Obama's Aunt Zeituni: Symbol of Everything Wrong with the Immigration Debate

In April, 2007, I was in Washington in a meeting with THE GUY who wrote the immigration bill that was never passed. He was our expert in a case of race discrimination brought by some illegal Mexicans who were quite angry and upset that my client was importing LEGAL Thai workers. So they sued the pants off of the grower and my client. I argued then that the lawyers who were representing those Mexicans were essentially perpetuating a system of impoverishment and illegality, all to the benefit of those that would use them, as they are now, as political pawns. And in that regard, I am thinking of the situation at the kosher meat factory in Postville, Iowa. The INS ICE got the word and put the finger on them: they killed two birds with one stone: getting rid of the Lubavitcher criminals and illegal aliens who were being exploited and who, sadly were also deemed illegal . There's no question but that the entire immigration issue has been politicized just as the author of this article asserts. The attempt by the wacky right press to let this out of the bag ONE DAY before the election is such a boorishly transparent attempt to smear Barack Obama that I can't believe anyone would think anything else by taking it all very seriously so as to alter a vote away from him on account of this revelation. This should be the worst news of his Presidency. I'm sorry to have learned also of the death of his grandmother one day before the election. I wish him Gdspeed tonight. He's gonna need it in ways he hasn't thought about before. He knows the shit has only started to happen in this new post-Gilded Gilded Age world. Tomorrow John McCain can thank himself for ducking this assignment. Job well done to both men.

Randy Shiner

Obama's Aunt Zeituni: Symbol of Everything Wrong with the Immigration Debate

By Duke, The Sanctuary. Posted November 3, 2008.

The details of the story couldn't be juicier for the right-wing, red-meat crowd. The timing is no coincidence.

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With three days left until the election, this morning the Associated Press broke a story about Barack Obama's long-lost paternal aunt who apparently has been living in the country without proper immigration authorization.

The details couldn't be juicier for the right-wing, red-meat crowd. She over-stayed a visa. Attempted to get asylum status due to the tumultuous state of her native country but was denied. Lives in public housing and donated a small sum to her nephew's campaign. Presenting a veritable cornucopia of right-wing stereotypes and frames from which to attack Obama, the wingnuts appear to be having a field day.

From the left, the counter arguments have been varied. Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic argues Culture Kitchen and Zachary Roth of TMP Muckracker examine the grubby little hands of Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove all over the smear campaign. At The Sanctuary, Kyle argues that the story will have little effect swaying independents towards McCain, while Liza Sabater of against the nativist framing in how the story's been presented and calls for Americans to stand up against intolerance.

All of these arguments are good ones, but they each only represent a single aspect of the big picture that is the story of Auntie Zeituni.

Obama's Aunt is emblematic of everything wrong with immigration, both systemically and as a political issue.

Without knowing the specifics of her case it's hard to say why in fact her status is what it is, but we do know that:

1. The authorities have know about her status for some time

2. DHS was ordered not to deport until after election

3. The second person to leak the story came out of the Administration

4. The timing of the story was orchestrated by Murdoch/Rove for maximum political effect.

Basically, the authorities have kept her under wraps until they could use her as a pawn for political gain.

And here is where I see her as symbol for the whole immigration debate.

The right wing has used 12 mil people as political pawns from the start of this current debate. If we look at everything they've done from passing HR4437, which they knew would never get through the Senate, to the failed CIR attempts, to the current fascists crackdowns…it's all been nothing more than political theater. played against the backdrop of real human suffering.

And now they wheel out Obama's Aunt.

They could have finished her case and deported her ages ago if that was in fact their intent. But it wasn't. They're intent was to keep her around to use as a pawn to whip up the base, and peel off independents.

And is that really any different from anything else that's been going on for the last few years to the rest of the migrant population?

Of course not.

They've been demonized, harassed and persecuted in an attempt to maintain political power.

All those on the right who have claimed to want to solve this "problem" with enforcement, and those who claim to want to "fix" the system, have in reality showed very little concern for accomplishing that task. They still believe that there's too much political gain from perpetuating the current situation. And Obama's aunt is a prime example of that. She's just another person of color stuck in a failed system, that doesn't work, who can be used at the appropriate time to beat down a political foe.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, obama, zeituni

Duke is a co-founder of the Sanctuary.

Obama Talks to the Jews on JTA - 19 Minutes WELL SPENT

This interview will be 19 minutes well spent:

 

http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/2008/04/09/jtas-ron-kampeas-goes-1-on-1-with-barack-obama/#comment-1840

 

I can only say that it was an Israeli woman, Irene Diamond I believe was her name, who posted a note on the “Jews4Obama2008” website who said very succinctly exactly why every Jew, regardless of affiliation or lack thereof, should, no, MUST vote for Barack Obama. There has to be a new discussion. The status quo will not work. Mind you, this woman was not sure if she should even have been on that website in the first place, as she was not American but who shockingly, shockingly, spoke common sense, something sorely lacking in Jewish/Israel (not to conflate the two) political and religious conversation these days. She said, paraphrasing: “We [the West and moderate Muslim elements] need to tell them [Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran] to get with the program of the 21^st century in terms of economics, infrastructure, government, law, and business as well as, of course, social services. And oh yes, not to treat your women like cattle who have to wear beekeepers’ uniforms. Who better to tell them this “news” than Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Listen well, friends. And read closely, too. If we just used a little common sense, the radicals would not exist or would be significantly less important in the daily lives of too many Israelis who are being killed in pizzarias and on busses. The madness must stop. This unique man has a chance to stop the madness.

 

Best Regards,

 

Randy

 

http://randyscornerdeli.blogspot.com/

 

"I'd only told them the truth. Was that so selfish? Our integrity sells for so little, but it's all that we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free."

 

            --from "V for Vendetta" (written by the Wachowsky Brothers)

 

"As I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world; people who love delis, and people you shouldn’t associate with.”

 

              -- Damon Runyon

 

Ken, anu yecholim! ["Yes, we can!" in Hebrew]

 

 

Commentary on Obama from Mike Huckabee

The following comments were reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 21,
2007 and nary a peep has been heard from ANYONE about them. Why isn't the Obama campaign making some hay out of this? Comprends-pas. Huckabee is being completely honest in this assessment without consideration of party alliances, as if he could ever be anything other than the minister he is.


”Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. I think that it was an important one, and one that he had to deliver. And he couldn’t wait. The sooner he made it, maybe the quicker that this becomes less of the issue. Otherwise, it was the only thing that was the issue in his entire campaign. And I thought he handled it very, very well.

“And he made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything around him that people may say or do. You just can’t, whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama, or anybody else.

“But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story — it’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left that are having to be very uncomfortable with what [Jeremiah] Wright said when they were all over a Jerry Falwell or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago.

“Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word-for-word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say, ‘Well, I probably didn’t mean to say it quite like that……’

“And one other thing I think we’ve got to remember.

“As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement’ — I grew up in a very segregated South.

“And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you — we’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie, you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant, you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.

“And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment, and you have to just say, ‘I probably would, too.’”

Mike Huckabee, March 19, 2007
On "Morning Joe" on MSNBC

Obama blasts Hamas Op-Ed

Obama blasts Hamas Op-Ed
Ron Kampeas
U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) slammed a Hamas official's opinion piece that was initially published in the Los Angeles Times and later reprinted by Obama's pastor in his church's bulletin.

Published: 03/21/2008


WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Sen. Barack Obama says that a pro-Hamas Op-Ed printed in his church's bulletin was "outrageously wrong."

In an issue dated July 22, 2007, in a section titled "Pastor's Page," the Trinity United Church in Chicago reprinted an article by Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzook. The article, which originally appeared as an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, justifies the Palestinian terrorist group's denial of Israel's right to exist.

The church's pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., who retired this year, has stirred controversy for Obama's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination with statements likening Israel to colonialists and blaming attacks on the United States in part on its support for Israel.

In slamming the Hamas piece, Obama noted that he strongly rejects some of his longtime pastor's views.

"I have already condemned my former pastor's views on Israel in the strongest possible terms, and I certainly wasn’t in church when that outrageously wrong Los Angeles Times piece was re-printed in the bulletin," Obama said in a statement e-mailed to JTA late Thursday. "Hamas is a terrorist organization, responsible for the deaths of many innocents, and dedicated to Israel's destruction, as evidenced by their bombarding of Sderot in recent months. I support requiring Hamas to meet the international community's conditions of recognizing Israel, renouncing violence, and abiding by past agreements before they are treated as a legitimate actor."

Obama has consistently condemned Hamas and defended Israel’s military responses to rocket attacks.

The reports about the church bulletin and Obama's response come just days after intensifying focus on Wright's controversial anti-American statements prompted the Democratic candidate to deliver a major speech on race relations in America. In the speech, Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, condemned Wright's most inflammatory comments but said he would not "disown" the man who inspired him to embrace Jesus.

In a short introduction to the reprinted piece, Wright wrote, “Islam has as many manifestations as Christianity and Judaism, but most Americans are only fed a media diet on Islam as it relates to the ‘war on terror’ and the Palestinian muslim problem in the ’state’ of Israel.”

The newsletter was posted by BizzyBlog and reported by WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Web site that has played a key role in advancing the idea that Obama and his advisers are not supportive of Israel.

The WorldNetDaily report ran under the headline “Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto." One line in the Op-Ed directly defended strikes against Israeli targets: “Hamas," Marzook wrote, "has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it -- a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman, issued a news release condemning Wright and calling on Obama to sever his pastor and his church.

The New York lawmaker, who is in the Israeli town of Sderot for the holiday of Purim, urged Obama to visit the town "to see what support for Hamas terror looks like, and he will see why he must sever his ties to Wright and his church."

Hikind, who was in Israel for Purim and could not be reached for comment, has his own ties to a controversial religious figure. Before being elected, he was an adviser to the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a leading advocate for the mass transfer of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs out of Israel. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League and Kach, a group that has been banned in Israel and classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

In addition to his statement on the Hamas article, Obama issued a separate statement timed for the Jewish holiday of Purim – a holiday rarely remarked upon by candidates or congressmen.

Obama's statement spoke of "the story of Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai saving the Jews of ancient Persia from destruction."

"Even as the parties are held, the songs are sung, and the noisemakers are rattled, the history of a people that has had to fight for its survival, remains at the heart of the Purim story," the statement said. "In our day, the celebration is mingled with a determination to ensure that Israel remains safe and strong, that we fight anti-Semitism wherever it occurs, and that the American Jewish community continues to play such an active and vital role in the life of our nation."



This week, the Obama campaign circulated a photograph of President Bill Clinton shaking hands with Wright at a September 1998 event for religious clerics, which was held the same day the Starr report on Monica Lewinsky was made public.

The Obama campaign's move prompted a series of name-calling back-and-forths between it and the Clinton campaign, underscoring how potent the Wright issue has become.

"A picture — oooooooo!" was the mocking response of Howard Wolfson, a top Clinton campaign official, to the New York Times.

Jay Carson, another Clinton spokesman, told Politico that the Obama campaign was "pathetic" to peddle the photo. "Less than 48 hours after calling for a high-minded conversation on race, the Obama campaign is peddling photos of an occasion when President Clinton shook hands with Rev. Wright," he said. "To be clear, President Clinton took tens of thousands of photos during his eight years as president."

The Obama campaign countered, "After their top surrogates pushed this story line and Senator Clinton's campaign outlined this as a central strategy in her plan to overturn the will of Democratic voters, I can see why they wouldn't want a photo out there that shows the kind of hypocrisy we've all come to expect from their campaign."

It's hard to say who is peddling the Wright narrative at any given time, but those pushing the story to JTA, at least, are not part of the Clinton campaign. In any case, there may be a positive Jewish spin: At the White House breakfast for clerics, Clinton drew on a number of writings on repentance – particularly Yom Kippur.

JTA Managing Editor Ami Eden and reporter Ben Harris contributed to this report from New York.

Trying to be Rational About the Irrational

I am not so presumptuous that I can’t say that if I was put in O’s shoes under identical circumstances (including things like my marriage, our place in the community, my wife’s family (which is IT for him in practicality outside his wife and child) and other things like that) that I wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing as Obama. And THIS is what Obama has to ask of the American people during the course of the upcoming primary election in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina.

Obama has to appeal to people’s (hopefully) better sensibilities or else he will win the Democratic primary and get slaughtered in the general out of fear that somehow he adopted this goofy Pastor’s thought processes.

The charges that Obama is following in the footsteps of Pastor Wright is pure and simple guilt by association which any human being could find themselves in. I know I could.

Putting Myself in Obama's Shoes

I came upon a group of fairly prominent Jews who had signed on to a letter posted at www.jews4obama.net. One comment to the letter was this:

1.Nancy Kreiter
Winnetka, Illinois

As a woman, an activist and a Jew, I have had the privilege of knowing and working with Barack Obama over the last decade. He is a “once in a lifetime” leader. His genuine desire to engage, listen and roll up his own sleeves to find solutions accounts for his unique ability to inspire others.

***
I’m beginning to calm down and put myself in Obama’s shoes. I can imagine the finger and handwringing that must’ve gone on when he first heard about his pastor’s comments about a year ago. Obama is a very smart guy. He knew this day would come.. He and his wife were, I am sure, torn about what to do about Pastor Wright’s comments in the context of a presidential campaign.

What Would Moshe Rabbeinu do? As a senator or a human being you don’t just ‘up and leave’ your place of worship after 20 years, do you? You stay and try to change what’s happening intra-organizationally.

Who are we to judge what someone else does in a particular situation if we ourselves have never been IN that situation? To stay in the church at this point is not good politically, obviously, nor does it make for good television (this is not black and white), but in this age of YouTube, Huffington Post and the rest, we (I) have to, repeat have to, slow down in direct correlation with the speed of information that is constantly coming at us. It is easy to react viscerally, which is what I did.

G-d, though furious with the Israelites for making idols whilst Moshe Rabbeinu was on Sinai getting the first edition of the 10 Commandments, gave the Israelites a second chance and didn’t end up killing them all. (talk about mass murder on a huge scale!) after a discussion with Moses in which he, Moses, begged and pleaded for his people's very existence.

This election isn’t about Pastor Jeremiah Wright with whose comments I do not entirely disagree with, except that he neglected in his sermon to mention the firebombing of civilians in Europe by the US and British Air Corps during WWII – Dresden, Hamburg, etc. Certainly Brig. Gen. Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the inventor of nighttime raids on cities in Germany would be a war criminal by today’s standards, no doubt, along with his American counterpart whose name escapes me at the moment as the US was doing what the British were doing, only in the daytime. But we won THAT war. I agree with Pastor Wright that the chickens HAVE come home to roost, but please, don't blame Jews. The fact is that America is hated for, among other things, "soiling" the sacred ground where Mohammed walked and they want us out of there. So just as soon as we figure out how to make electric vehicles that will do 0-60 in 4 seconds and which do not cost $100,000 (there is one company, Tesla Motors, that does sell such a car) and close down the oil companies, we can leave the Arabs in peace. Hopefully. Unless you buy into the strong argument that the Koran teaches world domination. Let us leave that topic alone for now.

This election is about this country. Ms. Kreiter says she worked with him for 10 years. I will listen to someone with that experience with him. We all ought to, lest we further divide the country and give Sybilla (Sybil+Atilla the Hun) or Grampa Munster (John McCain) the presidency. I want to see Obama win, if only to see how it turns out. We cannot always control the actions or words of others and are only in a position to make moral judgments based on actions. And both Obama’s words and deeds are consistent with someone who cares about a Jewish core value: tikkun olam, the repair of the world, and those people like me who were quick to jump on him should calm down long enough to reflect on what they would have done under similar circumstances.

One does not repair the world by stomping off of it in a huff because certain things are not exactly the way we would like them. Pastor Wright is only a human being, prone to make mistakes, as we all are. Nothing on this earth and no-one in it is perfect. If that were the case, the Messiah would already be here. There is more work to be done, and I am sticking with Obama.

Hermeneutics or, rather Words as Choice

(C) 2006 by Randy Shiner "Greenwich Village Requiem for the World"

Well, for we Jews, today marks, the start of Adar Bet, which occurs in the Hebrew calendar once in a blue moon. (bad pun - sorry; also, I should know this...) I am happy to say that this month starts off with a real rib tickler.

The Republican nominee for President, John McCain, is reported to have made the following statement about his endorsement received several weeks ago of one televangelist John Hagee, an oft-quoted bigot who openly despises Catholics. I suggest to my readers (all one of her -- you know who you are) Jew-hate isn't far behind the Catholics and blacks are probably pulling a strong second in the hatred category by this cretin.

"We've had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics,'' McCain said."


Look at the phrasing and timing of this “repudiation” of Hagee by McCain. Notice the word “if,” which should be screaming at you about this character and McCain’s past involvement with him.

As to the timing of this alleged "repudiation", compare the length of time that McCain took to make this momentous decision. Obama’s “rejection/denunciation” of Louis Farrakhan (fine by me, by the way, considering he called Judaism a “gutter religion) took exactly one-nanosecond to denounce, then told that wasn’t good enough by Sybil, who suggested that “denounce” wasn’t good enough and that he should therefore agree to affirmatively “reject” the supposed and unrequested “endorsement” by Farrakhan. That little test took another 3 nanoseconds, the time it took him to determine if “reject” was the satisfactorily term he would use, which he (in the space of that 3 nanosecond period) thought, instintively that somehow “reject” was as good as “denounce” or better.

And this (McCain) is being lauded for his “experience”?! He doesn’t know, instinctively, what IS offensive or racist or words that could even be construed as such, are?! And we are going to trust this guy with the phone call at 3 a.m.? This guy's making decisions that affect the world? Where is the Obama camp on this? Obama should be slamming McCain (and Sybil, to the extent that she basically endorsed John McCain as better than him than he would be) as President last week, left and right with this. How much money did Hagee give to the McCain campaign directly or indirectly? He should not have been with Hagee in the first place. That is instinct. John McCain has lost a lot of credibility with this in my view. Instincts are important, as we have come sadly to learn over the past 7+ years, to know about or observe. McCain reeks of business as usual.

What Happened Last Night - Clinton Nets A Gain of Four Delegates

Maureen Dowd, in today's NYT, observes that it was "shoulder pad feminism" whose tone was "if you don't vote for a woman, you're a traitor to the cause" that played the key role in Hillary Clinton's popular vote victories last night in three of four states which held primaries. As my dear departed mother (zt'l) used to say, "if you throw enough s**t on the wall, some is bound to stick". And indeed, in addition to the kitchen sink, she trotted out the feminists of yore and others who played to the traditional bias against women in America as a basis for rejecting Obama and supporting her. "People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?"

It's a pity that the people of Ohio and Texas could not see past this shameless yet ultimately successful attempt by the Clinton campaign to divide traditional liberals like this. Aren't we past identifying people's ideas by the color of their skin or what equipment is between their legs? I believe, in the end, in the power of ideas and in turn, their power to motivate people. And all you need to do is look at who is best able to articlulate those ideas, propose changes based on them and motivate people to implement them. I am more interested, as I have written in this space, in what is between their ears; nothing more and nothing less.

For all the horn-blowing and drumbeat of "Clinton Comeback" after last night, she gained a net total of FOUR delegates. FOUR. Repeat a third time: FOUR. She still trails in the delegate count by plenty, and as long as like-thinking Americans show up and vote their conscience and not their sex or race, there is only one candidate: Obama.

Meanwhile, we are stuck in a primary that will see both candidates go after each other, giving John "Grampa Munster" McCain all the ammunition he needs for the general election. He can dismiss 65% of his staff right now, and just sit back in his Arizona Barcalounger and watch the fun and games as the Democratic candidates rip each other to shreds.

In THAT battle, I am glad that Obama came of age politically in Chicago. He is going to need every bit of that experience in the coming weeks to fend off the Clinton attack machine and hopefully address those women voters who, in Wisconsin at least, had the shmarts to see past Obama's skin and Clinton's pantsuits and bra to the ideas that they offer the Country to get us back to where we need to be.

This is an awful situation to be in and, in the end, Hillary is doomed to failure, a fact which someone in the Demcractic National Committee needs to tell her before we hand the Republicans another victory. Do they have the cajones to tell her what she NEEDS to hear as opposed to what she WANTS to hear? I doubt it, but at the same time, the Obama campaign rolls on with an almost insurmountable lead in delegates.

What will be interesting, if it comes to this, is when Hillary starts to argue about popular vote being more important than the delegate count, the exact opposite of what she was saying only a month or two ago. You can bet her whining will get tiresome and someone, finally fed up, will tell her to go back to her seat in the Senate, sit down and read a copy of Vogue. She's forgotten how to be a real lady and at the same time command respect and admiration. (see, e.g., Barbara Boxer, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, the late Barbara Jordan, and the list goes on and on) All I see is political maneuvering and hacksterism from someone who will say or do ANYTHING to get herself elected President. At this point, she can only want the election for the thrill of power; her campaign right now is leading her party to ITS doom.

RS

Thoughts on the Future of Israel and the Middle East

Dear Readers:

In my limited interaction with Israelis, I can tell you that the bombings, rockets, and other sorts of terrorist attacks have already, in large measure, already succeeded, according to an article I read yesterday. Though the reasons for it are certainly not stated so (with the exception of the ability to earn more money), it indicated that >40% of all PhDs from Israeli universities are now elsewhere, mainly in the US and Canada, despite the fact that Israel’s seven major universities more students than they can handle. In Los Angeles, 100 miles up the road, there is a huge Israeli population in excess of 40,000, complete with a Hebrew newspaper. When I asked an Israeli friend of mine why he moved to LA, he stated to me quite unequivocally that they didn't want to live in an atmosphere where even those engaged in innocent activities (e.g., parking your car) are subject to the potential of getting killed.

As far as I can see, there are only a few choices for Israel and none of them is without cost in blood and treasure, and none of them is particularly attractive nor guaranteed to work given the religious fervor with which its present day enemies (e.g, Hezb'Allah) is operating under. To my mind, Israel must somehow re-energize itself existentially, away from the notion that it can live in peace with people who live only to hate and die, unlike themselves and us, people who live to love (with some notable exceptions, of course...)

They are not unlike the Japanese under the militarists who encouraged martyrdom for the emperor. I have read quite a lot of personal accounts of battles in the jungles of the South Pacific by US Marines and remember a conversation I had with my hard-drinking ex-Marine Sgt. and great-uncle Jack Diamond. At first, they were scared to death of the "banzai charges". But after awhile, they took the attitude that if they wanted to die so much, then they had an obligation to themselves and their country to assist them in that regard.

Japan was, after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, able to be pacified because of only two things: 1) the possibility that a third (nonexistent) atomic bomb would be dropped on them and 2) the feeling on the part of the Japanese populace that their leaders had been instrumental in the devastation wreaked on them by the US Army Air Corps, which bombed Japan until they ran out of targets.

Islamic radicals continue to cause Israel and its civilians harm. The intentional targeting of civilians is by any measure, a crime. These animals only understand the voices that come out of gun-barrels and from under the wings of F/A 18s and the like and unfortunately are sometimes even tone deaf to those measures. Do you suppose there is a reason why Hamas put their headquarters smack-dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Because they expect retaliation from Israel and want Israel to (albeit inadvertently -- on Israel's part) to cause as much "collateral damage" as possible.

It must get into the minds of the Arab/Muslim general public that their so-called leadership are nothing but cowards and criminals. They have to understand that they are being used as bait by their so-called leaders for their own ends.

My basic faith in the goodness of human nature, naïve as that may be, tells me that the bulk of the so-called "Arab street" has to be made up of people who just want reasonably normal lives where they can get up in the morning and go about their business to improve themselves and their lot, something that their leadership (and the rest of the Arab world) has cynically and purposefully prevented in order to keep the Palestinian refugee crisis alive and "in play" for 60 years as if they were pawns in a game of chess.

Until they are empowered with the gut-level understanding and the ability to actually live their lives free of violence, of at least all of the foregoing, I am afraid that the choices that Israel faces are in part quite similar to those that the US government faced against the Japanese in the 40s: 1) a bunch of little wars (e.g., aid to Britain to protect her empire) vs. periodic incursions into hostile territory to quell particular outrages and criminal acts such as those that have been visited on Sderot and now Ashkelon and 2) a war that devastates whole cities and towns until the people in them (those that are left) wake up and see that their leaders' (and their own, I am sure in many cases) idea that Islam is destined to and must rule the world is, like the belief in the invincibility of the Showa Empire, doomed to failure. Perhaps, like a drug addict, they will have to "bottom out" before they seek treatment. Until then, they will do anything for a "score".

I have not commented on the powerful role that the media play in this complicated and tragic calculus, especially post 1995 or so with the advent and the penetration of the Internet where so much trash is instantly disseminated and believed (I spoke with a Jewish friend of mine in France about the US elections on Thursday, and she believed the canard that Barack Obama was a Muslim) and public focus is guided by a 24-hour news cycle. To the extent that Obama's message is resonating so loudly here in the US, it is because he is trying to empower people simply to do the right thing; to look inside themselves (us) and understand what is right. This is the reason why he could get up in front of Black leadership at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (former home to Martin Luther King Jr.) and tell them that the anti-Semitism in the Black community has got to stop. He reminded them that it was Jews who were by their side in the South in the early 60s. He was, from accounts that I have read, met with icy silence; he did not care. Sometimes people have to hear what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. This is a man running for high office who seemingly has an idea of what personal integrity is, though I am sure that by the time the elections are over, that will come into question in some way.

The media have a different agenda: to sell airtime, a goal which is oft-times in complete contradiction to their so-called "journalistic integrity". The more controversy they can generate, the more space they can sell. They don't, as readers know, only "report" the news; they are opinion-makers. People have an obligation to inform themselves and to act accordingly. To the extent that they do not, the problems that ensue are entirely their own fault. And inasmuch as the media do not have Israel's existence at heart, Israel must do what she must do in order to ensure that their existence is not forever chipped away at by criminals who have commandeered the minds and lives of their followers, who, if they do not soon realize that their leaders are leading them to a place they do not want to go, will receive exactly what my great-Uncle Jack gave to the banzai warriors with his Thompson sub-machine gun on Guadalcanal: a one-way ticket to what they call "paradise". Threats and criminal acts against Israel and the diseases of anti-Semitism and radical Islam which support them should be losing propositions. I am sure that Israeli leadership understands this far better than I.