Casual Prejudice at Vanity Fair:
Here's James Wolcott's vain attempt at starting a post highly critical of Israel with some humor: "In angry retaliation for the house arrest of Bernie Madoff, Israel has launched a hellacious air assault against Hamas in Gaza ..."
Get it? Madoff's a Jew! Israel is a Jewish country! Israel is retaliating for the arrest of Madoff! Ha, ha!
One would have thought that this sort of "humor" died out at a country club in Greenwich around 1958, but I guess not.
--balls deep
Here is a joke to balance things out:
How many Palestinians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None! The lowlifes stole them all. Ha Ha.
Seems like a different mindset than Greenwich.
No, it isn't. That a small number of innocents who have been killed in Gaza (the great majority of casualties are acknowledged even by Hamas to be combatants) is indeed regrettable, but it is entirely the fault of Hamas, which created the need for the current action by engaging in daily war crimes and put those women and children in danger by locating military facilities in civilian areas.
I didn't find the bulk of the post THAT vicious though. Most of it was just quoting The Independent op ed piece.
BTW, within a couple of days we will see whether this involves sending tanks and ground pounders into Gaza. If that is the case, I think things will become disproportionate by any reasonable sense FAST. I reserve the right to make a judgement before then, however.
THAT would be terrible.
Well, maybe not. She's like petting sandpaper and that might be what he's after.
Of course, that is, as long as no cartoons or jokes are told about Islam. That's a serious matter. God help Vanity Fair if they ever were to joke about Mohammad and his proclivity for the sexual conquest of sophisticated women of ages less than ten, for example. There's nothing funny about joking with Islam (you do know, they'll cut your head off).
Now, back to keeping the Jewish response proportional...
I live in San Diego. If Mexico, or terrorists allied with the Mexican government, and acting with their tacit approval, lobbed rockets in our neighborhoods, would you honestly expect the U.S. to respond prick for prick? And if so, what do you think the fate of that administration would be come the next election?
I think there would be a big difference if the Jylands-Posten cartoons had come out of the US: we don't have hate speech laws so there would not have been a sense that the law was applied in a discriminatory manner.
The piece is a good reason why I don't pay attention to a lot of magazines though. I have better things to do with my time than read tasteless and pointless humor of that sort.
In the 1700s, shunning was a terribly effective technique for providing moral guardrails in early American society. Open condemnation is equally valuable today when done consistently and objectively, yet our news media has chosen to be silent on the most fundamental of issues. While it's difficult to advocate criminal prosecution for errors of omission and editorial selection that avoids critical dialog of certain communities, I think we all can fully blame our newsmedia for every harm that Islam and other "protected class" fundamentalists commit. The crimes the NYTimes, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, the Washington Post and others are guilty of are no different than that of those who ignored or denied the Holocaust, the killing fields in Kampuchea and other crimes against humanity. I'm determined as many others are to ensure history remembers people like Pinch as enablers of these crimes.
Please note that I have not YET said that I think that the Israeli response is disproportionate in this case. I have criticized past cases which I argue have in some cases been tantamount to war crimes.
As it stands right now, the vast majority of the casualties by Hamas's own admission have been Hamas combatants. This is remarkable, but I think that will change as soon as the air war has concluded and the ground war begins in earnest. Israel will be facing the situations we face in Iraq but without any effort at nation building and no sense of legitimacy from the Palestinian people. And they will be fighting in a very dense urban environment. Let's not kid ourselves, that will be a nightmare, and it is not yet clear whether Israel wants to commit to a ground war that Hamas obviously badly wants.
This is more than prick-for-prick right now, but it is still within reasonable operational proportions because the civilian casualties have been remarkably contained. A full-scale ground war will change all that, however.
Nice strawman. Try answering the actual question without all of your strange disclaimers that have nada to do with it.
Would you be OK with Mexico arbitrarily sending missiles into San Deigo?
YES?
or
NO?
Not hard.
If, as here, one noncombatant was killed per 4 or so combatants, it would still be hard to argue about.
If we turned around and decided to do to Mexico City what Sharon did to the Jenin Refugee Camps, I would be protesting loudly.
Would you support the US placing their strategic weapons in civilian residences?
Figures.
If we what? Made ourselves victims of biased media reporting that claimed a nonexistent massacre?
No. But if you started bombing civilian residences because people had handguns legal assault rifles, and the like, I would have a problem with that.
Nobody I have seen is arguing that there were massive stockpiles of weapons in these homes. If there were, I would expect to see far higher casualties...
Once again though I think Israel is CURRENTLY within their rights, though that could change....
no jewish settlement ever took any palestinian land. they were build on disputed land, subject to future negotiations.
It is a little more complicated than that. They settled on land the Israeli state claimed after the 67 war, and where nobody was actively using the land. However, if they want to claim the entire territory, they owe the residents citizenship. If not they shouldn't be doing that sort of thing.
You take that back!
In the meantime, Hamas is the elected government of Gaza, they and they alone are responsible for civilian deaths.
Gaza was part of Egypt until June 1967. Israel should just quit trying the impossible and cut off all supplies of any kind to Gaza. Let Egypt supply them from their side of the border with Gaza. If the Egyptians refuse to feed their former and most likely future countrymen, that is not Israel's problem. Let them starve, immigrate or surrender. Until then Israel's responsibility is solely to its own citizens and not those of its enemies.
How about if massive stockpiles of weapons were not located in homes, but they and other strategic assets, e.g., machine shops to produce rockets, were located cheek by jowl among residences, schools, clinics, etc.? Or you don't think Hamas, like Hezbollah, would put their people at risk that way? You similarly don't believe that the Hamas and Hezbollah have used ambulances to conceal the movement of weapons and fighters?
I have in the past felt that Israel was behaving unreasonably. It appears presently that the Palestians/Hamas have earned being pounded pretty good. When you fire a thousand or so missiles into a neighboring country, you can expect that it will get a bit peeved, even upset, and respond as countries do.
I suppose civilians will be killed in the course of that upset. That is one reason why, ahem, civilized nations have since the 17th century put their soldiers in uniform and established "military base" so that there are clear distinctions between military and civilians.
First: the fact that are many less Israeli casualities are due to the care that Israeli society care for his citizens. The Radar warning belt that detects Palestinian rockets and warns citizens to get in bunkers, efficient communications and medical procedures that save dozens and maybe hundreds of lives by getting on time. We could got also to security guards that saved dozens of lives, armored bus stations, the wall, etc.
All of this are absent of Palestinian Combatants with the even more depicable behavior of using civilian buildings and assets like ambulances, to wage war, build rockets and move combatants.
So we have Palestinian combatants willingly putting Palestinians civilians at risk and Israeli behavior saving lives of many Israeli civilians, not surprisingly of course that shows up in numbers of casualities and some people found a way of criticizing Israel precisely because of that.
Why? Say it?
Since that time, though, the "cousins" have been renamed "Palestinians" and are now worthwhile to use as bait to nibble at the evil Israelis. The fact that some "cousins" will reach an early martyrdom is not of very much concern to Egyptians, Jordanians and Saudis, et al - unless, of course, the media is watching.
Wolcott came out and he was fat, balding, and wearing a sport coat he must of bought in the 70’s. All I could think of was the old Chris Farley line, “Fat man in a little coat” (??), and laugh. It was hilarious that a man who looked like Wolcott was spending all his blog time mocking other peoples looks. The man simply didn’t care whether he had anything serious to say. And he still doesn’t.
And every time I see Wolcott’s name, I still laugh.
I think that you're misreading Wolcott here, seeing the Madoff reference as anti-semitic.
The point of Wolcott's opening sentence is that [in his view] there's no justification for what Israel's doing. His whole point in mentioning the Madoff affair is its wild irrelevance. Like saying--"In angry retaliation for last week's Seattle snowstorm, Israel has launched a hellacious air assault ..."
Why did he use Madoff as his irrelevancy, rather than the weather in Seattle? I suspect that a lot more people in Wolcott's circle are talking about Madoff.
Joe Barack Jimmy, Oh, never mind.David Post's joke does not "mock an ethnic group/nationality." The ethnic background of the peasant is incidental to the thrust of the joke, as evidenced by Post prefacing it with "say," -- as in "for example" -- when referencing the subject's nationality. It could have been a peasant of some other nationality and the joke would have worked just as well.
Here, by contrast, the joke turns on Madoff's Jewishness and Israel's Jewishness, which the author relates in a topical way. The Jewishness is the thrust of the joke, which would not otherwise work given its topical nature.
The distinction is not difficult to grasp, really.
It's a joke about banks. Not Bangladeshi peasants.
Arthur's sense of humor = fail.
We'll see seriousness when the warning phone calls stop, and the bulk of the IDF indirect fire is artillery, rather than smart bombs.
that idiotWolcott, David - what else did you expect?Israel must ultimately find a path away from armed action, because they are doomed on the path where they are mortal enemies of the surrounding nations.
Israel has nukes, but cannot eliminate the threat to its existence with them; too many arab nations and too much land to win in a nuclear exchange. For the arab world however, they can win (with winning narrowly defined as eliminating israel with nukes). A couple nukes would completely eliminate the country by blast effect on the cities, and fallout on the country side. The effect will be quite disparate; while a few middle east countries will be bombed back to the middle-ages, few will notice the difference their present state; israel will be wiped clean off the map.
The kind of curdled offense taken reminds me of the way the bloggers at Feminist Law Professors respond to...anything involving women that is in any way less than reverent. Maybe there's some context I'm missing, but this doesn't seem to be worthy of your attention.
Where are all the mocking comments that Wolcott should enroll in 'sensitivity training' or that DB should lighten up?
i hate to see the right-leaning commentariat suppressing this reflex. Let it out, folks!
I take it, Bill, that you haven't attended a West Texas 4th of July BBQ. After the small stuff (like you mention), the really big fireworks are set off.
It's a joke. Lighten up.
Or police stations. Or universities.
The Egyptians, as well as the Syrians and Jordanians don't want the Palestinians back because they are led by two competing gangs of homicidal maniacs.
They are also dirt poor and would require expensive/aid from whichever government that took them in, since International Aid would probably die out once the Palestinians were nationalized. Since they are generally quite heavily armed, if they weren't given it or found such aid insufficently generous... They would rapidly be setting up suicide bomber attacks in Cairo, Damascus or Amman
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