A Majority of Israelis want to negotiate with Hamas, and a majority of Americans want an end to the Iraq war. -- voicevote

Ah, another fellow comments on a problem with Democracies. They are not better than other forms of government necessarily. The Wiemar Republic gave the world Hitler in the end.

Imperial USA is a Democracy and many around the world notice that the 'people' often get the short end of the stick on almost any government action.

When did the government ever help the 'little guy'?

"I think this is really it. It is the wonderment from here that anybody could ever get to a point where you'd be so, I don't know, (desperate?), (evil?), that you'd be willing to let your own people get blown up just to facilitate your revenge ... From here it looks like a kind of desperation that I can't even begin to grasp. That's why it's becoming harder and harder for Americans to sit back and watch this happen without feeling like doing whatever it takes to get this thing moving again toward some kind of sanity."

But there is plenty of despair and desperation and abject poverty in the world; I'm not sure the Palestinian plight is of such a greater magnitude. I keep coming back to: the world has poured money into them, we left them greenhouses, and we would employ them if they wanted jobs in Israel if we didn't have to worry about getting blown up. And yet, yet, they just can't put down the rockets and redirect the money to building a society. After awhile, it doesn't look like desperate freedom fighting to us, it looks like the cynical exploitation of the suckers' money, and some useful PR from people who don't know any better. The Palestinian says 'look what they have done to us to make us do this!' and no one questions the logic of that? "We" aren't turning (the generic) you into suicide bombers and rocket launchers; "you" are deciding that making a senseless point of hatred against evil Israelis is somehow more noble or worthwhile than taking the world's help to build a decent functioning society. We shouldn't be expected to facilitate that by silently absorbing the bombs and rockets and just kind of hoping that you don't actually hit anyone.

In spite of the tendency of too many people to label and idealize German Nazis as some sort of superhuman villains never again to be equaled on earth, evidenced by this sort of ad hominem comment replying to an honest, good-faith attempt to discuss the topic at hand by Armagednoutahere...:

(3) you think that making obviously absurd, outrageous Nazi comparisons is a super-clever way to score points when discussing Israel with Jews. I'm leaning toward (3), so go to hell, asshole.

-- Gator90

...it seems only too clear to me that this could easily be a Nazi speaking back in 1939:

perhaps i think too highly of my own people (and some of you don't even believe there IS such a thing, or if there is, it's a negative) but we are in a really tight situation here - global warming, mass extinctions etc. or at least that's what i believe. so we need all the IQ we can get - and you don't get that from a people whose average is 80 IQ.

- david sugarman

David then reduces the Holocaust victims to a measure of their supposed IQs, and tries to explain Arab nations' mistreatment of Jews as petty envy:

unfortunately half of all the 3+SD IQ's were killed by hitler. we could have used those, now dead, einsteins.

[snip]

i think it must be spiteful envy, why else?

- david sugarman

This self-righteous, exceedingly arrogant, "superior" self-classification of one's people (and therefore oneself) as apart, but most importantly allegedly above - in this case by measure of "IQ" - the run-of-the-mill rabble of the rest of the world, is a mirror image of the 'superior breeding' storyline used to justify and prop up the Nazi war machine in WWII. How horribly tragic for all the victims of that savage war machine, including for the Jewish victims of immeasurable worth - because multi-talented fellow human beings, a worth far, far beyond any mere IQ measurement - murdered as a result of a depraved and sickly-warped Nazi assessment of humanity. A depraved and inhumane assessment by which Jews were classified as somehow "inferior" and thus a self-justified focus of hatred and abuse for Germans who claimed a similarly-arrogant, warped, "superior" self-classification.

Seeing such a comment on a site on which I also happen to comment, I have to condemn such racism, whether typed by a German, an Israeli or an American. It is an appalling and frightening sentiment to see openly expressed, and is obviously so ingrained a self-justification and bias as to be virtually impossible to dislodge with reason. How can Israelis, and Americans blind to Israel's faults, not see and understand these awful parallels with the Nazi mindset, and work to mitigate them, in the name of those never given the chance to simply live their lives in peace?

Think as highly as you will of your people, self-segregate to your heart's content, but take great care that in doing so, whether for self-preservation or simply in pursuit of self-confidence and vain pride, you actually do, as you claim, "live and let live." A high IQ may lead to dreadful deficits in other departments of life, just as a low IQ may lead to great advantages in those same areas. How small-minded, warped and inhumane of any one or any "people" to believe otherwise, and especially to use such a belief system to excuse or justify abusive treatment of a "people" unbelievably asserted to be of lesser worth when it comes to solving humanity's current "global warming" crisis, due to a 'race-based' allegedly uniformly-lower measurement of IQ.

I don't know if anyone else pointed this out, but Glenn's comparison here of Condi Rice's remarks with that poll isn't really fair. Rice, according to the NPR article, was talking about including Hamas in a Middle East peace process/summit, while the Israelis were specifically responding to a question about negotiating with Hamas on a cease-fire and the release of an Israeli hostage. If you asked Israelis how many of them would be in favor of including Hamas in a ME summit, etc., I would highly doubt you'd find anywhere close to 64 percent of Israelis (and half of Likud supporters!) that would go along with what Rice was arguing against.