I'm pro-US and pro-Israel: Why must I feel ashamed?

you should be ashamed because you are willfully ignorant.
2nd

reply to post by halfoldman


Well I guess you will have to be a Palestinian to find out.

reply to post by zionistsareterrorists


AMEN

Click here for more information.

Let me just add that my interest is historical and musical in the broadest sense, and this thread is not about advocating violence or bashing anybody, but rather also to look at the experience of people who fall outside the currently defined groups with official "victim status".
If people disagree with that it's fine, just please include more than a one liner and a personal insult!
You cannot insult or cajole people into your ideological camp!

Okay okay okay okay okay..
All trolling and ideological disparity aside people, I think that some of you should be ashamed for viewing this and many issues as black and white!
This forum's credo is Deny Ignorance, yet we have pages of no substance trying to argue the US is great or the US is bad?
Coming from a Canadian: The States have done things right sometimes. Oftentimes they seem horrible and corrupt.
It is no different for any other country, people or faction....whether its South Africa, the Vatican, or Canada.

Vilifying the views of others is neither a tactful or an effective means of validating your point of view.

Anyway, I just had to speak my piece. I'm out. To greener pastures and all that.
SB

reply to post by StripedBandit

Thanks for that, and I suppose at the end of the day none of us create the ideological options that are available for human beings.
We cannot create the wind that blows us, but music helps to see how we are blown.
No group has a monopoly on suffering, and to recognize that we suffer and experience affiliations is very important, because that is something in ourselves that we can then also recognize in the other.

Reviewing the thread from last night I am quite happy with the music and slant, although it seems I was on such a roll with my rant that I didn't reply directly to some posters, and I do apologize if anyone feels that was the case.
I'd say my main point was in my opening post, and of course one doesn't have to support some of the historic or regional songs to support the USA or Israel. I'm really not very au fait with patriotic American or Israeli music, so anyone is welcome to improve on that.
It's strange how war, or memories of war comes with a sense of pride and also great sadness.
No matter what side one may be on, it is not a good state for humanity to be in.

It should also be added that my rant comes from a certain context in SA where one is constantly bombarded with ANC ideology, and all their major social and policy failures in every sphere of government are offset by blaming the whites, and a constant barrage of anti-Israeli rhetoric by self-serving academics.
A lot of it just seems like sloganeering to further careers, and it doesn't offer anything constructive to anybody.

Just consider the climate in which the University of Johannesburg cut ties with the Ben Gurion University earlier this year: occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com...
Sad really when one considers that they were working on water projects that could have benefited the poor in SA (especially as SA faces a water crisis due to ANC mismanagement).
They say individual academics can continue their relationships with the BGU - yeah right, and kiss your career goodbye.
And what have the ANC done to educational standards in SA?
People like Tutu should be apologetic about the state of our education and it's racial quotas and lowered standards, and now ruined institutions like Medunsa, which under apartheid trained over 80% of black doctors in sub-Saharan Africa.
They really want to boycott Israel more, especially the Muslim faction of the ANC.
Unfortunately for them there's not much to boycott, except for Ahava cosmetics.

Last week I attended a lecture by a visiting liberal (well obviously) "queer feminist" academic.
Most of the talk was once again on Israel (yawn).
I just kept thinking: how can she unconditionally support terrorist groups that wouldn't think twice about stoning her to death, or at least giving her a good lashing?
The irony and willful ignorance is astounding.
Oh yes, and it's fashionable to conflate Israel with apartheid in every sentence, by people who know nothing about it. That's how you get ahead these days.
Unfortunately groups that become fashion statements will be forgotten in their slums as soon as a cosmetic change is made. Tragic really.

So I think my discourse wasn't really any more extreme then the liberal dominant discourse of the day.
As the new subaltern out-group in SA we are brow-beat into silence, at least in public discourse.
As the Afrikaans folk singer Koos Kombuis sang recently in a reworking of Marlene Dietrich's "Where have all the flowers gone?": "Where have all the white liberals gone?"
There used to be so many, but one can only associate oneself with dysfunction and stupidity for so long.

Listening to the radio this morning I heard that the tragedy in Norway is now called a "right-wing" plot, and the shooter is said to have used material from SA right-wing websites in his manifesto. However it seems that the pieces he used were about Europe, and can be found all over the web.
After a peek at some sites it is clear that none of them support what he has done, and the overriding conspiracy is that the media are painting a false picture to smear conservative people. The whole case is pretty perplexing and unclear. Of course most of the extreme right do not support Israel or freemasonry, and they call him a "Zionist Freemason", but that is clearly also an over-simplified allegation.
One really can't say too much at the moment, except that what he did was beyond disgusting.
There is a lot of stupidity in the far-right too, and constant tiffs about ideology (one only thinks of the white homeland some of them want for SA run as a Spartan type of theocracy, which sounds about as appealing as a root canal).
None of that has anything to do with being pro-Israel or the US, but in the current context any critique of the liberal discourse threatens to be conflated with what happened in Norway.

Let's not forget the fantastic UK soldiers: