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IF PRESIDENT Bush wanted to deal with Iran by "bombing them back into the stone age", (as an American general once put it during the Vietnam War), now would be the time. With everybody riveted to the World Cup, who would notice?

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Mon Dieu, Mondial! (Balls instead of Bullets)

[ 27 June 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 27 June 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Originally posted by ceti:
I don't know where this is going, but someone really needs to correct the spelling for "Isreali"!

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Raelly!

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The history of occupation is not just that of Palestinian suffering and Israeli aggression; it is also the history of its ideology, the history of the fictions the Israeli society fabricates in order to justify its major colonial project which has just entered its 40th year. These fictions do have a history: one can trace their career from birth to maturity, their shifts from the margin to the center and vice versa, their rise and fall among definite segments of the Israeli society or media, sometimes their (reversible) death.

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"ISRAEL HAS declared war on the Palestinian people! The Palestinian people will answer in kind! The Palestinian rebellion will go on! The Palestinian fighters are steadfast in the service of the nation! Down with the Nazi-Zionist occupation! Out with the unclean infidels from the Holy Land! Destroyed Rafah - we shall build you anew! Long live the Palestinian revolution! Long live the State of Palestine!"

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A Hamas leaflet of last week? Not exactly. With appropriate changes, this leaflet was published on July 2, 1946 - sixty years ago almost to the day - by the Haganah, after "Black Saturday".

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Sorry if I spoiled the surprise ending, but you never know - some genius on babble will quote it next year as having been an authentic leaflet.

[ 02 July 2006: Message edited by: unionist ]

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THAT'S IT. Tomorrow the World Cup games come to an end. We can congratulate the new champions and wish them arrivederci or au revoir, as the case may be.

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Excellent article, CMOT Dibbler...

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It is indeed. However, I cannot help feeling that Avnery's logic is flawed. The British army of fifty years ago is not the Isreali army of today. Churchill did not have nukes at his disposal, and the British weren't fighting to maintain control of the West Bank's water supply. The Palestinian resistance will never be able to dislodge the IDF, not so long as the West Bank and Golan Heights provide most of Isreal's fresh water.

[ 15 July 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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THE REAL aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government.

That was the aim of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it.

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Just two weeks after the tragedy of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas into Gaza, history repeated itself on the Lebanese border, this time as farce. Hezbollah, the Middle East's most sophisticated guerilla, managed to kidnap two Israeli soldiers into Lebanon. Once again it took the Israeli army almost an hour to figure out that two of its troops were missing. The soldiers must have been already "far, far away," as the charismatic Hassan Nasrallah said contemptuously, when the army took the odd decision to send a tank into Lebanon to get them. Just 70 meters north of the border fence, the Merkava – "one of the most protected tanks in the world" – drove over a powerful bomb and was completely destroyed. All four crew members were killed instantly. It then took the army more than 12 hours to extricate the wreck and recover the bodies, under heavy fire in which yet another soldier was killed, bringing the total number of Israeli casualties in the incident to eight. The strongest army in the Middle East seems unable to protect its own soldiers, let alone Israel's citizens. A sane state would send its talented chief of staff home; Israel, instead, sent him to wreak havoc in Lebanon.

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A WOMAN, an immigrant from Russia, throws herself on the ground in total despair in front of her home that has been hit by a missile, crying in broken Hebrew: "My son! My son!" believing him dead. In fact he was only wounded and sent to the hospital.

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"IT SEEMS that Nasrallah survived," Israeli newspapers announced, after 23 tons of bombs were dropped on a site in Beirut, where the Hizbullah leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker.

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- Who is winning this war?

On the 15th day of the war, Hizbullah is functioning and fighting. That by itself will go down in the annals of the Arab peoples as a shining victory.

When a featherweight boxer faces a heavyweight and is still standing in the 15th round - that is a victory, whatever the final outcome.

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IT IS the old story about the losing gambler: he cannot stop. He continues to play, in order to win his losses back. He continues to lose and continues to gamble, until he has lost everything: his ranch, his wife, his shirt.

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Nothing compares to Israel's open, independent, and pluralistic media in times of war. Saturday we had the pleasure of watching Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman give an especially repulsive horror show on Israeli public television (Channel 1). Foxman was invited to the studio to comment on Kofi Annan's announcement that four UN observers had been apparently killed by Israel deliberately. From the odd choice of "expert" for this subject to the style and content, the "interview" – in a prestigious foreign news weekly magazine – looked like propaganda from the darkest regimes. Moderator Yaakov Achimeir stated time and again as a matter of fact that the observers had been killed "by accident," so that the only realm left to investigate was Annan's personal psychopathology for suggesting otherwise.

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THE DAY after the war will be the Day of the Long Knives.

Everybody will blame everybody else. The politicians will blame each other. The generals will blame each other. The politicians will blame the generals. And, most of all, the generals will blame the politicians.

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The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel's ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later. He has allowed his war cabinet meetings to become fully public through the kind of leaks no serious wartime leadership would ever countenance. Divisive cabinet debates are broadcast to the world, as was Olmert's own complaint that "I'm tired. I didn't sleep at all last night" (Haaretz, July 28). Hardly the stuff to instill Churchillian confidence.

His search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well. That confidence -- and the relationship it reinforces -- is as important to Israel's survival as its own army. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue.

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FOR ME it was a moment of shocking revelation.

I was listening to one of the daily speeches of our Prime Minister. He said: "We are a wonderful people!" He said: We have already won this war, it is the greatest victory in the history of our state. He said: We have changed the face of the Middle East. And more to that effect.

Well, I told myself, that's Olmert.

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The UN Security Council resolution draft on Lebanon reflects a new stage of Western colonialism in the Middle East, and perhaps a historic precedent: for the first time, the UN Security Council – should the resolution draft be endorsed – breaches the fundamental principle of the right of people under occupation to resist, and in fact legitimizes the violent partition of the sovereign state of Lebanon.

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All generalizations are wrong, except this one: Israeli liberal intellectuals are against war. They have always been against it, and they even suffered greatly for their critical views, as they stress proudly. They were against the previous war, they will be against the next war, they are against all wars. There is just one minor exception, though: the present war, every present war, which they always support. Because the present war – well, that's something totally different from all those other wars! How can you even compare?! The present war is always inevitable, and necessary, and just, and worthy of support.

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Israeli Intellectuals Love the War

[ 08 August 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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TODAY, THE war entered its fifth week. Hard to believe: our mighty army has now been fighting for 29 days against a "gang" and "terrorist organization", as the military commanders like to describe them, and the battle has still not been decided.

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SO WHAT has happened to the Israeli army?

This question is now being raised not only around the world, but also in Israel itself. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the army's boastful arrogance, on which generations of Israelis have grown up, and the picture presented by this war.

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What the Hell has Happened to the Isreali Army

[ 13 August 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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More than once it has been said in this column that an army that has been acting for many years as a colonial police force against the Palestinian population - "terrorists", women and children - and spending its time running after stone-throwing boys, cannot remain an efficient army. The test of results confirms this.

....

THE COMMON denominator of all the failures is the disdain for Arabs, a contempt that has dire consequences. It has caused total misunderstanding, a kind of blindness of Hizbullah's motives, attitudes, standing in Lebanese society etc.

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THIRTY THREE days of war. The longest of our wars since 1949.

On the Israeli side: 154 dead - 117 of them soldiers. 3970 rockets launched against us, 37 civilians dead, more than 422 civilians wounded.

On the Lebanese side: about a thousand dead civilians, thousands wounded. An unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead and wounded.

More than a million refugees on both sides.

So what has been achieved for this terrible price?

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WITH A few words, a Lebanese army officer destroyed, the day before yesterday, the illusion that Israel had achieved anything in this war.

At a televised Lebanese army parade that was also broadcast on Israeli TV , the officer read a prepared text to his assembled troops, who were about to be deployed along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

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In the village of Aita al-Shaab we found a family sifting by hand through the remains of their house. They found what they were looking for: the bodies of the grandparents, several weeks old and not all in one piece. They were no longer human beings, but rather masses of putrid, rotting flesh falling off the bones, leaving an unmistakable stench that was only partially mitigated by some coverings that the family had placed to try to preserve a shred of dignity.

In her grief, the daughter of the elderly couple launched into an indictment of George Bush and the U.S. relationship with Israel, which I was fortunate enough to capture on film:

"Let the people of America see our children. Let all Americans know what Mr. Bush has done to us, that this is his democracy, his "New Middle East". We don't blame Israelis. We have always known what they are. I have a two-year-old baby who can't stop saying, 'They broke my house. I want my house.' Can the American president answer this child? Have the American people no reaction to the gifts of Mr. Bush to the people of Lebanon? He cares more about a dog than for the killing of an entire nation. Does he want to kill the people of the Middle East to create a 'land without people'? We are the Middle East, and without us there is none. Heaven without angels is not heaven. I do not blame the Israelis. I blame Bush, who proclaims democracy and humanity and freedom and dignity, to be imposed upon the entire world with steel and fire, while he professes to believe in God. That's what I want to tell Mr. Bush. I'm looking for my Mom and Dad underneath these ruins. To me they are everything, and even a grain of the soil of this land is more honorable than Mr.Bush. He cannot rule our country even under fire. Even if we are dead, we will be free. His great technology is useless. Is this the way to use technology? Let him learn how to use technology for good. He cannot rule us this way. We are honored to give our blood for our country, even our souls and our houses. We live under the sun of freedom, while he [Bush] has no honor. We've been looking for my parents for 22 days, but of course this is of no interest to Mr. Bush. Let Americans know that the hunger that they suffer is so that Israel can have the weapons to destroy Arab countries. I hope that Americans learn the reality of what is going on. We will stay here. This is our land. We are not afraid of them and their weapons."

Of course there was plenty of evidence that they (IDF) had been there recently. They had painted graffiti, broken into some of the homes, put their cigarettes out on the furniture, eaten the food, smashed nearly everything that could be smashed and vandalized wedding pictures and pictures of the Virgin Mary. (Just to show you the misconceptions westerners hold about religious attitudes here, the house belonged to a Muslim man who simply liked to venerate this Christian icon of his fellow Lebanese.)

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The land is still there - Paul Larudee writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon

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A STORY has it that Oscar Wilde once attended the premiere of a colleague's play and every few minutes raised his hat. When asked about this odd behavior, he replied: "I am a courteous person. I raise my hat when I meet an old acquaintance."

If I wore a hat, I would have to raise it every few minutes these days when I view TV talk shows, listen to the radio or read the papers. I keep meeting things I wrote years ago, and especially things I have written since the beginning of this war.

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IN HIS latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one."

Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these are perhaps the most important words.

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"We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not," he said in an interview with Lebanon's New TV station.

Nasrallah also said he did not believe there would be a second round of fighting with Israel, and that Hezbollah would adhere to the cease-fire despite what he called Israeli provocation.

[...]

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EHUD OLMERT has found a convincing proof of his great victory over Hassan Nasrallah: "I am touring the country freely while Nasrallah is hiding in his bunker!"

It is said that "the style is the man," and by these words Olmert shows his quality (or lack thereof). At the moment, dozens of Israeli airplanes and helicopter gunships are standing by, ready to kill Nasrallah if he as much as shows himself. Nasrallah does not have a single airplane or helicopter to kill Olmert. The vast material superiority of the Israeli army over a guerilla organization is no achievement of Olmert - but Hizbullah's ability to survive the massive onslaught of our army is certainly the achievement of Nasrallah.

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NAPOLEON WON the battle of Waterloo. The German Wehrmacht won World War II. The United States won in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Zealots won against the Romans, and Ehud Olmert won the Second Lebanon War.

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ONCE saw a nice sketch in a political cabaret: on the stage several people were speaking in unconnected sentences, all of which ended with the word "but". For example: "Some of my best friends are Jews, but…", "I have nothing against blacks, but…", "I really detest racism, but…"

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Left, but...

[ 08 September 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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IN EVERY language there are some words that cannot be properly translated into any other. It seems that they express something intimately connected with the speakers of that language and rooted in their history, traditions and reality. Such words become international expressions, appearing in other languages in their original form.

For example, the German word "Schadenfreude". Or the English word "gentleman" and the American word 'business". Or the Russian word "pogrom" (originally meaning devastation). Or the Japanese word "kamikaze" (divine wind, the title given to suicide bombers). Or the Mexican "manana" and the similar Arabic "bukra" (both meaning tomorrow. The difference between them? The joke says: Bukra is not so urgent.) And, lately, the Palestinian "intifada".
The most prominent Hebrew addition to this international lexicon is "chutzpah", a word that has no equivalent in any other language. Some English words may come close (impertinence, cheek, insolence, impudence), but none conveys the full meaning of this Hebrew-Yiddish expression. It seems that it reflects something that is especially characteristic of Jewish reality, which was transferred to the State of Israel, which defines itself as a "Jewish State".

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GUESS WHOSE words these are: "Starting this war was a scandal…It was possible to solve the problem of the missiles in South Lebanon by diplomatic means…The offensive of the last two days of the war, in which 33 soldiers were killed after the cease-fire resolution had already been accepted, was a spin of the Prime Minister…The Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense and the Chief-of-Staff must resign…"

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Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

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HAD HAMLET been a reserve soldier in the Israeli army, he might now declare: "Something is rotten in the State of Israel!"

And indeed, something is rotten.

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ONCE, WHILE traveling in a taxi, I had an argument with the driver - a profession associated in Israel with extreme right-wing views. I tried in vain to convince him of the desirability of peace with the Arabs. In our country, which has never seen a single day of peace in the last hundred years, peace can seem like something out of science fiction.

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It is not nice to admit this, but I do get some pleasure from this war.

Until the war broke out I thought that our media were the worst in the western world. From the very start of the Intifadah our media have been speaking in one uniform voice, faithfully parroting the official story, not asking probing questions, refraining from any real criticism. Barak turned every stone. He went farther than any previous Prime Minister. He gave everything and Arafat turned down his generous offers. We have no partner, etc. etc., ad infinitum. No thorough research, no examination of facts, no recording of testimony from all sides, no comparisons and no incisive conclusions.

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IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

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he Palestinian Authority - both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - needs this money like air for breathing. This fact also requires some explanation: in the 19 years when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, from 1948 to 1967, not a single important factory was built there. The Jordanians wanted all economic activity to take place in Jordan proper, east of the river, and the Egyptians neglected the strip altogether.

Then came the Israeli occupation, and the situation became even worse. The occupied territories became a captive market for Israeli industry, and the military government prevented the establishment of any enterprise that could conceivably compete with an Israeli one.

The Palestinian workers were compelled to work in Israel for hunger wages (by Israeli standards). From these, the Israeli government deducted all the social payments levied on Israeli workers, without the Palestinian workers enjoying any social benefits. This way the government robbed these exploited workers of tens of billions of dollars, which disappeared somehow in the bottomless barrel of the government.

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THE NAME of Franz von Papen is familiar to everyone who knows the history of the German republic that was born after World War I and that died when Hitler came to power.

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Fleeing from Nazi Austria on the eve of World War II, Sigmund Freud was asked to sign a statement saying he was not mistreated. The old Jewish psychiatrist is said to have asked whether he could add: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."

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AT THE height of the epic Battle of Britain in 1940, when British airmen were killed at an appalling rate ("never was so much owed by so many to so few"), an official in charge of propaganda had a bright idea to raise morale. On the walls at the Royal Air Force bases a poster appeared with these words: "Who is afraid of the Ju-87?" (At the time, one of the most effective German planes.)

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In its original German form – Liebermann – the name means "lovable man." It is hard to imagine a name less appropriate for the new deputy prime minister of Israel.

He is not lovable, neither in his personality nor in his views – and that is the understatement of the year.

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"THANK GOD for the American elections," our ministers and generals sighed with relief.

They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this week. They love Bush, after all.

But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom of the page.

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THE KEY word was "Hamas". It was spoken from the tribune and appeared on printed material - but in two very different ways.

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"If we know Hizbullah is planning to kidnap our soldiers, we should set out, publicly, on the front page, 20 targets in Lebanon, and say 10 of them will be destroyed, no matter who is there."

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In spite of the war raging in nearby Beirut, Jounieh was full of life. The Christian elite spent the day in the sun-drenched marina, the women lounging in bikinis, the men slugging whisky. The three of us (myself and two young women from my editorial staff - a correspondent and a photographer) were the only Israelis in town, and so we were feted. Everybody invited us onto their yachts, and one rich couple insisted that we come to their home as guests of a family celebration.

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A FRIEND of mine, who was brought up in Egypt, took part in the interrogation of Egyptian officers captured in the 1956 Sinai war.

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[ 03 December 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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A revealing book I have recently read about the present Middle East is Joris Luyendijk's Almost Human. Luyendijk was a Dutch journalist who spent several years (1998-2003) in Arab countries as well as in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, working for two Dutch quality newspapers and for the television. His background as a social science student, his command of Arabic and his academic research in Egypt, as well as the fact that he deserted the journalistic profession, all give him a unique critical perspective on the "Middle East," both as an actual reality and as a permanent media item. In fact, the gap between these two – between the Mideast's reality and its Western image – is the true subject of the book.

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The Israeli interior minister, Roni Bar-On, declared that his ministry has planned the demolition of more than 42,000 homes of Palestinian Bedouins that were built even before 1948 ... On the ground, the Israeli authorities on Wednesday demolished 17 houses in Tawil village, Negev desert, and assaulted an old woman and four young men who tried to stop them.

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NO ONE likes to admit a mistake. Me neither. But honesty leaves me no choice.

A few days after the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, I happened to go on a lecture tour in the US.

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WHEN THE Israeli government decided, in the space of a few hours, to start the Second Lebanon War, it did not have any plan.

When the Chief-of-Staff urged the cabinet to start the war, he did not submit any plan.

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:
Back to the Scene of the Crime

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According to Seymour Hersh, the invasion was planned well in advance:

"Washington's interest in Israel's war"
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact

Whatever the truth, it's win/win from an antiwar activist's standpoint.

If it was planned, it proves Israel's bad faith and hawkishness.

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A FEW weeks ago, the 15th Asian games, the "Asiad", was held in Qatar.

The Israeli media treated the event with a mixture of derision and pity. Some kind of picturesque Asian circus. Our television showed an exotic horseman with a keffiyeh at the opening ceremony, riding his noble Arab steed up a steep staircase to light the Olympic flame. And that was that.

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A recent call for a cultural boycott against Israel by John Berger and others has elicited one of its more wretched responses in the Guardian (Dec. 22), signed by Anthony Julius and Simon Schama. I confess I haven't heard of Anthony Julius before – I am told he is a lawyer, and lawyers sometimes bend truth for their clients. But Simon Schama is a prominent academic, professor of history at Columbia, a man of science. He should know better.

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The Embarrassment of the Wretched

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

I think it is very basic, and a test of whether the opposition to Israel is made up of hypocrites, or not.

That is: those who can't find a word to say in criticism of Iran, or Hezbollah, or any of the other parties to the conflict, but are DEEPLY offended by Israel's human rights abuses, are simply hypocritical.

When international conflicts arise, there will always be those who direct all criticism at "the other guy". In the Cold War, Stalin had his absolutist defenders, as did Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy, etc.

To me, the most enlightening writers on the Cold War were those who could put aside their political or ethnic favouritisms, and try to be even handed.

Similarly, if one talked ONLY about human rights abuses in the United States, especially "the Negroes in the South", as the Communist Party did in the late forties, that would also be stupid and unfair.

Both would be instances of "singling out".

Why should I engage in any kind of conversation with someone who routinely misconstrues what I say in order to smear me. For instance, I have never said, that Amedinejad was not a racist, I in fact said that it was likely that he was. However, your fist pounding outraged wailing and nashing of teeth, really requires simple ideas. So, you seem happy to make out that Amedinejad is Hitler renewed, but then whine like a little baby should anyone even mention Israel and Nazi Germany in the same sentence.

The only thing your red-bating canard has achieved so far is to make me look reasonable, while you appear like a flailing maniac. I certainly hope you don't lose it like this in court -- god help your clients.

How many lawyers at Wansee Jeff?

[ 28 December 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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I disagree with the idea, in the linked article, that the "Don't Single Out" argument is flawed.

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I agree with Jeff. We should really stop singling out Isreal. To that end, I suggest that we stop refering to "america's best friend" as the only democracy in the middle east. We should also stop talking about it as if it were a bastion of tolerence, hemmed in all sides by arab savages. To do so is blatently unfair.

Edited because of concerns about style.

[ 31 December 2006: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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"I DON'T care about the principles! All that I want is that my wife can live with me and that we can raise a family!" cried out the engaging young man on the TV talk show.

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In one of the news broadcasts that he presented last week on Channel 1 television, Haim Yavin defined the Syrian feelers as an "escalation in the peace attack," no less. No one could better describe the panic that Syrian President Bashar Assad is arousing in Israel. Attacks are something we understand, and escalation is also a user-friendly concept for Israelis. Therefore, it appears that peace has no meaning unless it comes in the form of an attack.

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Since Judas Iscariot embraced Jesus, Jerusalem has not seen such a kiss.

After being boycotted by Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert for years, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister of Israel two weeks ago. There, in front of the cameras, Olmert embraced him and kissed him warmly on both cheeks. Abbas looked stunned, and froze.

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The Anti-Defamation League won't say anything, and neither will the other Diaspora Jewish organizations. Bibi is just too big, too popular, too important, too much a symbol of Israel for the Diaspora Jewish establishment to say a word against him, let alone accuse him of being a shameless bigot.

Two positive things happened: Members of the haredi public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate.

That's the Israeli people's overwhelming choice for prime minister talking. I hope The New York Times, CNN and every other major news medium in the world picks up this story and doesn't let it go until Israel and Diaspora Jewry are shamed into dumping this guy once and for all.

On second thought, exposure as an anti-Arab racist by the international media could cause Netanyahu some problems overseas, but at home, it would only increase his appeal.

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But he won't be, because anti-Arab racism in Israel is either supported or strategically ignored by the mainstream of the Jewish world, and pretty much taken for granted by the gentile world.

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I'm not entirely comfortable with this statemement. It sounds a like he is condemning a huge chunk of the world's jews as racists and hypocrites. If he had said:

"...because anti-Arab racism in Israel is either supported or strategically ignored by several important organizations in the mainstream Jewish world..."

It wouldn't sound like he was heaping scorn on Jews in general. I like the rest of the article but that part makes it seem like he's pulling a Tarek Fatah.

[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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At conferences abroad I meet many Palestinians. The serious ones among them acknowledge in private conversations that the Palestinians' tendency to deny and distort reality and to believe that words can change it is to their detriment and to a large extent responsible for the catastrophes that have befallen them.

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:

I'm not entirely comfortable with this statemement. It sounds a like he is condemning a huge chunk of the worlds jews as racists and hypocrites. If he had said:

"...because anti-Arab racism in Israel is either supported or strategically ignored by several important organizations in the mainstream Jewish world..."

It wouldn't sound like he was heaping scorn on Jews in general. I like the rest of the article but that part makes it seem like he's pulling a Tarek Fatah.

[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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...and pretty much taken for granted by the gentile world.

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The Gentile world includes 2 billion Christians 1.3 billion Muslims 900 million Hindus and 350 million Buddhists. To say that all those people take anti arab prejudice for granted is silly.

and then there's this:

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The Anti-Defamation League won't say anything, and neither will the other Diaspora Jewish organizations

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Why didn't he just talk about Israel's allies within the diaspora? The diaspora is large( 9 and a half million Jews do not live in "The Holy Land") There are a lot of Jewish organizations based outside of Israel who oppose everything Bibi stands for.

[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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A Haifa University survey investigating Arabs and Jews' views on one another reveals disturbing results.

The poll showed that 75 percent of Jewish students believe that Arabs are uneducated people, are uncivilized and are unclean.

On the other hand 25 percent of the Arab youth believe that Jews are the uneducated ones, while 57 percent of the Arab's believe Jews are unclean.

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IT WAS murder in broad daylight. Undercover soldiers disguised as Arabs, accompanied by armored vehicles and bulldozers and supported by helicopter gunships, invaded the center of Ramallah. Their aim was to kill or capture a Fatah militant, Rabee' Hamid. The man was wounded but managed to escape.

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Mahatma Gandhi would have loved it. Nelson Mandela would have saluted. Martin Luther King would have been the most excited - it would have reminded him of the old days.

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"IF ARAFAT were alive…" one hears this phrase increasingly often in conversations with Palestinians, and also with Israelis and foreigners.

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The United Nations General Assembly has just adopted a resolution condemning denials of the Holocaust. The resolution, co-sponsored by 103 countries, was approved by consensus, without a vote.

Perhaps it's too early to predict the reactions to this fresh UN resolution, but let us try to speculate what they might be.

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IT SOUNDS like a promo for a second rate soap opera: a 21- year old woman appears with a much older celebrity, who grabs her, forces a kiss on her and pushes his tongue into her mouth.

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WHEN A Prime Minister has just lost a war, is dogged by corruption allegations and sees his popularity ratings in free fall - what can he do?

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