Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-30-2008

[andrewducker]

• The Northern Ireland Analogy
  And why it's not the same as Palestine
  (tags: israel ireland politics)
• The reality TV school is now open
  "The mission of the New York Reality TV School is to train and develop non-actors," explains its prospectus. "We train students to be exciting, confident members of reality TV casts . . . Students will work rigorously through coaching sessions and on-camera exercises in order to readily showcase the dynamic aspects of their personalities and to be able to shine, showcase, and supersede the expectations of cast-mates, producers and audience ..."
  (tags: stupidity culture TV)

Comments

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

While there's nothing in the NI / Palestine analogy post that I would disagree with, it seems to me that it also makes some false comparisons of its own by focusing solely on Hamas insofar as the PLO were the ones we always heard about before. In contrast in NI it's always been the IRA and Sinn Fein as far as I can remember, with the INLA or whoever very much secondary.

Maybe we just shouldn't try to draw analogies and look at each instance individually more?

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Interesting article about the NI/I-P analogy. Indeed it's an analogy that far too much is made of - particularly in Israel, from what I can gather. A very major point that it doesn't address, which strikes me as a little odd, or at least rather unbalanced, is the difference in the timescales involved. I mean Israel has existed as a country for just sixty years now, and 90 years ago, only about 10% of the population of the land now covered by Israel/Palestine was Jewish. Nobody is still alive who remembers the colonisation of Ireland by the English 200-odd years ago (let alone the extensive history of English involvement in Ireland going back another six centuries before that). Northern Ireland's current British-identifying population largely consists of families who've been there for, what, around ten generations or so? Even leaving aside the ongoing influx of Jews from around the world under Israel's 'right of return' policy, most of the Jewish population of Israel arrived in the country only a few generations back, if that (having mostly left a very long time before that).

Obviously it's not as if this fact settles anything either way, and it's not obvious whether or not it has major policy implications, but it does (I think) make a huge difference to the aptness of analogy.