Letters to the Editor
Sandy Yago
Published Letters: 94 Editor's Choice: 3
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yeah, I was also put off by this "we" thing
[Read the article: The blind giant of the Middle East]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and why am I supposed to care about Israel more than about, say, Tibet?
Anyway, no one is here to answer that question.
I would also take exception with equating Israel and the US as ideas. The US was an idea of the NEW, it was to break with the old and to create something never-before-existing grand thing. Sins were committed but hindsight is always easy. Conquest and extermination were done the old fashioned way, the new ideology of Manifest Destiny being cobbled together to ease the guilt. Slavery was retained as a price to pay for unity. But the idea was to create something new and by and large it succeeded.
Israel was an idea from the past, from a mythical and mystical deep past going back many thousand years when a God was supposed to have furnished the Jewish nation/race/people with the deed giving them group ownership over the land called Palestine. The parallelism with the US may be seen in the cobbled-togetherness of the ideology of the Right of Return, or Zionism, but it just shows that every expansionist entity needs a slogan, be it that or Manifest Destiny or Proletars of the World Unite. While the (il)logical form maybe similar in all cases, the content, the message is different and that's what counts.
The ideology of Zionism predates German nazism by well over a century and it is partially rooted in a gentile affair: the competition between French and British colonialism in the middle east. It was also a convenient cover for the nonassimilationist (i.e. simply anti-semitic) stance of the great West European powers and that's what makes it an especially ugly scheme after the end of WW2: what the Nazis could not accomplish, i.e. getting rid of the Jews in Europe, by using force, that the Allies accomplished by doing a duplicitous favor to the Jews and consummating the idea of Zion into which the surviving European Jews wound up migrating en masse, enthusiastically, urged by the delusion of recreating a 3400 year old myth.
(But even the delusion is more complicated: a "pure" version of that delusion, espoused by the Neturei Karta orthodoxy of Judaism, and itself going back to the pre-Nazi times of the 20th century, claims that Zionism is illegal under Talmudic law. It expressly objects to the fact that outside force, the worldly powers of Europe, were involved in the creation of a Jewish state.)
Contrast this with how the US came about. It did not claim special rights to the land, it was based on the very pragmatic notion of "leave my stuff alone". It's expansion was veni, vidi and vici on a large scale, this country fought with the original inhabitants, it's mother country, other colonizers, neighboring countries and with itself. It won and became what it is with no outside help.
So there is really no comparison.
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Case in point: Salon
[Read the article: America closes the book on intelligence]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Today when Kosovo declared its independence, and another potential conflict looms in the Balkans (and of course by now every stupid American have forgotten about Bill Clinton's little war on Serbia), what leads the site?: scantily clad unintelligents from a tv show.
Other topics the editors of this site deemed important this weekend: the pussy-whipped Greenwald downplaying the dangers of Islamofascism (obviously no surprise there), Obama vs Cinton yet again, more tv shows, cartoons, truffles (oh la la, la France, j'adore!), and while Islamic fundamentalism is not something Salon considers dangerous, the CIA it does since it released 2 concerned treatises about the topic.
It seems that Salon is part of the very process it commented upon on its pages, while, I'm sure, it sees itself way above it, like all true-believer liberal outfit.
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Promises and pheromones
[Read the article: Yes, we can]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is amazing how many people exist who actually believe the promises of a politician if he/she promises something the promisee hopes to be true. Most recent case in point is McCain's promise to the conservative wing of the Repug party that he will not raise taxes. That occurred shortly following his endorsement by Bush 41! Who doesn't se the abject irony here?
I guess, too many.
Obama is of course the superpromiser. And what a huckalicious lad, holy cow, dames just faint left and right when they see him. Strong on promises, strong on pheromones, what a potential to be an effective president! I begin to understand this outpouring of support for him.
Note to self: see doctor to check on vomeronasal organ. I begin to suspect it got plugged up again.
I think the Obester should nominate Glen Greenwald as his Defense Secy, finally a man who understands the infinitesimally small significance of radical Islam in today's world.
The country can finally focus on the task of eliminating the True Enemy of America: the 50% of its own population consisting of the rightwingers. Maybe a Rooseveltian idea should be resurrected: internment camps. Their children could be reeducated by outlawing private schools and forcing them into UFT bootcamps.
Provided of course that Barry can be dissuaded from going forward with the dangerous idea of school choice.