Uh, how is any of this "Anti-Israel?"

The Iraq war may or may not have been launched to secure Israel's future. Whether or not it was is debatable, but that does not reflect positively or negatively upon Israel or Zionism.

The 1967 war was waged as a Blitzkrieg by Israel, which wanted to knock out the Arab capabilities before the Arabs had a chance to respond. That only reflects poorly on Israel if you think that the Israelis had no right to attack. Since I'm assuming most of you are happy with what the Israelis did (because you are a bunch of ignorant loonies), that does not reflect poorly on Israel either.

But. please, go ahead and waste your breath on harmless bystanders.

"In the process of reducing Iran to rubble, Iran will strike back at all their Sunni neighbors. The World economy will suffer and we will stick straws into any oil deposits currently within our reach off limits by self imposed restrictions. Development of renewable energy would be accelerated well beyond the dreams of even the most ardent environmentalist. Foreign aid to Islamic countries would be completely unacceptable to the American people along with even the remotest thought of Muslim Immigration into the Country. Apologies for Islamic behavior will become unacceptable altogether."

Either that, or none of that would happen.

But it's bound to be one of the two.

If you bomb Iran's nuclear sites, that's an act of war, and the Iranians will have made the Strait of Hormuz totally impassable before your planes have left the country. Meanwhile, every soldier of yours in Iraq becomes a legitimate target for the Iranian regular military, which now has the opening it has always wanted to go next door into Iraq and carve out a sovereign Shiite block. History will have vindicated Iran, and your international reputation will be finished.

Hugh's idea is dumb, and above Gambol makes plenty sense, but go on cheering for it if you like.

It's a bit like saying "Well, Germans, as private individuals, might have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, maybe even a few million, but the notion that this was deliberately orchestrated by Berlin is false and therefore it was not a genocide."

There are two problems with this:
1) Since when does a mass killing need to be orchestrated by a central authority in order to be called a genocide? It needs to be orchestrated by someone. It does not need to be the government.

2) Even Lewis agrees that there was a plan to deport millions of Armenians. What, were they all just going to pack up and leave? In areas where they were in the majority, they were going to resist, which means that they were going to have to be killed. The Turks knew this, which makes the whole "oh it was just deportation" argument very thin.

Finally, in highlighting and (probably exaggerating) the existence of an Armenian rebellion against the Turks, Lewis essentially makes the claim that "they were asking for it." The fact of an armed rebellion does not justify or mitigate the existence of a genocide. Nothing does.

The Armenian genocide may not have been "exactly like the Holocaust," but it was like it in the most crucial aspects: An attempt was being made to remove, by killing, a category of people from a large geographic area. Whether one uses guns or gas chambers is academic, and a distraction.

. . . And there goes Godwin's Law, folks.

Criticism of Israel =/= Anti-Semitism. FYI.

Israel is America's Algeria, because, like the French occupation of Algeria, Israel is financed and materially supported by America. Conservative Americans treat Israel as an American territory, and Israel finds its most vociferous supporters in the US.

It also might just end like Algeria. For the sake of the Israelis, I hope it ends more like South Africa did, but at least you now understand the simile.

It's amazing what you might have learned had you paid attention in History Class.

Still waiting on those references for how Classical Arabic has no words for "woman."

At least my claim was verifiable.

It's on his WIkipedia page, but unfortunately, the referenced articles have been taken offline.

In 2002 he tried to explain away the comments here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4&fe...

"According to Bernard Lewis, western Europe will be Muslim by the end of this century."

Yeah, according to Bernard Lewis. A reliable source indeed *snicker*. How much faith can you have in a man who denies the Armenian genocide?

"But of course all those mosques and mullahs are just my paranoid delusions! Are you sure?"

No, some of them might be real, but the notion that they could ever possibly take over IS a delusion.

If you believe that, then there's just no hope for you.

Israel is America's Algeria.

No.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=98...

Free yourself of your paranoid delusions.