Cognitive Reorientation Required?

Why would any young Australian volunteer to leave Australia, the country that has sheltered them, probably for most or all of their lives to go to Israel expressly to join the Israel Defence Force (IDF) on behalf of the most oppressive and vicious regime (not counting the US) operating outside of international law in the world? The idea disgusts me.

And what is so different in this than those who have chosen to go to other countries to join a recognised terrorist organisation in opposition to a legitimate national government (such as Syria) at the risk of punishment on their return – even if they are allowed to return to Australia? To me this is exactly the same thing. There should be no difference in the treatment of these people to how returning terrorists are dealt with.

How are other Australians meant to view the disjointly different levels of treatment meted out to citizens with other national affiliations? In particular of course, I am thinking of Palestinian Australians or Arab Australians in general.

When is Australia going to become a true citizen of the world and drop rather than hiding behind its mostly western heritage with all the biases, attitudes of infallible superiority, unquestionable right of authority, and inbred racist tendencies which comes as part of that?

Or do we, like the rest of the west, need to taste a level of debasement and some cognitive reorientation first?

“The young Australians ‘walking into a war zone’ to join the Israeli Defence Force as ‘lone soldiers'” – ABC News Australia

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Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
The Buddha

You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.
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Tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
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The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
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Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
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Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry Kissinger (Who controlled Henry Kissinger?)

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
Henry Thoreau

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What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
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It is the microbes that will have the last word.
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Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
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I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
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Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
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I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
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In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.
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You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
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John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

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Knowing no stories is ignorance.
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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

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Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.

Cognitive Reorientation Required?

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