UN HUMANITARIAN CHIEF CALLS THE LACK OF ACCESS TO SOUTHERN LEBANON "A DISGRACE."
[quote from USA TODAY (WORLD) begins]
The top U.N. humanitarian official criticized Israel and Hezbollah on Thursday for hindering aid agencies' access to trapped civilians in southern Lebanon, saying it was a "disgrace" they had failed to allow convoys to get through.
The plans the UN tried to work out with Israel and Hezbollah have not worked out. People are dying because relief workers can't get to them. Egeland is blaming "all groups" for the failure.
[quote from USA TODAY article begins]
"The Hezbollah and the Israelis could give us access in a heartbeat," Egeland said at the U.N.'s European headquarters in Geneva. "Then we could help 120,000 people in southern Lebanon. I don't think that any military advantage has been gained in these last days or will be gained in the next few hours."
[quote from USA TODAY ends]
The bitter taste is somewhat mitigated by this: "The international Red Cross said it has received a personal commitment from Israeli Prime Minister Eahud Olmert that "everything possible will be done to facilitate access for our teams on the ground."
And in this, hinting that a diplomatic solution acceptable to Israel may be in the works:
Israel Delays Push into Northern Lebanon.
Even a grain or two of sugar helps the medicine go down at this point.
From The Huffington Post (David Mamet), BIGOTRY PINS BLAME ON JEWS.
This note makes many of the same difficult-to-refute points about Israel that my own Jewish friends keep presenting to me, then pisses me off completely by saying what most of them have too much sense to believe or assert.
[quote from blog begins]
That the Western press characterizes the Israeli actions consistently as immoral is anti-Semitism. What state does not have the right to defend itself - it is the central tenant of statehood.
The Jews are not the victims of bad p.r. They are the victims of anti-Semitism.
[quote from blog ends]
In the same blog, he says that Israel wants peace. I believe this, certainly, but it is plain to any objective observer that you do not achieve peace by waging war, unless by "peace" you mean "the silence born of fear." And that's not going to happen here either, because a sure way to create hatred for generations to come and terror for your children is to go for the short-term solution.
Mamet can pin that label on people critical of Israel, but he can't make it stick. As he perfectly well knows, the issue is a hell of a lot more complicated than "Israel wants peace; it's the other side who are making all the trouble."
The plea of self-defense is only credible when there is or has been an attack---not in the past, but IN PROCESS. It's a hard truth for a lot of people to swallow, but you can't both act preemptively to kill or maim your enemies and retain the moral high ground. And if in the course of a preemptive search and destroy mission you kill the innocent along with the guilty, you are now in precisely the same moral position as those we all deplore.
So anyway, nice one, David Mamet! Accusing well-meaning pro-Jewish people of anti-semitism because they don't like this latest development is a very good way to win support for the parts of your argument that are valid and that do make sense. Except not so much, judging by some of the comments (some are quite good and supplied a grain or two of sugar to this nasty dose).
I am so very sick of people using emotional arguments to score points. Judging by responses across the country to yesterday's news from England, so are a LOT of Americans.
SPEAKING OF BIGOTRY
A DAMAGED MAN'S SHOWDOWN WITH THE DEVIL
Well, it will make for some compelling footage in the biopic they'll doubtless make about him in the not so very distant future. It's not as if he stopped at making anti-semitic remarks.
[quote from article at Times Online]
In more affable vein he greeted a female officer with the line: “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?” Locked up for the night in the Lost Hill sheriff’s station, he reverted to his character Martin Riggs, the emotionally unstable Vietnam veteran escaping his tormentors in Lethal Weapon. Gibson swung like a monkey from the bars of his cell and allegedly threatened to urinate on the floor.
[quote from article at Times Online ends]
Hee. Okay, I do still feel sort of bad for him--it's always upsetting to watch someone implode--- but setting aside his vile anti-Jewish tirade, could he have made more of an ass of himself? Jesus must have been so proud.
Man, the guy is his own bad karma.
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