This is the first of six Mondo Awards we are rolling out. This entry was first published here in late December, and it wins the Steadfastness Award. Writer Jillian Kestler-D'Amours will receive a half dozen books.
For the Indomitable People of al-Araqib
It was 6 a.m. when the Israeli police invaded al-Araqib for the third time. Still half-asleep, I stood alongside village residents and Israeli and international activists, trying in vain to stop the impending home demolitions. Thin tarps were ripped from wooden beams, water tanks were dragged away and mounds of sand were poured over each article of the families' belongings, making it nearly impossible to salvage any materials.
In the end, nothing was left standing. Each time the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Araqib has been demolished since then – it has been razed to the ground a total of eight times since mid-July – nothing ever is.
I have visited al-Araqib, located near Beer Sheva in the Israeli Negev desert, on over a dozen occasions, interviewing residents about their experiences, their fears, and mostly, about why it is so important for them to remain on their ancestral lands.
“We need to teach even the smallest children that this is our land, and we can't leave it, no matter what happens," resident Hakima abu Mdeghem told me, one morning in September. The mother of nine children, Hakima regularly welcomes me into her home whenever I visit the village.
"The hardest thing here is that you're sleeping in your home and then, suddenly, you have no home. It's the worst thing that can happen to a human being: to destroy his home,” she said. "My children are sad and they are afraid. They are angry at the army and the entire country, especially the younger ones.”
The impact the demolitions have had on Hakima’s children, and virtually all the other children in the village, is palpable. Even worse than the demolitions themselves is the constant threat that a demolition is imminent. Speech impediments, bed-wetting and difficulty sleeping are all consequences of living in the near-permanent state of fear that hangs over al-Araqib like an invisible cloak; you can’t see it, but you can always feel it.
And yet despite all this, visiting al-Araqib and spending time with the families that continue to live there, is a motivator for me as a journalist, a social justice organizer, and a person. Getting to know the families is the experience that has most motivated me since I moved to Palestine/Israel last May; I’ve been inspired and continue to be inspired by the people of al-Araqib.
Their courage and determination in the face of tremendous adversity is admirable, but it is another quality that inspires me the most: the ability of residents to retain their generosity, humility and above all else, their humanity, in the face of ever-present challenges, destruction and hatred.
This ability is a testament to their strength of spirit. It is a beacon of hope in the otherwise devastated landscape of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the personal, human moments – not the images of destruction or injustice (and there are many of these horrors seared into my memory to choose from) – are the ones that first come to mind when I think of al-Araqib. They are the ones that make me excited to see the Lehavim Junction taking shape in the distance, knowing I'm only a few minutes away from the village.
Being woken up at 2 a.m. to children’s laughter, as Hakima’s youngest children – Sujud, Ibrahim, Mohammad and Alia – excitedly opened their gifts during Eid al-Adha. Watching Miryam and Zainab expertly prepare bread and trying (read: failing) to do the same. Taking rides with Salim to the nearby town of Rahat to pick up the village children after school. Laughing as I succumb to the fact that my mix of English, broken Arabic and sign-language won't communicate exactly what I want to say, despite furious minutes of trying.
How to remain human in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges is something that Hakima, Salim, Samieh, and virtually all the residents of al-Araqib have taught me, time and time again. And for that, I continue to stand in solidarity with them in their tremendous struggle for justice, equality and at the most basic level, the right to live in peace. For that, they are my inspiration.
Jillian Kestler-D'Amours blogs here.
congrats Jillian, a excellent essay about an amazingly inspirational people. our first mondo award winner!
The absurd fact is that al-Araqib is a village of Israeli citizens, albeit non-Jews.
But, I’m told that Israel is not an Apartheid state because discrimination and dispossession are limited to the occupied West Bank, or some such nonsense.
yes they are Israeli citizens avi, and i make no distinction because israel doesn’t. they are all extinguishable as far as that apartheid government is concerned.
Woohoo! Congratz Jillian!
I love your contributions and I also love your name!
of love ;) sweet
What abuse these children have to endure. I cant imagine growing up under the fear of being exterminated by another group of people.
All this is done through the assistance of the US media machinery to gloss over these horrifying tales, only allowing the stories of Israeli victimization to come through the megaphone – loud and clear.
I can see why the girl is so crushed speaking to MK Nachman Shai at the J Street conference in the recent post.
They play this game about we’re the only democracy in the mid east, when they are ethnically cleansing Palestinians. People that have lived their for thousands of years longer than these new century interlopers.
in my project of tracking C Span’s descent into zionist control, I listened to a 1988 interview of Wolf Blitzer. A woman caller said, “Aren’t the Palestinians half-Jewish and half-Arab?
I don’t remember how Blitzer handled that — probably predictably. What struck me is, Yes, it has to be true that a goodly percentage of the Palestinians are Jewish or came from Jewish stock. Likely, they are the only authentic Jews in the region.
Did Herzl, ben Gurion, Weizman, Ruppin know that there were ancient Jews living on that land, and that European Jews were displacing them? It’s like a Greek tragedy w Freudian overtones.
Does anyone have a source for information about the earliest encounters between Palestinians Jews and European zionists, in the first decade of the 1900s?
Hi Psycopathic,
I am not sure why you believe that immigration started in the first decades of the 20th century and it was only European Jews who moved to Palestine. It may help to educate yourself on the Yemenite Village in Silwan, which was ethnically cleansed during the Hebron Massacres.
link to en.wikipedia.org
DBG, Perhaps there’s some history that YOU need to know.
From Etan Blooms dissertation on Arthur Ruppin, the Father of Jewish Settlement in Palestine.
link to tau.ac.il
It may help to educate yourself on the Yemenite Village in Silwan, which was ethnically cleansed during the Hebron Massacres.
Your link to Wikipedia does not support your claim. It doesn’t mention anything about 1929, which was when the Hebron Massacre was. It mentions some killings and house destruction in 1921, but if you look at the cite there is a dispute about the accuracy of the charge since the only supporting evidence for 1921 is a Ynet article, and there is a totally conflicting Israeli cite here:
The first Yemenite Jews arrived in Palestine in 1882. The yearning for Jerusalem brought many to settle in the city and around it. The dream of a land flowing with milk and honey was soon replaced with the harsh reality of scarcity in food and work, but also their recognition as Jews. The Jewish residents of city, the people of the Old Yeshuv, didn’t accept the Yemenite Jews as the later had expected. The Yemenites dressed differently from the Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jews, spoke a different language, prayed differently, and were the poorest among the Jews. Many of the Old Yeshuv Jews seriously doubted the Yemenites’ Jewish identity.
Due to their condition and social status, many of the Yemenite Jews were forced to live in caves or sheltered rocks in the mountains around the old city. Some lived in the mountains and caves in the village of Silwan, just outside the city walls, south of the Temple Mount and the Jewish quarter. In those days, Silwan was already a recognized Arab village. The first Arab families moved to Silwan hundreds of years before. For instance, Siam family, one of the largest families in the village, claims that it arrived in the village during the days of Salah Al-Din (the 12th century).
The first to help the Yemenites were missionary Christians who in that period resided in the American Colony neighborhood (today known as Sheikh Jarah). The Christians associated the Yemenite Jews with the lost Gad tribe, and supplied them with food, clothing and even money.
When the dignitaries of the Old Yeshuv heard that Christians were helping the Yemenite Jews, Y.D. Frumkin decided to organize Jewish aid for the Yemenites. Frumkin founded the company “Ezrat Nidahim” (“Sequesters Aid”) in order to raise funds and buy lands for the establishment of a Yemenite neighborhood. The first houses were built in Silwan, next to Bir Ayoub (Job’s Well), in the south-eastern end of the village, away from the old city. From letters sent by the Yemenites to their community in Sana, Yemen, we can learn that the Yemenites didn’t want to live in Silwan:
“…and this land is far…in the mount of olives and its name is Silwan, and this place is not Israelite but the land of gentiles, and I saw the place and it is not pleasant to me…and many complain that they were chosen to live in Silwan, because we had informed that the place is very far from the Israelite neighborhood [the Jewish Quarter and the newly-built Jewish neighborhoods outside the walls]…”
The letter clearly shows that the village was inhabited before the arrival of the Yemenites. Also, it is clear that the Yemenites wanted to live among Jews. At the same period, new Jewish neighborhoods were built west outside the walls, far from the Arab villages. Nevertheless, the Old Yeshuv decided to build the Yemenite neighborhood in Silwan, and called it the Shiloah village. The Yemenites had no choice: they could not afford a house in the new neighborhoods, and were not accepted among the Jews in the Jewish Quarter.
In 1884 the first Yemenites settled in Silwan and for 45 years lived peacefully and in very good terms with their Arab neighbors. It seemed that the people of Silwan, which was known to be a poor village, found common ground with the poor Jewish Yemenites that lived among them.
In the 1929 Arab Riots, not a single Jewish resident of Silwan (Shiloah village) was killed or injured. The Arab residents of the village, led by the Ghozlan family, sheltered their Jewish neighbors and prevented their attack. After a few days of rioting, the British, who mandated Palestine at that time, moved the Yemenite Jews into the old city. A group of Jews returned to live in Silwan after 1929, but following the 1936 Great Arab Revolt, all the Jews left the village.
Despite the attempt to depict the 1929 Arab Riot as a violent incident against the Jews in Silwan, it is clear that it was not the case. From a letter of gratitude that the Yemenite Jews sent to their Arab neighbors, we can learn about the devotion and benevolence that the Arabs have shown towards the Yemenites by undauntedly protecting them, and also about the amity and good neighborly relations that prevailed between the two communities.
“We, the undersigned, the residents of the Shiloah village, openly declare that we obliged our gratitude to the dear and pure-hearted man, the honorable Haj Muhammad Ghozlan, one of our respectable Arab brothers, residents of the Shiloah-Silwan village, and his kind friends, who showed exceptional compassion and benevolence to their neighbors, the Jewish residents of the village of Shiloah, during the days of the 1929 riots, and did not allow the bands of rioters to harm us…”
The letter of gratitude attests not only to the compassion and morality of the Arab residents of Silwan, but also to the true coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It attests to daily lives of good neighborly relations, respect and mutual aid, to coexistence as a way of life….
link to alt-arch.org
The Ghozlan family, descendants of the protectors of the early Yemenite Jews, were evicted from their home in 2006 by right-wing settlers.
Given Zionist involvement in editing Wikipedia, it’s no wonder that troll after troll continue to cite that ‘encyclopedia’ as though it were a scholarly or journalistic source.
Perhaps it’s indicative of their intellectual laziness, as well.
what an amazing post and link tree. i don’t know how i missed it earlier. thanks for posting.
tree, I second Annie’s comment – these are great links you provided, offering quite some clarity on the history of the immigrant yemenite settlers. The lack of acceptance by the yishuv and the relegation to second class status of the yemenites is especially enlightening.
You are truly a master of historical links, I plan to make good use of some of the facts you unearthed for us here and elsewhere for another little essay I am trying to finish.
—–I cant imagine growing up under the fear of being exterminated by another group of people.—–
yes, growing up knowing that such a fear is something that actually happened will lead to harsh reactions.
emphasis on Reaction
Yes, Philip, especially in reaction to having to face an organized attempt to kill and drive out the survivors from the land that they were ceded by the UN.
it wasn’t a party, it was a civil war. it was declared by the Pals and the Arabs to be all-or-nothing. bad choice, dirty war.
“it wasn’t a party, it was a civil war. it was declared by the Pals and the Arabs to be all-or-nothing. bad choice, dirty war.”
This guy is starting to get on my nerves. I don’t know why.
you don’t know why? helllllllo
The UN resolution made it quite clear that Zionists had absolutely no right to ethnically cleanse and confiscate land. The partition plan made population transfers illegal and the only reason — the only reason — Israel hasn’t suffered any consequences for its crimes is the US veto on the Security Council.
The filthy lying and demonization of Arabs probably isn’t helping your estimation of fuster-bluster.
Chaos
if only the Arab Council had felt bound by the UN rules, things would have worked out much better.
damn shame that they decided to say screw it and chose war instead.
Of course I do Annie..I was just being disingenuous, I don’t know why! :).
And Chaos!
You should know me better by now! :)
pg, sometimes i have to take a few deep breaths, relax my jaw and neck, remind myself their job is to disrupt our conversation and own the narrative. imagine coming here on our first mondo award announcement and trying to highjack our conversation.
“if only the Arab Council had felt bound by the UN rules, things would have worked out much better.”
Agree with the Partition plan?
First, that would meant that they accepted the idea of a state based on the supremacy of one ethnicity over the others. That in itself would have been an immoral decision.
Second, they would have condemned the Arab inhabitants of the proposed Jewish state to suffer the subjugation or expulsion that the Zionists clearly had in mind.
Third, they would have agreed to the creation of a state which had, as its avowed intention, the destruction and invasion of the neighbouring Palestinian state.
So how much better would it have been?
oh, blather and bubblepipes. RoHa.
first, the Pals most certainly welcomed a state based on supremacy, just as long as it was their supremacy. they damn well demanded it.
secondly and thirdly, bullsh1t. whole lot of Arab citizens in Israel.
The first Israeli New Historian, Simha Flapan, dispelled this and many of Israel’s other founding myths – using Israeli sources – more than three decades ago in his 1987 book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities.
It’s now out of print but not hard to find as a secondhand book. You need to read it fuster, because by repeating lies you’re coming across as a nothing more than a propagandist.
no, Sumud, I don’t need to read it. you want to trot out something so enduringly marvelous that it’s out of print a score of years later, that’s fine, but it’s not incumbent upon anyone to listen to your crap about trotting out lies.
(three decades since 1987 already? how the time flies)
If only the zionists had felt bound by the UN rules, things would have worked out much better.
To remind you, zionist militias invaded the area designated by the UN Partition Plan (UN GA 181) for a Palestinian state *months* before any of the arab state armies responded in mid-May 1948. The Arab League decision to respond militarily was made at the beginning of May and was largely undertaken as a defensive action after events such as the Deir Yassin Massacre. By the time the Arab League declared to the UN they intended to take military action, already between 250,000 and 400,000 Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed and were flooding into Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The Arab League declaration is well worth a read:
Arab League Declaration on the Invasion of Palestine, May 15, 1948
Also important: the UN never condemned the Arab League’s decision to come to the aid of Palestinians.
So much for your “sweetness and light” fuster.
Maybe you aren’t interested in factual accounts of the history of Israel and Palestine but a great many people are. You write grandiosely below how “this site could be a great thing”. As long as you’re pushing very old and very tired hasbara I see no reason to believe you’re here for any reason other than to cause trouble.
When did the Palestinians Arabs demand a state based on ethnic supremacy of Arabs? They certainly wanted a state in which they, the natives, would be the majority, but that is not the same thing.
“whole lot of Arab citizens in Israel.”
Legally discriminated against. And a whole lot more expelled in 1947/48. This was the publicly avowed Zionist plan, as well as being the logical consequence of Zionist theory.
As far as the Zionist intention to take over all Palestine is concerned, we have it from thier own mouths.
Ben-Gurion 1937, “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of Eretz Israel.” (On the Peel commission plan.)
1938 Ben-Gurion: “after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”
1947 Zionists begin expelling Arabs from the territory the UN proposed as a Jewish State and attacking beyond that territory to expand it.
1947/48 Collusion with Abdullah of Jordan to prevent a Palestinian state from being created.
1948, Menachem Begin “The partition of the Homeland is illegal . It will never be recognized.The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever”.
whole lot of Arab citizens in Israel
A convenient minority. Enough so that the Israelis could bat their eyelashes innocently as they said, “Ethnic cleansing? What ethnic cleansing? Look, real live Arabs!”
Here’s the thing about the partition plan: It divided the land roughly in half but not the population. The “Arab state” happened to contain almost no Jews. Therefore almost no Jews were at risk of being evicted or being subjected to Arab supremacy.
Whereas the “Jewish state” contained almost half the Arab population. Which was definitely at risk of being evicted, this being Ben Gurion’s plan.
You seem to think there was something unreasonable about this population not wanting to be driven out of its homes by some arbitrary decision by international bureaucrats, not wanting, at best, to be second-class citizens in a Jewish-supremacist state.
If only the woman had felt bound by the rapist’s demand, things would have worked out much better. Damn shame she decided to try to fight him off and got killed.
But it was all her fault for fighting, right, fusty?
I prefer that you didn’t read Sumud’s link and stayed in ignorance fusty.
It’s better for Palestine if zionists remain like propagandized robots.
I look forward to the spectacle of the giant hammer of truth falling on your zion house of cards (that’s israel).
Kbannnng!
Correction, 24 years; ~ a quarter century ago.
See that fuster? I [mistakenly] told a lie, and then I corrected it. Now you.
Sumud, just a math goof, not a lie.
but well, I never said that annie was pathetic.
I’m considering admitting that omission as a mistake.
but I’m still holding back. I’m a hopeful hopper.
Hoping to inject some white noise into the Mondoweiss comments section, from what I see.
I advise and ask all to proceed w/ caution when responding to fuster. There’s a point to which it is useful – dispelling hasbara and pointing new readers to interesting source material – and after that it’s just so much gunk designed to make the comments section unreadable. I haven’t had much time to comment on MW lately but I do recall seeing an article a few days ago that had been thoroughly trolled: about 300 comments with more than 50 authored by fuster alone, mostly irrelevant junk – also some fairly heated rhetoric on both sides; most unattractive.
the Pals….
Fuster drops the other shoe. They’re such a bad fit on a frog.
Next he’ll be telling us about the Pakis and the wogs.
I don’t need to read it. you want to trot out something so enduringly marvelous that it’s out of print a score of years later, that’s fine, but it’s not incumbent upon anyone to listen to your crap about trotting out lies.
For someone who has been consistently corrected on this site due to your misstatements, you’d think you’d be more interested in learning instead of just bloviating in ignorance. RIF, except when it comes to you, I guess. If however you have some primal fear of out of print books, why not read Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”? Much more updated than Flapan’s work from 1987, due to newly opened Israeli archives. It details the meetings of Ben Gurion’s Consultancy, which planned the expulsion of Palestinians from the Jewish State and the areas that the Zionists wanted to have from the allotted Arab State, with explicit expulsion actions starting in December of 1947, following several years of Jewish terrorism and detailed covert Zionist record keeping on every Arab village in Palestine.
Or you could look at this, from Israeli filmmaker Lia Tarachansky.
link to sevendeadlymyths.webs.com
an organized attempt to kill and drive out the survivors from the land that they were ceded by the UN.
You’ve got it backwards, fuster. The overwhelming majority of the battles in 1948 were on soil that had been ceded to the Arab State not to the Jewish one. And the ethnic cleansing that Israel engaged in prior to May of that year was in direct violation of the UN partition plan, in that the UN plan assured that any resident of either state had a right to remain in that state if they so wished, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. In other words, under the plan, the 500,000 Palestinians had the right to remain in their homes in what was to become the Jewish State. Israel violated those rights almost immediately after the UN vote.
if they chose war why didn’t stockpile weaponery and why did the jewish residents of palistine do so?
Lifted from Lawrence Of Cyberia – one of the best sites on the web on the subject of Zionist Lies about Palestine:
No Such Thing As Liberal Zionism
Just look at these numbers. This table [1] shows the population of Palestine when Zionists first arrived to pioneer their Jewish state.
“Palestine pop first aliya”(click to view image)
The year of the first Zionist immigration was 1299 (Muslim calendar), or 1881/2 A.D. You can read for yourself that at that time there were 462,465 people living in Palestine: 403,795 Muslims; 43,659 Christians, and 15,011 Jews.
How are you going to build a Jewish state in a land where the preexisting population is just 3.3 per cent Jewish, except by dispossessing those 96.7 per cent of the population that happen to have the “wrong” ethnic-religious origin?
If Zionism could only ever be achieved through denying self-determination to the indigenous, majority population, what exactly is “liberal” about that?
2. This map [2], based on land ownership statistics compiled by the British government in Palestine, summarizes the respective holdings of the Arab and Jewish communities in 1945. – “Palestine land ownership 1945″(click to view image)
It shows that the Jewish population of Palestine legally owned less than 7% of the land at that time.
—————–
How can you establish a Jewish state in a place where such a small fraction of the land is in Jewish hands, except by taking over that large proportion of the land that belongs to non-Jews?
——————
If Zionism could be achieved only by stealing Palestinian land from its legal owners because from an ethnic-religious perspective they happen to be the wrong sort of people, what exactly is “liberal” about that?
3. This table [3] shows the population of the two states that the UN proposed to create by partitioning Palestine – against the will of most of its people – in 1947. Despite large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine under the British Mandate – again, against the will of a large majority of its existing population – Palestinian Arabs still comprised about two-thirds of the population of Palestine in 1947 a merely 12 months before the Jewsih ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab native population
“Palestine population_1947″(click to view image)
Even after drawing generous boundaries to ensure that the influence of Palestine’s Jewish minority population is amplified by gathering almost all of the Jewish population into a single polity, the Palestinians’ overwhelming numerical advantage means that the UN’s “Jewish Palestine” is demographically not a Jewish state, but a bi-national state
It was called “the Jewish state” because it contains the overwhelming majority of Palestine’s Jews, not because an overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were Jewish.
Even worse from the Zionist perspective, Jewish Palestine is not only a bi-national state, but a bi-national state whose large Arab minority is guaranteed equal treatment under the terms of the partition.
Under those circumstances, how can you have the “Jewish state” that Zionism envisaged?
David Ben-Gurion KNEW you couldn’t, because
He also knew what kind of “severity and distinctness” was required to render 80% of the population Jewish, specifying that the Arab population “can either be mass arrested or expelled; it is better to expel them”
If the only way to establish a dominant Jewish majority among a Palestinian population that remains stubbornly diverse is by expelling en masse those people with the “wrong” ethnic-religious background, what exactly is “liberal” about that?
……………
If the only way to maintain a Jewish state is by exiling millions of Palestinians for generation after generation, and keeping millions more disenfranchised in walled enclaves in the Occupied Territories where they can be massively bombed into compliance should they resist their collective exclusion from equal participation in governing their own homeland, in what sense is this “liberal”?
There is not – and never was – any “liberal” way to create a Jewish state in a land so overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim. There is no Jewish state in Palestine without perpetrating the decidedly illiberal practices of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, disenfranchisement and de-development against the Muslim and Christian majority.
There is no other way to do it. Just look at the numbers.
—————–
Unlike Fuster (and EVERY other Zionist that posts here) the numbers don’t lie
>> Unlike Fuster (and EVERY other Zionist that posts here) the numbers don’t lie
As RW has pointed out in the past, it’s all about nuances. Ethnic cleasning was “necessary”, Israel is “a good in the world”, blue dot in a sea of green, the Native Americans, a “required” evil, green yarn on the Green Line, look to the future, make “better wheels” and, last but never least, “Remember the Holocaust!”
See? Now it all makes sense.
“For someone who has been consistently corrected on this site due to your misstatements.”
Fuster does not ‘miss-state’ – Fuster Lies – he knows the history, it’s obvious, because whenever there is any accurate history capable of supporting any point he wants to make, he finds it and posts it – so he knows the history.
He CHOOSES to post lies however (not ‘miss-statements’, as you prefer to call it) because there actually is very little of anything out there to support the ridiculous racist ‘eternal Jewish victim’ narrative concerning Zionism in Palestine protecting itself from the attacks of the racist Anti-Semitic Arabs, which he chooses to push here – so he has to rely on LIES because otherwise he’d have nothing to post
I’m not denying that there is a strand of thought in the Arab world these days which is Anti-semitic, but as far as I can see the only reason that strand survives (and sometimes prospers) is because of the behaviour of the Zionists themselves and also because most of the Despots kept in power by the US use it to distract their people from their Leaders own despotism.
They keep waving the Zionists and their murders and land-stealing in front of the people so as to distract them, BUT none of that would be possible if the Zionists were not still murdering and stealing in the first place
no, annie, it’s not a job. it’s a contribution to the war of ideas.
as long as people on this site bring discredit to it by posting nonsense, I try to bring my little sweetness and light and perfectly nuanced word-of-the-Lord incredibly honest and fair comments to aid the proprietors in elevating the discourse.
this site could be a great thing.
instead there are incredibly stupid and insane comments from lunatics such as the Psychopathic one.
many wonderful posts, but too many terrible comments.
my little sweetness and light and perfectly nuanced word-of-the-Lord incredibly honest and fair comments …
now that one gave me a good guffaw
at least I accomplished something with all my foolery around here.
making a pathetic fool out of yourself.
no, annie, it’s not a job. it’s a contribution to the war of ideas.
a contribution? is that what you call your little daggers and darts eh?
like taxi said: Kbannnng!