I’m sure he thinks it a treacherous tool of the Juicebox Mafia, but Pollak really ought to learn to use Google. It indicates that the phrase “Israel, right or wrong” is indeed used by Jewish supporters of Israel. See, e.g., Israel Insider, a journal that declares that slogan to be its “continuing credo.”
http://israelinsider.ning.com/page/emergency-appeal-please-help

We are easily provoked, by uneducated imams, without much thought, or facts.

I will say this, within 10 years, both France & England will face violence by muslims, as they will be provoked to believe that their ethnic rights have been violated for many years, and will demand greater freedom, even limited autonomy….

The US is not far behind

Our problem is that we don’t learn how to integrate within other societies.

Remember this: More Muslims are killed by Muslims than by any other

Algeria is involved by a civil was for the past 8 years with thousands of casualties.

The Kurds have been slaughtered by their Muslim brothers…

We are a violent people

God willing (inshallah) we will learn to live in peace within our Muslim world, and then there will be peace….. until that day we’ll all suffer and you will hypothesize, analyze, summarize, etc. etc.etc.

Why I don’t know

Hell be the fist coward to dial 911, write his congressman, senators, shouting at them to call the police, call the army, and demand that they do something.

He needs to speak (condemn) the palestinians with the same enthusiasm, and ask them not to start shooting symbolic rockets into israel.

Apparently the american Bolsheviks are alive & well.

You guys are in an imaginary world, you have no isea who the arabs are, what they think, what they want.
As an arab I can care less about you infidels.

One day (hopefully) in the near future, while you are on vacation to either london or paris, you too will become victims (casualties) of some ethnic group, who believes that they are oppressed.

Soon enough, many arabs living in europe, will come to believe that, they are being oppressed, that their ethnic rights have been violated,; and an imam will say some vial thing that will spark more violence.

You will then have to over interpret the french, or british, on how they will over react and compare them to the germans of WWII.

You need to go back to school and learn a new trade where you can contribute to humanity

Go help the somalis, afghans, chechnniya, stand up for the ethnic chinese muslims, etc.

ur a f-cking looser

BTW, Hesbollah now have veto power in Lebanon’s government, which is what they wanted. They were busy last year or so trying to achieve it. Apparently they have no interest now in pushing war, but would be even harder nut to crack then they were two years ago.

Chanting “rockets rockets rockets” misses the entire stated goal of Hamas – never truly negotiate, just posture. They’re not freedom fighters – they are organized crime that terrorizes Palestinians while wrapped in the flag of nationalism.

Despite the snark above I have tremendous sympathy for average Gazans. The Israeli settlers are war criminals who en masse should be uprooted and tried as such. But enabling Hamas’ grip on Palestinian citizens is not the answer. As corrupt and useless as the PA/Fatah have been historically they are preferable players.

This shows a deep deterioration of thinking capacity and moral understanding in the West, especially from the so-called Left and “human rights” groups. As for Jews who condemn Israel, their ignorance is very profound, at best. Israel is probably the most slandered country in the world –ever. And these creeps take the slanders seriously. Likewise, the Jews are the most slandered and libelled people in history. That’s how the Holocaust happened, inter alia. So there’s nothing new under the sun.

Well yeah actually.

http://news.webshots.com/photo/2298296970103726530OBKYUv

LOL

Rather than requiring proportionality in the results of Hamas actions why not allow Israel proportionality in intentions? Hamas stated intentions in their founding charter is the destruction of Israel and driving every jew out of “Palestine”. Unfortunately living lives of unrefined savagery have left them woefully unable to actually successfully carry out their intentions but every rocket they fire and every human bomb they send to murder the innocent has that same intention. Isreal on the other hand has only the intention of stopping the aggressions of Hamas and trying to live in peace. Obviously there is no proportionality between the intentions of Hamas and Isreal, on one side genocide on the other a desire to live in peace.

Will Mr. Klein accede to Israel responding to Hamas’ intentions proportionally? Certainly Israel has the ability to destroy Gaza and drive every Muslim there elsewhere but they don’t. That’s the difference Mr. Klein, not the results of the actions but their intentions. Personnally I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Klein is morally cretinus enough not to see the difference. I wonder why then he chooses to provide rhetorical cover for such savagery by turning every exchange into loser take all counting of the corpses? Is it because that’s the only metric by which Hamas can be rationally defended without actually condoning Hamas intentions?

To do otherwise is, in my opinion, immoral. It is also likely suicidal for a Western democracy which cannot exist in a state of permanent warfare.

Hopefully, Israel will wake up to this before it is too late.

As of now, Israel’s unwillingness to properly defend itself has resulted in a world that more or less expects Israel to agree to its own destruction.

The President-Elect of Israel’s greatest ally (and his Secretary of State designate) has already endorsed Ahmedinijad’s doctrine of a nuclear exchange in which Israel would be annihilated and Iran would suffer some limited retaliation.

You are almost certainly right. It would be most inconvenient at this point for the “loyal left” to forget that they supported our original thrust against the Taliban. The policy flip will probably have a “reasonable” cause. I suggested the discovery of an Abu Ghraib, which is a particular case of your “occupation.”

On the other hand, I can’t help but notice how quickly, completely and conveniently the left “forgot” its adversarial stance on Saddam and Iraq when Clinton was in power. So maybe they won’t need an excuse.

The one thing we can be sure of is that, very shortly, America will be as wrong in Afghanistan as Israel is in Gaza.

The Palestinian people elected Hamas leaders, and even Abbas has been very quiet. No use waiting for the “streets” to repel Hamas from Gaza. The “people” don’t seem to mind thier continuous poverty and oppression whether it is from the PLO, Hamas, or Hezbollah.

I wonder how a Hillary run State Department will react to future rocket attacks on Gaza?

Please tell us, oh self-appointed keeper of Jewish Jewishness, who — if anyone — do you deem Jewy enough to criticize Israel?

To J. Lichty: You may be right. My view is a little less bleak than yours, but I’m sure you’re right to some extent. I still believe the factors I pointed out were relevant, but I surely should have included the more basic fact that Israel is a Jewish state. Among my liberal colleagues, I don’t find much animosity against liberal Jews, or even conservative Jews as long as their politics are liberal. This is why I think it has more to do with politics than religion, though these of course are intertwined in the case of Israel. I certainly don’t meet many who would agree, even tacitly, that Jewish blood is worth less than other blood. To be clear, I was speaking only of American and European perceptions, not perceptions in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where surely the influence of anti-Semitism is greater by many orders of magnitude. But I would not deny at all that general anti-Semitism is a factor in America, and even more so in Europe.

To RCAR, I think you’re wrong that Israel’s perceived closeness with the Bush administration is “the source of most” of its bad PR for the past 8 years. Israel had bad PR long before Bush and will long after Bush, and I think the animosities of much of the world toward Israel run far deeper, psychologically and historically. The change of power to Obama will have no effect on that, in my view. However, I agree with you that Obama would be a much more effective messenger to *liberals*, both in America and in Europe, in order to educate them on Israel’s history and right to exist and defend itself. I’m just less hopeful that Obama would do such a thing. Bush has proven himself a friend (albeit an imperfect one) of Israel, in my view. Obama’s rhetoric is mixed, and I doubt he’ll want to oppose the general tenor of the left and its vituperation against Israel. I thought of Bush’s last SOTU mostly because it’s coming up soon, and because it would be nice to get some of the basic facts regarding the history of the modern state of Israel and its clashes with the Palestinians into the bloodstream of popular political dialogue. I don’t think Bush’s raising the issue would raise the level of hatred toward Israel, but perhaps I’m wrong.

It’s early yet. Dare I suggest that almost all of the American Left’s passion for the war in Afghanistan comes from the opportunity it provides to condemn the action in Iraq without appearing to be too soft on terrorism. When Iraq is settled and the central focus shifts to Afghanistan, they will be shocked, shocked to discover that the evil American military is in action there against the noble, indigenous patriots of the Taliban. The turning point will likely come with the discovery of the real Abu Ghraib in Khandahar.

It is the West that is to be defeated, as exemplified by Israel and America. Whatever arguments that advance that cause are legitimate.

Bad idea,On a PR basis,Israel’s perceived proximity with The Bush Admin is the source of most of the bad PR for the last eight years. Obama will be much more effective in helping educate his supporters re:Israel’s right to survive,and how they will accomplish that survival.

The mental gymnastics you see in the condemnation of Israel is purely and simply because it is the Jewish state and even to those who do not crave Jewish blood, Jewish blood is and will always be cheap.

While your attempt at distinguishing the Taliban and the Palestinians is correct on some level, you miss the most basic point. The cheering is not for the Palestinians but against the Jews. It really is that simple.

In both cases, there is a dramatic “disproportion” in military technology, in the level of social-political advancement, and in the number of casualties. Yet the purpose of America’s and Israel’s responses is not to work some abstract calculus of proportionate justice, but to achieve military and security aims, and in any case these “disproportions” did not lead all (or even most) liberals to oppose the American action in Afghanistan. So why do they support the one and oppose the other?

In my view, it has to do with the popular conceptions of the Taliban and the Palestinians. It would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic, but the Taliban were disfavored among many of my colleagues in academia not because of their treatment of women or the cruelty of their theo-thugocracy, but because they had destroyed ancient Buddhist rock carvings. “Who are we,” they would ask, “to judge how a different culture treats its women? But who are *they* to judge Buddhism?!” The Taliban were/are hardly the cause celebre that the Palestinians have been for a long time now. Why is that?

In some respects it seems as though the Palestinians are the “inner city poor,” in the minds of liberals, suffering under the oppression of the “Wall Street barons” of the Israeli Jews. It was hard to make the argument that America had oppressed Afghanistan, except in the vague sense in which (in the mind of the liberal) American business and culture has oppressed everyone everywhere. In other words, the complaint of “disproportion” is a red herring. Tthe Israelis are blamed for the military offensives largely because liberals believe that the Israelis are responsible for the conditions in which the Palestinians find themselves. Yes, there is a contentious history between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians, but few in America (or in Europe) actually know that history. And few know the intricacies of Hamas/Fatah and the various parties in Israel. Instead there is the general perception that Israel put the Palestinians where they are and has kept them there. Also Israel seems to be perceived as a generally conservative entity, turning the Palestinians into the Che Guevara freedom fighting brigade. If the world thinks of the Palestinians that way, so will the Palestinians themselves, and they will (rightly) believe they have the world’s support and so they can get away with anything.

As long as this is the case, I don’t think a peace process will succeed. The “groundwork” for peace will come not (only) through minor trust-building maneuvers, but through changing the way in which the parties are perceived. Israel needs to win the PR war before this issue can be resolved. Israel–and America, as Israel’s ally–needs to set forth the history of the many, many ways in which Israel and the US have sought to assist the Palestinians, and how the Palestinian leadership and the leaders of the nearby Arab and Muslim nations have *kept* the Palestinians precisely where they are. As long as Israel is blamed for the conditions prevailing in Palestine, they will not receive support for their military responses to Hamas’ attacks. The Palestinians will continue to be seen as the oppressed poor who are throwing stones at the restaurants that refuse to give them food, while the Israelis will be perceived as the wealthy restaurant owners who order their security guards open fire in response.

When is the last time a United States President has educated the American public on this history? What better use would there be for President Bush’s last State of the Union address? It would not overturn the PR battle, but it would be a step in the right direction.

By the way, Fatah is no better than Hamas. It’s not our job or Israel’s to replace one insane band of thugs with another.

Noah,

The nanny not get back to the house promptly enough for you? Have to pull a little Alex Kuczynski Duty and actually deal with the kid? (Talk to Norm and Midge about what happens when a child goes unattended for decades. Pretty it’s not.)

The Juicebox Mafia? When will they learn to write?

Oy vey!

“Expressing condemnation and denunciation for what is going on against our brothers in Gaza and expressing solidarity with them by words only doesn’t mean anything in the face of the big tragedy they are facing,” he said in a statement released by his office in Najaf.

“Now more than at any other time, both Arab and Islamic nations are required to take a practical stance for the sake of stopping this repeated aggression and to break the unfair besieging of these brave people,” the statement said, without giving details of the proposed stance.
“