plersuds, you have a very peculiar sense of morality

are you trying to say that just because someone wears a regular military uniform that they are immediatley more moral than suicide bombers? does this apply to the russian uniformed soldiers that raped woman and killed children in berlin? the uniformed guards at Auschwitz? the uniformed Japanese soldiers at Nanking? the uniformed soldiers at My Lai?

get with it mate, we are ALL capable of extreme evil and we are ALL capable of extreme good, black, white, christian, jew, muslim, uniformed or not, whatever. It might sound like a cliche but it is true.

There is an axis of evil but in my humble opinion it directly connects James McConvill, Marilyn Shepherd and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Shepherd's comments about the "Iranian girl" - by the way she had a name Shepherd and it was Atefah Sahaaleh - are absolutely absurd. No girl in Australia would ever face a court for her so-called crimes, let alone be sent to the gallows. I detest the death penalty everywhere - in the United States, in Singapore and in China - but in the case of Iran its application is particularly venal. And monstrously medieval.

And it is from the medieval cesspit that the Iranian mullahs represent, that Hezbollah - the party of a totally non-existent god - draw their inspiration.

McConvill, who has argued in favor of scrapping the UN and disposing of international law, and who seems to have “conflicted” views (at best) about racial equality in Australia, has nothing to teach Israel about humanitarian principles. True to form, he here presents a wildly one-sided case (for example, only bothering to mention civilian deaths and destruction on the side of the aggressor, while ignoring Israel’s losses), and uses these to throw around a lot of unclear accusations, couched in meaningless words meant to sound vaguely nefarious (for example, that the “Israel Lobby” is “ubiquitous”!). McConvill provides almost no specific complaints or suggestions, let alone hard facts. What is the “real evil” that he thinks is coming from Israel and the so-called “Israel Lobby”? He doesn’t tell us.

The fact is that many Americans (and many Australians, as well) simply disagree with McConvill about who their allies should be, who is a “decent democratic nation” and who an “unprincipled basket case”, which side has chosen a strategy of routinely and purposely targeting civilians, and what policies best promote “justice, humanity and peace”.

Americans who wish to promote and maintain a strong US-Israel relationship play by the same rules as those who promote close ties to Australia, Arab dictatorships, Canada, Europe; the interests of oil companies, the medical industry, teachers, and farmers; greater protection or exploitation of wildlife; organized labour; immigrant groups; the gay and lesbian community, etc. This is a big part of how politics works in a complex, open, liberal democratic society. All organized political groups have their successes and their failures, and there is nothing nefarious about it. And it is no wonder that a group that promotes a strong, close relationship between the United States and the only democracy and reliable friend in the Middle East is more successful than competing groups that work, in the name of money and oil, to prop up and arm some of the world's most corrupt, aggressive, regressive, terrorist-supporting, human-rights violating, heinous absolute monarchies, autocracies, and dictatorships.

Continued...

continued from above...

As for Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper, let’s see… former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed it. So did the widely and deservedly discredited CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, and Tony Judt, who is on record as supporting the dismantling of Israel, which he considers to be an “anachronism”.

Meanwhile, the paper has earned blistering criticism for being full of errors, dishonest, slanderous, unscholarly, grossly overstated, disturbingly similar to classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, etc. This has come from a wide variety of commentators – not only traditional supporters of Israel, such as Alan Dershowitz, but also from harsh critics of Israel, such as Noam Chomsky, As`ad AbuKhalil, Stephen Zunes, and Ned Walker.

As Christopher Hitchens has commented on the paper, “what is original is not true and what is true is not original”, and its main thesis is “partly misleading and partly creepy”.

Saintfletcher,

let me tell you a secret: I also hate America and I also would like to see Australia independent.

My reasons for hating the USA may perhaps differ from yours - they are snubs thinking the whole world belongs to them, they pollute the world and its culture, promoting junk food, violent TV, and GM crops.

But I realize one thing: we cannot survive without them.
The idea of Australians being able to defend our continent on our own is hilarious, but with such long borders and relatively such small population, we must save it for dream-time and realize that we have no choice but continue paying our tribute to the emperor of our time, so that neighbouring nations know that if they attack us, big-brother is going to make them regret it.

If given a choice whether to live under American (cultural and/or physical) occupation, or under Islamic occupation, I regrettably choose the first.

This is no longer a nice game - WWIII has started, it is just hard to recognize because it is so different than the first two, and Europe is already on the verge of falling prey to Islam. Unlike in Israel or Somalia, Islam does not need to use artillery there - its weapons are the womb and exploiting the weaknesses of fair democracy. Europeans are desperate, many already flee Holland and Belgium and French thinkers also admit that the days of France as a free western-civilized country are numbered. It is quite reasonable that within 20-30 years, even the pope will flee and establish the Vatican in South America.

Australia is no exception. Islamic organizations have already declared Northern Australia to be part of a future Islamic state that includes most of South-East Asia. Even if you do not live in Northern Australia, is anyone so naive to believe that they will voluntarily stop their Jihad there?

Perhaps after the war, if we are still alive, we will strive for independence, but meanwhile we simply do not have too many options in choosing our allies.

It seems to me that this hostility is a nicely engineered self perpetuating mutual destruction that can both continue and escalate indefinitly.
These poor people from both sides are just the lemmings that happened to be closest to the cliff.
Perhaps when the world population gets down to a permanently sustainable level, lemmings won't need to leap anymore.
All the factors involved from energy criticality thru religious intolerance to politics are only multiple facits of a greater survival of the fittest challenge that all species face.
A long term view of human survival would seem to suggest that leaving the protagonists to battle it out will achieve much the same result as intervention, ie the elimination of surplus humans.
Party now while you still can and watch the events unfold.