Post(s) tagged with "nationalism"
“Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”-George Bernard Shaw
Source: rationalhub
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict:
As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational “terrorists” who have no point of view worth listening to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland for over a thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during the creation of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes — on both sides — inevitably follow from this original injustice.
Introduction
This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how this process occurred and what a moral solution to the region’s problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the historical record.
The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs’ inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.
The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in this booklet will show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).
The Arab community, as it became increasingly aware of the Zionists’ intentions, strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of the British. The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)
In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn’t matter. The Arabs’ opposition to Zionism wasn’t based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people.
One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystalized in the late 1930’s and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation.
But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.
Source: warriorsrise
This is a picture I took of the bust of Skanderbeg at a memorial to him in Lezhe, Albania.
Skanderbeg (1405-1468), born Gjergj Kastrioti, was taken by the Ottoman Sultan to serve in the Janissaries when he was a child, after Albania was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. He was nicknamed Iskander (Alexander in Turkish) and eventually reached the rank of bey (general). He was therefore called Iskander-bey, or Skanderbeg to the Albanians. In 1443, after serving the Ottomans for most of his life, he inexplicably chose to abandon his army and led an effort to liberate Albania, uniting the fractious nobility and beginning a war against Turks. From 1443 to his death in 1468, he lost only two battles, and effectively stopped the Ottoman advance though Eastern Europe. After his death, Albania was conquered again by the Turks, and would not regain its full independence until the end of World War I in 1918.
I’m kind of obsessed with him. Just sayin’.
Source: contemplatingcaptain
Ethiopia’s desire to model its modernization after Japan, and Japan’s romantic vision of Ethiopia.
Source: users.ju.edu
- Jerry Farber, quoted by Derrick Jensen in Walking on Water (via cultureofresistance)
Source: mikroblogolas
yj3t:
I miss my country so much </3
;A;
This looks like the typical nationalist product of an eastern Europe country; it’s sad for me to see this commingling of politic issues, sport and culture in a country so close to me, Albania is just over the sea I see by my window and I know some Albanian good people who had hard times. I hope all Balkan states will overcome their political conflicts and join as soon as possible the European Union.
Source: queen-of-love-and-beauty
”Zionism is a mutation of Judaism as can be seen by the authority of history. Zionism and Judaism are two different concepts. Judaism is thousands of years old, Zionism is a hundred years old. So Zionists do not represent the Jewish people. And the other important thing to remember is that anti-Zionism is not, as the Zionists claim, anti-semitism. In fact, in modern day I would say it’s pretty obvious that the Zionists themselves are perhaps the biggest cause of the anti-semitism that does exist. Simply because of their actions, because of their whole philosophy which is so obviously wrong in the eyes of moral, just people.”
Source: zaraahmed
- Doug Stanhope (via thirdw0rld)
Source: theprospectofvanishingforever
Loading more posts
Ask
Members
Following
Stuff I like
-
Alèmayèhu Eshèté—Love...
-
shut up and happy birthday
-
fdo7:
All the President’s Men (1976)
...
-
Ecco. Prima che smetta di postare cagate anche...
-
I viveri per il prossimo vegabondaggio...
