Getting away from Keith and Boba's nonsense for a moment, into the real world, the following is the gist of Noam Chomsky's column. I know String gave a link, but I know also that Keith never reads them through.

""Gaza, which I was able to visit for the first time last October.
There violence is met by the steady resistance of the "samidin" – those who endure, to borrow Raja Shehadeh's evocative term in "The Third Way," his memoir on Palestinians under occupation, 30 years ago.
Greeting me on my return home were the reports of the Israeli assault on Gaza in November, supported by the United States and tolerated politely by Europe as usual.
Israel isn't Gaza's only adversary. Gaza's southern border remains largely under the control of Egypt's dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, which credible reports link closely to the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
Just last month a young Gaza journalist sent me an article describing the Egyptian government's latest assault on the people of Gaza.
A network of tunnels into Egypt is a lifeline for Gazans imprisoned under harsh siege and constant attack. Now the Egyptian government has devised a new way to block the tunnels: flooding them with sewage.
Meanwhile the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports on a new device that the Israeli army is using to counter the weekly nonviolent protests against Israel's illegal Separation Wall – in reality an Annexation Wall.
The samidin have been ingenious in coping with tear gas so the army has escalated, spraying protesters and homes with jets of a liquid as noxious as raw sewage.
These attacks provide more evidence that great minds think alike, combining criminal repression with humiliation.
The tragedy of Gaza traces back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were forcibly expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion held that "The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them – to run away."
It is noteworthy that today the strongest support for Israel in the international arena comes from the United States, Canada and Australia, the so-called Anglosphere – settler-colonial societies based on extermination or expulsion of indigenous populations in favor of a higher race, and where such behavior is considered natural and praiseworthy.
For decades Gaza has been a showcase for violence of every kind. The record includes such carefully planned atrocities as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 – "infanticide," as it was called by Norwegian physicians Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who worked at Gaza's al-Shifa Hospital with their Palestinian and Norwegian colleagues through the criminal assault. The word is apt, considering the hundreds of children massacred.
Violence ranges through just about every kind of cruelty that humans have used their higher mental faculties to devise, up to the pain of exile.
The pain is particularly stark in Gaza, where older people can still look across the border toward the homes from which they were driven – or could if they were able to approach the border without being killed.""

I think I just substantiated the word "murderous" I applied to the Israeli government and the word "merciless", used by me to describe the IDF!

Don T.