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Read other letters about this article
I knew you'd reconsider your statement, and, as always, I appreciate your honesty.
Whatever Steele has said, does it help anything to go around calling him "Jew Hater" over and over?
The point is that, in the context of this discussion, Jew hatred is not irrelevant. If you start from the position of believing that most Jews are racist and elitist, it calls into question everything else you've written, does it not?
How about we all stick to the subject of whether Israel's actions are justified, what can be done about Hamas, what Israel expects the average Palestinian citizen to do, and so on?
I find that your suggestion is frankly impossible, and I'm not saying that flippantly. From my side of the aisle, it seems that if I try to engage in a discussion, a single sentence is invariably cherry-picked from my post to crucify me, all criticism I make of Israel is ignored, and I'm painted as a neocon Bush acolyte. So many Strawmen are set ablaze all around me that I begin to choke from lack of oxygen. It seems to go with the territory.
There's a lot of misdirection going on. The conversation gets diverted into generalizations about a group of people, or into accusations of racism, and pretty soon nobody is talking about anything meaningful at all.
I'll give it a shot.
I have kind of a radical idea (surprised?). The Geneva convention should be modified to define acceptable engagement versus an enemy who engages in illegal guerrilla war.
It seems to me that Israel is being held to an impossible standard, because there is no standard of engagement when your enemy launches attacks from civilian areas, doesn't wear a uniform, etc, etc. These things are illegal under Geneva, but Geneva doesn't exactly spell out any alternatives, other than to sit back and wait to die.
