You are not going to succeed at overturning Congress.

Better to do good work with prospects.

"Why is a Zionist the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee?"

Seniority.

A crisis may be in the offing. Hard to know. This may be the moment of greatest opportunity for reconciliation.

The crucible of Zionism/Palestine has made all Jews that attempt to bear humanism at the same time as identity into zen masters.

I wish you would appreciate people like Walzer more in that regard.

Rejecting positions, embracing engagement itself.

"Why is the 2-state solution doomed? Because the Democratic head of the Foreign Affairs committee, who represents the 'mainstream' of the Jewish community, is against putting any pressure on Israel."

Ditto! As are all the presidential candidates.

To his credit, Bush applied a tiny bit of pressure when he visited Israel in January, saying that the Palestinians deserve a contiguous state, and that the settlements should stop. But just a couple of weeks before his planned arrival, Israel has approved another settlement in east Jerusalem.

Normal presidential protocol would dictate not visiting a state which is in such open defiance of long-held U.S. foreign policy. It's also extremely unusual for a U.S. president to visit a foreign country twice in four months, when there is no substantive progress on bilateral issues. Bush's visit to Israel is an embarrassment to him and to the nation. It makes him look subservient — which he may well be.

Let's just hope he's not going there to coordinate an attack on Iran. He's got enough war crimes under his belt already, as do the Israelis.

Witty, if you are representative for 'supporters of Israel' no amount of 'convincing' would do any good.

I have never seen you do anything else than responding to arguments with gaseous and evasive babble. If one could find anything of substance in it it would be a defence of the status quo hidden behind the narcissistic suggestion of 'humanity' and openness to compromise.

"i say i cant be jewish if zionism is going to define it as the destruction of arabs and denial of human rights."

Well said, my man! All of us have to confront not only the axioms of our religion, but how they are interpreted in the present.

Bush and Cheney are nominally Christian (Methodist, specifically). Most protestant Christian denominations have published statements questioning or denouncing the Iraq war. But as the media have de-emphasized the war, so have the churches. It is not an "up front" concern anymore.

It's practically a staple of sermons these days to praise Rev. Martin Luther King. Easy to do in retrospect. But King was way up front, way early, in criticizing the Vietnam War. He said this on 4 April 1967:

"A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

The issues which King raises in this speech are not unlike those raised by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forty years later. King was denounced as a communist for saying, inter alia:

- End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
- Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
- Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
- Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam.

The analogies to Iraq, Israel and Iran are obvious. But very few Christian ministers, and very few Jewish rabbis, are willing to take such bold stands today.

My wife and I are seriously considering turning Buddhist. We just cannot stand the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The whole idea of canonizing scriptures is effed up. If the universe is an ongoing revelation, there is no "final word" on anything.

Aggressive war and oppression of others is flat-out wrong. If religion cannot steer us away from this, then it's irrelevant and even counterproductive.

I'm more worried about the survival of the United States. Seriously, if you are right about Jewish power, isn't the tribal survival instinct a great threat to United States?

From a recent article by Andrew Wimmer in Counterpunch:

"Sixty years ago, as Europe lay in the ruins of war, Albert Camus was invited to the Dominican monastery in Latour-Maubourg. “What does the world expect of Christians?” the friars wanted to know. “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

But Jim why do you expect anything better from Buddhism? Burma is a Buddhist country (admittedly the monks have been speaking out there recently). And so is mainstream Sri Lanka where the killing has been going on for more than thirty years, not only vice versa with the Tamils but also the erstwhile 'Marxist rebellion' in the South.