Skinner Sphere

Today's Pearls Before Swine captures the Middle East "Peace Process" in four quick panels. You cannot arbitrate between two parties when one party wants the total destruction of the other. There's no room for compromise. Offering to only destroy 95% of your country instead of all of it isn't an improvement.

Labels: Israel, Middle East, Palestine

Ron at Dean's World has a good post on the support America shows for Israel in response to an outpouring at a Sean Hannity freedom concert. This quote, "They (on the right) know what Israel means and how the hatred for it is the same hatred that the wicked, the jealous, the barbarous have for America.", sums up my support for Israel. Below is an excerpt, but read the whole thing.

There has never been a country, in the long exile of the Jews, that has been more kind to the Jews than the United States of America. Where would Israel be without America? More important: Whither the Jewish people who live there? How many times has America stood by Israel?

This is not because of a Jewish lobby. There was no lobby at Six Flags. Conservatives and especially evangelical Christians have sincerely taken on the cause of Israel as their own. (Interestingly, the non-Jewish libertarianesque types in the Blogosphere I know best, Dean and Glenn Reynolds, are also strongly pro-Israel; I don't think libertarianism, as such, is necessarily inclined one way or the other.) We're talking about Sean Hannity... Oliver North... David Limbaugh. Not the matzah ball crowd. Not on the AIPAC Chanukah list.

Technorati tags: Israel, support

Labels: Israel

The Left is becoming harder and harder to write satire about. Rush has created a PSA asking the Left to pull back from the edge a bit so he can continue making parodies. Here is the latest example. I'm going to show excerpts from a recent liberal column and from a satirist's column. It's up to you to decide which is which.

"Israel has had a long history of responding to attacks on its people, and what do they have to show for it? More attacks! Israel seems to have missed an essential fact about the area in which they live: It's full of Muslims. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and Muslims live in corrupt dictatorships and murder people. That's just how things are. Does Israel really think they can solve that with violent attacks against the violent? That's madness. Israel should have known that, by their location, they were essentially agreeing to get murdered every so often; anything else is cultural ignorance. But, by joining our voices in a cry of condemnation, maybe we can wake Israel up to the fact. We'll have to shout loud for them to hear us over Hezbollah's bombs, but they have to hear us now.

...Israel is at war and surrounded by millions of people who want them dead, so what they need most right now is our criticism. Let's remind them who were the ones who decided to be Jews where they are not wanted so maybe they'll realize their folly and stop the aggression. Then we will finally have peace in the Middle East (as long as you don't count Muslim violence – but who does?)."

"The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

...Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down."

It's hard to tell. They could come from either and you wouldn't know the difference. The first excerpt comes from Frank J. at IMAO, a great little humor site. The second one is from Richard Cohen, in the Washington *BLEEP*.

Found at Right Wing News.
Technorati tags: politics, Israel, Hezbollah

Labels: Hezbollah, Israel, politics

Ace is discussing a Daily Kos diarist's post imaging no Israel. To be fair, some of the dKos crowd are replying how wrong that is. One of Ace's commenters, caspera, has a great response that needs to be seen. Sure, Ace has way more readers than I, but it is buried in the comments. I don't know if caspera blogs, but I thought this needs to get out.

"The world let the Jews down and the Arab States have let the Palestinians down."

A pretty reasonable sentiment for Daily Kos, but it is still pretty wrongheaded, I think.

Here is the crux of the problem as I see it: Islam's notion that once land is Islamic, a good Muslim must wage war to regain it for the Caliphate. The logic of this philosophy leads ineluctably to perpetual war against Israel. The Arabs consider Israel to be Muslim land and want to regain it, but every time they have tried to do so openly, they get their asses kicked. Solution: fight a proxy war and radicalize your proxies to carry on the fight indefinitely. The Palestinians are a 190 proof distillation of the Islamist desire to get that land back. If the other Arab States weren't there, it would merely be 120 proof. It is because Israel is the only non Muslim country in the Middle East, that it is like a bone in their throat.

The Palestinians have been given one of the most badass patches of real estate on planet Earth. If the Palestinians were not radical Muslims, say they were Sicilian-American mobsters to take a classier more high-minded caste of people, Gaza would have casinos and bikini-clad hotties drinking umbrella drinks on their beautiful beaches and would be doing booming business with Israel and they wouldn't be worrying about the Arab States "letting them down." It would be a Middle Eastern Monaco. Instead, since Islam preaches no bikinis, no drinks, no fun, but please do kill the Jews, and wage perpetual war against the infidel, and reclaim that land for Dar Al Islam, Gaza is doomed regardless of what the other Arab States do.

Egyptians can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they don't have to join the jihad since they are already in Dar Al Islam. Palestinians don't have that luxury. They must wage jihad. Islam itself, not the Arab States, really, let the Palestinians down.

We can't really admit that this is what's going on in "Palestine" because that admission leads us ineluctably to the unpleasant discussions in the other threads below. Caliphate and Ummah are some of the scariest words in the English language, or whatever language they come from. They're like Borg, but worse because it's real.

A few lefties try to imagine a world without Israel because that fantasy relieves the pressure on their brains like a shunt. I think lefties are unwilling to face the following unpleasant fact: rich white people are gonna have to put the smack down on some poor brown people, and the poor brown people are the ones who are actually causing all the trouble for a change. Liberals and lefties with great justification fought White racism in the US, but they seem to be unprepared to accurately identify friend and foe outside the US Civil Rights paradigm. Seriously. I think when lefties imagine no Israel, they are actually saying, "I am so morally vain that I would prefer that all the Jews in Israel be transported elsewhere so that I don't have to rethink my worldview. It's more convenient for me." I might be wrong on this, but that's the sense I get.

Technorati tags: Israel, Gaza, Religion of Peace, RoP, Daily Kos

Labels: Israel, Kos, rop