JstaRebel

Hello....I filed my I 130 January 22, 2013 and received NOA2 approval and I am now waiting for to show up at the NVC...STILL! Just thought I'd start a thread of some others with spouses/fiances from the DR going through the K1 or CR1 process that would like to share stories.

Thank you for posting the video clips of Israelis throwing stones at Palestinians. I found these to be a stepping stone (pun intended) to some other very interesting videos. You are very passionate regarding your beliefs and given the Palestinian circumstance, your passion is warranted. I learn a lot from your posts, and enjoy reading the factual information that usually accompanies your posts..

Thank you for posting the video clips of Israelis throwing stones at Palestinians. I found these to be a stepping stone (pun intended) to some other very interesting videos. You are very passionate regarding your beliefs and given the Palestinian circumstance, your passion is warranted. I learn a lot from your posts, and enjoy reading the factual information that usually accompanies your posts..

Is this is the same UN that has created resolutions condemning a lot of things being done in Serbia, South Africa, Israel, and even the United States to name a few??

Just because I don't agree with another persons or groups beliefs doesn't mean I'm offended by them. I'm sure that some people would take offence. Like I said earlier, I guess it all depends on the person or cause, and whether or not they are trying to be offensive or not. IMHO, this particular "protest" was aimed at being offensive towards Muslims. I can understand why Muslims would have been offended by this protest. I personaly was not offended. However, I was ashamed that Americans in being so tolerant would protest like these women did is such an offensive manner.

[quote name='wife_of_mahmoud'
FEMEN needs to recognize that Muslim women do in fact have agency, and the idea that Muslim women are helpless, passively indoctrinated by the alleged evils of Islam, and desperately need of Western feminist help is oppressive and orientalist. Patriarchy is not specific to Islam — although there are inarguably extreme and truly saddening examples of misogyny in the Muslim community, patriarchy is a global issue. Furthermore, feminism is not only a Western institution — to assume that Muslim women need someone to "speak for" them is insulting to all the grassroots political organizing and activism that Muslim feminists have done. It's disturbing how a the rhetoric of "women's liberation" has been co-opted to justify aggression, violence, and prejudice against Muslim communities. In what way is it appropriate to "rescue" women by indulging in and re-circulating essentializing, stereotyped, and offensive depictions of their culture?

As I read this post, I'm ashamed that this happened in my own country. It's sad that people and societies around the world have issues when dealing with individuals because they are different. When I'm in the DR with my wife, and I go into a cantina by myself, or club to simply sit and have a beer and listen to the music, I have been mocked as being a sex tourist. I've actually got into a fight with a Dominicano while out dancing one evening with my wife because he simply figured she was a puta because she was with a white man. No man is going to disrespect my wife in any country. Why should it be any different for any other husband?
I also have to say that I'm guilty of responding badly to people simply because they are different than I am. I remember right after 911, I was in an airport, and watched as security detained a Muslim couple. When the husband (i think) protested, they were "harshly detained". I remember thinking "thats a relief". Now they wont be on my plane.
Traveling the world as I have done pretty much my entire adult life has taught me to be tolerant because people are just people. They are for the most part the same as everybody else, and pretty much want the same things in life. Job, money, family, happiness... Maybe a house with a dog and a whilte picket fence..

[quote name='wife_of_mahmoud'
FEMEN needs to recognize that Muslim women do in fact have agency, and the idea that Muslim women are helpless, passively indoctrinated by the alleged evils of Islam, and desperately need of Western feminist help is oppressive and orientalist. Patriarchy is not specific to Islam — although there are inarguably extreme and truly saddening examples of misogyny in the Muslim community, patriarchy is a global issue. Furthermore, feminism is not only a Western institution — to assume that Muslim women need someone to "speak for" them is insulting to all the grassroots political organizing and activism that Muslim feminists have done. It's disturbing how a the rhetoric of "women's liberation" has been co-opted to justify aggression, violence, and prejudice against Muslim communities. In what way is it appropriate to "rescue" women by indulging in and re-circulating essentializing, stereotyped, and offensive depictions of their culture?

As I read this post, I'm ashamed that this happened in my own country. It's sad that people and societies around the world have issues when dealing with individuals because they are different. When I'm in the DR with my wife, and I go into a cantina by myself, or club to simply sit and have a beer and listen to the music, I have been mocked as being a sex tourist. I've actually got into a fight with a Dominicano while out dancing one evening with my wife because he simply figured she was a puta because she was with a white man. No man is going to disrespect my wife in any country. Why should it be any different for any other husband?
I also have to say that I'm guilty of responding badly to people simply because they are different than I am. I remember right after 911, I was in an airport, and watched as security detained a Muslim couple. When the husband (i think) protested, they were "harshly detained". I remember thinking "thats a relief". Now they wont be on my plane.
Traveling the world as I have done pretty much my entire adult life has taught me to be tolerant because people are just people. They are for the most part the same as everybody else, and pretty much want the same things in life. Job, money, family, happiness... Maybe a house with a dog and a whilte picket fence..

More on the counter protests at al Jazeera (absolutely safe for work and families and children too - no "bumpy bits" on display)
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201304050033-0022659

Great. Another friggin "trader".
The above has nothing to do with American Islamophobia. America needs more traders skimming their balances off of their savings about as badly as they need liberals skimming their income out of their pockets.
Please come back to advise us when you are physically making something that is a measurable and discernable good, other than money for yourself from trading inflated values of things that other people make.

Israel does have a narrow window to find a permanent solution to the Palestinian problem. Iran will be a nuclear power, and by proxy, so will Hezbollah. That is inevitable. When that happens, Israel will no longer have that unique distinction among its neighbors. There is a reason the US did not invade Pakistan to clean out the Taliban, like they did in Afghanistan. One you have a nuke, you no longer have to sit at the kiddie table on holidays.

Something is up. Kerry apparently asked for "modifications" to the wording of the document, which Palestinian sources say they refused. He's been very busy these past weeks shuttling back and forth between Jerusalem and Ramallah and Jordan. And there's supposed to be a big powwow over it at the upcoming Arab League meeting.
They say a picture tells a thousand words.

I would very much like to hear (read) some of your stories sometime. whether some people are attracted to incidents, or the incidents are attracted to the person is the same. The fact is that some peoples lives are devine destinies.

Dear participants,
Please give me seconds of your time to read these lines,
Well. Killing a human being is something really bad, nobody dares to object, it is a soul being wasted in vain, while it can draw a smile on someone’s face… or produce something that can make someone’s life better.
But I will tell you about my experience, once we lost our house and land; we lived in many many countries in our quest to find tranquility. We managed to do for a while. But suddenly when you saw an Israeli official, a spokesman of a certain Israeli administration, speaks from your house, which you came to know that your house was turned to be the headquarter of that certain administration… how would you feel?
Ironically, that smart man mentions one fact; we came to a land with no people, while the house is 200 years old.
Again, killing someone is something disgusting, whether in a Holoca.... or in the surrounded and locked 55 square kilometers bombed with a white phosphorus “JELLYFISH”, internationally prohibited….

Well, this is what you "specifically" wrote:
So I responded to exactly the parameter you set up: how many deaths of Nazis. And not all of the victims of Nazis were Jewish - as least half of their victims and very likely more were not Jewish.
But if you meant to say: how many Nazis were killed specifically by Jews - well, it's hard to determine a total number, but there are certainly accounts of thousands of Nazis and their collaborators (or accused Nazis and accused collaborators) being killed by Jewish resistance groups.
You have to understand that not all Jewish resistance occurred in the camps - in fact, that was the most difficult place to resist. Most of the Jewish resistance operated outside the camps - in Germany as well as in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Algeria, etc. They carried out many operations to kill German troops and collaborators. And these killings even continued after the war - don't forget the Nokmim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_resistance_under_Nazi_rule
Then by all means respond to those people directly in the threads where they say it, and stop trying to derail this thread with stuff nobody in here said.
It’s an interesting dichotomy. You perceive that Israeli soldiers are fighting “because they have to.” Apparently, this basic urgent need includes having to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and seize their property, prevent them from returning to their own land, oppressing millions more for decades under a brutal military occupation so that more of their property can be seized, and all the while transferring your own population into that stolen land - in some cases, even into the very same houses once they've been "cleansed" of Palestinians !
It's all glossed over as a matter of “necessity,” so therefore it must excuse any brutality and war crimes on the part of Israelis. There - nice and neat and no need to worry your pretty little head about any of it.
But of course, this indulgence is reserved only for Zionist Jews. No one who happens to have the misfortune of being a non-Jew born and trying to live life in a land that Zionist expansionists covet could ever deserve such a right to use force to defend themselves. It's their job just to shut up and take it, right ?
Poor little Israel. Being an oppressor-victim is such a tough life.
So you can’t provide a source for your 30,000 claim ? That’s what I suspected. So we are left with the JVP's figure, which upon careful review claims significantly fewer than even 20,000.
I realize that English is not your first language, but I was very clear in my comments about which war involved Arab countries trying to "defend Palestinians" - this was the war of 1948, when Arab countries launched a very weak attempt to try to stop your government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing operation.
You now have made the strange leap of applying that comment to every single other conflict Israel has gotten into with Arab countries. That’s not what I said, nor is it the historical record.
Arab countries’ involvement in subsequent wars with Israel were not over “defending Palestinians,” but rather trying to defend and recover their own sovereign territory which Israel had attacked, invaded and attempted to annex - the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai, and the Lebanese Shebaa Farms.
This sort of blurring of the facts is part and parcel of the Zionist narrative. According to Zionism, all the Jews of the world are part of a single nation (which Zionism purports to manifest in the State of Israel.) The flip-side of this ideology requires perceiving all Arabs as part of a single nation, as well - as if everything that Palestinians or Morocco or Iraq or Egypt or Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia do is all part of some universal mission of the Arab national collective (as the fairy tale goes) to “drive Jews into the sea.” This of course is deliberate - it’s designed to feed the racism and xenophobia that form the very foundation of Zionism, and then project that hatred onto The Arabs. “‘Cause they’re all out to getcha !”
Cuckoo for cocoa-puffs. That’s what Zionism is, and it has enslaved millions of Jews in its hideous perversion of Judaic values.
But the truth will make you free.

A couple of things I'd like to bring up regarding illegals and taxes. Large corporations such as Tyson foods, Raeford Farms, and Columbia farms (that I'm aware of) use a temp. service for hiring illegal workers for their processing plants. The immigrants do NOT pay income tax, SS tax or disability. In fact, one of the things that makes me sick is how Big Corporate America makes money off of using the fact that the workers are Ilegal. Also the temp companies that hire out the immigrants charge each one $2-3.00/ hr. for them to work at these processing plants. I have turned in Columbia Farms on three different ocassions while working on their water treatment equipment in Spartenburg, SC.
You're so correct with your posts regarding who is doing all of the construction (roofs, concrete, ect..) in America today. If our government (IMHO) would hold the companies that hire illegal immigrants accountable, the problem wouldn't be as big as it is. It really sucks when a kid in say his senior year of HS goes out to get a summer job on a construction site and can't even be a laborer because he doesn't speak spanish.. This is just wrong, but you can't blame any person for wanting to better their lives. I can however blame American companies that will take advantage of another human being in order to majke a better profit and "help their bottom line".. Greed and Vanity... The worst of the sins!!

A couple of things I'd like to bring up regarding illegals and taxes. Large corporations such as Tyson foods, Raeford Farms, and Columbia farms (that I'm aware of) use a temp. service for hiring illegal workers for their processing plants. The immigrants do NOT pay income tax, SS tax or disability. In fact, one of the things that makes me sick is how Big Corporate America makes money off of using the fact that the workers are Ilegal. Also the temp companies that hire out the immigrants charge each one $2-3.00/ hr. for them to work at these processing plants. I have turned in Columbia Farms on three different ocassions while working on their water treatment equipment in Spartenburg, SC.
You're so correct with your posts regarding who is doing all of the construction (roofs, concrete, ect..) in America today. If our government (IMHO) would hold the companies that hire illegal immigrants accountable, the problem wouldn't be as big as it is. It really sucks when a kid in say his senior year of HS goes out to get a summer job on a construction site and can't even be a laborer because he doesn't speak spanish.. This is just wrong, but you can't blame any person for wanting to better their lives. I can however blame American companies that will take advantage of another human being in order to majke a better profit and "help their bottom line".. Greed and Vanity... The worst of the sins!!

You don't see any other comparisons??
I was going to list several other comparisons, but I decided to simply ask you a question.. How would you like living as the Palestinians are FORCED by Israel to live?

You don't see any other comparisons??
I was going to list several other comparisons, but I decided to simply ask you a question.. How would you like living as the Palestinians are FORCED by Israel to live?

‘To Exist is to Resist’: Seminar day in Jiflik
Posted on March 27, 2013 by freedombuspalestineReply
Hosted by Jordan Valley Solidarity, in the beautiful Friends’ Meeting House in Jiflik – the oldest building in the Jordan Valley – The Freedom Bus group heard talks from Mazin Qumsiyeh and Saed Abu-Hijleh about the history of Palestinian resistance, the nature of apartheid and personal experiences of living under occupation.
Members of the Freedom Bus with Mazin Qumsiyeh
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Professor of Biology, Bethlehem and Birzeit University
Mazin opened his talk by questioning the idea of coming ‘in solidarity’ to Palestine. He argued that instead of thinking of ourselves as standing in ‘solidarity’ with the Palestinians, it would better to see ourselves as part of a global struggle, of which the Palestinian struggle for freedom is only one part. The same kind of people that are the cause of Palestinian suffering are the kind of people who are in positions of unjust power everywhere, he said. The problem in Palestine, Mazin argued, is not religious. It is to dowith money, resources, and greed. The Palestinian people are seen by the Israeli state as an obstacle in the way of resources.
Mazin is the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine, a book detailing Palestinian resistance against colonisation from 1881 to the present day. He talked about the first Palestinian uprising in 1881, which used petitions, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and lobbying to demand an end to colonization and the creation of a secular, democratic state. Arguing that these demands have been consistently made by Palestinians since this first uprising, Mazin put Palestinian resistance in the historical context of anti-colonial movements across the globe.
There were further Palestinian uprisings in 1917, 1921, 1929 and 1936. The history of these moments of resistance is not well known. For example, the first demonstration to use automobiles was held in Jerusalem in 1929. It was organised by Palestinian women, who arranged to bring 120 cars from across the country into the Old City in Jerusalem, where they drove through the narrow streets, horns blazing.
Mazin’s history of non-violent resistance – known in Palestine as ‘popular resistance’ – was fascinating. There are many forms such resistance can take, from weekly demonstrations to boycotts and strikes. Perhaps the most fundamental form of popular resistance is simply to remain on the land, living and working, and refusing to be moved. This kind of resistance is key to Palestinian life in Area C, where homes and infrastructure are constantly being demolished, and traditional ways of life are becoming increasingly difficult. Mazin argued that in this way, every Palestinian living in Gaza or the West Bank is engaged in resistance every day, hence the famous slogan: ‘To Exist Is To Resist.’
During the question and answer session, Mazin outlined the best ways in which internationals can help the Palestinian struggle. Firstly, he said, self-educate. Read and learn, so that you can make arguments and have discussions about Palestine and its history. Secondly, use the skills that you have. “I don’t want to see someone with excellent media skills planting trees,” Mazin said, “If you have specialist skills, use them.” Thirdly, he emphasized that the most useful work is not necessarily in Palestine itself, but in our own countries. Support in the West is key for Israel, especially in the United States and England. It is here that political work must be done to undermine this support.
Saed Abu-Hijleh, Professor of Political Geography, An Najar University
Saed began his speech by talking about his own history. Born in 1966, his formative years were spent under the occupation. In 1976, when he was 10-years-old, six Palestinians were killed in the ’48 territories during Land Day demonstrations. There were protests in response all over the West Bank. Shortly afterwards, a 15-year-old girl who was in his sister’s class was shot by an Israeli soldier. Along with other school students, he joined the demonstrations in response.
In April 1982, when he was 16, an Israeli soldier entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and shot dead four Palestinians who were praying, injuring seven others. In response, there was a mini-uprising. On 27 April, Saed joined a demonstration in Nablus along with other students. An Israeli soldier machine-gunned him with explosive bullets. Saed was shot many times, and was lucky to survive. A few months later he was sent to Israeli jail. He was sent to Al Farah prison near Tubas, which was in fact a military camp used to hold activists from all over the West Bank. While in prison Saed was tortured, beaten and whipped with electrical wires. However, Al Farah prison brought activists from many different areas together, and they were able to forge links and learn from each other. This enabled them to organise nationally, rather than just locally.
In 2002, during the second intifada, Saed’s mother, Shaden, was helping those in the local community who were being affected. She was a school teacher, and a member of the Popular Committee, involved in supporting those who needed help with shelter, food etc. One day Israeli soldiers came to Saed’s family home and shot his mother dead. She died in his arms. You can watch a video of Saed talking more about his mother and her legacy here:
Saed’s descriptions of his life and experiences were extremely moving. Saed is also a poet and we were lucky enough to hear some of his poetry, which you can read here.

Ya know Steve, you've been ranting a lot about Tiff, and her lack of concern regarding "her immidiate family". Just a thought, pack up your friend, daughter, and yourself. Head to HK,or skip it and head to a motel room with air conditioning, room service, pool, and enjoy a few days vacation without the issues. This actually might be a good thing and a wake up call to her as well as you guys getting a break from all of the #######..
Like the song says; Watch me as my jeans sag low when I walk out the door,, I'm going to be a man,,, cause you forgot that I wear the pants..
Good luck, and I wish you well..

Ya know Steve, you've been ranting a lot about Tiff, and her lack of concern regarding "her immidiate family". Just a thought, pack up your friend, daughter, and yourself. Head to HK,or skip it and head to a motel room with air conditioning, room service, pool, and enjoy a few days vacation without the issues. This actually might be a good thing and a wake up call to her as well as you guys getting a break from all of the #######..
Like the song says; Watch me as my jeans sag low when I walk out the door,, I'm going to be a man,,, cause you forgot that I wear the pants..
Good luck, and I wish you well..

Ya know Steve, you've been ranting a lot about Tiff, and her lack of concern regarding "her immidiate family". Just a thought, pack up your friend, daughter, and yourself. Head to HK,or skip it and head to a motel room with air conditioning, room service, pool, and enjoy a few days vacation without the issues. This actually might be a good thing and a wake up call to her as well as you guys getting a break from all of the #######..
Like the song says; Watch me as my jeans sag low when I walk out the door,, I'm going to be a man,,, cause you forgot that I wear the pants..
Good luck, and I wish you well..

[quote name=' timestamp='1364313491' post='6081325]
I assume you understand (even if you don't agree or aren't sympathetic to) the cultural draw of Jewish people to that part of the world.
But yes, I do agree that it would have been more pragmatic to have done this somewhere else.

Certainly I understand the cultural draw of Jewish people to this land. Just as I understand that Christians all over the world, as well as Muslims, also have deep religious ties to this Holy Land. But that doesn't mean any one of these groups has the right to move there en-masse and take over the place through military force, and kick out all or most of the people who aren't members of their group.
Also, Palestinians aren't just people somewhere in the world who have a deep religious tie to the land. It's their home - their families have been living there for centuries (many who include Hebrews among their ancestors.) They are the indigenous people of Palestine, and they have every right to live in their homeland as any Jewish person has.

AIPAC .. No doubt about this. Look no further then the entitlement monies..