Informant38

This is hard:

This is very hard:

You can be very critical about what President Bush does and says and stands for, and still see considerable merit in the walls that are finally being erected in Baghdad.

Amitai Etzioni/Huffington 02.May.07
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Mr. Etzioni is an Israeli-American sociologist, famous for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany in the 1930's.
There is a very large wall in Palestine, erected by the Israelis. It is a source of some contention for those whose lives and livelihoods have been damaged and/or destroyed by it. Mr. Etzioni mentions it almost in passing after citing the far less-well known "Green Line" of 1963 that separated Turks from Greek Cypriots in Nicosia; citing the Berlin Wall; citing the walls that led directly according to Mr. Etzion to peace in northern Ireland through the segregation of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. The article's ostensibly about the walls in Baghdad, but really it's about something else, that's not supposed to be said clearly and directly.
He's flirting with some kind of accuracy when he says the Palestinian apartheid wall does "cut some Arab villages into halves" and "intrudes into land considered as belonging to a future Palestinian state." Though it's a delusional, or delusion-inducing stance overall. What Israel's doing to the Palestinians is sadistic and immoral, and the only possible justification for it is the genetic and spiritual superiority of the Jewish people, which is a claim some people will find debatable. The harm to Palestinians by the apartheid wall is far outweighed by the gained safety and security of Israelis, according to Etzioni, though that suffering is undeserved and greatly underreported. The money quote would be maybe:

"...no one can deny that these barriers play a major role in reducing terrorist attacks on civilians in Israel proper and thus also the retaliatory measures that Israel launches in return."

That's pretty much the psychotic's rationale, the kind of denialist horseshit the nervous accused might be expected to come up with. Watered-down a little it's the garden-variety sadist's justification for his gratuitous cruelty. Etzioni gets a prominent and amplified lectern from which to deliver this irrational goop, the Palestinians get to ask politely for Israel to please stop killing them and taking their land, and have no voice in America media with which to do even that.
Which brings us to the larger, more difficult task.