Isaerl and Gaza and Obama and everyone else

Every nation has a right to defend itself. No one would argue that, at least no one who lives on Earth amongst human beings. But the situation in Israel is not just one nation attacking another and then a response.

The Palestinians were forced off their land, attacked, and penned in. Their neighbors dislike them as much as the Israelis do. However their plight provides dictatorships accross the mid east to allow their oppressed publics to vent anger at an enemy that is not the king, or president for life.

Organizations of brutes that use strife as a means to grab power and control (Hamas et al) also use the Palestinian cause as fuel for their own purposes. I recently sent a message to my mom about the perfect analogy for the situation. It starts where Michael Bloomberg left off.

In short Bloomberg said that if someone was banging on your apartment door yelling at you saying they want to kill you, you would want the police to come and stop them. I fill out the whole story...

The people pounding on the door used to live in the very apartment currently occupied by the people calling the police. They came home one day and found all their stuff dumped in the hallway. They complained to the land lord. He agreed with them that they had been wronged. But the new occupents would not listen and continued to live there. Not only that but they also took the job of doorman. So now the hall-people have to asked the doorman's permission to leave the building to go to work. Because they got angry and pounded on the door the doorman will not let them leave.

Finally the mob shows up, and for some protection money, they mug the apartment dwellers. The cops are called and tell the hall people to settle down. They move into a new apartment only to find that the next day the other dwellers have now kicked them out of that apartment too. The mob is still around and loves to pray on the down and out. So they make promises to the hall-people and make more violence on the apartment occupents.

This goes on and on.

That is a better analogy to what is going on in Palestine. The victem of Israeli action in Gaza will be America as much as Hamas. America is seen, with justification, as the main supporter of Israel. We give 400 million a year in military aid alone. How much do we bother to toss Palestine?

Obama needs to strike a neutral position here. Hamas is the mob for sure. But Obama needs to reach over the heads of Hamas and Israel and talk to both peoples and link them with both sides common desire to live a peaceful life. Talking to the gun toting scumbags on either side will solve nothing.