yep well, what isa said.

now uh, something more ontopic, we talked earlier about the buildings and stuff, how they see it as provocation..well uh, dunno if it was published in your media, but in the last month we had 3 umm...incidents?.. read all about it here:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3960282,00.html

I'm an atheist, Isa's an atheist, Jebby's an atheist. There are probably more on this site.
A pretty large majority of the Netherlands are atheist. Of all my friends, only two are Christian and only one is Jewish. And two of those three are immigrants.

Why does everyone it seems hate jews?

Ever heard of Islam?

The Arab countries are all more or less opposed to the state Israel, and therefore, Jews, while being supportive of Palestine. However, there's a lot of hatred towards Islam in the western world, which you should be painfully aware of (Organized Koran burnings, anyone?). Those things enrage Muslims in countries such as Indonesia (but of course, also in Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, the ones you've heard the most of), causing hatred towards Christianity, and increases the amount of terror attacks caused by Islamic extremists, which gets featured in western media, increasing the hatred towards Islam...

If you check the current politic situation in almost the whole Europe, there's a lot of intolerance towards Muslims and Islam right now. Nobody wants to forbid the building of synagogues, but minarets have been banned in countries such as Switzerland and many countries are about to follow.

Sure, there's a lot of "traditional" hatred towards Jews from mainly the Arabic countries, but the Muslims are hated in the whole western civilization by now, or at least parts of it.

I am not pleased with the development of the situation in Jerusalem, West Bank or Gaza (both sides are acting stupid, but right now, the Israeli government is making things worse I think [if you want, I can post more detailed thoughts about that]), but I am even less pleased with how things have developed in the European parliaments, with countries getting more and more closed towards other countries (mostly immigrants), especially the poor ones like Somalia (Sweden has a huge number of immigrants from Somalia, most of them poorly integrated in the Swedish society, causing anger from "Swedes") and the Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq and Iran, but also the Romani people from countries such as Bulgaria and Romania.

This turned out to be a completely different post than I thought it would be, lol...but to summarize it: There's a lot of hatred towards all religions, but in our western civilizations, the hatred is mainly directed at Muslims, not Jews.

Note that I am in no way proposing hate attacks towards Jews.

O i see i see

Yah I guess you have a point its just most people to me seem not to like Jews very much....

really do we have so many atheists here? But you also have to realize that there are two kinds of atheists: the kind who believe in atheism as in, they actively believe against religion, and the kind who just don't believe anything, not because they made the choice to but because they just don't think about that stuff. Except that when you say "atheist" I tend to think of the first kind

Also shos, you seemed to be bothered a lot by potential bias against your country. But you don't need to respond to that bias by being biased towards the other way. Do you really find it hard to see how the housing issue can be interpreted as provocative?

If you don't think about religion, then obviously you're not believing in anything, unless you've been indoctrinated from the birth. Unless you're talking about agnostics, which are people not sure if there is a higher being or not.

And what do you mean with "believe against religion"?

Oh, I guess a better way to say it is that you can be the kind of atheist who is against religious beliefs, or agnostic. Lol at "believe against religion", what I meant was the guys who are so biased against religion that you could mistake their atheism as a religion in and of itself.

You mean like this guy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjoEgYOgRo

I could easily fit into that category that you're talking about. While I defend everyone's right to believe in whatever they want to (Scientology is mighty stupid though), I think religion hinders clear thinking. For example, evolution contra creationism (which can be countered by summoning the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

I'd respond to what you just said with another tangent, but this is the Politics Topic and not the Religion Topic....

We should make one...

It'd end up being a warzone...

Oh yah... Screw that thought lol

of course i'm bothered, 1 in every 2 people in the world holds the opinion that the world is better without me, you know..

i don't find it hard to see that, but you have to understand that this country has an aveage of more than a war every 8 years through its whole lifetime, and that's without counting the intifada(all 5 of them?). we're trying to arrange any kind of peace for years now, and this whole time we're giving things, letting go, giving up on all kinds of stuff. in return we get terror attacks. wonderful, we start peace conversations, so they run 3 shooting attacks in one month since the conversations started. their reasons for them are, by the way, "The attack was carried out to mark the 15th anniversary of the killing of the Islamic Jihad's founder Fathi Shaqaqi.", so you can't say we're trying to provoke anything here. we're trying to have a country that lives in peace, while they keep up with their terrorist attacks, so you're expecting us to give up more and more, and if we don't, it counts as provocations?

akajflkajflkjalkfjalkjf shos! Is that really your argument? You're saying that "they're being provocative, so therefore we're not being provocative. It's their fault."

Well, since you think your country is pursuing peace, let me say that peace is not easy to attain. You can't just say "oh well, they don't want peace, I guess we should give up." The famous peace-makers of the world, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, they didn't give into hostility. They didn't leave their cause just because they had to face adversity. If you cared as much about peace as you say you do, you would stay true to your cause. Maybe then the international community would side with you more often because it would be clear who is being provocative and who isn't. But right now, you both seem like lost causes.

??
I didn't understand, lol. that is not what i was saying. what i said was that we gave up soooo much already; and what for? what good ever came for it? we have a soldier that is captive for almost 5 years, terror attacks every now and then, with bonuses when we try to converse about peace? so you're saying that we should stop building houses again, in order to help the conversations?

peace is something that comes from two sides as far as i know, and if while the conversations are there WE stop building and THEY kill more people of ours, i don't think there's a reason to stop building, or even have those conversations. the 'official' leaders of the arabs here are not even remotely related to their people...it's useless. lost cause you say? well, yeah? the problem is what we do now, since we keep getting people killed over here. it's not that i have anything against islam, but i have serious things against islam HERE. if we weren't diplomatic and bla bla bla you kno we can make gaza a nice parking lot. but we are..

maybe your English is just sloppy but...are you saying that you should keep building, even if that is interpreted as provocative, which in turn leads to more violence and death? So building is more important that those lives?

But shos, you also have to understand why not many countries side with you. The reason is NOT because they just plainly hate Israel (times have changed, not many people care that much about you), it's because you guys have totally abandoned hope for peace, or you're just pursuing peace without any real effort. It's hard to side with anyone on this issue, actually, when you think both sides are wrong, and neither is right. And yet you have such a strong belief that your country is right and being accused unfairly, and I have to say that your too biased to even look at the situation clearly.

'which in turn leads to more violence and death'? what caused the terrorist attacks was the fact that the conversations started, not that we started building. the building was continued only 2 days ago..

i still can't see what else can we do? the US started war with iraq, for example, without being attacked first, right? we have lost lots of people with no practical reason so far, and we're just letting them be. with restrictions, yes, but it took us 25 years to enter gaza, you know. how much did it take for you to enter iraq, or afghanistan?...

the whole problem with our deal is that usually there's a war between two civilized and diplomatic countries. israel is facing an organization that is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, that is controlling a vast amount of people willing to kill themselves to hurt us. not quite fun, eh?

About 19 in 20 people don't care for the Israel/Palastina issue any more than the land wards in Africa. And every person I've met who has a strong opinion on this issue is a pretty heavy Zionist.

Rand Paul was just elected a senator. This is very saddening, because he wants to legalize hate speeches, and is vague about his opinions on discrimination: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003500.html

Yeah, I'd hate to take sides. But I really, really, REALLY am against people like him and his party. (not naming parties). That's probably the only political thing I'll have a radical view on. No overly-crazy conservatives. Period.

I am back once again to report about American politics that I disapprove of. While not very important in the semi-short run, the representatives voted down the health care bill. The senate will of course re-vote it (and if nothing else, Obama has his veto), so it won't matter, but it is an indication of what we can expect in the future from the Republicans now that they have to actually act responsible in front of the Americans, and not just vote NO to everything like they used to while they were in the minority.

I don't really like to form too radical of opinions since I can't even vote on anything, but I find it pretty foolish for a bill to be repealed before it's even put into action:
1. They're just gonna spend time repealing everything they don't agree with.
2. The Democrats might start doing the same thing, thus creating an even-more standstill congress.
3. They didn't even wanna give it a chance (lame reason).

It just seemed like they were being bad sports from the eyes of a slightly politically uneducated person (me). Feel free to expound/enlighten me.

What they've done so far is that they've TRIED to repeal everything they don't agree with, by voting No to everything the Democrats propose. There was one Republican senator that said that even if the Obama health care bill contained everything he thought was the best for America, he'd still vote against it just to put pressure on Obama. While that was about a year ago, it's interesting to see reasoning behind the votes...

Obama has already tried to make a deal, and succeeded, with the Republicans regarding taxes. I think the situation is a difficult one (frankly, just get rid of the Senate [why should you need a 60% majority there?] and have all the remaining elections at the same time, instead of two years apart) but it can be fixed, should the Republicans actually want to act responsible. The Tea Party politicians though...