Israel kills two Palestinians in West Bank
...since the killings of the settlers last week for which Israel has retaliated by restricting Palestinian traffic...
Palestinian officials said Israel had informed them of the second fatality...
...told Reuters Israel had killed one of its members...
Israel withdrew from Gaza last month but still occupies...
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"O come, O come, Emmanuel,-
And ransom captive Israel"
-Traditional Christmas hymn
It's not the sentiment, it's the linkage. The presentation of a unified body. Israel. With all its resonance and Biblical assertion.
It would sound a little awkward to hear "America killed 5 Iraqis in Ramadi" "America burned the corpses of two Taliban captives". So you don't hear that.
What you do hear is "a video purportedly showing American soldiers burning...".
Or you read "TV footage that purportedly shows US soldiers in Afghanistan burning the..."
Or "...in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba revealed more sexual abuses by the American soldiers there ..."
Not America, American - Americans.
It's deceptive, on the surface the sense of the writing is conveyed, you know what's meant and you just keep reading.
But it makes it sound like the land of Christmas is being attacked, and subconsciously a lot of people respond to what they've read in just that way.
The NASCAR thing was like that - all that hype and stars-and-stripes rah-rah, it gave dumber Americans a rallying point that had all kinds of tangential payoffs.
It pissed off the liberals and environtmentalists, it was a blue-collar sport so allegiance to it was allegiance to class, and it had gasoline running all through it, and it made lots of noise. But it didn't rise up out of the public soul, anymore than George Bush did.
The main push for that unifying and separating logo-saturated entertainment came directly through the media - the same media that with a straight face delivers these phrases that make it sound like Israel is being picked on and wounded by bad people, and only "responding" only "retaliating" for being attacked, never attacking.
The problem is arrogance I think - and a kind of desperation that arrogance makes inevitable - arrogance that underestimates its target audience.
I don't think this was the plan - I don't think it was supposed to fall apart so soon, though I do believe that that was intended eventually.
It's the kind of scam that makes the slide from one polarized stance to its opposite seem like relief and rescue - like positive change. It just wasn't supposed to happen this early.
And it's because they misjudged their audience - because a lot of those blue collar yobs are waking up to the fact that they've been lied to, that they've been asleep, and that some really creepy stuff has been happening while they were out.
So the great war between Good and Evil commences I guess, with team uniforms being sold at discount on the street.
Israel of course being the unmistakable Good. And anything that opposes it being automatically Evil.
It's just that the presence of the supporters and allies and champions - Pat Robertson, Sharon, Falwell, Netanyahu, Dobson, Perle, Bush, Feith, Cheney, Gonzales, so many others - is ugly and cruel and deceptive, which I've always thought were the traditional hallmarks of Evil.
