Aranyos, ügye? Creative and humourous way to raise awareness about waste and recycling, right? Strangely but perhaps not surprisingly, the Kremlin protectorate did not agree. Check this story for a photo essay of his arrest.

Bad day to be a zionista

Way to go, Erdo!

The Turkish PM stormed off the stage of a Davos panel after telling Shimon Peres, 'You know very well how to kill people.' Photos here, Peres actually looks somewhat distressed. BBC has also posted a video of the incident.

Meanwhile, in Paris, another Blight of Zion was getting slapped down. At the Erez border crossing, the IOF actually shot at the French Consul General. Shooting at high level diplomatic officers is not, as far as i'm aware, de riguer on the intl circuit. Maybe they were waving a white flag, or had PRESS taped onto their cars, or had just called an ambulance - Israeli soldiers love to shoot at ambulances.

The French Foreign Ministry summoned Israeli ambassador Daniel Shek today over an incident in which a convoy of French diplomats, including the nation’s consul general were blocked from crossing the Gaza border for over six hours and shot at by Israeli troops. [read the rest here]

In London, uni students and others made a bold attempt to catch Israeli Colonel Geva Rapp, who's doing a speaking tour in the UK to discuss his recent killing spree in the Gaza Strip. The demo was organized on the fly, the Colonel was whisked away by the Mossad, et al. still a free man, relatively speaking. If caught, the plan was to have him arrested for war crimes. i followed this on facebook, no link at the moment.

Three fiascos in three different european countries on a single day. i'd say the pressure is definitely building. Is Obama going to come to their defense or use the momentum in Europe to force the Israelis' hands? For now, making them squirm in places where they'd normally expect to be casually sipping martinis is a very, very good thing.

Cell Phone Recycing

Explanation of Samsung's cell phone recycling program and their innovation in corn-based plastics.

Deep Intrigue on the Subcontinent

This post could also have been called 'Israel further endangers the world,' which would have been entirely fitting, except it doesn't grab one's imagination in quite the same way that 'intrigue' does. And this stuff is very intriguing, albeit scary and even a bit bizarre. What i'm referring to is Israel's relationship with right-wing Hindus and its increasing influence (read: profiteering) in India's 'security operations'. Came across this story in the UAE press about a 'radical Hindu group', Abhinav Bharat, best known for conducting a series of bombings last year in Maharashtra. The report claims that this relatively small group of fascists - let's be honest here - has been preparing to set up a shadow government based - you guessed it - in Tel Aviv. Helping a group that uses extreme violence to cleanse India of its muslims seems like an obvious step for Isreal. They could surficially justify it as the best way to assist Washington in rounding up all the genetically bad guys, since Israelis in military uniform io Pakistani soil would definitely not go over very well; on the periphery of the al-Qaeda-Taliban Wilderness Reserve, build up a strong Hindu buffer and make it that much harder for India and Iran to sustain progressive relations. Makes perfect sense, right? Israel aids fascist terrorists who have as their objective the elimination of supposedly fascist terrorists.

A couple of years ago, i came across mention of how Israelis had sold India on the need to construct a barrier between Jammu and Kashmir. Not only did they generously promote the idea (using their monstrosity in the Palestinian Territories as a model for what's possible), they also offered to help them build it, which was oh so kind and of course, very, very profitable. Researching this again, i learn that in fact, India followed Isreal's lead in unilaterally deciding where the border lies; in both cases, doing this violates international law but as we have learned, when it comes to fighting terrorism the law gets pretty simple, i.e. 'whatever we decide'. The law of the jungle has become the law of the desert; be careful what you wish for, chides a grinning Osama bin Laden. And this isn't the only thing that's familiar. According to a NY Times story from 2004:

In places, the fence has created divisions within a division. Some farmers have been separated from their grazing lands, and a few houses and hamlets that have been in Indian-held Kashmir since 1947 are now outside it because the fence could not be built around them without crossing into Pakistani territory. There are gates for cattle and people, with proper identification, to cross back into India.

It's easy to toss out cynical rhetoric about this, but what it means in very real terms is that Israel has set up yet another system in which people are daily subjected to humiliation and true hardship in the interests of financial and political greed. This is not occurring in an otherwise peaceful, idyllic setting. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Kashmir in the past decade or so, there's been a huge amount of suffering and now there is a wall. Indian commanders claim that successful attacks have decreased, but it's understood there still need to be some attacks, otherwise people will start to question whether the fence is really needed and maybe the time is right to make a political settlement.

People who want to come and are determined to come, they will come," said Umar Farooq, a political leader in Indian-held Kashmir who opposes Indian rule. "They have routes and maps, and they will use them." "It's a waste of money,'' he said, adding that it was better to pursue a political settlement. With the fence, he said, the Indians are "trying to sort of legitimize their claim day by day" to Kashmir.

This sure sounds like a day in the West Bank to me. Now here's where it gets both familiar and creepy. The NY Times story about Abhinav Bharat, which details the history of their prosecution for the Maharashta attacks, includes this update on the status of the case against them:

The investigations into the blasts were dealt a blow after the death in the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November of Hemant Karkare, who was head of Mumbai’s antiterrorist squad. Many people, including a federal minority affairs minister, demanded an inquiry in to the circumstances that led to Karkare’s death, alleging a right-wing Hindu group might have been behind it.

The last time the head of a terrorist unit was killed, it happened in NYC on 'that date' - you, know, the one that will be carved into Rudolph Giuliani's tombstone. But think about it, ok? India is now Israel's third largest customer in the arms market, with a growing Hindu nationalist movement that Israeli commandos work with as partners in the war on terror [sic]. A series of terrorist attacks is carried out by a group which at the very least, has been getting moral support from Israel as part of the latter's intensifying partnership with the politically-based Hindu nationalist movement - the one holding political power - and then the chief anti-terror investigator is killed in another attack, carried out by people whose identities and allegiances are not entirely clear. Dr. Vijay Prashad, in an excellent analysis of this relationship, makes a very good case that India is foolish employing Israel to advise them on security, since the Israeli record of success actually stinks. But my guess is that it's all much more diabolically orchestrated than what's been muckraked to date, and that Israel is influencing the political machinations in New Delhi in just as reprehensible ways as they've been doing for years in Washington. That Jews were killed in Mumbia now makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? We shouldn't ever believe for a minute that the State of Israel is unwilling to sacrifice the people it claims it exists to protect, in the interests of a higher goal. Back home, these deaths feed the monster, who in turn feeds on Muslim blood. The Hindu right loves Netanyahu; Netanyahu would just as soon nuke Gaza, and on and on and on.

To my mind, these are all very, very high stakes. Consider the decoupling of India and PakGhanistan in Richard Holbooke's mission statement. Evidently the Indian government had a very effective lobbying operation which succeeded in getting Obama (and presumably, Killary) to agree to keeping India out of the operations profile. India, perhaps under Israeli guidance, wants to remain an independent partner, a rogue operator, if you will, carrying out its own anti-terror (read: anti-muslim) agenda, which apparently is all about provocation but that is, after all, what fascists have always done best. What i find truly mind-boggling is why huge contries like the US and India are organizing their agendas according to what one of the smallest, most racist, countries ever tells them to prioritize. Whether Obama at some point takes the leap and says 'enough' remains to be seen, but this much is certain: Israel's agenda is totally corrupt and is magnifying conflicts which could otherwise be headed towards some measurable resolution. Intrigue can be a positive rush, but not this kind, if i choose to be honest about it.

Inaugural Zeitgeist

NO, i never thought i’d live to see the day when a black man would become ‘The Man’ - nearly everyone in the world cheering him on, no less. My scenario for that had entailed a total collapse of the US as currently constituted, enabling smaller states led by regional leaders to rise out of the ashes. So, i’m totally jazzed to see the Obamas move into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and feel an almost childlike glee at the possibility of MLK and Malcolm X portraits hanging on the walls of the oval office. Long, long overdue. i hope that a few years from now, people will wonder why they feared changing government leadership as long as they did, and that this will lead them to a deeper understanding of the self-destructiveness of racism. It’s certainly a plus that something has replaced ‘Where were you when the towers were hit?’ as the definitive personal trivia question of our times, although where i live, people are mostly asking for assurance that things are – really – going to change. With so much economic insecurity in Europe, watching W lead [sic] the US to near total collapse has been like hearing that your boat’s going down AND all the life rafts have been punctured. Clearly, the inauguration didn’t come a moment too soon and judging by the enthusiasm, the new prez apparently came to town with a boatload of patch kits.

On Day Two of the First One Hundred Days (can they make it sound any more epic?) Obama's announcement at the State Dept that he’d signed the order to close Guantanamo received enthusiastic applause, which, given the international orientation of that audience, cemented for me how terribly the whole enemy combatant/extraordinary rendition policy has weighed down international attitudes towards the US. i can say unequivocally that this has been the most-criticized activity of the Bush junta that i, personally, have encountered – even from Iraqis. While it’s something of a discrete problem, that Obama dealt with it on day one was more than welcome. Bombing Pakistan – well, the US has been bombing one country or another for decades, most people don’t like it but they didn’t like the whole Guantanamo-rendition system more. The next big global issue to address is climate change; Europe wants fast, smart action from the US in setting aggressive CO₂ reduction targets and the newest industrial, coal-breathing behemoths like China and India need emissions control diplomacy from the US in a big way.

It’s been interesting reading views and hearing Europeans discuss the inaugural event, itself. i think the masses of people in DC served as a kind of confirmation that most americans really did not support the Bush regime; at the same time, the huge show of unity was a bit disconcerting. All those people fired up and ready to go… good for them, let’s hope they stay in their own neighborhood. Actually, that’s not really true. Here’s a hilarious appeal from the former Hungarian ambassador to the US after a rumor was floated that Whoopie Goldberg (yes, the dancing nun) was interested in becoming the new US ambassador to Hungary.

It feels like i should write more about Obama this and Obama that, but i really don’t have it in me. i watched the inauguration with one of my students, and though her English is not proficient enough to follow a political speech of that nature, i saw that it didn’t really matter to her what he said because he looked so confident and kool and that’s exactly the kind of political celebritidom she and (i think) a lot of people on this side of the pond have been looking for in US leadership. To me, the speech was somewhat disturbing because i actually don’t agree that americans never have to apologize for our way of life: that line could have been lifted from the Reagan Library or some other repository of offensive exceptionalist rhetoric. But i’m hip to the zeitgeist - it’s not what he says but that he says it – not what people hear, but how they feel. In a post-modern world, asking for anything beyond that is just silly and defeatist.

Women in Resistance

Speaking of Vietnam (see previous entry), i’ve just finished reading Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram. Dr. Thuy grew up and went to medical school in Hanoi, North Vietnam in the 1960s. She was intensely committed to supporting the revolution in the South, eventual reunification of her country, and standing tall against the american devils. The diaries chronicles her experiences working in hidden clinics, trekking through mine fields to treat resistance fighters in the middle of the night, etc. - all acts of incredibly bravery; she also chronicles her struggle to obtain party membership and show her leadership worth and self-learning as she was given more and more responsibilities by the party. The majority of entries are about her personal relationships, particularly psychic withdrawal from the great love that was not meant to be. After giving it her all for nearly 4 years, she was killed by an american soldier in 1970. The contents in her pack were sent to US military intelligence, eventually the diaries surfaced and were published in Vietnam in 2005.

One of the striking things was her unwaivering belief in a future Vietnam that would be nothing less than utopian. She had such a clear vision of where it all was going, and used that as a source of power to not crack when things got really hairy. Her constant self-chidings about having bourgeois emotional responses to a variety of events is absolutely charming, and because the diaries are so personal, they provide an incredible lens into how/why she felt her own development was an integral part of the development of her country. No hubris here, she simply believed that the decades-long struggle, all the blood it had shed, the political vision it harboured, demanded nothing less from all of them. As the bombing intensified in her area and the clinic had to keep relocating, what she writes conveys a sense that there was a very blurred line between civilians and resistance; everyone living there was effected by the US invasion and understood that survival meant resistance… an almost biologically logical response.

Here’s her entry on 16 January 1969, following a quick evacuation of the clinic. Thuy had stayed with patients who could not be moved.

The whole house is empty. The Clinic is silent and oddly somber. There are only a few wounded soldiers and some staff left. I can hear the murmurs of the stream outside.

I am already twenty-six years old, no longer a naïve girl. Why do I let this gloomy scene color my feelings? In fact, it’s the other way around. Ngyuen Du says, ‘When one is sad, the scenery can never be cheery.’ What joy is there when the American bandits are trampling on our nation and killing our countrymen? What joy is there when our country is still divided, when family members are still scattered in all directions? But, Thuy, does your heart recognize only yearnings and sorrow? Our struggle demands that the people have great joy and a strong will and belief in our cause. Nurture these positive sentiments and wipe away the cloud of sadness from your eyes.

Can anyone out there explain the difference between dropping white phosphorus on people and gassing them to death? i'm not real clear on that.... how easily we forget.

i think we can all agree that if this is what the "only democracy in the Middle East" [sic] considers legitimate self-defense [sic], it's time to re-evaluate the pro-democracy agenda. Excerpted from this story on Al-Jazeera:

The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:

"We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said.

"This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised."

Causing "immense damage and destruction" and considering entire villages "military bases" is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Eisenkot's description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable.

Top Fun: Plane Stupid Sued by RyanAir for millions

If i were 25 years old, hanging out with a bunch of folks fed up with the juxtaposition of climate scientists’ data - let’s call them the ‘facts’ - against announcements about airport expansions, locking down on a local runway would seem like an obvious way to vent. The UK group, Plane Stupid, did exactly that last month at Stansted Airport, one of London's three international air hubs. Reported thus by The Independent: "Sixty militant environmentalists staged a dramatic protest on a taxi runway at Stansted yesterday morning, forcing the cancellation of dozens of flights and prompting a review of airport security." Militants? Please, spare us the bogus terrorist-leaning spin. When militants close down airports, we get something more like this (definitely check out the link, the arabic means DANGER). A bunch of early 20s climate catastrophe obsessives weighted down with fence cutters and carabiners hardly matches the level of danger posed by RPG-carrying renegades patrolling an airport in looted Ethiopian jeeps. Nevertheless, people who depend on functioning airports are right to be concerned: these floating direct action cells do have the potential of making shutdowns on behalf of the atmosphere look like irresistible, guilt-allaying fun. They may not be militant, but they definitely heightened the tension.

Last week, 49 of the 57 arrestees were sentenced to 50-90 hours of community service and must pay various costs arising from damage to airport fencing and legal prosecution. Not a huge amount, but more than any of these people probably have in a bank account. On the heels of these punitive measures from the state, Ryan Air has filed a £2 m (€2.5m) suit against them for financial losses incurred due to 57 flights being grounded and ‘reputational damages’. These latter are claimed to be €500,000, rather remarkable given that the company is also reporting an 11% increase in passengers for the month of December 2008. If the airline thinks it can subsidize rising jet fuel costs this way, all i can suggest to them is be cautious when talking with shareholders.

Plane Stupid has received both kudos and criticism for their action, and it would have been great to email them some questions for this piece (Have you devised a way to get onto tarmacs without damaging fences? Have you considered interfering with military flights?) However, checking their website for contact info, this is what we now find: ‘The Plane Stupid website is currently down for legal reasons.’ Oh well. Among their detractors, there’s this report on a very misguided blockade of EasyGroup – mistaken for the parent company of EasyJet – and a post on Jawa Report that one of their financial backers is the owner of Lush Cosmetics, which has airport shops all over Europe… or so the writer claims (couldn’t find any airport locations in the countries i checked). While i can agree that shutting down a Stansted runway is hardly in the political punch league of Gandhi’s salt march, trashing these folks for engaging in non-violent direct action to make a very important point doesn’t cut it, either. The way things are going with a proposed expansion at Heathrow, we may see MPs, the Mayor of London, and some EU emissions regulators following their lead. It’s simply impossible for the UK to meet its air pollution reduction requirements if it continues to fill the friendly skies with more and more planes.

Air travel in Europe has risen to new heights in part because train travel is now more expensive than flying, thanks to the plethora of budget airlines that have been popping up over the past 10 years. The one exception to this is Spain, where planners continue to excel in creating the most livable country of the 21^st century. Otherwise, there’s been something of a positive feedback system in motion: as more people fly within the EU, train travel goes up to counter the reduction in ticket sales; higher train prices drive more people onto budget flights…. duh. A NY Times story published last summer cites these figures from the European Low Fares Airline Association: “…the growth in passengers on European low-cost airlines has been phenomenal, almost doubling to 120 million per year in 2007 from about 60 million per year in 2005.” They further point out that the doubling of ticket sales includes workers from the newest and poorer EU members to Western European countries happy (or at least willing) to obtain cheaper labor. Mediterranean, Black Sea and similar “we’re only going there because it’s cheap” vacation sites have benefitted to the extreme from companies like Ryan Air connecting them to northwestern population centers. The feedback system is here also operative in encouraging air travel: the cost and time needed to reach places like Varna, Bulgaria or Almeria, Spain by land are prohibitive for most of the tourists traveling to them for a mere 3 days of escapism, and the destinations are investing more money in promoting themselves as ideal cheapo vacation spots. Forget about ecotourism with these crowds: we’re talking suburbanites frying themselves on ‘hotel guests only’ beach chairs and then feasting on cheap paella or whatever. Nobody seems to really care where they are, it’s all about faux jetset vacationing in which one isn’t supposed to be thinking about climate change, Gaza, or whatever else ails the real world.

Just today, british news agencies have been reporting on a grab bag of celebrities and Greenpeace purchasing 1 acre plots of land located precisely where Heathrow’s expansion is to be sited. A great idea, and one which supports in principle the message from Plane Stupid: do whatever you can to keep greenhouse gas reductions on track. More airports are definitely not the answer. Here’s a wild thought: instead of rewarding people for racking up frequent flier miles, start setting limits on air mileage for non-essential purposes. We all get to go once around the earth, and after than you start paying fines – or simply aren’t allowed on a plane without a specific waiver for family emergency, business, etc. Granted, this is not an idea that RyanAir and its peers are likely embrace, but with all that lawsuit money, at least their owners would still be able to fly off into the sunset.

Gaza: Wipe them all out

Just watched Democracy Now's report on the pro-israel demo in NYC this past weekend, held in front of the israeli consulate there. Let me state for the record that amerisraelis are totally insane. The title of this post is a quote from one of them, and she was not alone in expressing that sentiment. Blow 'em off the map, the world will be a better place. It's so strange to find upper middle class white people being so spiteful. i mean, they have lovely homes, probably more than one, lots of space and amenities, kids in all the best schools, so can't they just be satisfied with that and let the Palestinians have their little plot of territory, too?

On principle, no society should be forcefully displaced. Pure pragmatism in the 21st century forces us to accept that one group of people can't keep pushing other people off their land because now, there's nowhere else to go. The planet is as contracted as it's ever been, relative to human occupation. Viva Palestina! Folks, there is no other viable option. What gives these people the right to be so fucking selfish? i have yet to meet one of them, excluding a single member of my own extended family, who would be able to endure physically as well as psychologically what the vast majority of palestinians have had to endure. These people (said in the same spirit as 'that one') have created a whole society of spoiled children. Palestinians are practical, tenacious and very well-disciplined, by comparison. i'd say roughly 80% of the palestinian men i have personally met have spent time in israeli prisons or detention centers, a significant majority subjected to heinous methods of torture, some when they were teenagers. It's been horrific, for a very long time. Seymour Hersh likes to quote his general friend as saying, "We can't be as rough as the americans are, because we know that eventually we're going to have to live with them." This is total bullshit, Hersh should know better than to so dismally misrepresent the truth. The israelis have treated the palestinians like animals, both officially and in what they would probably describe as a neighbourly way. US passport-holding jews who say things like "WE have intelligence" and so forth, in order to justify civilian slaughter, reflects anything *but* an accurate understanding of what life is like in places like Jabaliya. i want to think they really have no idea of the depth of suffering and inhumanity they are responsible for, but my optimism has been rapidly waning.

Definitely check out this video for an excellent window into the israeli proposanda machine The rationale employed goes as follows: we have a right to protect ourselves, our rights are unlimited, therefore the methods of protection are without bounds. Also notice that every reference to palestinian anything must include 'hamas'. Oooh, they are so clever, aren't they? But a superb effort on Alex Thomspon's part to not let the barbarity of it all off the hook. He probably still hasn't learned that one thing you'll never catch an israeli official saying is 'we're sorry.'

Deconstructing W? Why bother?

Just did a google blogs search for 'W Bush final press conference' and it coughed up 117, 548 hits. i know the majority of these writers are glad to see W leave DC, and i do support blogging as a form of self-therapy for depression or whatever else ails you, but what more is there to say about this guy after 8 dreadful years of "misunderestimating" him? (In case you're wondering about the non-word there, this was the term W used yesterday when queried on his relationship with the press.) i actually did watch the press conference - yes, all of it and definitely a first for me - a somewhat surreal event, it appeared that W was trying to do an imitation of Josh Brolin imitating him as a down to earth, infantilely reflective kind of guy. He said a lot of ridiculous things, which i'm sure most of those 117, 548 bloggers have all deconstructed ad infinitum; listening to his walk down presidential memory lane was like reliving a bad dream that started in Florida and finished up in the bowels of the US Treasury. The only segment in which he seemed truly sure of himself was in talking about security threats to the US and stamping out terrorism, bringing to mind a psychoanalysis i'd read years ago in which W as an inherently pathological personality was gone over with a finetooth comb. What the psychologist had said was that he is most sure of himself when talking about alpha male priorities: war, revenge, carrying the big stick. Is this what W himself had in mind yesterday when he described himself as a Type A personality? One can only speculate, but why bother? The only truly relevant comment i can offer on the occasion of George and Laura's relocation to Houston is this: have a nice trip and see you in court, and if he's not sure what his new business cards should look like, TV3 in Australia has already solved that problem:

Gaza: Multi-tasking the Outrage

There are so many reasons to be irate about Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip, and a whole other set of outrages about the way officials and hawk pundits (aka Israeli apologists) are processing the current situation, that i've been mentally multi-tasked into a state of mesmerization. Where does one start to dissect all this insanity? Yet continued silence is not a viable option; after recently living in Palestine for 2 years, now is hardly an appropriate time to bail on my support for an end of Israeli occupation and establishment of a viable Palestinian state. So i'm just going to pick one or maybe two points to address right now and deal with other aspects of this debacle in later posts. Unfortunately, this is a conflict that keeps on giving...

This evening there's a story in the Jerusalem Post about attacks on jews in various european countries. Oh no! anti-semitism on the rise in Europe, we all know where that leads. Concurrently, i've been coming across random blogs where people are noting threats and attacks on individuals who've been expressing their criticism of Israel, as well as invectives unleashed by zionists (or maybe just arab/muslim haters?) on mainstream media comment boards that are just as hateful as anything spewed out by a neo-nazi. The thing i 've always noticed about zionists and israelis in general, is that they are expert in throwing tantrums that shut down any possibility of rational dialogue. i don't support hate crimes, but the way that israelis deal with criticism is so infuriating that it hardly comes as a surprise that people outraged by the situation in Gaza are choosing to lash out in these ways. Blaming the victim here? To some extent, yes, i am. As long as world jewry continues to support Israel as their haven, their property, their private little playground in which they are free to commit war crimes on a daily basis, they have very little grounds for complaint when people the world over decide to crash this delusional party. Unfortunately and predictably, attacks on jews in Europe only feeds zionist logic, so not only are such hate crimes morally wrong, they are also counter-productive. What i'd like to see are large groups of jews protesting outside israeli embassies covered in anti-zionist grafitti.

On the flipside, the demonization of Hamas is so out of control that it makes anti-jewish anti-semitism look absolutely mild. Personally, i don't support Hamas as any kind of liberation movement, but i do support the right of Palestinians to choose the lesser of two evils when it came time to vote in 2006. The crazy thing about what's happening now is that Israel has controlled this history from the very beginning. They funded the islamic movement at its inception in order to drive not a wrench but an abyss between palestinian political factions, and then worked with the US to so corrupt their supposedly preferred lackeys, Fatah under Abbas, that Hamas' victory in the elections was more or less assured. i know lifelong Fatah supporters who, in spite of having extremely low opinions of Hamas leaders as competent government officials, still voted for them with the hope that giving them a chance to govern (and hopefully tone down the islamic rhetoric as a result) was a better option than acquiescing to the self-destructive rule of Fatah. Now we've got Tzipi, Condi and everyone in between screaming about how they have to keep killing kids until Hamas is destroyed - what the hell are they talking about? They need Hamas - otherwise the whole premise of palestinians as israel-hating fanatics is going to collapse on their cute little New Jersey doppelganger settlements.

i say this because i think most of the world has had enough of israeli bullying and now supports a free palestinian state. That is a change in global consciousness that is not going back into any closet - ever. i was glad to read that israeli diplomats have been expelled from Venezuela and would like to see more countries follow Chavez' lead. Personally, i'm renewing my commitment to boycott israeli goods and services, and to not casually socialize with zionists, (which i've tried to do in an effort to be even-handed). These people need to be isolated and punished in all the ways that nonviolent resistance can come up with. Gary Kamiya offered an analogy to how the US has treated Native Americans, and rightly concludes that although there are differences, if the US tried to conduct a campaign similar to what Israel's been doing, people would not accept it. Certainly if whites in South Africa said the post-apartheid govt's been a failure so let's go back to the way it was before, we know what the global response would be the minute that first bullet was fired into a Soweto child. Outrage, pure and simple, and very creatively multi-tasked.