Shorter Jeffrey Goldberg

“The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.”

  • In Gaza as in Iraq and Afghanistan, if a great many civilians are dead, well, then it is because they wanted to die to make Israel and America look bad. Sadly, such carnage is really out of the stronger parties’ hands.

Also:

  • Glenn Greenwald’s just some guy on the internet. I’ve fought for the IDF. Who ya gonna believe?

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


 

Comments: 225

 
 
 

Good morning!

 
 

Ah yes, the old “asymmetrical warfare” argument. Those damn civilians, trying to defeat us with their inconvenient deaths!

 
 

This ceasefire ended when Israel violated its terms and killed Palestinians; Hamas did not violate the ceasefire. Israel did.

And around 80% of ceasefire violations are from the Israeli side.

And thank god, too, because without bold action like that, and the violence which follows violence, it would be even harder for Israeli militarists to come up with another excuse not to have a peaceful 2 state agreement while they expand settlements and further clamp down on Palestinian life.

Also, Goldberg is totally right: because the tiny Hamas, armed with hand-made rocket, dreams of destroying Israel, the 5th largest military in the world, and also nuclear armed, it totally means Hamas could, because, you know, they’re fanatics, and fanatics can do anything they want.

 
 

I’m sure the Israelis are working on a final solution to the Palestinian problem as we speak.

 
Jeffrey Goldberg
 

Stop genociding yourself.

*boom*

Stop genociding yourself.

*boom*

 
 

I get it now, they’re just dying for the benefit of the international press. This is a time honored tactic of warfare, I should’ve picked up on it sooner.

 
 

Maybe they’re all suicide bombees.

 
 

What the MSM won’t tell you is that the members of HAMAS have, in fact, mastered the art of possessive reincarnation, so that for every soldier killed, a baby or young child becomes immediately possessed of his soul and starts building rockets out of Arabic alphabet blocks and breastmilk. Which is why we have to kill the women and children, too, because they belong to THEM now.

 
 

Goldberg:

Bush is ultimately correct in saying that democracy is the antidote to terror, that freedom is the antidote.

I hate to say it for aesthetic reasons, but the answer is more Friedmanesque. Prosperity is the antidote to terror. When you get to a place where there are more shopkeepers with a stake in shit not blowing up all the time than people with little to lose, that’s when shit stops blowing up all the time. As per Northern Ireland.

Of course that’s just part of the answer — not putting large groups of people on permanent lockdown while you let the most racist, violent members of your own society steal their stuff with impunity … that helps too. Also not extrajudicially executing them whenever you feel like it. Or making them permanently displaced people for six or seven decades.

Bonus shorter Goldberg: I was in the ‘Nam, man! Greenwald wasn’t in the ‘Nam! He didn’t see the shit go down, man!

 
 

If the Palestinians didn’t want to be bombed, why do they keep reproducing so many targets?

 
 

Isn’t this a shorter Hugh Hewitt?

 
 

Come on. Goldberg isn’t the uncritical pro-Isreal and anti-Palestinian yahoo you make him out to be…
What he says about Hamas counting on the psychological effects of Palestinian casualties – well, it may or may not be true, I have no way of knowing that, but Goldberg certainly isn’t discounting the lives of Palestinians the way you claim he is.

I mean look at this quote of his:
“I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal. I’ve seen many people killed in Gaza. I’ve served in the Israeli Army in Gaza. I’ve been kidnapped in Gaza. I’ve reported for years from Gaza. I hope my former army doesn’t kill the wrong people in Gaza. I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive. I know they’ll be back in Gaza. I think this operation will work, and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dreams of the Palestinian statehood goes to die. Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die.”

That’s not Krauthammer, Peretz, JPod or some other completely batshit crazy warmonger speaking here. I really enjoy your site and many of your satires but sometimes I think you paint with much too broad a brush.

 
 

JG: Look, asymmetric warfare is hard as you know. You have this perverse situation, America obvious faces this in Afghanistan, and faced it ultimately, I think fairly successfully in Iraq, or at least provisionally successfully in Iraq, where the weaker party wants you, the stronger party, to maximize his own casualties. I mean, it’s hard as Westerners, it’s a little bit hard to wrap your mind around this. But the Israelis want to minimize Palestinian casualties. The Palestinians want to, or not the Palestinians, but Hamas, which is a very cynical organization, wants to maximize the number of Palestinian casualties. The interesting thing about Hamas is that its power is derived not from its indifference to Israeli life or Jewish life, but from its indifference to Palestinian life. I mean, if their goal was to keep Palestinians alive and healthy, you don’t fire rockets from the middle of schoolyards and hide them in mosques, quite obviously. So that’s all a windy preface to saying that I think this is very hard to do. And Hamas is a fairly implacable enemy. It is not susceptible to domestic pressure on casualties the way the Israeli Army is. It’s not susceptible to international pressure. It’s a proxy of Iran, and Iran is not very responsive to international pressure. So I find it hard to believe ultimately that this will work. I’m very worried about it. I don’t, I think that you have the possibility of the makings of a quagmire. And so I would really hope that Ehud Barak has a well-developed exit strategy there.

Although one could argue that the Israeli operations in no way sought to maximize Palestinian casualties, there is no argument whatsoever that they sought to minimize them. The evidence appears to be, over this operation and for decades, that Israelis prefer a healthily large but not too internationally gross number of Palestinian civilian casualties.

If I were cynical, I could point to the numbers of Israelis actually killed by Hamas’ rockets and claim that they, Hamas and not the Israelis, were admirably and remarkably focused on minimizing civilian casualties.

But since Israeli military operations are, by definition, universally admirable operations, and Palestinian actions of any variety (from protests to UN complaints to suicide bombing to rocket launches) are all lumped in as the work of an “implacable enemy” and as “terrorism”.

 
 

Marc,

sorry, but anyone who says “I think this operation will work” and actually knows what the operation is all about (which I assume Goldberg does) truly deserves getting his butt kicked HTML Mencken-style.
Also, this: “I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East”. Evoking the mystery of the place that is the Middle East and relinquishing responsibility by pretending that the shit that’s going there is the result of some mystical forces and not of people’s actions, yeah, that works.
And the final bit of irony: “Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die.” Gaza is where almost two million people were imprisoned and are now being killed for voting the way they did.
Goldberg may not be batshit crazy, I will grant you that. But he is as much of an immoral asshole as any other neocon. So do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.

 
 

“This operation will work” at ensuring that there is another, similarly murderous operation conducted in a year or two.

 
 

A bit of a different view from a real journalist, Robert Fisk of the Independent:

From Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

by Robert Fisk | The Independent | Wednesday, 7 January 2009

So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?…

…What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre.

And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I’m afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against “international terror”. The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I’ve reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover

…And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn’t. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Now, Fisk would find work and life and meeting with officials a lot easier if he pulled the same propaganda stunts as a Goldberg does, and I’m willing to grant that Goldberg is completely unintentional in doing so.

But first you have to be aware of what’s going on, and being there isn’t everything. There are always a lot of eyewitnesses everywhere, yet it still takes a clue in order to draw the right conclusions.

 
a different mikey
 

Fisk has been right about too much for too long. It’s no wonder that few in Washington pay any attention to him.

 
 

Bulbul:

I am assuming that “So do us all a favor and go fuck yourself” means you don’t agree with me, right ?

 
Nancy Harlan Sinatra
 

This Perf was made for Heh’n
And that’s just what he’ll do
One of these days this Perf
Is gonna Heh all over you

 
 

“This operation will work” at ensuring that there is another, similarly murderous operation conducted in a year or two.

This.

 
 

You know, there’s something that’s being overlooked in all of this.

Bush’s very direct responsibility not only for Hamas holding power in Gaza, but most likely for them having the weaponry they’ve been using to poke at the Israelis as well.

Seriously, is this dude like some elemental clusterfuck catalyst or what? I kept saying, even after the economy went into meltdown, that Bush still had at least one major fuckup left in him before leaving office. This situation in Gaza, which he fully engineered – this is it. In his two weeks remaining in office, I don’t think he’s got time to fuck up anything else on this grand of a scale, but don’t count him out yet – two weeks is plenty of time for a whole raft of minor and medium-sized fuckuppery.

 
 

Bush’s very direct responsibility not only for Hamas holding power in Gaza, but most likely for them having the weaponry they’ve been using to poke at the Israelis as well.

Yep. Know what’s sad? The two places I heard about both of these first were…

1) Here
and
2) Michael Savage

 
 

If reworking old talking points were easy then lil’ Annie Keulter might imagine softly

“These self-obsessed Palestinians seemed genuinely unaware that Israeli occupation is an attack on Israel and act as if Israeli attacks happened only to them .”

“Palestinians believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently , denouncing the occupation was an important part of their closure process .”

“These Palestinians are pampered , lionized on TV and in articles about them , reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis . I’ve never seen people enjoying their genicidal death so much .”

Gosh I just hate it when they bleed all over my beautiful clean mind

Donchoo ?

 
 

DA’s right, but there’s another, simpler solution than to try and create a viable economic infrastructure in some of these places, “governed” as they are.

Terrorists exist to attack people/nations/institutions against whom they have a grievance and against whom they are otherwise powerless. Despite what the ever thoughtful Don Rumsfeld might have led you to believe, it is extremely difficult to get people to take up arms against people they LIKE.

But occupy them. Bomb them. Blockade them. Steal their resources, overthrow or murder their leaders, keep them in poverty, uneducated, in “refugee camps” for generations with no hope their childrens lives will be better and I will promise you this. 100% of them will fight you. They will try to hurt you however they can. They will try to raise the cost of their subjugation so you will, if nothing else, go away and leave them in peace.

The Palestinians do it. The Iraqis did it. YOU would do it. Stop killing and stealing and they won’t be mad at YOU. Their circumstances might not materially improve, but they won’t blame you if you aren’t responsible…

mikey

 
 

And remember that great Goldberg quote:
“Bush is ultimately correct in saying that democracy is the antidote to terror, that freedom is the antidote.”

Hamas was democratically elected. The elections were held because of pressure applied by Bush. The “will” of the people was Hamas. It’s an empty platitude that freedom and democracy make everyone happy and amiable.

Ironically, Hamas was built up by Israel against Fatah. They became popular because they stood up to Israel, because they were less corrupt than Fatah, and most importantly, they were providing civil services — trash collection and so on.

The last part is key: Hamas started acting like a government. It’s the same thing that helped the IRA become legitimate, the same thing that helped Hezbolla.

 
 

I liked him better when he was roasting Denis Leary.

 
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
 

Bonus shorter Goldberg: I was in the ‘Nam, man! Greenwald wasn’t in the ‘Nam! He didn’t see the shit go down, man!

Yeesh. Total ‘nam sequitur.

Prosperity is the antidote to terror.

Agreed. It would also solve a lot of similar but less deadly troubles inside the U.S., but it’s not compatible with capital gains tax cuts (domestically) or giant arms sales (internationally) to be of much interest to the current crop of policymakers.

Thanks for that, though. That whole Bushit worldview that the world is this delicate, ever-shifting balance between Freedom and Terror was one of the most tiresome things about the whole tiresome mess that is the nearly-over Bush reign. Feh.

 
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
 

Oh, and the whole use of “terror” as a shorthand for “terrorism” and the conditions that cause it to be used really gets up my nose too. I promise to stop doing it.

 
 

if my 2008 had a highlight, it would have to be receiving word from the atlantic’s lawyers (ted olsen!!!!1!!!!1111) that one of the reasons jeffrey goldberg was so angry about my wife’s mccain photo was because it illustrated his article about mccain and war, an article he was sure was going to win the pulitzer. now all anyone would talk about was jill’s photo instead.

god, even thinking about it again makes me smile. he is a total shitbag. and to marc’s point above: he is of course FAR worse than jpod or krauthammer et al, because he provides washington consensus flanking cover by being somewhere in the middle-left of their universe (really, it’s true), and thus enables even more terrible behavior by being a useful idiot. marc, if you don’t know that phrase “useful idiot” you might want to look it up–it tells you a lot about your average washington middle writer these days.

 
 

“Bush is ultimately correct in saying that democracy is the antidote to terror, that freedom is the antidote.”

Hamas was democratically elected. The elections were held because of pressure applied by Bush. The “will” of the people was Hamas. It’s an empty platitude that freedom and democracy make everyone happy and amiable.

Yes. If I remember correctly, Bush’s insistence (per neocon dogma) that elections would drive out the radical anti-Israel extremists and needed to happen right now pretty much floored every sane observer in Israel and Gaza, because Fatah was in the middle of a series of scandals and the only existing alternative was Hamas. Mind you, a ‘good’ result probably would have looked a lot like the Ukraine – gin up a fake opposition group, send in US/Israeli corporations to smash and grab what little independent national infrastructure is left, and then wave your finger and cluck angrily when the people inexplicably vote your mind-bogglingly corrupt and openly autocratic color-revolutionary horse out on a rail in favor of Dangerous Radicals.

But still, the result was such that Hamas went into office with great trepidation, believing for some time that it somehow served US/I purposes for them to be in office – because why in the hell else would they have insisted on elections?

Incidentally, I think at this point we’re running into a major narrative problem for Israel: their constant arguments that X operations are necessary for their security, to do otherwise would be to self-destruct, you can’t expect any other country to deal with radicals this way so why force it on us, &fc no longer function. They’ve blockaded Gaza and closed all diplomatic channels; they’re waging an international war to modify the electoral politics of a foreign country. Either they’re entitled to besiege and engage in open hostility with the Gaza Strip or they’re entitled to treat radicalism (and astoundingly minor terror attacks, in the wider scheme of things) there as an internal security problem. Wanting to have it both ways puts them in a special class of countries occupied only by them – to whom the laws of diplomacy and basic human rights are privileges to be revoked by the stronger actor at will.

More on point, supposing Iran developed the same opinion about Likud that they have about Hamas – would American newspapers crow about Ahmadinejad’s glowing humanitarianism in taking as few civilian lives as possible while cluster-bombing Israeli long-range air installations and conservative political centers?

 
 

HTML, you have no idea how you spun my head around with this.

It took me twenty (sleep-deprived admittedly) minutes to realize this wasn’t Doughy Pantload…

 
 

Not to change the subject, but how did this nugget slip past the news desk?

Jan. 5- Dennis Announces His Marriage
Posted by: Allen Estrin at 3:00 PM

Dennis and Sue were married December 31 by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at his synagogue, Kehillat Ma’arav, in Santa Monica, California.
The former Susan Reed, known to all as Sue, was raised in the Los Angeles area, graduated from Occidental College, obtained her law degree from Loyola Law School and was admitted to the California Bar in November 1994. After a half-year practicing business transaction law, Sue left her career to be a fulltime mother to her two boys, one of whom is autistic, and shortly thereafter also to raise her two nieces after the death of their mother, Sue’s 35 year-old sister, Cyndi, from cancer.

Sue met Dennis at a speech he gave for the Jewish organization Chabad in San Diego, where she lived until 2008 when she moved to Los Angeles.

And in conclusion…

Over time, I hope many of you will get a chance to meet Sue.
I thank all of you who have shown me such warm and loving support over these past few years. You have no idea how much that has meant to me.
Dennis Prager

 
 

Is this the wife who won’t have sex with him?

 
 

” ‘nam sequitur”

a/k/a Sobchak Syndrome?

 
 

Is this the wife who won’t have sex with him?

No, this is the girlfriend who has a drinking problem.
Evidently, A serious drinking problem.

 
The Goddamn Batman Would Take On Glenn Greenwald As A Sidekick In A Gotham City Second, But That's Not How Glenn Rolls
 

It’s hard out there for an asymmetrical warrior.

 
 

Hmmm. By thumbing through past issues of S,N!, I see that Prager’s ClownHall column “Eight Reasons Why My Wife Should Have Sex With Me Even When She Doesn’t Want To” was posted on Dec. 30 — one day before the wedding. Not-so-subtle warning to the latest Mrs. Prager? Preemptive gauntlet-throwing-down, based on his past marital experiences? Whatever, I just threw up in my stomach a little.

Also: Who’s “tintin”?

 
 

Also: Who’s “tintin”?

You mean the sucky French comic?

 
 

Marc said,

January 7, 2009 at 18:11

Bulbul:

I am assuming that “So do us all a favor and go fuck yourself” means you don’t agree with me, right ?

Dude, you’re advocating genocide. I thought the response was quite reasonable given your position.

Some ideas don’t deserve polite debate.

 
 

MzN—

I’m guessing Clif…er, Tintin is referring to his biographical “photo” on the About page.

 
 

Gawd. Now I know how the [in]famous Imperial British arrogance was born.

The USA is heading down the same path.

 
 

There’s an “About” page?!

 
 

Tintin isn’t French. He’s Belgian. A Major Motion Pic is in production w/ Spielberg helming. It’s motion-capture. What’s the opposite of “I can’t wait”?

 
 

In order to mary Prager I would think it would be NECESSARY to have a drinking problem.

 
Northern Observer
 

In Gaza as in Iraq and Afghanistan, if a great many civilians are dead, well, then it is because their leaders volunteered their lives to make Israel and America look bad. Sadly, such carnage is really out of the stronger parties’ hands.

Fixed!
Seriously, aren’t satirists suppose to be smarter than this?
Allahu Akbar Baby!

 
 

I love Michael Savage! He’s the only wingnut on radio who rants for an hour about random meaningless things like restaurants (always some restaurant stories) and then states,”I’m probably bipolar. And I’m better off without those meds!”.

Seriously.

 
Turbine Yukon Palin
 

First, and most importantly, the ceasefire was remarkably effective: after it began in June 2008, the rate of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza dropped to almost zero

Is it really a ceasefire if shells are still being lobbed over by one side or the other?

I’m not being snarky. I’m genuinely curious why this would be considered a ceasefire.

 
 

While I would certainly argue that Goldberg’s assertion that “Israelis want to minimize Palestinian casualties” is false, does anyone here really believe that Hamas doesn’t want more Palestinian civilian casualties? And by the way, he is saying that Hamas wants this, not the normal people doing the dying. It helps their cause, and they see it as strategic, don’t they?

 
 

I’m genuinely curious why this would be considered a ceasefire.

Well, not ceasefire exactly, but since their style manual has neithter ceaseishfire nor ceasefireishy, they went to print with the words they had.

 
 

What’s the opposite of “I can’t wait”?

In Show Bidness, the opposite would be S. Goldwyn’s “Miss it if you can.”

 
 

My understanding of the Hamas strategy is that they really do want to maximize their own casualties.(1) The reasoning being that if you are small and getting the crap beat out of you by a huge bully then it is in your interest to take as much punishment as you can and then wave that bloody flag in the media.

It’s the video camera effect on police brutality only conducted on the international stage. You’d have to be pretty desperate to adopt that strategy but I think the situation in Gaza qualifies.

.
(1) I have no way of knowing if this true. It may be just propaganda. I don’t know.

 
 

Who said the 2.75 shells a month were being lobbed by Hamas during the cease fire? The other 8 months, with no cease fire, averaged 162.38 shells a month.

 
 

Sue left her career to be a fulltime mother to her two boys, one of whom is autistic

don’t wingnuts not believe in autism? I wonder how that’s going to work out.

 
 

Well, even if Hamas did/do want to minimize casualties, there’s no reason not to wave the bloody flag when civilians get hit.

Oh, wait, there are no Palestinian civilians (or Palestinians, really) they all voted for Hamas, & as such deserve to die. (Per Debbie Snack Cakes.)

 
 

I hope my former army doesn’t kill the wrong people in Gaza.

Just scratch the name and address of the right people, the ones who need killin’, on the shells or bullets.

Or is he talking about the IDFs propensity for “friendly fire” (or as we call it, Shalom, you’re dead!)

It’s the old shoot-and- kvetch!

 
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
 

” ‘nam sequitur”

a/k/a Sobchak Syndrome?

Sobchak Syndrome manifests as a series of ‘nam sequiturs, yes. Heh.

 
 

(1) I have no way of knowing if this true. It may be just propaganda. I don’t know.

Nah! You think?

 
 

“Is it really a ceasefire if shells are still being lobbed over by one side or the other?”

Yes, it’s possible. The legal definition of ceasefire doesn’t always mean what you’d think it means. Depending on the terms of the treaty it might mean that the official military has agreed to a ceasefire. That doesn’t mean other groups couldn’t lob a few rockets over the border and they often do. Of course the Israelis counter that those groups weren’t really independent. That the Palestinians are supporting them, which may be true and so the merry-go-round continues.

 
 

If the Palestinians didn’t want to be bombed, why do they keep reproducing so many targets?

My wife and I couldn’t conceive a child, so I killed the neighbor’s kids.
Adoption? No way! The kid may not be the same Jewish race as me!

 
 

While I would certainly argue that Goldberg’s assertion that “Israelis want to minimize Palestinian casualties” is false, does anyone here really believe that Hamas doesn’t want more Palestinian civilian casualties?

To some extent, this is exactly accurate: both sides are driven primarily by a convergent belief that what needs to happen is a no-holds-barred race war which will end in the glorious cleansing of the interloping Semite infidel. What Likud and Hamas vary on is primarily which Semitic infidel it is who will wind up being cleansed gloriously.

In another sense, though, it’s somewhat disingenuous (as we like to) to give full agency to the Hamas leadership. Sure, they’re more than happy when Palestinian children being massacred gives their enemies bad press, but we like to pretend that they’re completely to blame for this (per the right) or that they and the invaders are equally to blame for it (per as acceptably far-left as American opinion on the I-P conflict gets).

The bottom line is that the IDF – after months, maybe over a year, of planning, and certainly in a move anticipated since the ignominy suffered at the hands of the actually-combat-capable Hezbollah – is currently inflicting hundreds of casualties in order to destroy a political party in a foreign country which they quit so recently that their former checkposts are likely still being used as hovels.

Unlike their last such attempt to do so, the political party isn’t a massive social institution in the foreign country and the foreign country is diplomatically isolated and militarily underwhelming, so this time – unlike last time – they will probably either succeed or come close enough to it to pull off a propaganda victory. The problem is that it hasn’t in that short time magically become the right thing to do. It’s a military solution to an economic and political problem, and no matter how ‘surgical’ or ‘precise’ or ‘humanitarian’ you are you’re going to bereave people, you’re going to render people homeless and vulnerable, you’re going to cast a lot of people into the dirt – and if you haven’t scrubbed that political segment completely clean, they’ll be an ideal constituency for another predatory right-wing resistance party.

People are being killed in the name of an ignoble aim by a state which has never considered any limits on its resort to bellicose means appropriate – and because the dominant frame in American politics is between what they’re doing being A-OK and us being a bunch of Stalinist wreckers for refusing to accept reprisal killings and summary executions, we’ll always be a basically poisonous influence on Israel.

We’re the reason Olmert has the political and diplomatic capital to try and solve his own political problems by bombing a political party out of a neighbor which he has previously attempted to hermetically seal. We’re the reason another PM ten years down the line will be doing the exact same thing, the little brothers of our Goldbergs and our Liebermen (and our Hagees and our McCains, and our Clintons and yes our Obamas, the dozens of invisible gentiles to every visible Jew guiding, shaping, and supporting our venomous policies) will be saying the exact same thing, and dozens of Palestinian children who a single fucking change now could have bought a half-decent life for are just going to grow up and continue the cycle, join another party whose name says something awesome about God and die pointless deaths fighting an imperial juggernaut to give the bosses on both sides of the line pretext to play at being sinned-against innocent weaklings.

So yeah, Hamas wants more Palestinian civilian casualties. Sure. But in the grand scheme of things they matter about as much as a fart in a paper mill.

 
 

Mooser – Nah! You think?

Please enlighten me. Seriously. That is what you hear in the media though and I’m half a world away and there is so much noise about this subject that I just don’t know what is what. That may be what some want I suppose. This whole subject is one big tar pit so I usually just avoid it.

 
 

Hey, hows about a little comic relief?

The President (George Bush) intends to appoint the following individuals to be Members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council:

Elliot Abrams, of Virginia, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Joshua B. Bolten, of the District of Columbia, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Alan I. Casden, of California, for the remainder of a five-year term expiring 01/15/11;

Michael Chertoff, of New Jersey, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

William Danhof, of Michigan, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Sanford Gottesman, of Texas, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Cheryl Feldman Halpern, of New Jersey, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09,;

J. David Heller, of Ohio, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Amy Kaslow, of Maryland, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

M. Ronald Krongold, of Florida, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Michael B. Mukasey, of New York, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09;

Daniel Silva, of the District of Columbia, for a five-year term beginning 01/16/09.
———————————————————————————————————

My favorites are in bold, but you may have your own.

 
 

Perhaps Joe teh Welfare Queen can sort this all out during his tenure as PajamasTV War Correspondent. I’m crappin’ you negative.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_re_us/joe_the_plumber;_ylt=AhvBrR71OnZOqnzpuv2WTjCs0NUE

 
 

don’t wingnuts not believe in autism? I wonder how that’s going to work out.

I don’t think there’s a Rabid Weasel talking point on autism yet, though that Michael Savage fella seems to have an opinion. (“Man up & quit whining.”)

I’m more curious as to the latest Mrs. Prager’s age difference w/ Dennis, the fact that she’s either a divorced slut or just a slut (where’d those two boys come from?) & that her sister died of cancer at 35. Sister dead of cancer at an early age, one son autistic. Toxic environment?

Sue met Dennis at a speech he gave for the Jewish organization Chabad in San Diego, where she lived until 2008 when she moved to Los Angeles.

Groupie? Dennis getting some action on the road? Was Dennie married then? Where’s the condemnation & moral outrage?

And a sarcastically sexist note: She went to law school, practiced “business transaction law(?)” for six months & then suddenly realized she had an autistic child she should stay home to care for? This is exactly why women shouldn’t be given anything to do but drop ’em & raise ’em! Or, In Dennis’ case, bend over & spread ’em! A white man could have had her law school slot!! Racist, sexist liberals!!

 
 

Legalize: Yeah, and the PJM-run “Conservatism 2.0” conference is being touted with huge ads featuring Sam the Skinhead’s friendly mug. Is that mendacious lump really a celebrity to the right wing? That speaks volumes, if so.

 
 

OTB said,
January 7, 2009 at 16:26

Good morning!

Take your firedoglake (what the fucking hell does that MEAN, anyway? Wouldn’t a flaming dog be put out by the lake? Is it a Dalmatian taking a swim? What?) phonus balonus cheery good morning crap & shove it!!

 
 

Frist!

 
 

The winger leadership rally also kicked out CSPAN and all other media covering the “event.” It’s understandable. You can’t really get a feel for the contestants’ positions with out freeing them up to drop n-bombs without fear of being persecuted by liberal fascists. The GOP will kill itself hoping to find the cure.

 
 

Legalize: Yeah, and the PJM-run “Conservatism 2.0? conference is being touted with huge ads featuring Sam the Skinhead’s friendly mug. Is that mendacious lump really a celebrity to the right wing? That speaks volumes, if so.

A lying tax-cheat who has delusions of grandeur involving buying his employer’s business &/or cutting a country western record, w/o out the slightest preparation or consultation w/ reality? Celebrity to the the right wing? He is the Right wing.

And now he’s going to be a “W. C.?” Why, his delusions of macho are the cherry topping the shit sundae.

 
 

The President (George Bush) intends to appoint the following individuals to be Members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council:

Words fail me.

I guess we’ll be spending the next five years learning never to repeat the mistake made by Europe when they tolerated Hitler’s fondness for arugula.

I’ll admit to not following the United States Holocaust Memorial Council too closely (I tend to find default American opinions on the Holocaust only slightly more dodgy than default European opinions on the Indian genocide), but is it common to basically fill it with political appointees? If not, I like to think Bush will find a way to appoint Mitt Romney head of the ASPCA before the door hits his ass on the way out. And even if so, Jesus Christ (so to speak), Elliot Abrams!?

 
 

He is the Right wing.

The Republican right. I think we have to be careful of fully associating the right with the GOP; Harry Reid has a lot more potential to fuck shit up than the increasingly small and impotent number of people who take an irritating, self-obsessed asshole who, when thinking of a black President, imagines Sammy Davis Junior ruining his Second Life with capital gains tax seriously.

 
 

I’m nagunnah look it up, but didn’t Goofball W. have some controversy w/ a previous appointment to said commission? (Like the guy was a Nazi, or a Zion-o-Nazi, or [here’s a surprise for a Bushie] said something really stupid?)

And w/ Abrams on it, maybe it’ll become a sort of reverse-Holocaust study group. “How to finally solve the Palestinian problem, w/o any one noticing until…”

 
 

Quick — how is the right wing, which spent the electoral season screaming about how Barack “No Birth Certificate” Kenyan-Born Muslim HUSSEIN Louis Farrakhan Marcus Garvey Muhammad Arafat Obama X. was surely a big ally of Al Qa’ida, and here Al Qa’ida is already criticizing Obama:

Al Qaeda No. 2 Blasts Obama Over Gaza – In Record Time

New York Daily News | January 7, 2009

Osama Bin Laden’s top thug on Tuesday blamed President-elect Barack Obama for Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza.

These raids are Obama’s gift to you before he takes office,” Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a taped 10-minute speech to Muslims.

“This is Obama whom the American machine of lies tried to portray as the rescuer who will change the policy of America,” Zawahiri says in the tape, according to a SITE Intelligence Group translation. “He kills [Palestinian] brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection.”

Apparently Zawahiri hadn’t heard Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet, or assumed he exercised power once elected.

The other question is how the New York Daily News could be so f***ing stupid that they snark “Apparently Zawahiri hadn’t heard Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet” merely 2 f***ing paragraphs after printing the Zawahiri quote “These raids are Obama’s gift to you before he takes office“.

What sort of monkeys are these?

 
 

It’s AMAZING how the war on credit takes a MASSIVE backseat when there’s a war on again.
Get some perspective people.

 
 

Anyway, how is the right wing going to spin this? Is this all a clever trick by Al Qa’ida to make us think that Obama Hussein Manchurian Candidate is Al Qa’ida’s enemy whereas in reality by 5 pm on January 20th we will all be forced to pray to Allah?

 
 

“In order to mary Prager I would think it would be NECESSARY to have a drinking problem.”

…but not sufficient.

 
 

Of course it’s a trick. Their filthy lying religion “requires” them to lie to white folksdecent Westerners.

And that’s 12:30 Eastern on Jan 20th. Better find your local mosque, because people not in them will be shot on sight by the army of Islamo-Nazi-terrorists who’ve been living in cargo containers in all our port cities for the last six months, waiting until 20 January to come out & take over, right after Obama dissolves the Armed Forces & sends a plane into the Pentagon (again) for his Inaugural speech.

The only bright spot is that B. O. will cut off Rick Warren’s head on stage, as an example of an infidel dog getting his due.

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

A lying tax-cheat who has delusions of grandeur involving buying his employer’s business &/or cutting a country western record, w/o out the slightest preparation or consultation w/ reality? Celebrity to the the right wing? He is the Right wing.

Don’t forget, he also went on welfare at least once, and continued to decry “Sharing the Wealth” and “Handouts”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPzW2XELAfw

Damn, he gives Big Bald Bastards a bad name!

 
 

One side issue: Jeffrey Goldberg’s only decent journalism of late has been his “taking knives and shit on planes” piece about TSA security theatre.

Had he been an ay-rab, he’d be in jail.

He’s the exemplar of how the PR game is rigged on Israel’s side. He has skin in the game. At the same time, you have smooth-talking Aussie-born spokesbot Mark Regev showing up on every TV station, buddying-up with people like the former JPost writer Wolf Blitzer. This is more sophisticated than “omg Joooz rule the media!”: it’s that Israel has spent a lot of time and money on creating a PR apparatus that integrates seamlessly with the US media.

If a Palestinian stood in front of a tank like the guy in Tiananmen Square, the US cabloids would unquestioningly report the Israeli spokesman describing him as a dangerous terrorist.

 
 

And in other news,

schmuck that he is, sometimes I love Larry Flynt.

 
 

Well, media handjobs to Israel aside, it’s pretty hard to spin killing many more people by accident in “surgical” strikes than the other guys do on purpose through lobbed rockets and suicide bombings combined.

 
 

Y’all have to check out this post from Dennis Perrin:

Frontline Laffs

Now that is some wicked funny.

 
 

It’s AMAZING how the war on credit takes a MASSIVE backseat when there’s a war on again.
Get some perspective people.

Well, arresting celebrities does sort of lose its gloss after a few election cycles. And Blago pulled a George Costanza and just walked into work after massive public humiliation. Our skins are too thick for just any old mayhem.

 
 

OT but…

rumproast.com FTW! Wonkette FTW!

Just sayin…

 
 

The President (George Bush) intends to appoint the following individuals to be Members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council

Meh.

It’s a glorified museum. No biggie.

 
 

M. Bouffant honey, is it … that time of month? And I would have thought your slut-calling “sarcastic sexism” enough for one post.

 
 

I tend to find default American opinions on the Holocaust only slightly more dodgy than default European opinions on the Indian genocide…

Well, ok. But isn’t the default opinion that they’re both horrific? Or is there a silver lining I’m just not seeing?

 
 

Waitaminnit, Cheryl “NPR is a Jewish Arab conspiracy” Halpern? I take it she was put in the seat for being the only Jew in New Jersey to vote for McCain.

I suspect a lot of them are gonna be kinda like that – subtle, low-profile frothing wingnuts, basically appointed in order to accuse Obama’s ropy black dick of being a source of anti-Israeli bias. (The idea of widespread black enmity for Jews is a favorite canard among the racist fringe, i.e. Podhoretz’s Negro Problem piece – part of a wider tendency among the wealthy, well-connected extremist bigots who get treated as the norm for American Jews to hold near and dear the idea that everyone who causes them to lock their windows and rant about affirmative action is in on a massive conspiracy to put them into the gulag, and therefore they’re justified in fantasizing endlessly about shooting them during the no-doubt inevitable mugging.)

 
 

Well, maybe sarcasm wasn’t the word. It was an attempted quick dip into the mind of the righteous right winger. They’d ask questions like that, if it weren’t Mrs. Prager.

P. S.: It’s that time of the century w/ me, 24/7. Nobody knows the troubles I seen.

Now it’s the rest of the world’s turn to suffer.

 
 

Well, ok. But isn’t the default opinion that they’re both horrific? Or is there a silver lining I’m just not seeing?

The default opinion is that they were horrific crimes against (simple-minded how-going ecologically-sensitive noble savages / middle-class Keillor characters living idyllic lives in quaint hamlets in the scenic Polish march) by an entire continent that uniformly hated them and wanted them dead.

The instinct – outrage at genocide – is correct; the conclusions are all kinds of wrong. At best, it’s simply shoddy and ignorant; at worst, it leads to spectacularly misguided shit like your J-Pods convincing themselves that they have every bit as much to fear from the world as the illiterate ghetto peasants they mistakenly believe they hail from or the idiotic belief that the worst thing about America is the ruthless, pious land-grubbing cowboys.

The Holocaust was a result of systematic discrimination. The flood of survivors that essentially founded modern Israel are completely different in character and in background from both the colonialist nutjobs that first settled there and the aforementioned illiterate peasants who made up the bulk of (and survived the least frequently out of) the victims of the Holocaust. The problem is that our perspective conveniently crushes them all into the same sort of people with the same sort of goals.

 
 

This kind of event is the real reason the right equates the Fairness Doctrine with censorship, Satanism & Fetus Sherbet – can you imagine the media having to make the choice between giving equal time to Palestinian spokespeople & telling the AIPAC press-flacks to GTFO? A beautiful fantasy – but still only a fantasy nonetheless. Even if Obama had the cojones to put the Fairness Doctrine on the books – which I strongly doubt – its targets would find ways to render it useless in short order. The media lobby knows what keeps the gravy-train on the rails, & it ain’t called balance.

Hamas hiding behind civilians in the West Bank? Holy fuck – it’s possibly the most densely populated chunk of real-estate on the planet … they’re literally arsehole-to-elbow in there – where pray tell could they seek cover where there AREN’T civilians?

You have this perverse situation, America obvious faces this in Afghanistan, and faced it ultimately, I think fairly successfully in Iraq, or at least provisionally successfully in Iraq, where the weaker party wants you, the stronger party, to maximize his own casualties.

Provisional success? I guess Napoleon was “provisionally successful” at Waterloo too, then, what with tricking Wellington into maximizing his casualties & all. Makes perfect sense to me.

“You’re still not killing enough of us, infidel dogs! Bomb faster!”

Yeah, & nothing says “surgical strike” quite like 2,000-pound bombs dropped into crowded residential areas. Focused like a laser – if your laser happens to be a blunderbuss.

schmuck that he is, sometimes I love Larry Flynt.

Ohhh yeah, baby, get that bottom-line up nice & high … mmm, that looks like one sweet stimulus-package … yeah, baby, I got your bailout right here.

 
 

Oh giggity. Welfare Joe is going to give us 10 days of awesome:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/07/joe-plumber-war-correspondent/

“I get to go over there and let their “Average Joes” share their story, what they think, how they feel – especially with, you know, world opinion. Maybe get a real story out there.”

None more awesomer,

 
 

“I get to go over there and let their “Average Joes” share their story, what they think, how they feel – especially with, you know, world opinion. Maybe get a real story out there.”

Will he wear a bikini, lipsynch and dance for us, too? [koff!oshry!koff!]

 
 

I’m sure Joe the Plumber’s dispatches from the field will fuel a number of Sadly, No posts bubbling with hilarity.

Am I the only one who is betting that Joe is probably applying for a passport for the first time in his life for his foray into the Middle East?

 
 

Prosperity is the antidote to terror. When you get to a place where there are more shopkeepers with a stake in shit not blowing up all the time than people with little to lose, that’s when shit stops blowing up all the time. As per Northern Ireland. – D. Aristophanes

I don’t think that’s quite what happened with Northern Ireland, but it’s very close.

IMHO, conflicts like the conflict in Northern Ireland or Israel/Palestine, for which there is no “middle ground”, tend to get solved when one or both of the “extremes” becomes palatable for “reasonable people”. I.e. if a reasonable person on one side looks at the hardline position on the other side and says “mneh … even if the hardliners on the other side win, it still won’t be that bad for me”.

This is what happened with apartheid: at some point Joe White South African said “so? even if that hardline ANC gets into power, things might get bad for me but not that bad”. So what was the point in fighting the end of apartheid anymore?

This is certainly what happened on both sides in Northern Ireland: once Ireland went from a poor, extremely Catholic country to being a relatively well-off and only very Catholic country, Jack Unionist could say “bugger then … even if the republicans get their way and we become part of Ireland, it wouldn’t be such a bad deal then”. Meanwhile when Britain had a Catholic first lady and Scotland got a parliament, Sean Republican could say “so we aren’t part of Ireland but rather the U.K. … now that things are better for Catholics and Celts have home rule to some degree in the U.K., we got what we want, so why fight more?”.

The problem in Israel/Palestine is that the reasonable people on both sides have every reason to keep on fighting. Unlike the ANC, what has even the “relatively moderate Fatah movement” done to make Israeli Jews feel “nu? even if all of Israel is absorbed into a Palestinian state, it’d still be ok for me as a Jew to live there”? And what has the Israeli side done except look completely disingenuous as far as the Palestinians are concerned?

That being said, it seems to me that Israel was under attack and has had every right to do what it is doing. A cease fire? Come-on … all that would do is allow Hamas a chance to re-arm.

And as to Alec’s comment against the mentality of “they have every bit as much to fear from the world as the illiterate ghetto peasants” … in fact they do: the world has continuously condemned Israel for breaking “international norms” that only seem to be considered norms when Israel breaks them. There is a double standard here against Israel.

 
 

Look for the liberal media to shoot Honest hard workin’ not-Joe’s plane out of the sky so that they can advance their evil world-domination-by-getting-killed agenda.

 
 

Joe the Real Story Bringer: because there’s nothing this world needs more than annoying-as-Hell know-nothing publicity hounds sharing their fact-free feelings on current events with us.

 
 

the world has continuously condemned Israel for breaking “international norms” that only seem to be considered norms when Israel breaks them. There is a double standard here against Israel.

So you believe Israel’s govt is at the same moral level as Hamas? Interesting.

 
 

Welfare Joe is going to give us 10 days of awesome

I put $50 at Ladbrookes.co.uk that he doesn’t set a toe in Gaza itself.

 
 

I have this horrible, sinking feeling that Joe the Plumber is gonna go over there and get kidnapped by terrorists and held prisoner for as long as the Iranian hostages were held, thereby inflicting upon my consciousness an unwelcome regular reminder of his existence for an extended period of time.

Where the fuck do they find these people? How do they interview folks to make sure they find the one least qualified for the job? What does this surreal parallel universe anti-interview process look like?

 
 

They’d ask questions like that, if it weren’t Mrs. Prager.

Wait. Mrs Dennis Prager or Mrs MRS Dennis Prager?

 
 

How do they interview folks to make sure they find the one least qualified for the job?

As always, the Marx Brothers provide the answer:

Rufus T. Firefly: How would you like a job in the mint?
Chicolini: Mint? No, no, I no like a mint. Uh – what other flavor you got?
Rufus T. Firefly: Just for that, you don’t get the job I was going to give you.
Chicolini: What job?
Rufus T. Firefly: Secretary of War.
Chicolini: All right, I take it.
Rufus T. Firefly: Sold.

 
 

I am breathless with anticipation wondering how Israelis citizens will respond when Joe introduces himself as the famous Joe The Plumber.

Will it be “Who?” or “Huh?”

Does he actually think anyone outside our borders even knows who he is? I can just see him setting up some interview full of self-referential questions, and people looking at him like, “Who is this nut-case?”

Maybe they’ll mistake him for the guys who filmed the movie “Jackass.”

 
 

in fact they do: the world has continuously condemned Israel for breaking “international norms” that only seem to be considered norms when Israel breaks them. There is a double standard here against Israel.

The worst souring of opinion on Israel imaginable, even if it somehow affected the US (we’re assuming a sort of magical post-imperial US which actually gives a shit about the rest of the world instead of being militantly ignorant about it and then acting surprised and hurt when the world shoves a buckknife up its ass), would not result in any Podhoretz being thrown into a camp.

Polish Jews particularly and eastern European Jews generally being killed by the millions took a single bad decade. (To be fair the major pogroms in Russia followed three bad decades, but so it goes.)

People who as teenagers thought of gentiles as aloof, somewhat hostile but generally tolerable foreigners were being murdered by them as adults.

Those people have every reason to nurture a siege mentality, because they’re under freaking siege. And more importantly, they pretty much by definition don’t have the personal or social resources to translate that siege mentality into anything truly brutal. Inculcate that siege mentality into chubby-cheeked young capitalists, on the other hand…

 
 

Well, Israel certainly seems to have internalized the Victim Mentality.

 
 

I have this horrible, sinking feeling that Joe the Plumber is gonna go over there and get kidnapped by terrorists and held prisoner

Not wishing any actual harm on the putz, but the only possible good to come from such a scenario would be the inevitable video he’d be forced to make condemning Israel and the U.S., followed immediately by Malkin and company screaming about what a spineless appeaser he was, and how they totally never would have capitulated.

 
 

This is certainly what happened on both sides in Northern Ireland

No it certainly isn’t. Sorry, DAS, but that paragraph of yours on NI is just pulled out of your ass, with a complete misconception of Catholic identity in the mainland and the situation on the ground in NI. Devolution in Scotland and Wales was tangential at best, and it wasn’t anything to do with Cherie Blair.

NI was fucking poor. During the worst of the violence in the 1980s, it had an unemployment rate twice that of the worst-hit pockets of mainland Britain. The kids who couldn’t get on the boat had fuck-all to do, and the mob bosses who draped themselves in the paramilitary garb gave them something to do.

It was — and still is — an achingly slow process from a mutually-recognised stalemate that continued because people couldn’t think of anything better to do, to a framework that still doesn’t provide a final settlement, but creates space and time and a heavy dose of EU hardship funding for people to actually do shit with their lives.

 
 

Palestine’s unemployment rate is around 45%.

 
 

Those people have every reason to nurture a siege mentality, because they’re under freaking siege.

# The 1 June 2001 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, in which 21 people were murdered and 120 were wounded;
# The 9 August 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem restaurant, in which 15 people were murdered and 130 were wounded;
# The 1 December 2001 double suicide bombing on the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 188 were wounded;
# The 2 December 2001 suicide bombing of a #16 bus in Haifa, in which 15 people were murdered and 40 were wounded;
# The 9 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which 11 people were murdered and 54 were wounded;
# The 27 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Netanya hotel on the first night of Passover, in which 30 people were murdered and 140 were wounded;
# The 18 June 2002 suicide bombing of a #32A bus in Jerusalem, in which 19 people were murdered and 74 were wounded;
# The 4 August 2002 suicide bombing of #361 bus at Meron junction, in which nine people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 21 November 2002 suicide bombing of a #20 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 5 March 2003 suicide bombing of a #37 bus in Haifa, in which 17 people were murdered and 53 were wounded;
# The 17 May 2003 suicide bombing in Hebron, in which two people were murdered;
# The 18 May 2003 suicide bombing of a #6 bus in Jerusalem, in which seven people were murdered and 20 wounded;
# The 11 June 2003 suicide bombing of #14A bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and over 100 were wounded;
# The 19 August 2003 suicide bombing of a #2 bus in Jerusalem, in which 23 people were murdered and over 130 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a hitchhiking post near the IDF base at Tzrifin, in which nine soldiers were murdered and 10 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which seven people were murdered and 70 were wounded;
# The 29 January 2004 suicide bombing of a #19 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 44 were wounded;
# The 14 March 2004 double suicide bombing at Ashdod port, in which 10 people were murdered and 16 were wounded.
# On Aug 31, 2004 16 people were killed and 100 wounded in two suicide bombings within minutes of each other on two Beersheba city buses, on route nos. 6 and 12.

 
 

B.N.: Yes, because American Jews are continuously menaced by exploding Palestinians at home and in the workplace.

 
 

Yeah, how dare those Palestinians not roll over for “Living Space”. I mean if somebody kicked all the people out of Maine for South Nova Scotia those Maine folks sure as hell wouldn’t carp about it, no sir.

 
You Can't Put Lipstick On A Repig
 

> # The 1 June 2001 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, in which 21 people were murdered and 120 were wounded;

Are you trying to make the point that Israel has killed more Palestinians in ~10 days than the Palestinians killed in 5 years?

Keeping count in this fashion is surely the fastest way to peace!

 
 

“I can just see him setting up some interview full of self-referential questions, and people looking at him like, “Who is this nut-case?””

I can certainly see the Daily Show gang riffing on this theme. Can. Not. Wait. for Jason Jones does Palestine.

 
 

Palestine’s unemployment rate is around 45%.

My experience has been that people with nothing to occupy them and no money spend their time Doing Good.

 
 

Idle Hands Are an Angel’s Playground.

 
 

Hey, B. Niccoli-

Do you have a list of all the Palestinians that died or were wounded in the same time frame?

Just for comparison’s sake.

 
 

Perhaps a map of Land and Housing Stolen by Palestinians from Israelis would be appropriate.

 
 

Maybe it’s because I’ve moved around a lot, but I’ve always thought it might be simpler to just grab some landmarks and give Israel a big chunk of the Australian Outback.

They could have the same size country without displacing anyone else. The Outback is freakin’ big. They have a similar climate. And they could not worry about bombs and mayhem.

I don’t think it would solve everything in the Middle East, but the excuses would change. And many of these countries didn’t have anything before oil. What will they do after the oil is all gone?

To a certain extent, that financial advantage has kept many oil-rich countries from growing up; just as a trust fund lets a boy grow up without becoming a man.

 
 

Yeah, Goldberg also wrote a post entitled “That Michael Scheuer Sure is One Crazy Jew-Hater” in which he plays the antisemitism card and criticizes Scheuer for daring to write a post using the words “cancer” and Israel in the same paragraph. The words that come to mind when describing his reaction are “biased” and “unhinged.”

 
 

I’m not following the logic that it’s OK to blow up innocent civilians if they’re Israeli, but a war crime if they’re Palestinian. Recognizing that terrorism against Israelis does not justify what is happening in Gaza is far different than “so what, Israelis suck”.

 
 

I’m not following the logic that it’s OK to blow up innocent civilians if they’re Israeli, but a war crime if they’re Palestinian.

Both are crimes, no question.

 
 

I’m not following the logic that it’s OK to blow up innocent civilians if they’re Israeli, but a war crime if they’re Palestinian. Recognizing that terrorism against Israelis does not justify what is happening in Gaza is far different than “so what, Israelis suck”.

Well, there’s the rub, innit?

Because the fact is, w/r/t the Palestinians, the Israelis do, in fact, suck.

That’s not a justification for Palestinian attacks on Israelis; instead it just makes such incidents inevitable. When people are fenced in, denied free movement, employment opportunity and on and on…while at the same time those fencing them in launch occasional forays into the area to shoot and bomb, you can’t really blame them for feeling like the targets in a Cheney canned hunt. They’ve got nowhere to go, and to make things even worse, they’re fenced in with people who are armed to the teeth and drawing violence down upon them – but under threat from them as well. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

So, while both sides are guilty of committing crimes against one another, only one side is as a matter of public policy backed by the force of an organized government, inflicting crimes upon the other on a routine daily basis. Look, if throwing bombs or driving tanks into areas where there’s no escape for the innocents isn’t terrorism, then these last 8 years have completely degraded the meaning of words.

So I don’t buy into the equivalency here, while I acknowledge that both sides have committed crimes against one another. Because only one side is enforcing an ongoing daily policy that is the poison root of the entire tree. When you are keeping people caged up and occasionally coming around to inflict some violence, none of those caged people are going to be able to get beyond that basic fact before moving on to anything else and things aren’t going to improve.

 
 

You know, Atlas Shrugs is not winning Best Conservative Blog. Let the scum rise to the top.

Okay, Ace is winning and he’s a dimwit, but he’s not quite as nutty as I’d like.

 
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
 

Ace is winning and he’s a dimwit, but he’s not quite as nutty as I’d like.

It’ll have to do – I can’t get the bedam site to come up at all. It must be mad at me for saying it was meaningless.

 
 

It must be mad at me for saying it was meaningless.

Yep, the site is super-slow. Someone should start at New Quick-Loading Weblog Awards.

 
 

This is certainly what happened on both sides in Northern Ireland … Jack Unionist … Britain had a Catholic first lady … Sean Republican … we got what we want, so why fight more?”.

That is an excellent and insightful analysis of political developments in NI over the past decade or so, except for the part about having fuck all to do with anything that has ever happened there (or in the rest of the UK or the Republic, for that matter).

For future reference, BTW, in the NI context, “unionist” is not the opposite number of “republican”.

 
 

Wow, it evolved into fun time over here! So, have the wingnuts figured out yet that this isn’t technically our war? Or even just their war? I’ve never seen so much flattened ass warrior syndrome in my life.

 
 

Where did Ashley Todd go? You remember, the B-carved-in-face girl?

So, what ever happened with her?

 
 

“Bush is ultimately correct in saying that democracy is the antidote to terror, that freedom is the antidote.”

Unfortunately, nobody wants to give the Gazans the relevant freedoms, like the freedom to determine the inflow and outflow of goods and services and people, rather than being under lockdown by Israel and Egypt, with supplies constrained, energy at Israel’s whim, and the economy completely bollixed because Israel can shut it down at any time.

Goldberg, no doubt, means “the freedom to not have the government they elected”.

 
 

“So, what ever happened with [Ashley Todd]?”

She’s hosting a show on Pajamas Media as “Ashley The Cutter”.

 
 

So I don’t buy into the equivalency here, while I acknowledge that both sides have committed crimes against one another. Because only one side is enforcing an ongoing daily policy that is the poison root of the entire tree. When you are keeping people caged up and occasionally coming around to inflict some violence, none of those caged people are going to be able to get beyond that basic fact before moving on to anything else and things aren’t going to improve.

More importantly, it’s better to get cross with Israel simply because getting cross with Israel can possibly lead to anything constructive. What are we gonna do to Gaza that hasn’t already happened to them twice?

 
 

Maybe it’s because I’ve moved around a lot, but I’ve always thought it might be simpler to just grab some landmarks and give Israel a big chunk of the Australian Outback.

I liked Fran Lebowtz’ NPR interview, just post-9/11, where she said, basically, “If we had given Germany to the Jews, and moved the Germans into Palestine, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.” Ouch.

I think the outback is missing a wailing wall, though.

What will they do after the oil is all gone?

I don’t know that the concept is lost on them. There is apparently a proverb, “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet. His son will ride a camel.” implying a better acceptance of the ephemeral nature of the current world situation than the average American.

Frankly, I personally have no fucking idea how to end that shit. I don’t think anyone does. All possible outcomes are a total loss for someone, or are seen that way by the parties that count. Is it fucked up that Palestinians seem to find blowing up Israelis better than sex and teach their children that the only good Jew is a dead Jew? Yes. Is it fucked up that the Israelis are, and have been for generations, trying their damndest to commit an under the table genocide, and making the lives of any Palestinian unwilling to conveniently die so fucking miserable that they might at least consider it? Yes.

What’s the solution? Fuck if I know. The one thing I can say with some certainty is that it won’t be coming any time soon, regardless of the calls for scorched earth (and babies) from the whingenuts or the most earnest, intelligent and well-meaning attempts at intervention by our new administration. People are going to continue to die because clearly nothing is more important than a millennia-old family feud.

 
 

Where’s Dragon-King Wangchuck? I miss me some Dragon-King Wangchuck.

 
 

So you believe Israel’s govt is at the same moral level as Hamas?

GOOD HEAVENS NO!

If the Israeli government would operate on the same moral level as Hamas, we’d be WAY better off.

The Israeli government is ten orders of magnitude MORE immoral than Hamas.

They have ALL the power. They could CHOOSE to respond to the resistance in a proportionate manner. They could CHOOSE not to flaunt the laws of war. They could cease targeting civilians and using collective punishment. They could negotiate in good faith. Nothing bad would happen to them if they did.

Nearly a thousand dead civilians should speak to somebody, even if it didn’t speak to the bloodthirsty and depraved madmen supporting this slaughter. Following, as it does, the slaughter in lebanon.

The people who have pointed out that there are VERY few nations that would be allowed to commit this horrorshow are so right, and really get to the nut of it.

Good lord, can you imagine if Hamas mounted an operation that killed HUNDREDS of Israeli civilians? Nukes would pop.

Sick fuckers will continue the siege, the slaughter, the ridiculous imbalance, the unfair domination, until one of two things happen. One, the world, finally sickened and exhausted by the murderous Israeli regime force them to behave in a civilized fashion and prevent the abuses, or the arab nations finally decide this obscene, gross imbalance must not be allowed to stand, and they truly do destroy Israel. Historians will lament the lost opportunities that lie stained by Israeli urine in the pages of history.

This cannot end well for anyone…

mikey

 
 

When ya steal someone’s land through force, it can take generations for the “pissed” to wear off. If I was a Palestinian, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to fight the Israelis, but I know I’d be pissed.

 
 

“They could negotiate in good faith. Nothing bad would happen to them if they did.”

Fail.

 
 

When ya steal someone’s land through force, it can take generations for the “pissed” to wear off.

I dunno…the First Nations here took it pretty well.

 
 

Is it fucked up that Palestinians seem to find blowing up Israelis better than sex and teach their children that the only good Jew is a dead Jew? Yes. Is it fucked up that the Israelis are, and have been for generations, trying their damndest to commit an under the table genocide

Jesus Christ’s tits in a mason jar, son, do you REALLY think these are actual, unrelated facts? Do you really think there would be a resistance without a blockade, without a siege, without the settlements and the airstrikes and the assassinations and the “incursions” and the invasions and the closed borders and the lies and the broken promises?

Do you really believe that there is some palestinian genetic mental illness that makes them want to kill Israelis for sexual pleasure? Can you not understand that they are FIGHTING for their survival? Is the concept of four generations in a “refugee camp” impossible for you to understand? Can you look me in the eye and tell me, if you were the son of a son of a son of a man who had his land taken arbitrarily from him, and a family who has had NOTHING, as in NO THING since, nothing but sadness and death and sickness and hopelessness, will you stand up and say you would not fight? You would not gladly die to kill your oppressors?

This is every kind of ugly. And here’s the deal. It’s not about jews. Jews have pretty much nothing to do about it. People in the Israeli government are making these horrendous decisions on a national, not on a tribal basis. They are political and military leadership. And they are being allowed to commit serial war crimes due to who they are and who is their protector. And it’s time to hold them accountable…

mikey

 
 

My experience has been that people with nothing to occupy them and no money spend their time Doing Good.

Y’know, we can help bailout the porn industry AND solve this crisis with an airlift of back issues of Hustler.

 
 

Obviously, the Moslem bacillus is a permanent impediment to peace on normal terms as we comprehend it. It’s like negotiating with wolves or rats or something.

I like how you just pull out a bunch of non-sequiturs: Israel and Palestine half-assing in 2000 is a general trend, one or two hundred Israelis being killed in terror attacks over a decade (during the freaking Intifada, no less) is clear evidence Jews in New York should immediately seek shelter when Arabs pass by. Blah blah blah blah.

Jesus, do you ever get tired of finding a vague pretext to whip out prepared remarks? I guess if I were to say something about halal butchery being completely humane you’d just redub Der Ewige Jude, although I might just be crediting you with too much intelligence there.

 
 

That’s stupid and ridiculous, Niccoli.

They kill palestinians ten or twenty to ONE.

They have F16s, cluster bombs, Merkava tanks, hellfire missiles and NUCLEAR fucking weapons. Christ, dood, that’s just stupid.

Lemme give you a nam sequitor. You ever been around a 2000 pound fucking bomb when it went off? I’m guessing no. I have, but I can’t even fucking imagine what that nightmare would be like in a city. People are going to bleed, and die, blinded, deafened, limbs knocked off. And how is this not terrorism, fuckwad?

mikey

 
 

Help!! Anybody!! New, non-Gazan post needed immediately, before I crawl out of the toobz & smack someone/anyone through their monitor.

 
 

This is every kind of ugly. And here’s the deal. It’s not about jews. Jews have pretty much nothing to do about it. People in the Israeli government are making these horrendous decisions on a national, not on a tribal basis.

And with regard to Israel, like no other country on Earth, America can only see the tribes. It’s funny: we’re functionally non-ethnicized, in spite of the desperate attempts of the right; we’re a country based on an idea, and we project that everywhere else we look. Sometimes, like our general take on European politics, this is a generally benevolent thing; we, or most of us, would never get shit-slingers like le Pen or Steyn. On the other hand, we let Bush sell us an easy war and an easier peace in Iraq.

And yet when it comes to Israel, it’s impossible to drop the tribes and just think nationally. It’s the Jews. It’s never the French or the Shia Arabs or the Han or any other group, but when it comes to Israel it’s the Jews, the whole Jews and nothing but the Jews.

It’s just stupid. And add that to the American media’s tendency towards ‘balance’ and highly organized efforts to favor the wealthy and the well-connected, and you’ve got the ugly 20% making all of the noise and setting all of the frames.

The sad thing? I suspect the Jews in America will get it long, long before anyone else will, and yet “the Jews” will always be presented as this single-issue hard-liner group – and Israel, the Jewish community, and Zionism (specifically nationalist Zionism, by far the dominant trend in Zionism outside of Israel) will always be presented as synonyms.

It’s just fucking disgusting.

 
 

Thanks mikey. As is so often the case, especially in matters of warfare, you provide bas relief to my chiaroscuro.

 
 

More importantly, it’s better to get cross with Israel simply because getting cross with Israel can possibly lead to anything constructive. What are we gonna do to Gaza that hasn’t already happened to them twice?

Yes. This is especially true in America, where pretty much everybody with a public voice makes the case for Israel and against… well, everybody who Israel doesn’t like.

 
 

Gawd, MzN, it just fucking infuriates me.

Israel in Gaza, Golan and the West Bank

US in Iraq and Afghanistan

Russia in Georgia. Ethiopia in Somalia. Sudan in Darfur. Nkunda in Congo.

We have reached some kind of “stability of dominance”, where the powerful can dominate and brutalize the weak, and all they have to do is wave the magic lantern of “terrorism” and the rules are suddenly revoked.

But where is the humanity? What has fucking HAPPENED to us? Us humans, I mean. Why is grinding the weakest among us into dust something we WANT to do? It gets us nothing. It accomplishes nothing, but save for lessening our reservoir of humanity. And we are forced to look farther and farther for even the weakest justification.

Where we should be finding a way to lift up the weakest, the sick, the hungry, educate the illiterate, feed the starving and house the helpless, we make bombs and attack helicopters and more guns and more guns and more fucking guns.

The path is obvious. And it is equally obvious that we, as a species, will not walk down that path. Our destruction is written in the atrocities we inflict upon those we choose to hate.

I don’t think I like us very much anymore….

mikey

 
 

mikey,

This is the closest I’ve come to what you describe. I was in Jerusalem visiting family, and was touring around the Old City that day. I thought about walking up Jaffa Road to Mahane Yehuda, but the heat of the day had worn me down. If I had made the walk I would have seen blood, death, blindness and deafness, limbs knocked off. That’s what Israel got for negotiating in good faith at Taba, fuckwad.

 
 

Niccoli, you are a thoughtless, inhuman thug. A slug, tribal, without care for the suffering of people outside your tribe.

You are the problem, you piece of shit, and your “solution” has been tried before. If you read your history, you may find that hits fairly close to home.

But either way, war pig, if you think you can somehow convince people that the Palestinians are some kind of existential threat to Israel, you’re gonna have a had sell.

Once again, they have no weapons but their lives, and if you let them have something, fuck, ANYTHING, they would be your partners, not your enemies.

Fucking murdering asshole…

mikey

 
 

That being said, it seems to me that Israel was under attack and has had every right to do what it is doing.

Three hypothetical questions:

A train car containing 10 Palestinians is careering down a track, completely out of control. Further down the track is an Israeli, oblivious to the onrushing train. Even if you called out, the Israeli would not have time to avoid being hit and killed. Your only option to save the Israeli’s life is to pull a lever which will derail the train, killing all ten innocent Palestinians inside. Do you pull the lever?

The same situation is occurring, except that the train was sabotaged by one of the Palestinians without the consent of the others. If you pull the lever, that evil Palestinian will be killed and the Israeli will be saved, but nine innocent Palestinians will be killed. Do you pull the lever?

A Hamas operative is hiding near a house containing 9 Palestinian civilians. He is preparing a rocket to fire into Israel that may kill an Israeli. You can drop a bomb and kill him, but you will also kill those civilians. Do you drop the bomb?

 
 

Ah hell, that’s far too rational for me at this point.

I want to shoot somebody…

mikey

 
 

If a Palestinian stood in front of a tank like the guy in Tiananmen Square, the US cabloids would unquestioningly report the Israeli spokesman describing him as a dangerous terrorist.

And if Israeli “settlers” were launching home-made rockets that occasionally kill the odd Palestinian they would be known as “hobbyists” or “rocketing enthusiasts”.

 
 

Joe the [unqualified] Plumber to become war correspondent. Next up, brain surgery, that is if anyone’s looking for an unqualified one.

 
 

And if Israeli “settlers” were launching home-made rockets that occasionally kill the odd Palestinian they would be known as “hobbyists” or “rocketing enthusiasts”.

How long before money is being raised to provide “settlers” w/ their own weaponry, as in Northern Ireland?

 
 

Here’s a video for Niccoli.

 
 

One of the few things I figured out long ago, is that if I’m going to go to war the most important qualification my colleagues MUST have is that they have figured out how to shit outdoors.

Bouffant, you’re on my right flank. Shoot anything that even squeaks…

mikey

 
 

That’s what Israel got for negotiating in good faith at Taba, fuckwad.

Yeah. No.

You’re talking about the solitary exception (revolving around the extremely violent past Israel and the PLO have with each other, a past which is more or less lacked by Hamas, which seeks to function as a belligerent rather than guerilla organization) to a larger trend of negotiation.

Sadat got shot for negotiating in good faith with Israel. The result? Israel lost the Palestine and the Baathist dream of a united Arab state collapsed.

Not just got set back, not just was impaired. Collapsed. From then on out, it would be impossible even in theory for the Arab coalition to raise an army capable of penetrating Israeli borders and occupying Israeli territory. It left the squawking political elite in place – Syria, with a brief interruption by Iraq for a time – but negotiation is the main reason Israel has had the luxury of developing a strategy of strategic bombardment, why conscription is a matter of the national character more than any truly pressing defense concern.

The existential crisis the American and Israeli hard right like to imagine Israel still faces ended because of negotiation between avowed enemies. And Sadat himself paid for that, but Egypt is still – miraculously, in light of Israel’s consistent chumminess with Islamist actors in the region, to act as a counterweight to the more leftist PLO – on good terms with its neighbor.

Egypt is, and will probably as long as the Nile flows remain, the only Arab power capable of raising an army large enough to overpower Israel’s, and negotiation took care of it.

I know it’s politically expedient for you to shit-name the idea of diplomacy, but better men than you have given their lives for it. It might not be quite as viscerally satisfying, but if 1978 hadn’t happened 1973 still would be, and trust me, that would put visceral satisfaction in a whole different light.

 
 

Ah, fuckit, guys.

Civilians being killed by battling rivals in their quest for political power is wrong, a disgrace, and every decent human being should make an outcry against it.

People deciding that some civilians are OK to kill, whilst making an outcry about others being killed are fucking hypocrits.

Niccoli’s concern for the Israeli civilians under attack is shared by all of us. His total lack of concern for the Palestinian civilians under attack is despicable – and his inability to understand the commonality between the two is perplexing.

 
 

the most important qualification my colleagues MUST have is that they have figured out how to shit outdoors.

Level ground free of undergrowth, a solid 4-5 inch tree to hang onto, privacy. If you’re wearing coveralls be very careful of your aim. Did you plan ahead and bring tissue. If not, gather some leaves first. Bury the mess. Pine boughs make an excellent hand sanitizer.

 
 

Niccoli’s concern for the Israeli civilians under attack is shared by all of us.

Frankly, g, and y’know I love you, no, it is not.

Go start a game in which you hold all the cards and when the other guy takes a trick, know what? I’m all like YAY about that.

I don’t hate the Israelis, but I HATE what they’re doing, and every rocket, every RPG, every dead IDF makes my heart sing. They created this horror, and they are perpetuating this horror. And when the sad, sick, oppressed people land a little fucking blow, and make one widow to offset the thousands the Israelis have made, well, I’m gonna find it difficult not to say “Get Some, Hamas!!”

There’s a way to make me see it differently. Just stop being a genocidal thug of a nation. Try to live up to your higher beliefs….

mikey

 
 

Henry Lewis, you’re in.

On my left flank, six meters out, with the PKM.

Supporting fire while Bouffant maneuvers…

mikey

 
 

So, this Arab guy walks into a bar.

BOOM

 
 

The real bloggies are on… go nominate SN/TBogg/JSwift etc. in the humour category. http://2009.bloggies.com/

Also, The Anchoress is taking a wild lead in the best individual blogger. Shoot that no talent down! (Vote for Lindsay Beyerstein.)
http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-individual-blogger/

 
 

I could not help it.

 
 

One of the best photos of the Bush family ever.

 
 

they have figured out how to shit outdoors.

Wiping w/ the L. A. Times, more than once. D. Sidhe referred to it as “urban camping.” (Not that specific activity, the living outdoors in the city thing.)

[Back to maneuvering.]

 
 

Seriously, is this dude like some elemental clusterfuck catalyst or what?

George W. Bush is a strange attractor for chaos.

Don’t be surprised if the planet gets hit by a comet before he leaves office.

 
 

I don’t think that’s quite what happened with Northern Ireland, but it’s very close.

Oh, away and shit, man. There is nothing in your little rant, das, that even approaches reality. Its important not to listen to the drunk brit fucker at the end of the bar discussing UK & irish politics. We are either fucked out our tits, or winding your yankee arse up!!!

A train car containing 10 Palestinians is careering down a track….

Or, to lighten the mood; “A Palestinian, a Jew, and Irishman, the pope and the Archbishop of York walk into a bar, the Pope says to the bargirl……..”

 
 

This ceasefire ended when Israel violated its terms and killed Palestinians; Hamas did not violate the ceasefire. Israel did.

And around 80% of ceasefire violations are from the Israeli side. – El Cid

Something about this statement troubled me. And now I’ve figured out what it is: how do you blame Israel for ending a cease-fire when nobody ceased firing in the first place?!?

One could argue that Israel should have stopped first or that Hamas should have stopped first or that Israel went against the terms of the cease fire more often than Hamas did, but in the end, all of these cease-fires are non-happenings because Hamas doesn’t, well, cease firing rockets.

Maybe Israel should live up to its ends of the deal too. But the thing is that Israel, no matter how half-assed what they do is, or how disingenuous their half-assed follow-through for their ends of any deals are, does take steps, if only half-assed baby steps toward peace. And what do they end up with? More rockets.

I challenge all of you so-called liberals who have infinite empathy toward any oppressed group to, for one minute, place yourselves in the shoes of an Israeli and think how an Israeli might feel that whenever baby-steps are being made by Israel toward some sort of compromise to the conflict, it doesn’t create any change in Israeli security. If you cannot do this, please, please ask yourselves why you have all sorts of empathy for everyone, except for Jewish Israelis.

Of course, I similarly challenge the pro-Israeli side to have empathy for the Palestinians (c.f. my blog).

*

lobbey … you say my rant has nothing that even approaches reality — I’m curious to learn what the reality is then. Please enlighten me. Can you give one or two examples where I am wrong about what has helped resolve the Northern Ireland conflict and what really resolved it?

I hate to sound all neo-con on y’all, but at one level Bush was right: if the Arab world was filled with shiny, happy and prosperous democracies (i.e. where prosperity was broadly based … e.g. the socio-economic policies of said democracies corresponded to those promoted by the Democrats here in the USA and not those promoted by the GOP), then the situation would resolve itself: Josef Zionist, while wanting Israel to remain a Jewish state really wouldn’t care too much if Israel was absorbed into a Palestinian state ’cause things still wouldn’t be so bad. And Yussef Palestinian wouldn’t care so much if even the settlers had their way ’cause he could always resettle in some nice Arab state just as the Arab Jews who were kicked out of the Arab world in 1947/48 were resettled in Israel (btw — how come y’all aren’t blaming the Arab world for the pathetic situation of those refugees? oh yes … because they were resettled in Israel! perhaps the Arab world is really to blame for the Palestinian problem? you wouldn’t know that, though, to read some lefties’ comments … it’s always “blame Israel alone” … and some of you wonder why some Jews think the left is anti-Semitic?). Nu the situation would resolve itself.

Tell me lobbey — this isn’t essentially what happened in Northern Ireland or even in South Africa? Tell me how this is so far off from reality …

The fact is that both the Israelis and the Palestinians are being reasonable in continuing to fight, given the history of the situation. Until reasonable people would be happy to stop fighting, the fighting will go on. And if you cannot understand how an Israeli would come to feel as s/he does … I would wonder why not?

 
 

From the article to which El Cid linked:

First, and most importantly, the ceasefire was remarkably effective: after it began in June 2008, the rate of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza dropped to almost zero

Almost only counts in (throwing) hand grenades and horse-shoes. It doesn’t count in a CEASE fire. A cease fire in which fire does not cease is, by definition, NOT a cease fire. Given that Israel was fired upon, it had a right (and responsibility to its citizens who deserve a government that can keep them safe) to respond to end the firing. That Hamas was able to “control itself” means that, well, it can control itself. And it decided to respond to Israel’s response by unleashing a wave of rocket attacks. Nu? Israel was under attack and is allowed to respond appropriately. If civilians die in the response, that doesn’t mean Israel hasn’t taken steps to minimize civilian casualties, just that, in an urban environment in which one side deliberately uses human shields, there is only so much that can be done to minimize the toll on civilians.

I suspect if Israel just started lobbing rockets into Gaza, you’d be wondering why Israel doesn’t use precision bombing.

 
 

And if you cannot understand how an Israeli would come to feel as s/he does … I would wonder why not?

It’s understandable that people want to commit war crimes. It’s not clear how those war crimes resolve the situation.

 
 

If civilians die in the response, that doesn’t mean Israel hasn’t taken steps to minimize civilian casualties

In fact it does. Israel is going after civilian targets.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20081231_Gaza_Letter_to_Mazuz.asp

 
 

Those targets hardly qualify as “civilian” targets.

 
 

Those targets hardly qualify as “civilian” targets.

They clearly do.

Note the “anyone and anything” statement here: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2008/12/28/israeli_airstrikes_kill_hundreds_in_gaza/?page=2

 
 

When ya steal someone’s land through force, it can take generations for the “pissed” to wear off.

Given my locale, you can probably imagine the wingnuttery surrounding me. Your argument is one of only two argumentative routes by which I’ve ever made headway with my reactionary friends, neighbors, family members:

“What if some asshole tried to push you off *your* farm? What would you do?”

“Those people or their parents or grandparents worked an olive or lemon grove in the same way that you and yours farm(ed) rice. Tell me you wouldn’t shoot the son of a bitch who stole it from you, or get shot in the effort.”

[The other route? “What we did to the Indians — was it right? Were the Indians wrong to fight back? Well, then…”]

I’m told by a moral philosopher that there’s a such thing as “just title” — it’s kind of like squatters’ rights, but much grander. As I understand it, it means that once a people has lived on land a certain amount of time, usually amounting to many generations or at the least enough time lapse since transfer that no living memory, or even living memory of that living memory, exists of that transfer, such land is theirs and claims of previous title are void.

I don’t think the situation with the U.S. Government vs. the Indians comes *near* to satisfying just title: the Indians are owed. Still. Big Time. Therefore to me it follows that not only was the founding of Israel a supremely immoral act (America can’t excuse what it stole in 18eleventy8; there’s no way Israel can excuse its theft of 1948), but everything it has done since then vis-a-vis the Palestinians — especially considering it is the only country in the world aside Morocco that is still stealing land to this day — is absolutely indefensible.

I don’t know how it works in Arab culture but I know how it works in my own rural white trash sliver of American culture. I’m the fifth generation to live in this house and work this land. I would be *instantly* homocidally violent to anyone who tried to steal it from me by force. It’s not that they’d merely be stealing my property; land is not just property; but by stealing it, they’d be stealing my history.

Anyway, the “just title” concept allows one to see who’s being reasonable and who’s being revanchist jackasses. The Palestinians were certainly there in 1948 (despite what racists like Joan Peters say), had been there long enough to get just title, and are still there today; Jews may or may not have been indigenous to the land in biblical times. It was revanchist jackassery for the Christian Crusaders, who could be seen as forcing the Jewish claim in their own name, to try to conquer the land a 1,000 years ago; it’s certainly revanchist jackassery for Jews/Israel to do the same thing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

 
 

Stealing links gleaned from lemuel pitkin, incidentally.

 
 

I find it very “convenient” then that certain peoples end up not having “just title” to any land.

 
 

One of those people would be me, a relatively rootless individual with immigrant parents. My suffering due to lack of just title has been extraordinary and has until recently prevented me from getting a Wii.

 
 

My suffering due to lack of just title has been extraordinary and has until recently prevented me from getting a Wii.

I’ll sell you my earldom for a porn DVD.

I’m keeping the barony.

 
 

immigrant parents

I call bullshit on Righteous Bubba as HIS GRANDPARENTS were immigrants. Clearly he will stoop to any low to smear Israel and the Jewish people.

 
 

I find it very “convenient” then that certain peoples end up not having “just title” to any land.

Pardon me for intruding into your tribal self-pity, but you’re wrong: Jews acquired just title, at very least in the “right to a piece of the action” sense, to parts of Central & Eastern Europe, which is why the Nazis and Czarists were acting so assholishly in depriving them of their title and eventually their collective lives.

Which in turn is why Israel, and a great many Jews who should know better, think it’s defensible that they should do the same thing to the Palestinians. Because it makes total moral sense to repeat the crime done to you on some innocent bystander, amirite?

 
 

I’m curious why folks think an open border party would somehow solve this situation… The open border policy is sure to engender multiple suicide attacks on Israeli soft targets. In fact, is there is one thing to blame the current predicament of the Palestinians on it is suicide attacks which struck abject terror into the hearts of the Israeli’s. Before that became common, the broders between Gaza, the West Bank and Israel were open.

I’m sure the response is going to be “the Israeli’s drove them to it by their illegal occupation.” This may be true, but then couldn’t one counter the Palestinains drove the Israeli’s to blockading Gaza by blowing themselves up on busses?

I fear that the onus here is on the Gaza Palestinans. If they act in good faith and end the rocket attacks you will see an easing of sanctions, all you need to do is look at the current relationship with the West Bank as an example. One may argue whether it is their moral imperative to do so, but the fact of the matter is I just do not see any other way that this will politically resolve. Israeli’s will not stand for constant rocket attacks in their territory, and they will elect leaders with more agressive stances who will push the assault with or without US support (they will have US support no matter what anyway).

 
 

I fear that the onus here is on the Gaza Palestinans.

It was once on Nat Turner.

 
 

It was once on Nat Turner.

__________________________________

This is why I have trouble taking you seriously, analogizing the Gazans as slaves is silly, untrue and counter-productive. Both sides have done wrong here and that needs to be acknowledged.

Fact of the matter is this, Israel is going forward with this because it has the implicit support of the Americans and the ARABS. Egypt has uttered nary a peep as Israel bombs tunnels on its side of the border. Hezbollah has denied any involvement in the rocket attacks. Jordan has been quietly supportive. Hell, even the protests in the West Bank are muted. The only folks outraged are the Europeans, and really they can pretty much scream in impotent rage all they want, everybody knows they aren’t going to do anything about it.

If the world wanted this to end they would need to put together a coalition of European, US and moderate Arab state soldiers in the territiories and on the border, with a mandate to actually stop attacks from either party. Of course no sane country is going to throw troops into that meat grinder, so here we are.

 
 

This is why I have trouble taking you seriously, analogizing the Gazans as slaves is silly, untrue and counter-productive. Both sides have done wrong here and that needs to be acknowledged.

I’m not saying Nat Turner was a prince. The analogy is to a held-down, hopeless and angry group.

There is no reason why you have to take me seriously, but “both sides are being bad” is a convenient way to forget about the theft of Arab property that is the reason for every conflict thereafter.

 
 

There is no reason why you have to take me seriously, but “both sides are being bad” is a convenient way to forget about the theft of Arab property that is the reason for every conflict thereafter.
_______________________________________________________

As one could argue that theft of Native American property was the cause of every problem therafter in the US. And of course depends on how reductionist you get on the timeframes. That is a pointless and unanswerable excercise. The fact of the matter is this:

1. The Arabs are there.
2. The Jews are there.
3. Neither of them are going anywhere.

So… the question becomes how do we enable these folks to live together in a practical way that results in the least bloodshed?

The answer is obvious, stop rocketing southern Israel and eventually Israel will ease up on the restrictions. Whether the world likes it or not Israel has most of the military power in this situation and as long as their populace feels directly threatened this is not going to change. This is NOT like Northern Ireland. The English were never concerned that if they conceeded to IRA demands the Irish would slaughter the English populace. That is a very real and palpable concern among the Israeli’s, engendered by many factors, one of which being that it’s written directly into the Hamas charter. The Israeli’s will not act rationally until they feel that heir basic security isn’t in jeapordy.

 
 

As one could argue that theft of Native American property was the cause of every problem therafter in the US.

No one couldn’t unless one was extremely dense.

So… the question becomes how do we enable these folks to live together in a practical way that results in the least bloodshed?

The answer is obvious, stop rocketing southern Israel and eventually Israel will ease up on the restrictions.

It’d certainly be nice if they stopped rocketing Israel. But you know, you’re incredibly poor, can’t work, can’t get medicine, and the people who make sure your life is miserable and demonstrate its worthlessness by killing your pals with impunity are right there and blameworthy. Killing Israelis is an unsurprising outcome and won’t stop unless there’s something else to do.

Israel is just going to have to suck up the fact that the people in Palestine are not going to like them for a while and find some way to get them meaningful work. They owe Palestinians money and livelihood at the least and lots of it.

 
 

[i]No one couldn’t unless one was extremely dense.[/i]

Then it looks like you got the point, it is a stupid argument.

[i]Israel is just going to have to suck up the fact that the people in Palestine are not going to like them for a while and find some way to get them meaningful work. They owe Palestinians money and livelihood at the least and lots of it.[/i]

I agree, but not until the Israeli’s feel that their physical well being isn’t threatened. Which starts when Hamas stops rocketing Israel. No way around it, sorry.

 
 

Then it looks like you got the point, it is a stupid argument.

It is rather dissimilar to the current Arab/Israeli wrangling.

Which starts when Hamas stops rocketing Israel.

Someone else will find ways to kill Israelis as long as the situation is miserable. So no, stopping the rockets is not a solution to anything although I’d certainly cheer it on.

 
 

As one could argue that theft of Native American property was the cause of every problem therafter in the US.

I’m all for giving back the red states to the Redskins.

 
 

Someone else will find ways to kill Israelis as long as the situation is miserable.
_____________________________________________

So then we have a feedback loop: Israel won’t ease up until they feel secure, but Gaza will not stop attacking until Israel eases up. Which leads me back to my previous post, if the world REALLY wants to stop this they need to get directly involved, until then nothing can be done except let both parties duke it out. Even if that entails Hulk Hogan (Israel) wail on Stephen Hawkings (Gaza) while everyone gets a front row seat.

 
 

So then we have a feedback loop: Israel won’t ease up until they feel secure, but Gaza will not stop attacking until Israel eases up.

This loop can be broken and may be broken soon by Israelis with a change in government. Here’s hoping.

 
 

This loop can be broken and may be broken soon by Israelis with a change in government. Here’s hoping.
___________________________________________

LOL que? You REALLY believe that?

I believe the current choices of leadership with a hope of winning are:

1. The current Israeli government.
2. The right wing party that will make the current government look like a bunch of dirty hippy freakniks.
3. The left wing government which has completely supported this military action and whose current leader is the defense minister who engineered this offensive.

All three parties pretty much have stated there will be no negotiations while they are under attack.

 
 

You REALLY believe that?

No. But they debate their actions more strongly than Americans do and if they are to survive they’ll have to catch on eventually.

 
 

So have any of y’all watched The House of Sand and Fog

Who do you think was in the right? The hawt chick or Ben Kingsley?

 
 

Clearly the hawt chick was in the wrong and the movie would have improved with the consequent focus on “women in prison” scenes.

 
 

Jews acquired just title, at very least in the “right to a piece of the action” sense, to parts of Central & Eastern Europe, which is why the Nazis and Czarists were acting so assholishly in depriving them of their title and eventually their collective lives.

I know many Eastern and Central European peoples who were no fans of either the Czar or the Nazis who would beg to differ about the Jews have any sort of “just title” to lands in Eastern or Central Europe. The fact is that we had no just title … we weren’t even squatters but were condemned to be a rootless people. And whaddya know … as soon as we decide to ‘grow roots” in a land which was stolen from us ages ago, how does the “international community” respond to our desires?

Anyway, if it is the case that inhabitants of stolen land acquire “just title” as long as they can hold onto it enough, then all Israel has to do is conquer all the land it wants to and hold onto it long enough (for about 1000 years or so) that way Israelis finally have just title to their lands?

Something doesn’t quite make sense here …

*

Anyway, as far as the Israelis are concerned, even if their ancestors did have just title to lands in Europe and in the Arab world, they were kicked out of said lands anyway. And they dealt with it and formed a state that people want to return to (Palestinians want to “return” to Israel, even if they weren’t even born there … how many Jews want to return to Poland?). Meanwhile what have the Palestinians done? And don’t give me that “brutal occupation” as an excuse … Nehru, Gandhi, et al managed to build a state under the thumb of the Brits, etc.

*

No. But they debate their actions more strongly than Americans do and if they are to survive they’ll have to catch on eventually.

Except the way they figure it (and not irrationally given the history of the situation), they aren’t going to survive unless they keep Hamas, et al., “under control” … which means continual “responses” to rocket attacks, etc.

Of course, a similar calculus rationally exists on the other side. Which is why you have the impasse you do.

As I said before (pace Lobbey) … what breaks stalemates like these is not when a compromise is reached — there is no compromise as each side has a mutually exclusive vision of what is to be done with Israel/Palestine and neither side has any reason to compromise or any reason to expect any meaningful steps toward peace from the other side — but rather what breaks stalemates like these is when conditions change such that the goals of extremists on one side don’t seem so bad to reasonable people on the other side.

If Yossi Zionist figured that living in a Palestinian state wouldn’t be too bad of a deal, then he wouldn’t be so hard-headed about trying to preserve the Jewish state. And if Yusef Palestinian figured “my family has handled being relocated before, what’s so bad about moving again to some shiny, neato Palestinian state even if it means that some dirty Zionist settler gets my land” … then there will be peace.

Unfortunately, pace BushCO rhetoric, you can’t force democracy on people by definition. And thus you (and certainly GOoPers cannot) force the Middle East to develop the sorts of democratic societies with broad-based prosperity that would allow everyone in the Mideast to feel secure and thus to stop hating on each other.

 
 

as soon as we decide to ‘grow roots” in a land which was stolen from us ages ago

“Growing roots” is a very nice name for stealing, “we” does not, presumably, refer to you in Forest Hills, and no your land was not stolen from you ages ago.

 
 

“Growing roots” is a very nice name for stealing, “we” does not, presumably, refer to you in Forest Hills, and no your land was not stolen from you ages ago.

Oh please, RB. Of course he includes himself in the “we.” To do other would be racial treason. Let me acquaint you with the rulez: Every Jew who thinks with his blood is a good Jew; every Jew who doesn’t is a self-loather and therefore not really Jewish at all!

Silly retarded me, being a good socialist I was taught to never forget where I came from, but also never allow my identity — my blood — to overwhelm my objectivity, not to mention inspire me to *aggressive* violence. You know, on the excellent grounds that unhinged tribalism inevitably leads to a third reich mentality.

Also, isn’t it great to know that accounts in a bronze age text of land being “stolen” must be taken as fact by everyone, but people who point to Israel’s documented and obvious taking of land by force, from 1948 to this very moment, are simply people who make shit up and are suspiciously hostile (hint hint) to Jews.

Put simply, DAS’s tribe is always right; to disagree is to be anti-Semitic. To refuse his historically persecuted tribe a blank check to persecute other people is to hatehatehate his tribe.

 
 

Oh, but wait, Retardo! You said you’d violently defend your home from theft! Now you’re condemning the violence used by Israel when it invaded Palestine and when it builds settlements! You hypocrite! Can’t you see that claim to land based on what the Bible says is so much more valid than a claim to defend the house you and your family have lived in for generations! Anti-Semite!

/DAS

 
 

Silly retarded me, being a good socialist I was taught to never forget where I came from, but also never allow my identity — my blood — to overwhelm my objectivity, not to mention inspire me to *aggressive* violence. You know, on the excellent grounds that unhinged tribalism inevitably leads to a third reich mentality. – HTML Menckin

Nu? How come this advice is something I as a Jew should take but the Palestinians shouldn’t take? Why shouldn’t they be criticized for allowing their identity to inspire aggressive violence?

In the late 1940s, mass movements of people were the norm of the day. Even India and Pakistan largely accepted these refugee streams. Israel (of course, that’s its mission) accepted Jewish refugees … why didn’t anyone accept those Palestinian refugees? Why does the international community all but force certain Palestinians to be refugees?

Nu? HTML — where should those pesky Israelis go? Into the sea?

 
 

Clearly the hawt chick was in the wrong and the movie would have improved with the consequent focus on “women in prison” scenes. – RB

Perhaps the lesson here is that if there was more hawt lesbian Palestinian pr0n, the Arab-Israeli conflict would dissipate?

 
 

Israel won’t ease up until they feel secure, but Gaza will not stop attacking until Israel eases up. – over_educated

Exactly! In general, for progress to be made in the Middle East, Palestinians need to see that even their baby steps toward living peacefully with Israel produce positive material results for them. Similarly Israelis need to feel that Israel’s baby steps toward peace produce increased, rather than decreased security.

Unfortunately, rational people on either side have no reason to feel that their side’s baby steps are met with anything that benefits them. Pathetically, neither many pro-Israeli types nor many pro-Palestinian types refuse to put themselves in the shoes of someone on the other side: it is horrible how defenders of Israel refuse to see viscerally how and why Palestinians are not benefiting from Israel’s baby steps and thus view those steps as disingenuous and how and why Palestinians are not benefiting from their own baby steps so they are less likely to make them.

It is also horrible (and redolent of anti-Semitism) how many so-called liberals refuse to even put themselves in the shoes of Israelis. They may claim to understand why Israelis feel how they do, but they refuse to put themselves in the shoes of an Israeli and really see how hardline feelings develop when every baby step Israel makes toward peace is not met with increased security encouraging more such steps on Israel’s part. Why should Israel do anything for the Palestinians when it doesn’t help them? And why can’t so many so-called liberals, empathetic to everyone else, be empathetic to Jews? Hmmm …

 
 

RB,

I took the “anyone and anything” statement as a claim that the targets involved are not civilian targets. That may be a debatible claim, but it is not a claim that should be dismissed outright.

 
 

I took the “anyone and anything” statement as a claim that the targets involved are not civilian targets. That may be a debatible claim, but it is not a claim that should be dismissed outright.

It should be. For instance if Iraq attacked the offices of the Housing secretary in the US that would be an attack on civilians. Israel’s attacks on “any” Hamas targets are the same. It’s really not arguable: those are offices where civilians work.

 
 

Perhaps the lesson here is that if there was more hawt lesbian Palestinian pr0n, the Arab-Israeli conflict would dissipate?

Israelis could do worse than supply Palestinian with a full slate of free cable TV. I think it’d be cost-effective, even if each household was also offered a big garbage bag full of pot.

 
 

How come this advice is something I as a Jew should take but the Palestinians shouldn’t take?

I anticipated that response and already mocked it. See above. But just to make it clear: you pretend not to know what the difference is between offensive and defensive violence.

And as far as thinking with the blood goes, it’s the Israelis’ batshit tribalism, which inspired their invasion, ongoing land theft, and all excuses and rationales for such, that inspires Palestinian tribalism in reaction. What part of “stop stealing my land because you think you’re racially entitled to it and I’ll stop being reminded that I’m NOT of that race” do you not understand?

 
 

where should those pesky Israelis go? Into the sea?

Nice try, Mr. Podhoretz.

They could come to America.

 
 

And why can’t so many so-called liberals, empathetic to everyone else, be empathetic to Jews?

Jews in the family here, and anti-Semites in the local playgrounds. That my six-year-old has been accused of controlling the media does not make one iota of difference to what a bunch of guys do in Israel.

 
 

They could come to America.

Ok!!!

The Jewish National Fund is going to start buying up land in Arkansas. I’m sure you won’t mind.

 
Leon Trotsky, Exile-in-Mexico
 

Um.

It’s is possible to empathize with a people and still think they’re wrong, DAS.

I say this as an American Jew, the Israeli government and military are in the fucking wrong. I’m sure there’s very nice people amongst them, I’m dead-certain the civilians there have just as many people protesting the events as there are the racist cocksuckers demanding it be increased to genocide.

This is not an issue of Jews, this is an issue of Israelis fucking over another country for decades and then using linguistic confusion to cover their asses.

 
 

The Jewish National Fund is going to start buying up land in Arkansas. I’m sure you won’t mind.

Why would anyone mind that? Indeed I’m for funding it rather than supporting more money for rockets on either side.

In my work I deal with immigrants a lot and – anecdotal evidence alert – there is no shortage of Jews moving away from Israel for a better life.

 
 

The Jewish National Fund is going to start buying up land in Arkansas. I’m sure you won’t mind.

I don’t. At all. They are welcome to. Unless you mean “buy” it like they are “buying” Palestinian land, in which case I reserve the right to shoot them.

 
 

Ok, I’ll see what I can do. The schvitz in Hot Springs, that should be a draw…

 
 

Seriously, the original Mencken had exactly the right idea: all the diaspora Jews should come here for their own sake and for America’s.

I *wish* Jews would buy land in Arkansas. I’d feel more comfortable here if they did: they’d at very least enrich the culture here. Bring on the kibbutzes.

More radically, since I can, if pushed, sympathize with tribal nationalism, I would recommend that, if Zionists wished it, America *give* (by which I mean, buy for) them an agreed-upon American parcel and let it become sovereign if it’s necessary to placate the desire for a nation-state. At any rate, by all means come here. Stop murdering people and stealing their land. I’d even support American funding of Israeli emigration from Palestine, and subsidies to ease settlement here.

 
 

Dear Henry Text Markup Louis,

I’m not sure if wishing for a return to 1947, or even to the day before a light bulb went on over Theodore Herzl’s head is going to solve anything. Instead, I’d ask you to support Israelis like this, who share your sensibility, if not your longing for a new diaspora.

 
 

I’m not sure if wishing for a return to 1947, or even to the day before a light bulb went on over Theodore Herzl’s head is going to solve anything.

Well no, but getting an acknowledgement that something is owed to the people you stole from is a big deal and noting that time and actually dealing with it helps.

If someone manages to pay off or give all the Palestinians sweet deals in a new land and they are happy with it I’m for that too. But for what it’s worth – nearly nothing of course – my impression is that most Israelis are far less hung up on the religious symbolism of the land than the Palestinians are.

 
 

“I anticipated that response and already mocked it. See above. But just to make it clear: you pretend not to know what the difference is between offensive and defensive violence.”

Whose pretending here? I think a prety good argument (whether you agree with it or not) can be made that invading the country that has been rocketing you for months is defensive violence.

Your “ongoing land theft” argument is equally disingenuous. Last time I checked the Israeli’s were the only party in this who voluntarily dismantled settlements (in spite of enormous political cost). If your premise is “the Israeli’s are doing this aciton to steal more Palistinian land” I would like to know specifically what parts of Gaza you think they are annexing. Oh that’s right… none.

The problem isn’t “Israeli tribalism” the problem is the prisoner’s dilemna death spiral these two states are in.

 
 

I think a prety good argument (whether you agree with it or not) can be made that invading the country that has been rocketing you for months is defensive violence.

It might be if scale were not taken into consideration. In the current situation it’s a pretty poor argument to call Israel’s action defensive.

 
 

“It might be if scale were not taken into consideration. In the current situation it’s a pretty poor argument to call Israel’s action defensive.”

Scale has ZERO to do with it. If you can’t leave your home for fear of getting rocketed in a public place, if Universities. schools, shopping centers, movie theatres etc. are all closed the actual damage is unimportant. The fact is that the constant threat is the value, not the death toll in civilian casualties. You can poo-poo that all you like and say the Palestians have it worse (they do) but the average Israeli voter doesn’t give a crap, they just want the rockets to stop. Fear is a powerful motivator.
.

 
 

Scale has ZERO to do with it.

You’re just wrong.

 
 

Your are Great. And so is your site! Awesome content. Good job guys! Interesting article, adding it to my favourites!

 
 

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