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how helen thomas should have apologized, so she could supplement her retirement income blogging for John Podesta...,
2010-06-08 23:02:45
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iran...,
2010-06-09 19:42:31
siege mentalities:
I'm really, I think, getting a little sick of all these cutesy arguments that Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians is worse for Israel than it is for the Palestinians. This Economist piece is better, in that is stresses the additional suffering Israel's blockade has created in Gaza, and how Israel's effort - not unusual historically - to strengthen Hamas' control and influence over Palestinian society is just as sickening and perverse as their earlier, original support for Hamas.
"Hamas is defending Israel," chuckles an Israeli foreign ministry official. ... "The siege is a gift," says a Hamas minister. ...
More damagingly for Gaza’s people, the siege has also allowed for much greater control. Manned by militants from its Ezz al-Din al-Qassam brigades hitherto deployed against Israel, Hamas’s internal security applies the brigades’ blinkered codes to harness society. This has created stability but at the price of a reign of fear. When rival Islamists decried Hamas’s rule in Rafah, the militants stormed the mosque and killed its worshippers. When leftists protested that the tax rises hit a people already burdened by siege, they were hauled to jail. The death penalty has been reinstituted. And insensitive to comparisons with Israel, Hamas’s forces have bulldozed the homes of Gazans who had moved onto former settlement land without authorisation. A thriving political culture has been culled to a one-faction state.
It's a ludicrous exaggeration to call Hamas' control of what little there is for the Palestinians to control a "state", but Israel has put the inmates in charge of the asylum. The United States should break the blockade itself and sever Israel's tacit alliance with Hamas.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-06-09 08:40:50 CST |
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