My Answers to you. Mr. Hall

Submitted by Debanjan Banerjee (India), Feb 21, 2012 at 23:03

Hall : What countries have laws that discriminate against Christians A) Jews B) and Muslims C)

My Answer : Many Western countries have laws that discriminate against religious displays of all the three faiths that you specify. France , UK , USA , Israel all comes to my mind. France and Netherlands for example have recently put in laws to penalize those Muslim women who wear headscarves in public buildings like schools. In the USA there are public outrage in building public places of worship like we say in the case of dearborn Michigan and NY 9/11 mosques for example.

Hall : 2) What countries have expelled millions of Jews A) Christians B) or Muslims C)

My Answer : Many countries have expelled their religious minorities in the past and present. Post-reconquesta Spain is good case in point who drove away the Jews and Muslims. In recent years we have seen Israel willing to drive out Muslim Arabs as well as African Christian immigrants from its lands.

Hall : 3) Was the displacement of the Palestinians MAINLY a result of the Israeli Government expelling them A), or Arabic leaders telling them to leave and they can return after wiping the Jews off the face of the earth .B) Otherwise please explain why the Arabs who ignored their Muslim brothers and stayed in Israel have voting rights and higher standards of livings than their Muslim brothers that left?? The Palestinians who fled into the arms of their Muslim brothers are still stateless persons. So obviously you cannot trust the Muslims to look after the Palestinians, the Israelis treat them much better.

My Answer : Regarding the expelling of the Palestinians from their lands , of course Israel did play role in the matter. Remember Der Yasin masscares. Actions like those helped to drive Arabs from their places in the beginning.

A) Regarding the Arabic leaders telling the Arab populations to leave voluntarily , I ask you this simple question , if the Arab leaders wanted to wipe out the Jews then why would they ask the Arabs to live those areas ? Was it not easy that the Arab leaders would ask the local Arabs to stay back and help in the fight against the Jews ?

B) There are more than one reasons to explain why the Arabs living in Isreal did not voluntarily live. First of all , not all of them have enough money to leave and most importantly the West Bank has been their homeland for centuries. Remember people find it difficult to leave their homelands even at the threats of persecution like most Jews in Eastern Europe and elsewhere did not flee the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe. Another important factor that needs to be considered here is that the Zionists understood the importance of cheap Arab labor compared to the growing Jewish Ultra-Orthodox minority , people who do not want to work on one hand and do not accept the Zionist enterprise on the other. So you can say that keeping Arabs in Israel was a policy of the Zionist policymakers also as a cheap source of labor as well as a hedge against the Ultra-Orthodox.

Regarding the status of Israeli Arabs , I must say you are living in a fool's paradise if you say that Israeli Arabs enjoy better rights than any one else. There has not been a single Arab General , Arab prime minister or president , not a single Arab head of Mossad , not a single Arab head of Likud , Labor , Kadima , Shas or YIsrael Betiniu parties and not a single Arab speaker of the parliament. There are now recent proposed laws in Israel banning Arabic as an official language in Israel. Many Israeli politicians like Avigdor Lieberman have even proposed that Israel with any eventual peace negotiations should consider exchanging Arab-majority areas in Israel proper with Zionist-only settlements in the West Bank. Do you really think any one can think about exchanging their populations if those very populations are given equal citizenship rights ? Many prominent Arab MKs have also often complained about serious discriminations against Arab citizens of Israel.

Peter Hall : 4) What form of Government do countries that have successful secular societies have? Democratic? A) Communist B) or Dictatorial C) Please supply what country you hold up as a model to base this new country on?

My Answer : Before I answer this question , I would love to know about what do you understand as "successful secular societies" ? What do you mean by being successful ? History tells us that no single society has been permanently successful over the centuries. Take the example of USA itself. In the years following the Second World War , America was the most prosperous society in the World but now days thanks to the economic competition from China , Germany and Japan etc , American much vaunted manufacturing industry is relegated to history and the American middle class in on the verge of oblivion. So is America successful ? I would say only a handful of its population can be termed as such while the vast majority lies dirt poor and most pitifully ignorant about their own conditions. So my point here is that the tag of being "successful" is too premature to be permanently bestowed upon any society.

Hall : Because the only country in the region you mentioned that is secular, democratic, and has not expelled millions of people, and is successful is Israel. Muslims have more rights in Israel than they do outside of it.

My Answer : It simply suggests that people like you are ignorant about the realities in the way Israel works. The Word "successful" is dependent upon the particular conditions that you want to judge it. I would say that the country which is proposing laws to ban African immigrants come into its land for losing it's "Jewishness" , tries to propose laws to permanently ban Arab refugees to return to their lands of origins , the country which is daily talking about pre-emptively attacking Iran as well as murdering scientists in Iran , the country whereby large numbers of ethnic minorities are kept in prisons and which is yet to produce an ethnic minority as its head of state or its chief of army or intelligence is not worthy of being called successful. That is my own viewpoint.

Hall : I ask you Debanjee, have you ever met a Jew? I have met many, they are really quite nice and not scary at all.

My Answer : I am well aware of the Jews. I am well accustomed with the works of prominent Jews like Howard Zinn , Noam Chomsky , Gilad Atzmon etc so I do not need your advice regarding Jews. In fact most of my arguments against your views have been formed by reading the works of Jews like the ones I have mentioned.

From your overall comment it seems to me that you have basic templates through which you try to judge people whenever you see some online comments which are not supportive of your Worldviews. I call it biased. I wonder what you would call yourself.

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