Senator Harry Reid was on "Meet the Press" this morning going on and on about Hamas being the bad guy. David Gregory had the presence of mind to say, Is there any difference between you and George Bush on this question? Reid: None. Grinning like a dashboard jockey, I'm afraid.
Thereby demonstrating once again the lockstep power of Jewish cultural/financial/political influence in Middle East policy.
Reid also said that Israel could no more tolerate Hamas's rockets than the U.S. could rockets being fired from Vancouver on our towns. This is a deeply-misguided analogy. Chiefly because Canada is a nation whose people have the rights of self-determination. If a minority in Canada was aggrieved, it would bomb Ottawa, presumably. If Canadians had a shooting-grievance with the U.S., there would be war–ala the US-Mexico territorial war of 1848–and negotiation and treaty would ensue, with acceptance of borders.
The Palestinians have no state, Israel has never established its borders. The Palestinians are in a state of feudal subjection to Israel. Without human rights or civil rights. Their leaders have no ability to exercise sovereignty over their own affairs.
And so the better analogy is to black people in the urban ghettoes in the 60s and 70s at the time of the riots. I saw this in Baltimore growing up, where I was a black-sympathizer. There was a divide between blacks and whites (still is, of course, but then it was even more rancorous) and blacks felt disenfranchised. (The sprinters' fists during the National Anthem at the Mexico Olympics.) There was some black-on-white crime at that time that surely had a political character. I bet it killed as many whites as the rockets aimed at Southern Israel.
And imagine if at that time, in retaliation for such attacks, the police had entered the ghettoes and destroyed the infrastructure and slaughtered hundreds of blacks. Of course it is unimaginable, even in the U.S. And actually, when something like that did happen, during the 60s in the South, you saw the overwhelming response from northern liberals. And the neocons of course were for draconian measures.
My analogy holds in that sense too: We are about to see in America, huge political/social division over this issue, the treatment by Israel of the Arabs under its power.
