I have always been rather critical of Israel's "carte blanche" status in the Middle East, always supported by the U.S. no matter how heavy handed it has responded to those that threaten it. I understand you need to go after terrorists who wish to wipe you off the map, but bulldozing people's homes because their idiot teenage son was brainwashed into becoming a suicide bomber only creates more of the same, a never-ending cycle. I have always had this surreal pity for the Palestinian people, who had their homeland stolen to create the State of Israel, and have been treated about as badly as American blacks were in this country and almost as bad as the Jews themselves were throughout history. It's as though the Jews of Israel took to heart the fine art of persecution.

OK, we can poke fingers at both sides, but this latest fiasco is beyond ridicule. First, Hamas, having been elected by a clueless and angry populace in the Gaza Strip, demonstrates why Israelis hate them so much by immediately sneaking into Israel proper and kidnapping soldiers, as if Israel was going to immediately cave into their demands to get them back. DUH, where in the hell are your brains, you idiots? If there's ONE thing Israel has demonstrated time and time again, it's that it does NOT negotiate with terrorists and it bites back HARD. I'm sure the citizens of the Gaza strip are so impressed with your good governance....... Now, as if stupidity were contagious, Hezbullah, their terrorist brethren to the North in Lebanon, have done the same thing, and now the citizens of Lebanon are feeling the effects of such folly. Like I said, you fuck with Israel, you suffer the consequences.

What is really apparent about these people, is that despite their grievances, real and imagined, they cant seem to understand, or if they do, care, what effect their actions have on those they claim to represent. I can tell you one thing, Hezbullah does NOT represent the interests of all the citizens of Lebanon, yet the innocent are suffering alongside those with vested interests in this group. Lebanon has come so far from the civil war wracked wasteland that sectarian strife had made of it, and now their peaceful progress is once again threatened. Equally, the Palestinians had a good chance of determining their own fates with the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip, and now that has been totally wasted with the election of the worst possible kind of people to represent them. Almost sounds like our own elections, doesn't it?

The holocaust created a new race of Jew, a people that never again will meekly be persecuted by every other race in the world because people need someone to hate. This has had the effect of arguably turning these people into the very kind of overlords that once tried to have them eliminated. In many ways, Jews now think of Muslims in much the same way that American Caucasians imagined African Americans. It's easy to demonize a whole class of people when many of those people publicly vow to kill every last one of you. So, peoples of the Middle East, keep glorifying cowardly terrorists who claim to have your best interests at heart while incurring the wrath of a people who have survived time and time again the jaws of genocide, and believe me when I tell you that this war will NEVER end. Rise above your oppressors, disavow violence, seek peaceful coexistence, and you'd be amazed what could happen. We here in America know what can happen; and we have a holiday named after the man who showed us how; Martin Luther King, Jr.