President Jimmy Carter: "How To Fix It": Ending this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas

[jberryhill]

37. you were saying "no rockets" right?

Let's say there is gang violence going on and the police lock down the city. This becomes intolerable, there are a number of police/citizen interactions which go bad, and the mayor says "if we go one day without a senseless shooting, we'll loosen up."

Who is in charge of the situation there? The least stable motherfucker in town.

We've seen the Ariel Sharon production of this same movie before. The Likudniks are a gang of their own.

You know, a couple of years ago the domain name kahane.net became the first Internet domain name to make it to the OFAC SDN list. I don't have to tell you what was there. The domain name dropped for non-renewal and I picked it up for shits and giggles. I turned on "catch all" email for the domain (that is collected inbound email for [e-mail]. After spam filtering that load, what you get are emails from people who didn't update their address book, you get cc'd on a lot of stuff, and you get reminders of accounts former users had at other places. You can use that info to "recover" passwords to those accounts, and get a good feel for the activities of people who had accounts at kahane.net. I got a pretty good feel for where there heads were at, and the whole vibe of this situation makes me think that they're sort of mind poison has broken out like a nutjob Ebola virus.

I mean, look, if we want to disagree about military action of some kind, that's fine. You can say that what is happening is appropriate to the circumstances, okay? But the really creepy thing to me is not even that. The really creepy thing is the outright refusal to even consider any iota of responsibility for both the circumstances and the consequences of this action. I mean none. I mean complete and utter moral blamelessness,

Just as a general proposition, reality is never that stark. Now, when you can fire an artillery shell to take out one person, and you take out ten other people, you are a human - a moral actor in that loop. If you can say, "but it's all that guy's fault" you are actually dehumanizing yourself. You have reduced yourself to a mere cog of a machine, with no more humanity than a machine. What is this doing to the psyches of the young men and women of the IDF? And what does it mean to the next generation of leadership which will rise from among their ranks?

And, again, my horror is not premised on whether someone thinks the scale of this action is necessary or appropriate. It is at the inability to even conceive of a point on the scale that would be "too much", or even see the scale at all.

If the idea is to take out some dude here or there, for example, or a tunnel entrance at some point, then wouldn't you prefer drones to artillery? Is that a trade you'd make?

Here you go
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/domain_of_terror-38371614.html