Youth Politics

Americans have a pro-Israel mentality. This is somewhat of a no brainer if you pay any sort of attention to US policy, but the question is why is the United States such a strong ally of Israel. That is, why is it that the US has decided to back Israel and not Palestine? How did this whole mess begin in the first place? The answer to these questions lies in history.

I don’t want to go into a full history lesson, but this is what I’ve gotten from what I’ve read.

Conflicting British Promises:

The British were looking forward to an Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, which happened to be allies of Germany and thus enemies of Great Britain in World War I. The Hussein-McMahon correspondence came about as a series of letters between Husayn bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, High Commissioner in Egypt. Here is what a letter from McMahon to Hussein said, and do remember that this letter is on behalf of the British government:

“The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed delimitation. Subject to that modification, and without prejudice to the treaties concluded between us and certain Arab Chiefs, we accept that delimitation. As for the regions lying within the proposed frontiers, in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to interests of her ally France, I am authorized to give you the following pledges on behalf of the Government of Great Britain, and to reply as follows to your note: That subject to the modifications stated above, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.” (Source: October 24 1915 letter from Sir Henry McMahon, High Commissioner in Egypt, to Sherif Husayn of Mecca, archived at UNISPAL.)

So here we have a promise stating that Arabs can have their own independent state in the region now known as Palestine. Only two years later, we have the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which stated that the British government

“view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” (Source: Yapp, M.E. (1987). The Making of the Modern Near East 1792-1923. Harlow, England: Longman. p. 290.)

Therein lies the problem. Two promises that are seemingly conflicting.

After World War I:

The Israeli’s eventually get their own country, and of course the Arabs in the region aren’t too happy about it. On top of that, the Israeli’s are unwilling to have only the half of Jerusalem that has most of the Jewish population. This is understandable because the parts of the supposed holy land that the Arabs controlled resulted in the desecration (the building of Mosques on top of sacred Jewish landmarks) of monuments and landmarks held sacred by the Jewish people. They feared the same would happen to the part of Jerusalem they wouldn’t directly control. The Arabs were furious about the Jewish not dividing up more of the region, and several wars ensued. Later on, Hamas was formed to terrorize the country of Israel, which they do not recognize as a country anyway.

Today:

The United States supports Israel because it does not support terrorism. Plain and simple. Although the Arabs basically got cheated out of their deal, it is the way they have been handling the situation that has led to US support for Israel.

The reasons the United States doesn’t deal with Hamas head on are

1. We don’t have the resources right now due to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
2. Hamas was legitimately elected in early 2006.

The United States has taken a stance that terrorism will not be tolerated, and has been on the side of Israel against Hamas since it’s founding in 1987. This is, in the end, why we support Israel, regardless of the historical implications.

I’m not trying to teach history here, but if you’d like more, go visit http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm . I’d like to thank rampantheart from The Voices Within for helping me find some sources.

Of course I write this because of the recent events in Gaza. What do you all think of Israel’s actions?

As a lot of you might know, Valkyrie came out in theaters today. I loved watching the trailers for it on TV because of the fact that they didn’t stress that it came out on Christmas day, only saying that it will show on the 25th. Seems like bad timing to me, even if you’re trying to target non-Christmas celebrating audiences. I can’t think of a better thing to do to celebrate the holidays than to watch people try to assassinate Hitler, can you?

It has been brought to my attention that people think the Holocaust was caused by a bad German economy. I cannot stress enough how wrong this “fact” is. Hitler was really the only reason for the Holocaust. He took advantage of the terrible German economy to suit his political agenda and to more easily persuade his audience to follow his cause. Because let’s face it, when you’re desperate, you’ll listen to a lot more people who promise a way out of misery. That’s exactly how it happened. It wasn’t caused by a bad German economy, it was caused by a lunatic.

There’s a lot of power play in politics, and this fact should be blatantly obvious to anyone. Hitler took power with ease and then put himself in absolute control via manipulation. Could anyone really have stopped him? Yes, they could have, but they didn’t want to. Hitler claimed he needed to do what he did to save Germany from total economic collapse, so he was left to do whatever he deemed was necessary.

I’ll probably watch Valkyrie, but certainly not today. I’m in too festive a mood to watch a serious movie : >

Merry Christmas everyone!

I was in Peru a few years back, and I was driving up to the beach with my family in a bus, as my extended family was also coming. It was a rented bus with a driver, so all of us could sit back and just sleep because it actually takes quite a while to get from the city of Lima to the beaches. Anyway as we’re headed up to the beach, we make a stop at a tiny convenience store in practically the middle of nowhere, and there were a bunch of kids sitting around. They were poor, and as soon as we stopped they began to gather around the front of the bus. A few of these kids came on board and were asking for money. I was told not to give any of them any money.

I would have loved to help them out and give a little bit of money to some of the kids, but I couldn’t possibly give money to every single one. And what if more kids came, hearing that we were giving money away for free? I could not selectively give only some of the kids money and expect to be able to leave easily. Yes, I suppose one argument is that helping some kids is better than helping none of them, and that is true. However given the circumstances, by giving money to some and not the others, I’m putting myself in the difficult situation of being unfair to the others who really also need the money. And who am I to judge who gets the money and who doesn’t?

The whole point of my story is that the United States puts itself in that exact same situation all the time with its current foreign policy. The only difference is that America actually does choose to single out some “kids” and help them without helping everyone else, and that’s bothersome. Who are we to pick and choose who gets to receive our help and who does not? Who are we to decide who to invade and who not to invade, simply because there is a dictator running the country or that the country is not democratic enough?

As the lone superpower in the world, the United States has taken on the role of World Police. This means that whenever any kind of trouble arises anywhere in the world, America feels compelled to help resolve the troubling situation. Can anyone see the problem with this mentality? America does not have an infinite number of resources. It’s bound by a finite number of troops, a finite amount of money, and a finite amount of goods. We cannot help everyone; there are too many people who need help. We also cannot pick and choose, because then others who do not receive our help will feel discriminated against in some fashion, and we cannot have that either.

So what is the US to do? Certainly we should help out with crisis’ that occur throughout the world, but we should do so with the international community. When attacking poverty in a nation, how does the nation tackle it? By individually contributing money to random strangers on the streets? No. A plan is formulated that the community can agree on and then it is enacted. The same deal should apply with our foreign policy, except instead of individual people you have individual nations. One man cannot do it alone. One country cannot do it alone. We do not have a monopoly on doing good and being righteous. Solving the world’s issues as a team seems like the best way to go, and you’d have a hard time convincing me otherwise.

Another big problem with declaring ourselves as the nation to solve the problems of the world is that we too have our own problems. We are not the ideal superhero that a lot of comic books depict. We are not incorruptible, or unbeatable. We are not the essence of what is good. We may think that because our viewpoint is one such that we are correct and everyone should follow our example. But this is not how everyone else sees us, and they shouldn’t. We started a war in Iraq based on a lie. Is that what good is? We ignore the Constitution at our convenience. Is that good? We ignore the international community for our own national interest. Is this what it means to be good? Point is, nothing the United States does is pure. We still stumble on our own hypocrisies. Georgia can attack its own territory and Russia is not allowed to step in, but Saddam Hussein can attack the Kurds inside his territory and the US is allowed to invade. What is the basis for us being correct and the Russians not? Is it because Georgia is our friend and Iraq was not? How does what we did look any different from the Russian perspective? To give the argument that the reason is that Iraq is not a democracy is an absurd one at best. It’s to say that democracy is the only form of government that should exist and that it is the correct one. Yes Saddam Hussein was oppressive towards his people. Yes his dictatorship essentially denied basic human rights to his citizens. But isn’t North Korea doing the exact same thing? Why haven’t we invaded North Korea? Why haven’t we invaded Cuba? Why are so many countries in the same situation being ignored?

The answer is that we simply cannot help everyone. I keep coming back to this point because it’s something I believe the next president of the United States needs to realize, and soon. The international community, in general, does not think too highly of us right now. Our foreign policy has been a dismal failure at best. The world is laughing at us because they know that we cannot solely save the world, even though we think we can. Take the “War on Terror” as an example. How can you possibly win such a war? Terror isn’t an object. It’s not a thing. There’s no entity behind it, and it has no leader. I think David Cross (a comedian) put it best when he said that “fighting a war on terror is like fighting a war on jealousy”. At what point can you finally say, “there are no more jealous people, we have won”? Can you ever get rid of every last jealous person on Earth? No. Can you get rid of all terrorists on Earth, no. Terrorism is a tactic. Tactics cannot be eradicated by any amount of force. You could dismantle the entire Al Qaeda network and terrorism will still exist on Earth. Wars based on ideologies never work, because an ideology is not something you can win over, it simply exists. What America can do, however, is to join the international community in preventing terrorist acts and undermining plots and protecting people. Those are tangible ideas that can be “fought” against. But again, it has to be a community effort, or it’s useless.

I’m hoping that whoever becomes the next president of the United States throws away the book Bush has written on foreign policy and begins to write an entirely new book, a book that speaks of cooperation and teamwork, a book that cuts out hypocritical acts and makes America look more like a righteous leader and less like an arrogant police force. America needs to regain face amongst the international community and needs to stop thinking of itself as the world’s superhero and more like the world’s greatest ally amongst allies.

What bothers me most, more than liars and those who make mistakes, are those who are hypocrites. These are the people who criticize others and then go behind our backs to do the same thing. America is full of hypocrites. America itself is a hypocrisy. Our policy of “say one thing and do another” is just awful.

America has always been this way; this is not the latest phenomenon. America was founded in the name of freedom, freedom from oppression (taxes, in our case), and freedom from the king. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was supposed to be a natural right for all men and women. So, what happened? That’s not what happened. It sort of worked out, but not really. How can a nation that promotes freedom institute slavery? That seems hypocritical to me, and it is. There is no freedom in slavery.

Nowadays America is still committing the same hypocritical acts. Get this, the United States wants Russia out of Georgia and to punish Russia for its aggression. The United States did this exact same maneuver in 2003, with Iraq. Except with Iraq it’s even worse because Iraq didn’t attack any territory that’s even partially loyal to the United States. In fact, Iraq did nothing at all. Russia retaliated when Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Now we’re telling them to leave Georgia? Now we’re thinking of punishing Russia for not obeying the international community? Did the United States obey the international community? America’s hypocrisy is put to shame here.

That is only a recent example of hypocritical acts committed by the United States. We don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, and yet we possess them ourselves. I’m not saying that I necessarily want Iran to have its own nuclear arsenal, but consider the implications of a nation with nuclear weapons telling another that they cannot have any such weapons.  That seems both selfish and hypocritical to me. And people wonder why there’s such animosity towards us over seas…

Guantanamo Bay is other example. We don’t want American prisoners to be tortured horrendously, and yet America turns around and do the exact same thing. Hypocritical much? I think so. How does the saying go, “treat others as you would like to be treated?” That still applies to the behaviors of countries, you know. America says it wants to set an example for the world, well what kind of an example are we if we go around doing whatever we please yet saying that those actions shouldn’t be done? And I’m not buying the whole world police idea, either.

America has a lot of growing up to do. We’re still a fairly new nation compared to the countries in Europe and East Asia. Our foreign policy leaves much to be desired, and it’s important that our government realizes that we cannot impose our best interests on others while at the same time shunning anyone who copies us in any way. I wonder what would happen if a nation like Japan invaded North Korea. Would we stop them, or would we allow them to continue? After all, Japan is just trying to defend its citizens against a country that might maybe aid terror. What a hypocritical situation it would be if we said no.

Yes yes yes, old news. But look at America’s response! I mean Russia invaded Georgia for crying out loud! And the best we can muster is an official condemnation of the act and threats of serious sanctions? There are people dying down in Georgia! Atlanta is screwed : P

But in all seriousness, let’s not have a repeat of what happened with Hitler. Oh Hitler wants Czechoslovakia? Go ahead. Oh Hitler wants Poland? Let ‘em have it. This is the same thing. Western powers (and, quite frankly, anyone) needs to take action against Russia and save that country from being conquered. I mean, why are we so unwilling to do such a thing? With Hitler it was simple, they didn’t want to cause another war. There hasn’t really been a World War for a while, so that can’t be it this time…

Oil. Dangit Russia has oil. And Western Europe uses a lot of it. It’s not really replacable at this time. If they get cut off from oil, their societies are going to tank, so they’re really in a snag. What about the United States though? I suppose they can us