Ed O'Loughlin's report begins, "Western powers are refusing to intervene to halt spiralling Middle East violence that has claimed more than 250 lives." But that should be qualified to read, "Right Wing western powers," etc., the US, Britain and Germany, to be exact. Why are they refusing to intervene? Because The Chosen Ones, with weapons supplied by Umeruhca, are doing their job for them against Hizbollah, whose weapons are being supplied by Iran. The verbally challenged US President is giving Israel's military one more week ("Go on, git Syria so's we'll have an excuse to git Iran and all that extra oil.") before sending Condi over to bite their heads off.

Did I say "Chosen Ones"? Oh, dear. That must mean I'm anti-Semitic. You just can't criticise a thing Israel does these days without being called anti-Semitic. I could even be a Jew, in which case I would be called a self-hating Jew. As Anthony Loewenstein says, the Israeli right wing have adopted Bush2's dictum, "You are either with us or against us." For them, in this greyest of world conflicts, there is only extreme black and white.

I have two Jewish friends. Neither is religious, which perhaps explains why they do not necessarily believe in "My Israel, right or wrong." There is no religious bullshit to cloud their vision, which is why they view Israel as a country rather than the righteous homeland decreed by a god who values them above all others. They understand that this conflict is fundamentally tribal. Almost, you might say, prehistoric. That as long as we isolate ourselves within a tribe, the tribe across the border must be viewed with suspicion or outright hostility. That's how it is with neighbouring tribes. Sooner or later they go to war.

My Jewish friends are deeply ashamed that Israel has updated an eye for an eye to an eye for a village. And their shame extends all the way back to the first Israeli expansion into Palestinian territory. Perhaps even back to the dubious founding of Israel itself.

Another Jewish friend, whom I lost contact with years ago, is a Canadian writer. We once attended a lecture on the Palestinian question by Noam Chomsky. On the way home, this otherwise mild-mannered young man muttered over and over about how the Palestinians were scum, were less than scum, were in fact sub-human. The venom in his voice blew me away.

What's that old song, "Hate makes the world go 'round"? It used to be some other emotion, an emotion gradually being phased out of human existence as the Right takes control of every country. (That the Netherlands (scroll down to "Dutch Detention") has eclipsed Australia's inhumane treatment of asylum seekers is a despairing example.)

The Israelis are bombing the sovereign nation of Lebanon to smithereens in order to root out arch-enemy Hizbollah in revenge for the latter's double-dare-ya incursion into Israel in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two more kidnapped. The word "disproportionate" just won't go away.

I'm just wondering if the thugs ruling Israel have taken a different meaning from the Holocaust to the one the rest of us have. Something like, "The Nazis tried to exterminate us, so the way to avoid this in the future is to be the new Nazis: Subjugate first and be saved. If that doesn't work, exterminate the scum." Surely that can't be the case. So why do they persist for decade after decade in treating the Palestinians as if they were sub-human? Why, after all these years do the Palestinians not have their own sovereign state? Because Hizbollah is predicated on wiping out Israel? But why is that so? Who did what to whom first?

I have the horrifying suspicion that Israel's claim to be a nation of chosen ones among all the peoples of earth is the justification, conscious or unconscious, for their disregard of the life of those whom they regard as not chosen. State terrorists fighting stateless terrorists is neither more nor less than a battle between terrorists. Didn't the Nazis feel the same privilege in coldly slaughtering all those they deemed inferior?

At the risk of unleashing a modern day Golem on my person, here is what I think. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right wing extremist, Israel has gradually become a terrorist state. Present-day Israel has absolutely nothing in common with the rich contributions Jews have made to the evolution of the human species. Without Jews we would still be in the Middle Ages. Historical anti-Semitism may stem from nothing more than jealousy. In almost every intellectual breakthrough it has been the Jews who got there first. That is why anti-Semitic skinheads are such a laughing stock. Promoting the white race as genetically superior, they are mostly white trash, their leaders puffy faced, bloated couch potatoes with the weak voices of ten-year-old boys whose nuts have yet to drop.

The Israel of recent times has more in common with these skinheads than the history of its own race. Worse, it has attached itself to the dying hulk of the biggest terrorist state of all, George Bush's hegemonic demon, Umeruhca. Together these two nations have implemented foreign policies that, by deviousness and/or by force, have caused more damage to the world than all the pissy little Muslim death-worshipping states put together. By their sheer arrogance and hubris, they have begat enough enemies to insure a future of massive conflagration.

Shame on all of them and their primitive religions. Such self-serving, inept understanding of the mysteries would have caused their deities, God, Yahweh and Allah, to long ago forsake them. In truth, these deities were invented, made-in-their-own-image, fronts for just about all the evil that has befallen mankind. Deep down, the believers of all three religions know this, that each is a fraud. And that is why they are going mad.

-- Chet LaMerde