Letter to the Editor

I read Walter Moss’ piece re: Intifada with a queasy feeling. Not because Mr. Moss’s opinions differ from my own but because he has made no effort to present both sides of the story, thus leading an uninformed reader to false conclusions which do not advance one’s understanding of the situation. I am not writing to debate Mr. Moss, but only to provide additional facts which shed more light on the events.

In the first paragraph, the new rage of Intifada is said to have resulted from Sharon’s visit to a mosque, which the author equates to Bin Ladin taking a poopie on the Statue of Liberty. It’s an oft-ignored fact, however, that Sharon discussed his visit with the Muslim authorities in advance, and they gave him permission to come and speak. Furthermore, I don’t see the relevance of the Bin Ladin analogy: American presidents speak in churches, synagogues, and mosques all the time, and no one sheds blood over it. As such, it’s hard for me to see how Sharon’s visit is a legitimate reason for the violence. Sounds to me as if the extremists have spun the event so that it enraged people and renewed support for more attacks, rather than the visit itself having been meant to do so. Of course, this is just my opinion – but it’s one formed based on more facts that Mr. Moss cared to present.

This leads into the next issue. Mr. Moss claims that “the only resistance (the IDF) meet are from poorly armed gunmen, and desperate Palestinian teenagers with bombs strapped to their chests.” This is not true, and any newspaper browsing by the author - including many Palestinian accounts, shows as much. Mr. Moss does not bother to discuss the fact that behind Palestinian resistance are organizations directed and funded from abroad. Many have pointed out that while these organizations use Palestinians as cheap delivery mechanisms for their bombs, their leadership serves the interests of foreign governments like Syria, whose interest is in continuing fighting with Israel, not in peace and prosperity for Palestinians. It’s also not mentioned that the suicide bombers’ families get hefty rewards from Sadam Hussein, a man whose power depends on the continuing strife between Israel and Palestinians (as long as they are fighting, the US will not be able to build a solid coalition against Iraq. As soon as they stop, Sadam is history.) So for Mr. Moss to propose that Israel is fighting against Palestinian teenagers without discussing the outside factors that contribute to the violence does not do objectivity justice.

I can go on and on debunking Mr. Moss’ article - for one, finding the most extreme quote from a Jew (on a Palestinian website) and attributing that sentiment to all Jews and the entire people of Israel, is nothing short of malicious bias. But instead, I want to conclude this already long letter with my personal opinion. Israel is a democratic state, even if it fits Mr. Moss’ agenda to call it “quasi-theocratic.” Its citizens, for the most part, are people like you and I. They do not want to kill Palestinians, or to control them. They just want peace and safety. You can blame them for electing Sharon, but you can also recall that they elected the peace-striving Rabin only a few years ago. When he was murdered, most people were horrified because they believed that peace was the way to go. What has made the people’s attitudes change since then? Could it be they elected Sharon because they saw that Rabin’s and Perez’s attempts for peace did not do much to diminish the violence? Could that be directly related to the fact that foreign entities infest Palestine and use it for their own goals; much like Al Quada was a pox on Afghanistan? For what it's worth, I believe that the Palestinians are much the same way - they want to live, be safe, and prosper. The only difference is that the moderate Israeli majority has the power to silence the extremists in democratic elections, whereas moderate Palestinians have to fight an uphill battle against those who wish to destroy Israel, even at the cost of continuous suffering of their own people.

 
Followup [to those who claimed that Zionist Jews are just as extreme]

Please note that you missed my point. I was not talking about Palestinians, I was talking about the other Arab nations. You're right that Israelis have their extremist factions. Fortunately, these extremists don't have an extra-governmental means of acting. In the end, it's the government that decides action, and a government is a representative coalition of different views, most of which are realistic enough about the fact that they must co-exist with the Palestinians. Daddy has illustrated this thus:

Perhaps the Palestinians have a point, and so to set the record straight, I do hereby denounce the following in the name of the Jewish People:

1. All Jewish suicide bombers who have ever acted against Arabs.

2. All Arab buses blown up by Jews.

3. All Arab pizza parlors, malls, discotheques and restaurants destroyed by Jewish terrorists.

4. All airplanes hijacked by Jews since 1903.

5. All forms of torture carried out on Arab prisoners to extract information.

6. All bar mitzvahs, weddings, Passover seders [and their Islamic equivalents] targeted by Jewish bombs.

7. All Arabs lynched in Israeli cities; all Arab Olympic athletes murdered by Jews; all Arab embassies bombed by Jews.

8. All mosques, cemeteries and religious schools fire bombed or desecrated by Jews in North Africa, France, Belgium, Germany, England or any other country.

9. All illegal settlement-building in the West Bank.

10. The destruction of American military, governmental and civilian institutions in Kenya, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - along with the murder of U.S. Marines and diplomatic personnel.

11. The treatment of Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens.

12. All Jewish school books which claim that Arabs poison wells, use Christian blood to bake pita, control world finance, and murdered Jesus; or that Arab elders meet secretly to plot a world takeover.

13. And I am particularly ashamed at the way my fellow Jews attacked the World Trade Center, Pentagon and civilian aircraft on September 11, and danced in the streets to celebrate the act.

You get the point. There are plenty of extremist jews, but they aren't exactly taking matters into their own hands [the worst they've done is killing Rabin, which no one in Israel condoned as martyrdom.]

On the other hand, the outside Arab nations have a way of pushing their actions out as Palestinian foreign policy whether Arafat likes it or not (my personal view is that he likes it.) The extremist voices in the Arab world are well funded, well armed, and not well restrained.

 
No Justice, No Peace!
Some posters astutely pointed out that the mid-east conflict is not about religion in a basic sense. IE, it's more about "my home! no, MY home!" than "my holly land, NO MY HOLLY LAND!" However religion is responsible to a large degree for what is happening. The major players in the conflict are Israel and Arab countries, not Israel and the Palestinans. Most of the suicide attacks are organized by networks operated from outside Palestine, and all of the money raised toward them is raised elsewhere. Worst of all, most of the sentiment "kill them all and get all of the land" is shouted on the streets of Syria, Egypt, etc. How can this go on, when this sentiment is clearly misdirected? Let's think back only a few hundred years of Western history. When the Europeans were conquering Asia, Africa, and the Americas, no one cared about the native people. If they weren't white and Christian, they did not have a right to live, much less live on the land the Westerners wanted. From that stems hundreds of years of brutal colonial regimes. The West has moved beyond that mentality. A modern call for Crussades would fall on deaf ears. The Arab world, unfortunately, has not moved on. A call for Jihad does not fall on deaf ears, unfortunately. So when we see the attitude of the Arab world toward Israel/Palestine, it's not all that shocking that the justice and peace the people clamor for is the justice of all the jews fucking off into the sea, and the peace of jews being dead. With these attitudes, is there any wonder the Palestinians haven't been able to stick to a ceasefire and a peace plan? I am sure they want to, it's their ass on the line. But the Arab world does not let it happen, because it does not want it to. For Palestinians, peace with Israel would mean security and prosperity. For the rest of the Muslim world, it's a slap in the face by heathens. They are no more likely to let Israel exist peacefully than the Western colonists were to let Native Americans keep their land and worship their gods freely. The mentality just isn't there.

 
Peace in the Middle East

... I know it's an emotional issue for both sides. It is for me - I have relatives living in Israel and my concern for their well-being is heightened daily by the news reports. However, emotion does not equal hate. I wish peace for Israel, but like most Israelis (including the present leadership, I believe) I do not think that whiping the Palestinian race off the face of the planet is viable method of doing so. Peace is the way. Imagine a time when Palestinians can live in their own state, without foreign and religious incitement to kill the jews. Only that will bring peace to the region. So on whom does the onus lie? A lot of people try to morally equate Israel and the Arabs, seeing the violence as a childish tit-for-tat. I don't see it that way, by the virtue of my faith in democracy. A democratic state with free press is inherently less evil than one where one-sided preaching of hate and religious justification for violence are the order of the day. For some reason even those who denounce Israel, do not think it's "odd" that there are Arab members of the Knesset, or that there's no violence against Arab citizens of Israel. To expect a Jewish member of the Palestinian Authority, or a cessation of violence toward the settlers, on the other hand, is ridiculous. One society is simply more open, educated, and accepting then the other. If only it were possible to create the same among the Palestinians, there can be long-lasting peace. I hope that the current Israeli actions will destroy enough of the existing terror infrastructure that a peace movement can grow in it's place (as of now, the Arab peace movement is being hung from the lampposts as Israeli Collaborators) and some hope can be nurtured.

 
Last night I had a long conversation with Maria about my disdain for the French. The godawful frogs really get on my nerves. I resent their sad attempts to maintain relevance in a world that has left them behind. Wearing ridiculous hats and snobbing euro-disney is not a sign of cultural sophistication - it's a refusal to accept the modern world. By blaming America for their own downfall locks them into the same philosophy of victimology that most of the Arab world suffers from. To think it's preferable to change the world back to a state where your culture dominated {for france, a leap backwards of a few hundred years, and for the muslim world an even longer jump} rather than adopt to and thrive in the contemporary is a folly to say the least. The difference, however, is that the majority of Arabs live in tyranical theocracies with limited and unfree press. The french, on the other hand, are a free-press democracy. Which is all the more reason they ought to get off their ethnocentric high-horse and wake up to what's been happening. America, for all the thankless rudness we get from the frog, saved their anuses from being raped by the Nazis. If not for us, there'd be a swastica flying from the Eifel tower (unless the practical germans melted it down into tank shells and manhole covers.) Even the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, all of whom were thoroughly defeated in WWII, are not stuck up about partnering up with America and embracing much of our culture. Well may be not so much the Italians, whch is why they can't get their act together. But yea, if our former enemies can be reasonable and have enough self-respect to admit when they're wrong and learn from us, the snobby French try to oppose us at every step. BLAH!

 
Holly smokes, it's that easy, huh? Well I guess a propper introduction is in order. I am cookie, and this is my blog. That's a fairly standard thing to say, methinks. Anyway, this will hopefully be a venue for me to vent my frustration [and yes, voice approval] about anything and everything in the world. What is the deal with parking in manhattan? Why are the frogs so rude? etc, ad nauseum! The concept of blogin [the term is still repugnant] began to appeal to me in large part due to Daddy, who opened up the posiblity that bloging isn't just for suicadal goth girls. Daddy and I differ in one aspect, though. He's got something to say. I don't. This bodes well!