From Huffington Post:
Glenn Greenwald @ Salon:
Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it."Hilzoy @ Washington Monthly:
One of the many things that makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so utterly dispiriting is that it's impossible to think of anything good coming of any of this. Worse than that, it's hard to imagine that even the people involved think anything good will come of it.Cernig @ Newshoggers:
What, exactly, do the Palestinians lobbing rockets into Sderot think they will accomplish? That the Israelis will look about them and say: Holy Moly, I had no idea this place was so dangerous!, and leave? Do the Israelis think: even though we've bombed the Palestinians a whole lot, and it's never done much good before, maybe this time it will be different! Maybe Hamas will say: heavens, this is a pretty serious round of attacks; maybe we should just sue for peace -- ? Or what?
Indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks on civilians and indiscriminate but deliberately targeted airstrikes on civilian infrastructure are both wrong. Collective punishment is collective punishment and is morally wrong no matter the relative intensity by which both sides pursue it or what has gone before in the way of provocation. Wrong (Strength 2) + Wrong (Strength 5) cannot ever = Right (Strength 7). All you can say is that one is less wrong but still ultimately morally reprehensible. You then (if you have any intellectual or moral integrity) have to open yourself to debate about how you weigh the relative wrongness of actions without retreating to strawman charges of anti-semitism or anti-arabism.
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10 comments:
Funny how Glenn Greenwald decries this sort of emotionally manipulative nonsequitur when that description describes most of his writing.
What the Israeli government should do is offer anyone who thinks that having 1/4 million people living under constant fear of deadly rocket fire is acceptable, and should be accepted implicitly by the Israeli government, a plane ticket to Israel and free lodging in Sderot, the border town hardest hit by rockets from Gaza. Hell, I'll personally pay for Glenn Greewald's Sderot vacation.
The only thing I can say is that because of the will of the current President, we invaded one middle eastern country and literally threw away thousands of lives and billions of dollars. We could invest the same effort in Israel and Palestine. We did, during the Clinton administration, broker a peace agreement and give the Palestinians aid. That agreement fell apart when Ariel Sharon went to a mosque, I believe, or when the Palestinians reacted badly to it (infinity and beyond, yada yada). That is the sort of thing we need to do again, instead of invading an oil state we need to negotiate yet another peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and we need to get money to the Palestinians in the form of investments, in their infrastructure and their businesses, to get them out of the habit of shooting rockets. We need to get in there, again. And again, if necessary. We are the only ones on the planet who can.
Of course, it would be nice for us to step up for Darfur, and I believe the Congo is having trouble. Once again, we are the only ones.
And yes, we never do.
The Temple Mount was just a mosque?
If that can be used as an excuse for rejecting peace, Can I use the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a excuse?
Of course, it would be nice for us to step up for Darfur, and I believe the Congo is having trouble
If we do I plan to give B.H. Obama the same support that progressive gave G.W. Bush with Iraq.
Even if BHO doesn't lie his ass off while he's doing it? Because that was kind of our hangup.
Well, I was working from an unclear memory, and did not use the computer to augment my memory. But I believe my statements were essentially correct, and I did suggest both sides were to blame. But if you want to suggest my argument is totally negated because I did not identify the Temple Mount, be my guest. That is certainly a way of ducking out of the problem.
Are you saying that that either the Congo or Darfur is the same as Iraq, Heir? That's why progressives are hypocrites if they don't reject Barack Obama's foreign policies, and call for his resignation? I know, you are one of those conservatives who likes to forget that we turned a blind eye when Saddam Hussein was actually using weapons of mass destruction on Iranians and Kurds in the 1980’s, because we didn’t like the Iranians and we didn’t care about the Kurds. And any humanitarian crisis in Iraq in 2002 was actually caused by our policies, just as hunger and poverty in Cuba are caused by our policies.
nevermind the fact that the whole reason we are targets of extremism is because of our government's one-sided support of the israelis in their fight over the existence of palestine.
the entire world is on the side of the people living in gaza, it seems. but not our government, no. that would make us antisemitic.
yeesh.
Heir, you gotta love the hypocrisy of these people...in their eyes, Iraqis are expendible, but we need to help the Palestinians, as well as the people of Darfur and Congo. I completely agree about the latter 3, but why is the "antiwar" movement so hell-bent on seeing Iraqis live under Saddam Hussein? Along with his two idiot sons, he was the epitome of evil.
You gotta love the hypocrisy of these people...in their eyes, Iraqis are expendable, but we need to help the Palestinians, as well as the people of Darfur and Congo. I completely agree about the latter 3, but why is the "pro-war" movement so hell-bent on seeing Iraqis live under Saddam Hussein? Along with his two idiot sons, he was the epitome of evil.
I mean look at this video taken on December 20, 1983. That would be 15 months after the massacre in Du'jail for which Saddam was hanged. And, there's Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq, shaking Saddam Hussein's hand and pledging our support in his war against Iran.
What a bunch of hypocrites!
You are absolutely correct, Maria. But it gets worse...just think of what GW 41 did during the Gulf War, when he left the Shiites (who he told to rise up against Saddam) to die. That's even worse than the handshake, don't you think so?
CH<
Don't know when you posted this -- just saw it now. Yes, that was worse.
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