Uberbah asks:

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Why is Israel the only country allowed to conquer territory and then whine "terrorism" when the conquered fight back? Especially when the "terrorist" rocket attacks kill no one as you slaughter them by the thousands.

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Your loaded comment begs another question: Why is Israel the only country not allowed to respond to terrorism with military force?

Israel's "conquer(ed) territory" that you so sneeringly reference came about due to two wars that Israel did not start, in which Israel was attacked by neighboring countries bent on destroying it.

Do you advocate we give Texas back to Mexico?

Nearly every national border on this planet came about through military conflict. Why is Israel different than all other countries?

And your "kill no one" nonsense is totally ridiculous. You do not measure action and reaction by simply adding up dead bodies. Israel has a right to protect its ability to function as a country, to have its citizens not live in fear from Palestinian mortar shells.

Palestine has been offered chance after chance to build their own country, and have turned to chaos, violence and rage.

Other occupied peoples have found peace is the most powerful tool. Gandhi did. Nelson Mandela did. Did not the Indian and South African blacks suffer too? They did not set off waves of nail bombers.

The Palestinians have had so many opportunities for peace. Israel bent over backwards, handed Arafat guns in the 1990s so he could form a police force. Those guns were turned on Israelis.

Yet to sneering people like you, Israel will never be legitimate. And the reasons for that belief go back thousands of years.

This has been going on since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. After Israel's debacle in Lebanon, the leadership decided to hire a US public relations firm and train all of its diplomatics in public relations. There's a good video Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land, that does an excellent job of explaining how Israeli p.r. in America works and dovetails with the corporate driven media in the US.

There is hope in seeing that the media environment in which Israel exists today is not the same as twenty years ago. People have access to the BBC, which while not great, reports in strikingly different ways on the Arab-Israeli conflict than CNN or MSNBC. I'm struck by the fact that someone with Glenn's stature (yes I know he's not in David Gregory's position--would we want him to be part of the mass political illiteracy in America created by our t.v. news shows?) with an audience of readers can air the analysis he does. In fact, when I got on yesterday I thought, there is a sea change in the media environment thanks to the internet. I also think the Mearsheimer and Walt analysis in the London Review of Books which turned into a book on Israel's lobbying in the U.S. broke an important taboo and opened up more public space for criticizing Israeli policies. Jimmy Carter's book did as well.

It says so much about the dearth of talent at NBC that Gregory was ever put on the White House beat, that he then was given a show on MSNBC, and that he has finally moved on to host Meet the Press.

I remember when he was at the White House he would occasionally ask a good question at a presser, but what I found so disconcerting was that when he would do a report on the presser for the evening news it would be the most mealymouthed summary imaginable. So I was never quite sure who the "real" David Gregory was, at least until I saw an interview with him on Charlie Rose from March 2007. When Rose and Gregory gushed about how Bush really was a very intelligent man, I knew then that Gregory was a complete and utter dope. Nothing I have seen or heard from him since has given me any reason to change that view.

Thank's for the explanation. The person who posts under all those incarnations was originally known as 'realname'. He/she then started using all the other aliases we've all come to loath.

He/she comes up with a pithy point about 1 post out of every 1,000.

<>Paul Daniel Ash could probably list them all

I admit to a certain fascination with this commenter. He's got a certain wit, which he seldom displays around here anymore... it's almost as if he's set a quota for comments deleted and just spits out the most randomly offensive thing he can say at any given moment. But a lot of the screen names - Merry Christmas From Hell, The Screaming Steam Hammers of Hate e.g. - show a creative, almost poetic mind. Albeit one drenched in vitriol.

To get some idea of his motivation, this comment is probably the most telling:

http://tinyurl.com/59ur9o

One gets one's emotional stimulation where one can, I suppose.

One of the good things about growing old is that you get to re-read some of the classics as your kids go through college.

My son gave me John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" as a holiday gift. Read it last night and came across this gem apropos Mr. Gregory's ignorance:

""The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defense would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government."

New Wog up

Link @ sig

Thank you WinSmith for that wonderful assemblage of strawmen and half truths. It is of course the Palestinians' fault if they get in the way of Israeli bombs. Why can't they simply do what they are told? Why do they persist in petulantly getting themselves killed? The Israelis want peace and what says peace better then an economic blockade at the same time as a truce? But what I really liked was your assertion:

Nearly every national border on this planet came about through military conflict. Why is Israel different than all other countries?

This is so true. The Japanese and Germans have been unfairly vilified for the perfectly justifiable goal of establishing their national borders. Perhaps the Germans went a little overboard in thinking that those borders should include all of Europe, and the Japanese all of Asia. But these are quibbles. It is the principle that counts. The end justifies the means, and a country can use military force when it chooses to for whatever reason it chooses to no, matter how many people get killed in the process. Thank you for clarifying this for me and putting Israel in the company of other great states, like 1930s Germany and Japan.