Tuesday, November 27, 2012

I'M NINE YEARS OLDER THAN THIS GUY...

and I pretty much agree with him.   A reader's email to The Dish about the Middle East:
Fuck ‘em both. I’m 50 years old, and we’ve been doing this dance for as long as I can remember reading newspapers, and it never changes much. Israel might give Sinai back to Egypt, or Gaza and the West Bank might get some form of Palestinian political control. And then. . . the same old shit. Terrorist attacks on Israel, reprisals by Israel, a cease-fire. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Illegal settlements spread, American politicians protest, Israeli politicians waffle a bit or stand their ground, nothing changes. Repeat. PLO or Hamas or Hezbollah, whichever Israeli PM, each accuses the other of being the impediment to “lasting peace.” Repeat. The details shift, but the fundamentals do not change. It just goes on and on.

So most Americans who are not Millennialist Christians or hard-core Zionists really do just tune it out. Speeds up reading the paper every day, as I can just skip the details about the latest iteration of the same old shit. On my most extreme days, I shamefully hope for some kind of nuclear catastrophe, and we’ll deal with the environmental catastrophe entailed by such a thing. But at least we’ll be done with this endless fight, which you recently pointed out is insoluble: religion plus politics plus territory cannot be negotiated.

I know that this sort of feeling is deeply flawed, but I honestly have felt this way since the late 1980s. And I feel it more strongly now, and many people I know express similar emotions. Here We Go Again. Why Bother?

3 comments:

Ken Hoop said...

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NK28Ak04.html


Sorry, Steve. I know you'd like to go back to singling out the mainstream right-wing neocons and pretend Obama & Co. are angels by comparison, but no go.

Greenwald or someone similar dealt with this Sullivan post already and showed how it was hypocrisy because the US is overwhelmingly complicit in creating the one-sided scenario and the fightback therefore.

Fuck em both? Yeah, the GOP AND the Democratic whores for Zionism,
which is to say both party wings of the American Empire, wings which allow, so long as the elite can neutralize the influence, scant dissenters like Kucinich and Paul.

Steve J. said...

Sorry, Steve. I know you'd like to go back to singling out the mainstream right-wing neocons and pretend Obama & Co. are angels by comparison, but no go.

You've got a point: I have let Obama and the Dems slide on foreign policy issues as well as domestic security issues. :-(

Ken Hoop said...

Btw, just as the American Police State Empire funded Osama jihadists initially to get the Sovets out of Afghanistan,(as if it made an ounce of difference to the averatge American's interests if the Soviet continued dominating Afghanistgan) Israel funded Hamas initially as opposition against the then dominant Fatah/PLO.