Lord Bertrand Russell addressing an international conference in 1970, wrote the following:

Lord Bertrand Russell addressing an international conference in 1970, wrote the following:

"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East".

"Message from Bertrand Russell to the International Conference of Parlimentarians in Cairo, February 1970." Reprinted in The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1970. ..I personally have no strong view on Israel.. I don't like to see ANYONE mistreated, I have little sympathy for any sort of religious or nationalistic or racial extremism, but the thing about this issue that really gets me is how in the United States you can't even discuss certain issue just discuss them, without being assaulted by at least violent rhetoric, for example try and advocate gun control you are a communist and a nazi and enemy of "freedom" advocate for universal health care and your trying to impose "Socialism" on America..and try to discuss the crimes committed by the israeli state as Norman Finkelstien a Jewish man whose mother and father survived the horrors of the holocaust you immediately become a self hating jew and an "anti -semite" and my real beef is not with Israel but with the myth that Americans enjoy more freedom , My contention. is this, its nothing but a myth..in many ways Americans lack the simple freedom to discuss issues like this that in other places they can be.as a civil libertarian this is what irks me.