Now allow me to ask you a 2 qusestions:

1) Who attacked Israel the day after the UN vote was rendered?

Israel suffered attacks by bands of Arabs the day after the U.N. Partition Plan was approved. I suspect the Arabs thought they got a raw deal.

There are many people in the U.S. who think the U.N. is a waste of time or worse, so perhaps there was some merit to the Arab position on this. I'll bet there would be a lot of pushback from people in the U.S. if the U.N. voted today to partition a U.S. state and give half to somebody else,

2) Why did the Palestinians who fled to Egypt, Syria, and Jordan have to remain in refugee camps? Why were they not allowed to integrate in the the societies of these countries?

I don't know, and I don't think anyone except the people responsible for deciding the treatment of the refugees really knows. My guess is that those deciders thought they could play the situation for political advantage. That sort of thing does happen, even here in the U.S.

BTW - Uncle Fester has awarded you the "Joke of the Day" for postulating that Ahmadinejad is a principled leader.

Congratulations

I didn't post anything of the kind. I remember seeing a post that said that, but it wasn't mine.

I could name other positions you have espoused that can be labaled as extremist on the basis of standing against your leaders.

Does that mean that people who are standing against President Obama are, by definition, extremists?

Don't hassle me, bros.

Sorry, I forgot to put in the <satire> </satire> tags.

Are you refering to the Palestinians?

Yes. Suppose you were a Palestinian. How long would it take you to forgive, forget, and accept the situation?

I'm just curious. Imagine that you had been forced out of your home and country at gunpoint by foreigners. How long would it take you to "get over it" and abandon attempts to recover what you had?

Indeed, I encourage all American homosexuals and liberal women to move to Iran at their earliest possible convenience...

No, no, you've got it all wrong.

Our Neocons seem to crave a merger of church and state, so they should move to Iran where they could enjoy an already-established theocracy. As an added bonus, Iran is a major oil-producing country so they'd have all the gasoline they could ever want for their monster SUV's.

The Bush Administration did try negotiating with Iran...

Are we thinking about the same "tried to negotiate"?

The one I remember involved demands from the U.S. that the Iranians agree to a list of conditions before the actual talking ever started. Is that the same one you remember?

I read recently where the general population in Iran is far more "westernized" than is portrayed in the media.

Iran was a constitutional monarchy in the early 1950's. They had a parliament, a prime minister, a cabinet, etc. This secular government actually ran the country, and the Shah was just a figurehead with minimal power.

The U.S. screwed this all up with Operation Ajax, which deposed the prime minister and resulted in the Shah becoming an absolute dictator. We also helped the Shah set up a nasty secret police organization named SAVAK. The Iranians didn't like this one bit, and this is the main reason they hate us to this day. The Shah's oppressive rule created the environment that gave birth to the Islamic Revolution of 1978.

Why did we do this to Iran? The British government asked us to as a favor to British Petroleum. BP's profit's were at risk because Iran didn't like BP getting 92+% of the revenue from the sale of Iranian oil, and the Iranian prime minister had nationalized the oil fields after BP refused to negotiate.

Thank you Alky - I knew there was no danger when Clinton and Bush were not obsessing over Al Queda just prior to 9/11/01.

The 9/11 attack was bad, but Bush killed more Americans with his totally pointless invasion of Iraq, and Wall Street screwed the entire global economy with their subprime crap.

What I see is this: We've been told repeatedly about the dangers of those scary enemies in other countries, but the most grievous injury to our own county in the last half-century was inflicted by our own people. The people who did the most harm seem to be people that our hardliners have been telling us we should worship.

We'll soon be a third-world country if we keep obsessing over those overseas enemies and ignoring our own internal enemies.

Hardliners on both sides love to say that they don't take shit from anybody, but both expect the citizens of their own countries to take lots of shit from their own governments.

... both sides suspect the other of doing things that they know they would do themselves if their positions were exchanged.

I have a theory about Palin and Salon's vocal 'progressives': yapping about her makes them feel somehow smarter. Nut my question is: if you feel smarter than Sarah about some things, so what?

I can only speak for myself, but that's not my gripe about her. I don't want a president who might base policy decisions on the assumption that the future fate of my "soul" is more important than the quality of my life here and now.