Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow! Tomorrow! (Sung with an annoying squeaky little girl's voice.)

The War Against Some Terrorists

WAR AGAINST SOME TERRORISTS

Just as the War Against Drugs would make some kind of sense if they honestly called it a War Against Some Drugs, I regard Dubya's current Kampf as a War Against Some Terrorists. I may remain wed to that horrid heresy until he bombs CIA headquarters in Langtry.

thanks to MetaFilter

Shrub cuts off funds to Hamas. That's fine. What about the Saudi's? They fund bin Laden and most of the terrorists at the WTC were Saudi. Any thought by Shrub that the Saudi's may have been just a teensy bit responsible for what is going on? And, of course, there is that fine terrorist school in Georgia where all the finest South American governments send their people. I think The War Against Some Terrorists fits just fine.

Israel/Palestine

I've been focusing on this the past couple of days. Things are not looking to good for everyone involved.

Sharon chose the Hamas

It's very likely that the young Palestinians who decided to kill as many people as possible by blowing themselves up in the middle of a large group of young Israelis and bus passengers, really believed that heaven was waiting for them. But they, like the other suicide bombers, didn't only see heaven waiting. They saw the hundreds of dead - including children, women, and the elderly - and the thousands of wounded Palestinians from the past year.

Despite the prevailing view in Israel, most of those casualties were not the result of exchanges of fire between two equally armed forces but rather a direct result of a massive, armed Israeli military presence in the midst of Palestinian civilian society.

When they strapped on the bombs, they may have also considered the broad popular support for their actions and its results. Most Palestinians want revenge. They regard the suicide operations as a just response to the suffering the Israeli occupation imposes, and not as the reason for that suffering and occupation. Many think that striking fear into the hearts of the Israeli public is an appropriate patriotic response to the fear with which the entire Palestinian public has lived for the past year: from helicopters, planes, tanks and jeeps positioned at the entrance to villages and towns and from which soldiers also open fire on people trying to get to schools or to their olive groves.
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Further attacks provide Sharon with reasons for his 'war on terror'

Another suicide bombing – the fourth in four days, but one that this time failed – allowed Israel's tireless publicists to complete their transformation of Yasser Arafat into Osama bin Laden Mark Two.

As they paraded in front of the cameras to protest against what could easily have been another atrocity against civilians in Jerusalem, there was a shift in the story-line devised by Ariel Sharon's spokesmen. Mr Arafat, bottled up in his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, was not only responsible for failing to stop suicide bombers infiltrating Israel. He was sending them.
(...)

"The doomsday prophets were right," wrote Tallie Lipkin-Shahak, a prominent Israeli commentator with extensive contacts within the military, "Ariel Sharon is taking Israel to the place with which he is most familiar and enamoured – war."

She stated that Mr Sharon was implementing a long-held combat plan, codenamed Large Pines. "For those who looked closely, it was clear that the Prime Minister, acting under the auspices of a broad national consensus and a yearning for unity, would thwart every chance of reaching an agreement and would capitalise on every opportunity provided by the acts of violence perpetrated by evil-doers in the Palestinian Authority and rejectionist organisations, to achieve his goal."
(...)

The evidence cannot easily be dismissed. Although Mr Sharon claimed to have embraced the US-led Mitchell peace plan, he determinedly blocked it, insisting on seven days of total calm – a demand that was never likely to be fulfilled in any circumstances, and certainly not while Palestinian towns and villages were blockaded by Israeli troops. Shortly before the arrival last week of the US mediator Anthony Zinni, he personally ordered the assassination of Hamas's West Bank military leader. Hamas replied with a weekend of carnage.
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A New Mideast Battle: Arafat vs. Hamas

After 14 months of conflict here, the radical group Hamas has gathered such strength that it has as much claim as Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction to represent the Palestinian mainstream. Maybe more.
(...)

Hamas's promotion of Islam and its schools and health clinics have all contributed to its rising strength. But the greatest source of its popularity is this: Its suicide bombers kill Israelis.

Palestinians argue that the Israeli military kills civilians. Israelis counter that, unlike suicide bombers, they do not kill civilians on purpose. Most Palestinians do not value that distinction.

It is hard for those who have not experienced it to understand the rage felt even by elite Palestinians over their treatment by Israeli soldiers — who are acting, the Israelis say, out of fear for their own citizens' security.

"It's not the primitive colonial model, where you use large-scale killing of the population," said Saleh Abdel Jawad, a professor of political science at Bir Zeit. "It's not this at all. It's a system that suffocates you slowly, slowly. It paralyzes your life, daily. And the people arrive to the point of explosion, and they cannot explode. And then one of the suicide bombers explodes instead of them."

He offered himself as an example, describing the humiliation and anger he felt after being held at a checkpoint in the baking sun for an hour and a half for no reason that he could see: "I remember myself, despite the fact that for 20 years already I don't believe in violence — hate violence. In my daydream there was this feeling that I want to get down from the car and grab the soldier and kill him — the feeling of impotency in front of this pressure."
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Sharon's War Cannot Be Won

Once again the world has had to confront the horror of innocent men, women and children killed by suicide bombers in the heart of Jerusalem and in Haifa. No decent person can refrain from condemning such attacks in the strongest terms. Such deeds harm not only their innocent victims, which in this case probably included Palestinian citizens of Israel, but also the just cause of Palestine.

As a Palestinian I am often challenged by the press on my views about such horrific bombings. I emphatically repeat my condemnation and state that I oppose the targeting and killing of innocent civilians regardless of whether they are Israelis or Palestinians.

Yet I wonder why no one asked how I felt when five Palestinian schoolboys were killed by a bomb planted by the Israeli occupation forces in a refugee camp in Gaza less than two weeks ago — or why Israelis and pro-Israel spokesmen, who are called for comment by the same radio and television stations that call me, are rarely asked to condemn the violence that is committed in their name.

I watched in sadness the latest American envoy to the Middle East, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, laying a wreath in Jerusalem at the site of the bombings. But where was the American wreath for the five boys killed in Gaza? Why are the targeting and killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including more than 150 children, and the suffocation by siege of three million Palestinians so often considered mere background noise to Israel's drama?
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