Do I have this right?

Only to wing nuts ... Dems/Liberals gottem too, ya know.

Some reasonable people don't hate either side, though of course those who say that are probably not being bomb battered.

Aye, there's the rub.

BBB
bm

dys
Usually, I think, folks try to set up a false dilemma of the "with us or against us" sort. Criticism of Israeli policies then becomes defined as "for the terrorists". It's sloganeering with the attempted appeal to simplistic-mindedness and, I think, a species of authoritarianism.

This Michael Massing piece is relevant...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062

...and so is this...
http://www.slate.com/id/2146383/?nav=tap3

There are certainly posters here who speak as though they hate Israel and have a really inappropriate tolerance for the acts of terrorism committed against it. Is there not a currently active thread titled, "It's Time to Stand Against Israel?"

Yeah like I said there are wing-nuts on both sides, I'm sure you take comfort in knowing that because it obviously justifies all the crap. Actually I think if the reasonably sane would simply ignore the wing-nuts they would lose their audience and fade back into their dark and lonely corners.

http://www.slate.com/id/2146145/

Weisberg is the editor at Slate. But the question arises (thankyou E Alterman), would he have accepted an invitation from Hezbollah?

Ha'aretz (Israel's finest newspaper) writer Levy...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1827332,00.html

Blatham
Blatham, when I try to access Ha'aretzda on Google, I get the following message no matter how many sites I try:

Error 500 'www.haaretzda...' Unknown Host.

BBB

Israel is an extension of U.S. policy in the region, and most Arab nations know it. Thousands of years of entrenched history in the region has led us to this scenario today; an extension of Western influence in an oil rich region where we are more and more desperate for the black gold, and where countries like China and India are expanding rapidly in direct competition for the world's resources.

We cannot maintain our present level of consumption with this type of competitive influence. It would seem as though destabilization in the Middle east would be exactly what gives American oil companies the justification (and governmental support) they would need in order to expand oil drilling off the coasts of Florida and California, as well as drilling in ANWR.

Many see Israel's influence in the region as responsible for contributing to anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East. And as they (we) continue to kill innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Lebanon, we are only fomenting even more hatred, and increasing terrorist recruitment and sophistication.

I am not so much a liberal or a conservative or a libertarian or a green, though I am sometimes each of those. I am primarily antibomb, anti military answer, near pacifist, though I pull back from total.

I think those of us who want to talk have lost out over historic time and that at this day and age, having might meaning right is atavistic.
Are there any reasonable people left?

I have felt neutral for a long time,
that it was not my fight,
tho the Moslems on 9/11 pushed me in the other direction.
David

I agree with Dookie on US oil consumption.

My ex husband was younger than I and a tad impressionable, I thought at the time. He would take a class and become the teacher's mouthpiece. (Did I never do that? well, depends on who is looking at whom.) In any case, he took some screenwriting class that described the key motivation, the master motivation, is fear. So, for the next few years that sort of permeated his understanding of people. Well, he wasn't all out to lunch there. I just didn't thing it was prime. (We had that kind of arguing marriage, good while it lasted.)

I digress on this in that I think our fears around 9/11 sent us off, by our own acquiescence, into paranoic behavior not in keeping with who we originally thought we were, or even more lately thought we were.
I don't the the US people have a clue of ourselves any more. Or, more properly, our clues are fractured.

Now, some of our fears around 9/11 were manipulated. However, we - if we were sharp, and had a sharp press, would have been picking up on that. I see us as a lambent society occasionally geared up by fear sans clues. Since this is not what I'd hoped for my country (I am, actually, patriotic in my odd way), I have sorrow for the US.

But, presently, my immediate sorrow is for all those people trying to get Lebanon back in gear all these long and trying years, whether Christian or Druse, or Shiite. It is hard for me to fathom seeing bombs hit them again, again, and again. I can hardly stand it, and I'm a world away.To see those bombs so cavalierly dismissed as an advance towards the birth of a new Mid East? good grief, the coldness, the bludgeoning.



I bet you all think I'm antisemitic, so called, and certainly anti Israel.

I am not antisemitic (look up the word) and one who cheered and laughed in '67. I read the book, Oh, Jerusalem, and agreed with it in the reading.

I see the war machine of Israel has gone so far too far that I can't defend it, and I have my accumulated-slowly sense of the other sides of all this.

I think that the hatred from all this will be borne way beyond our lifetimes. And bombing will be much of the trigger.

Yes of course, OM David we all see that you have always been quite neutral on many issues.

Yes.

The same sort of (predictable) reactions as those used against those who opposed the US invasion of Iraq. The implication being that you "hate the US", don't "support the troops", etc, etc, etc .... and for exactly the same reasons - to deflect attention from the real issues & muddy the debate.

The fact that I have strong opinions on many issues,
does not prove that I have strong opinions on EVERYTHING.

I can be neutral on some things.
David

Name two.

...controversial issues that you have no opinion on...

There are blatant reasons why much of the Arab world sees Israel as an extension of U.S. policy. Us, and the rest of the Arab world, see interviews of Israelis on CNN and other cable news networks who speak with American/New York accents. We know about the billions that the U.S. contributes to the Israeli ecomony each year. Arabs know where many of those Israeli weapons originally came from that are destroying their families and their infrastructure. We witness the actions of the pro-Israeli movement in this country throughout our own political process, as the unyielding support of Senators and Representatives, as well as administration officials, are channeled into tactics of demonization and labeling against rivals on the left of this debate. But the left aren't anti-Israeli, even though the pro-Israeli movement insists that they are. Therefore, once again it is the rightwingers/neocons who hop on this for political gain, and who hope for continued unrest in the Middle East, for it is what manipulates their constituency into fear and paranoia, thereby blindly putting their trust in a party that has done nothing but foment fear, incompetence and corruption into the American political process.

The argument for a "sustainable" cease fire from the likes of Condi Rice and others is nothing but lip service to the war mongering neocons who insist on this reckless policy of chaos. It also distracts from the unbelievable failings of the Iraq war, which has been managed by the same party of fear, incompetence and corruption. And it placates to the pro-Israeli movement in this country.