Slugger O'Toole

Latest comments from RepublicanStones (see all)

RepublicanStones has commented 1,908 times (1 in the last month).

1. Comment on UTV Insight: Collusion and some of its innocent victims…
   on 14 May 2013 at 9:16 pm

   Weren’t there IRA men in the Civil service? Murders by them would also be state murders, if that is your definition.

   Yeah, i mean if you’re saying the DVLA was involved in a conflict with the IRA and members of the DVLA conspired in murder whilst the upper echelons protected them, and refused full and open investigations, then you may have a point.

   My definition of State Murder would be a murder committed under orders of the state.

   What is your definition of ‘the state’? is it its leader? is it its legislature? is it its various security services?
   No doubt unionists will insist that unless there are minutes released from 10 Downing street in which the Prime Minister of the day him or herself explicitly states their support for collusion then it never happened. Plausible deniability zooms right over their heads, which is amazing considering how high up they are in those ivory towers.
   Nudge nudge, wink winkery was the order of the day, as is evidenced by the recent Mau Mau revelations and the attempted disposal of the damning evidence.
   There is little hope of moving forward and healing as a society if this head in the sand routine is going to continue to be the default setting for unionists when the dreaded word ‘collusion’ rears its well documented head.

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2. Comment on The NI peace process has lessons for Israel and Hamas
   on 23 November 2012 at 11:35 am

   Israel needs to put Hamas to the test. It can do this by putting forward the outlines of a fair and comprehensive settlement and a reasonable path for getting there.

   A fair and comprehensive has been on the table for a decade. The Arab peace plan, which includes full normalization with the Arab states. But Israel has routinely rejected it. And to suggest the US should play an even more intimate role is beyond absurd. Its involvement is part of the problem.

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3. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 23 November 2012 at 10:58 am

   Some folks might suspect it is a profoundly anti-Zionist agenda for folks to have expediently invented a nation for the express purpose of attempting to deny Jews ownership of their homeland

   World Jewry no more owned Palestine than Anglo Saxon’s owned provinces of Germany. Ignoring the fact that Palestine was a class A mandate (which meant its people were adjudged to be most ready for full independence) this attempt to use a mix of ancient history and large myth to deny a native people the right to live on their own land is obscene. I have gone over this many times on Slugger with the above commenter and he thinks it merely suffices to have his crap debunked and then wait a while and hope nobody will notice when he decides to spew it up again. See comments here – http://sluggerotoole.com/2011/09/03/israel-and-unionism-2/comment-page-1/#comments

   His continued attempt to claim Palestinians as a man-made nation, when in fact ALL NATIONS ARE MAN-MADE CONSTRUCTS is bizarre. He rhymes off some quotes as if it will legitimize the illegitimate. He uses the European concept of the modern nation state as a prism through which to view and judge a non-European people unworthy of living on their own land. However if we are to use his logic, it actually backfires. taking the elements of what we consider to be a nation, Palestinians actually qualify far better than world Jewry does. They all come from one place on the globe, share a language, customs, dance food etc. World Jewry encompasses many different ethnicities (black africans to blue eyed blond haired Americans) and share very little in common aside from anything to do with their religion.

   But this is irrelevant, because it doesn’t matter what those who we now call the Palestinians referred to themselves as in the past. Fact is, they were there, they were born, raised, loved, lived, farmed an died on that land. If we are led to believe that the worlds Jews have a deep yearning for a land that most of them have no connection to whatsoever except for a holy book – tell me, what kind of connection to the land do a people who are actually from it, lived on it and whose loved ones are buried in it, have?
   Routinely we hear from the likes of this commenter that there are plenty of other Arab states the Palestinians could go live in. the obscenity of such a statement is brought into stark relief when one imagines an Afrikaner saying it about the indigenous blacks of south Africa and its surrounding states. Lets ignore the fact that many Palestinians who are now Christian and Muslim would be descended from Jews who converted to those religions, religion is not entitlement to land, be it Jewish or Muslim. it boils down to an ideology usurping a native people in their own land. You can bring in ancient myth and obscene imperial justifications (Balfour document) but for any decent human being, its about morals. What Zionism has inflicted (and continues to inflict) upon the Palestinians is simply immoral. Period.
   David Ben-Gurion himself admitted that Zionism was the aggressor…and so it remains.

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4. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 23 November 2012 at 10:22 am

   Ok, yet again one is forced to wade through quite a bit of mendacious nonsense (from one commenter in particular). Now with regard to the figures this commenter cites, specifically…

   In 1920 when the British took control of the territory from the Ottoman Turks there were less than 10,000 Muslim Arabs in it. In 1914, the population was 40,000 Jews, 10,900 Christian Arabs, and a mere 8,000 Muslim Arabs (Jerusalem: Illustrated History Atlas by Martin Gilbert). There were, of course, no Palestinians since that is a word that was invented by the British.

   When one looks at the source he uses, the Martin Gilbert book (Gilbert i will elucidate on further in a minute) it is a book concerned with Jerusalem, its population and architecture etc. But this commenter clearly aims to portray the population statistics for Jerusalem as being representative of the whole of Palestine at the time. Page 57 of Gilbert’s book is where this commenter gets his figures above, but it is population figures for Jerusalem alone, not the territory that the entirety of the territory thatthe British took control of. Which actually included quite a bit more than just Jerusalem. But that doesn’t work for our commenter’s crude attempt at manipulation.
   Furthermore, Gilbert’s book has a tendency to cite the source of population figures only on some of his figures. For instance on page 37 he gives a source for his population figures for Jerusalem) as being POPULATION ESTIMATE , I845
   OF DR.SCHULTZE, PRUSSIAN CONSUL
   Yet on the page this commenter cites from is one where Gilbert abstains from providing a source for his figures.

   Now after being caught out on this little attempt by Neil, he then claims he wasn’t referring to the entire area (yet his original claim does not read that way).
   With regard to Gilbert, another name you should all be made aware of is a woman by the name of Joan Peters. Peters penned a fraudulent work back in the 1980′s which attempted to do what our commenter is attempting to do above. That is, claim that Palestine was kinda empty and that most Palestinian Arabs were only recent migrants to the area. The book she penned From Time Immemorial and the surrounding controversy can be read here
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Time_Immemorial
   and for more invocation of – here
   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/newt-the-jews-and-an-invented-people.html

   Why you may ask am i mentioning Gilbert and Peters in the same breath? Well, because even many years after Peters work has been roundly debunked as fraudulent crap, Gilbert used her debunked nonsense in his book, In the House Of Ishmael.

   When Gilbert discusses what was happening in Palestine during the British mandate, he quotes Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine to back up his assertion that more Arabs than Jews entered Palestine as immigrants in the 1930s. But when that book was published in 1984, critics swiftly demonstrated that its use of archives and statistics was seriously flawed and substantially misleading. Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, denounced the book as “sheer forgery”.

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-the-house-of-ishmael-a-history-of-the-jews-in-muslim-land-by-martin-gilbert-2149550.html

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5. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 20 November 2012 at 11:54 pm

   Hamas hides behind the civilian shield

   If i may be so crude as to cut and paste another users comment which highlights the ridiculousness of this oft heard criticism of Hamas…

   You’re right. Hamas should not behave like every other guerrilla force that’s preceded it; instead, it should engage the IDF on open terrain, in classic set-piece battles. To do so, however, it will need arms, logistical support, diplomatic cover, and training equal to that of the IDF. I therefore propose (and so should you) that the US provide the palestinians (both Hamas and the preferred PLO, just as we arm both Labor and Likud) the $8.5 million per day that it currently provides the state of Israel. Because history doesn’t begin in a vacuum, we would also need to make up for all of the time lost since 1967, so we should divert the US 5th fleet currently threatening Iran in the Persian Gulf in order to provide the necessary balance of forces to level the playing field until the palestinians can catch up. Finally, we should make both sides sign treaties prohibiting the use of human shields, since, as we know from the 2010 Givati Brigade case, overwhelming military superiority is, in and of itself, insufficient guarantee against the cowardly practice of human shields.

   Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/11/the-wrong-house-in-gaza.html#ixzz2CoIBqe8Y

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6. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 20 November 2012 at 11:23 pm

   Surgical Strikes BluesJazz huh? What kind of surgical strike requires the wholesale depopulation of 11 villages?

   http://blog.thejerusalemfund.org/2012/11/israeli-military-order-to-besieged.html

   I also guess the Al Dalu family were cockroaches huh?

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7. Comment on The moment of quickening
   on 20 November 2012 at 10:41 pm

   I must admit, I’m bitterly disappointed that this thread isn’t about a certain Scottish immortal

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8. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 20 November 2012 at 9:48 pm

   Any thoughts on what would be a justifiable approach from Palestinians to resist occupation generally, (not just specific rocket attacks and occasional ground invasions)?

   Even civil resistance ends up with internment or death (Bassem Abu Rahma). Recourse at the UN is routinely blocked by you know who. what else is left? If even targeting the occupiers military gets labeled as terrorism (even though under int Law occupied people have the right to resist with force), if even civil resistance ends you up in Administrative detention (internment) or dead, and you can’t take your case to the world…whats left?

   And the sustained barrage you speak of is as a result of Israeli action. If pillar of Cloud is meant to act as a deterrent, its actually had the reverse effect.

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9. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
   on 20 November 2012 at 9:15 pm

   Two state solution is on the shelf with the Rubix cube and the mullet greenflag. One state is where its headed.

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10. Comment on … a ballot paper in one hand: #Gaza 2012
    on 20 November 2012 at 9:13 pm

    What did they do with the opposition?

    Do tell us reader, but try and paint the whole picture…

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