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Reply to Len

len:
"You worship at the shrine of democratically elected govt by people who get an orgasm by sending their children to be suicide bombers. So, you are all hot to trot on form and not substance."

This is truly a first, no one at TH has ever accused me of supporting elected democracy too much. And until you produce Semen-Stained robes as evidence, I'll regard your 2nd statement as hate speech and slander, meant to dehumanize your opponents to justify your treatment of them, much as the Nazis sought to paint the Jews as less than human.

I abhor suicide bombings as well as any other kind of terrorism, but I regard it as the logical extremity of despair and hopelessness. A young person born in the same refugee camp that his great-grandparents were driven into, having grown up on stories of the homeland they lost, is of course vulnerable to being manipulated into performing such atrocities.

len:
"Right or wrong in some abstract sense the international community carved out Israel and arab lands from old Ottoman empire and then the british take over of it.
The arabs rejected this and went to war. The israelis won because of their superior culture"

The Arabs fighting Israelis fortunately had different agendas, often at cross-purposes with each other. I'm glad they lost. But if I were an Arab in 1947, and I saw what a U.N. committee with no Arab representation (save Iran) gave the Jews, and how much more it was than what they had actually settled by then, I might have rejected it, too.

And I blame the 1948 war mostly on the Jews themselves. With the bombing of the King David Hotel they culminated some two decades of not just biting but trying to chew off the hand that was feeding them. The war-weary (and war-bankrupt) British should not have left, America and the U.N. should have massively assisted, but one way or another that region needed at least another decade of mandate rule during which a stable and peaceful Israel and Palestine might have been established.

A person more cynical than I might claim that Israel had calculated it's odds of winning the war with the Arabs quite accurately, and failed only to conquer Eretz Yisraoel from the Sinai to the Euphrates.

len:
"...So one cannot isolate Hamas from the general picture. Apparantly, you don't take Hamas seriously in their stated goals to exterminate the Jews in Israel."

Of course I take that threat seriously, just as I take seriously the Likud party's stated aim that there will never ever be an Independent Palestinian State. I reject both positions as inimical to any hope of a stable peace in the Middle East.

Were I the president of the USA, should I ignore, reject, and wage economic warfare against any Israeli government with Likud representation? Should I tell myself that it's for the Israeli people's own good, and that if only I rain down poverty, chaos, deprivation and enslavement making their very existence a Living Hell for a long enough time, then they will achieve enlightenment and select a government more to my taste?

len:
"So I am not impressed with your arguments that the Hamas govt should have been rewarded. Maybe is word we use when we hope. And what I see from you is some kind of hope based on what I dont know that Hamas will evolve into rational people. But you should be wise enough to see the other side and apparantly you do not want to."

All I can see is that since the 1950's the policy of the USA, and to the extent that we could control it the policy of the rest of the Western World, has pretty much followed your ideology. Israel is good, Israel can do no wrong, Israel should do whatever it wants and America should keep it's Mouth Shut and it's two-Billion-plus dollars/year flowing, and the Palestinians and the Arabs are evil, they can do no Right, every single thing they do has zero justification and civilization's only hope is to beat them all into submission and/or extinction.

That's been the way of things, and frankly the results flat-out SUCK. In over sixty years this approach has produced no peace, no justice, just an endless strife with no hope for anything better in sight. It's time for something different.

Or it was time, anyway. The Palestinians had made a real change, they threw out an ineffective and corrupt old guard. Now, there's just chaos with an Israeli-occupied puppet West Bank and Hamasistan or something in Gaza.

len:
"Jimmy Carter, France all thought that Khomeni was the savior. Same kind of hope you have. Interestly enough the pschopath Sadamm Hussein read Khomeni better than the gushy liberals and expelled him from Iraq."

The savior for whom, Western Oil Companies?
Are you capable of recognizing that what's best for the USA, the West and Israel is not necessarily what's best for the people of Iran, or does that idea just make your head explode?
Were the Iranian people better off under the Shah and his SAVAK, or did he just do a better job of serving foreign interests (ours) by keeping that oil pumping, so we could stay fat, happy and stupid ignoring what he did to his people?

I wish to God that Islamic Religious Fanatics did not rule Iran, but can you blame the Iranians for throwing out the Shah? Wouldn't it have been great if America and the West had swallowed it's pride over the hostage crisis and ENGAGED with the new government, perhaps trying to help the Fatah-- err, I mean secularists-- achieve a more workable balance with the clerics than the wild-eyed, Islamic-radical, terror-exporting Ayatollah-run government they have now?

len:
"So, yes, you can make your argument to support hamas, but you should also understand that there are reasons not to. So what is the right answer. You are so sure of yourself that smells of fanaticism. I am suspiious of your formal arguments re democratic elections."

If I've made any sense to you at all you should see that my reasons for supporting THAT particular democratic government at THAT particular time are nothing other than Realistic, Opportunistic even. And not just for the cause of Israeli-Palestinian relations. A few degrees of longitude East we're engaged in thoroughly stupid Iraq war, as ruinous to the cause of the War on Terrorism as it is to that of Middle East peace, but we are desperately trying to graft some kind of Democratic government onto a people who view the concept as something from another planet. We complain and punish them when they try to manipulate the democratic process to serve their own needs. "It'll never work if you don't have faith in the process and give it an honest chance," we tell them. And then we turn around and over in the Palestinian territories we----
ahhh, if I have to keep rubbing your nose in it like this then I'm wasting my time, you're just incapable of recognizing hypocrisy and it's consequences.

len:
"The Iranian people and the left in this country hailed the Khomeni revolution and supported it democratically. The cuban people hailed Castro. The French thru the democratic process at first supported the Vichy regime in WW II."

I don't know about the Vichy France, if they were elected it was with Nazis encouraging the voters at gunpoint, but from Iran and Cuba I learn this:

If we support evil regimes that oppress their peoples (like the Shah and Batista) because those governments serve our interests, those governments will eventually get kicked out and be replaced by other governments. Their peoples may or may not like these new Governments, but it's a safe bet that WE will definitely not like them, and they WONT serve our interests.

len:
"AS for Hirsi Ali, all the liberal reviews were negative; They are uncomfortable with her."

What little I've heard of Hirsi Ali (until now) was from the dreaded mainstream media (NPR, I think) and it was complimentary.