tsquire1: "...to compare the situation of a male withholding information to a women with its antipode is to ignore the reality of a patriarchal society where men benefit substantially for gender privilege."

I agree. The imbalance of power between men and women is institutionalized, ie. patriarchy, so that while individually women can be hateful or "sexist," there's no entrenchent, and little to no meaningful empowerment for women to subvert and reverse structural injustice and inequalities. And so it is with racism. A Palestinian can hate Jewish Israelis, but from outside.

In Israel Palestinians are "the other." They have nothing in the way of leverage, so instead there's misery, frustration and endless intractable conflict. So it is that from despair erupts the most existentially strange phenomenon of violence: the suicide bomber.

It's one of those historical ironies that the first suicide bomber in Israel/Palestine was an early zionist.

*beg

Israel was a strange country. In the summer and fall of 1992 you'd have found me in either Tel Aviv or within the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. I often went for long walks in the evenings and it happened several times that on Allenby Street or maybe Dizengoff that an Israeli would strike up a conversation and then quickly jump to explain how "we are the same you and me, but the Arabs are animals." Or it was dogs. Or cockroaches. It always shocked me and I'd look at my watch and say something about being late.

I'd been having a wonderful time playing backgammon and chain-smoking Nelsons with the Palestinian and Egyptian friends I'd made at the open-sided cafes in Arab east Jerusalem.

Israeli racism is not unique. Franz Fanon wrote the definitive work on the racism of colonialism. (The Wretched of the Earth)

Gabriel Ash is an Israeli journalist, originally from Romania. Ash's article "Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind of a European Settler" is a lucid and powerful indictment.

http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm

Israel was a strange country. In the summer and fall of 1992 you'd have found me in either Tel Aviv or within the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. I often went for long walks in the evenings and it happened several times that on Allenby Street or maybe Dizengoff that an Israeli would strike up a conversation and then quickly jump to explain how "we are the same you and me, but the Arabs are animals." Or it was dogs. Or cockroaches. It always shocked me and I'd look at my watch and say something about being late.

I'd been having a wonderful time playing backgammon and chain-smoking Nelsons with the Palestinian and Egyptian friends I'd made at the open-sided cafes in Arab east Jerusalem.

Israeli racism is not unique. Franz Fanon wrote the definitive work on the racism of colonialism. (The Wretched of the Earth)

Gabriel Ash is an Israeli journalist, originally from Romania. Ash's article "Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind of a European Settler" is a lucid and powerful indictment.

http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm


*******

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

*******

I spilled a little coffee when he slapped that slice of cheese over Danny's mouth.

***

(From the site) What is the human development index (HDI)?

http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/faq/question,68,en.html

The HDI – human development index – is a summary composite index that measures a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Health is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by GDP per capita (PPP US$). For details on how to calculate the HDI, see Technical note 1 HDR 2007/2008 [5,680 KB]and also the interactive HDI calculator and the Excel tool Calculating the indices [61 KB] - interactive tools that help understand the calculation of the HDI.

Website of the UN Human Development Index, Human Development Report 2009 - HDI rankings: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

***


Invariably it's the democratic socialist countries that are at the very top of the 20 annual UN HDI reports--while Somalia is probably the country closest to a laisse faire, or "Austrian" (failed) state.

Oh snap.

*beg

I like the story that the Yippie Paul Krassner tells of the time he dropped acid with Groucho Marx. About an hour after taking his dose, the elderly comedian called his personal assistant, instructing him/her to bring to the mansion every sort of exotic fruit he could find.

^Hehe. He's the sort of guy who never uses a big word when a diminutive one will do.

Check out the sixteen year old with a full beard.

I'd like to thank clever marketing for this authentic emotional experience.

"I'll shut my yap for now and just hope he comes down with cancer."

Ah you're such a well-behaved little psycho. I almost miss those violent rape scenarios you used to leave on my profile page. Wishing me cancer is almost like offering me a bowl of ice-cream when compared to those little private love notes. :-)

Just for Harvey- Hava Nagila on banjo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PchepbAy02k

That's almost an original thought, gwizz.

blankfist: Qualm is Swahili for troll. True story. - 1 day 1 hour 53 minutes ago

gwizz: Troll (internet): See: Qualm. - 41 minutes 27 seconds ago

*kill this gross video