28 Quotes

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Postby Dreams End » Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:01 am

chlamor seems to have lost interest in his own quotes. Or maybe he forgot about them as he scrolled through all those pictures.

oh, slow dazzle:

Demonising an entire nation without placing that nation's activities into the context of the power structure that controls it is not only dangerous, it is very slack thinking. To reiterate the point I made above, a debate cannot be commenced without an understanding of the context within which that debate is to proceed


That simply does not happen on this particular topic. Notice, for example, this idea of posting a bunch of very short quotes with no context. This is not something unique to chlamor, you find similar lists all over the internet, usually with a bunch of the same quote.

But what kind or argument or analysis is that? I suppose that I should get busy on a similar list of quotes from leaders in the Arab anti-Zionist movement. There are some CHILLING ones as a significant segment of that movement has roots in Nazi collaboration. I mean, despite the failure to comment on it on the other thread, that really is the Al-Husseini with Hitler, and that really is a big deal.
Second, I can't believe I'm supporting DE...rotflmao!


The reason I spend so much time on this is because there is so much of this on the LEFT, which is where I stand politically. So from that perspective I tend to agree with lots that people like chlamor post, though I'm not a believer in Peak Oil as chlamor is.

Anyway, back to the quotes.


"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.


You won't agree with what the actual quote says, but it is important to see the difference:

I have personally known Golda and extensively talked with her about the Palestinians and I distinctly remember how she NEVER used or would use a remark as "they do not exist". She did however make clear that she herself had been a Palestinian, which she sometimes underlines by showing her old passport of the period of the British Mandate, which gave her the status of resident in 'Palestine'. Because nothing can be clearer than consulting the quoted source, in this case The Times of London, dated June 15th 1969, which I happen to have in my files, I will now quote the interview which Golda Meir gave to Frank Giles, who wrote the following dialogue: 'Do you think the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, an important new factor in the Middle East? Golda Meir: Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was no such a thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian State? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."


In the New York Times in 1976, she clarified:
There is no Palestine people. There are Palestinian refugees . (Meir wrote in “The New York Times” on January 14, 1976 that the often cited and controversial “There are no Palestinians” statement attributed to her is a misquotation, the “London Sunday Times” of June 15, 1969.)


You won't agree with that, but it was not saying the people themselves "did not exist" she was saying there was not State of Palestine...and historically this is correct. "Palestinian" refered to all people who lived in Palestine...Jew, Arab, Turk, Christian, Muslim, whatever.

I think we would have liked Golda Meir around here. Even the militant anti-Zionists. Here are some other of her quotes that I found. I haven't verified them...and some aren't even central to the argument. I was just struck by them.

In many ways, it would have been simpler to have Arab workers and Jewish landlords. But if this had been the turn of events, there would have been no room for Jews and no right for us to return to a land reclaimed through the toil of others.



As for Jews being a chosen people, she wrote , I never quite accepted that. It seemed, and still seems to me, more reasonable to believe, not that God chose the Jews, but that the Jews were the first people that chose God, the first people in history to have done something truly revolutionary, and it was that choice that made them unique.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil .


Stuff about Kissinger:
While he was President, Richard Nixon commented to her that both Israel and the U.S. had Jewish “Foreign Ministers” (Kissinger and Abba Eban). Yes, she responded, but mine speaks English. When told by Kissinger that he was an American first, then the Secretary of State and then a Jew, Golda told him that was fine since, in Hebrew, people read from right-to-left. And, during the 1974 negotiations between Israel and Egypt, Kissinger told Golda “when I reach Cairo, Sadat hugs and kisses me. But when I come here everyone attacks me.” Golda responded: If I were an Egyptian, I would kiss you also.


On women:

She was often asked if she felt limited because she was a woman, not a man in government. She would respond by saying: I don’t know -- I’ve never tried to be a man.

In a similar vein, when questioned about how it felt to be named Israel’s first woman Foreign Minister, she replied: I don’t know. I was never a man minister. She also would say: Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.


Hey, I wonder when Saudi Arabia or Iran will have a female head of state? Think that might happen soon?

In any event, chlamor is doing what the last person did who posted such a list and I bothered to check out their authenticity. As soon as I did so, she then said, "Oh, I just posted those to show how useless it is to go around trying to verify quotes".

chlamor is headed that way, too:

The quotes are emblematic. They are reflective.

Let's get with the substance. Let's get with what's real.


Let's start, then, by using real quotes...and then let's stop arguing by selective quotation. You have a very narrow view of Israel and like so many on the internet, you cherry pick quotes to support that view. Lists such as yours are all over the internet. And strangely, they ALL leave out the same words. Wonder how that happens? How can so MANY people make the same typos?

The challenge from my point of view is that I get asked to defend every statement by every Jew who ever lived. I'm no fan of Sharon...in fact I'm no fan of the Israeli right. The difference is, I recognize that there IS an Israeli right and that Israeli thought and opinion is not monolithic.

And these quotes ARE important as they are used over and over again to "prove" how evil Zionists are. Wisely, chlamor did not choose this one:

are beasts walking on two legs."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.


Again, we wonder how anyone could be comfortable quoting what isn't even half of a sentence. Here's the actual quote.

The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of... Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.


I realize he didn't include this on his list of "verified" quotes, but he did have it in his original list of which he said:

Now go ahead and rebuke each quote one by one. You won't, you can't.


I can and I did...at least the ones I can track on the internet. (I'm familiar with several others on his original list as also being fake or misquotes) The "beast" one is an important example at how wildly out of context these things are taken. And these are the kinds of quotes that cause mothers and fathers to abandon their families and blow themselves up on a bus filled with civilians. They matter.

In fact, chlamor, I would argue that it is YOUR responsibility in posting such inflammatory quotes, to insure that they are accurate and in context.
Just because these same quotes are used on rightwing and Nazi websites doesn't make them wrong, but I would think that this fact would give you extra motivation to make sure you verify them before repeating them.
Dreams End
 

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