The Israeli military's indiscriminate murder of civilians has earned the fierce condemnation of nearly every worldwide human rights organization in existence- Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, The United Nations Human Rights Commission, plus UNICEF, The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Vatican, The UN General Assembly, and on and on. The Asian Parliamentary Association has said it will attempt to haul Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Israel has a major PR problem... and its squeaky clean image is starting to crumble even here in the US, where AIPAC has the corporate media (along with our government) still in lockstep with the idea that Israel can do no wrong. Tikkun, the Jewish spiritual organization & interfaith magazine, had to purchase ad space for their pro-ceasefire message in the NYTimes, since their point of view is so under-represented in its pages.

Glenn's column is (for good reason) one of the net's most popular political web-logs, & Glenn is one of the few high-profile commentators in America not obviously cowering in fear of the Israel lobby. Now that he's turned his focus on the US media's unquestioning support of Israel, all sorts of "progressives" who've been reading Salon "for years" have suddenly come out of the woodwork, calling those critical of this massacre (including Glenn himself) "anti-Semites," among many other insults.

Seems to me that those of you attempting to defend Israel's indefensible military actions really have your work cut out for you this time. Good luck with that.

Dress shit up

With a little

Yellow happy face..

building in Gaza. To say that the article is ambivalent is the kindest thing one could say about it but it takes on another meaning when it hasn't been updated to include the admissions of Minister Barak and Herzog that it was "a grave mistake" and that it required Israel's "apologies". The press in America seems to have been neutered in the same way that a domestic pet may be neutered when taken to a veterinarian.

All I can say is

Why all of the distress?

Just slap a little yellow ribbon magnet

On this whole fuckin' mess...

What does "anti-Semitism" mean?

Define "anti-Semitic."

I might take you seriously if you had any facts to support your assertions. And you don't; its just a ragtag of stuff you probably over heard on right wing talk radio. I doubt your anything you claim to be.

Gaza after 2005

Was not, I think, the potential paradise you envision.

.....

Oh, I'm sure it wasn't a paradise. But if the occupation (the settlers, the military, the checkpoints, etc) was so awful, evil, heinous, and unbearable (and I'm sure it was), then it had to have been better the day after the Israelis left. Even if the Gazans didn't want the greenhouses or the industrial zone (and I can understand the reluctance to use them), simply having the Occupiers gone *must* have made a difference, empirically speaking. If life was no different after the Israelis left, then what was all the yelling and screaming, and the violence, and the campaign to end the occupation all about? Was there really no sense of 'things can be different now, where do we start?' The day the Israelis left, Gaza was in emotional control of its life, and had every reason to believe that physical control was theirs for the taking. But, they just couldn't take 'yes' for an answer, could they?

Please, follow your own logic. Yes things should have, and indeed seemed to improve in Gaza after the settlers and military withdrew. Then, and this is the part you repeatedly ignore, elections were held (forced?) and Hamas won. And Israel most emphatically did not say "yes."

Frankly your cute talking point, which is becoming repetitive about "Not taking Yes for an answer" is just insulting in how selectively you decide what should've been acceptable to Gaza, much less what was really possible for them to achieve.

What Israel actually said to Gaza is quite a bit closer to "Fuck You" than to "Yes."

CatmomJ

I might take you seriously if you had any facts to support your assertions. And you don't; its just a ragtag of stuff you probably over heard on right wing talk radio. I doubt your anything you claim to be.

......

I didn't claimn to be anything except a progressive, which I am. But on Middle East politics I part company with the Left because I think there is a tremendous amount of denial, ignorance, unfounded hatred, and intellectual dishonesty. I think I've been pretty careful not to throw around talking point assertions .

I don't own a radio and no, I don't use my computer as a radio. I read widely, everything from Counterpunch to Commentary.

She doesn't tell us where she's progressing to but I don't think she has anything in common with John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progess". It's interesting all the same. She turns up here sniffily disparaging the level of "discourse", as if she's Edith Wharton. Having announced that she's a ""progressive", and saying little or nothing after that, she gets the seal of approval from, of all people, NeoConCabal, who in naval fashion "likes the cut of her jib". Although that might be construed as an indecent proposal, both she and the Con-artist are incredibly dense if they don't think people wouldn't recognise their game for what it is. It would be funny if I didn't know that the "Terrorised, traumatised, trapped" people of Gaza didn't have to endure one more night of horror in Gaza.

Years ago a good friend originally from Mexico told me he hoped to live long enough to see PRI defeated in Mexico. I hope to live long enough to see the United States criticize Israel and withhold our annual payments to them over Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

That's not an anti-Semitic statement; many Jews within Israel want peace and a two-state settlement although they are shouted down by the ultra Orthodox (who don't serve in the military).

Yes, I realize the effects of Hamas' rockets and the hundreds of tunnels to Egypt. The Likud wants only a Carthaginian peace with the Palestinians forced into a diaspora away from Gaza.

Most of the troubles in the Middle East have been caused by actions taken by European and American governments with Israel only becoming a factor in the past six decades. Today Israel's actionis are the greatest threat to peace in the region and the U.S. can no longer blindly let them run roughshod over their neighbors and original citizens.

The second world war was fought to end such behavior (and Israel can't claim they are immune from such comparisons) and people worldwide are tired of genocide that is happening now.