Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

As i understand it that poster's thing is he says he can't understand why Israel is hammered so much about it's treatment of indigenous Palestinians when, in his mind, other countries including Australia and the U.S.A. have treated their indigenous people just as badly, yet are not criticized nearly as much. As i understand it he sees Israel unfairly hammered by myself and others. Pointing out to him i have posted much negative about Australia's treatment of Aboriginal's - and about injustices in other countries as China , Afghanistan, Myanmar, wherever - did not satisfy him. It was like every time we criticized Israel we had to make a comparison with our own country. If you America. If me Australia. That suggestion was obviously mindless, as there are articles in which country comparisons are made and there are articles which focus on something about a particular country. Right now Israel is in the hot seat.

"You have been ragged on about some bizarre connection made in a poster's head conflating Australia's dealings with aborigines and israel's present day treatment of palestinians.
P - In a crossover between my rock hunter world and comparison of politics between israel's treatment of the gazans and present day australia's treatment of aborigines, I noticed that one of the best precious opal mining areas in Australia, Mintabie, has been returned to the aborigines and mining claims ceased. I cannot find an example of israel returning any land or resources to the palestinians. Now I will never be able to go to Mintabie and help plunder the opals, sigh.
P - The terrorist acts perpetrated against israel were horrendous--- no comfort in bothsideisms. Just tossing out a fact since you have been the subject of guff about treatment of aborigines in your country that are conveniently devoid of bringing the discussion up to the present."

Thanks for your Mintabi mention .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mintabie,_South_Australia , i wasn't aware of that particular one, but there have been some quite large tracts of lands handed over to Australian Aboriginals.

Looks opal mining communities in general have some problems:

Is this Australia’s last generation of opal miners?

A bureaucratic error shut 3,000 mining claims in White Cliffs and Lightning Ridge, and many fear the industry won’t recover


A nobby of black opal freshly mined at Lightning Ridge in NSW. Australia supplies 95% of the world’s opal, but some main hubs in the state are under threat. Photograph: Mandy McKeesick/The Guardian

Mandy McKeesick
Sun 30 Jul 2023 10.00 AEST
Last modified on Tue 1 Aug 2023 19.31 AEST

Think of mining and you may imagine gaping great holes such as the iron ore mines of the Pilbara or cavernous underground workings of the copper mines of Mt Isa.

In outback New South Wales, the mining of Australia’s national gemstone looks quite different. Opal mining is the home of the one-man operation, where small-scale miners prise opal from the earth often with no more than a jackhammer and a rickshaw. Opal is not kind to the commercial miners who chase defined resource targets. As one miner puts it “opal doesn’t follow rules, opal is where it wants to be”.


White Cliffs NSW: where life is lived underground and the desert
‘does all sorts of strange things’
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/may/14/white-cliffs-nsw-where-life-is-lived-underground-and-the-desert-does-all-sorts-of-strange-things

Australia supplies 95% of the world’s opal. But mines at Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs, the main opal production hubs in NSW, are currently under threat. In May, the department of mines and regional NSW instructed 858 miners to stop work, after a review found 3,343 mining claims granted between 1 January 2015 and 13 February 2023 were invalid.

Continued - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/30/nsw-regulatory-change-australias-last-generation-of-opal-miners

I'll save another bit for a separate reply.