No, I don't think that analogy applies. I'm not saying that Israel shouldn't try to win or whatever. I'm saying that a human life is a human life, regardless of the nationality.

Good thing somebody here knows everything or we'd catch the confuse.

well i have military experience. anyone else here?

im comforted by the fact that you play so fast and loose with other peoples' lives, but i dont want my government to **** around, thank you very much.

and you intentionally misrepresented my point. i don't have the faintest clue about whether iran actually is close to a bomb and whether they ever intend to use it. and neither do you, regardless of all the influence you're trying to exert here. you simply have no idea. you have 4th hand knowledge from journalists who want you to have 4th hand knowledge.

I'm simply laying out the prudent decision-making process for a country facing a potential threat.

let's have a thought experiment: you're an israeli. you've been listening to ahmadinejad for a decade. you've been listening to his coreligionists and sometimes allies-sometimes enemies for decades. You've witnessed irrational suicidal terror as a weapon of first-resort.

now let's roll a die: if it rolls 1, a 1% random sample of all iranians die; if it rolls 2: a 1% random sample of all israelis die. 3-6, means Iran has no plans to arm hizballah and/or will not develop nukes or any of a number of scenarios that don't affect israeli voters. if you stop the die, its an automatic 1 (and even then, let's be honest, the israeli and US military will not be as indiscriminate with civilians, especially when the suspected nuclear facilities are not located in urban areas).

Are you going to wait for that die to stop rolling? Are you going to do everything you can, to make sure its not a 2? Are you truly indifferent between 1 and 2? Is simply hoping for 3-6 enough?

Here's a better question: if the israeli government and military were to disappear tomorrow, how many jews do you think would be left alive on tuesday?

now ask yourself: if the iranian (or jordanian, lebanese, egyptian, for that matter) government and military were to disappear tomorrow, how many arabs do you think would suffer at israeli's hand?

LOL. You believe our politicians.

1. there would be no jews left by tuesday.
2. no arabs would be dead on tuesday.

and that's one of the reasons why I trust Israel with nukes and not Iran.

except that there's no certainty to be had regardless of what you do. what you're really saying here is that different actors assign different weights to the possible outcomes of various actions. no ****?

complaining that external observers are clueless or wrong because they're not advocating your preferred Israli lives:Other lives trade off is dumb.

Sigh. I don't want to sidetrack this thread too much, but the state of Israel is the issue, not the Jewish people. The two have unfortunately become linked in the minds of prejudiced people in the Arab world over the past 60 years, but those that hate Israel don't necessarily want all Jews dead (some extreme crazies obviously do). It's in the friggin Quran that Jews are protected as people of the book.

The rest of what you said is all well and good, but it doesn't change the fact that to the vast majority of non-Israelis in the world they value an Israeli life the same as an Iranian life.

So millions of Jews in America would just immediately die? Right. Please leave discussion to people with at least an inkling of intelligence.

These "thought experiments" are unbelievably bad. They tell us nothing of the real situation because they make no attempt to factor actual reality into them. The rolling dice was especially bad.

Philosophically, you are correct, but in reality this is untrue. It's blatantly obvious that the Israelis and American governments consider their people's lives worth a high price. They make a point to prove it. There is a reason why people avoid killing Americans overseas - they absolutely know there will be a response and people WILL die.


This is right.

For what it's worth, I think he has a point. When he says "We did nothing to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Give them a piece of Germany or the United States", he has a point. You can argue about if the Jewish people should be there or not, but their argument is they shouldn't have that land in the first place, and you'd be surprised how many people agree with that.

No, its entirely untrue, and one of the biggest myths of this conflict. Its an unfounded assertion based on Arab political rhetoric, and I'll elaborate in a direct reply to champstark.

If you think Zionism or Israel's location has anything to do with the Holocaust, you're simply in a world of make-believe. The holocaust was simply the last straw in a long history of persecution and murder of Jews in europe and the middle east, and its role was ultimately to accelerate existing processes for re-establishing an existing, millenium-old movement to return to the Jewish peoples' historic homeland. What has been characterized by Arab (and Western ideological opponents of Israel's existence) as "colonialism" is more accuratetly characterized as a correction of the historical injustice of the exile of the indigenous Jewish people from Israel.

If you honestly believe all Muslims inherently want all Jews to die, then there's no point in us ever discussing anything again.

There are plenty of Arabs who don't want anything bad to happen to the Jewish people, but are very much against the state of Israel. There are even Jews who live in Arab lands who disagree that Israel should be a state.

Who said anything about location? There are plenty of historical injustices. How long has it been since they lived there? What if this were reverse, and a group were exiled from the United States 1800 years ago and came back and claimed a big chunk of it (or, a religiously important chunk of it) with no agreement from us? I'm sure many people would look at this very differently.

this is obviously a retarded statement.