The United States and Canada has arguments once in a while. But they are not the nature of arguments that can’t be solved diplomatically.
The United States and Canada has arguments once in a while. But they are not the nature of arguments that can’t be solved diplomatically.
I disagree. Sometimes the nature of the arguments can’t be solved diplomatically. Like the time that the United States invaded Canada and we had to send them back packing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jlFZhprU4
Or the official version by one-dead troll:
Obama is brilliant. He deserves Another Peace prize, or was that just a dressup Beauty Contest in Oslo?
I’ll give the Obama camp some credit. After defending the Israeli murder of innocent Turkish civilians year after year, the Obama camp has now pressured Israel to apologize:
Capping Visit, Obama Brokers Israeli Apology to Turkey
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/middleeast/president-obama-israel.html?_r=0
Except Israelis and Palestinians have been arguing for 3,000 years! They’re long past the diplomacy point.
@ Medea
Israelis and Palestinians have only been “arguing” since the connived and immoral creation of the so-called “state” of Israel in 1948. I say “state” because all other states in the world have fixed borders whereas Israel’s borders are on skids, lubricated by the blood of Palestinians whose land is continuously being stolen from them. This is far beyond being solved by diplomacy which has been a ploy Israel has been using since 1948 to perpetuate its occupation. Palestinians are long overdue full remuneration for their loss and suffering and the return of their land and their exiled people.
Disagreements between Israel and Palestine are comparable to the disagreements between the US and Canada? What is this man smoking, or his handlers for that matter?
If I were a Palestinian who had any familiarity with the history of Canada-US relations, even including the War of 1812, I’d be livid at this. Probably a lot of Israelis would be livid, too.
It scares me that he would even for a moment turn his attention to Canada, and worse, in the same sentence as Israel and Palestine.
The whole sound bite sounds like a circular reasoning to me: if we could just get past the arguing, we wouldn’t have anything to argue about.
You’ve got that right, schubert — and bubblebustin! Perhaps they are having something to argue about these days, an intergovernmental agreement and cross-border give-away’s and such.
Ooops, is sound bite something to take with a steak holder?
Obama Compares Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to Arguments Between U.S. and Canada”????!!!!
Considering that he signed the HIRE Act bringing FATCA into effect, essentially triggering a financial war on Canada and other foreign countries, I think this is his way of admitting that this is a WAR and not just an argument.
This guy “borrowing a word from ‘Gunny Highway’ from the movie “Heartbreak Ridge”, he’s a walking cluster**** as a Chief Executive of the United States.
I would question anyone who fully takes sides with one side or the other. Israel was created due to activities during the 1930’s, if we remember what was happening then. And it is populating further with Jewish people who have not found hospitable living arrangements in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, and so on. It would take a lot of discussion to establish which side is the single one which is causing the war conditions in that reason. The scope of that discussion goes quite a bit further than the scope of FATCA, FBAR, and extra-territorial taxation.
The sound bite looks like Obama is struggling without a telepromter to put out some blah blah that fills his time up on the stage. He had been attempting to say nothing of substance, but throwing Canada into the discussion didn’t help him.
… thanks for the chuckle, bubblebustin, furthering USCitizenAbroad pointing that out in Steven Mopsick’s latest blog entry.
I needed that today!
Em, Jews have been arguing with their neighbours, all the other peoples who live in the Palestine region, for thousands of years. 1948 is only the latest of many conflicts.
I quite agree about Israel shifting boundaries. Unfortunately the powers that were didn’t step in to enforce the two states plus Jerusalem solution at the time and now it’s far too late.
Well, “the World’s Longest Undefended Border” is no longer undefended
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/editorials/legacy-of-911-the-worlds-longest-undefended-border-is-now-defended/article593884/
So there is a parallel with the new walls between Israelis and Palestinians. Ironically, too, although Reagan urged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”, since 9/11 Reagan’s successors have been busy building new barriers, not all of them physical.
I don’t take sides with anyone in the Palestine-Israel conflict. For as long as one can remember and the UN treaty took place in 1947 establishing the State of Israel (not the 1930s) the two sides have been picking at each other. The Israelis claiming that the State of Israel was theirs by God-given right – ownership rights based on the tenets of a “book” and the Palestinians angry that the territory that they had been using was taken by foreign edict. The two sides have been bombing each other for several decades now.
It doesn’t take a political science degree to understand that Obama may have very well been telling the truth as far as comparing Palestinian-Israeli relations to Canada-USA and anyone who doesn’t see the relationship considering the financial position that the USA has taken is looking through rose-colored glasses.
The Russians have said that any financial attack on their banking system will result in a first strike nuclear attack. Call it a bluff, call it whatever, but I wouldn’t play nuclear chicken with a country that still has a sizeable amount of nuclear weapons in its arsenal. And frankly any further attempts at FATCA implementation should be met for what it is: an outright declaration of war.
@Calgary411
🙂 Have a great day!
@AnonAnon
Let’s hope it ends with a defended and perhaps a walled border. Let’s hope it doesn’t end with the 49th border being pushed up to the Arctic Circle. I’m beginning to see some possible parallels with that which must not be questioned.
@Medea Fleecestealer, prior to 1904, Jews and Arabs living together in Palestine with relative harmony. For much of the Ottoman period, Turkey was a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution, where Jews both enjoyed cultural and economical prosperity. Jews also thrived in Baghdad. If one digs deeply around on the net, one can find old stories the harmony shared between both groups of people in Palestine.
This changed with the second Second Aliyah, because the Jewish-Russian immigrants, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms, introduced a different mentality. This is how the conflict began following 1904:
In the last decade of researching and discussing the topic, I have found mideastweb.org to be one of the best, most balanced resources on the topic, and this is the absolute best summary of the cause of the conflict that I’ve seen so far.
So, the conflict is not 3000 years old, but rather 109 years old. Jews and Arabs can live just fine together and most of the current existing hostility is manufactured by the extremes on either side.
As a side note, many argue that the Bush/Obama camp has been introducing a similar type of socialism into America which has caused more discrimination against Arabs, Americans living abroad, etc. Human beings must be the most stupid species that never ceases to fail in learning the past and thus tends to repeat past mistakes over and over and over again, creating conflict to live in conflict so that it can complain about conflict.
Need to emphasize that the Jews were not welcome in RUssia, nor in Europe. And the same from the middle east countries where they had lived. No doubt that a lot of the fight they have came from being kicked out of wherever they have fled from. Today in Europe, the sh_t talk is directed at Israeli politics, but with it being so strong and unified, I question that it is really about Israeli politics.
And given that it is difficult in Scandinavia to get a job or apt without a Scandinavian name, I don’t see full support for the Arab side, either.
@Mark Twain, generally any minority group is at a disadvantage, especially when they refuse to assimilate into their host nation. Yet, Jews generally had it better in the middle east and northern Africa prior to 1948. After 1948, discrimination against Arabs in Palestine led to discrimination against Jews in the rest of middle east and N. Africa, resulting in Jews migrating to Israel. Yet, Arabs are not to blame for such alone (Lavon Affair, etc.) and Israel did benefit from such. The goal of Zionism has always been to encourage or even cause Jews to move to Israel and there are plenty of examples where Israel created tensions for that purpose. Remember when Ariel Sharon has urged all French Jews to move to Israel? Why else do you think that Israel’s main “enemy” (Iran) happens to be the home of thousands of Jews? Israel has even been trying to bribe Iranian Jews with cash to move to Israel. So, when the Israeli press reports that Jews in Malmö are threatened with verbal and physical harassment and must thus move to Israel, it is not necessarily the Swedes who are to be blamed for such.
I hadn’t been updated on the draw of people to Israel.
Well, the national TV is definitely not showing both sides. There is all kinds of pro Arab on TV but never any pro-Israel. ANd the people that I deal with are very pro Palestine and anti Israel.
In conflicts like that and like the Croatian–Serbian–Bosnien, it is quite difficult to find the side with the good guys.