From: Philip Hood (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Dec 04 2006 - 10:16:40 PST
On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Mitsu Hadeishi wrote:
> It seems to me that
> we ought to be putting pressure on both sides to tamp down their extremism
> and inflexibility and get down to the business of giving each other a chance
> to have peace.
mitsu, I'm not sure where you are from, but
the truth is that any particular israeli
regime is mostly responsive to whichever
political forces have put it into power, and
with these so-called "democracies," like
the US and other governments, that inevitably
winds up being whichever blocs of people
were able to organize and get out the vote
and win a "majority" of controlling positions
in the "representative" government.
saying that, there's much much more we can
do by being citizens of whichever government
we are to have THAT particular government
examine ITS ROLE in the problems in Palestine
and Israel.
In the case of the US, there are already so
many laws on the books that we have that,
if followed, would make the world a much
safer place. The only issue is that until
very recently, there has been little in
place to compell the executive branch to
merely follow the existing law.
So again, my major point is that we MUST work
w/in the context of our own government and
within our network of friends and loved ones to
get out the messages that are the correct one.
Its not to say that an international focus on
this wouldn't help, but there has been international
focus on this issue for nearly 60 years. Its
usually going the same way, and things have
actually become much worse over time. Seldom,
however, does the citizen look at his or her
own government's participation in the affairs.
Keep the focus on thing with which you can
control more readily: this is where there will
be the most effect.
For the US, in most cases we talk about,
including Palestine and Israel, to alleviate the
pressure and stop much of the killing and tone down
the high tensions leading to anxiety and death, all the
general citizen need do is to compel those
running the government to merely follow
the law thats already on the books.
-ml
pth
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