Monday, January 5, 2009

At the LATimes, the real enemy is bad op-ed page editors

Yesterday's LATimes has an op-ed by two Israelis (Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren) entitled: In Gaza, the real enemy is Iran: Israeli attacks must not stop until Iran's proxy, Hamas, is defeated.

By this logic, the real enemy of Israeli settlers are the Jewish diaspora (and fundamentalist Christians) living outside Israel that send them money and other resources to colonize Israel for the coming of the messiah. It's the same process: if we assume that Hamas doesn't represent the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, but is rather just a proxy of Iran to destabilize the region, then we cannot conclude differently when it comes to Jewish settlers and their co-religionists outside the region who encourage illegal settlement growth. Thus, what Oren and Halevi should have said (but didn't) is that "In the world, the real enemy are religious extremists: and financial support for those extremists must be made illegal, WHEREVER it happens."

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