You can stop this nonsense whenever you like. Nobody is forcing you to write this foolishness. But so long as you're so compelled, I'll continue to ridicule you for it:

The funny thing is that UC Irvine's views are indistinguishable from those here. And the folks here who most defend it seem genuinely outraged that anyone call them on it.

You made no mention of "UC Irvine's views." They are never once discussed in the quotation you provided. That's the first thing you need to realize.

What you quoted was the opinion of the Zionist Organization of America about UC Irvine. And a completely unsubstantiated opinion at that. While you mistake this opinion as perfectly unadulterated fact, those of us blessed with brains in our heads understand it to be simply a case of "he said."

Now that I've responded to all of your nonsense thus far, perhaps you'll do me the courtesy of answering just one question:

Please explain exactly why a desire to avoid war with a non-threatening country in a very volatile region is a clear expression of a desire to see all jews exterminated. Please be as detailed as you can, as I'm very curious to know how this works.

A very thoughtful comment, AJ. Nice one. I had one response to this:

Not to mention it has very little to do with whether or not the US ought to go kill some Iranians in order to make a few Zionist extremists feel better. No, I don't think this is a good argument. Try something else, please.

You're right: supposed anti-semitism at UCI has absolutely zero to do with whether or not we should bomb Iran. For anonymous, the connection must be that because Jews may or may not have suffered some indignities at UCI (an arguable point at best), it means that we need to kill a million Iranians so that Anonymous will feel better about the whole thing.

As for finding a better argument, that's not going to happen. The fact that these idiots are relying wholly on the "support Israel in even the most extreme circumstances or we'll call you an anti-semite" means that they've completely run out of valid arguments. This is it. In the same way, when you go to the store and only find a few cartons of UHT milk, it generally means they've run out of the real stuff.

Strawman much?

Salon's position, which I assume is in concurrence with Blix's, is very prudent: keep an eye on the Iranians, who may decide to try developing nukes sometime in the future. However, for now they are no threat, and military action makes no sense.

Exactly how is that not prudent?

Are you saying it would be more prudent to start a war against the Iranians, even though it's extremely likely that if we were to do so, we would get to Teheran and discover what we also discovered in Iraq: that we just invaded a country that was of no threat to us?

As for the notion that Iran has been at war with us for 30 years, you're on thin ice with that one. That means that your hero President Reagan sold weapons to our enemy in a time of war. Was that what you meant? If so, there are a lot of history books that need changing, to read "Ronald Reagan was the worst traitor to the US since Benedict Arnold." If this is not your point, please clarify.

Anonymous' latest scrawling:

Yes let's toss non proliferation out the window because....because....because.... well because the Jews have the Bomb. Yes yes better we should heavily arm the whole world to protect us from those people. That will make everything better. Uh OK there's a rational PoV.

Fortunately, no one ever suggested anything like this. Seriously, Anonymous, rather than making up strawman arguments that you can go after Don Quixote style, you'd do much better to address things that people actually say. And in so doing, you won't look so foolish, thus doing your worldview a disservice by letting it be associated with such idiocy.

Start this way: What is your actual point? You seem to be suggesting that we need to go to war against Iran no matter what, and if you disagree it means that you thirst for the blood of Jews. Is that basically it? Please confirm, and in so doing, explain the mechanics that takes one from a distaste for unnecessary violence (which is what a war against Iran would be) to a desire for a holocaust against Jews. Please show this step-by-step.

Or don't. You can always continue the idiot tactic you've been using up until now.

I refer, of course, to the Holocaust. Am I the only one who sees the parallel?

Yes, I see it. And hongdb illustrated it for us. 9/11, like the holocaust, is not allowed to be compared to anything else, because to do so would lessen its power as The Worst Event To Ever Occur After Which Nothing Is Ever The Same Again.

9/11 and the Holocaust are by no means equivalent (and of course, no one suggested they were). The level of death and malice in the holocaust were orders of magnitude beyond what happened in 9/11. However, both terms have become a touchstone of wide-eyed "never happen again" fear, by which some terribly policies have been justified.

As far as that goes, I'd say they're both examples of something in the human psyche and its response to fearful things that are experienced collectively by the masses. If we can better understand this reaction and its characteristics, we might be better prepared to manage that reaction the next the The Worst Event To Ever Occur occurs.