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From the Wall Street Journal:

Militant Islam Threatens Us All
Hamas rockets have the same terror goal as Hitler's blitz.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123128827234659279.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

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"In the days before volcanoes were invented, lava had to be hand carried down from the mountains and poured on the sleeping villagers.
This took a great deal of time." 

----- Original Message -----
From: [log in to unmask]
Date: Wednesday, January 7, 2009 1:47 pm
Subject: Why Israel is no better than the African wife-beater
To: [log in to unmask]


> ********************************************************
> 
>              RENEW YOUR AAM MEMBERSHIP FOR $25!!!!
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>    MAIL YOUR CHECK TO AAM, P. O. Box 1016, MADISON, WI 53701
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> 
> Why Israel is no better than the African wife-beater
> 
> By CHARLS ONYANGO-OBBOPosted Wednesday, January 7 2009 at 19:08
> 
> Watching the might of the Israeli army pounding hapless Gaza into the  
> 
> Stone Age in retaliation for the radical Hamas group?s rocket attacks  
> 
> on civilians inside Israel, reminded me of the contradictions of life  
> 
> in the village donkey?s years ago.
> 
> When we were little, whenever we visited our grandparents, we were  
> struck by how widespread and public wife-beating in the village was. A 
>  
> ?real man? in Africa was the one who put his woman in her place with a 
>  
> jolly good whacking whenever she ?stepped out of line?.
> 
> Something puzzled us, though. Some of the wives seemed fearless,  
> because sometimes they would publicly provoke and goad their husbands  
> 
> into a temper. The sight of someone ?looking for a beating? was  
> incomprehensible to us.
> 
> When we grew older and wiser in the ways of the world, it all made  
> sense. For while wife-beating was tolerated as a legitimate tool for  
> 
> disciplining an errant spouse, at the same time, there was no man more 
>  
> despised than a wife-beater.
> 
> At the beer pot, a man who was dismissed as a ?weakling who can only  
> 
> beat his poor wife? would be so humiliated, he would have to walk away.
> 
> We understood that, in a bizarre way, in societies where women were  
> powerless, provoking men into beating them was a strategy. They  
> suffered, but the husband lost more by having his standing in society  
> 
> diminish, because he was seen as a bully who preyed on the weak.
> 
> In this way, the women could be ?helpless? victims of domestic abuse,  
> 
> provocateurs, and heroic casualties of war all wrapped in one.
> 
> Which brings us back to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. My own view  
> 
> of Israel is a messy bundle of mixed feelings. When I was much  
> younger, I was pro-Israel. Then I grew older, more knowledgeable, and  
> 
> became an idealist, hoping to make a small contribution to save the  
> world. Then what Israel was doing to the Palestinians became  
> unpalatable.
> 
> The genocide by the Nazis in which more than six million Jews were  
> killed, remains one of the most difficult bouts of hate and  
> murderousness to come to terms with. It therefore hasn?t been easy to  
> 
> be critical of Israel, a State founded partly to give Jews a sanctuary 
>  
> in which they could defend themselves.
> 
> So here we are, after 12 days of air strikes and a ground offensive,  
> 
> Israel has killed more than 600 Palestinians in the Gaza, many of them 
>  
> women, and children blown up while they were in their school building. 
>  
> On the Israel side, Hamas? rockets have killed five people.
> 
> Hamas is just one of many radical Palestinian organisations. That  
> Israel needed to lay siege to Gaza for 18 months and starve its  
> population into submission, and now deploy its vast army to deal with  
> 
> this threat, is actually a failure. It is a war that, in the end,  
> Israel cannot win.
> 
> Many supporters of Israel partly side with it because radical groups  
> 
> in the Middle East are determined to wipe it off the face of the  
> Earth. That would mean a repeat of the Nazi-type genocide against  
> Jews, and that is unacceptable.
> 
> Hamas probably understands that, and its success has been in provoking 
>  
> Israel to act with disproportionate and raging vengefulness. Over the  
> 
> years, Israel?s treatment of Palestinians has sometimes had uncanny  
> parallels with the Nazi?s treatment of Jews.
> 
> The result is that Israel is close to establishing some kind of  
> equivalence of evil, in which its excesses against Palestinians assume 
>  
> the level of abomination of that of the Nazis against Jews.
> 
> Israel?s right to exist is based on a powerful moral imperative that  
> 
> derives, in large part, from the Holocaust. If it loses that through  
> 
> its severity against the Palestinians, it loses the argument about its 
>  
> existence. If that happens, even if it had the strongest army in the  
> 
> world, it would no longer be able to defend something that no longer  
> 
> exists.
> 
> Increasingly, there are many thoughtful Jews to whom Israel?s  
> militarism has become unbearable. Writing in the Christian Science  
> Monitor a few days ago, Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the  
> Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, and the author, 
>  
> of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, said: ?In 
>  
> nearly 25 years of involvement with Gaza and Palestinians, I have not  
> 
> had to confront the horrific image of burned children ? until today?,  
> 
> she wrote.
> 
> ?Why have we been unable to accept the fundamental humanity of  
> Palestinians and include them within our moral boundaries??  
> Ultimately, our goal is to tribalise pain, narrowing the scope of  
> human suffering to ourselves alone.
> 
> ?Our rejection of ?the other? will undo us. Israel?s victories are  
> pyrrhic and reveal the limits of Israeli power and our own limitations 
>  
> as a people: our inability to live a life without barriers? As Jews in 
>  
> a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do we as a  
> people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also humane??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "A candle loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle"
> 
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