Comments on: “What a wonderful world this would be” The Marketplace of Ideas Thu, 19 Jan 2017 18:02:12 +0200 hourly 1 By: John Yorke Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:00:15 +0000 Well, Ilya, that's a very wide-ranging picture you portray and all of it, sad to say, is true enough.
But the past and even the present are, to a large extent, often just the record of mankind's burgeoning catalogue of mistakes and our quite amazing inability to learn from most of them. Our achievements, however, are contained therein also and many of these can be applied to problems that exist today. But only if we know where – and how – to look.

I'm looking back now more that half a century. It was a very minor thing at the time but I can still call it to mind from across all those years. I was watching a children's television programme (in the bygone days of black and white transmission). Two heavy climbing ropes, the type that were common in school gymnasiums of the day, had been suspended from an overhead gantry in the TV studio. They hung vertically down with some distance between them. A small group of children were present and the task was simply for each individual child to end up holding the ends of both these ropes. But every one of them failed to do so. While one rope was easily grasped, the distance to the other could not be crossed sufficiently because of the fixed length of this first rope. In the end, the solution was simplicity itself. Let go of the first rope at its maximum limit, walk over to the second, take hold of it and then return towards the first. This, by then, had swung in an arc across the studio floor and, on the backward traverse, it came easily within reach. Thus it was that, only by extending both ropes to their natural limits, could the puzzle ever be solved.

This is what Israelis and Palestinians have to realise if they are ever to succeed in solving their own very challenging 'puzzle.' They have to entertain the possibility of letting go. Only in such a way can they both end up having any real chance of resolving the differences that have so long existed between them.

But isn't 'letting go' counter-intuitive, anathema to mindsets that have always striven to hold onto or try securing what they believe to be theirs? How then is it possible for such as these to see the prospect of release as a means of securing a better future for all concerned?


Well, Ilya, we can't stay children all our lives, can we?

By: Ilya Meyer Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:53:53 +0000 John Yorke, there are so many fallacies in what you write it's difficult to know where to begin.

You are equating what Jews of 3000 years ago are reported to have done, with what the Muslim world is routinely doing to this very day. The terrible excesses of Christian fanaticism of several centuries ago, with what occurs daily in the Islamic world now, 2012. By that lapse of logic, we ought not to report on any negative news anywhere because hey, somebody did something even worse a few thousand years ago.

It's like this: whatever Jews of Biblical times did or didn't do, it's not the way we live today, and it hasn't been the way we live for the past couple of thousand years. The Jewish religion does not make a practice out of burning, raping, massacring, beheading people of other religions or our own co-religionists in the name of religion.Churches and mosques are not ransacked, turned into toilets or converted, triumphantly, into synagogues. That approach is the preserve of modern Islam, today. Exclusively of Islam and no other religion. Even the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have more or less agreed on peaceful means of resolving their differences.

If we were to follow your line of argumentation to its logical conclusion, then we may as well tell the Norwegians and Swedes to stop pretending they have a right to an opinion on anything because we all know they raped and pillaged their way across England. Admittedly a thousand years ago, but it's the principle that counts, right? And the Americans can button their lips, because look what they did to the native peoples of North America a few centuries ago. As for the English – Australia's indigenous people should now send every white-skinned person back where their great-great grandparents came from. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Any attempt at moral equivalency between the Jewish state attempting to survive against the onslaught of its violent Islamic neighbours, on the one hand, and those Islamic states working flat-out to destroy Israel simply because it IS a Jewish state, on the other, is morally repugnant. There is no moral equivalency whatsoever.

My list is not an attempt to portray Islam in a negative light – that unfortunately is being perfectly ably handled by the Islamists themselves without outside help. That list was a way of directing public opinion to what hugely expensive, publicly funded bodies such as the EU and UN flatly REFUSE to notice: Islamic intransigence – at the same time as the EU and UN examine every breath taken by an Israeli under a microscope.

That selective treatment (Jews are unfortunately all too familiar with the consequences of selection), that overt bias, that craven acceptance of bullying as a means of social intercourse, is not going to give the EU and UN a constructive role. And it is never going to bring peace to either Israel, or the pan-Arab forces arraigned against it. The fighting will go on, until the world community – the EU and UN come to mind – apply the same principles to everyone. Even-handedly.

I have no doubt that a lot of good can be done if only a modicum of fairness were applied, if the world community were to act out of principle instead of expediency, if the world community were to actually acknowledge the elephant in the room.

By: John Yorke Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:13:02 +0000 Yeah, Iiya, you are correct. Muslims do seem to include some very bad apples indeed. Whereas Christians and Jews, members of the other two monotheistic religions, are squeaky clean by comparison. That is until you recall the millions who died at the hands of Christians in the last century alone. And Jews could dish it out with the best of them when the occasion arose; entries recorded many times in the Old Testament/Torah will attest to that. There it makes mention of a number of battles where Jews were involved in some very questionable military activities and suchlike episodes. Even today, that propensity for terminating with extreme predudice is still around. And, as ever, this has become the norm on all sides.

The mirror refects both ways. And what it has shown, so far, does not put any of us in a particularly good light.
Then, maybe, it's time to rectify that oversight and show that we can all improve massively on the many poor performances essayed in the past. As an example, this might be one worth considering:

And, relatively speaking, it's such an easy and comprehensive role to undertake that it has to be wondered why no previous production has ever been staged. Perhaps it's the small amount of mathematics that puts people off.

By: Eduardo Schmidt Wed, 05 Dec 2012 23:17:36 +0000 seriously, all of what you wrote here makes you wonder on these "impartial" mediators' thinking, doesn't it?