Have you heard about the (pro-) gay-rights bill our President signed right before Christmas? Probably not, if you rely on the mainstream media for news. In fact, even the blogosphere has been strangely quiet about it, although Gay Patriot launched an item about it this morning.
His succinct wrapup (a reference to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell):
Bush increased American gay rights, Clinton took away American gay rights. Facts are facts.
Hat tip: A Disgruntled Republican.
(Welcome, readers of TheDonovan.com, a.k.a. Castle Argghhh. If you’re a fan of “Jonah’s military guys,” you might be interested in my October post about that site, “In Praise of Milbloggers, and of the Iraqi Air Force”. And a warm welcome as well to Wired and Mudville Gazette readers.)
In an earlier post (“Israel Turns to Social Media in Fight against Hamas“) I described how the Israeli Consulate in New York is using Twitter in the battle for public opinion regarding the conflict that partisans on both sides seem to be calling the “War on Gaza.”
It turns out there’s some social media savvy on the Palestinian side as well.
GazaTalk.com (warning: if you click around on the site you’ll see gruesome photos) launched January 1. I discovered it at about 5 a.m. January 5 (today), via a link in the tweetstream of Beshr Kayali. I have no idea who he is beyond the fact that his Twitter page says he’s in Damascus, and because I need to wrap this up quickly before a busy workday, I’m not going to research it.
The GazaTalk.com homepage features the death toll scorecard badge above, along with links to articles, blog posts, pro-Palestinian “Gaza Tweeters” and more.
(Disclosure: I’ve made clear where my own sympathies lie in this conflict. For this post, I’m setting aside my political views to focus on social media.)
If you click on the image below, I think you’ll see a much-larger version of it. (Works on my machine, anyway, but I’m still a newbie blogger and I don’t know if it will work for you. Give it a shot, then come back here to continue the text.)
By using Tweet Grid — one of the many independent sites that have sprung up to leverage Twitter’s tweetstream — I’ve collected the most recent tweets from both Kayali and from Benny Daon. I don’t know anything about him either, but he gives his location as Tel Aviv.
The large screenshot (if you can see it) shows Daon and Kayali parsing the nuances of the conflict in 140-character tweets. Here’s a text version of one exchange:
Beshrkayali: RT @ysalahi: Gaza’s 9/11: 500 dead so far out of 1.5 million in #Gaza. that’s approximately 100,000 americans out of 300 million.
Translation: Kayali is re-tweeting (“RT”) a tweet from someone else (“@ysalahi”) which compares the Gaza death toll with the 9/11 death toll, based on the respective populations of Gaza and the U.S. (If anyone cares about what I think about this argument on a substantive level, please inquire in the comments — I’m staying neutral in the body of the post.)
Daon fires back with a different take:
daonb: @Beshrkayali of the 500 dead in #gaza most are jihadists who got their wish and many others were human shields. In 9/11 just civilians
One last observation, then I’ve gotta wrap this up. Daon and Kayali both press their cases in highly partisan language. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think I detect a hint of grudging respect and even camaraderie in this exchange:
daonb: @Beshrkayali watching bbc news now for smart analysis on #gaza. hoping we can have peace after this bloodbath, but very much doubt it
Beshrkayali: @daonb Yeah me too… It appears that Israel won’t stop until ALL Palestinians are dead… That’s what Olmert said… #gaza
The two sides in the Gaza War may not be negotiating, but at least they’re tweeting.
Photo: Associated Press via Yahoo! NewsI didn’t vote for Obama, but I wish him well, because there’s a lot at stake. Sixteen days from now he’ll be America’s president, and my president.
So I don’t want to slip into the kind of partisan glee some conservative bloggers have been showing at the growing evidence that the man behind change.gov (I bet they retire that domain before 2012) will face some limitations in his ability to change the world.
There’s little doubt that Obama will be treated with considerably more respect throughout his term by the American news media than Bush ever was. That’s likely to be true around the world as well, at least initially. But America has real enemies, and Obama will quickly become the face of the Great Satan for jihadists everywhere. The process is under way.
Based on what I’ve seen so far, I am more confident than I was two months ago that Obama will protect America with a muscular foreign policy. It will be interesting to see how the longtime purveyors of Bush Derangement Syndrome will react when it’s their man making the tough decisions.
I got a little carried away commenting on another blog, so to justify the research time I’m repurposing the comment here. 🙂
At Politics After 50 (having been born in 1958 I think this is a great blog title), the author had this to say about the video clip embedded below:
I know this is old news, and I only just now watched this video to get the pleasure of seeing Joe Scarborough put in his fluffy, airhead, GOP-talking-point-parrot place by Zbigniew Brzezinski. But when I finally watched it, I learned something about the problems between Israel and Palestine from Brzezinski, so I thought I’d post this for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to watch it yet.
We may be about the same age, but clearly the anonymous blogger approaches politics from the opposite side. But I always want to have my assumptions challenged, and he had piqued my interest. So I watched the clip, which is embedded below.
If you’re interested but don’t care to spend 9 minutes watching, jump ahead to about 6:30. Or, just read the comment I posted on his blog:
Funny, after watching the clip it looks to me like Zbigniew Brzezinski was put in his failed-advisor-to-a-dithering-President-Carter place by Joe Scarborough.
The part of the clip where Zbig lowers the tone of the discussion by saying Joe’s understanding is “stunningly superficial” begins at about 6:30 into the interview. The statement by Joe that triggers Zbig’s childish outburst was this: “Let’s go back to 2000, Dr. Brzezinski. You and I both know Bill Clinton gave Arafat and the Palestinians everything…”
I wonder, would Zbig say Clinton’s understanding was “stunningly superficial”? Because here’s how Clinton described it:
[Bill Clinton said:] “The true story of Camp David was that for the first time in the history of the conflict the American president put on the table a proposal, based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafat refused even to accept it as a basis for negotiations, walked out of the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism.”
Here’s another Clinton assessment:
President Clinton, and others who participated, put the blame for the failure of hte talks squarely on Arafat and the Palestinian negotiators. In 2001, Clinton told guests at a party at the Manhattan apartment of former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke that Arafat called to bid him farewell three days before he left office. “You are a great man,” Arafat said. “The hell I am,” Clinton said he responded. “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.”
Sounds to me like Joe Scarborough had it exactly right.
Time and again, after reading a Charles Krauthammer column, I find myself thinking, “why couldn’t I have written that?” It’s a combination of my admiration for the man’s craft and my nearly complete agreement, more often than not, with what he has to say.
Today’s column is headlined “Moral Clarity in Gaza.” It’s hard to decide which snippet to quote. But here’s the sentence that resonates most clearly for me, the day after Hamas thug Nizar Rayan died along with the family he used as his human shields:
For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
To coin a phrase, you should read the whole thing.
My satisfaction at the news yesterday that Israel had taken out a top Hamas leader was tempered somewhat by the fact that his family died with him — today’s stories put the toll at four of his wives and 10 of his children. On the face of it, that sounds like a lot of “collateral damage,” no matter how important the primary target.
But you’ll hear no criticism of Israel from me over this incident. Not only did Nizar Rayan consciously use his family as human shields, they also refused to leave the house even after Israel warned them that it would be destroyed.
Still, as a parent, it pains me to think of a small child being killed because the grown-ups can’t get along. However, small children grow up — and even before yesterday, Rayan already sacrificed one of his sons to “martyrdom”:
Rayan, 49, ranked among Hamas’ top five decision-makers. A professor of Islamic law, he was known for his close ties to the group’s military wing and was respected in Gaza for donning combat fatigues and personally participating in clashes against Israeli forces. He sent one of his sons on an October 2001 suicide mission that killed two Israeli settlers in Gaza.
Israel’s military said the homes of Hamas leaders are being used to store missiles and other weapons, and the hit on Rayan’s house triggered secondary explosions from the stockpile there.
Israeli defense officials said the military had called Rayan’s home and fired a warning missile before destroying the building. That was impossible to confirm. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss military tactics.
Meanwhile, Hamas itself has admitted that Rayan was the person who pioneered the human shield concept that claimed his family. From the valuable website of the Israeli Consulate in New York:
Hamas has released an official statement declaring that Dr. Nizar al-Rayyan who was killed in a pinpointed attack earlier today is the father of the “Human Shields†method:
“It was Dr. Rayyan, who took the initiative, two years ago, to protect homes against Israeli occupation air strikes by forming human shields which succeeded in stopping this practice by the Israeli occupation, where they used to phone the occupier of the home and warn him to evacuate it in ten minutes because the home is going to be bombed.â€
[bold not in source]
I’m sorry the children were killed. But Rayan killed them. I stand with Israel.
… turn off the damn comp and go see it, right now. (Or, whenever it’s showing in a theater near you.)
It’s a thriller. It’s a love story. It’s a music video (don’t miss the dance scene after the credits start rolling). It’s a Bollywood-to-Hollywood crossover. It’s a multi-cultural morality play for the ages.
It’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, starring nobody I’ve ever heard of.
Go. The Internet will still be here when you get back.
Nick O’Neill has a good post at Social Media Today describing Israel’s use of social media in the current conflict in Gaza. Among other things, the Israeli Consulate in New York is engaging with supporters and critics alike, on Twitter. It’s reminiscent of Scott Monty’s efforts on behalf of Ford.
Update: Also see this, at Pajamas Media — it describes how Israel’s social media efforts represent an end-run around the mainstream media, much of which is bizarrely anti-Israel. “Now Israel can go directly to bloggers and other social media users to make their case without the biased filtering that takes place in all but a few outlets in the mainstream media.”
Updated Update: The IDF has a YouTube channel with a selection of precision bombing videos. In the one below, Israel strikes a Hamas truck as it is being loaded with Grad rockets. It’s a powerful answer to the charges that Israel is bombing indiscriminately. (Hat tip: Meryl Yourish)
“A senior Hamas leader, Nizar Rayan, was killed today with his four wives and two of his children in an Israeli air strike in Gaza, medics said,” according to an account in The National, an Abu Dhabi-based, English-language paper. (Photo: AFP/Getty, via CNN)
The deaths of the wives and children are unfortunate, but Rayan knew he was a target and chose to endanger his family by using them as human shields. Whenever Israel has an opportunity to kill a senior terrorist, it would be irresponsible not to pull the trigger. Hamas can stop the conflict at any time by ceasing its rocket attacks against Israel, which have continued today.
In an earlier post I defended Israel’s use of “disproportionate” force. I later found a post by TigerHawk explaining why a disproportionate response to Hamas rocket attacks is not just defensible, but also necessary:
Massive, militarily disproportionate retaliation is the cornerstone of deterrence, and without it there would be more war, not less. …
The requirement that retaliation be proportional rather than “massive” destroys the credibility of the threat to retaliate and therefore the effectiveness of the deterrance. Why? Because it allows the attacker to determine the price he will pay for launching the attack. If the attacker knows that he can absorb a blow equal to the one he delivers, then he will not be concerned that the defender has the capability to retaliate massively.
This is like limiting the penalty for property crimes to restitution. Why not rob the bank? If you’re caught, you only have to give the money back.
Unfortunately I can’t find the link where I read the following idea, so I’ll just paraphrase: If Hamas and all the world’s jihadists were to lay down their weapons, there would be peace between Israel and Palestine. If Israel were to lay down its weapons, Israelis would be slaughtered to the last man, woman or child.
Can anyone offer any evidence that the above statement might not be true? This is a serious question, please leave a comment if you can make a substantive argument. And if the statement is true, I find it hard to understand why anyone would not root for the Israelis.