Saturday, October 13, 2007
Some years ago, as a BU undergraduate, I was taught a very useful skill by my roommate Paul -- the act of sticking two fingers down your throat to induce the expulsion of the stomach's contents through the esophagus as a solution to relieving the ill effects of a night of overindulgence in drink. This is also useful in the relief (usually only temporary) of other stomach difficulties, though the act itself is unpleasant.
I can happily report I no longer need to stick two fingers down my throat to induce vomiting any longer. All I need to do is bookmark this article on an Iranian web site written by Marxist Chris Hedges, nee of The New York Times, and read it whenever the stomach isn't feeling quite up to snuff: Israel's toy soldiers
If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return.
But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.
The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in Israel in 1981. It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year...
I'll spare you the balance, though you can read it yourself. Hedges seeks to equate Arab kiddies attending those ubiquitous terror summer camps run by Hamas and Fatah with Jewish kids getting some discipline and self-esteem in a semi-military environment.
...How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and simulate military maneuvers? And what about the summer schools in Gaza organized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in the basics of military life? These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were widely denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching their children to hate and kill...
It's moral equivalence at its most brain-numbing. Hedges proceeds to reach for a single example of a militant terrorist Jew and finds one who committed his crime a year before the program he's attacking was even started.
But you know, when the depth of your analytical waters run no deeper than, "Guns'r bad...m'kay?" it all starts to look about the same. Maybe he's just seen Taps one too many times.
Christopher Hitches mopped the floor with Christopher Hedges as documented here...
http://www.zombietime.com/hitchens-hedges_debate/
Hedges came off like a sheepish undergraduate taken to task by Hedges.
JOACHIM MARTILLO! More FRIO CERVESA PRONTO!!! And WASH MY CAR, BY HAND.
I knew a Chris Hedges, a horse thief in Mississippi. Couldn't be the same fella, could it?