tallowood wrote on Jun 18^th, 2026 at 2:55pm:


Where is the 'fantasy' in:

The bungled creation of Israel, caused by UN dysfunction, is the root of Islamic terrorism in our time"?

freediver wrote on Jun 16^th, 2026 at 8:22am:


Why did you fail to mention the large sums of financial aid given to Hamas by Israel?

lee wrote on Jun 18^th, 2026 at 1:32pm:


Even if your claim were true,

Is that a good reason to confiscate their homes, farms, and businesses?

Is that a good reason to block their return to their homes?

Is that a good reason to conduct ethnic cleansing, driving nearly a million people off their land and killing thousands and thousands in the process?

Is that a good reason to impose on them a regime based on ethno-supremacism, denying them the most basic of human rights?

Frank wrote on Jun 24^th, 2026 at 9:43pm:


Even if they were allowed to why would they want to?

Quote:


http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1778844301/14#14

Quote:


They were treated better than Israel now treats non-Jews:



Uri Avnery: Mohammed’s Sword

PalestineChronicle.com

As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.



The Jewish Community in The Ottoman Empire

by Ekrem Ekinci

Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire was a place where Jews could live without fear of persecution, a comfort denied to them in most of Europe. Sultan Bayezid II accepted tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews escaping from Spain in 1492. They settled in various cities such as Salonika (Thessaloniki), Smyrna (İzmir) and Constantinople in particular. Likewise, groups of Jews who managed to escape massacres in Poland and Ukraine in 1660 settled in the Ottoman Empire, as well. Around 90 percent of Ottoman Jews were of Sephardic origin and lived in cities, including Edirne, Bursa, Jerusalem, Safed, Cairo, Ankara, Tokat and Amasya. During the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, when Constantinople had a population of 500,000, the number of Ottoman Jews was around 40,000. In Salonika, the biggest Jewish city in the world at the time, Ottoman Jews constituted more than half of the population.



The Sephardic Exodus to the Ottoman Empire - How Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal transformed the region.

by Eli Barnavi, from the Jewish study group, My Jewish Learning

Throughout the 16th century, the Jews in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The empire was rapidly expanding, and economic demand rose accordingly. Thus the Jewish population could easily enter into trade with Christian Europe, and into industries such as wool weaving that were only then beginning to evolve. Under the leadership of figures like Don Joseph Nasi and Solomon ibn Yaish, they could take advantage of their worldwide network of family connections and their knowledge of European affairs in order to promote the concerns of the Sublime Porte, as well as to protect their personal interests and those of their community.



History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire

In addition to the already existing Jewish population in the lands the Ottomans conquered, many more Jews were given refuge after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, under the reign of Beyezid II...  Jews had a considerable amount of administrative autonomy and were represented by the Hakham Bashi, the Chief Rabbi. There were no restrictions in the professions Jews could practice analogous to those common in Western Christian countries... Some Jews who reached high positions in the Ottoman court and administration include Mehmed II's minister of Finance ("Defterdar") Hekim Yakup Pasa, his Portuguese physician Moses Hamon, Murad II's physician Is'hak Pasha and Abraham de Castro, who was the master of the mint in Egypt.

- Wikipedia

thegreatdivide wrote on Jun 18^th, 2026 at 12:55pm:


Whinging about the past is not the same thing as having a plan for the future. Every nation that exists today is offensive to someone.

Do you having anything at all to say about Iran sponsoring terrorism?

Frank wrote on Jun 24^th, 2026 at 9:43pm:


In addition to what I posted above look at how the Ottomans treated Christians and their places of worship:


Quote:



Yet what's happened since 1948?  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in a state of decay.

Hwy, last year Israel bombed a church in the West Bank which was 1,700 years old!

It seems to me that a lot of people want to somehow defend Iran's sponsoring of terrorism, by talking about anything other than Iran's sponsoring of terrorism.

Perhaps they haven't noticed the war.