I agree. I think that all that phoney guilt about the holocaust is, as Freud would say, just self-indulgence.
In message <a0431010bb6113a2510b3@[128.32.105.161]>, Brad De Long
<delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> writes
>>Sorry, but Israel cannot be defined as a democracy
>
>
>More of one than Syria...
Being a bit undemocratic is like being a bit pregnant. It is true that Israeli citizens have a democracy amongst themselves, but since that is premised on the denial of the rights of the expelled Palestinians as well as those under occupation, it is no democracy at all. The recent poll to the effect that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly considered Israeli Arabs to be traitors is indicative of just how superficial the facade of Israeli democracy is.
Today the only component that survives of Syrian nationalism is its autocratic structure, but it is worth considering that the Ba'ath socialist movement of Michel Aflaq was a popular movement that, even if it was deflected by Assad into a narrow elite regime, galvanised the people behind it (at least in part because Assad was artificially inflated by the US and Israel as a hard-liner). -- James Heartfield