Cool infographic from The Independent
While not the most terse way to make this particular point, I think it’s pretty effective.
Note that this infographic is (hopefully) dated by now, as “US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for an urgent ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, conditional on both sides addressing the root cause of the conflict.”
July 24th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
One is left to wonder if they would have posted a similar page showing the countries interested in “Peace in our time” back in the late 30’s.
July 24th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
The Elvis Costello song or the “Big Country” album? If you mean “peace for our time,” then no, I can’t say that I’ve heard of anybody doing a similar graphic.
July 25th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Thanks for the correction on the quote. Looking back at the general consensus of the world at that time, I suppose I’ll look at this imbalance in countries’ opinions as equally misguided and ultimately maelevolent.
It is certainly disturbing to see the world giving as much deference to Israelis in 2006 as they did to Czechs in 1938. But it isn’t really surprising.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
I am trying to see the comparison to Czechoslovakia at the beginning of WWII. Czech. had internal ethnic conflict too and was being forced by (most of) the rest of the world to cede much of its territory to Germany. I am also assuming that the US, Britain, and France were reticent to get into another war and thought they could stave Hitler off with some territorial concessions. In that scenario, Czech had few strong friends save Russia, and was massively overpowered by Germany. In our current one, Israel has nuclear weapons, has a very strong friend in the US, and is probably not in danger of losing most of its territory.
Here, we have a conflict not over the mainland of Israel, and not over the part of southern Lebanon that Israelis finally withdrew from, but from another small part that is considered part of Syria but Hezbollah considers part of Lebanese territory that Israel was still occupying. I think the reaction of the rest of the world is not malevolent or borne out of some hatred for Jews, I think it is one of concern for excessive targeting of civilian areas, and thus further inflammation of terrorism in the region. Such a world response does not mean that the current opinion is that Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself or have a state.
July 31st, 2006 at 2:49 pm
This is random, but I wanted to say when I first saw this graphic, at http://cedarseed.livejournal.com , it inspired a pretty serious debate between Tej and I. I thought it was pretty moving, and Tej thought that the US, Israel, and UK were justified in their being against peace. As a general rule, I’m staunchly antiwar, and was quite annoyed at Tej’s stance.
However, I kept bludgeoning him with links to blogs that are talking about events in the two countries in question, SET in the two countries in question. Maybe between that, Israel’s continued disregard for human life, and Olmert’s ineptitude, Tej changed his mind on Thursday.
My point is, I still agree with this graphic, even if it has started a lot of internet arguments as to whether it’s correct or not. Especially after what happened with Qana this weekend, it appears that Israel really does want the terrorists to win.
Also, if you haven’t seen this, http://www.moiz.ca/coffin.htm