Thanks, Bobert.

Mike Miller wrote I promised myself noy to try to conduct a dialogue with the cadre of closet Jew baiters who infect this forum. There is not, nor will there be, a cogent discussion on matters concerning the Jewish state.
Frankly, I have had true discussions with Palastians and pro-Palastinian Israelis but I have never had a real discussion with a anti-Israeli non Semite.

There's nothing like a good logical fallacy to shut down a political discussion, eh? Poison the well--suggest that a person who says anything negative about Israel must be an anti-Semite, so everything they say about Israel is false or uninformed. Dubya used this trick after Sept. 11. Anyone who opposed his rush to war must not be a patriot, so people who objected to his disastrous response kept their mouths closed so they wouldn't be barred from the conversation later by the rancor of knee-jerk conservatives.

It's time people learned to separate the Jewish faith from the Jewish state. Set aside the corrosive wellspring of collective guilt over somehow not doing enough to prevent the Nazi death camps, set aside the hyperbolic romantic ideals of freedom fighters in the deserts of the Middle East from a Leon Uris novel. Look at the lives being lived in the region--yes, it is a set of politically manufactured states. The British were good at taking places apart and rearranging them. Look at India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran. Lumping and sorting that led to massive bloodshed, boundaries established because a minor functionary in London had a handy straight edge when he was drawing the map of new nations for people he didn't understand or never saw.

The Israelis aren't responsible for the great disarray in the Arab world--infighting and factions have taken their toll. The Israelis are, however, guilty of frequently walking into that powder keg with a lighted match.

Edward Said wrote in 2002:

Arabs have for so long been deprived of a sense of participation and citizenship by their rulers that most of us have lost even the capacity of understanding what personal commitment to a cause bigger than ourselves might mean. The Palestinian struggle -- that a people should endure such unremitting cruelty from Israel and still not give up, is a collective miracle -- but why can't the lessons of living (as opposed to suicidal, nihilistic) resistance be made clearer, and more possible to follow? This is the real problem, the absence all over the Arab world and abroad of a leadership that communicates with its people, not via communiqués that express an impersonal, almost disdainful disregard of them as citizens, but through the actual practice of concerted dedication and personal example. Unable to move the US from its illegal support of Israel's crimes, Arab leaders simply throw out one "peace" proposal (the same one) after another, each of which is dismissed derisively by both Israel and the US. Bush and his psychopathic henchman Rumsfeld keep leaking news of their impending invasion for "regime change" in Iraq, and the Arabs have still not communicated a unified deterrent position against this new American insanity. When individuals and organisations like ADC try to do something on behalf of a cause they are gunned down by troublemakers who have little else to do but destroy and disturb.

Surely the time has come to start thinking of ourselves as a people with a common history and goals, and not as a collection of cowardly delinquents. But that is up to each one, and it's no good sitting back blaming "the Arabs" since, after all, we are the Arabs.

SRS