quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: KoM: And "Tit for Tat" hasn't worked as a strategy for a long.. well... ever...
Israel needs an overwhelming, disproportionate response to put an end to all of this. Otherwise it'll drag out till doomsday.
I don't think "tit for tat" is an accurate description. The rocket attacks have killed what, a few dozen? The retaliation is up to ~250 dead so far, and they're just getting started. That said, I'm not claiming that the particular level of force that Israel has been using will eventually make the Arabs give up, just that there exists some level of force - even short of genocide - which will do so.
I wonder how aware the Palestinians are of the loss ratio? The ones getting hit know they've been hit, but they may not have access to much information about how hard Hamas is hitting back. And even the ones getting hit are a pretty small minority of the whole Gaza population. Perhaps Israel should make sure that everyone in Gaza knows the casualty figures for both sides?
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It's interesting because the 250 dead are mostly Hamas infrastructure, terrorists, etc. A small percentage are civilian.
On the Israeli side, civilians are sought out. Hamas times their rocket attacks to coincide with the times that children are coming to and from school.
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I betcha the papers here won't mention that the majority of the people killed in this operation aren't civilians.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Until the Palestinian people realize that Hamas does NOT care about their long term interests, or until Israel decides to throw away 20th century rules, things will continue this way forever.
I suspect a complete removal of the Palestinian presence would invite an outside reprisal, and possibly escalate, rather than relieve, tensions.
I also suspect that certain powers among the Palestinians have created what, for them, amounts to a gruesome win-win situation: they attack the "oppresser" (however feebly and randomly), they win. The "oppresser" counter-attacks (however carefully), civilians die, more Palestinians rally behind their "struggle"; they win.
I agree with your first suspicion, but if it came to a land war, I think A. Israel could hold their own, and B. If it came down to it, they'd just start nuking Muslim capitals, or maybe Mecca, until they backed down. At least that way they fight a war they can win, rather than a war set up for either failure or unending death maintenance. I think they are still more powerful than any other single Middle Eastern nation, and I don't think the MidEast would unify under a single banner to attack them with enough power to kill them as a nation. It might not end the tension, but it would transform it into an equivilant form of tension that is more easily won, namely, a conventional war vs. a guerilla war.
As for your second suspicion, I think that's a very succinct description of exactly how the situation stands. Nations have done it for centuries, but it would seem that Hamas has really perfected it. That's exactly why I said that the Palestinian people as a whole need to realize for themselves that their leaders don't have their best interests at heart. If they did, they'd be negotiating seriously. But they don't, so they keep provoking the IDF into responding. There needs to be a fundamental grass roots change before relief can come from that side.
I guess the conflict is still young. Many of the great conflicts of the world have lasted a lot longer than 50 years, so maybe it'll take another 50 for them to realize. But Hamas has everything going for them it would seem. They know exactly how Israel will respond, they have an angry, fairly uneducated and poor population of masses that they easily manipulate, which is wrapped in a cocoon of religion, the ultimate shield against reason. It's not a very compelling situation.
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quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: OR Israel can keep their tiny little peice of desert and the palistinians can go live somewhere else in the vastness that is the Muslim world.
That argument has never made any sense to me. Why would the Muslim world be any more willing to do something like that than say the Christian world has been over its 2,000 years of existance? Look at the wars fought between Muslim nations over the last 1,500 years. The ten year war between Iran and Iraq isn't that far gone. And there was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Why, whenever Palestine is being discussed, is there all of a sudden some glaring blind spot in relation to the idea of nationalism and borders that seems to exist nowhere else in international issues?
Just because they are Muslim doesn't mean they don't have nationalistic and cultural differences just like every Christian nation has. There is no one Muslim nation, and hasn't been for hundreds of years, if ever in reality. Just like there has never really been one Christian nation, even during the Crusades.
So the whole "why can't they just go somewhere else in the Muslim world?" argument strikes me as pretty naive. To them it's not their problem, though they may feel bad. Many of them are far, FAR more happy to use Palestinian suffering as a wedge issue with their OWN populations in order to incite hatred against the West and keep themselves in power rather than lose the issue by actually helping to solve it.
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While I agree with you, i think people often make that point from the perspective of Jews who have NO other homeland and who have spent 2,000 years wandering.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: I betcha the papers here won't mention that the majority of the people killed in this operation aren't civilians.
The only pictures in our local paper were of Palestinian soldiers carrying wounded civilian children into the emergency room at the nearest hospital. I was sickened by how one-sided the coverage seemed- there was hardly any mention the attacks were NOT on civilian populations, and even less about the attacks being in retaliation for missile strikes.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: While I agree with you, i think people often make that point from the perspective of Jews who have NO other homeland and who have spent 2,000 years wandering.
The situation is sad, unfortunate, and that perspective is perfectly understandable. It's rooted in the idea of some sort of global fairness. That it's only fair that the other major world religions have strongholds of their own, so they should get one too, and if that comes at the price of one small population amongst a vast one with large amounts of territory, viewed only in terms of religion and not geopolitics, then that's only fair, especially given the many sufferings of the past.
I think by and large though, that sort of reasoning is best used to convince one's own self, rather than the mass of others, because most of those masses DO see the geopolitical lines, and are of another religion that might make them sympathetic, but still on another wavelength.
As an aside, I actually agree that it is very, very unfair. But when has fairness ever mattered?
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Two sides, neither of which are helping their situation any with their actions, in the middle east.
Reprint story ad infinitum.
It's fascinating how you've had nothing whatsoever to say about them bombing us constantly. But the moment we do something about it, it's all, "Both sides are terrible!!! Wahhh!!!"
Disgusting.
Heh, hey lisa.
That's a pretty massive reading comprehension failure on your part.
I will give you a million dollars if you show me the part of my post where I call either side terrible.
Or, if you're interested, you could try not re-inventing my words for me in order to sneer at my posts, as you are wont to do on several subjects that propel you into snideness and emotionalism.
quote:Originally posted by Armoth: While I agree with you, i think people often make that point from the perspective of Jews who have NO other homeland and who have spent 2,000 years wandering.
a) Many individuals did have and do have other homelands in the world. Just because Israel is the only jewish state doesn't matter to everyone. b) No one individual has wondered for 2,000 years, so it's a little hard to be sympathetic about 2,000 years of history when every jew alive today has lived mostly in the time when Israel has been a nation. c) For as long as people like you believe that the Israelis have *more* of a claim on that land than any arab people because of their history, their blood, or divine right, then there will always be war. To look at your neighbors and say, "you have other places to go, I don't," when you know that in fact, you have as many options as they do, or as few, will always cause tension. I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago. Love and cookies?
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Foreign Minister of Egypt, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, was on television, and issued a statement to Hamas:
quote:The Israelis have been warning you that this was coming if you continue your cross border rocket attacks. Egypt has been imploring you to stop firing rockets into Israel, but you ignored our words. We have been urging you to renew the cease-fire with Israel, but you refused. You have brought this upon yourselves. You are responsible for what is happening to the people of Gaza.
Honest to God, when even the Arabs are putting the blame squarely where it belongs, what kind of moral bankruptcy does it take to draw any kind of equivalency between the two sides here?
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: While I agree with you, i think people often make that point from the perspective of Jews who have NO other homeland and who have spent 2,000 years wandering.
a) Many individuals did have and do have other homelands in the world. Just because Israel is the only jewish state doesn't matter to everyone. b) No one individual has wondered for 2,000 years, so it's a little hard to be sympathetic about 2,000 years of history when every jew alive today has lived mostly in the time when Israel has been a nation. c) For as long as people like you believe that the Israelis have *more* of a claim on that land than any arab people because of their history, their blood, or divine right, then there will always be war. To look at your neighbors and say, "you have other places to go, I don't," when you know that in fact, you have as many options as they do, or as few, will always cause tension. I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago. Love and cookies?
If you've read any of my previous posts, while Jewish, I obviously tend toward the Israeli side. However, I've never once said that this was a cut-and-dry clear moral good.
As I said before, I understand how angry the Palestinian people are, and how not simple it is for Jews to waltz into Israel and create a country. I'm not sure that if the Israeli state was founded upon a scriptural claim that I would support it as I do now, despite being a religious man. That is simply because at this era of the world, i don't believe in things like Jihad or wresting land away from heathens - if any sort of new world order is to begin, it will begin through understanding, learning, or some ultimate act of God.
However Israel was not founded solely on divine right. It was founded in the wake of the holocaust. And Jews did not simple invade Israel and fight off the Palestinians, they were given the land by the British occupiers. Is it moral for the British to give away other people's land? No, I don't think so. But do I think that the Jews, in the wake of the holocaust, made the wrong decision by embracing a new homeland? No, I don't think so.
And can you really judge? I mean, this is why Iran makes it a policy to deny the holocaust. It is the one assumption that accounts for the moral existence of a Jewish state in Israel.
And thats my point. The "Zionists", a century ago, were practically a fraternity. They had no shot at success, and no strong backing. It was the Holocaust that changed things for the Jews. And are you asking me if my grandparents - all 4 - sat and thought about whether it was okay to have a homeland after their first wives, husbands, children, parents, and siblings were all murdered by Europeans, whether they thought they were going to have milk and cookies?! No. That's the point of exploring the depth of both sides. Both sides are deeply emotional, and their emotions are pretty legitimate. Yes, even the Palestinians have legitimate emotional foundation. And that's why things are a mess.
and in response to b) - no one individual has wandered for 2000 years? You clearly did not grow up Jewish. While some cultures do not stress their history and merely look at things from the perspective of their small lives, other cultures stress history as a source of identity. Both Palestinians and Jews do this. It's really not so hard - even though I, myself, have not been wandering - my grandparents have. Hearing holocaust stories is one thing, but hearing them from your own family is scary. I remember I walked into my grandfathers house in Israel and I saw this old faded picture of a boy I didn't recognize - i found out that he had a son from a previous marriage who was killed in the holocaust. My grandfather had a whole nother family! It's a very strange feeling to know that your own existence is the product of someone wiping out the family of your grandparents.
But that's why it may not be such a good idea to yell at Lisa. Some people are more emotional than others, some people are more angry, and MOST people are insensitive.
I feel very connected to African Americans because they often feel this way: that no one really "gets" it. Growing up, the descendants of slavels, i mean, it will totally affect you.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago.
You mean, when the Arab countries were beginning the process of throwing out and/or killing their Jews, the Russians and Poles were actively pogroming theirs to death, and Germany seemed to be one of the safer places to be a Jew?
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: I betcha the papers here won't mention that the majority of the people killed in this operation aren't civilians.
Just fyi, every account I've read so far (on CNN and local news) has said "mostly militants" after listing the number killed.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago.
You mean, when the Arab countries were beginning the process of throwing out and/or killing their Jews, the Russians and Poles were actively pogroming theirs to death, and Germany seemed to be one of the safer places to be a Jew?
Yeah, then. Personally I would have picked Canada or the United States.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago.
You mean, when the Arab countries were beginning the process of throwing out and/or killing their Jews, the Russians and Poles were actively pogroming theirs to death, and Germany seemed to be one of the safer places to be a Jew?
Yeah, then. Personally I would have picked Canada or the United States.
OMG, how many times are we going to have to make this point? You never LIVED in 1908! If you were a Russian Jew, ousted in Progroms, you really think you would have 100 years of foresight to say - bah, forget Germany, a Jewish cultural center, a place where people probably will speak my language and is on the same continent, I think I should move to the U.S. - I have a hankering that there's gonna be this really great sci-fi author in 70 years, and with technology at that time, i may be able to build up a social network around his material! CYA RUSSIA!
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: I feel very connected to African Americans because they often feel this way: that no one really "gets" it. Growing up, the descendants of slavels, i mean, it will totally affect you.
Everyone on Earth, probably without exception, is a descendant of a slave. But what you said in your post about "not getting it," I don't think is fair. Do I actually get it? No. My family has lived in America since the earliest colonial days, and as a white American, I am robbed of any ethnicity or history my family may have had. No one cares about that, including you, but I am expected to be infinitely understanding of other people's needs to differentiate themselves from my "part" of society. I don't particularly blame anyone for this. It's mostly the fault of circumstance, and of white Americans themselves that we have abandoned our histories and our individual inherited cultures to buy into an American dream that makes us the source of great enmity in the world.
Still, I often feel that when someone tells me I don't "get it," I should have a right to talk about the ancestors I had who were some of the first reformers in protestant churches in Provence, and who were persecuted by Catholics, and emmigrated between France and Italy, back to France, to Brittany, and finally crossed over into protestant-friendly Elizabethan England, where an ancestor of mine was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, and how his great grandson became one of the first people from England to come to live in Massachusetts, before there was even a colony to welcome him. Over successive waves of migration, and after being displaced in every major American war my family ended up in the Dakotas, and finally in California in the 1940s. That's about 500 years of wandering, where no more than a single generation of my family has lived in the same place as its parent generation.
So, I wonder if I am allowed to be "totally affected" by all of that. If you think on it, my ancestors did something far, far worse than what Israel has done, helping to take away the lands of millions of people in America. They were also seeking religious and personal freedoms that Europe could not provide. But they had themselves been persecuted for centuries by the Catholics. So is that the endgame for Israel? Victory and dominance would also take away a sense of all that struggle and wandering, just like it did in America, in such a short time.
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I think that you are being reasonable. If you incorporate your history as part of a sense of your identity, then yes, It is my duty to be sensitive to that.
Law is based on live and let live, as long as no one else is harmed.
But my morality is based on a relationship with all of mankind. If I want to relate to you, and you perceive your identity as a result of those experiences, then of course I will be sensitive to that. I am sensitive to the triumph of your past, to the courage of your ancestors whom I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to for their sacrifices to enable me to live in one of the greatest countries ever to exist.
I respect it tremendously. And yes, the crimes of colonial America are great - though it took mankind a while to mature morally to understand what a crime it was. Israel vs. PA is different - at least for Israel. I think Israel understands that it is immoral to simply kill all Arabs and conquer the territory for itself - I think, and hope, that this tension is the expression of perhaps one of the greatest moral dilemmas ever to face a country, and the great restraint that Israel must juggle with the protection and peace of its citizens.
On the point that "everyone is a descendant of slaves" - First of all, not so true.
Second of all - to the extent to which you incorporate that as a part of your identity, taht is to the extent to which one must be sensitive. To African Americans, that even was relatively recent, and they still bear the burdens of that time, so yea, to them, one needs to be sensitive.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: I'd love to know what the zionists thought was going to happen when this all started a century ago.
You mean, when the Arab countries were beginning the process of throwing out and/or killing their Jews, the Russians and Poles were actively pogroming theirs to death, and Germany seemed to be one of the safer places to be a Jew?
Yeah, then. Personally I would have picked Canada or the United States.
My great-grandparents (and their parents) agreed with you. They all came to the US at about that time. (As opposed to the cousins who emigrated to Israel slightly later.) But that simply was not an option for most. The US had quotas -- what were those who were not allowed to come here supposed to do? Because they WERE the majority.
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Out of curiosity, when did the quotas start in US immigration? I know Chinese exclusion laws were in effect in the mid to late 19th century, but when did anti-Jewish or anti-eastern European quotas or exclusions begin, and what form did they take? Did they lessen following the Holocaust? That's not a piece of history I am clear on. My Godmother's family came to the US in the 1940's from Austria, but she's not inclined to discuss it, and I have no idea *how* they got there.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Out of curiosity, when did the quotas start in US immigration? I know Chinese exclusion laws were in effect in the mid to late 19th century, but when did anti-Jewish or anti-eastern European quotas or exclusions begin, and what form did they take? Did they lessen following the Holocaust?
Quotas were by country, and they were in existence by the late 1880s, if not earlier.
posted
Yep. It took my great-grandparents until 1949 to get permission to immigrate to the US. (Most of the rest of my relatives ended up in Israel, but my great-grandmother was dead set against that, so they waited. And waited. And waited.)
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My Grandmother was turned away in the late 40s as well and made her way to South America. She eventually found her way to Israel herself.
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The ones who were turned away and didn't eventually make it out mostly have no descendants to speak for them.
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Bear in mind that "No Dogs or Jews" signs were still around as late as the 60s in places like Florida. They weren't even considered tacky in the US prior to WWII. No one wanted a flood of Jews into this country. Ick.
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When my family first moved into our house on Long Island about 20 years ago, someone painted a swatstika on our garage.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Bear in mind that "No Dogs or Jews" signs were still around as late as the 60s in places like Florida. They weren't even considered tacky in the US prior to WWII. No one wanted a flood of Jews into this country. Ick.
I read "Outliers" last week just to see what all the fuss was about. It's not a great book but it has some interesting stuff in it, and one of the things it talked about was how exclusion from major financial law firms in the first half of the 20th century put Jews in a perfect position to become dominant in the field when the nature of business changed later on. Because they had never been incorporated into the dinosaur firms in New York, the best Jewish lawyers were adaptable to changing business when the others were not.
What I couldn't figure out was whether Gladwell (the author) was saying that this kind of pattern was a necessary part of our societal pattern, or if it simply demonstrated how inefficiently our society utilizes its best people. On the one hand it is only wars and famines and all manner of suffering that distinguish survivors from those who perish, but on the other hand, those people are always around whether there are things to suffer through or not.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Foreign Minister of Egypt, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, was on television, and issued a statement to Hamas:
quote:The Israelis have been warning you that this was coming if you continue your cross border rocket attacks. Egypt has been imploring you to stop firing rockets into Israel, but you ignored our words. We have been urging you to renew the cease-fire with Israel, but you refused. You have brought this upon yourselves. You are responsible for what is happening to the people of Gaza.
Honest to God, when even the Arabs are putting the blame squarely where it belongs, what kind of moral bankruptcy does it take to draw any kind of equivalency between the two sides here?
Holding Israel responsible for the consequences of its actions is not the same as drawing moral equivalency between the two sides. Israel knew about the potential for civilian casualties but decided to launch the attacks anyways. They judged that the potential gains of the attacks outweighed the potential for innocent deaths (I generally agree). Israel can't tolerate having rockets launched into its cities forever. However, it doesn't make sense to place the blame for civilian deaths solely on the Palestinians because Israel was the one who killed them (so Israel has to account for them). I don't have much of an opinion about the current situation because I haven't read any information about the Palestinian deaths that would give me an educated opinion on whether or not they were excessive though I think what's causing people to protest Israel in this situation is that the number of Palestinian deaths has been much larger than the number of Israeli deaths since the media started paying attention.
Also, the reason you don't see much criticism of the Palestinians here is that nobody bothers to defend them.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: You clearly did not grow up Jewish. While some cultures do not stress their history and merely look at things from the perspective of their small lives, other cultures stress history as a source of identity.
For my part, this is very not applicable. The historical context of our lives as Chinese people has very often been a closely examined part of life.
As for the rest of the discussion, I'm not entirely sure how, but it seems that the discussion has segued into a discussion as to whether the Jews should have founded and moved into Israel. For my part, I only answered the original hypothetical (what would I personally do if I was Israeli or Muslim and in that area (i.e. leave)) and I answered it from a hypothetical person in the current day.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Foreign Minister of Egypt, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, was on television, and issued a statement to Hamas:
quote:The Israelis have been warning you that this was coming if you continue your cross border rocket attacks. Egypt has been imploring you to stop firing rockets into Israel, but you ignored our words. We have been urging you to renew the cease-fire with Israel, but you refused. You have brought this upon yourselves. You are responsible for what is happening to the people of Gaza.
Honest to God, when even the Arabs are putting the blame squarely where it belongs, what kind of moral bankruptcy does it take to draw any kind of equivalency between the two sides here?
I can see you are misundestanding my position, and perhaps I haven't explained it very clearly. I think of the conflict at three levels:
1. Underlying cause: Both parties want a certain parcel of land. This is where the moral equivalence lies, and where my unsympathetic "tough luck" comment comes from. I don't think either party has any particular claim to the land.
2. Tactical. Hamas fires rockets at civilians to make the Israelis give up, Israel fires rockets at Hamas installations to make Hamas give up. Israel is ahead, morally speaking, on this one.
3. Practical: Which tactic is likely to work? As far as I can tell, neither one.
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As much as I'd like to think they would be marching every Arab in Gaza across the border into Egypt, closing the border hermetically, and rebuilding all of the Jewish towns in the renamed Katif Strip, plus hundreds more, I suspect it's more likely to be a ground invasion to clean out Hamas for good.
Olmert should be in jail. The man resigned his position months ago, and he's playing wargames a month before new elections. It's disgusting.
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Well, if you think about it, the US already annexed over half of Mexico's territory in the 19th century.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: If mexico lobbed rockets into Houston Mexico would have been annexed by now.
Not if the annexation of Mexico were likely to lead to a world-wide boycott of American goods, or war with China, or some such reaction.
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Barak is willing to consider a ceasefire while Olmert wants to continue. While I, nor any good journalist, have all the details, that doesn't make me very happy...
I'm more inclined to side with Barak - ceasefire and see if the rocket attacks cease. If they do not, resume fighting.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Bear in mind that "No Dogs or Jews" signs were still around as late as the 60s in places like Florida. They weren't even considered tacky in the US prior to WWII. No one wanted a flood of Jews into this country. Ick.
Well, yes. If you open the door to te Jews, why, the Arabs would be right behind them. Can't have that, can we now? Ick.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: I'm more inclined to side with Barak - ceasefire and see if the rocket attacks cease. If they do not, resume fighting.
Don't you think that giving them another "ceasefire" is dangerous, given what we know they do with them?
The only conceivable end, though it may be long in coming, is to traumatize the Palestinian people to the extent that, would a terrorist want to launch a missile, he could only do it in the dead of night out of fear that his civilian neighbors would kill him.
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quote:Originally posted by Armoth: I'm more inclined to side with Barak - ceasefire and see if the rocket attacks cease. If they do not, resume fighting.
Don't you think that giving them another "ceasefire" is dangerous, given what we know they do with them?
The only conceivable end, though it may be long in coming, is to traumatize the Palestinian people to the extent that, would a terrorist want to launch a missile, he could only do it in the dead of night out of fear that his civilian neighbors would kill him.
Maybe. But maybe they become so traumatized that his civilian neighbors become militants.
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That was the difference between germany post The War to End all Wars and post World War Two. I am personally very unclear as to where the distinction should be drawn but there is a fine line between defeating an opponent and making him dread war and humiliating him, leaving him anxious to bare arms and regain face. i agree that it is a tough issue to navigate but a ceasefire now would be no different than the last ceasefire was: a gathering of arms.
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The history of anti-catholicism in this country is just as bad as anti-semitism. It was illegal for a long time for Catholics in many states to vote, hold office, or even go to school. For every swastika on a garage door, there was a burning cross in someone else's front yard.
White Christians don't live in some sort of bubble of safety while everyone else in America has been persecuted. Protestants who chafed under Catholic rule in Europe came here to escape, and do some good ole' persecuting of their own. And even a lot of them got run roughshod over, especially if they were Irish (who in many places in the 19th century were considered one step BELOW blacks), or eastern European.
I haven't really read into the quota system at length, but from what I have read, it was pretty despicable. It was designed to let in large numbers of who we at the time considered either racially superior, or easier to keep under our boot heels to do our dirty work for us. Jews probably got the short end of the stick because so many of them lived in Eastern Europe, and in the early 20th century, the quotas for countries in the east was something like 100 people per country. I think all of Africa had a quota of 100 people. But western and northern European countries had quotas in the thousands. It's a miracle as many Jews made it here during that time as did.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Bear in mind that "No Dogs or Jews" signs were still around as late as the 60s in places like Florida. They weren't even considered tacky in the US prior to WWII. No one wanted a flood of Jews into this country. Ick.
Well, yes. If you open the door to te Jews, why, the Arabs would be right behind them. Can't have that, can we now? Ick.
I wish that every Arab now living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (and Jordan, for that matter) would come and live in the US.
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