circular monkey death squads attack...,
2005-08-17 11:35:13
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Russ Feingold for President. ...,
2005-08-18 10:25:29
we're moving to miami:
The contrast of responses from Gaza evacuees and their West Bank counterparts is interesting, with some gingerly uprooted Gaza nutters weeping in their hotel rooms that they didn't resort to violence against their fellow Israelis.
Pure wingnut batshit. It's not like they'll be lacking for new land to rob at the behest of their Government, just last week Israel announced a 72 unit expansion of Beitar Illit settlement in the West Bank. Beitar Illit alone is already home to some 20,000 Israelis, the total number of evacuees from the "withdrawal" will be all of like 9,000. By the end of this process there will probably be more settlers on Palestinian land than there were before it began:
This year, the Housing Ministry has issued tenders to build 235 housing units in settlements, most in the Jerusalem area, Bleich said. It also has revived a plan to build 3,650 new units in Maaleh Adumim, Israel's largest settlement, just outside Jerusalem.
Not the kind of context you'd ever get from CNN, from which you could learn just about enough to be a loudmouth knownothing. It's really pretty impressive how they manage to find so many commentators that fail to mention the openly public Israeli strategy of staging what amounts to a shallow PR stunt in order to consolidate its grip over the West Bank. More so that they can't find a single commentator who notes it. They keep talking about weeping IDF troops who've "never had to do something like this", which is absurd, they've been doing it next door for years. Meanwhile in New London...
update:
A West Bank settler who shot to death four Palestinians in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh said Thursday he had no regrets and hopes someone kills Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
And the usual comments about pushing Israel into the sea from the Gaza Hamas rep.
Look, I'm no more than a very lay layman on Hamas or most of the things I bloviate about, but I would hazard that there really ain't that much stock to put on shit like that past political haymaking, not least because they could never do it and wouldn't attempt it once they had a state, but which Hamas would undoubtably continue after the establishment of a state just to "get out the vote" for their party.
They got something like 34% of the vote in the last Palestinian elections, about equivalent to popular support for continuing attacks after "full Israeli disengagement". Machine PA bosses - the party that long ago recognized Israel's "right to exist" - beat the Islamists every time. But to get them to stop attacking Israel - decline and eventual cessation, concievably "on a dime" - you need to give them something worth defending, you know, like a viable state to vie for control over so they can wage a more effective campaign against 'bad' Palestinian Muslims and the usual sort of religion-based politics stuff that one would expect from religious extremists. If I were playing "objective" I would make the same sort of explanatory noises about the quote above, but I'm playing activist and think he's demonstrative of the mindset of the people who are pushing the settlement policy, and possibly a little more nuts than the Hamas guy because he's just speaking for himself, not for an institution that thinks it's in its interests to speak like a lunatic, per our old "madman in the wings" nuclear diplomacy. To get to a useful place for a discussion the extremists on both sides will have to be outed from political power or forced into accepting a solution.
