This is an outrage.  I suppose the proper thing to do in response is to support Israel in ditching whatever hasn't already been ditched of the "Roadmap to Peace."  And maybe fund the creation of some more West Bank settlements, or expand the wall further into the West Bank.  That will teach Ahmadinejad not to make wild, inflammatory statements, or produce revolting propaganda.    

That will certainly end the bloodshed. No doubt about it. Maybe we could begin by acknowledging that Muslim racism & Israeli racism are two sides of the same coin.

After halting, slow progress toward peace during the Clinton administration. the Middle East has become one more example of George W. Bush's ignorance, arrogance, incuriosity & incompetence stirred together vigorously with ideological certainty, fundamentalist fantasy & delusional thinking.

The only legitimate role for the US in the ME is as an honest broker, a role we have regularly paid lipservice to & routinely undercut with our actions. 

The idea of wiping Israel of the map is utterly repugnant to me - but so is the idea of wiping the Palestinian Territories of the map by "expanding the wall further into the West Bank" or creating "more West Bank settlements."

You are ejected from my game of Three Card Monte.  But there are plenty of rubes out there to take your place.  

Maybe we could begin by acknowledging that Muslim racism & Israeli racism are two sides of the same coin.




If there's one thing that's guaranteed to make my blood boil, it's facile, brain-dead, vapid comments like "Muslim racism and Israeli racism are two sides of the same coin."




Even a casual glance at the nature of Israeli and Muslim societies would reveal how much nonsense this is. And the fact that it's nonsense does not mean that Israel is a nation of saints or that it hasn't done stupid, provocative things or that there isn't any racism in Israel. It's just that in Israel, overt racism, such as that preached by Meir Kahane and his intellectual descendents are at the fringes of society, whereas in the Muslim world they are at the very center of state policy and propaganda. People are shocked at what Ahmadinejad said. But they forget that it is but the latest version of the same message that has been preached by Muslim leaders since Israel's founding. Nasser explicitly said in the 50's and 60's that he wanted a war of extermination. He was lauded as a hero.




Meanwhile, nowhere in Israeli society is there a voice calling for any Muslim country or people to be "wiped off the map". Nowhere in Israeli society are there voices dredging up historical anti-Muslim canards such as what Egyptian TV did with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Nowhere in Israel are there voices spinning wild conspiracy theories about Arabs such as what you see in Arab countries all the time (my personal favorite: Israel caused the Asian tsunami disaster). Recall what Yitzhak Rabin said after the massacre of Arabs by a Jewish fanatic:




"You are not part of the community of Israel," pronounced an infuriated Rabin. "You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism."




Now compare that to the fact that most Palestinians SUPPORT the murder of innocent Jews in suicide bombings.




Sure prejudice exists in Israel the way it does in every Western country. Many Israelis assume Arabs are uneducated, untrustworthy and lazy. Is this a nice thing? No. But it's a far cry from the sort of crude, cartoonish racism about Jews that pervades every Muslim country in the world and that is fanned by Muslim leaders.




It's time to stamp out this stupid, lazy argument that each side is as bad as the other on this issue. It has never been true and is not true now.

Bradthedad, excellent response, you took the words right out of my mouth. I was about to respond to that absurd post about Israeli and muslim racism are equal, until I came across your post and you said it all for me. 

BradtheDad writes:

Meanwhile, nowhere in Israeli society is there a voice calling for any Muslim country or people to be "wiped off the map". Nowhere in Israeli society are there voices dredging up historical anti-Muslim canards such as what Egyptian TV did with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

BradTheDad's rose-tinted spectacles clearly filter out the word Moledet.  Binyamin Elon, the Chairman of the Moledet Party and until recently a member of the Sharon Administration, wrote the following:

The State of Israel must demand the relocation of the refugees as a precondition for peace within any future negotiations. We cannot relinquish these lands, and we cannot live peacefully with the Arab population currently living in them. We also cannot succumb to the current, politically - correct 'solution' - the creation of an Arab terrorist state, within the borders of our own country, bent on our ultimate destruction and willing to sacrifice its women and children towards this end. Our very existence is at stake.

Elon may be more careful in his phrasing than the Iranian President but there is little difference in the idea of performing ethnic cleansing to create a Greater Israel and the idea of wiping the Palestinian Territories off the map.

BradTheDad continues:

It's just that in Israel, overt racism, such as that preached by Meir Kahane and his intellectual descendents are at the fringes of society, whereas in the Muslim world they are at the very center of state policy and propaganda.

Again BradTheDad conveniently ignores the Israeli occupation.  The continued Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people is inherently racist.  It is consequently a convenient fiction for Israelis to pretend that racism is a fringe-belief.

Hey, maybe they're really mad at the Israelis. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the cartoons. Maybe they were mad before the cartoons.

Cartoons don't make people mad. 

The only legitimate role for the US in the ME is as an honest broker (...)

There is no legitimate role for the US in the Middle East. The ancient hatreds there have nothing to do with us. Whatever lunatics take charge, they will still sell us oil. They can't eat it, after all. (We should also further reduce our dependency on Arab oil by building more nuclear plants in the US - as shown in Canada, France, and Japan, they are as safe as any other form of power generation if built and run competently).

It is long past time for America to return to our roots of isolationism. That seems to be a dirty word in modern American politics, largely due to WWII. But I am convinced that that war was a sui generis aberration, not an example of a more general principle. It's worth pointing out that without the racist imperialist Woodrow Wilson's insane intervention into WWI, the Treaty of Versailles would never have happened and there never would have been a Nazi German regime or a WWII in Europe. Since the end of WWII, what has foreign intervention gained us? Aside from turkey shoots like Grenada and Iraq I, it has been a series of unmitigated disaster. From Vietnam to Iraq II, virtually every intervention has made things worse off for both Americans and the countries in which we intervene.

It's time to do what the British did after WWII: re-evaluate our priorities. Choose entitlements over empire. Fuck the dreams of global glory. Let the losers who want to do that, do it on their own time and their own dime. Start building a decent nation for Americans before we start messing around with the rest of the world.

'Meanwhile, nowhere in Israeli society is there a voice calling for any Muslim country or people to be "wiped off the map".'

Totally false. The entire history of Zionism as stated by its founders and supporters in publicly available publications and statements by most of the Israeli leaders both before Israel was founded and subsequently CLEARLY call for the removal of Palestinians from every section of "Greater Israel", and the definition of "Greater Israel" itself has been clearly stated as controlling the main section of the Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates - which covers most of Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and a large portion of Iraq.

Do the Zionists believe this can be done PEACEFULLY? I don't think so.

It must be remembered that Zionism goes back into the nineteenth century, so this cannot be blamed on Palestinian actions in the Twentieth Century.

It should also be remembered that the Jews two thousand years ago were nationalist fanatics who, like everybody else at the time, were busy trying to conquer their neighbors - until the Romans, who were really good at that job, came down and conquered them and eventually drove them entirely out of their own country.

What was then worse was that the Romans used a Roman double agent named Paul to hijack the Jews own prophet-king and start a new religion which then persecuted the prophet's own people for two thousand years - which would be a hilarious joke on mankind were it not for the millions of people murdered by the Roman Church during that time.

Compared to this record, the Muslims late arrival to the fanatical religion building game is almost irrelevant, except that it's tied to the West's domination of the region for economic and political reasons.

Currently, the Israelis - most of whose rulers are not even ethnic Semites, but Eastern Europeans who converted to Judaism centuries ago - are attempting to use the West's need to dominate the region to achieve dreams of domination and wealth by destroying the Arab states and seizing the oil. They are even willing to suck up to fanatical Christians whose only interest in supporting Israel is to create conditions ripe for their mythical "Armageddon" at which they hope most Jews will be killed and their (hijacked) Jewish prophet will return and let them take revenge on the "infidels" - oh, wait, wrong terminology - the "heretics". 

You gotta ask yourselves which of these morons should be taken seriously. I say let the Jews, the Arabs, and the Christians kill each other off while we Transhumans sit back and watch the show with popcorn and cold fruit juice. Then we'll deal with whoever is left standing. 

In the meantime, worrying about one side or the other's pointless propaganda is nothing to the purpose. 

It is long past time for America to return to our roots of isolationism.

It isn't as if the USA was drafted to be the world's sole superpower.  We wanted it, we got it, and we get the obligations that come with it.

I don't know a lot of Israeli history so I checked before I posted here. According to Wikipedia, Ariel Sharon is responsible for at least two massacres of Palestinian civilians. The first was the Qibya massacre in 1953. 60 Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli soldiers.

I love Wikipedia - I think it is great source for non-controversial information - like the list of English prime ministers or the worlds of the Star Wars universe.  It is not going to be a reliable source for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Again, according to Wikipedia, Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 where between 460 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians were killed.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was committed by a Lebanese Arab Christian militia that had a temporary alliance of convenience with Israel during the Lebanese civil war.  Sharon was not responsible for the massacre - in fact he won a libel case against Time for similar claims. 

At most it could be said that Sharon and the Israeli army command should have known of the possibility of retaliatory violence by their Lebanese allies on Palestinians and should have done more to prevent it.  The Israeli public thought so, which is why Sharon's political career was devastated by the fallout from Lebanon.  It took nearly 20 years, the utter failure of Oslo and the Palestinian suicide offensive launched post Camp David to rehabilitate Sharon.

If Ariel Sharon or anyone else butchered my family, I would want to kill them in return. The characters in the cartoon were preventing an evil soldier from killing more innocent people, nothing else. Saving the world from evildoers is a fairly routine theme in action cartoons around the world.

First, I can't imagine you being apologizing for any such Israeli cartoon that dehumanized Arabs in the same manner (if we lived in a parallel universe in which such things happened). Second, this cartoon is being used to whip up hatred among Iranians - none of whom have sufferred anything at the hands of any Israeli.  Far to the contrary, the virulent anti-semitism of the Iranian revolution led to constructive expulsion of one of the world's oldest and largest Jewish communities.   

I have read that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. I assume that Israel would use nuclear weapons if it was attacked by Iran.

There's a dramatic assymetry here.  The overwhelming majority of Israel's population is concentrated in a tiny strip along the coast - Israel's sole metropolis could be vaporized.  The fact that Israel might be able to exercise the "Samson option" and vaporize an Iranian metropolis in retaliation is not exactly consilation from losing 50% of your population and having the majority of your country uninhabitable.

Going back more than twenty years to Comtech Telecommunications, members of the Israel military have benefitted from lucrative but somewhat vague US defense contracts. Companies like Global Ordinance and Mistral depend on the US taxpayer whether the US taxpayer likes it or not.

Now we see the truth behind your pose of "open-minded innocent."  You have an axe to grind on a perceived Israeli link to the evil American military-industrial complex.  No doubt you would still have found the cartoon to have been innocent if you didn't believe in dark conspiracies involving Israeli defense contracts. 

MEMRI is operated by right wing Israelis.

That's a bald assertion to make from some one who does not claim to know much about Israeli history.  Can you name the political affiliations of all MEMRI members?  Are you confident that every single one of them is a supporter of the National Union party, the National Relgious Party or a Likud hardliner?

Furthermore, do you have evidence that MEMRI's translations are inaccurate or that the hate speech that they record in the Arab world is manufactured?  This is throwing up mud rather than dealing with the reality of Arab and Iranian fanaticism. 

The Daily Telegraph is owned by Hollinger and associated with Richard Perle

This is wholly irrelevant, but revealing.  Accepting the reality that fanatical indocrination is taking place in Iran would be a concession to the evil right-wing media and their neocon friends.  Therefore, for the glory of progressive politics, it must be denied.