not so deep thought

How exactly is the security of Isreal a concern of the United States?  What vital interest is served by our support? Just sayin'.

Gaza photo blog

see Sarah Palin pictures

see Sarah Palin pictures

see Sarah Palin pictures

Thank you President Olmert

I guess that should be his title since he gets to decide what American foriegn policy is and how we should vote in the U.N.

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime MinisterEhud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nationsresolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Imagine for a minute a Democratic President got out from behind a podium and take orders from the President of France.  Me thinks the wingnuts would be losing there minds.  But as John Cole says, "Crickets."

I am not aware of all internet traditions

Apparently the trio of Matt Yglesias, Ezra Kline, and Spencer Ackerman (all of whom I read but have been neglectful of adding Attackerman to the blogroll.  This will be corrected.) have been dubbed the Juicebox Mafia by the pro Israeli blogosphere.  

Of course they had the audacity to suggest that the current Isreali attack in Gaza was disproportional and perhaps ill-advised.  Since they are Jewish they cannot be condemned as anti-semites, ( I will avoid this tag simply due to the fact that no one reads my blog) so they will be ridiculed by the Very Serious People as children who cannot possibly understand the world.  

Because it is obvious to anyone watching that the only response to random, annoying, and potentially deadly rocket attacks is airstrikes that kill not only the intended target but also many innocents.  because throughout history this strategy has worked.  See The First Jewish-Roman War,  which after a Jewish revolt Rome burned the Temple to the ground and enslaved many Jewish people.  But they made a slight error and let Jewish people continue to reside in Judea.  A mistake they rectified after the second rebellion which lead to the Diaspora, or expulsion of the Jewish people from Palestine.  Obviously, in this analogy Rome is Israel and The Jewish people are the Palestinians.  

Personally, I find this bit by a guest blogger, Eyal Press,on Ta-Nehisis's blog to be instructive.

Many years ago, the Israeli scholar Yehuda Elkana published an essay in which he noted that there were two lessons one could draw from the horrors he'd witnessed as a boy at Auschwitz.  The first was "this must never happen again."  The second was "this must never happen to us again."  Of the two, wrote Elkana, a member of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace-International, a network of scholars committed to ending the occupation and promoting a just settlement of the conflict, "I have always held to the former and seen the latter as catastrophic." 

Just to prove my non-anti-semite cred I will unveil my Mid-East Peace plan for all three of my faithful readers.

Step One-  Allow people of Jewish ancestry move to the United States.

 

That about covers it.

Update:  Couldn't they have called them the "Jewcebox Mafia?"  Just wondering.  Seems funnier.

america the blindfolded

It has always amazed me that in Israel it is possible to criticize Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but in America you are considered an anti-semite or terrorist if you do. This column

by Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is further proof of this strange phnomenon.  It is worth quoting at length.

This was a routine year, another year of the occupation of which no end is in sight. From Rosh Hashana 5768 to Rosh Hashana 5769 our forces killed 584 Palestinians, 95 of them minors. Many fewer than in 2002, when 989 were killed; many more than in 2005, with 190 killed. Eighteen Israelis were also killed in the past year, many more than in the previous year, when just five were killed, and much less than in 2002, when 184 Israelis were killed. All in all, an average year for bloodshed. 

All of this was observed by Israeli society with eyes covered. Even the nearly 60 Palestinians who were killed on one black summer day in Gaza barely earned a mention in the newspapers. With eyes covered, Israeli society continued to look at the routine of the occupation, the mothers in labor who lost their babies at checkpoints, the farmers victimized by lawless settlers, the night raids, the unemployment, the poverty and the hope that died long ago. 

This could never be published in America outside the most lefty publication.  The suggestion that the United States and Israel have different interests is met with approbation and accusations of Jew hating.