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The teaching of history at Cornell

  

Category:  Op/Ed

By:  vic-eldred  •  last year  •  97 comments

The teaching of history at Cornell
In his speech to the crowd on October 15, Rickford said that “Hamas has shifted the balance of power.” Rickford added that he abhors the targeting of children and civilians, yet added “but we are able to breathe — for the first time in years.” “It was exhilarating,” he said. “It was exhilarating, it was energizing.”

Link to quote: Cornell professor who called Hamas attacks ‘exhilarating’ takes leave of absence | The College Fix


If anyone still wonders why we now have people graduating from the university who are basically ignorant of subjects like history, I once again have the answer. Today our focus is on Professor Russel Rickford who believe it or not, teaches history at Cornell University. When Hamas attacked defenseless Israelis and raped women and chopped the heads off of infants and took hostages as human shields, the history professor said that he found the attack exhilarating and energizing.

“It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating, it was energizing,” he was seen telling the crowd, claiming “you would not be human” into to feel the same.

“I was exhilarated!” he said to a smattering of applause.

Cornell professor who found Hamas attack ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energizing’ now on leave of absence (msn.com)

How many examples do we need of radical left teaching in higher education?  Why is the federal government giving money to these universities?

Today we learned that he is taking a leave of absence from his duties (of indoctrinating impressionable young minds).

Cornell issued the following statement:

“We learned yesterday of comments that Professor Russell Rickford made over the weekend at an off-campus rally where he described the Hamas terrorist attacks as ‘exhilarating,’” Pollack Kayser wrote.

“This is a reprehensible comment that demonstrates no regard whatsoever for humanity,” they continued. “The university is taking this incident seriously and is currently reviewing it consistent with our procedures.”

Cornell professor who found Hamas attack ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energizing’ now on leave of absence (msn.com)

It is as if the Cornell faculty had no idea what Rickford's views were. Rickford after first standing by his remarks, apologized...sort of.


Now you know why so many college grads (indoctrinated & undereducated) vote democrat.


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Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
1  author  Vic Eldred    last year

Good morning

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A lot has happened overnight.  Later today Joe Biden will hold a news conference on the middle east situation. The Defense Department has revealed that there have been over 14 attacks on US bases in the past week with at least two dozen injuries. The UN is about to cease operations in the Gaza strip. Israeli jets have hit the air base at Aleppo in Syria.

24 American soldiers injured in drone attacks on US bases in Iraq, Syria: reports (msn.com)


The truth is slowly trickling out.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Vic Eldred @1    last year
The truth is slowly trickling out.

The truth of what? 

 
 
 
Right Down the Center
Masters Guide
1.1.1  Right Down the Center  replied to  JohnRussell @1.1    last year

Give it a little thought, I am sure you will get there.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
2  Sparty On    last year

I wish I was surprised.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
2.1  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  Sparty On @2    last year

"The Biden administration says it will respond if Iran attacks US troops.   But, since October 17, Iran has attacked our troops at least 13 times.  Biden did nothing.  Don't those attacks count?  No more excuses, Mr. President.  This is your red line."

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John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) / X (twitter.com)

 
 
 
Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
2.1.1  Just Jim NC TttH  replied to  Vic Eldred @2.1    last year
No more excuses, Mr. President.  This is your red line."

Problem is, he learned about red lines from his former boss, Barack Hussein Obama, and they are movable it seems.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
2.1.2  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  Just Jim NC TttH @2.1.1    last year

Something tells me that the one who drew red lines in the sand and christened the "JV team" is still at the helm.

 
 
 
Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
2.1.3  Just Jim NC TttH  replied to  Vic Eldred @2.1.2    last year

I have a feeling you are correct............at least in frequent contact.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
2.1.4  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  Just Jim NC TttH @2.1.3    last year

There are a lot of clues.

 
 
 
Jasper2529
Professor Quiet
2.1.5  Jasper2529  replied to  Vic Eldred @2.1.2    last year

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Krishna
Professor Expert
2.1.6  Krishna  replied to  Vic Eldred @2.1    last year

Just my two cents (and I could be wrong) but personally I don’t think that is starting a war with Iran is such a great idea. 

 
 
 
Thrawn 31
Professor Guide
2.1.7  Thrawn 31  replied to  Vic Eldred @2.1    last year

Chill the fuck out dude. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
3  Sean Treacy    last year

Poisoning the minds of our youth student by student. 

No surprise universities are hotbeds of Hamas support.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
3.1  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  Sean Treacy @3    last year
No surprise universities are hotbeds of Hamas support.

And to all those people who tried to ignore it: It isn't going to go away unless we put a stop to it.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
3.1.1  Sparty On  replied to  Vic Eldred @3.1    last year

We stop it by boycotting such institutions.    I stopped giving to my college several years ago.   Stop donating your money and your kids.

Hit em where it hurts.  Their pocketbooks.

 
 
 
Krishna
Professor Expert
3.1.2  Krishna  replied to  Sparty On @3.1.1    last year

Actually IMO that is a good idea. Demonstrating in the streets & debating online probably won’t have much actual effect— but I do agree that stopping donations will be much more effective.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
3.2  Sparty On  replied to  Sean Treacy @3    last year

Dumbshits don’t know what they don’t know yet.    Useful idiots …. Nothing more.

 
 
 
Jasper2529
Professor Quiet
3.3  Jasper2529  replied to  Sean Treacy @3    last year
Poisoning the minds of our youth student by student.  No surprise universities are hotbeds of Hamas support.

While true, they're also hotbeds of stupidity. I've seen videos of a woman calling for boycotts of corporations like Nike as she wore Nike sneakers. Another video showed a "professor" carrying a hand-printed sign that included the word Apartheid ... except he spelled it Apartied

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
3.3.1  CB  replied to  Jasper2529 @3.3    last year

MAGA is so petty.

 
 
 
Jasper2529
Professor Quiet
3.3.2  Jasper2529  replied to  CB @3.3.1    last year
MAGA is so petty.

When did it become "MAGA" to factually call out blatant stupidity, hatred, antisemitism, and hypocrisy, CB? Once again, you are bizarrely accusing me of being MAGA. Yesterday, I politely asked you to stop harassing me and accusing me of being what is not true. Today, I am again politely asking you to stop, but this is my last warning.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
3.3.3  Texan1211  replied to  Jasper2529 @3.3.2    last year

When some liberals stopped??

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
3.3.4  CB  replied to  Jasper2529 @3.3.2    last year

You asked a question so I will try to respond to it: Spell out what is antisemitic in this situation.

You can't just HARRASS whole swaths of people with a label without making an argument (case) for why it should stick to those you label. Here is space: Make your case for improper discrimination of Jews on student campuses and improper support of the Palestinians as a people.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
4  author  Vic Eldred    last year

"The two men who ran over and killed a retired white police officer were laughing in the court room today and mocking his family. If the races were reversed this would be a national news story!"

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Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) / X (twitter.com)

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Vic Eldred @4    last year

White people are so oppressed. 

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
4.1.1  George  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1    last year

Another stupid comment, thanks John!

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
4.1.2  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @4.1    last year
White people are so oppressed. 

Of course, that isn't anywhere even close to the vicinity of what he actually stated.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
4.1.3  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  George @4.1.1    last year

John thinks they are entitled.

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
4.1.4  George  replied to  Vic Eldred @4.1.3    last year

To what? 

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
4.1.5  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  George @4.1.4    last year

To loot and steal.  They were oppressed so it is considered reparations.

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
4.1.6  George  replied to  Vic Eldred @4.1.5    last year

It is the soft racism of low expectations, nothing more.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
4.1.7  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  George @4.1.6    last year

It is a form of racism.

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
4.2  George  replied to  Vic Eldred @4    last year

Yes, but we all know that the MSM is run by liberal democrats, and they don't expect as much from certain segments of society, it is the soft racism of low expectations. like this.

Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon's "Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math proficiency requirements for graduation (yahoo.com)

Because we all know, Math and English are racist.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
4.2.1  Sean Treacy  replied to  George @4.2    last year

Progressives don’t even try to hide how little they think of minorities 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.3  Sparty On  replied to  Vic Eldred @4    last year

We should waste no tax dollars on turds like this.    Well, except for the cost of two bullets.

Easy peazy ….

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
5  George    last year

While Iran uses drones to attack military bases, Biden called out B-7 hoping to hit their battleship.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
5.1  Sparty On  replied to  George @5    last year

Lol …. good one

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6  JohnRussell    last year

Are you sure you "know" history? 

There are very few people who argue for justice for both sides, it is always you are totally pro Israel or totally pro Palestinian , and one result of that is that all of the Palestinians grievances come under a forced umbrella of "terrorism".  The history of the region is much more complicated than that. 

Let me make it plainer, the "history" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes well beyond "terrorism" on the part of the Palestinians. 

The author of the following article , is by the way, Jewish. 

A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return

MAY 28, 2021   15 MINUTES
Save for Later Save A Jewish Case For Palestinian Refugee Return For Later
By Peter Beinart
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S ATURDAY 15 MAY WAS NAKBA DAY, which commemorates the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Israel – or who fled in fear – during the country’s founding in 1948. The commemoration had special resonance this year, since it was Israel’s impending expulsion of six Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that was a trigger for the violent struggle engulfing Israel-Palestine. For many Palestinians, that imminent expulsion was evidence that the Nakba has still not come to an end.

Every year, commemorating the Nakba represents a kind of mental struggle to remember the past and sustain the hope that it can be overcome – by ensuring that Palestinian refugees and their descendants can return home. In my own community, by contrast, Jewish leaders in Israel and the diaspora demand that Palestinians forget the past and move on.

Israel’s parliament passed a law in 2011 that could deny government funds to any institution that commemorates the Nakba. Israeli teachers who mention it in their classes have been reprimanded by Israel’s Ministry of Education. Last year, two Israeli writers, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, published an influential book, The War of Return, which criticised the Palestinian desire for refugee return as emblematic of a “backward-facing mode” and an “inability to reconcile with the past”.

I read The War of Return last year just before Tisha B’Av, the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem and the exiles that followed. On Tisha B’Av itself, I listened to medieval kinnot, or dirges, that describe those events – which occurred, respectively, 2,000 and 2,500 years ago – in the first person and the present tense.

In Jewish discourse, this refusal to forget the past – or accept its verdict – evokes deep pride. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once boasted that Jews “have longer memories” than other peoples. In the late 19th century, Zionists harnessed this long collective memory to create a movement for return to a territory most Jews had never seen. For 2,000 years, Jews have prayed to return to the land of Israel. Over the past 150 years, Jews have made that ancient yearning a reality. “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion,” proclaims the Israel i Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel constitutes “the realization” of this “age-old dream”.

Why is dreaming of return laudable for Jews but pathological for Palestinians? Asking the question does not imply that the two dreams are symmetrical. The Palestinian families that mourn cities such as Jaffa or Safed lived there recently, and remember intimate details about their lost homes. They experienced dispossession from Israel-Palestine. The Jews who for centuries afflicted themselves on Tisha B’Av – and those who created the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, in response to rising nationalism and antisemitism in Europe – only imagined it.

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“You never stopped dreaming,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once told an Israeli interviewer. “But your dream was farther away in time and place … I have been an exile for only 50 years. My dream is vivid, fresh.” Darwish noted another crucial difference between the Jewish and Palestinian dispersions: “You created our exile, we didn’t create your exile.” Many prominent Palestinians have alluded to the bitter irony of Jews telling another people to give up on their homeland and assimilate in foreign lands.

Of all people, we should understand how insulting that demand is. Jewish leaders keep insisting that, to achieve peace, Palestinians must forget the Nakba. But it is more accurate to say that peace will come when Jews remember. The better we remember why Palestinians left, the better we will understand why they deserve the chance to return.

Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return remains taboo. But with every passing year, as Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, this supposedly realistic alternative grows more detached from reality. There will be no viable, sovereign Palestinian state to which refugees can go. What remains of the case against Palestinian refugee return is a series of historical and legal arguments about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to remedy it now. These arguments ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we.

The consequences of these efforts to rationali se and bury the Nakba are not theoretical. They are playing out on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli leaders who justify expelling Palestinians today in order to make Jerusalem a Jewish city are merely paraphrasing the Jewish organisations that have spent several decades justifying the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 in order to create a Jewish state.

Refugee return constitutes more than mere repentance for the past. It is a prerequisite for building a future in which Jews and Palestinians enjoy safety and freedom in the land that each people calls home.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST REFUGEE RETURN BEGINS WITH MYTHS about what happened in 1948, the year Britain relinquished its control over Mandatory Palestine, Israel was created, and the Nakba occurred. These myths allow Israeli and diaspora Jewish leaders to claim that Palestinians effectively expelled themselves.

The most enduring myth is that Palestinians fled because Arab and Palestinian officials told them to. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an American Jewish organisation that fights antisemitism, asserts that many Palestinians left “at the urging of Arab leaders, and expected to return after a quick and certain Arab victory over the new Jewish state”. The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi debunked this claim in 1959, revealing that, far from urging Palestinians to leave, Palestinian and Arab officials often pleaded with them to stay. Zionist leaders at the time offered a similar assessment.

The narrative of Palestinian self-dispossession also blames Arab governments for rejecting the proposal put forth by the UN in November 1947 to partition the territory governed by the British Mandate into Arab and Jewish states. “Zionist leaders accepted the partition plan despite its less-than-ideal solution,” the ADL has argued. “It was the Arab nations who refused … Had the Arabs accepted the plan in 1947 there would today be an Arab state alongside the Jewish State of Israel and the heartache and bloodshed that have characterised the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been avoided.”

This is misleading. Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan on paper while undoing it on the ground. The UN proposal envisioned a Jewish state encompassing 55% of Mandatory Palestine’s land, even though Jews composed only a third of its population. Within the new state’s suggested borders, Palestinians thus constituted as much as 47% of the population. Most Zionist leaders considered this unacceptable. The Israeli historian Benny Morris notes that David Ben-Gurion, soon to be Israel’s first prime minister, “clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible in the Jewish State”. As early as 1938, Ben-Gurion had declared: “I support compulsory transfer.” His logic, concludes Morris, was clear: “Without some sort of massive displacement of Arabs … there could be no viable ‘Jewish’ state.”

Establishment Jewish organisations often link Arab rejection of the UN partition plan to the war that Arab armies waged against Israel. And it is true that, even before the Arab governments officially declared war in May 1948, Arab and Palestinian militias fought the embryonic Jewish state. Arab forces also committed atrocities.

But what the establishment Jewish narrative omits is that the vast majority of Palestinians forced from their homes committed no violence at all. In Army of Shadows, historian Hillel Cohen notes that “local Arab representatives had approached their Jewish neighbours with requests to conclude nonaggression pacts”. When such efforts failed, Palestinians often surrendered in the face of Zionist might.

In roughly 18 months, Zionist forces evicted upwards of 700,000 people, more than half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population. They emptied more than 400 Palestinian villages and depopulated the Palestinian sections of many of mixed cities and towns. In each of these places, Palestinians endured horrors that haunted them.

In April 1948, the largest Zionist fighting force, the Haganah, launched Operation Bi’ur Hametz (Passover Cleaning), which aimed to seize the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Haifa. A British intelligence officer accused Haganah troops of strafing the harbour with “completely indiscriminate … machine-gun fire, mortar fire and sniping”. The assault sparked what one Palestinian observer termed a “mad rush to the port” in which “man trampled on fellow man” in a desperate effort to board boats leaving the city, some of which capsized. Later that month, the Haganah launched mortar attacks on the city of Acre, cutting offits supply of water and electricity, which probably contributed to a typhoid outbreak, hastening the population’s flight.

IN OCTOBER 1948, ISRAELI TROOPS ENTERED THE LARGELY CATHOLIC AND GREEK ORTHODOX village of Eilaboun in the Galilee. According to the Palestinian film-maker Hisham Zreiq, the troops were met by priests holding a white flag. Soldiers from the Golani Brigade responded by assembling villagers in the town square. They forced the bulk of Eliaboun’s residents to head north, thus serving as human shields for Israeli forces who trailed behind them in case the road was mined. After forcing the villagers to walk with little food or water, the soldiers robbed them and loaded the mon trucks that deposited them across the Lebanese border. According to an eyewitness, about 12 men held back in the town square were killed in groups of three.

In al-Dawayima, in the Hebron hills, where Israeli forces reportedly killed between 80 and 100 men, women and children, an Israeli soldier told an Israeli journalist that “cultured, polite commanders” behaved like “base murderers”. After Israeli troops evicted as many as 70,000 Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in July, an Israeli intelligence officer likened the event to a “pogrom” or the Roman “exile of Israel”. Less openly discussed were the rapes by Zionist soldiers.

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Refugee return is a prerequisite for building a future in which Jews and Palestinians enjoy safety and freedom in the land each calls home
Eviction was generally followed by theft. In June 1948, Ben-Gurion lamented the “mass plunder to which all sectors of the country’s Jewish community were party”. In Tiberias, according to an official, Haganah troops “came in cars and boats and loaded all sorts of goods [such as] refrigerators [and] beds”, while groups of Jewish civilians “walked about pillaging from the Arab houses and shops”. Israeli authorities soon systematised the plunder. In July 1948, Israel created a Custodian for Deserted Property, which it empowered to distribute houses, lands and other valuables that refugees had left behind.

Israel conducted a census in November 1948. A month later, the Knesset passed the Law for the Property of Absentees, which determined that anyone not residing on their property during the census forfeited their right to it. This meant that as well as the Palestinians outside Israel’s borders who were barred from reclaiming their houses and lands, even Palestinians displaced inside Israel, who became Israeli citizens, generally lost their property to the state. In a phrase worthy of Orwell, the Israeli government called them “present absentees”. The scale of the land theft was astonishing. When the UN passed its partition plan in November 1947, Jews owned roughly 7% of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. By the early 50s, almost 95% of Israel’s land was owned by the Jewish state.

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I HAVE ARGUED PREVIOUSLY THAT JEWS COULD NOT ONLY SURVIVE, BUT THRIVE, in a country that replaces Jewish privilege with equality under the law. A wealth of data suggests that political systems that give everyone a voice in government generally prove more stable and more peaceful for everyone. But for many Jews, no amount of data can overcome the fear that, in a post-Holocaust world, only a state controlled by Jews can ensure Jewish survival. And many Jews would find a transition to be profoundly jarring. It would require redistributing land, resources and power, and reconsidering cherished myths about the past. To ensure that this reckoning never comes, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies have offered a range of legal, historical and logistical arguments against refugee return. These all share one thing in common: were they applied to any group other than Palestinians, Jewish leaders would probably dismiss them as immoral and absurd.

Consider the claim that Palestinian refugees have no right to return under international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” United Nations general assembly resolution 194, passed in 1948, asserts that those “wishing to return to their homes and to live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date”.

Opponents of Palestinian return argue that general assembly resolutions aren’t legally binding. They claim that since Israel was only created in May 1948, and Palestinian refugees were never its citizens, they would not be returning to “their country”. But these are legalisms devoid of moral content. Since the second world war, international bodies have developed a clear ethical principle: people who want to return home should be allowed to do so.

When the refugees aren’t Palestinian, Jewish leaders don’t merely accept this principle, they champion it. The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, states: “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities”. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) – whose chief executive, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands” – endorsed the Dayton agreement and urged that it be enforced by US troops. In 2019, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – the US’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group – applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict”.

The double standard expresses itself most glaringly in the debate over who counts as a refugee. Jewish leaders often claim that only Palestinians who were themselves expelled deserve the designation, not their descendants. But a cross the globe, refugee designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the next.

Moreover, the same Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews. In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s associate executive director declared: “We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

Israel and its allies insist it has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they also claim that doing so is impossible. Veteran US Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy”. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes and resettling people in a short time in a small space, Israel leads the world.

More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organisations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1bn to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during the second world war. In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust involved the murder of millions, which the Nakba did not, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If Jews robbed en masse in the 40s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do, too.

When Jewish organisations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property. So does the Israeli government, which estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for property lost in the Nakba as well. UN resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property”, created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses. Using land registers, tax records and other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the 20th century”. In recent decades, those records have been turned into a searchable database and cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical complexity. It’s political will.

Palestinian scholars have begun imagining what might be required to absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return. One option would be to build where former Palestinian villages once stood since. According to Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there. He envisions many returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture, with more investment and advanced technology”. He’s even convened contests in which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored villages.
Israel and its allies insist it has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they also claim it’s impossible
For Palestinians uninterested in reconstituting destroyed rural villages, Badil has partnered with Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that raises awareness about the Nakba, to suggest two other options – a “fast track” in which refugees would be granted citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the government oversaw the construction of housing and other infrastructure designated for them.

When Jews imagine Palestinian refugee return, they probably imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. Given Jewish history, these fears are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former Pales tinian homes, since, tragically, only a few thousand remain intact. More importantly, the Palestinian intellectuals and activists who envision return generally insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary nor desirable.

Badil and Zochrot have outlined what a “humane and moderate solution” might look like. If a Jewish family owns a home once owned by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their heirs) and then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash value of the home in return for relinquishing their claim. If neither accepted, Zochrot suggests a further compromise: ownership of the property would revert to the original Palestinian owners, but the Jewish occupants would continue living there. The Palestinian owners would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died, at which point they would regain possession. In cases where Jewish institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood – for instance, Tel Aviv University, which was built on the site of the destroyed village of al-Shaykh Muwannis – Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish inhabitants pay the former owners for the use of the land.

IF ALL THIS SOUNDS DAUNTING, THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS. Across the world, efforts to face and redress historic wrongs are rarely simple. Nearly three decades after the end of apartheid, the South African government in March unveiled a special court to fast-track the redistribution of land stolen from Black South Africans; some white farmers worry it could threaten their livelihood. In Canada, where the acknowledgment of native lands has become standard practice at public events, some conservative politicians are pushing back. So are some Indigenous leaders, who claim the practice has become meaningless. Thousands of US schools now use the New York Times’s 1619 curriculum, which aims to make slavery and white supremacy central to the way US history is taught. Meanwhile, some Republican legislators are trying to ban it.

But as fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur. There is a reason that the Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations for slavery with the sub-prime mortgage crisis that bankrupted many Black Americans in the early 21st century, and that the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama – best known for memorialising lynchings – ends its main exhibit with the current crisis of mass incarceration. The crimes of the past, when left un addressed, do not remain in the past.

That’s true for the Nakba as well. Israel did not stop expelling Pales tinians when its war for independence ended. It displaced close to 400,000 more Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel rid itself of another 250,000 Palestinians through a policy that revoked the residencies of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who left the territories for an extended period of time. Since 2006, according to Badil, almost 10,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have watched the Israeli government demolish their homes. In the 50s, 28 Palestinian families forced from Jaffa and Haifa in 1948 relocated to the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. After a decades-long campaign by Jewish settlers, the Jerusalem district court ruled this month that six of them should be evicted. By refusing to acknow ledge the Nakba, the Israeli government and its diaspora Jewish allies prepared the ground for its perpetuation.

“We are what we remember,” wrote the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “As with an individual suffering from dementia, so with a culture as a whole: the loss of memory is experienced as a loss of identity.” For a stateless people, collective memory is key to national survival. That’s why for centuries diaspora Jews asked to be buried with soil from the land of Israel. And it’s why Palestinians gather soil from the villages from which their parents or grandparents were expelled. For Jews to tell Palestinians that peace requires them to forget the Nakba is grotesque. In our bones, Jews know that when you tell a people to forget its past you are not proposing peace. You are proposing extinction.

Conversely, honestly facing the past can provide the basis for genuine reconciliation. In 1977, Palestinian-American graduate student George Bisharat travelled to the West Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiyeh and knocked on the door of the house his grandfather had built and been robbed of. The elderly woman who answered the door told him his family had never lived there. “The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home … burned inside me,” Bisharat later wrote. In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his wife and children looked on, a man originally from New York answered the door and told him the same thing: it was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house after Israeli forces seized it in 1948. When they met, the man said, “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” and then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” In that moment, Bisharat wrote, he experienced “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things possible that are not possible today”.

There is a Hebrew word for the behaviour of that former soldier:   teshuvah , which is generally translated as “repentance”. Ironically enough, its literal definition is “return”. In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees – far from necessitating Jewish exile – could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organised Jewish life. “The occupier and myself – both of us suffer from exile,” Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer the Nakba continues, the deeper this Jewish moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home

A version of this essay was first published in Jewish Currents. Eliot Cohen, Sam Sussman and Jonah Karsh assisted with research

PETER BEINART IS EDITOR-AT-LARGE OF JEWISH CURRENTS. HE IS ALSO PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE NEWMARK SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK  
 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
6.1  George  replied to  JohnRussell @6    last year
By Peter Beinart

So you get your opinions from a self loathing coward who failed to protect the women in the office he worked at because he was afraid it would affect his career. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.1.1  JohnRussell  replied to  George @6.1    last year

I get my opinions from people who demonstrate they know what they are talking about. 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.2  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.1    last year

You get your “opinion” rationalizing that the end justifies the means.    Nothing, I mean nothing, can justify the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah over the years.

Thinking otherwise is just obtuse.

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
6.1.3  George  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.1    last year

You get your opinions from people who tell you what you want to hear. It's confirmation bias. nothing more. a lot of close minded people do it.

 
 
 
George
Junior Expert
6.1.4  George  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.2    last year

I'm not sure which is a larger driving force, their hypocrisy or antisemitism, We were attacked unprovoked and destroyed 2 countries, but somehow Israel has to follow different rules concerning their attackers? is it straight up antisemitism or are they just hypocrites?

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.1.5  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.2    last year

I have never justified Hamas or Hezbollah or any other terrorists. I am pointing out that the history of the conflict is not what right wingers think it is. 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.6  Sparty On  replied to  George @6.1.4    last year

Some of both I suppose

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.7  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.5    last year
 I am pointing out that the history of the conflict is not what right wingers think it is. 

A massive sweeping generalization

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.1.8  Texan1211  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.7    last year

"We just too dumb to understand high-faluting liberal ways!"

Always dependable when they can't argue a point--pretend no one but they understand anything.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.1.9  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.7    last year

I just posted a long article about it. I read it, did you? 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.10  Sparty On  replied to  Texan1211 @6.1.8    last year

Yup, if I had nickel for every time someone less educated than I, bagged on my education, I’d be a much wealthier man ….

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.1.11  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.5    last year
I am pointing out that the history of the conflict is not what right wingers think it is. 

Let me be the first to point out to you that the recent history is this:

Hamas, the terrorists that represent Palestinians, attacked Israel, kidnapping civilians, murdering them in their beds, fired rockets into Israel aimed at civilians.

Hamas, and the Palestinians who allow themselves to be used by Hamas, must suffer the consequences for their attacks.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.12  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.9    last year

I read it and it didn’t point out anything I didn’t already know.    

You underestimate people’s intellect here every day John.    One of your faults.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.1.13  JohnRussell  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.12    last year

I'm waiting, and been waiting for years for the right wingers on Newstalkers to substantively engage the material seeded here. 

I see only one two of you who do that, Sean and Nerm. Ronin did to some extent too but he appears to be gone. 

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.14  Sparty On  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.13    last year

Nice, a “sweeping” Ad Hominem attack but fair enough.    

[deleted]

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.1.15  Texan1211  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.14    last year

[deleted]

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
6.1.16  Sparty On  replied to  Texan1211 @6.1.15    last year

They got their marching orders from their chosen one early November 2016 and like good useful idiots, they persist still to this day.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.1.17  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.1.13    last year
I'm waiting, and been waiting for years for the right wingers on Newstalkers to substantively engage the material seeded here. 

It is hard and tiring trying to respond to every single "Orange Man Bad" article seeded here or every comment made with the same shit-for-brains "logic".......

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.1.18  Texan1211  replied to  Sparty On @6.1.16    last year

I like the old saying "If you ain't with us, you're against us!"

Some folks like to make excuses for terrorism.

I choose to consider them 'woke' fools.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.2  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6    last year

Look, you can gussy up the PIG that is terrorism and make all sorts of excuses as to why they are terrorists, but at the end of the day, terrorists are still terrorists.

When Palestinians rise up and take responsibility for their own future by ridding themselves of the terrorists who represent them, then we can talk. 

Supporting terrorists makes one just as guilty as if they pulled the trigger.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.2.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Texan1211 @6.2    last year

Do Israelis have a responsibility to rid themselves of a government that wants to annex all the remaining Palestinian territory?

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.2.2  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.2.1    last year

Nope.

Not until Israel is safe from terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Israel shouldn't have to deal with terrorists diplomatically. 

I don't get why so many Americans are supporting terrorists.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.2.3  JohnRussell  replied to  Texan1211 @6.2.2    last year

I dont get why you dont know anything about the history of the region.  Well, actually I do. 

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.2.4  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.2.3    last year
I dont get why you dont know anything about the history of the region.

[[][deleted]

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.2.5  JohnRussell  replied to  Texan1211 @6.2.4    last year

[Deleted

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
6.3  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @6    last year

You missed it John. The Palestinians are no longer part of the equation. It is called the Trump Doctrine.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.3.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Vic Eldred @6.3    last year
The Palestinians are no longer part of the equation.

and you claim to know history

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
6.3.2  author  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @6.3.1    last year

They voted for Hamas

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.3.3  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.3.1    last year

Making excuses for present-day terrorism is a bad look.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.3.4  JohnRussell  replied to  Texan1211 @6.3.3    last year

[Deleted

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.3.5  JohnRussell  replied to  JohnRussell @6.3.4    last year

either copy or paste a sentence of mine where i either support or make excuses for hamas or shut the fuck up.  i flagged your comment but i guess the moderators are letting it stand

so copy and paste a sentence of mine where i support or make excuses for hamas or shut the fuck up

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
6.3.6  Texan1211  replied to  JohnRussell @6.3.1    last year
and you claim to know history

And you ignore acts of terrorism and try to excuse them with a litany of reasons why it happened.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
7  Sean Treacy    last year

“Many House Democrats decline to directly criticize Rep. Tlaib after she doubles down on Gaza hospital blast misinformation”

As party leaders and the professor demonstrates, this isn’t your father’s  party of FDR and JFK who believed in America, this is a party of radicals who hate the west.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
8  Texan1211    last year

Why does it seem like an inordinate amount of liberals are cheering for the Palestinians to prevail over Israel and are looking past the acts of terrorism committed by them so easily?

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9  CB    last year
Gaza: UN experts decry bombing of hospitals and schools as crimes against humanity, call for prevention of genocide

19 October 2023

“We are sounding the alarm: There is an ongoing campaign by Israel resulting in crimes against humanity in Gaza. Considering statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies, accompanied by military action in Gaza and escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank, there is also a risk of genocide against the Palestinian People,” the experts said.

“There are no justifications or exceptions for such crimes. We are appalled by the inaction of the international community in the face of belligerent war-mongering,” the experts said.

“The Gazan population, half of whom are children, have already suffered many decades of unlawful brutal occupation and lived under the blockade for 16 years,” the experts said.

“It is time to immediately cease fire and ensure urgent and unimpeded access to essential humanitarian supplies, including food, water, shelter, medicine, fuel and electricity. The physical safety of the civilian population must be guaranteed,” the experts said

Well, the UN is sounding the alarm. I will not support the deliberate killing or mass killing of civilians on either side. Israel needs to take it to heart that support for its position will wane with each civilian death from one individual to another adding up against their 'judgement' on Gaza. 

Go after terrorist (see U.S. response to Afghanistan/Iraq); 'liberate' civilians or at least protect their access to safe living conditions, or face an international protest storm. 

NOTE:  I have not verified it yet, but there is a real-world rumor in my area that upwards to 4,000 civilians in Gaza have been killed by bombings (and the ground invasion has not begun). I will not support the death of innocent people.

And conservative who 'SAY' they love life and the Unborn shouldn't either. As some of the Gaza suffering is happening to pregnant girls and women.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
9.1  Texan1211  replied to  CB @9    last year

Who cares what an outfit like the UN says?

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
9.2  Texan1211  replied to  CB @9    last year

Why would true innocents tolerate terrorists in their midst and allow them to represent them?

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
9.3  Sparty On  replied to  CB @9    last year

I’ll side with the women and children Hamas murdered, raped and slit throats.

The UN can kiss my ass.

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
9.3.1  Texan1211  replied to  Sparty On @9.3    last year

AMEN TO THAT!

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
9.3.2  Texan1211  replied to  Sparty On @9.3    last year

I'm getting tired of the Israel-bashing, Palestinian-loving folks who want one side to act one way and excuse terrorism.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.3  CB  replied to  Sparty On @9.3    last year
Go after terrorists (see U.S. response to Afghanistan/Iraq); 'liberate' civilians or at least protect their access to safe living conditions, or face an international protest storm. 

NOTE:  I have not verified it yet, but there is a real-world rumor in my area that upwards to 4,000 civilians in Gaza have been killed by bombings (and the ground invasion has not begun). I will not support the death of innocent people.

And conservative who 'SAY' they love life and the Unborn shouldn't either. As some of the Gaza suffering is happening to pregnant girls and women.

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.3.4  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  CB @9.3.3    last year
but there is a real-world rumor in my area that upwards to 4,000 civilians in Gaza have been killed by bombings

Who is reporting the numbers?  How do you identify a dead, adult male civilian from a Hamas soldier?  How do you attack Hamas facilities when they are beneath a mosque or mixed into an apartment building.  Why did Hamas try to prevent civilians from leaving northern Gaza?

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
9.3.5  Sparty On  replied to  CB @9.3.3    last year
I’ll side with the women and children Hamas murdered, raped and slit throats. The UN can kiss my ass.
 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.6  CB  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @9.3.4    last year

Locally, a Palestinian neighbor. I have no reason to dispute his knowledge, because he is intricately involved in his people's. . . plight "back home."  As to what happens to/for Hamas. That is not a concern of mine (or his).  Civilian deaths have to be limited to civilian participation in the acts of terror, not "wholesale slaughter" of any/all on the ground. Or Israel will face a backlash. For Israel can not complain about civilian deaths. . . if they expand on the number of civilian deaths as an act of revenge!

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.7  CB  replied to  Sparty On @9.3.5    last year

Of course you would. Revenge is a dish best served up cold - the saying goes. It's shortsighted however. As these people, both sets of them, are bound to the land together. Truly revenge is not something either Palestinians and Israelites should wish for in the larger scheme of their lives.  The Middle East 'eternal' episodes of "Hatfields and McCoys" should end now.

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.3.8  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  CB @9.3.6    last year

Locally, a Palestinian neighbor. I have no reason to dispute his knowledge, because he is intricately involved in his people's. . . plight "back home." 

Is this an answer to a question?  Are you serious?

As to what happens to/for Hamas. That is not a concern of mine (or his). 

How can you or he have an informed opinion while not being concerned about Hamas?

Civilian deaths have to be limited to civilian participation in the acts of terror, not "wholesale slaughter" of any/all on the ground.

Again, how does anyone decide which are adult male civilian deaths versus Hamas deaths.

Or Israel will face a backlash. For Israel can not complain about civilian deaths. . . if they expand on the number of civilian deaths as an act of revenge!

They always do regardless.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
9.3.9  Sparty On  replied to  CB @9.3.7    last year

Hamas must be wiped off the face of the earth.

Full stop ….

 
 
 
devangelical
Professor Principal
9.3.10  devangelical  replied to  Sparty On @9.3.9    last year

... every religious extremist.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.11  CB  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @9.3.8    last year
As to what happens to/for Hamas. That is not a concern of mine (or his). 

How can you or he have an informed opinion while not being concerned about Hamas?

Civilian deaths have to be limited to civilian participation in the acts of terror, not "wholesale slaughter" of any/all on the ground.

Again, how does anyone decide which are adult male civilian deaths versus Hamas deaths.

Look! If you want my statements, then receive them. You don't know a damn thing about it other than what I tell you. So listen and stop wasting time feeling around for something to dispute! Therefore, do NOT misunderstand me and then turn around and change the content of my statement. 

As to what happens to/for Hamas. That is not a concern of mine (or his).

I support the terrorist be taken down and out. That is easily implied by further reading what come after, "That is not a concern of mine (or his)."  Hamas is on it own for what it did to Israel on its own! 

It does not need 'extra time' to give it the proper meaning! The meaning is 'inside' the two sentences. 

You changed it into something other, because that is the BS you pursue on a daily basis here. So, I should ask you: Are you serious?

As for civilian deaths versus Hamas deaths . . . let me put it to you in a way you might understand: When kids are killed, when people attest that their elderly ones and young adults who are not affiliated (proven to not have any connection)  to Hamas (including a lack of insignia or head coverings, or 'colors')  are found dead en-masse or alone the U.N. and other countries have intelligence operators who can (and will) determine those persons 'condition' and state through investigation. 

BTW, the people in the region know the differences between terrorist and ordinary citizens. 

You don't have to know. . .since you are here. All you have to do is read and accept what the experts on Hamas/Israel/Palestine are conveying to us.  

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.12  CB  replied to  Sparty On @9.3.9    last year

As to what happens to/for Hamas. That is not a concern of mine (or his).

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.3.13  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  CB @9.3.12    last year

Exactly, a completely separate issue, hard to believe that someone would try to link them.

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.3.14  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  CB @9.3.11    last year
Therefore, do NOT misunderstand me and then turn around and change the content of my statement. 

Sorry, it seems to happen a lot with your statements.

It does not need 'extra time' to give it the proper meaning! The meaning is 'inside' the two sentences. 

‘Extra time’?

the U.N. and other countries have intelligence operators who can (and will) determine those persons 'condition' and state through investigation. 

Are they counting the bodies?  Did they get it way wrong at the hospital?

BTW, the people in the region know the differences between terrorist and ordinary citizens. 

Uh huh and they would never lie.

All you have to do is read and accept what the experts on Hamas/Israel/Palestine are conveying to us.  

Naivety must be comfortable for you.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.15  CB  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @9.3.13    last year

I have no ideas WHAT you are chiming in about this time. Can't take "Yes" for an answer, eh? Have to be snarky—just because. I guess. Anyway, you comment didn't "connect" and this is my comment about it.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.16  CB  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @9.3.14    last year

Well, we know MAGA lies on a daily basis, so why would I trust any of you? Besides like me, MAGA's here, sitting on our fat 'butts,'  MAGA likely doesn't have any more of a special insight than any other commenter here. As for those extremely tired little 'digs' that MAGA writers like to insert into their comments. . . I'm not petty like MAGA and I won't corrupt myself to think I have to be petty to get my point across. If MAGA are that DESPERATE to try to be somebody at the expense of good and meaningful discussion that's just pathetically weak. Continue being weak and anemic in your "responses."

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.3.17  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  CB @9.3.16    last year
Well, we know MAGA lies on a daily basis,

What does that have to do with me?

If MAGA are that DESPERATE to try to be somebody at the expense of good and meaningful discussion that's just pathetically weak.

Perhaps MAGA has learned, like I, of the difficulties of having a good, meaningful with you.  You rarely answer questions and frequently write in a style that makes it difficult for me to interpret your point.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.3.18  CB  replied to  Drinker of the Wry @9.3.17    last year

Please. Try to be less contrarian and you would get a lot more out of these exchanges.

Personally, I think your "conversational" banter is over the top, but I don't make a point to keep breaking your peace over it. You and your conservative friends like to make attempts to tell others how we have to come up (or down) to your 'standards' of discussion. I can't/won't do it. I have no interest in forsaking what I know to be a right course of action simply to be popular or CONSERVATIVE. 

Finally, I will clear it up for you: I am definitely a liberal. I definitely and deeply care about right and wrong in our society. I am not here to be popular or worse—a conservative who believes that as long as I am in the majority I can use that position to keep others from living the American dream on their own terms. I write the last because it strikes me that conservatives take the stance that if they can get the voting consensus (numbers) behind their cause/s—might makes right. That's incorrect. 

Right is right because it serves the good for some or all; wrong is wrong because it can not be misconstrued to be good in the sense of good for some or all.

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
9.3.19  Sparty On  replied to  devangelical @9.3.10    last year

And all Atheistic extremists.    Especially Atheistic extremists since they have reaped such carnage in the world throughout the years …..

 
 
 
Krishna
Professor Expert
9.4  Krishna  replied to  CB @9    last year

“UN ‘expert's’ ”?

Who declared them to be “experts”? And what was their criteria?

I was not an expert until now. By I hereby proclaim myself to be an “expert”. 

So there ya go—as of this moment I am a verified expert so no one here should even bother arguing with me because as an expert I am always right!

 
 
 
Drinker of the Wry
Senior Expert
9.4.1  Drinker of the Wry  replied to  Krishna @9.4    last year

We can self identify our race and gender so why not our expertise?  I think that you’ve made the wise decision, Krishna, as only an expert would.

 
 
 
CB
Professor Principal
9.4.2  CB  replied to  Krishna @9.4    last year

Krishna, you're kidding right. Experts have credentials. Do you have ME or internationally respected CREDENTIALS?  Well, you asked and I have responded. :)

 
 

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