...because as long as the canard of anti-Semitism exists, those who support Israel will always have the trump card. As Alan Dershowitz has demonstrated for years, the key to win any argument about Israel is to simply declare the pro-Palestinian side anti-Semitic. A couple of academics publish a paper on this very topic, and they are immediately labeled! You can support Israel and all of its policies and still see the problem with our utter lack of any kind of an open discussion about the country.

It is an entirely uncontroversial thing for an Israeli politician to say that he wants to preserve the Jewish majority of Israel. If you had a white politician in America saying the same thing, only substituting white for Jewish, you would rightly denounce him as the worst kind of bigot. But we don't question Israel, we don't challenge and we don't discuss. Because the threat of being labelled anti-Semitic is just too great.

I still haven't heard an answer to my question. How can you have a democracy that does not have egalitarianism? How can you have a liberal democracy without protections on minority rights? How can you have a theocratic state and have any chance for free and open minority religions?

These are the most basic questions of liberalism and democracy, and no discussion exists.

And since people keep bringing up the Holocaust, a quick correction-- 12 million people were killed, not 6.

Xanthro has done what, eventually, is always done in any discussion whatsoever of Israel and its policies: reduced those who dare to question the Israeli regime as "Jew haters". You see it all the time; you rarely see it stated so baldly and obviously.

There can't be progress without discussion; there can't be discussion when the application of broad labels and epithets prevents people of conscience from speaking their mind.

It plays right into the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah to engage in this kind of broad campaign. Thousands of Arab moderates watch this kind of action-- which is killing civillians, no matter what the intentions (over 200 in 6 days, according to Reuters)-- and it drives them away from any desire to coexist and towards extremism and religious fundamentalism. And that in turn fuels those who's minds were made up years ago.

Please, no more rhetoric from anyone about how Israel doesn't target civilians. They do and they are. And if they didn't target civilians, the fact remains that they are killing them at a breathtaking pace.

Two major arguments always crop up in the pro-Israel responses in the letters section: one, that Israel should be supported because it is a democracy, a haven of sanity in an insane region, a responsible and righteous actor in the Middle East who represents the values that we in the West believe in. And, two, that the Israelis are free to act as recklessly and violently as they want because that is what the Arabs (who in particularl rarely matters) do, and that Israel can and should act as ruthlessly as possible because that is what the enemy, supposedly, would do.

But you can't have it both ways. You can't at once reap praise for being a righteous nation and also have the leeway to respond as viciously as possible. You can't be a symbol of virtue while you bomb innocent people. Israel is either a virtuous democracy or it is the modern Sparta. It can't be both.

Israel is in the process of ruining a country and killing hundreds of innocent people who are not in Hezbollah. They are killing innocent people, they know they are killing innocent people, and they don't care. You are in effect saying that what they are doing is right because they could do so much worse. So as long as they only killed 70 people today, they're okay? If it was 700, well, that would be wrong. But 70! No big deal! Especially when they could kill so many more.

Israel is knowlingly and intentionally killing civilians. Read this article, or any of the hundreds of others out there describing the bloodshed. You are rationalizing the murder of hundreds of people who have never fired a rocket or shot a gun or launched a bomb. And something is wrong with my moral compass?

Whether they are intentionally killing civilians or not, they are killing civilians. Now, I would say that, considering the fact that Lebanon's civilian casualties are

occuring at literally ten times that of Israel, it's rational to believe that this is intentional. And considering that everyone else has no evidence to support the notion that Hezbollah's killing of civilians is intentional but Israel's isn't, I don't see a compelling reason not believe that. Take away the built in Western assumption-- that Arabs target civilians, while Israelis only target military targets-- and actually objectively look at the situation as detailed in this article. How can you believe that the Israelis don't know what they're doing?

Again, all I see in response is this: "Hezbollah would do it if they could." But these people who are being killed are not in Hezbollah. And considering that Israel's supporters are constantly claiming the righteousness of the state, shouldn't you hold that county to a higher standard than an admitted terrorist organization?

In order to justify Israel's actions, you have to twist yourself into a pretzel of rationalization and justification. But at the end of the day, all that is left is the same sad fact: Israel is conducting a military campaign that is leaving scores of civilians dead. And that is a terrible evil. No matter what the qualifications, the provisos, the rationalizations, the dilutions, that's the fact that remains. Israel is knowingly killing innocent people.

How dare you. Down with Fagles! Up with Fitzgerald!