Answer me honestly, do you even understand how analogies and similes work? I'm serious here, because it really looks like you don't. I am constantly galled by the total inability of people on these forums to relate differing, but similar concepts to one another. Maybe it's my bad for assuming that people would "get" a simple rhetorical device, and I should stop using them altogether.Samuel wrote:No, it would be like discussing who shot first in Bloody Kansas. Which is irrelevant to the Civil War.
The point of an analogy or simile is not that the two things are precisely the same. The point is that they share some salient characteristic which can be compared in an illuminating fashion. Your analogy attempts to show "Bloody Kansas happened before the Civil War, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine commenced before the present conflict, thus both relationships are exactly comparable!" This is so obviously stupid that you should be embarrassed for yourself. My analogy attempted to relate two present arguments by showing that both were strongly affected by the fundamental conditions from which the arguments arise; the moral standing of the Confederacy (of which the flag is symbolic) and the moral standing of Israel's foundation. Since I guess you didn't get this, I'll address the idea directly.
It is pointless to argue about right and wrong in the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict without reference to the ethical and moral quandary presented by the foundation of Israel on land seized from the Palestinians. If this was wrong, the Palestinians are taking action against an immoral occupation. If we instead accept the rightness of Israeli claims at face value, then they are simply defending themselves against terrorism. Ignoring or displacing this issue and discussing only the present, as Uraniun235 suggests, is at best distorting the discussion, at worst effectively a decision in favor of Israel (as it is typically the one initially provoked in each discrete incident, and because the alleged theft of Palestinian lands is the whole reason that Palestinians fight in the first place).
It's possible to calculate the ethics of actions in isolation. It is unarguably unethical for Hamas to fight Israel by randomly killing civilians and using their own noncombatants as human shields, just as it unarguably unethical for Israel to contain 1 1/2 million people in a de facto open air prison. But when we look at issues in this way we lose all sense of context and the decision is meaningless. Hamas fights Israel in this fashion because it lacks the capacity to fight conventionally but is still under pressure to appear to be doing something; Israel keeps people in Gaza because it has to put them somewhere they wouldn't be a huge danger to security. In either case, to understand why this is so, we have to go back, and back... and so on.
Now, I'm not saying that I think the IvP moratorium is good. I'd be willing to open the issue to discussion, and if people want to be babies about it and form vendettas over it, then I'll be willing to ban them. What I'm saying is that the concerns people are citing in favor of the moratorium are true--the debate will turn to these issues because otherwise its stupid--but despite that they aren't sufficient reason to keep the rule around.
