mrp 2006-05-14 23:13||   2006-05-14 23:13|| Front Page Top

#38 anon,

I'd like to correct you on one point:

The Irgun Zvai Leumi was disbanded shortly after the birth of the state of Israel and incorporated into the IDF, post Altalena affair.
Posted by Brett 2006-05-14 23:36||   2006-05-14 23:36|| Front Page Top

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