Terry,

I appreciate your words.  I've always held Cedar in high regards and find her opinion a valuable one.  But there are some things that make me cranky - and one of them is when someone assumes I can't understand something because I haven't experienced it first hand.  I've seen my share of terrible things though I don't pretend to know what it is like to watch tanks firing on my home, or troops smashing down my door and carrying away my family. 

I realize I am blessed to live in America, but America had its growing pains as well.  We also fought a superior military in the late 18th century and we also fought our own bloody civil war in the middle of the 19th century.  I can't help that my fortunes now come because of the blood, sweat, and tears of others before me nor can I help that others after me will bare the painful burden of defending liberty and freedom.

But I have studied history and I spend a great deal of my spare time contemplating what is happening in the world.  I have my own life.  I spend most of my time during the day (at work) running complex simulations on communications networks that won't be commercially available for another 30 years.  I've published papers on OFDM, high-performance processor-memory convergent architectures, and computational cryptography (among other things).  I've spent a lot of time with my face buried in textbooks studying numerical analysis, Fourier series and transforms, thermodynamics, modern physics, radar systems, optics, electromagnetics, orbital mechanics, and a list of other things most people don't care about. 

The point is that those things are wildly different from anything we ever talk about here.  I come to these boards to voice my opinion and to hear the opinions of others.  I don't come here to be called blood-thirsty, brainwashed, or cold-blooded especially when my words, though they may have been better chosen, were certainly not malicious in nature.  I come here to learn and share but like clockwork there is ALWAYS someone who says, "You're American, you don't get it" or "I wouldn't expect an American to understand", or "Americans don't care about people."  It never ends. 

Newsflash, there are plenty of Americans just like me that do care and believe it or not we do understand.  We want things to be better and we have our own ideas about how they can be better.  It may come as a surprise, but some of us can read and some of us can analyze - perhaps better than one might think.

If we've got it wrong, debate us on the issues.  As soon as you get into the name-calling I start getting angry and when you start to equate American with stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or blood-thirsty, I get defensive.  I find that crap incredibly disrespectful, shortsighted, and antithesis to anything we should be doing on a message board such as this.

Which makes you

What about the Native Americans who were forced onto reservations in the USA? Do they deserve right of return?

What about the white's in South America who fear repression and so they leave, do they deserve right of return as well?

The thing that's funny though is, i've talked to people in the Israeli govt, they don't see a problem with right of return to the west bank/gaza strip. It's Palestinians coming into actual Israel that they don't agree with. Furthermore, they are open to sharing Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state and swapping land with the Palestinians so that they have continuous borders.

Now unfortunately, I haven't been able to talk to Palestinians in the govt about their thoughts on this and what would be wrong with such a compromise. Any thoughts on what may be stopping Palestinians from making such a deal? Other than radicals constantly disrupting the peace process of course.

Slow down cowboy! Indians never enjoyed Pakistani nuclear weapons simply because it allows Muslim radicals within Pakistan freely and unstoppable by government to blow off Indus. Same thing gonna happen with Iranian agent from Hezbollah and Hamas to blow off Israeli while Israelis won't be able to respond towards Lebanon or Palestine simply because those have nuclear weapons.

Good thing you never lived around cold war so you don't know how ppl in Soviet Union or Us felt like, so multiply it by knowledge that terrorists units within country with nuclear weapons can posses a nuclear weapon. Its like Chechens would overtake nuclear facility during cold war crisis. Stop being smart ass, ask any Indus what he/she feels towards Pakistan.

+ Israel doesn't posses a nuclear weapons, unless of course you believe Elvis was an alien or John Lennon got killed because of his views by FBI.

I'm not talking about Palestinians with nuclear weapons. I'm talking about Iran.

Pakistan hasn't given nukes to the Taliban... so why will Iran give them to Hezbollah?


Oh my God... you're joking, right?!?!

Please... tell me you're joking!!!!

"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when you are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
- Olmert

I've spoken with Israeli Jews in America that KNOW where they are. Every Isreali knows where they are. There are vents in the damn sand.

Don't make the mistake I'm stupid, mdma, or that the rest of the world is too. The fact that Israel has nukes is the worst kept secret in the Middle East.

Any more 'words' of wisdom, oh wise one?   

And that is supposed to bother us how?
... you flatter yourself dahling, but not too many others are taken in by your charades.