COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Fed up Palestinians leaving Palestine

Some good news for a change:
More Palestinians flee homelands

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writer Sat Dec 9, 1:42 PM ET

A technician armed with $7,000 in savings and a tourist visa plans to seek political asylum in Europe. Travel agents report a brisk demand for visas to Cuba, one of the few places that welcomes Palestinians. More than 20 factories have moved out of Gaza in recent months.

Driven by fear of civil war and increasingly bleak economic prospects, Palestinians are fleeing their violence-wracked lands in growing numbers. Many are skilled and educated, and are leaving behind an increasingly impoverished and fundamentalist society.

The brain drain reverses a trend of the 1990s when, fueled by peace hopes, thousands of well-to-do Palestinians returned from the diaspora to the West Bank and Gaza, building homes and setting up businesses.

Palestinians have emigrated in large numbers before, a response to decades of war, unrest and displacement, but Palestinian government officials fear this is a particularly strong wave.

The emigration is hurting Palestinian prospects for statehood, says pollster Nader Said. "What Israel couldn't do by force," he said, "we were able to do with internal dispute, lack of leadership, accompanied by economic pressure and the siege on Gaza."

Some 10,000 Palestinians emigrated between June and October and another 45,000 have made preparations to leave, said Ahmed Suboh, a Palestinian Foreign Ministry official, citing reports from Palestinian missions abroad. He did not have comparisons to previous years or a breakdown of destination countries.

Emigration from Gaza, in particular, has picked up.

Life in the fenced-in strip has become increasingly difficult following Israel's pullout last year. Access to neighboring Egypt is easier, but crossing points into Israel have remained closed most of the time because of Israeli security concerns.
This is very good news, unfortunately, I read somewhere that the EU is again trying to figure out how to get more money to the Palestinians.

The story also said that many of those emigrants are bound for Canada. Canada, crazy Canada.

8 comments:

  1. Our partners in Defense and Prosperity, whit, those Canucks.

    The northern end of the Union

    ReplyDelete
  2. Democrats Held Meetings with Hamas

    Conspiracy or truth? After Nelson's visit to Syria, I wouldn't discount it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kind of OT to start, but I think the paste below by 'Rat in an earlier thread is the most important perspective to be learned from OIF so far, and confirms my gut feeling all along that some of the exquisite and learned handwringing discussions we had at you know where were a bunch of hogwash.

    Dangerous hogwash at that, since softheaded thinking eventually costs many more lives than the handwringers try to save to begin with.

    Same thing WRT immigration:
    Being "compassionate and enlightened" about the issue ignores that thousands of our fellow citizens die for such "compassion" and the phoney bookkeeping and hidden costs, as well as the increasing tolerance of lawbreaking by all involved from POTUS on down, is an unacceptable price to pay for cheap services and veggies that kill.

    ReplyDelete
  4. desert rat said...
    Then at the Boston Globe they are writing about all the Iraqi we owe a safe haven to, here in the US, now that all is about to be lost in Iraq.

    But at Investors Business Daily they take a different view, seeing the appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno as the #2 US Soldier in Iraq

    "... But Odierno has one overriding fact in his favor if he chooses a more traditional approach, such as killing as many of the enemy as possible. For all its political appeal back in Washington, soft power isn't working in Iraq. It may be a hit with military analysts, but it hasn't impressed our enemies. And whatever successes the U.S. achieved in Baghdad two years ago, they clearly were temporary. Neither the U.S. nor the Iraqi government has been able to stem the bloodshed or to break the power of the militias.

    The potential cost of such failure goes far beyond Iraq. If the world sees that the U.S. cannot bring some reasonable degree of order to territory occupied by its armed forces, America will no longer be seen as a formidable foe or a reliable friend.

    In the short term, aggressively destroying — not placating — enemies wouldn't be popular in Iraq or anywhere else outside the U.S., and may be hard to sustain politically at home. But it would be far more damaging in the long run to lose by not fighting hard enough.

    The coming months will tell whether the choice of a commander with a different style and reputation will make much of a difference on the ground. We hope it does. The war in Iraq requires not only a surge of troops and firepower, but also a shift in attitude. Security must come first. Nothing else, from the digging of new sewers to the building of democracy, can move forward without it
    .

    VDH said at the begining that the lack of sufficient force would eventually cost.
    How dearly we are now learning, esp the Iraqis.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You got a link for that, 'Rat?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sorry, I meant to put that in Santorum thread:
    Delete, please, I'll put it there.
    No Trashcans!

    ReplyDelete
  7. A small point, to be sure, but I do not think Mr. Abbas has the constitutional authority to call for new elections. Hmmm

    Abbas guard base in Gaza City attacked

    ReplyDelete
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