I'm behind. Anything interesting tonight? So far, it seems nothing but airstrikes in Lebanon.
pretty much..and volleys of katyushas into northern Israel...martial law in no. Israel...Tobin live now
Mike Tobin on live right now saying a Hezbolla mucki-muck was killed and Hezbollah has captured an Israeli tank and they want to get it back so it doesn't fall into the hands of Syria.. I'll have to listen again at the top of the hour to see exactly what happened beyond that.
Well I ran across this on Google Groups
The smartest Arab in the entire Universe speaks:
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.politics.misc/browse_thread/thread/c6a8a3fab467a92a/7619721c1f894ef3?lnk=st&q=%22Fouad+Ajami+%22&rnum=2&hl=en#7619721c1f894ef3
Dear Brethren, the War With Israel Is Over
As Israel enters the third week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it
voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is
spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and
political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks.The new views are
stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can
think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs
from their Arab friends:
Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:
The war with Israel is over.
You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand
by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on,
away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal
struggle" with Israel.
Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to
fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in
1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn
is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10
years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.
At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state
in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the
West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out
even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice,
friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that
do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving
Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern
Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to
Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire
ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude
yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your
social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.
Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death
and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners,
including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg
for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and
medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim
fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can
neither fight nor hope to win.
In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out
landscape that is shrinking by the day.
What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important,
what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth
or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?
We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building
housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and
new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as
Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to
war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like
North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to
you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in
liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire
Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my
friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.
Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving,
leader of yours,Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods - more pain,
greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives - while your
children played in the sewers of Gaza.
The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?