I'm not alone NZ Bear , James Lileks , and I are on the same page.
The Bear:
But I am past the point of believing that they, as a people at this point in time, have a right to a state. Nor can they be trusted with even the basic freedoms a civilized society should expect and aspire to......It is not time for yet another incursion into the territories, to be followed by a pullout in a few days. It is time for Israel to take full control of the West Bank and Gaza. All of it. And it is time for the complete and total disarming of the Palestinian people. No armed PA security force(s). No militias. No police. No guns, no bombs, no mortars, nothing. Israel should sweep in, and when they do, they should pack for a long stay. For they will have to be there a long, long time.
Mr. Lileks:
Let’s talk oppression. Let’s talk occupation. Let’s talk genocide, as Arafat likes to call any Israeli action. In college I fell in with a group of Ukes, and learned a good deal about the Soviet horrors visited on their nation. Churches: razed. Language: forbidden. Menfolk: off to the camps. Land: collectivized. Population: starved to death by the millions. You’d talk to the old men, the partisans who made it to America after the war, and their hatred of the Soviets was white-hot forty years later. Ukraine at the time was still under Soviet control, remember. And let’s pause a moment to remember all the campus protests over Russia’s illegal, genocidal occupation.Didn’t take long, did it.
We housed a dissident who’d been kicked out of the USSR after spending a few years in a “psychiatric” hospital, where they’d done all sorts of horrible things to him and broken his health for good. Sixty years of occupation, oppression and mass extermination, and not one of these men would have taken the war to girls on a bus bound for a Moscow high school. Not one.
As for me, well, you saw what I had to say below.
Posted by Rich at June 19, 2002 2:39 AM