worth a try....

It's already kind of late, and I'm tired.....

But a tinfoil-encased leftard moonbat (upon further examination he appears to be a middle-easterner) -- who sullied this blog with a 'comment'-- has brought to my attention a newspaper article, used on his blog as the prime evidence for the evils of Zionism. Don't follow his links, you'll only be frustrated and stunned by the total lack of working thought processes there. I"ve not found a way to link without sending you to the hell of his site, so just trust me on what it says.

In the moonbat view of the universe, in order to prove one's (predecided) point, one finds the documentation that proves one side committed atrocities against the other, and then the discussion is over-- the other is pure and good, the one side is evil and indefensible. That article provided the proof of the atrocities, and that was that. No context, no broader scope of time and circumstance. One list of atrocities, and it's time to deliver judgment.

This practice of too-fast judgments and too-shallow research is poor at best, but particularly when the recent history of the two sides is well documented, and one need only look to see who's doing what. In this case the "Zionists" are harshly judged for the excesses of a stressful and dangerous war of 1967, one which they did not start and which if they lost would have meant the end of, the death of, everything and everyone held dear in that soldier's nation. Stress? Uh, yeah.

While most Israeli soldiers served bravely, honorably and by the rules, a few did lose their bearings and become cruel in their treatment of their enemies. And unlike an Arab terrorist, many of those who did these things are haunted even today by their revived consciences, losing sleep, gaining depression, etc. The experiences have ruined families, broken hearts and lives, made failure of success...

My tinfoil-hatted acquaintance stops here, and the end of the list of Israeli atrocities, the work done, the lines practically writing themselves, and says literally that this (the content of the Haaretz article) is Zionism.

Shudder. Deep intake of breath. "The horrors!"

The story was in Haaretz, a powerful story of the separate lives of soldiers in the Six Day War, with details of the terrible things they did, the conscience that grew silent in them, the rage that became the controlling factor in daily decisions.... men shot for no reason, women beaten after attempts at attacking well armed soldiers, and general loss of concern for the victim Arabs as the final day wound to an end.

This is the list of wartime atrocities from 1967 that every American leftist wishes had been from Iraq 2004, because they're already so darn CERTAIN that our evil soldiers commit such atrocities every day before camp breakfast.

IN this burning fever to accomplish the tarring of the Israeli military, there's something juvenile; "YOU guys call yourselves GOOD, eh? Well, folks, read what they did here and here and then you'll know they're not so high and mighty GOOD as they pretend to be!" There is also the very real need to make the geopolitical job for any given country easier by not having to measure up to some moral standard, by not having to risk the public's perception that the 'bad guys' are needlessly attacking the 'good guys'.

The list is quite compelling. Even the soldiers on the side of good can become overly determined to deliver punishment to the bad side for all they've done, all the death and pain that their intransigence and aggression forced upon us. We didn't want to fight them, but by God if they are going to fight us, we will do what we must to win.

And even though it's really a short list of a handful of anecdotes, one can be confident there are more such stories. Something snaps in some soldiers under the stress not just of battle, but literally of defending your family and friends and homeland from total extinction, as the Jews did in 1967.

I do not defend the men who did these things. No war has ever come and gone without men doing such things, and often they were good men who later could not explain why, and were haunted by it. It happens, and it happens in all wars.

Over the past couple of years in Iraq, the world has feverishly attempted to saddle America and Bush with the acts of the handful of people in that stupid Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, who are now stateside serving prison time for what they did.

Can I point out that, in the history of war, this normally does NOT happen. Cruelties, atrocities, these happen in war, on all sides. But only the American military investigates, takes custody of the bad actors, puts them on trial, finds them guilty, and sends them to prison.

And remember that this article my tinfoiled friend directed me to read, the one that proved Zionism was an ideology of murder and madness? IT was written in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper which anyone who knows such things agrees is the leftist paper of record over there.

Read this for more. Haaretz is descibed as never having seen a Palestinian atrocity worthy of being mentioned in their paper. Subsidiary of the New York Times? We report, you decide....