No one appreciates the limits of logic as much as I. Logic is a way to look at relationships from every odd angle; it's about the repercussions of what you already know. Logic says nothing about that is actually there; it speaks to what can be there assuming the state of your knowledge is complete and will never give you a single new thing.
This is why few actually find logic compelling, or even convincing. This is why you have to tell little stories, craft little metaphors, and depend on repetition to physically wear a groove into people's neural patterns to get your point across.
Before Gibson there was Kofi Annan. I do not accuse the United Nations secretary general of anti-Semitism -- a slam-dunk in Gibson's case -- but here again there is a rush to judgment, an impatience, an anger and a general vexation that, at best, is worrisome. When an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed four U.N. observers last week, Annan was quick to say Israel had done so deliberately. Why Israel would do such a thing -- what's the benefit to it? -- went unexplained or even, it seemed, unconsidered. Annan, who later said he would await an Israeli report on the incident, was having a mini-Mel Gibson moment.
What is the caucasian equivalent for "Nigga, please"?
I mean, the op-ed is well crafted and all. The opening is attention grabbing.
The world is having a Mel Gibson moment. If it does not quite hold Jews "responsible for all the wars in the world," then certainly it is ready to blame Israel alone for the carnage in Lebanon and, in the addled formulations of some, the war in Iraq as well. Gibson offered his inebriated analysis to a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, but drunk and a skunk though he may be, he put his finger to the anti-Israel zeitgeist and uttered its prevailing sentiment: Enough.
He closes the circle well.
Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000. It pulled out of Gaza last year. It was making plans to pull out of most of the West Bank. Still, the suicide bombings continue, the rockets keep coming down and soldiers get kidnapped, maybe never to be returned. Yet the world, appalled at what it can see on television and untroubled by what it cannot, has had it with Israel. Mel Gibson would understand.
He even put his finger on Israel's problem (if that can be separated from the USofA's problem at this point).
A constant state of war makes a country mad. It unnerves it, unhinges it -- which is what happened here after Sept. 11. ...The world has a responsibility here. If it can no longer put up with Israeli excess, with its (understandable) policy to strike back disproportionately, then it has to put an end to the slow bleeding of that country. The world -- the United Nations -- created Israel. It ought to safeguard it. It is the only way.
But Kofi Annan as Mel Gibson? The world as Mel Gibson? I think that's a little over the top. Or under the bottom. Something like that.
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Richard Cohen and people who
Richard Cohen and people who share his views have lost their minds. Why do they believe that Israel's policy of disproportionate response is understandable? And understandable by who? I never thought for one moment that it was okay to hold hostage and kill members of the Israeli Olympic squad no matter how badly Israel had treated the Palestinians and I didn't need Spielberg's film to remind me of that terrible incident. But if the Israelis' dropping a bomb on an apartment building in Qana or deliberately targeting a U.N. observation post after receiving at least six warnings that its shells were coming too close for comfort can be subsumed under the category "understandable" then the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics can be placed in the same slot.