roachboy

edited a bit later for clarity:

nonsense.

first off, like other folk who seem to find this offensive into gaza like a thrilling off-tackle run in a game and are cheering the israelis for their impressive offensive line play, you leave out everything that makes an assessment of the actual situation coherent.

for example in sporting events, both sides wear the same equipment. so there's a basic parity. one team may be better than another, but at least they're playing the same game.
in this situation, that's simply not the case.


[[aside: i've often wondered over the years about why exactly it is that the israeli military is such an object of attachment and projection on the part of americans who tend to like military action instead of diplomacy---i think they find something admirable in the fact that israel's military has operated with such impunity, that they have done so much in violation of international law, treaties and other such namby-pamby conventions of modernity, which these folk wish the american military was free of as well. this is speculative, of course, because this position is so far from anything i think that i can only approach it this way, by filling in blanks that seem to hold logically. and i don't know how to present this as a question without entailing a donnybrook. so i'll leave it at that]]

hamas is in itself an expression of the failure of the entire us/israeli right approach to palestine, to occupation---all of it. the only way forward is to treat this as a political problem that requires an international solution. and israel really has to be seen as a state like any other. enough of the projection of the illusion of "american exceptionalism" onto it. it is a political agent that has made a series of stupid decisions that have resulted in countless unnecessary deaths. unless you think that the palestinian people are somehow less than the israelis---which is an ugly correlate of much cheerleading for the idf in this context---it's clear that the rhetoric of "terrorism" has the effect of enabling massacre--look at what's happening right now. i mean rationally, not as if it were some sporting event.



the claims you make about iran as circular. "iran hasn't done anything therefore the bush policies toward it hare coherent" is like saying that a meteor has not hit the earth so you're rituals that you do before bed to ward off meteors are effective.

ahmanjiad's administration is politically weak and reactionary and has used its anti-israeli rhetoric in particular to legitimate itself publically. sound familiar?

behind the scenes, iran has offered repeatedly to help the united states in the context of the iraq debacle--had the bush people been less simple-minded, a regional solution to iraq might have been possible--if you accept the american action as given--that would have opened very different possibilities for disengagement--with all the political complexities that would pose within iraq in place--one thing is sure, though: iran has no interest in a destabilized iraq. this is self-evident.

have you ever wondered about this iran-syria-muslim brotherhood alliance and whether and how it makes sense?
what do these folk have in common?
a political solution to the palestine-israel problem undercuts the rationale for all of it.
continued brutality props it up, perpetuates it, justifies it.

latest casualty count: 500 palestinians killed. no update on the number of wounded yet today. (following the titter channel posted earlier in the thread---it's most interesting and desparately sad)

the paradox--which is obvious to most of the planet, though apparently not to the marketing machinery that has accompanied this sickening action on israel's part: all hamas has to do is survive at all and the ambient brutality of this action will hand them a political victory.

no-one, however, is laughing.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite