Does it bother anyone besides me?

[eppie]

We support Isreal for 3 reasons.

1 The rest of the world with the exception of Asia is rather anti-semitic, especially Europe. After seeing what the Nazies did 60 years ago, there is a feeling that its worth proping up Isreal because no one else would help them if they were down.

Thats the main reason.

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Excuse me? Europe rather anti semitic, where do you get that from? In the west that is for sure not true. If there are any antisemitic countries than that e.g.the baltic states, but also there antisemitism for sure is not a government point of view.

occhi
Israel is the beneficiary of some 3-5 billion dollars per year in aid, and a harder to track amount of "forgiven" loans. Somewhere, I am sure, there is a cost benefit analysis outlining what American security gets for its $3-5 billion per year. Some is spent, I imagine, in the US for things like helicopters, missiles, tools, spare parts, what have you. Where is the rest going?

(I hope I did this quoting right)

Occhi, I know you will react to me that I get carried away by conspiracy theories but listen to this.
The US (as a country) spends 5 billion on Israel, so that is the tax-payers money. As youi pointed out rightly part of that money (a few billion for sure) is spend on american weaponry and other stuff. And as the weaponlobby is quite strong they will get the money.
So public money is spend, and half of it is coming back for the people who own the rights businesses.

This is the scary thing when you have business people in politics, depending on what the population of a country will stand, they will often try to get some profit themselves.
A very clear case of this is of course Italy, where Berlusconi even succeeds in passing on laws that make him immune against all kinds of fraud charges against him, and laws that give his football team millions of tax-profit. Many people in Italy are very much apathic, helped a lot by the fact that berlusconi owns most television stations.

Same thing happened in the US in the Iraq war. First you make sure all the people like the idea of going to war, and then it is no problem at all if you spend tens of billion of dollars of their tax money.