Helen Thomas’ Frighteningly Awful Comments And Their Fallout

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The fallout is that after 50 years of writing about politics, she’s retiring.

As other commentators have already noted, hers were some pretty sharply worded, incredibly short-sighted opinions and some that, given her longevity, she should have known better than to utter. That is, hindsight is supposedly 20/20, so you’d think that someone who has a working memory of the restless peace between the World Wars, World War II, the Holocaust, the Six Day War and everything since then, probably wouldn’t say (to a rabbi no less) something as idiotically hare-brained as “the Jews should move back to Germany or Poland or whatever.”

But what I want to comment on [via Yglesias] is Matt Welch’s comments:

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance.

Yglesias quotes more and thinks “there’s a lot to that.” I, on the other hand, think there may be something to that. You can choose to stress either the “think” or the “something.”

In either case, this strikes me as a sort of irresponsible, pre-Popperian analysis freed from any notion being able to test it. Or, if Popper is the wrong starting point, then it’s the same kind of sloppy thinking that announced Camille Paglia’s downfall as an important thinker just after publication of Sexual Personae, where she makes an extended observation of popular culture through time that reaches a similar conclusion to Welch’s.

Application of this type of analysis to the culture at large, although just as untestable, at least has the benefit of historicism, being able to observe cultural expression under various kinds of restraint.(Although given Popper’s criticism of historicism, I’m not so sure this is a good thing, but that’s Paglia’s aestheticism for you. And come to think of it, doesn’t Popper argue that historicism leads to fascism, and wouldn’t that explain Paglia’s unhinged right-wing rants that she thinks are true leftism?)

But analyzing this strange outburst from a woman who has spent 50 years not saying anything like it seems about as useful as rooting her opinion in her Electra Complex. It’s a cute heuristic pulled from an undergraduate literature class but not much more than that.

Not that I want to lash out against Welch or Yglesias too strongly. Neither of those two writers are given over to this sort of pop psychological analysis, so it fairly stands out when they feel enough on the subject to post (or in Yglesias’ case, repost) these sorts of remarks.

Both are inventing a frame for Thomas’ remarks that allows them to comment on the Big Lie that is unbiased reporting and the necessary steps needed to preserve that illusion. Far be it from me to strip them of this teachable moment, I guess. Reporters should report in as unbiased way as possible, but the need to force reporters to adopt an unbiased persona has always been ludicrous.

Whether Thomas was suffering from a lifetime of professional restraint is a difficult proposition to accept given her reputation over the last year of often, and perhaps insolently, expressing her opinion. It also seems  unlikely that Thomas was, as Yglesias says, suffering from a lack of freely airing her opinions to an intellectual audience that might question her and thereby help her better form her opinions. Other reporters from Arthur Schlessinger (whom I mention specifically because he was a peer of Thomas’) onward have escaped this professional limitation. No, this just seems to be a judgmental failure on the part of Thomas alone, perhaps because of her age—I know my grandparents and those of my friends, are prone to similar outbursts—perhaps due to something else.

As with most stories of this nature, it’s better for us to, if we must do something, discuss the accuracy of the statements rather than to focus on why she might have said them. Helen Thomas is no more an expert on this subject than anybody else. So while we may be shocked that she said it, her words are just words. She didn’t kill any Jews, past or present, by expressing her opinion. Best to try and keep it all in perspective. If she had said this 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, I may feel differently given the power that the lead White House correspondent might have over public opinion, but Thomas has really only held that post symbolically over the last decade or more and now she’s retired. So who cares?

Is Obama a Secret Muslim? The Role of Reputation in Politics

Filed Under Barack Obama, Domestic Politics, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Israel, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy | 1 Comment

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going through some old flagged blog posts that I’d always hoped to blog on and have now made that a priority. Luckily nutball national security analyst Frank Gaffney has given me a good opportunity to do that and make my comments fairly relevant (double bonus: I get to knock out two starred blog posts to do it!).

Frank Gaffney, a presumably educated individual, still thinks, despite all evidence to the contrary that:

“there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”

As Yglesias notes, the “evidence” that Gaffney is pulling from amounts to nothing more than Obama giving a speech in Cairo and not threatening to bomb all of Islam back to the age of Mohammed.

However the evidence to the contrary, that is, that Obama is Christian, is far greater and requires far less mind reading. You can think what you want of Jeremiah Wright’s political leanings, but there is little doubt that the church–the church that Obama attended for two decades–is a Christian church. There is further a lack of anything like Muslim orthodoxy in any report of Obama. He doesn’t abide Muslim eating requirements, doesn’t pray at the right times every day, doesn’t face toward Mecca, etc etc.

Perhaps most importantly, Obama says he is a Christian. As a matter of fact. Obama invokes Jesus and Christianity in his speeches more than the born-again evangelical George W. Bush.

Now, Tony Perkins, quoted in the above-linked story both says that hearing Obama invoke Jesus is “a comfort” and that there’s “a political motivation” behind his utterances and I don’t think these two feelings are necessarily in opposition. I think that Obama can be a Christian and hope to benefit politically from this fact. Why not? Every president before him has been a Christian and at least attempted to relate to his voters by virtue of this alignment. Even the deist Thomas Jefferson was fond of quoting God in his writings.

But the sheer number of Christian invocations when taken into consideration along with the fact that 11% of the country still think Obama is a Muslim calls into question two things: the durability of reputation and whether or not we should care.

I’ll tackle the second one first. Should we care if Obama is a secret Muslim? I argue we shouldn’t. First of all, there is no provision anywhere that the president of the United States must be a Christian or for that matter be religious at all. So there’s certainly no legal ground from which we can launch an attack against a Muslim president for being Muslim.

Furthermore, as I’ve already said on this blog, regardless of whether a president, in his private life is a Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or “other” he (or she) is certain to violate more than a few of their religions’ tenets. That is to say, they will violate so many in the course of governing the country that they can hardly even be considered religious at all. Not only will they violate these tenets they 1) enter the profession knowing it will call upon them to do so and 2) they will persist in the profession even after they have done so and knowing they will be called on to do it again–which violates any reasonable standard of penance for their sinning. So unless we adopt a Weberian model of the suffering political martyr who condemns his own soul to Hell so that others don’t have to, we have to admit that politicians are never of the faith they profess.

But I think Hans Noel at The Monkey Cage flushes out the real reasons we shouldn’t care if Obama is a secret Muslim or not…or for that matter…why we shouldn’t care if he suddenly came out as a not-to-secret Muslim: namely–that his accountability would still be primarily to American Christians, American Jews and American business and political interests that are primarily run by American Christians and American Jews.

Noel’s argument is simple enough. Regardless of what Obama, or indeed any politician personally believes about anything, if they want to maintain their power they will attempt to cater their policies to the people who can best help them maintain that power. So it doesn’t matter if Obama personally thinks that a cap-and-trade scheme is the best thing for the country. What matters is what he thinks he can get passed that will 1) at best engender more support or 2) at least not cost him too much.

In today’s political climate it is unlikely that Obama is going to push an agenda that is so Muslim-friendly as to cost him his job and that’s true even if he’s a Muslim.

In regard to the first concern above, reputation, I almost provocatively titled this post “How many Muslims must Obama torture before he earns a reputation as a Christian?” as an homage to this intelligent post at Lawyers, Guns and Money [How many pirates do the French have to kill to earn a reputation for toughness?] In this post blogger Robert Farley points out that the idea that the French are  “surrender monkeys” is so ingrained in our collective psyche that we tend to view all of their actions through this lens. If they act with any sort of timidity we interpret this as proof of their acquiescent attitude. If they act with any sort of toughness we treat this not only as anomolous but as a cynical attempt to alter their well-deserved reputation.

But reputation is a strange bird. Obama has a reputation as a Muslim for better or worse. Certain biographical facts provide the grain of truth needed to keep conspiracy theorists in business. His middle name is Hussein. His father was Kenyan. He knows some Indonesian (and may be to some extent conversationally fluent). Politically he’s shown a willingness to confront Israel on their settlement issue and shown some sympathy to the Palestinian cause. And of course, the most recent trespass, he actually gave a speech in Cairo.

Why Obama giving a speech in Cairo is suddenly evidence that he’s Muslim but Bush’s repeated meetings with Hu Jin Tao didn’t implicate Bush as a closet atheist is anybody’s guess.

But what’s true of international politics is often true of domestic politics, a theme I’ve covered before here at Porch Dog. In the same way that those who believe that the French are surrender monkeys are likely to interpret toughness from the French as a purposeful and cynical attempt to trick us, those that believe Obama is a Muslim will continue to believe that his assertions to the contrary are a little “The lady doth protest too much.” The fact that he invokes Jesus more than Bush did is just evidence of his”protesting too much.”

But this leads commentators like Gaffney into desperate waters. They are eventually forced to admit that without evidence one way or the other, what politicians they like (Bush) say they can take at face value and what politicians the don’t like (Obama) say they must question, seeking the truth in the subtext. But why what one politician says can be taken at face value while the other one must be deconstructed is never explained. Eventually commentors like Gaffney will be caught in an embarassing “I looked into his eyes” moment.

I still maintain, like Noel, that the thrust of our understanding of what a politician will do should be what he has done. Our understanding of a politician’s personal life is largely inconsequential and will always be incomplete–even after the completion of the official memoirs where a politician will be hyper-concious of steam cleaning his image for the purpose of posterity.

Israel and the Security Dilemma

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To further yesterday’s discussion on the security dilemma (*groan*) here’s one way to look at the impossiblity of achieving a two-state solution in Israel.

Preemptive defense of a list soon to follow: Because security dilemma problems are cyclical, I want it to be clear that I’m not assigning “first cause” to the first item in the list. The list, can be started anywhere and it would be just as true.

  1. Many Palestinians deny the right of Israel to exist at all, but most want a two state solution–but even those are unhappy with Israel’s lack of following through on promises made during ceasefires and more elaborate truces
  2. Within Palestinian territories there are skilled, armed, active terrorist groups that occassionally launch mortar attacks on Israel or orchestrate terrorist attacks in Israel.  Robert Pape has argued that most terrorist attacks are in direct response to Israel failing to follow through on promises
  3. The Israelis,  quite naturally, perceive these attacks, regardless of their cause, as a threat to their security
  4. The Israelis demand that such groups be arrested and either tried and convicted by Palestinian authorities or else extradited to Isarel for punishment there.
  5. Palestinians do not arrest, try, convict, or extradite terrorists
  6. Israelis launch attacks either to arrest suspected terrorists or just in retaliation

Again, the order of this list implies a linear struggle with Palestinians to blame, but I want to emphasize that I added a second part to both 1. and 2. above–Palestinian discontent with Israel is not purely or even mostly rooted in a denial of Israel’s right to exist. A lot of Palestinian discontent is rooted in a hatred of Israeli policies like checkpoints, discrimination, and a failure to withdraw from illegally occupied lands. And, at least according to Pape, nearly all the Palestinian assaults on Israel can be viewed as terrorist campaigns centered on a specific failure of Israel to follow through on a negotiated promise.

But what I wanted to talk about was #5.

Terrorism, as I ‘ve said before, is a criminal matter, not a military one. Because terrorists often use assault rifles, mortars, and other explosives as tools of the trade it is often confused as some sort of military affair, but this simply isn’t the case. Terrorists do not have military goals neither do they operate using military strategies. Rather, from start to finish the operate as typical street gangs and other types of organized criminal groups. They fund their operations through crimes like robbery, drugs, smuggling, and black market sales. They get around on forged paperwork. They communicate through hacked computers and cell phones. They’ve developed a special thieves’ cant to talk about their plans. At the end of this long, shadowy path, the end result is the murder of innocent people.

In order to successfully fight organized crime a state utilizes its police force. This police force is not just dedicated to arresting the members of the criminal unit, but in successfully infilitrating the criminal network along the commodity chain. It’s not enough to know who the guy is that pushes the firing mechanism on a roadside bomb. Its better to find out who planned the job, who made the bomb, from whom he obtained the materials, by what means he made the money to buy the materials etc. This is intense police work and if you don’t believe that you need to start watching some documentaries on how the FBI ruined the mob, and when you do, pay special attention to what they did to the Philadelphia branch.

In order to run and operate a successful organized crime fighting task force requires a lot of organization, a lot of time, and  a lot resources.

It is probably true that some in various Palestinian governments from Arafat to today have been covert supporters, suppliers, and defenders of these terrorists groups. Not necessarily the top guy, but the Palestinian government is rife with corruption and anyone in the chain of command could be the Joker in the deck and likely escape notice. At any rate, the government, so long as it denies the legitimacy of terrorist attacks has some level of plausible deniability. Supporters of the regime will no doubt lend a higher level belief to their denials than detractors will, and the Israelis will allow for none at all.

What is even more true is that, even if the Palestinans wanted to rid their government of corruption and investigate and shutdown active terrorist groups they don’t have an effecient and established government system ready to make those moves.

In a 2005 essay in National Interest Dennis Ross, the new Ambassastor-at-Large to the Middle East as-yet-unconfirmed envoy to Iran who served in various capacities under both George W. Bush and Clinton, described the policy goals of Mahmoud Abbas shortly after his election earlier that year. What Ross described was essentially a politician who understood that prosperity is built during times of peace. He attempted to work with Fatah and Hamas in order to end the sporadic criminal violence that so frequently resulted in Israeli retaliation.

Given Abbas’ history and his associations, it is easy to second guess his motives. And the Israeli did.

Looking into Palestinian lands, what Israel saw was Hamas and Fatah growing more powerful. Not only were they gaining political legitimacy, they were growing profitable. As long as peace reigned in Palestine, foreign investments in Palestine would grow and these two political factions which both rally their supporters through cries of “death to Israel” would continue to gain supporters. It is not hard to see why Israel would perceive this as a threat.

It wasn’t long before Israel was ramping up oppression at checkpoints, orchestrating illegal raids, and not long after that people would be murdered and the peace would be over.

These are the fact Ross provides, more or less, although he doesnt cage it precisely this way and comes away more hopeful for a two state solution that I would. What I see here is that Israel is dedicated to keeping the Palestinian government weak and divided as a means of protecting its national security. A weak and divided Palestinian government couldn’t stop the terrorists in their midst if they wanted to and so Israel always has an excuse to blame the Palestinians for their actions and orchestrate devastating attacks on Palestinian territories.

More simply, Israel asserts the right to attack Palestine if Palestine is weak and can’t control or arrest terrorists and Israel gets to attack Palestine if Palestine is peaceful which would allow an anti-Israeli government to gain the authority and legitimacy to take on the terrorists. In light of the security dilemma discussion we can see that Israel is just as threatened by terrorists launching mortar attacks as it was by the growing political strength of Hamas and Fatah.

The Nightmare is Over

Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs Desk, Iraq, Israel, Politics, Porchy | 4 Comments

I tweeted the above headline yesterday at 10:04 Tucson time, 12:04 Washington DC time, about three/four minutes after Obama officially became the president of the United States and about 10 seconds before Obama and Roberts would participate in asynchronous oath flubbing. Some disagree with this sentiment. That’s fine, we are all entitled to our opinions. And I have a blog which I pay for with my own hard earned cash where I get to express my opinion, so, as a coda to all the other things I’ve said about Bush since I started this blog nearly two years ago let me say this:

Realizing that the last eight years under President George W. Bush have been a horrible nightmare of near-epic proportions should be as uncontroversial and nonpartisan a statement as can be made. Whether you are a liberal, a conservative, a progressive, a neocon, a socialist, and anarchist, or any other -ist imaginable the guy was a horrible fuckup. A tragedy in every respect. Let’s recap.

  • Classic conservatism calls for smaller government but Bush made the single largest increase to the federal bureaucracy since the creation of the CIA when he created the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Classic conservatism calls for less intrusion into our private lives and yet Bush spied on Americans and in the process violated federal law (and if you think that spying on Americans is OK because there are dirty little terrorists in our midst then fine, but the proper route is to change the law and then spy not just break the law because “why the fuck not–if the president does it it’s not illegal!”)
  • Classic conservatism values private property and privacy in general and yet Bush appointed Supreme Court justices that recently added to the evisceration of the 4th Amendment, the one that guarantees you protection from illegal searches and seizure.
  • Classic conservatism supports a free and unregulated market but one of Bush’s first acts as president was to increase tariff’s on imported steel which exacerbated the economic shortcomings of a wobbly American autoindustry.

I hardly need to rundown the list of things that liberals hate Bush for but let’s start here:

He raised taxes on the middle class, vetoed S-CHIP, eviscerated the Endangered Species Act, fought tooth-and-nail against raising automobile fuel efficiency standards, tried repeatedly to  drill in ANWR, he lowered taxes on the wealthiest Americans, No Child Left Behind (which reminds me I should add that to the list of things Bush did to increase the size of the federal government), he withdrew from the missile defense treaty (which arguably led to the Georgia invasion), he withdrew from the Kyoto protocol, his “axis of evil” nonsense helped strengthen our international competitors, and he’s done nothing for Darfur, Congo, Indonesia, or–for that matter–New Orleans.

For the non- or bi-partisans out there Bush:

  • Presided over the single largest terrorist attack on American soil. For all his talk on how there hasn’t been a terrorist attack since 9/11 he fails to mention that NO OTHER PRESIDENT BEFORE HIM had a 9/11 either–so by his own logic he’s worse than all 42 previous presidents on this one measure alone.
  • Went to war in Iraq under false pretenses (or, if you refuse to believe the obvious–he went to war in Iraq because he’s stupid and refused to listen to the entire intelligence community that he hand-picked to guide him when they told him there were not weapons of mass destruction there). In either case, the war in Iraq has been a horrible distraction from the war in Afghanistan–which reminds me…
  • Both wars have led to thousands of American dead. Even if you don’t care about a few tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani deaths, a few thousand American deaths are pretty important. How do I know? Ask their mothers.
  • He failed to catch Osama bin Laden, which he freaking promised us.
  • He presided over the worst economic downturn since 1929. We keep hearing blame shifting on this one, and it’s true, all of history is contingent on the history that happened before it. But Bush and the conservative ideology he perpetuated, whether done by him, Clinton, his father, or Reagan are to blame here (ok, so maybe that one should go in the liberal column–but really the point here is that, Bush presided over this economic downturn and most certainly did not act to prevent it when many sensible voices were calling for him to).
  • Bush and Cheney and their crew of lackeys continued to support the Unitary Executive Theory of presidential power even though the Supreme Court has already ruled that it is an constitutionally illegal interpretation of the powers of the office–A fact and process that has significantly stripped the American people of its voice (by weakening the power of Congress to oversee and question the president’s actions).
  • He kidnapped American citizens and transported them to illegal detention facilities in foreign countries.
  • He screwed up talks with Korea and Iran so that both restarted their quest for nuclear arms
  • He tortured prisoners of war or detainees in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay
  • He started the military prison in Guantanamo Bay

    There may be some argument about the last couple of these that they are really liberal complaints and not complaints that conservatives share. It may be true that there are some people who claim to be conservatives that also don’t disagree with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture, but I will argue, and have argued, that to be in favor of these human rights atrocities is to transcend conservatism into something completely amoral that the founding fathers of conservatism would have rejected. Political realists like Stephen Walt will tell you that torture 1) extracts false and misleading information, 2) it undermines our moral authority 3) and subjects our own soldiers to torture by the enemy, which doesn’t even get to 4) the psychological stress that those delivering the torture suffer. I argue that not wanting to use up America’s resources in a way that doesn’t further our strategic aims is neither a liberal or a conservative demand, but an apolitical one. More than that, no political persuasion should hold a monopoly on basic human decency. As a liberal I extend to conservatives my faith that they are basically decent human beings that think it’s wrong to torture people. If I’m wrong, so be it. I’d rather be wrong here than give up all hope in half the nation.

    I haven’t really delved into why neocons should hate George Bush so let me get to that one as quickly as I can.

    For years during the Clinton presidency, neocons stated theories about how America should use its unique position in the world to reshape global governance (using its military if it had to, pleasepleaseplease). Enough smart-on-paper jackanapes spewed these shortsighted and vile theories that Bush and Cheney, et al, eventually adopted them.

    So, if you are a neocon you should hate George Bush because he adopted your idiotic theories and proved beyond  shadow of a doubt that you and all your hard “intellectual” work was nothing more than racism and ethnocentrism dressed up in the language of the university. Shorter version: he proved you are a foreign policy charlatan.

    It isn’t that occasionally Bush didn’t sign a law I agreed with, or said something I nodded my head in approval to. But give me a break, on any measure, the guy has weakened our nation materially and militarily. If you don’t see that, then you are either purposefully blinding yourself to the truth or you’re just not paying attention or don’t care enough or some combination of the three.

    Here’s the deal. I love nightmares…like actual ones, not metaphorical ones like the Bush presidency. I think they are exciting and, when it comes to retelling your dreams, a good nightmare is way better than just a random collection of images that no one but you cares about. But just because I think nightmares are fun and make good stories doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a nightmare. And I suppose it’s possible that some people have actually loved their eight years under Bush, but that doesn’t make them not nightmarish years.

    You can assert that Obama won’t do any better. Honestly, you may be right. He may not do any better. It would be virtually impossible to do worse, but I suppose if everything goes awry he might tie Bush for one of the top five or six worst presidents ever. But here’s the thing, even if Obama is a worse president–the nightmare of the Bush presidency is over. If Obama sucks swamp water for the next four to eight years, then we can attribute all those forthcoming ghastly images to the nightmare of Obama. On inauguration day 2012/2016 I will hyperthink (via my GroupThink for iPhone gadget) “the nightmare is over.”

    But for now, I stand by my initial Tweet. The nightmare is over.

    Blah blah pro-Israel blah blah blah

    Filed Under Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Israel, Politics, Porchy | 8 Comments

    Forgive me for perhaps stating the obvious, but why is it so important to be “pro-Israel?” One of Bush’s claims to fame is that he is one of the most “pro-Israel” presidents ever. Obama was accused–and is still being accused–of not being “pro-Israel enough” and in some circles he is considered downright anti-Israel, and that’s a bad thing.

    Talking heads on the Sunday circuit repeatedely level this “anti-Israel” or “not pro-Israel enough” charge against anybody who whispers that maybe…just maybe…indiscriminate bombing of one of the world’s most densly populated regions might be….er…inappapropriate…a little.

    Now, I’m a bleeding heart liberal and I care about a lot people in the world and would like to see them better off. I would most certainly like to see an end to the non-stop violence in and near Israel. That’s for sure. But the part of me that cares about people outside of this country doesn’t much care what nationality those people are. The fact that I would like to see an end to the genocide in Darfur does not make me particularly pro-Darfur…or anti-Sudan. It makes me anti-genocide. And I won’t apologize for that.

    The fact that I would like an end to the civil war in the Congo doesn’t make me anti- or pro-Congo (depending on which side of that struggle you may be yourself). I’m just pro-People Not Getting Murdered.

    Likewise, the fact that I would like to see the Palestinians stop bombing Israel and Israelis stop bombinb Palestinians doesn’t make me anti-Israel or pro-Israel, anti-Arab or pro-Arab.

    There is another part of me that, because I was born here, raised here, have my job and family here, friends here, etc. that is deeply, deeply pro-America. I know it’s annoying to other parts of the world but I’m invested in rooting for the home team. And I know that Israel is our ally, but I know that Israel is not America. They are our ally for a lot of reasons not the least of which is global positioning. It’s really convenient for the United States to have a well-trained military that generally likes us in the Middle East. It’s also nice to have a functioning democracy in the Middle East. It’s nice for our soldiers to lay their heads every now and then. It’s nice to have a trade partner there.

    But because they are Israel, and we are America–that is, because we are differenct nations–we are going to have different domestic and foreign goals.

    For example. We are trying to prove to the Middle East that America is not a bunch of Muslim/Arab haters. Our reputation as Muslim haters has made our jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan much harder. Our reputation as Muslim haters has made us a big target for terrorist groups. Our reputation as Muslim haters makes progress in Iran slower than it has needed to be. Generally speaking, being perceived as hating Muslims has made it very difficult to do a whole lot in a very large and important region of the world. And one of the primary reasons we are seen as Muslim haters is our support of Israel.

    That is not to say we should stop supporting Israel. Please see three paragraphs ago. We should support Israel. But, on the other hand, they could be a little bit more pro-freaking-America rather than us being more pro-Israel.

    What is this pro-Israel nonsense anyway? There are lots of Israelis that don’t believe that Israel should be bombing the Palestinians right now. Can’t I be pro-Israel when I’m pro-Those Sensible Israelis?

    But back to the bigger point. There is no requirement that I be pro-Israeli, nor anybody else. I’m pro-America. And Israel just wenn and made it much harder to get American interests served in the Middle East. And if I have to be anti-Israel to be pro-American, then so be it.

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