http://www.kcrw.org/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?tmplt_type=program&show_code=tp

“February 1st, 2006 at 3:20 am”

Nikos, do you ever sleep?

“And oh, btw, ALYB, I welcome and value your potential responses to any of my posts, despite the (arguably) understandable unwillingness of several others to continue their correspondences with you.”

btw: if you are going to be “everyone’s” friend no matter how crazy and offensive their behavior don’t expect me to answer your posts anymore.

I, for one, find you not only ‘entertaining’ but stimulating — even if occasionally nuts and offensive.

(As I know you do me! And thanks for it, too.)

Hamas, it seems, has, just the other day, filled the vaccuum — to the benefit, I suspect, of no one but the higher echelons of their leadership.

Those who in desperation voted for them will not likely benefit.

Nor the Mossad who, it seems, originally channeled money to them to counter-balance the PLO (see this thread’s curious first post), nor the many peace-seeking Israelis, nor the peace-be-damned Zionist settlers who crave a ’160′ of their own in the West Bank and Gaza.

Nope. Just the Hamas leaders.

And their string-pullers in Tehran and Saudi.

Crap.

Why do the hawks always seem to find a way to slay all those beautiful doves?

As for apartheid, I placed the prefix ‘quasi-’ quite deliberately, but failed to include a note that I’d do the same for the good ol’ US of A, and not merely for ‘minority’ issues. We discriminate more against our majority — women — than we do most everyone else. No, none of this includes awful junk like segregated drinking fountains (but it does cost a whole lot more to build segregated rest rooms!)

But yes, you’re right that the issue in the occupied Palestinian territories is just that: occupation. I worry though that after so many years, simple disengagement is potentially just as damaging as continued occupation. It will leave a vaccuum to be filled by the Islamists of Hamas, and perhaps worse.

I wonder if instead Israel couldn’t make friends out of enemies by helping rebuild the territories, channeling international money to Palestinian contractors, as they’ve done for construction of the ‘fence’.

I’d be happy to see your opinion of this notion.

Yes, Nikos, your comparison was unfortunate, but so is your comparison to the Apartheid State of South Africa.

A recent poll showed that over forty percent of Arab citizens of Israel said they were proud to be considered Israeli.

But to the point, there are Arab members of the Israeli parliament. There are also Arab judges on every level of the judiciary including the Supreme Court. Arabs are represented in all levels of Israeli society except the armed forces. This is because the country didn’t want to force its Arab citizens to fight against other Arabs. (Members of the Druze community do serve in the army as do, if I am not mistaken, Bedouins.

Now, while there is still, unfortunately discrimination in Israel, which is recognized by the government, the level and type of discrimination in no way rises to the level of an Apartheid system.

As far as relations to the Palestinian Arabs are concerned there too the term Apartheid doesn’t apply since both communities see themselves as belonging to distinct societies. The problem isn’t apartheid but “occupation.�

In disengaging itself from the Palestinians the Israelis have decided to stop acting as occupiers. This will take some time but in the long run a two state solution is the right formula for achieving peaceful coexistence in the Mid East. Once the two states are set up and in existence then the two economies I am sure will begin to merge. Of course, the next step will depend on Palestine existing as a secular state.

As far as Greece is concerned, Nikos, don’t underestimate the Islamicists determination to get back all the territory it once conquered and then some. I agree with your sentiment of “Me? I’d honestly rather die than Submit.�

1. sidewalker: Right.

Guilty as implicated. Thanks for the Sobran link. It got me to thinking that in centuries past (and unfortunately in the present in many cultures and subcultures), icons of ‘evil’ weren’t secularized but demonized and singular: ‘Satan’. So it seems that ‘Hitler’ has, to us secularists, become the iconic name of anything evil—and I must confess my unhappiness that I fell into that tawdry and all-too-common trap. It’s a result of lazy and sloppy thinking—which I’d sworn off for New Year’s. Ha! But I’m grateful you so gently pointed it out. It didn’t help any that when I wrote my sequence of idiocies I was intoxicated by the endorphic-aftermath of a great six-mile run through the local forest, plus about three subsequent ounces of Friday-night vodka. Or four. Or more. Had the hangover the next day to prove it, too.

So, once again to the many I must have offended: I’m sorry! I was clueless and hopelessly benighted.

2. ALYB: yeah, I misread your post. It was late and my eyes were swimming—but that night it wasn’t from vodka, but from simple weariness. Really. I was sober.

Quit laughing!

3. digitalcommuter: I’d like to point out that Greece, even under the Ottomans, was never Islamic, and so probably doesn’t fall into the same category as Seville in ‘Al-Andalus’. But such a semi-jest would in truth be willfully ignorant and blindly foolish, because, according to their prophet, the House of Islam must struggle with the House of War (everybody not in Submission to Allah) until they have been brought, kicking and screaming, into the House of Islam. Ugh.

Me? I’d honestly rather die than Submit.

I’m rather fond of my secularism. And of my freedom of speech. And of my freedom to dress how I like, to dance, to listen to music, to drink alcohol (maybe not in excess, however!), and to draw cartoons attacking cultural and religious sacred cows, if I so choose.

And I prefer that the women with whom I associate to have the freedom to choose their own morality instead of having the so-called ‘morality’ of misogynist men from millennia past forced on them at knifepoint.

By the way, I wanted but failed to slip into my Friday-night drunken-while-typing idiocies that one of my family members calls me ‘the Jew-lover’. This, sadly, tells you more about him than it does about me, however. (Luckily, he’s only a distant relation.) My point in bothering to launder in public such soiled family rags is only to suggest that one needn’t have had a Jewish mother to care about the prospects and fate of the Jewish state. Israel has plenty to fear from Islamists who murder innocents in the name of their god. One might therefore hope not that Israel’s leaders cower in readiness to accede to whatever demands the killers make, but that they instead actively and boldly erase the quasi-apartheid conditions that give the Islamists the ammunition to seem a ‘legitimate option’ to the impressionable youngsters they brainwash into suicide-murderers.

Unfortunately, my stupid ‘nazi’ comparison wholly occluded this point. I’m making this admission and statement of regret particularly in light of the past few posts to this thread. As one of my sage co-workers liked to point out: ‘You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’

And your arguments can persuade many more readers if they’re offered with respect rather than with scorn.

Sorry, all. (It’s time for another New Year’s resolution, methinks.)