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Re: [POLITICAL] Linus' opinion about Israel (before the WTC)



If you guys are trying to push politics onto this list, could you at least
do so intelligently, and without implying that people you don't even know
are racists, based on rumors and out-of-context sentences?

Did any of you ever consider that maybe what Linus said (about the existence
of torture in Israel) is, or at least was a few years ago, true, but that it
was only part of the whole story, and that Linus probably knows that too?
Maybe Israel does (or did) have torture - but Israel is not *about* torture.
Israelis are a whole lot more than a group of several million sadist
torturers. The Israeli way of life about more than torturing innocent people.
I bet Linus knows that. Couldn't Linus say he condemned some specific aspect
of Israeli law or way-of-life without immediately being branded an Anti-Israeli
or an Anti-Semite?

Please try to think the same about people from other countries whose laws
or government you don't like. For example most of us resent Iran's current
regime, and even talk about this publicly and loudly, but don't we respect
specific Iranian people (one or two of which is on this list, by the way)
whose lives are *not* devoted to funding terrorist groups, developing weapons
of mass destruction, or spreading some sort of fundamentalist revolution?
Won't we accept patches from them? I certainly would!

Heck, why talk about Iranians, when we can even talk about Americans - they
have the death penalty and even (pardon the comparison) the DMCA. Even if I
hate these laws, and even if I post my opinion about it in a mailing list,
does it mean I don't respect the other aspects of the American way of
life, that I hate Americans, or that I would refuse to accept patches from
them? No, it doesn't.  It shouldn't.
Alan Cox (in case someone doesn't know, this is the second-most important
Linux developer, he is English, and is employed by Redhat, as far as
I know) publicly denounced the DMCA and announced he would not go to the
U.S. until this law is repealed. He and other people constantly say things
like "A country that has a law like DMCA will soon have laws like <....>".
Is he an Anti-American racist? Does he refuse patches from Americans? No.
Similarly, Linus is probably not an anti-Israeli or anti-Semite.

BTW, is Linus' alleged comment about copyright not being respected in Israel
so untrue? Look around you: did you ever see *anyone* buy Microsoft Word
for home use? I know a rather poor American who needed a Word Processor,
so she went to the store, looked for the cheapest one which fitted her needs
(she chose Word Perfect) and bought it. In Israel, we have a word for that:
"frier"...  Every time I tell people about Linux, they tell me "who cares
about a free operating system - I already have one, Windows!" (forget the
free-beer/free-speech speeches for a moment). Sad, but true.
Again, it is a generalization, and like all generalizations it is bad, but
at least don't go around screaming it is always false.

We (the human race) have just lost over 10,000 (and probably much more) good
people in Tuesday's Manhattan carnage. Just considering the percentage of
Jews in NYC, there might have been 1,000 Jews in there. We may (and let's pray
it isn't true!) have lost more Israelis over there in a day then we did in all
of last year's terror attacks over here. Some of these people (like Akamai's
CTO Danny Lewin, who lived in Haifa and studied in the Technion, finishing
Math and EE in 1996) you might even known personally. Let's keep this week a
time of mourning, a time of thinking how to uproot evil and hatred from the
world - not as a time for thinking "everyone is against us [Israelis]".
This was the kind of thinking you could have had last week (during the Durban
UN convention), but nothing is the same any more.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, Sep 13 2001, 26 Elul 5761
nyh@math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |An apple a day keeps the doctor away. An
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |onion a day keeps everyone away!

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