Hebosaurus

Andrew, a high school friend, wasn't on the college path, and after graduation, he bummed around for a year until he decided that sitting in a darkened room for hours at a time sounded like a great time.

For one month, a middle-aged woman named Anne called nightly to complain about the aliens that communicated with her through the television. Anne, it seems, recently had been released from a psychiatric hospital, and no sooner than she had stepped through the front door, her little green friends returned. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't think, and the police threatened to bring her in for an evaluation if she continued to call. Couldn't Andrew do something to help her?

Feeling sorry for the woman, Andrew told Anne that he learned in a training class that covering the ceiling in tinfoil interfered with alien communications. Perhaps she could try that. "Ahhh..." Anne said, as if she were the sole lunatic who didn't know that tinfoil blocks all extraterrestrial signals.

Anne didn't call the next night. Not the night after, either. A week went by, and all was quiet on the ET front.

Two weeks after giving his advice, Andrew received a call from a frantic man: "Some bitch broke into my house! She got a knife! She said I gotta leave cuz God told her this her property!"

Andrew's suggestion stopped the aliens from bugging Anne, but drowning out their voices brought forward the godly background noise. The police made good on their promise, and Anne found herself back in the psych ward.

The moral of the story: Unless your name is Avi Goldstein and your people are widely loathed, you can't claim land you say that God promised you.

Israel's modern existence is based on the claim that God said that a handful of humans were his chosen people and could set up base in an arid desert the size of New Jersey. Don't tell me you slept through the section of Geology 101 that shows the original boundaries of God's holy country. It's clearly sandwiched between Gondwanaland and Jihadea.

One can accept Israel's very logical premise that everyone picks on them -- confiscating their land, sending them to death camps, forcibly segregating them, squeezing them until it's no longer possible to maintain a comfortable existence in a country they'd known all their lives -- therefore they're taking all of their dreidels and moving to a new sandbox. The inability of a group and the rest of the world to get along amicably is a fine reason to place that group in a small strip of land, away from all of those who can't make nice with them and with whom they can't make nice.

Anti-Semites who rail against a Jewish state overlook that if they weren't living there, they'd be living here -- and don't they have enough control over the American media? A widely reviled group chooses a mass exodus to less-than-prime real estate, and people are against it? Put an electric fence around them, give them a few olive trees, throw in a Sarit Hadad CD, and call it a day.

You mean the Israelis already tried that tactic? And it hasn't worked too well for them? Shit. Back to the drawing board.

Ira, Mahmoud, you're more similar than you'll ever dare admit. You're outsiders, and no one wants you, save for using you to further agendas.

The Arab world has no genuine interest in the plight of Palestinians. If they did, they happily would have absorbed and integrated them into their societies because a Palestinian today was an Egyptian or Jordanian yesterday. But a Palestinian population with a standard of living equal to those over the Green Line is not a Palestinian population bitter and miserable enough to buy the anti-Jewish propaganda of its corrupt leaders and vent their frustration through violence, and it's not a Palestinian population useful enough for domestic propaganda that takes the local population's mind off the wrongdoings of its own government.

Palestinians are the Arab world's Battlebots. Throw in a few batteries, rev them up and watch them mindlessly pummel the enemy, as the operators comfortably maintain their distance and gain street cred with their own populace, who hold up Palestine as a symbol for all that's wrong with their lives.

The United States has no genuine interest in the plight of Israelis, regardless of the hard-on Islamic fundamentalists have for the considerable military and financial assistance we give to Israel. We don't love Israel. Hell, we turned away boatloads of Jews during WWII. We just find it easier to deal with people who don't routinely blow themselves up. We believe in civilized killing. We like Israel because Israel is our kind democracy -- easily bought and sold -- in a sea of autocratic governments.

And the country provides enough instability in the region to prevent the Arabs from building a solid alliance, and it allows us to remain a legitimate presence in the Middle East. We use concern for the safety of Israelis as a rationale for putting ourselves at the ready for war. And that Armageddon -- man, when are the Jews and Arab Muslims going to help bring that about?

In the middle of this mess are peace-loving human beings who want nothing more than to hold hands, sing the respective folk songs of their people and give their fellow man a big hug. After passing through metal detectors and being patted down, naturally.

That didn't do it, either? You're a tough crowd.

Which came first, the chicken or the coop?

A policy of containment and self-defense appears rational in light of martyrdom being the most valued escape for Palestinian youth, but would Israeli troops need to reoccupy territories and shell bystanders if Sharon hadn't provoked the Palestinians by visiting a tomb he knows is a sore spot for these people? You can't twist the knife in the back of an insecure group of professional victims with some of the best PR lackies this side of Hollywood and expect to come out unscathed.

They know how to work the system, and the sympathy the Holocaust generated has all but evaporated. You've been usurped, and your current strategy is failing.

Violence begets violence because you're dealing with ignorant, violent people whose belief system sees little wrong with turning themselves and their children into homemade explosives. They're not going to turn the other cheek, and they're not going to fall in line because you bulldoze their homes and stores.

One common pro-Israel argument is: What would Americans do if foreigners -- let's say Mexicans -- sent streams of suicide bombers and armed combatants into its former lands to reclaim the territory that was "stolen" from them? Wouldn't we react in a similar fashion? In fact, wouldn't we be in even more cruel in our oppression? Cheney and Rumsfeld are president, after all.

Aside from overestimating America's affinity for California and Texas, the argument oversimplifies the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I know we like our political and social issues wrapped up into a convenient Opposing Viewpoints book, but America doesn't have a complex history that dates back thousands of years, it didn't enjoy centuries of expansion that collapsed into strategic partioning at the hands of outsiders, and it's mostly gotten over the complex of having been subjugated by an imperial power hellbent on conquering and dividing to suit its mercantile needs.

America's evolution cannot be compared to that of a region as old and diverse as the Middle East. Our sacred cows are still calves, and our break from colonialism was a bit more amicable, largely because we were splitting from people not that different from us.

If the British had reneged on allowing the colonies to become an independent state and instead partioned the land so that much of it was set aside for an ethnic or religious group different from that of the majority demographic in order for that group to divide the colonists in a way that allowed Britain a continued presence in the region, it's not unreasonable to assume that there would have been an even bloodier revolt.

Land is sacred and when you add long-held beliefs, no matter how irrational, into the mix, you're going to find that people are willing to die to reclaim it unless you offer them an enticing deal.

America won its freedom through war. We liked our new land, but we started to get restless. We wanted to expand. We encouraged settlers to go west.

Our settlers met up with indigenous people who weren't too pleased with sharing the land, and in order to take the land for ourselves, we needed to suppress opposition from the people who were scattered across it. When the last pockets of resistence were squashed, we rounded up the survivors and segregated them on small parcels of land, where you had to give up old traditions to achieve even marginal recognition.

This arrangement worked well until the latter part of the 20th century, and rather than engage itself in a prolonged battle that, like most movements, eventually would be overrun with irrational militants, the government gave the Native Americans casinos, cheap alcohol and tax-free smokes. Now, everyone wants to have a great-grandmother who was half-Cherokee.

As a group, Native Americans are in terrible shape, but we've handed them the illusion of economic freedom and independence, that they are the masters of their own destiny, and they've mostly stopped their complaining. The best part? They're so dependent on the dominant culture for survival, they won't risk losing their economic base over disputed acres in Upstate NY. Send Tommy Blackbear on a suicide mission on the 5 express train, and you can kiss the Mohegan Sun good-bye.

It doesn't matter that there are high rates of violence, illiteracy and alcoholism -- they can sell cigarettes cheaper than any 7-11 in the five boroughs.

And when they do get a bug up their ass about reclaiming land, buying them off is as easy as promising them another casino to attract the white man's monetary retribution. No 17-year-old girl blowing herself to bits, some brain matter and charred feathers as her legacy. Just closed door meetings between politicians and tribal leaders who are pushing it to claim even 1/4 Native American blood.

Israel's current campaign against the Palestinians and vice versa will only breed more hatred, which is what the leaders of both Israel and the Arab world want. The more the Palestinians and Israelis suffer, the more likely they'll be to react violently in response to the desperation they cling to. The more violence that occurs, the deeper the rift between each camp.

And the deeper the rift, the more entrenched each side becomes in proving their righteousness and gaining more backing from supporters. Fundamentalists on both sides can use the suffering of their people to sway the man on the street to embrace or tolerate more radical methods of achieving their goals.

Israel's crackdown prevents Palestinians from earning a living, supporting their families, and gaining that psychologically important illusion of freedom. Publically preventing them from doing this feeds into the cult of victimhood that pervades the Arab culture, and it gives ammunition to those in the industrialized world who only see a put-upon people suffering at the hands of the big, bad, hypocritical jailers, and it provides justification for those who just know they'd be super-successful if it weren't for the damn Jews.

When you're broke, unable to leave your village to attend school, or find work, and your house has been destroyed as punishment for an act committed by a family member, you're easily swayed by outside influences and death seems a welcome relief. If you can take out a few oppressors with you and earn money for your family in the process, so much the better.

Thousands of dollars being donated to one's family after detonating oneself in a pizzeria has more allure than 72 pieces of ethereal ass at your beck and call, and to a young person without the maturity to view acts in the long term, it's better than any alternative currently on the table. Quick cash for killing some occupiers vs. undertaking a lengthy non-violent peace process that won't net ab and om a few grand. Hard decision.

Palestinians, though, need to realize that while an explosive death might seem preferable in the now, it's going to get a bit old when, thirty years down the road, they're still under curfew and whining about the oppressive conditions in which they live and the atrocities of Israelis killing their children -- the peaceful children who haven't been brainwashed into blindly hating an entire group of people and blaming all of their problems on them, thus preventing their society from moving forward because each generation imposes upon itself even more psychological restaints.

It's hard to build a stable, prosperous society when your engineering students are turned into human bombs instead of helping in the planning and restructuring of what you hope will be an independent state, Jews driven to the sea or not.

But it's irrelevant that Arab Muslims largely are culturally backward people and that their religious ideology is one in the greatest need of a secular injection. You -- that's you, Moshe, et. al. -- shed your native citizenships and opted to form a collective based on a single identifying factor in a pity-partying, non-Jewish region that you knew would hold a serious grudge because of the circumstances of your state's formation. What did you expect, an interreligious feast of matzah and mansaf each third Thursday of November?

Learn to live with them because the more you kick sand in their faces, the tighter their topis get. And there are more of them than there are of you. Outbreed them, get them hooked on Jew money, or hire a hotshot PR firm to convince the Muslim world that they're out of step with the modern world because of their own corrupt leaders and not a Zionist conspiracy because the force thing isn't working too well for you.

Providing jack-off material for white misogynists since 1997.

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