Well, well, well. Look who has a blog now.
Peter Preston cheers suicide bombers
Peter Preston cheers suicide bombers in this essay for the Guardian, titled Palestinians have found a weapon Israel can’t counter. There are so many offensive statements in this piece (of crap) that I will try to focus on the most odious:
The Israelis use their heavy-duty kit to blast the remnants of PLO authority. The Palestinians wrap teenage girls in Semtex and send them, smiling sweetly, to devastate supermarkets and cafes.
Ahh. Moral Relevance and equivocation, the preferred side-arm of every nitwit.
Are they – the inexhaustible legions of Hamas and Hizbullah – to be condemned for that?
In a word, YES, you silly limey bastard.
It is easy to feel revulsion at so many young lives lost in a cause we can’t fully understand; and over so many Israeli civilian lives, innocent lives, brutally shattered.
Apparently not easy enough, as it appears to have utterly escaped you in this ode to suicide bombers.
Yet there is also another reality. The IDF has its jets and tanks, weapons of conventional war built and used to kill. The Palestinians possess no such weaponry; they are completely outgunned and outclassed. No one – apart from Arabs bearing wan words – comes to their aid. But they have, nevertheless, found a weapon at last that the Israelis cannot counter.
That is almost right. No one does come to their aid. Not even the ARAB nations, who have done nothing but exacerbate this problem.
Suicide is their chosen tool, their howitzer of ultimate resort, clinically chosen. We may think of suicide as an act of emotion – but, as Primo Levi once said, that overlooks its careful sentience. “Animals don’t commit suicide.”
Groan. Animals do strap explosives to themselves and blow up seders and 22 innocent victims.
And we need to be clear: it’s a winner. It has humiliated one of the world’s toughest conventional armies. They move in, flattening all before them and, far away, another burger bar or shopping centre is blasted to smithereens. There are some wars conventional soldiers can’t win.
Cue the triumphant music. The Palestinians are about to suicide bomb themselves into oblivion, because the rest of the world is about to break out a big stick- and we are not going to beat Israel with it.
Go read the rest of this disgusting babble. I am tired.
I liked him better when
I liked him better when he was rapping- Cornell West in the Philly Enquirer:
Many are calling for the Bush administration to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. And such intervention could help. Yet the Bush administration is making no effort to conceal that its heart lies elsewhere: in creating a coalition in the Islamic world that will support forthcoming U.S. attempts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Though little evidence links Saddam to Osama bin Ladin or al-Qaeda, the White House has used the cover of outrage at terror to legitimate a new war in Iraq that will complete what the last Bush administration left unresolved.
I am sure these remarks went down well at the Philly VFWs.
Gabriel Ash needs serious help:
Gabriel Ash needs serious help:
Not every day you’ll catch me declaring my profound agreement with the interloper in the White House. So take note. In his State of the Union, George Bush urged Americans to volunteer, to help build an America that “serves goals greater than the self.” He said “America needs citizens to extend the compassion of our country to every part of the world.”
I couldn’t agree more.
It is therefore absolutely essential to publicize the work of American men and women who are doing just that.
This is the third day of Sharon’s new military campaign against Palestinian civilians. With 20,000 reservists called, it promises to be a long and bloody one.
Tanks wreak destruction in Ramallah, Hebron, and other Palestinian towns. Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers vandalize homes, wantonly destroying furniture and precious food.
Journalists and TV offices are top targets. The IDF shoots at ambulances, arrests medical personnel, and storm hospitals.
Yesterday they destroyed offices and equipment belonging to two human rights organizations, LAW and Al-Haq.
Five Palestinian policemen in IDF custody were apparently executed in cold blood.
There are reports of more mass executions in Ramallah today. Sharon calls it a war against “the infrastructure of terror.” But the only infrastructure that matters is the determination of Palestinians to shake off the occupation or take Israel to Hell with them. Sharon’s war is a war against the Palestinian population, and against humanity.
Gabriel Ash is available for comment at: [email protected]
Please refrain from making crude comments about the email address.
Matt Welch has a warning
Matt Welch has a warning for the blog community:
Any human ecosystem that is suddenly subject to the glare of media attention — praise, derision, whatever — is inevitably changed and distorted by the process. It’s hard to see clearly with the lights shining on your face, no matter if you are a trained cynic, journalist, anti-fluffitarian or lead singer. The easiest trap is to confuse attention with actual self-importance — if they’re all looking at me, I must be special, right? Call it the David Talbot Syndrome. Can’t tell you how many times I made a somber, pretentious ass of myself back in Prague, when the next round of A-list teevee journalists (Lesley Stahl, Judd Rose) would come to town to do the Young Americans in Prague story. Remember: if you lose your sense of humor, if your skin becomes thin, if you develop an exalted and undeserved sense of personal status … then you have let the gatekeepers win. By becoming one of them.
Joshua Green points out something
Joshua Green points out something that appears to have eluded only Bob Woodward: Norm Mineta is a worthless layabout.
Some perspective from Victor Davis
Some perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
The proposed solution to the crisis in the Middle East is predicated on one notion: the return of the West Bank and all the other lands occupied by Israel after June 10, 1967. As the current conventional wisdom goes, our diplomatic efforts should be directed toward that single goal. Israel must give back conquered land. In return its Arab neighbors will promise to recognize its existence, make peace, and normalize relations.
One way of determining whether such an agreement would lead to peace would be to imagine what really might happen should Israel give up all of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Fortunately, we need not be utopian about the future, but rather simply revisit the past before June 5, 1967. Then Israel possessed none of those territories. Yet there was no peace – but simply a series of pauses between wars not unlike the present predicament. A quick perusal of a number of general histories about the pre-1967 era – especially Michael Oren’s forthcoming magisterial work Six Days of War – reveals a chilling similarity with the present calamity.
Did the Arab states accept Israel’s right to exist between 1947 and 1967, when it remained within its U.N.-mandated (Resolution 181) borders? Hardly. Three wars were fought to destroy Israel itself, not to restore the West Bank for the Palestinians. We must remember that for all the talk of Palestinian grievances over the present occupation, Muslims are now allowed free access to their mosques in a manner Jews and Christians were not accorded for their own places of worship under Jordanian control. Desecration of religious shrines and cemeteries was a pre-1967, not a present, phenomenon.
Seriously- All they want are the pre-1967 borders. I’m chuckling at the transparency of this ‘peace’ plan.