Friday, February 12, 2010
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Richard Cravatts: 'Speech for me, not for thee' - 'Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barrage with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view...'
Now we're hearing that attacks on Israel, for example by certain famous bloggers who are not however antisemitic but only critics of right wing Jews and AIPAC and wild eyed fundamentalist settlers who pulverize poor residents of Gaza in order to harm Obama's Peace Plans, are due to America becoming less supportive of Israel.
This is also due to the fact that Israel is becoming "less moral."
Well. I have this to say about that:
If indeed America is becoming less supportive of Israel and therefore making nasty comments about Israel and The Jewish Conspiracy - whoops I mean The Israel Lobby - it's due to the fact that Israelis can't even get a word in edgewise and also this is true on so-called progressive blogs but also on some far right wing blogs and among "realists" who think Israel isn't cost-effective and whose existence is contrary to "American Interests."
Humbug.
Oh did I mention all the revisionist history in which the awful Jews are really the Nazis and anti-semitism means "Anti-Arabism" and Israel is just a consolation prize for 6 million dead Jews?
I'm starting to get mad. If people will not even listen to different points of view we are doomed and that doesn't just extend to the Arab/Israeli conflict but to other issues as well.
We've got to be willing to listen and learn. That's the only thing that got people out of the caves in the first place.
PS: define "moral." How moral would any country be which is attacked constantly and told it shouldn't exist?
PPS: people were attacking Jews - and Israel - back when we were supposedly moral.
So give me a break.
This has been happening for 40 years.