Comments enabled for now....
I have resisted having comments on my blog since I started it, because of some of the petty and often vulgar abuse that I've seen on sites like Gutshot and the Hendon Mob. However, I have lately found that I've been getting involved in many off-topic discussions on poker fora, as frankly I find them more interesting. This probably isn't fair on those who aren't interested, so as an experiment, I am going to introduce comments. I will of course stop them if I have to spend time removing abuse.

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to post something I wrote today about Israel/Palestine. It's a subject I intend to learn more about. I didn't always have an opinion about this and my current opinion isn't the one that I had about four years ago. Now read on....

Israel/Palestine

The topic of Israel/Palestine does fascinate me, yet I'm not Israeli, I'm not jewish and I think that judaism is a false religion, like ALL religions. But I can spot a country with courts, juries and elections and I can spot thugs who steal from their own people too.

I didn't use to have much of an opinion about the matter until a casual remark by a friend about four or five years ago. He said 'If Israel carries on like this, it'll be a temporary state'. I had no idea what he was talking about. He began to say something about a visit to a mosque in Jerusalem by an Israeli politician that had kicked off a hostile reaction from Palestinians. On my next visit to the local library, I found a book called 'Arabs and Israelis for Beginners' and took it out. It comes from a series of 'for Beginners' books, which take a cartoon based approach to issues, mostly from a left-wing angle. I trusted it to give me a grounding. Reading it left me feeling that the creation of Israel had been highly unfair and that the country's behaviour was provocative to innocent Palestinian people. It made me quite angry actually.

Then after Sept 11th, I started reading a blog that was mentioned in the Mirror (irony here!) and was blown away by the quality of the writing. It was Norwegian and I loved it. It also listed other sites and I was amazed that there was so much good writing out there that could be accessed for free. From them I learned the counterarguments and learned some facts that I didn't know before - stuff that almost never gets mentioned in the Independent and the Guardian.

More and more, I've come around to the Israeli point of view. I do want peace and prosperity for the Palestinian people as much as I want security for Israel. But the best start for that to happen is for outsiders to stop indulging the Palestinians in their tendancy to blame all their woes on the west and on Israel. In 2002, I went to Vegas and found myself sitting next to an American of Pakistani extraction in the Bellagio. I asked him about Pakistan and he said something I'll never forget: "We need secular government and we need to stop blaming everything on the rest of the world. Every time I phone my parents back home they rant on about the CIA, Israel, the jews and so on." Palestine is the same. While I think it would be best for Israel to leave the territories in the West Bank, some honest speaking would help too. Like this from Donald Rumsfeld: "My feeling about the so-called occupied territories, is that there was a war, Israel urged neighbouring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict." That is the kind of plain speaking truth that should be said more often, instead of the pandering that most journalists do.