Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Corey Gil-Shuster" channel.

  1.  @kingskidgirl2  There was never any such thing as a Palestinian passport. The passport would be issued by the Ottoman Empire and the person holding it would be listed as a resident of the eyalet (province) of Greater Syria. Palestine was used unofficially as a name of the region but there was never a sovereign state called Palestine.
    26
  2.  @Paul-fritz.  Point 4 is really not correct. You're confusing de facto acceptance with international law. Stalin got to take Kaliningrad because no one wanted to fight WW3 to stop him, not because he or the USSR had any legal claim to it. Stalin also carried out massive and illegal ethnic cleansing throughout Eastern Europe, but few people complained because no one else was feeling much sympathy for Germans in 1945. But again, that's not international law. Most of the other losses that were sanctioned (like Japan losing Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan) were accepted because the historical claim of Japan to control any of those territories was dubious to say the least. But the US couldn't have said, for instance, it was just going to annex Hokkaido or Kyushu and that would be legal because Japan started the war. But the real issue isn't this, it's people, not land. Even assuming Israel had a right to annex Gaza and the West Bank, what becomes of the people living there? They are still human beings, they have human rights, and that right includes being citizens of whatever country rules them with the right to participate fully in politics. Is Israel going to make the people living there citizens? Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1871, but it didn't expel or murder all the people living there, they became German citizens with the right to vote and all other rights that other German citizens had. And while, as I said, ethnic cleansing has sometimes been tolerated because of realpolitik concerns, it is still illegal, and Israel isn't the USSR, it doesn't have the power to defy the rest of the world and get away with it. Murdering or expelling all the Arab residents of Gaza and the West Bank simply isn't an option, no matter how much Netanyahu might wish it were.
    4
  3. I'm gonna guess you've never discussed the subject of Native Americans with an Afrocentrist.
    3
  4.  @cacadores3955  No there was not. The Romans conquered and then destroyed the Jewish kingdom and set up a province called Syria Palaestina, but it was just an administrative subdivision of the Roman Empire ruled by a Roman governor. That continued until the Arabs appeared and stole the land, but there was never an Arab kingdom of Palestine either, it was always part of some larger caliphate or empire.
    3
  5.  @charitysimon-peraboh5555  The Jews were Canaanites. Hebrew is a Canaanite language which was originally written in a Canaanite script. What happened is that the monotheistic Canaanites conquered the polytheistic Canaanites in the next village over and assimilated them. This started before there was any such thing as a monarchy in the region but it continued well into the historical period. Baal and Asherah weren't foreign gods, they were gods worshiped by the Israelites before they became monotheistic who were then reintroduced by intermarriage with the closely related neighboring people. That's why the Bible is so down on intermarriage for Israelites - not because they were marrying strangers, but because they were marrying people from similar cultures who would cause them to backslide into their own historical paganism.
    3
  6. No one really knows. That's why observant Jews aren't supposed to go on the Temple Mount: since no one knows for certain where the Temple stood, if you walk anywhere on the Mount you could be profaning the Holy of Holies without realizing it.
    2
  7.  @danielch6662  "There is nothing under the mosque but dirt and rock." Because the Arabs who built it leveled whatever man-made structures they found there. We have no idea where the Temple actually stood, but it could be anywhere on the Mount, and every square inch of that ground was built on in some way in antiquity, if only with pavement.
    2
  8.  @namesmudd2015  Because no one knows whether the Temple was in the same place that the Dome of the Rock is now. Some scholars even dispute whether it was on what is now called the Temple Mount at all, although that's a minority view.
    2
  9. You don't even want to know what passes for "history" in schools run by Hamas or the PA.
    2
  10.  @thecursed01  I don't think 99.99% of the world has any idea what happened in Liberia.
    2
  11. "Most of the others know as little about this as a protesting Harvard student." I mean, they're sadly misinformed, but they're not that ignorant. And they can probably tie their own shoes without Mommy's help.
    2
  12.  @geegeeh.6118  No, but there is certainly evidence that a Jewish kingdom existed under the Omride dynasty just few years later. And there is copious archaeological evidence of cultural continuity from the time David and Solomon are believed to have lived and even before that time to the historical period.
    2
  13.  @Cassidyvassily2000  Was the Koran written with the same spoken language of any Muslim country today? Was the Iliad written with the same spoken language of Greece today? Would you deny that the Iliad is a work of Greek literature? Or that Shakespeare wrote English literature?
    2
  14.  methodius--9405  By the same token Julius Caesar wasn't Italian and Plato and Socrates weren't Greek. Try telling an Italian or Greek person that and see how they respond. Lubavitchers may like to think and say they're the worldwide leaders of Jews, but no Jewish person I knew thinks that.
    2
  15.  @war_falco4466  "Why didn't us give Jews one of its states" Because unlike Europe and the Middle-east America is not divided into tribal kingdoms and ghettoes. There are nearly as many Jews living in the US as there are in Israel, only here, unlike the Middle East, Jewish people can live freely and have full civil rights wherever they choose rather than being confined to a ghetto and treated as second class citizens, so they don't need to control their own state.
    2
  16. Great, now find me an Islamic country now or at any point in history where non-Muslims, and particularly atheists and polytheists, have the same rights as Muslims.
    2
  17.  @tis5yoab  There was never a Khazar kingdom that was Jewish, there was a Khazar kingdom whose ruler converted and made Judaism the official religion, which lasted at least 15 minutes after his death, and that is not the same thing by a long shot.
    2
  18.  @AT-zq4st  The only reason Muslims don't do that a lot more often is their own military incompetence. But oh boy, do they want to. Just a few weeks ago there was a story in the NYT about a Moorish family in Morocco that still had the key to "their" house in Spain which they were planning to reclaim once the infidels were finally driven out. Funny, the story didn't discuss how Spain became Moorish and how "their" house became theirs to begin with. It is an article of faith in Islam that once any territory or people or individual becomes Muslim it is an affront to Allah, which must be fought with violence and punished with death, for them to leave Islam. This is why in almost every Muslim country it is illegal to promote any religion other than Islam - and in some cases punished by death. When was the last time Israel executed one of its citizens for converting from Judaism to Christianity or Islam or for seeking converts to those religions?
    2
  19.  @ahmedabdelazeem9690  "before jews , who was living in this land?" Not Arabs, that's for sure.
    2
  20.  @elderhiker7787  They Jews were and are Canaanites - see my reply above. They just invented a separate national identity because of their religion. But if you look at early Iron Age sites the Israelite sites are virtually indistinguishable from other Canaanite ones except in things dictated by religion like idols and the presence of pig bones in their garbage middens.
    2
  21.  @bobs182  Philistia was also a foreign occupying culture and, more important, there are no Philistines today nor have there been for the past 2500 years. Philistia was almost 100% depopulated by the Assyrians, far worse than the northern kingdom of Israel was. Those who weren't flayed, impaled, or burned alive (the Assyrians did not play very nice with people who resisted them) were scattered to the far corners of the Assyrian Empire and lost any memory or knowledge of their cultural identity.
    2
  22.  @bobs182  The Palestinians have nothing whatsoever to do with the Philistines, who were utterly destroyed as a people by the Assyrians, the people scattered to the far corners of the empire and the land becoming empty for generations. The Romans revived the name as their new name for the province formerly known as Judea as a way of thumbing their nose at the Judeans, who had rebelled against them one too many times, and that's how the ancestors of today's Palestinians got that name. But they had to stretch back into Herodotus to find that name because there had been no people going by that name for about 800 years by that time. Also, the Philistines were not natives to that land, nomadic raiders who settled the area in the late bronze age after the Egyptians drove off their invasion. They probably came from the Aegean and spoke an Indo-European language possibly related to proto-Greek. The Canaanites, from whom the Israelites emerged regardless of their mythology to the contrary, had been there for many centuries by then. Today's Palestinians are much more closely related to the Israelites of Samson's day than they are to the vanished Philistines.
    2
  23.  @bobs182  The words Philistine and Palestinian are the same but the people have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. The Romans took a deep dive into history to find a name that was deliberately insulting to Judeans to rename their province. The Philistines were destroyed by the Assyrians and scattered to the winds 800 years or so before that. Unlike Israel, archaeology shows that Philistia was virtually empty for years until the surrounding people gradually resettled there. But no people today has any connection with the ancient Philistines any more than people from Troy, New York have with Hector and Priam.
    2
  24.  @danielch6662  That's not entirely true - the last bit, I mean. There's historical evidence that some members of some of the other tribes settled in Judah after the destruction of the northern kingdom. They just lost their separate tribal identities at some point in the last 2700 years as started identifying as Judahites (Yehudim). And Ethiopian Jews are reckoned as descendants of the Tribe of Dan. Not to mention the Samaritans - who do not identify as Jews but go to show that while other Israelites don't share the post-exilic traditions of the Jews they had more or less the same beliefs and the same Torah at some point in the past. So the idea of Israel being for all the tribes is not so far-fetched.
    2
  25.  @anotherone-xp9ox  It's the religion of lies and murder.
    1
  26.  @whale-psychiatrist  Which characters do you mean? Because there is a fair amount of evidence of the existence of people described in the history books staring with the divided monarchy. Several of them - Ahab, Omri, and Hezekiah come to mind - are mentioned in Babylonian and Assyrian records, for example. And there is no direct evidence of David but there are references to the royal house of Judah as the House of David.
    1
  27.  @maazc081  There is precisely zero proof of the ancient Israelites invading Canaan from the outside, and quite a bit of evidence that what we now call Judaism was a cultural development within Canaanite society that over the centuries succeeded to the point where the shared identity was forgotten. Evidence outside the Bible, I mean, and if you're going to accept the Bible then you have to accept that God ordained that the land belong to the Israelites for all eternity.
    1
  28.  @Qvadratus.  By "like the middle ages" you mean the Israelis are acting like Muslims have acted toward everyone else for the last 1400 years? Since, of course, Islamic culture has never emerged from the middle ages, in fact in many ways it has regressed considerably in the last 800 years or so. Of all people on the planet Arabs have the least right to complain about their land being colonized. How many civilizations and how many people were burned to ashes in the long, bloody history of Muslim expansion by conquest? How do you imagine that Syria Palestina became Muslim and Arabic-speaking to begin with? Even the Spanish and English in the Americas pale in comparison.
    1
  29.  @TesseRact7228  God, and then much later the UN. Pick your favored authority, I guess.
    1
  30.  @Qvadratus.  It was NEVER taken away. They were exiled from it, which is not the same thing. They were exiled, and then God decided they had repented sufficiently and they were allowed to come home. No one else ever acquired title to the land, they were just occupiers. All of them have come and gone: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mamluks, Turks, British, all the great empires rose and all of them fell and none of them has ever been the rightful owner of the Promised Land. Only Israel.
    1
  31.  @ybench5871  "there is proof of existence of roman way before any jewish state" No there isn't. Outside records of ancient Israel and Judah from 600 BC and before are found in many other countries. Egyptians, Babylonians Moabites, Phoenicians, probably others I'm forgetting. AFAIK Rome itself, let alone a Roman presence in the Levant, can't be attested that far back except in its own mythology. Romans were only a significant presence in what is now Israel starting with Pompey Magnus in the 1st century BC.
    1
  32.  @Xinjiekou_新街口_Station  In terms of being kicked out of Palestine that's a long and sad story. But they weren't kicked out by other people living there, they were kicked out by the Emperor of Rome for rebelling once too often against Roman rule. If you are ever seriously interested in why and how that happened I'd recommend reading Rome and Jerusalem by Martin Goodman.
    1
  33.  @morningcalmrisingsun  No, hardly anyone converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. Most Jews lived in either Christian or Muslim lands and while Islam could sometimes be more tolerant of Jewish people, in both cases seeking converts from the majority religion was strictly forbidden and in practical terms a very bad idea likely to provoke mob violence. Not to mention, since ancient times Jews haven't really had any interest in winning converts. If you compare the formal process of becoming Jewish with the formal process of becoming Muslim it's somewhat amusing: a long, involved process with lots of obstacles and refusals along the way in the first case vs. uttering thirteen words once in the other. (Of course, living as an obedient Muslim after you've converted is a lot more involved...)
    1
  34.  @monjiaitaly  No, we fought a number of wars over that and won every one. As did Israel. Anyway the tribe that owned the land I was born and grew up on has all of about 200 living members left, so it would hardly be equitable to dispossess millions of people in favor of that few.
    1
  35.  @PeruDeCorleone_MalGenius  "Hebrew Israelites" are like the Holy Roman Empire - actually none of the above.Why do you want to steal other peoples' culture, is your own that deficient?
    1
  36.  @TesseRact7228  Who, then?
    1
  37.  @Qvadratus.  Not sure which comment you're responding to but it's nonsense on both counts. Islam is the worst thing that's happened to the human race since the invention of agriculture. And Moses was the descendant of the people who lived there before Moses. Jews and Canaanites were the same people, Arabs are not the same as either.
    1
  38. "Fake news!" It's the rallying cry of the post-rational world.
    1
  39.  @karimbakry551  Arabs in Palestine welcomed Jews? That's a laugh. They were massacring Jews before WW2 and they've never stopped.
    1
  40. Muslims, Christians, and every other religious minority in Israel have far, far, far more rights and an infinitely better life than non-Muslims in any Muslim country. Does Israel levy a tax on every non-Jew? Does Israel say that in any legal dispute between a Jew and a non-Jew the non-Jew not only loses but isn't even allowed to contest the case in court? Does Israel execute people who try to promote any religion other than Judaism? That's all mandated by Sharia law.
    1
  41.  @JohnDoe19991  It was rebuilt in the time of Persian rule, Herod just renovated it and expanded and improved the surrounding plateau.
    1
  42. It's not actually a wall of the Temple, it's a retaining wall built by Herod the Great when he expanded the complex on top of the Temple Mount. The Temple itself was completely destroyed and today not one stone of it is left standing on another as foretold by Jesus 2000 years ago.
    1
  43. Do you have a few years to discuss that?
    1
  44. In this regard, Palestinians are more or less what Germans would be today if Hitler had won and three generations of Germans had grown up with no education and nothing to read that wasn't Nazi propaganda.
    1
  45.  @h.y1855  gave it back to the Jews. The southern kingdom, Judah, had only been part of the Babylonian empire for a few decades, before that there were independent Jewish kingdoms for centuries, and before that it was Jewish tribes without a national government. The Persian Empire was relatively enlightened for an ancient empire and allowed subject peoples to keep their own religion and culture as long as they accepted Persia as the ultimate sovereign.
    1
  46.  @keratomeliusis  The name "Israel" is first attested in the Merneptah Stele which is thought to date to around 1209 BC. So you're off by over 3,000 years.
    1
  47.  @graceg3250  Your ancestors chose to leave Europe and come here as did mine. Jews did not choose to leave Israel.
    1
  48.  @gianthills  There is no historical evidence of Socrates, other than that some people wrote about him. Which is also true of Jesus.
    1
  49. IIRC, that same Grand Mufti actually toured the extermination camps as Himmler's guest and watched the mass murders with approval. You may also have heard of his relative and pupil, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Wonderful people the Palestinians have chosen as their leaders and spokesmen.
    1
  50.  @tintinismybelgian  Be forewarned: it gets very, very ugly. A lot of them claimed that people who now claim to be descended from Native Americans are all imposters and the real Native Americans were Black people.
    1