Philip Greenspun on Israel

[Owen Byrne]

Russell Turpin wrote:

> Owen Byrne:
>
>> Umm, not to mention slavery...
>
>
> That's harder to account. Most killing related
> to US slavery, discounting the Civil War itself,
> occured in the capture and transport of slaves.
> The slave trade to the US ended in 1808, if I
> recall correctly. That did not have much impact
> on the slave population, which by that time was
> growing more from people born to slavery than
> sold into it. The actual practice of slavery in
> the US did not involve much killing. The whole
> point was to extract economic value from forced
> labor, not to commit genocide. Indeed, it was
> illegal to kill a slave.
>
I've been meaning to post this for a while but haven't - figured it 
would start a flame war - so much easier to inject it into the middle of 
one... and  this seems to be a good leadin - and seems mildly related to 
this. What happened to sick/weak slaves?:

Philip Greenspun on Israel:
http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/

>> It is currently fashionable to demonize Adolf Hitler and the Germans 
>> who voted for him and his policies. However it is worth pointing out 
>> that Hitler original plan was not to kill Jews; he wanted to take 
>> their property and then kick them out of Europe. The U.S. and 
>> Britain, which together controlled the seas, were the largest 
>> obstacle to the German plan of expelling Jews. The U.S. would not 
>> accept Jewish immigrants. The British White Paper of May 1939, backed 
>> up by the British Navy, closed off Palestine. Under the White Paper 
>> no more than 75,000 Jews would be admitted to Palestine during the 
>> succeeding five years and after that all immigration would be at the 
>> discretion of Arabs. Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" was a solution 
>> to the problem of "there are no countries that are willing to accept 
>> Europe's Jews", not to the problem of "we really enjoy killing Jews 
>> and how can we kill as many as possible?"
>


> Taking the long view, the State of Israel is most simply explained as 
> a concentration camp for Jews. Starting in the 1930s the Europeans 
> expropriated the property of their Jews and collected the physical 
> bodies of those Jews in camps where they could be worked to death--the 
> Nazis did not put healthy Jews into gas chambers but only those who 
> had become exhausted by slave labor. In the 1940s and 1950s the 
> remaining Jews of Central Europe were by and large sent to Israel 
> while at the same time Arab nations expropriated the wealth of their 
> 1000- and 2000-year-old Jewish communities and sent the physical 
> bodies of the Jews to Israel (except for some thousands who were 
> killed by mobs). In the last decades of the 20th century the former 
> Soviet Union began to export its Jewish population, though without the 
> violence and confiscation that had accompanied Jewish migrations from 
> Europe and Arab nations.




Owen