CNN asked viewers, when I was in the airport the other day, how they would solve the Israel/Gaza crisis, with an e-mail address where you could send your response. The anchor said, in a completely unironic tone, “Hey, wouldn’t it be something if one of our viewers out there had the answer?” as though an e-mail response to a cable news network is going to somehow solve thousands of years of conflict in the region.
Wait, has it been thousands of years? I forget, with all this specious “BUT WHAT IF MEXICO WAS LAUNCHING MISSILES AT CALIFORNIA?!?” shittery, as though Israel did absolutely nothing — nothing, and it’s appalling that you would even imply it as a possibility — to warrant any kind of attack. I guess all our politicians and most of our conservatives here in America seem to think that all the conflict in that region began with Hamas launching those missiles.
It’s getting to the point where, as soon as I hear about U.S. politicians supporting something, my immediate response is to oppose it, just because they’re wrong nearly all the fucking time.
It’s weird how it’s gotten to be that any response — of whatever intensity — is always justified, as long as someone did something bad to us. Like that asshole Bloomberg:
Well, let me just phrase it for you something that’ll bring it home. If you’re in your apartment, and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, ‘I am going to come through this door and kill you,’ do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command? Just think about it in that context. There is no so such thing as a proportional response to terrorism. This is not something we are playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. People’s lives are at risk.
LET’S KILL HUNDREDS OF ARABS BECAUSE DOZENS OF ISRAELIS WERE KILLED! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED! THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE! NUKE THEM FROM ORBIT! IT’S TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!
I’m not saying by any means that Hamas is the best thing since sliced freedom, but everyone’s been treating this as such a one-fucking-sided issue, as though Israel is always already innocent of any wrongdoing in any situation, and that’s just ridiculous and wrong. Wrong. I don’t hate America (or, by extension, usually, for conservatives, Israel), I hate bullshit. This is a major reason the terrorists hate us: Because we unquestioningly support anything Israel does, and we treat any conflict there like it’s entirely one-sided.
[Aside: It's ironic, by the way: Religious fundamentalists tend to be so quick to claim that certain people "hate America", while at the same time talking about (but not actually living by) the idea of "hate the sin, love the sinner". Do they just not understand that you can hate what America does sometimes without hating America itself? Maybe it's because that expression tends to actually mean nothing to them, and they hate gays as much as homosexuality.]
In response to the CNN question, I have an idea for how we could possibly ameliorate the problem: Build a time machine, go back to World War II, and convince the U.S. government to allow Jewish refugees from Europe and the U.S.S.R. to settle here, so that Israel wouldn’t undergo such a massive population boom that effectively turned the Arabs living in the area into a minority underclass of prisoners.
Or, how about this: Everyone can stop giving a shit about this religious feud gone way too long into overtime, stop bombing each other, stop subjugating and oppressing each other, recognize that we’re all human beings, for fuck’s fucking sake already, and deal with all of this like an intelligent civilization.
