http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/if-1-5-million-jews-were-locked-up-in-gaza-where-would-commentary-be-on-violent-resistance.html
Steve Walt at Foreign Policy, "Get ready for more stupid Mideast violence." Some great points, beginning with the idea that when leaders kick the can down the road on a difficult problem, it becomes intractable/terrifying. Think, American slavery, 1830-1861... Or, a Palestinian state, promised in 1947, undelivered for 8 decades, amidst ethnic cleansing... Walt:
If memory serves, one of the lessons of Roger Fisher's little book International Conflict for Beginners was "settle conflicts early and often." This isn't always possible, of course, but his basic insight was that unresolved conflicts are dangerous precisely because they provide opportunities that extremists can exploit, they harden perceptions and images on both sides, and most importantly, they can always get worse. ..
However one sees this situation, a key point to keep in mind is that this sort of thing isn't going to stop as long as the occupation and the siege of Gaza persists, and as long as one people has a state of their own and the other does not. If the situation were magically reversed and a million-plus Israelis were being kept in the same condition as the Gazans, I'd be astonished if some of them didn't try to take up arms against whomever was oppressing them. And I'll bet Commentary magazine would think that such actions would be perfectly okay. That thought-experiment doesn't justify the murder of innocents, mind you, but it may help us understand where such deplorable actions come from.
Domestic extremist Philip Weiss allows and encourages these kind antisemitic and hate-filled comments:
August 19, 2011 at 9:37 pmDon’t invoke 9/11, rabbi. You guys have all the claims to victimhood necessary to carry out your racist visions of Eretz Israel without trying to hijack that, too.
August 19, 2011 at 10:24 pm
When you’re not straw-manning the Congo, you’re straw-manning Tibet, and when that gets tired, you straw-man Hamas, and now you’re straw-manning Syria — and if you REALLY CARED about Syria, you’d speak to the decades-long occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Golan Heights.
Israel is the one who is starting a war with Egypt. Unequivocally. You can try to blame everyone and their grandma if you want but Israel is the one staging military attacks on Egypt, not vice versa.
I will say that there is absolutely nothing righteous about you, biorabbi. Too bad, that might have been your sole redeeming quality.
Think: search engine. The algorithms will bring up their names every
An antisemite put this list up recently on the MondoWeiss extremist blog. It’s the definition of an extremist by Laird Wilcox who has been tracking extremist groups, domestic and otherwise, for over 40 years. His collection is now housed at the University of Kansas and is named after him. He created this list after studying several hundred extremist groups, large and small. Here are his 21 characteristics, which he explains in greater detail on his minimal site.time someone searches for domestic terrorists, domestic extremists, or
left-wing extremists or terrorists.
1. Character assassination.
2. Name-calling and labeling.
3. Irresponsible sweeping generalizations.
4. Inadequate proof for assertions.
5. Advocacy of double standards.
6. Tendency to view their opponents and critics as essentially evil.
7. Manichaean worldview.
8. Advocacy of some degree of censorship or repression of their opponents and/or critics.
9. Tend to identify themselves in terms of who their enemies are: whom they hate and who hates them.
10. Tendency toward argument by intimidation.
11. Use of slogans, buzzwords, and thought-stopping cliches.
12. Assumption of moral or other superiority over others.
13. Doomsday thinking.
14. Belief that it’s okay to do bad things in the service of a “good” cause.
15. Emphasis on emotional responses and, correspondingly, less importance attached to reasoning and logical analysis.
16. Hypersensitivity and vigilance.
17. Use of supernatural rationale for beliefs and actions.
18. Problems tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty.
19. Inclination toward “groupthink.”
20. Tendency to personalize hostility.
21. Extremists often feel that the system is no good unless they win.