It's funny, but this particular issue invokes some of the most deeply held tenets of one's tribal affiliation, that it invariably drives people to come on and make their tribal grunts and do their tribal dances, which all look like nonsense to those not in the tribe.

Today we've got Lotus Feet, whose posts would make my 3-year-old son scream "Oh, grow up already!"

While these comments may not provide much direct value to this discussion, they do provide a fair degree of context. This is an issue wherein common sense is difficult to find.

Nice job to the rest of you, though, and especially Glenn in his interview with Hewitt.

Does it bother you that our grandparents came here with nothing and now we are 40% of the Forbes 400, 20% of the professors at leading universities, 33% of American millionairs, and 20% of all Nobel laureates, 40% of the partners of NYC's and DC's leading law firms, 11590% more than our population's statistics?

Yes sir, there's nothing like Forbes to prove our moral bona fides And they say Jews are obssessed with money! Anti-semites, all of them!

And all that with those boxcars waiting at the station! And with all the Goyim hating us! How did we manage it?

And since you mention it, yes, we have done very well here. So what the hell is Israel for?

"Little wonder that Mr. Greenwald is describing the debate he had with Hugh Hewitt regarding the current crisis in Israel as a "substantive discussion," considering that Hewitt cleaned Greenwald's clock.

When humiliated, some people tend to lash out angrily to deflect from their shame, and others lapse into a meek posture of submission in order to avoid further embarrassment. I surmise that Mr. Greenwald falls into the latter category, as evidenced by Greenwald's tea-sipping, oh-so-civil characterization of the woodshed beating righteously administered by Hugh Hewitt."

You have an odd way of conveying your positive feelings toward Glenn Greenwald.

Back when we were giving aid to Sadam Hussein (during the Iraq-Iran war), we also were careful to support Iran, I believe.

With that in mind, are we also supporting the Palestinian government to any extent, along with our Israeli aid?

stevedew asked: 'The only point I wished to make in my earlier comments was that war is ultimately unnecessary. Do we really need to send our promising young men and women abroad to kill their fellow human beings in order to be secure as a nation? Or can we gain that security through negotiation and communication with our foes?'

I think WW I could certainly have been avoided. Once it happened as it did though, I think it would take some form of military action against Germany (once Hitler took over) to stop it from Hitler's mad ideas of world conquest. You know, due to the strict military censorship in effect in Imperial Germany, the populace had no idea they were losing the war (WW I). Thus, they were quite susceptible (IMO) to the Nazi 'Jew's stabbed us in the back' BS propaganda.

Probably something military would also have needed to be done about Imperial Japan or we could have let them take over what they did & have to deal today with the agressive entity they were.

I don't understand what kind of forum Winsmith thinks he's in. That is the most basic unit of knowledge--that Israel and Egypt have the largest aid packages of any country in the world from the US. Certainly, if you didn't know that, you have no business expecting your opinion on issues of foreign policy to be taken seriously. What an aquamaroon.

I got to page 20 and the comments ran away from me again (habitually slow reader). On the off-shot chance that no one has mentioned them, two points:

1) In the interviews preceding Glenn's, Martin Kramer talked about the U.S. training Fatah military and police since 2007. Steven Schippert subsequently talked about Fatah giving positioning intelligence to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in the current conflict. My question: Does the U.S. therefore have boots on the ground in this, and if so, where was the War Powers Resolution? We certainly considered American military advisers to be boots on the ground in Vietnam and in Afghanistan.

2) The Keshev article cited by El Cid, together with other articles since this started, have all questioned whether bombing a police academy is a military target. Accepting the statistics printed there for that bombing, one gets the following:

• civilian casualties last week: 50 reported widely + 155 at the academy.
  
• civilian casualties over the weekend 90 widely reported.
  
• NYTimes reporting that an increasing proportion of casualties since the weekend are civilian. They backhanded an Israeli claim of military targets as "limited evidence".

Given this, and the 550 total for casualties (as of late yesterday) the U.N. figure of 25% civilian is too low. 300+ civilian casualties out of 550 is more than 50%.

Does anyone here think that Lotus Feet and the others say all this stuff at work (if they don't work at all-=Likudnik firms)?

Do you think they tell there Christian neighbors how they really feel about them? That they hate them so much they can't even live as equals in a democrqatic society. That they trust them so little, they must have an escaope hatch to an all Jewish world?

Of course they don't! They probably live as I do, living and working with all kinds people every day, and they haven't got a jetliner all fueled and ready in case they have to make an escape to Israel (The boxcars, the boxcars)

It's a fantasy! They cannot stand the reality of being Jewish (like it's so bad for us here) so they make up this idiotic fantasy of Jewish power and exclusivity.

Shame on them, after America has given us so much!

Oh, and what's the story with Groucho Marx, lotus foot? Is he ashamed to be Jewish, or what?

And stop with the concentration camp shit. It was the Zionists who co-operated with the Nazis, well documented.

"One cow in Palestine is worth..."

link at sig

Democrats have silenced dissent and offered unflinching support for Israeli actions, including gross violations of international law.

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted January 6, 2009 (see sig)

The Democratic leadership's strident support for the ongoing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip underscores how the Democrats suffer from the same illusions as the outgoing Republican administration: that placing an Arab territory under debilitating sanctions that punish the population as a whole, bombarding heavily populated civilian areas -- resulting in widespread casualties among innocent people -- and invading and occupying territories with a long history of resistance to outsiders will somehow lead to greater moderation from those afflicted.

The reality is that Israel's war against Hamas and the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip is no more likely to result in more rational and compromising positions from the Palestinian side than the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel will lead to more rational and compromising positions from the Israelis.

As a result, the hard-line militaristic position of the Democratic Party does not bode well for a more enlightened Middle East policy after eight disastrous years under President George W. Bush.

[…]

In June, 38 of 49 Democratic senators -- including Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton of New York -- wrote a letter (PDF) to President Bush that Americans for Peace Now, a moderate Zionist group, warned would build "a defense, in advance, for a large Israeli military offensive in Gaza." The letter also urged the Bush administration to block any U.N. Security Council resolution critical of Israel, claiming that United Nations opposition to Israeli attacks against crowded urban areas constituted a refusal to "acknowledge Israel's right to self-defense." An almost identical letter in the House, drafted by House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., received the signatures of 150 of the body's 230 Democrats.

Americans for Peace Now noted that such an Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip would likely result in large-scale civilian casualties. In apparent anticipation of the large numbers of Palestinian deaths that would result from such military operations in the Gaza Strip, the House passed a resolution (PDF) in March, during an outbreak of fighting, that claimed, "Those responsible for launching rocket attacks against Israel routinely embed their production facilities and launch sites amongst the Palestinian civilian population, utilizing them as human shields." The resolution goes on to specifically condemn "the use of innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields by those who carry out rocket and other attacks" and yet again makes note of Palestinians who "continue to be utilized as human shields by terrorist organizations."

But according to Joe Stork of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, while Hamas failed to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip, the watchdog group had found no instances of Hamas actually using human shields in the legally defined sense of deliberately using civilians as a means of deterring counterattacks. Despite my contacting the offices of more than a dozen Democratic members of Congress who supported the resolution -- all of whom are members of the so-called Progressive Caucus -- none of them could provide any examples of Hamas actually using human shields. It appears that the Democrats' goal in pushing through this resolution was to convince their constituents that it was the Palestinians, not the Israelis who were attacking them, who were responsible for civilian casualties and who would likewise be responsible for the far greater number of civilian casualties that would inevitably result from the Israeli bombardment and invasion which was to commence later that year.

Democratic support for an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip went beyond such nonbinding resolutions. In apparent anticipation of the long-planned Israeli invasion of Gaza -- which was to begin just three months later -- the Democratic-controlled Congress voted in September to send 1,000 of the highly sophisticated GBU-39 missiles to Israel, which have been used on a large scale in the Israeli assault.

On Nov. 5, Israel launched a brief but significant military incursion into Gaza. Though the raid was a clear violation of the cease-fire that had been in place at the time, no criticism was heard in Washington. There had been a series of minor violations by both sides, but the magnitude of this raid appeared designed to provoke Hamas into letting the cease-fire lapse. Israel then tightened its siege of the Gaza Strip, prompting Human Rights Watch to note that "Israel's severe limitations on the movement of nonmilitary goods and people into and out of Gaza, including fuel and medical supplies, constitutes collective punishment, also in violation of the laws of war." Despite this, President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders continued to defend the sanctions.

[...]

http://www.alternet.org/audits/117475/democrats_are_cowards_in_the_face_of_israel%27s_brutality/?page=entire