Recent Israeli actions and massacres

[Undertoad]

<i>There comes a time when you must answer this. Is Sharon an honest man or is he guilty of crimes against humanity? That is basically what your dispute with anything I have posted comes down to. An honest man would have stopped believing numbers from the Israelis long ago - just as honest men in VietNam called US government reports in VietNam the 5 o'clock Follies. </i>

This is, I think, your problem. Having determined that Sharon is a dichead, you have decided that the entire government is not to be trusted under any circumstance. It gives you license to entirely dismiss any facts you don't like.

Which leads to the obvious question: exactly what sort of statesman do you think Arafat is that you would believe <i>his</i> information?

Since journalists have not been there, how can you trust any of the information you have?

Here's a WashPost editorial that's really swaying me. What happened the last time Israel agreed to stop a defensive occupation? It was Lebanon, two years ago... and it's where Powell is going tomorrow, to ask whether they might consider not lobbing rockets across the border at random, for no apparent reason.

Stop with the he-said-she-said of today and think of the big picture. Israel is, to the Arab world, a little practice ground where they can focus all their energies; it is, to a lot of folks in that part of the world, a place where they can gather up a lot of hate. It's a place to keep shit afire. The entire Arab world is funding the Palestinian side. And why?

Because they hate the west.

And if they are successful at exporting their approach to the world, Europe and the US would be next.