I second your comments, and kudos to Phil and Adam. That said, I urge you to pop over to Dan Flescher's "Realistic Dove" to read what the hand-wringers have to say about Phil Weiss.

That's what we're up against.

PM

Right and left.

Have you looked at Haaretz? Israel is saber-rattling. Iran is saber-rattling.

"By "up against", I hope you mean, "whose concerns must be addressed", not just the usual dismissal and retaliation"

Here also, it's a matter of scale. Just as Mr. Witty ignores that matter in terms of actual comparative physical death and destruction, he pretends in the same manner that the usual dismissal and retaliation comes from both sides equally in terms of quantity and quality, and
with equal funding.

If this was so and is so, Phil would never have been moved to set up and plug away on this
blog, Carter and M & W would never have written their books, J Street wouldn't finally have
been set up, etc.

I was at Mads Gilbert's lecture last evening at Columbia University, a few hours after the NYU lecture. I was disappointed that the turnout wasn't bigger due to what I read on Mondoweiss about the turnout at U of Chicago. The NYU lecture earlier on in the day was publicized around the activist community; but not the Columbia lecture. Campus Anti-War Network had a listserv going around about him speaking at NYU, but the only info I heard about him at Columbia came from Phil's blog.

My family and I were actually talking to Helen Schiff after the event. [Phil, she told me you went to the NYU lecture and I silently wished I had gone so I could have run into you. We both think that your voice is strong within the activist community.] Once again, she called out the crowd to realize our voices in determining U.S. foreign policy regarding Israel. During the lecture, Mads said he would be interested in coming back to the city to make the presentation again if we provided him with a venue. I told Helen afterwards, that I truly thought we could get 200-300 people to come to a Dr. Gilbert presentation in the future if we organized it correctly. That is, if Campus Anti-War Network + Jews Say No (with the loveable Dorothy Zellner) + Code Pink organized it. She completely agreed. Phil/Adam, if Helen Schiff and I are able to organize something in the future [with Dr. Gilbert] would you announce it on the blog?

Aside from my excitement to organize with good hearted activists after the lecture, I was pretty heartbroken by the end of the lecture. The few photos that Dr. Gilbert was able to take were only a small picture of the awful sights he experienced working at Al-Shifa hospital during the “war”. Children literally got limbs ripped off by DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosives) while Israel was collectively punishing the civilian population in Gaza. He provided first hand testimony and strong evidence to support that Israel attacked civilian targets purposefully. After about 400 civilians had perished, Shimon Peres exclaimed that the operation had gone 90 percent according to plan. All those civilians’ casualties were part of the plan Shimon?

Mads Gilbert said that the doctors in the Gaza hospitals didn’t need him and his colleagues. He was there to provide solidarity and I believe he is a truly courageous person. His colleagues and he were the only European journalists reporting out of Gaza during the siege, because the IDF had blocked foreign reporters. Fox News called his testimony, terrorist proganda, (link to foxnews.com
so he must saying resembling truthfulness.

Thank you Dr. Gilbert.

(Phil let me know if you can give Helen and me a shout-out in the future about a Dr. Gilbert event if we need one.)

-Joel

"Iran is a bigger issue today anyway.

Have you looked at Haaretz? Israel is saber-rattling. Iran is saber-rattling"

When's the last time Iran attacked another country, 240 years ago?
When Iran helped us in Afganistan after 9/11, and offered help otherwise, including putting brakes on
Hamas and Hezbollah, the response it got was to be named part of "the Axis Of Evil." A Bronx Cheer, a raspberry–berift of living Iran memory, e.g., the puppet regime of the Shah.
When Iran looks around its neighborhood, does it view itself as less vulnerable than Israel
views itself? Does it not see how N Korea's nuke ability protects it, that insurance policy
hardly a shadow of what Israel obtained on the sly?

Iran is a bigger issue today than settling the I-P conflict only in the mind of Likud, especially
Israel's new regime–Witty has already bought their new spiel, really an old one, PNAC's.