From Alan Pogue’s posting on The Rag Blog:
I went to hear Norman Finkelstein last night and am glad I did. He is Jewish and the child of parents who were in the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz but he understands one cannot be moral only within one’s group. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 opened his eyes to what the government of Israel was doing. He turned his formidable intellect on the lies told to justify the suppression and removal of Palestinians…His theory on Israel’s attack on Gaza was that Hamas had become too moderate, too reasonable, too willing to make a deal. His most damning evidence was contained in quotes from Israeli politicians saying that if the cease fire went on too long it would give Hamas credibility…
Where is the evidence of bad attitude here? Don't see any. Those who cheer extreme
macho tend to think with their gonads on this issue. To be intelligent is to seem somehow
a traitor to those who do not really think and cannot actually analyze what they repeat
as borrowed wisdom from others. The government of Israel is like any other government
in that it is composed of individual humans who have strengths and weaknesses and who
respond to public attitudes which may or may not be wise. Maybe it is just too hot in
the Middle East to allow calm thinking and problem solving.
Or maybe certain ideologies in the Middle East are self-perpetuating. As they said in the sixties, you create your own reality. As long as you continue to invade neighboring countries while oppressing your native population, strategies with which Americans have long been familiar, you can expect everyone to hate you. But you can't expect people to believe you when you cry wolf, claiming that a country that hasn't invaded anyone for centuries is a threat, despite your possession of four hundred nukes.
Take for example the idea that Iran would threaten the US or Israel by possessing a couple of nuclear bombs. Daniel Luban points out that the reigning ideology
…speaks for itself, so much so that its logic need not even be spelled out. Of course a nuclear Iran would utterly reverse the power dynamic in the Middle East, and of course Iran would immediately take advantage by obliterating Israel (including, of course, Muslim holy sites and the infrastructure constituting a future Palestine) before perishing in a nuclear holocaust of its own. To doubt this is to put oneself beyond the pale of rational discussion.
I can't recommend Jim Lobe's blog highly enough.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree on April 30, 2009 10:07 PM