Israel Agrees to Release Samir Kuntar

I am sick to my stomach. Israel's cabinet today agreed to a "prisoner exchange" involving the release by Israel of Hizballah terrorist Samir Kuntar in exchange for the "release" of Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were abducted by Hizballah in 2006, setting off the most recent Israel/Lebanon war. Amazingly, Israel made this "deal" despite clear assessments from both the Mossad and Shin Bet that its two captured soldiers were no longer alive. Again, just sickening.

But even if they were alive, this is no "prisoner exchange" by any stretch, or at least one that involves the exchange of legitimate combatants. Kuntar, unlike Goldwasser and Regev, is no soldier or any other type of legitimate combatant. He is a murderer, who should have been executed shortly after he was captured and tried (Israel, for some inexplicable reason, has no death penalty, even for the worst of terrorists). This man brutally murdered a four year-old girl and her father in 1979. You can learn all about it here. And Israel is trading him (and the bodies of numerous other terrorists) for what will likely be the remains of two soldiers and "intelligence" related to the fate of soldier Ron Arad, who disappeared in 1986 (and is likely dead). Add to this the fact that Kuntar has said openly that he will join up and fight with Hizballah against Israel once he is set free.* How can any country make such a deal and claim to be either sane or moral?

Yes, the soldiers' families are grief-stricken and want their sons and husbands to come home (or to at least know their fate). Who wouldn't? Nobody can blame these people for favoring such a deal. But the job of politicians and leaders is to look beyond that and see the forest for the trees. The families' grief and desire to know the fate of their loved ones cannot be allowed to trump the national interests of the country. And it certainly cannot be allowed to interfere with the just punishment of a remorseless murderer for the brutal crimes he committed (and has said outright that he will murder again). Unfortunately, the family of Kuntar's victims just doesn't have the same political pull as the soldiers' families do.

Don't fret though. Kuntar's brother said that Kuntar was a fighter and that all of Lebanon would celebrate his return. And Hizballah stated that Kuntar's release proves the organization's strength. What an awful, awful day.


*Hat tip: Solomonia

Why Gentile Americans Overwhelmingly Support Israel

In the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Meade writes an immensely thoughtful essay about what drives the foreign policy of the United States with respect to Israel. Unlike certain other people, Meade does not believe that U.S./Israel policy results from the insidious machinations of some well-funded "Lobby" representing a minority of the population that is acting against the interests of the United States.

Rather, says Meade, U.S. foreign is and has always been driven by the will of the majority of the American people. That logically leads to the question of why the majority of Americans tend to support Israel while the majority of the rest of our beloved planet clearly does not (and is so receptive to the message of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, linked to above).

Well, I'm not going to spoil it. Read the essay. It's THAT freaking good. I swear, I didn't chuckle at all until the last page, when Meade hilariously suggests that the Arab leadership might one day end terrorist attacks and embrace non-violent civil disobedience (Michael Moore made the same suggestion in one of his books). Suffice it to say that if such a mentality was even possible, we probably wouldn't be in this pickle. But other than that this essay is great. If nothing else, you'll learn that Adam Clayton Powell raised money for the Irgun, which might be the single biggest badass fact I've learned about Israel in like five years.

So stop reading this blog, and read the essay!

Hat tip: DeProgram Program

Inside the Brain of Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi

Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi has been laying pretty low for the last twenty years, and I can only guess that Libya's "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution" grew tired of allowing his fellow dictators to corner the market on craziness. Well, not to worry because on June 11, 2008, Qaddafi decided to share his thoughts with the world. Buckle up, everyone, because this one is going to be a bumpy ride!

"It has been proven that there is no democracy in [the U.S.]. Rather, it is a dictatorship no different than the dictatorships of Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and the rest of the tyrants."

A wobbly start. Invoking Hitler is not exactly the most creative approach, though you have to respect the Genghis Khan name-drop. You don't hear many folks comparing the U.S. to Genghis Khan. The Mongols were pretty bad-ass so that can't be all negative, right? Okay, let's hear the reasoning as to why there is no democracy in this lovely country of ours.

"In the days of crazy Reagan, the American president issued a presidential order to launch a war against Libya, for example, a presidential order to besiege Libya, a presidential order to boycott Libya, and so on. Is this a democracy or a dictatorship?"

I'm going to go with "republic" (because that's, like, what the Constitution says, and stuff), but that's a topic for another day. In any event, the "logic" employed here is just priceless (as is the irony of Qaddafi referring to "crazy" Reagan -- projection, anyone??). But let's follow the reasoning. The U.S. gave Libya its comeuppance so that makes the U.S. a dictatorship. This is ironclad. I have no response.

"There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama.

"All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency."

I have no doubt that the butchers in Darfur are just jumping with joy at the thought of Barack Obama becoming President. Obama is not Muslim. And he by no means "studied" at an Islamic school (except in the sense that the student body was mostly Muslim at some schools he attended before he was ten). One would think that a powerful crazy dictator would be able to get his news from someplace more reliable than email forwards.

"But we were taken by surprise when our African Kenyan brother [Obama], who is an American national, made statements that shocked all his supporters in the Arab world, in Africa, and in the Islamic world."

"We hope that this is merely an elections 'clearance sale,' as they say in Egypt - in other words, merely an elections lie. As you know, this is the farce of elections - a person lies and lies to people, just so that they will vote for him, and afterwards, when they say to him, 'You promised this and that,' he says: 'No, this was just elections propaganda.' This is the farce of democracy for you. He says: 'This was propaganda, and you thought I was being serious. I was fooling you to get your votes.'

"Allah willing, it will turn out that this was merely elections propaganda. Obama said he would turn Jerusalem into the eternal capital of the Israelis. This indicates that our brother Obama is ignorant of international politics, and is not familiar with the Middle East conflict." [...]

Don't worry, he backtracked. Barack's no Zionist Lapdog like I am. Now we get to the real good stuff.

"We thought he would say: 'I have decided that if I win, I will monitor the Dimona nuclear plant, and the other WMDs in Israeli's possession.' We expected him to make such a decision. He undoubtedly had this in mind. When he talked about Iran and its nuclear program, he undoubtedly had Dimona in mind.

"But when he was thinking about Dimona, he undoubtedly had the fate of former president Kennedy on his mind as well. Kennedy decided to monitor the Dimona nuclear plant. He insisted on doing so, in order to determine whether or not it produces nuclear weapons. The Israelis refused, but he insisted.

"This crisis was resolved with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. He resigned so he would not have to agree to the monitoring of the Dimona plant, and he gave the green light for the killing of Kennedy.

"Kennedy was killed because he insisted on the monitoring of the Dimona plant. This image was undoubtedly on Obama's mind. He undoubtedly wanted to talk about this, but decided not to."[...]

I'm inclined just to let this sit on its own. Read it. Digest it. And reflect on just how big a secret freaking Dimona has been over the years. Lee Harvey Oswald, Zionist Lapdog?

"We expected him to say: 'If I win, I will implement the one-state solution - the "Isratine" which appears in Qaddafi's White Book.' This idea constitutes the final, deep-rooted, and historic solution. It is impossible to establish two midget-states in this area. What kind of country is only 15 km deep? The so-called Israel is only 15 km deep. What kind of a country is this?

"There are five million Palestinians there. We expected Obama to say: 'I've decided to return millions of Palestinian refugees to the land of Palestine, from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967.' This is the 'change' that the peoples applaud, the change that the American people - and the black people in America - want.

"We expected him to say: 'I will strive for the independence and unity of the Kurdish nation. This nation must take its place under the sun in the Middle East.' The Kurdish nation is torn apart, tormented, and persecuted, and is colonized by everyone. He should have supported it, instead of supporting the collaborators, while sacrificing the future of the Kurdish nation. This is 'change.'" [...]

We expected him to say "Death to America! Death to Israel!" That's the change the American people (especially African-Americans, I guess) want. Mu'ammar Al-Qaddafi: a man with his finger on the pulse of America.

"The thing we fear most is that the black man suffers from an inferiority complex. This is dangerous. If our brother Obama feels that because he is black he doesn't have the right to rule America, this would be a disaster, because such a feeling would make him act whiter than the white, and go to an extreme in his persecution and degradation of the blacks."

My first impression after hearing Obama speak? Inferiority complex. It's possible that this is a translation issue, but you have to adore how Qaddafi believes that if he becomes President, Obama will "rule" America.

"We say to him: Brother, the whites and blacks in America are equal. They are all immigrants. America belongs neither to the whites nor to the blacks. America belongs to its original inhabitants, the Indians. Both the whites and the blacks immigrated to America, and so they are equal, and Obama has the right to hold his head high, and say: 'I am a partner in America. This is my land as much as it is yours. If it is not my land, it is not yours either. It is the land of the Indians. You are immigrants, and so are we.'"[...]

So we should all prostrate ourselves before the Indians, our rightful lords and masters?

"We are still hoping that this black man will take pride in his African and Islamic identity, and in his faith, and that [he will know] that he has rights in America, and that he will change America from evil to good, and that America will establish relations that will serve it well with other peoples, especially the Arabs."

He has no "Islamic identity." You are a crazy person. And why should he change America from evil to good? As Mel Brooks taught us over twenty years ago, evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb!

John Stewart Can Go to Hell

Update: Debbie Schlussel has provided a more detailed response to the John Stewart video (and was kind enough to link to this blog. Thanks, Debbie!)


I have disagreed with John Stewart a lot over the years, but through it all, I always saw him as intelligent, funny, and generally worthy of respect. That changed last night when a friend sent me a clip of The Daily Show (click on "Indecision 5768"). In that clip, Stewart pokes fun at the Presidential candidates during their addresses to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The first 80% of it is fine, maybe even a bit funny.

But at the end, Stewart "comically" maligns the candidates for not expresssing any criticism of Israeli policies during their speeches. He also incredibly states that one cannot "remotely criticize Israeli policies and expect to be elected President." At this point, my jaw dropped.

First, why would he expect any candidate to criticize Israel WHILE ADDRESSING AIPAC?? Seriously, when has any candidate ever criticized the NAACP (or the African-American community) WHILE ADDRESSING THE NAACP?? Or for that matter, when has any candidate ever seriously criticized the NAACP and been elected President?

But more important, Stewart is nothing short of a traitor for disseminating what amounts to enemy propaganda: that somebody cannot "remotely criticize Israel's policies" (whatever that means) and get elected President. He just provided a sound byte for the Arab world that will serve as further justification for acts of mass murder against his Jewish (and non-Jewish) brothers and sisters in Israel and throughout the world and will further the myth that the "Israel Lobby" (whatever that is) has a stranglehold over both the US media and the Middle East debate. Maybe Stewart forgot that Obama said that the so-called Palestinians were suffering more than any people on Earth. Not to mention the fact that Obama has surrounded himself and associated with numerous anti-Israel people like Robert Malley (who had to quit once his Hamas connections came to light). I guess Obama can't get elected President, right?

These blog entries usually contain a degree of humor. But there is nothing funny about this. I am really pissed off. John Stewart has criticized Israel in the past, which is fine, even though I believe he's wrong when he does it. If he wants to say he favors a "two-state solution" or that Israel should take down settlements or withdraw from Judea and Samaria, that's fine. He's expressing a respectable opinion. A wrong and uninformed opinion, but a respectable one.

But I have no tolerance for traitors who disseminate enemy propaganda tinged with anti-Jewish stereotypes that have served as the justification for killing Jews throughout the centuries. And that's exactly what Stewart did by making jokes implying that you can't criticize Israel in America.

John Stewart is an empty shell of a man, and he can go to Hell.

So About That Whole Ethnic Cleansing Thing

Commentary has a rather fine article detailing the ACTUAL history leading up to the 1947 War of Independence, and of course, the Nahkba (everybody give our oppressed refugee friends a sniffle and a tear now!). Because you can't celebrate Independence without recognizing the (Greek?) tragedy that was the Nakhba. In fact, I think you shouldn't be able to celebrate anything without reflecting on the Nahkba. Next Saturday, when you're at your great aunt's 65th birthday, you go up to each one of your family remembers and remind them just how much the Palestinians suffered in 1948 and continue to suffer today! When your five year-old cousin Timmy is about to eat some birthday cake, swat it to the floor and tell him "That's what it felt like when the Palestinians were driven from Haifa!" For the more one tells the story of the Nakhba, the more he is to be praised. And if you don't tell the story of the Nakhba every time you so much as crack a smile at the sunset, you are a soulless, Imperialist, Fascist, Zionist lackey (or lapdog).

Teaching the Little Tykes About Anti-Israel Protesters

So the JTA recently posted an article about how kids apparently have trouble dealing with anti-Israel protesters. Time for the Zionist Lapdog primer!

A burst of black balloons ascended toward the gray sky as thousands of area Jews marched down the Philadelphia boulevard waving their blue-and-white flags in support of Israel. . . . "I don't get it," a 9-year-old said to his parents as they tried to explain that these balloons were not meant as symbols of celebration.

Simple, kid. There are people out there that hate Israel. And they will continue to hate Israel, regardless of what Israel does or tries to do to make them happy. So don't bother trying to make them happy or to hate you less. Do stand up for what you believe is right.

With Israel and its supporters marking the nation's 60th anniversary with festivities around the world, pro-Palestinian groups have been unusually assertive in pressing their case that Israel's birth marked a "nakba," or catastrophe, for the Palestinian people.

Message for 9 year-olds: In wars, there are almost always winners and losers. And the losers are usually pretty pissed off that they were not able to vanquish the winners. That does not mean the winners should not be celebrating like there was on tomorrow that they stopped the losers from driving them into the sea.

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition that includes many anti-Israel organizations, is launching an advertising campaign in New York in advance of the city's June 1 tribute to Israel, which is likely to be the largest celebration of Israel outside the Jewish homeland itself.

I can't wait. Incidentally, the name of that organization is a flat-out lie. It's not a campaign just "to end the Israeli Occupation" (whatever that ultimately means). Rather, this organization favors the so-called "Right of Return." This means they want to flood Israel with millions of Arab "refugees", most of whom have never spent a minute of their lives in the Holy Land, so that the
Arabs can overwhelm the Jews demographically and ultimately take over the country.
Indeed, according to their FAQ, if you're just for "ending the Israeli Occupation" but don't favor this large scale Arab invasion of Israel, "then this would become grounds to review [your] membership with the Campaign." Ain't that sweet?

While debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is commonplace among adults, for children it can be unsettling to see large signs and graffiti denigrating the very state they are celebrating.

I don't really see the big deal here. Kids see unsettling things every day. That's why adults are around to explain things to them as best they can.

In Philadelphia, the parade marchers persevered down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the city's grand boulevard. Spontaneous singing erupted with songs of peace and hope -- "Oseh Shalom," "Hatikvah," "Lo Yisa Goy el Goy Cherev."

The conversations between parents and children were heard everywhere, as the adults sought to explain why protesters were raining on their parade.

Because they hate Israel and have no desire to allow Jews to have their own country.

For some it was an opportunity to educate, to explain and in some instances re-explain that Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land of Israel, that Israel has sought to make peace with the Palestinians but that many Palestinians have opposed it -- some violently -- and that people have the right to express their opinions as long as they do so peacefully.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Not about people being able to express opinions peacefully -- that's fine. But you don't say that "Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land of Israel" as if each has an equally legitimate claim. That is simply not true whether one looks at the Bible, the secular historical record, or international law.

You explain that Jews have the legitimate right to settle and have sovereignty over the land of Israel and that the Arabs have actively and violently opposed this for over a century. They have oppressed Jews in their own Arab lands and have sought and continue to seek to destroy Israel. The fact that the Arabs have failed to do this and are lamenting over their "Nahkba" is exactly why you are celebrating so joyfully.

For others it was more black and white. "Some people want to destroy Israel; we want it to live," one mother was overheard telling her children.

Praise the Lord!

At Israel parades and celebration events nationwide, this confusion has increased with organized anti-Israel activity. From an educational symposium in San Francisco to parades in Sacramento, Milwaukee and beyond, pro-Palestinian activists have been a forceful presence this year.

Nakba events have made a "strong showing this year," said Josh Ruebner, the director of national advocacy for End the Occupation.

"It is very important to put across an alternative message," Ruebner said. Pro-Palestinian groups believe that "the overwhelming discourse about Israel minimizes or ignores the fact that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948."

Okay, we dealt with this issue in the last posting. So I won't rehash my arguments here. Just read the last paragraph for my response to this attempt to put forth an "alaternative message." I don't think there's any obligation to mourn the suffering of the losers who tried to destroy you or to disseminate their propoganda while you celebrate your victory. But I'm, like an extremist and stuff.

Like many of the anti-Israel protesters at several of the demonstrations, Ruebner is Jewish.

"As a Jewish person, I don't believe we should be celebrating at the expense of another people," he said." This is profoundly opposed to Jewish traditions."

That's a profoundly ignorant statement. What do we celebrate on Passover? The destruction of the Egyptain army as we were freed from slavery. On Purim? The killing of Haman and his 75,000 followers who tried to destroy us. On Chanukah? The victory of the Jews over the Syrian-Greeks. And that's just a sampling.

There are few things more central to Jewish history and traditions than the celebrations of our victories over those who attempted to kill us. And the Arabs are no exception to that.

At the JCC of San Francisco, during a May 8 educational symposium in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary, anti-Zionist activists staged the largest anti-Israel protest ever to take place in the building, according to a JCC official. Twenty of these protesters were escorted out by the San Francisco Police Department, which was well equipped to deal with the situation due to intense security preparations for the event.

According to Doug Kahn, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, the protest was loud and there was much chanting.

But since the Bay Area is known as a hotbed of action on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian fence, “there was a smooth and effective response," Kahn said.

So apparently they trespassed and attempted to disrupt and educational event by heckling it down. Good to know that such people are so in favor of freedom of expression.

The rest of the article basically deals with parents explaining to their kids that protesters are free to protest under the First Amendment. That's undoubtedly true, but it's not an adequate response or explanation. You have to explain to children why these people are protesting, and why they're wrong.

Israel, The Refugees and the Lebanon War

Counterpunch is a pretty radical Left Wing newsletter that, for whatever reason, devotes a highly disproportionate amount of its time and bandwidth to Israel-bashing. A piece written a couple of days ago by Kathleen M. Barry was no exception. The article is styled as an "open letter" to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi protesting Pelosi's celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary (can there be a greater war crime?).

The first sentence of this screed lectures the Speaker of the House to "[c]heck your history books." Since I am now anticipating an authoritative lecture on the history of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, I naturally skim to the bottom of the article to investigate the author's qualifications to give such a lecture:

Kathleen Barry is Professor Emerita of Penn State University. A feminist and sociologist, she is the author of Female Sexual Slavery, Prostitution of Sexuality: Global Exploitation of Women, and Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist and is now completing Expendable Lives, a new book on masculinity and war.

Nothing there indicates that Barry possesses any level of expertise on the Middle East or that she has read or written even a single sentence about the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Of course, this alone does not discredit her arguments (after all, facts are facts, regardless of who presents them), but it does provide some explanation and context for the silly and completely unsubstantiated arguments that are to follow.

Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel is celebration of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine, the celebration of the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs who generations later still people the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordon [sic], who still mourn their families slaughtered by Zionists as they completely destroyed Arab villages in Palestine, who still hold keys to their homes that were seized by the new Israeli state in 1948.

There are so many mistakes here that it's just laughable. First, her 750,000 figure is inflated. As explained by Middle East scholar Dr. Mitchell Bard in his exhaustively-researched book debunking numerous myths surrounding the Arab/Israeli Conflict:

Many Arabs claim that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1947-49. The last census was taken by the British in 1945. It found approximately 1.2 million permanent Arab residents in all of Palestine. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. In 1947, a total of 809,100 Arabs lived in the same area.¹This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure — 472,000, and calculated that only about 360,000 Arab refugees required aid. (emphasis added) (citations omitted)

Second, there was no "ethnic cleansing" in Palestine, at least by any rational definition of that term. After the 1948 War of Independence, about 160,000 Arabs remained as citizens of Israel, and that figure has grown to over 1 million today, which comprises roughly 20% of Israel's population. If one counts the Arab population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the total Arab population in what the Arabs consider to be "Palestine" is nearly equal to the Jewish population. So if Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing, they're, like, really bad at it and stuff.

Third, the implication here is that the refugee problem was somehow caused by the Zionists, who willfully and relentlessly dispossessed the Arab population. This is a complete distortion of the historical record. Historian Efraim Karsh has spent considerable amounts of ink debunking such ridiculous claims. As he wrote in an excellent essay:

The claim of premeditated dispossession is itself not only baseless, but the inverse of the truth. Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, the Palestinians were themselves the aggressors in the 1948-49 war, and it was they who attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to "cleanse" a neighbouring ethnic community. Had the Palestinians and the Arab world accepted the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and not sought to subvert it by force of arms, there would have been no refugee problem in the first place.

It is no coincidence that neither Arab propagandists nor Israeli "new historians" have ever produced any evidence of a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians during the 1948 war. For such a plan never existed. In accepting the UN partition resolution, the Jewish leadership in Palestine acquiesced in the principle of a two-state solution, and all subsequent deliberations were based on the assumption that Palestine’s Arabs would remain as equal citizens in the Jewish state. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, told the leadership of his Labour (Mapai) party on December 3, 1947:

"In our state there will be non-Jews as well-and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well."

In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the improvement of health in the Arab sector, the incorporation of Arab officials in the government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction.

That's just a sampling. That whole essay is a must-read. Bard also further debunks the idea that it was the Zionists who forcibly expelled the Arabs. Of course, the fact that there are Arabs suffering in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and wherever else leads to the question of why those countries have allowed that situation to continue. But that is an issue that Barry never addresses. Instead, she writes:

I stand with Jews, with Palestinians, with every people who seek protection from persecution, but never with those who persecute others, who conduct well documented ethnic cleansing to gain their own protection which in six decades of Israeli wars has been no protection at all for Israelis.

Well, it's good to know that the so-called Palestinians don't persecute others. Israel could only dream of one day becoming the beacon of tolerance and pluralism that is the Palestinian Authority. And indeed, six decades of wars have provided no protection for Israel, other than to, like, ward off attempts to destroy it and stuff.

After criticizing Israel for its Original Sin of, um, existing, Barry then goes off on some weird tangent about the 2006 Lebanon War:

I expected George Bush to align himself with the war mongering far right wing government of Israel. He after all provided most of the millions of laser guided smart bombs Israel directed at apartment buildings and cluster bombs that still take lives in the south of Lebanon. Israel’s crimes against humanity in the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon go unnoticed by you and your delegation as you are only concerned with Hezbollah’s threat to Israel, kidnapping of three soldiers. In that war, the Israeli Air Force launched more than 7,000 air attacks on about 7,000 targets in Lebanon between 12 July and 14 August, while the Navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments. Does that sound at all proportional to the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers? Neither are justified, but reason is required, although with your personal convictions override reason making you very dangerous in a position of leadership.

Are those the Israeli tags of kidnapped soldiers you carry from that war? Do you wonder at all about the families of the 1200 dead Lebanese while you worry for those soldiers? Check the details Nancy, Israel’s aggression of Lebanon’s borders has outnumbered Hezbollah’s.

Okay, you heard it here first, folks. The ruling Kadima party is the "war-mongering far right-wing government of Israel." As the link explains, the platform of these Kadima guys and gals is to achieve peace with the Arabs by making land concessions. Filthy war-mongerers!!

In any event, the object of this rant within a rant is to criticize Israel for acting disproportionately in response to the kidnapping of its two soldiers by the Hizbullah terror gang. I hope we can all agree that kidnapping soldiers is an act of war. When you fight a war, the object is to get the enemy to surrender. This is usually done by hitting him with more force than he is able to bring to bear against you -- i.e., by hitting him with disproportionate force. Barry's claim that Israel's aggression somehow "outnumbered" Hizbullah's (huh?) is especially odd given that Hizbullah's missile attacks forced Israel to effectively depopulate the northern portion of the country and make roughly 300,000 people homeless. If anything, the force employed by Israel was not disproportionate enough because those two soldiers unfortunately remain in captivity.

Bathing in self-congratulations on Israel’s 60th anniversary, without any acknowledgment of the Naqba, the disaster wrought upon the Palestinians by Zionist in what was then Palestine, you have told me and all Americans clearly that as Speaker and therefore head of the people’s house, you are not representing Americans. You are representing the current Israeli government without ever questioning, in fact, implicitly condoning their crimes against humanity.

Okay, here's the climax. The rest of the article is basically non-substantive filler so here we go. The whole basis of this article seems to be that it is somehow improper to celebrate Israel's independence without bowing your head to mourn the Nahkba, the tragedy of those who were, of course, dispossessed so the greedy Zionists could have their homeland. Shame on those like President Bush who recognize that, while neither side is perfect, there are good guys and bad guys here, and Israel is the side worthy of celebration. And people without neurotic guilt have no problem celebrating victory over the bad guys even when the bad guys suffered as a result of the war. This isn't really that radical a concept when you think about it. Every July 4, we celebrate this country's independence as a generally positive event. I have never once heard anybody claim on July 4 that we were somehow wrong to celebrate our freedom while ignoring the plight of the victimized Loyalists who opposed the Revolution and therefore were forced to flee the country after having their property confiscated. This happened to tens of thousands of people. Yet you would have trouble finding even one American who expresses a scintilla of guilt over that. As I have written before, I don't do guilt well when it comes to the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone!