Did I miss something?

I speak against God because God separates humans into Us and Them. I could care less about churches and God if they would stop dividing humans into Us or Them!

I have no desire to march anybody anywhere! I don't believe in solutions that wall off and separate people. In fact, wasn't that the Nazi approach to peace. I believe maps and borders are meaningless when it comes to Israel. What is needed is tolerance and integration not intolerance and separation.

No, I think you are still in the conversation. I have a different point of view on some of that. I don't think God divides us into Us and Them. I think we divide ourselves. I don't think churches do that. I think members of churches do.

Yet as long as we are still conversing, we are conversing. All those maps give us/them something to talk about and another way to record a conversation that results in an agreement. An agreement gives us/them a way to have really long conversations.

As attractive as it is to think it's just us chickens, it simply isn't so. There is diversity, some of it self-made, self-selected and self-preserved. Diversity is really wonderful stuff be it in music, art, conversations or people. Separation is a fact of human communities as much as it is in the space between the notes of a melody. Sometimes it is the most important part and people will commit a lot of resources to preserve it. It's only when they will commit all those resources to try to make everyone be like them or not be at all that it becomes a bad habit and some times, a really bad habit. War is a really bad habit. When it is reinforced by cultural norms, then one must look at those norms. Here there is a lot to the argument that religion is a powerful norm that is being used by some people to separate people by attempting to kill them, to war. But it is people using religion; not religion using people. As I've tried repeatedly to show by example, religion can unite people including people who practice different religions.

That was the goal of Pope Paul. I'm a Protestant. I'm also a Buddhist. To me, someone who came to God through different religions, who really admires a man who buys a church and tells people to bring their own God, religious leaders like Paul, like the guy who put his family's name on the little white church in Great Barrington, are very important to the rest of us. They do not separate us. They are happy to unite a world that lets us coexist together in our separateness. When the Middle East understands men like that and embraces what they are trying to do and say, then there will be peace in the Middle East. And the maps won't make the difference; they will mark it.

There are quite a few people ''up there'' like Finklestein and Chomsky, who say that Israel must withdraw to the Pre-1967 Borders. Some fine day all of the children of Abraham shall lay down their swords and never train for war again.

Lets hear it for Steve Earle who has a good sense of what is going on:

http://youtu.be/7xBSZq5ZCQU

Word for the day: obfuscate!

The holocaust united people of different religions at a ravine called Babi Yar, Jews and Christians with 35000 bullets and two days of excitement. 35000 bullets, I bet they were heavy. Had to tie up a big truck or two for a while. I wonder if they were in cases labeled party favors?

Got plan?

A means: real options trading. Negotiation by slow deliberate means based on proposed options for steps toward a Palestinian state and securable borders where at each change the options have a pre-set value. Look up real options as a means of strategic trading. It works in finance, works in procuring very large scale systems over long life cycles, can be applied to long term continuous negotiations to peace. You need the history of similar conflicts/opportunities that can be scaled to the projected costs to determine the uncertainties involved in each option. This enables parties to decide to take or defer an option and to estimate costs of waiting and to reallocate resources should an option have no known uncertainties. Do budget for unknown unknowns.

Don't like the means? Propose alternatives. If you don't have them, say so. And admit that peace in the middle east is not something that interests you. Conflict is.

well it does look like a formula of sorts but the solutions look like they are separated from it.
ideas in that department i suppose could come from deep discussion






considering the pages and pages and pages...and ...pages of straw men you have generated around here, i think that is kind of funny to read.

off to the gish gallop polls!

Pish-posh pills?

Sounds like a text book.

The difference between me and you is that you believe peace is something that can be bartered and I believe peace to be a state of being.

I have a proposal. I think Israel should draw up a plan that divides the resources equitably. Then the Palestinians get to take their pick of which portion they want.

The difference between you and me is I know peace is something we make and pay to preserve and you believe it is a cheese sandwich to be consumed and if you like it, you tip the waitress.

Whatever it sounds like, it is a plan, a proposal, a means, an alternative It is one way real people doing real work achieve real goals. Israel is not going to give up defensible borders. If you have to wonder why look at what Syria is doing to it's citizens. Prior to 1967, the Syrians occupied the Golan and they used it to lob rockets into Israel. I don't think Israel is going to give them back so Syria can do to Israel what Syria does to its own.

So do you want Middle East peace? Really? Or do you want to pick victims, assign blame, stand back at a safe distance and kibitz because that is precisely what the nations of the world did while the Einsatz and the local police force were filling that ravine with Jews, gypsies and anyone else who took the orders printed on those posters and showed up to be mowed down. Otherwise if only for the sake of rational discussion, make a rational suggestion.

I thought it a good proposal?

I can say one thing, you win...peace is a cheese sandwich.

I hope no one is put out by my randomly jumping into this discussion, but sometimes the spirit moves me and I cannot control myself.

In any case, with all due respect I feel compelled to disagree with the above statement. Peace is actually a chonklit cake.

Then FUCK negotiators!

I really need to know which "god" you are referencing when you say this...

I find it hard to believe that.

The jealous god.

There is only one true god and that god is a jealous god!
The god of judgement and retribution!

I speak of the god of Westboro Baptist church and the god who was the copilot on 9/11. I speak of the god of Srebrenica (1995) and Babi Yar (1941) and Jericho (approximately 3000 BC) and the multitude of god induced killing fields that lay between the dawn of time and this very moment. The god of the old world and the god of the new world. The god of Israel and the god of Palestine and the god of Washington DC and the god of Kabul. The god who intends to burn me in hell on a roasting spittle everyday for time eternal!

You know (trumpets blaring an intro....BUMP BUMP BA BAAAAHHHH)

GOD ALMIGHTY