"Jumps like a Willys" is right, of course.

You are not clear there, but if you mean it's a drop in the bucket of our current global financial foreign aid, I believe Israel gets the lion's share (more than 50%). I believe I read recently that our aid to Israel is around $80 billion per year. That's no drop in the bucket, and really, we can't afford it.

--Ron

Winsmith posits: "Our support for Israel is large, but it is a drop in the bucket of our current global financial entanglements."

This one is for WinSmith's "I oppose Bush's entire doctrine of pre-emptive war" from Raimondo:

The Israeli blitz demonstrates a new moral principle in action, one that stands the old Catholic just war theory on its head by establishing the concept of disproportionality. Whereas the old just war theorists insisted that responses to aggression must be proportionate to the provocation, this new theory – let's call it the Luciferian theory – holds just the opposite: that an overreaction is mandated in order to strike fear and awe into the enemy. This will supposedly deter them from stepping out of line in the future.

We saw this Bizarro World morality applied in Lebanon in 2006, when Israel invaded the country, killed over 1,000, mostly civilians, and devastated civilian targets, including hospitals and water plants – all because Hezbollah had kidnapped a few of their soldiers. Now Israeli government officials are claiming that because the Palestinians insist on fighting back and firing missiles as deep into Israel as Beersheba, this places a million Israelis in mortal danger, and therefore anything and everything is justified in "self-defense."

This mutant morality was prefigured by the Bushian theory of preemption, which arrogates to the U.S. the right to attack any nation on earth, based on the possibility that someone somewhere is plotting to do us harm, and it will now be upheld (or, at least, not contested) by the Obama administration. This war is sending a message not only to the Palestinians, but to the Americans: the Israelis are telling us that they, too, claim the "right" to preemptively go after their avowed enemies, at least in their own regional sandbox, without having to justify it in a way any normal code of morality or international law would condone.

The two most destructive and objectively anti-American forces in the Middle East – al-Qaeda affiliates and the Israelis – benefit the most from this fresh outbreak of a festering conflict, and the losers are the Palestinians and the American people, with the former enduring the slaughter and the latter paying for it.

We will pay for it not only in billions of our tax dollars, but in terms of the hate-America factor, which will skyrocket on the Arab "street" and inspire many to take up arms against us. These are prime recruits for the jihadists such as bin Laden, whose ultimate target is the continental United States. At the rate we are going, we'll have to close off the country entirely in order to keep out enemies both numerous and determined. In the end, however, nothing will protect us against the relatives and loved ones of the innocents Israel has slaughtered, with our help and full approval.

How timely.

Bringing the Arab-Israeli War Home

If America were blessed with a noninterventionist foreign policy, we could all thank Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for giving President-elect Barack Obama a thoroughgoing lesson in the absolute irrelevancy of Israel and Palestine to the national interests of the United States. More than a week into Israel's invasion of Gaza, America is still alive and kicking and none of our citizens are dead, which is the way it should be, as this is their religious war and not ours. If stubborn noninterventionism were our creed – as the Founders intended – the Gaza war could continue for two more days or two more months and we could simply shrug and mutter "Who cares?" America could simply go on its way, rebuilding its economy and marveling over the madness of two religions fighting to the death over a barren sandpit at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, America today is run by a political and media elite that is addicted to intervention. This would be bad enough if these men and women had the brains to intervene and produce a result that benefits U.S. interests, but they are not. They are instead – despite their Ivy League diplomas – uneducated and naïve people who still live in the Cold War, foolishly believing that America is the boss of a strong Western/NATO community (which is now in its death throes on Afghanistan's plains); that other nations are eager to do America's dirty work; and, most fatally of all, that the national security interests of the United States and Israel are identical.

*snip*

The American people should be livid, though, with their bipartisan political elite and the Israel-firsters at Commentary, the New York Times, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Post, as well as that hive of anti-American U.S. citizens that fund and lead AIPAC, for involving them in this barbarous mess. At some point down the road, every U.S.-taxpayer-funded bomb, artillery shell, and bullet aimed at the Palestinians will yield Americans killed at the hands of al-Qaeda, its allies, or those it inspires in attacks launched in response to U.S. support for Israel. Those Americans will be killed because their political and media leaders – corrupted to the bone by AIPAC – have involved them in a religious war that threatens nothing vital to their country's principles or national security, their personal economic well-being, or their children's lives.

OMFG! I thought Omooex actually threatened you from what you said, now I see it was a rhetorical device and you don't have the mental capacity to understand his point! He wasn't threatening you, he was using rhetoric to point out the insanity of violence to settle scores! Reading comprehension, zenwick, try it, you'll be less of a fool for it later.

--Ron

Zenwick quotes Omooex: "One day, as I said, I hope that no one is talking about either side; that doens't mean I don't have very strong feelings about Israel, and its supporters such as Zenwick. To be honest, if I was having that conversation with him in person, I'd endeavor to knock as many of his teeth out as possible in order to demonstrate that might makes right is not a perspective that benefits everyone equally. As a matter of sanity and survival, I don't get into these kinds of conversations in person with such people--that is the only logical endpoint for them as far as I am concerned."