Re: The Gaza pullout – an Oscar winning performance
The real problem has been discussed here before. MyVoice and I have addressed this many many times. We have posed a media based campaign for the Palestianians. Daily civil disobedience, moral attacks on vacant buildings, self immolation versus suicide belts. The problem is that the image that the Palestinians project is that of terrorists. Every time they walk into a pizza parlor and blow up innocents it gives the Isrealis the right to say, "Do you see how these people are?" It is an easy to understand message. The Palestinians are barbaric and brutal. When the Isrealis show them no mercy, they flash images of some religious dinner blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber. The Isrealis can live on these images for a decade. The Israelis want to build a wall? Would you want neighbors like that? I'd build a wall to if my neighbors spent every waking hour trying to kill me. The Isrealis make the message easy to understand. You guys are just so biased, that you refuse to see how effective their message has been.
Now you guys may argue that everyone should simply "see the truth". The problem is, that the Palestinians have at various times killed Olympic atheletes, hijacked airplanes and cruiseships. Long before many of you were born, the Palestinians made a decision to be seen by the media as brutal terrorists, who break normative rules in pursuit of their goals. They have never reformed that image. They have never chosen a media-centric approach instead of raw brutality. That is why they are losing. The Israelis are beating the snot out of them in the media. The Israelis have mastered a relentless media machine, and the Palestinians think that a few more unaimed mortars into some settlement is just fine, and the world should see the wisdom of this.
The fact that you guys have never come to terms with is that suicide bombings invalidate the Palestinain cause. When you pursue a moral cause in immoral ways, you render the cause irrelevant. Suicide bombing crosses such a moral line with Americans, that they will never be able to fully support the Palestinians until the Palestinains forswear this method. Similarly the suicide bombings and beheadings in Iraq are the best possible advertising for George Bush. The intentional targeting of innocents is a moral bright line that Americans can never understand. We can understand mistakes and accidents, but there is no sympathy ever for the intentional targeting of innocents. We do not understand the rewriting of the definition of innocent either. The sooner the Muslim world understand this absolute in American thinking the sooner we will come to some understandings....