Reply #87: There are similar government pressure on Isrealis as on Americans?

[quilp]

We don't get any news of Isreali oppostion to Sharon.

I find the "racism" you mention totally incomprehensible. I just never think in those terms, and can't understand anyone who does. As far as I know the Arabs and Jews are "Semetic". Yet they accuse each other of "racism". How can that be? Aren't they the same "race"? I am told I am "Caucasian". This is a mountain range in Russia. I was born in London, England. I don't see a connection. I think "race" is a bogus category without meaning. There are people, countries, and cultures. There are no "races".


"Magistrate" seems to think I question the intelligence of Arabs. These are the people that invented the numerical system we use today!

Actually I think I'm in the mainstream of what people believe about the situation in the Arab world. They are in a double bind. They have had despots and rulers forced on them by the West. In reaction they have inflicted upon themselves these lunatic clerics. The idea that an unelected American president, dependent on the Christian Right, is going to bring democracy to Iraq would be funny if people weren't actally dying for this cynical lie.

If anything I am "class conscious". I believe the best thing any country can evolve is a large and properous working class of the kind we had in the "sixties". This cannot happen under a dictatorship or theocracy. And when this class declines, or is threatened, the country ends up with one or the other. Which is where I sometimes think we are headed. I'm with the Frenchman who said. "I can't wait till the last aristocrat is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."