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my back button is getting tons of work in these convos on lebanon.
let's assume for a moment that there is something of substance to this thread.
what argument(s) are there that link the material discussed in the foxnews style documentary to anything more general?
all the filmakers seem to want to do is to enable people who are predisposed to be unable to cope with the realities on the ground in gaza and the west bank to discount any information that they do not like.
the way the fine folk at secondraft.org (the source of the film) frame what they do slots directly into that peculiar know-nothing wing of likud cheerleading that is only possible at thousands of miles remove from what is happening, within a discursive framework that equates any critique of israel--ANY critique at all--with anti-semitism. (ustwo--using his finely honed trolling style--has been implying this last argument both here and in the tedious melgibson thread in gd.)
what a fine reflection of democratic debate that is.
i would imagine that this film has been getting chatted up on the planet limbaugh as a way of helping poor beleagured conservatives find new and improved ways to--um--streamline their information, erase what bothers them about that pesky reality (you remember that? reality is that set of factors that includes the ongoing brutalization of palestinians under direct military occupation--as with gaza--and a more diffuse violence deployed via the settlement programs in the west bank--a de facto apartheid system--the criticism of which is fairly routine in actually existing israel, where there are no attempts to equate judaism as a whole with the views of likud and parties to the right of likud like what you find in its shallow american copy--etc etc etc)....erasing significant elements of reality would enable folk to imagine that bush policies toward israel now are sane, that the massacre of civilians in lebanon does not matter--and to imply that saying otherwise is antisemitic.
if you want to make actual arguments in support of the israeli actions in lebanon, try taking account of the actual facts of the matter rather than relying on some cheap sub-fox documentary that you treat as unproblematically accurate to which you append a series of totally unfounded generalizations.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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