A Prophet Speaks

From September 6, 2003:

"It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."[emphasis mine]

But Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below — from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption."[emphasis mine]

But Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

"We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state — not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."[emphasis mine]

Oh....

These are the real principles that should be touted in the Middle East, not those that condone more bloodshed and violence or excuse war crimes on both sides.

Ah, but I guess by agreeing with this 'prophet', I am as anti-semitic as he is.

At least I am in good company.

(h/t to Eugene)