Hamas does not call for the wiping out of Jews and the deaths of Israelis. Article 31 of the Hamas charter:

Article 31: "The Islamic Resistance Movement is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions. It does not antagonize anyone of them except if it is antagonized by it or stands in its way to hamper its moves and waste its efforts. Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — to coexist in peace and quiet with each other."

Hamas considers the formation and political structure of Israel to be illegal. Arabs frequently refer to Apartheid South Africa as a similar model to Israel's Zionist preference for Jewish citizens.

Calls for the "destruction of Israel" are almost always referring to the Zionist political entity of Israel, not the people who live there.

Also, claims have been made that Gaza Christians are being told by Hamas to leave or face physical threats. I can nowhere detect any such pronouncements being made by Hamas itself. Threats by isolated gangs against individuals do not constitute official policy of Hamas any more than the foaming hatred of the Ku Klux Klan represents the policies of the Indiana Republican Party.

It would be good to see some documentation of any such pronouncements by officials of Hamas, if such claims are going to be leveled.

I got my cite on the Hamas charter from Wikipedia. The article is linked to my sig.

I think the only question we need to ask here is:

Does this person wear a "Kitty not Happy" tee shirt?

Cause the workplace is dehumanizing, and we all need to lighten up and accept difference, and conflict, and quirkiness. Cause personal problems have a place in the workplace.

Or maybe the subordinate's hubby should just slap her around a little?

Jeepers, does nobody pay attention around here at all?

P.S. All references to unhappy kittys and slapping are from another column that ran earlier this week, and which not a single other letter writer thought to reference.

To busy gazing at our own navels, it seems....

I can't really improve on it. I'll just repeat the money quote here as a tribute:

"Leave earth -- our nursery -- and the true nature of the universe asserts itself. Emptiness, mostly frozen, more and more emptiness, punctuated at the rarest intervals by hellish, radiation-saturated, roiling furnaces. Inevitably (even here, in our nursery), every marginally temperate place is obliterated in the mindless, explosive deaths and rebirths of idiotic gas."

If our universe was put together for our benefit by an intelligent designer, then they sure wasted one hell of a lot of material.

This was an informative and interesting article by Juan Cole, responding to questions that have been raised worldwide by the Media about why Doctors became terrorists.

Cole does a nice job of putting the involvement of medical personnel into both the context of the isolated religious fanatic and the terrorist cell mentality. It isn't a simple question and it doesn't have simple answers. I am grateful to Dr. Cole for providing additional perspective.

As to the mouth-breathers who cannot understand why so much Islamic violence is currently directed at the West, well, let's think about it from Islamic, and particularly a Middle East point of view.

We in the Judeo-Christian West have planted a Zionist colony, Israel, onto soil that formerly was home to millions of Islamic citizens. This colony is expanding by brutal occupation, and has an economy that cannot support itself without constant subsidies of arms and capital from the West.

We further established massive bases on lands considered holy by all of Islam, after manufacturing a Saddamistic threat (using fake satellite data) to Saudi Arabia during the first Iraq war. (These bases have been removed, but were a major impetus for the September 11th attack).

Finally, we assaulted and conquered an important Middle Eastern country, Iraq, using more false claims of threats. We have have proceeded to dismantle Iraq's social fabric and infrastructure in the most aggressive and corrupt way imaginable.

There is nothing facing the Western world that approximates in the slightest way these long-term, humiliating threats to Middle-Eastern and Islamic sovereignty and security. The equivalent would be a forcible Islamic colony in the Orlando region of Florida, several huge Islamic military bases in Rome and Paris, and an Islamic conquest of Spain involving a million Christian casualties and two million Christian refugees.

Put that kind of provocation into the Western world, and you'll see so many Christian terrorists, both government sponsored and freelance, that the "Islamo-Fascist" threat will look like a debate about English draperies conducted over tea and crumpets.