Glenn is not a journalist, but he is a media voice with an exremely large, national reach. When he whines about the "mainstream media," it's only because he hasn't quite grasped that he *is* the mainstream media.

O'Reilly does the same thing and it's infuriating. I'm sure Glenn will be on MSNBC explaining how no one on cable is allowed to criticize Israel. And now the left can have people in the media whining about the media not talking about what they're talking about.

I'm sure both Olbermann and Maddow will spend significant time this week critiquing the Israel attack (as they have every right to) and I also expect numerous newspapers will allow anti-Israel voices to be heard. I have NY1 here in New York, and numerous Palestinian protesters were given voice on the local news. Glenn's quotes around "debate" are nonsensical. His argument that in the Self/Other binary of subject/object identification that Israel is the "Self" and Palestine the "Other" is laughable. Maybe Glenn's family identifies with Israel, but the rest of America sure doesn't.

Linking to a propaganda media clip from 2005 mislabeled as "Israel attack on Gaza 2008" as his evidence of the tragedy of the attack, and then offering some mealy mouthed backtrack betrayed every bit of Glenn's determination to use heart-tugging visuals to make the argument his facts can't. It was pathetic, proven even more so when it was exposed as mislabeled pro-Palestinian propaganda.

I'm frustrated with Glenn on this because I consider him perhaps the most important media critic at work on the National scene right now. He is indispensible on so many issues, and then plunges into pathological sneers and rage whenever Israel comes up. It detracts from his important work on so many other issues.

His notion that because blood-thursty neo-con cowards cheer the murder of Palestinians that this therefore invalidates the morality of the attack itself is inane logic. Pro-war lunatics and anti-Muslim racists will cheer every military attack, right or wrong. That does not mean every attack is automatically wrong. Attempting to discredit an issue by citing guilt-by-association is an intellectual con game.

By all means the morons on the right deserve scorn and contempt for their disregard for the death of innocents. They are pathetic human beings. Glenn is right to excoriate these people. But to use their ravings as "evidence" that the attack itself is therefore as illigitmate as the Iraq War is a logical shell game. It feeds off the legit critical analysis of the Iraq invasion and uses that capital to smear-by-association the acts of another country. Critique Israel on its merits. Not because some chickenhawk said something stupid. Those are two distinct issues.

I'm pretty high up on the list when martial law comes to town.

But just think of the bright side, you'll probably be able to meet all of your favorite authors!

self-pitying and, in extreme cases, completely crazy. The painter, Hogarth, shows the effects in "Gin Lane". I suppose, in some cases, they start thrashing around in a very indelicate way.

When your write about Israel

dun dun dun...

I can just imagine him in full battle gear charging house-to-house with his AK-47 facing down the terrorists, wiping out their families to prevent a new generation of terrorists from growing up, saving Israel for democracy...

you can see the psychic scars, the sad eyes that have seen so much tragedy, the war-weariness, the PTSD...I'm glad he's been able to get some rest, eat well, sleep well, soften his calloused hands, get a little chubby...

You perform a great service publishing photos of these keyboard soldiers - I'll remember the haunted visage of that proud, tough commando Doug Feith as long as I live...

god these guys make me sick

Yes, I need to securitize my internet activities. Just too lazy.

I have been criticizing Israel on the internet for a few years now, so I am sure I have been tapped, hacked, virused, tagged - and soon to be bagged. There is even a Fusion Center near me.

Since Israel supplies so much of the NSA/DHS software and hardware used to spy on Americans, it's not a stretch to believe I'm pretty high up on the list when martial law comes to town.

It's not often that one has the chance to read a trenchant and succinct dismissive summary, even indictment, of a blog host's life and weltanschauung by an observer who is not at all grotesquely supercilious, patronizing, and condescending, and who fills in the gaps with arrant projection and fantasy in the absence of factual knowledge to boot.

You said a mouthful there, brudda! And you are so right, it isn't very often.

If there are six or so back to back, back and forth posts between me and another troll, then it probably isn't a good thing.

I saw that happening and sure enough, poof.

Whenever your write about Israel, a new crop of soldiers in Israel-Firster troll army seems to come out of the woodwork with the usual pro-Israel apologies and distractions, so who really needs to engage the bigoted trolls when there is a whole new group of apologists that have made their way to these comments in the past few days?!

No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting

On the contrary. What is expected is for people to think of it, and to conclude, I would just leave if I were them.

glenn's not a journalist.

I did leave myself open to this with my careless use of "declare[d] a blockade...".

Your chief mistake is thinking that Israel declared a blockade on Gaza. They did not.

Nonetheless, when shipments of food and purely humanitarian supplies are stopped, the world is quite right to call it a "blockade".