#375 An Armada of Humanaterrorists (Israel)

Well, it sure was louder!

I haven’t finished listening to the entire show yet, but I’ve just heard the portion from the Young Turks, in which Israel gets completely chastised for their actions in the blockade. In my opinion, coverage of this event through various types of American media have been slanted, and I’ve only come across a handful of articles written in Israel’s defense. Here is one from the New York Times, written by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/opinion/03oren.html?ref=israel Get the facts. Decide for yourself.

This was one of the best shows I’ve heard you do. @Duc, it’s true that the Young Turks did a typical amount of inarticulate spluttering in lieu of commentary, but that’s the way they cover most issues. Wait for the Colbert interview with Ambassador Michael Oren — a brilliant satire of the inhibitions Americans have about honest criticism of the State of Israel. “The Palestinians are the ones who should go back to wherever they came from, don’t you agree?” The Bill Maher segment demonstrated another blind spot we have about Israel: Maher expressed an adolescent worship of Israeli machismo, manifested in tales of commando raids. I used to have a bad case of Israel worship myself. Israelis are cooler and sexier than Palestinians, they have high tech weapons and awesome secret agents. For a lot of us, that’s enough to justify anything the Israelis do, as long as they do it with style. The Palestinians? They’re just plot devices, bodies that get in the way. Or looked at another way, they’re the Indians in the Wild Mideast — the people who inconveniently occupied the Promised Land when the European Zionists arrived. Their presence tends to spoil the neat and compelling David-and-Goliath story of Israel that we were all raised on. The Israelis turn out to be no better than our ancestors: land stealers, treaty breakers, and Injun killers. Someday I suppose they’ll romanticize How the East Was Won, and many of them will claim to have a grandmother who was a “Palestinian princess.”

jay,i was shocked at your lack of knowledge and research of the so called flotilla was a fake of peace activates…

i went to Canada to escape the draft in 71
wound up in Vancouver for collage.
i have been in Israel for over 25 years.
i did the army here and im proud the way we acted.
i enjoy your program(podcast)
and im not about to write you offer just get some facts straight jay.

shalom bruce david

Hi Jay,
I love the pod casts and I look forward to them weekly. I do feel that your coverage of the Israeli flotilla raid was too biased against Israel.
I kept waiting for someone from the left to talk more in depth about this issue instead of just focusing on the sensational bits of the moment, as so many ill informed on the right seem to do. But that never seemed to materialize.
It seems obvious that, not unlike our own government, that the hard right is often hurting the country as a whole when they over react to situations. However, Israel is under constant attack from Gaza, and Hamas still holds one of their soldiers from a year ago. I think under the circumstances, Israel has shown great restraint. If Mexico was firing rockets into Texas daily, we would be at war. And we defiantly would not stand by while one of our solders was held prisoner after being abducted.
I’m not discounting the hardship of the Palestinian people, they are victims of Hamas as well. But little has been made of the fact that many of the surrounding Arab countries are to blame for Palestinian problems as much or more than Israel is. Most coverage also forget to mention that the reason for Israel is that the Jewish people still have many enemy’s who wish them ill. When the media conversation only focuses on the Palestinian side it misses the whole story which is an injustice to both sides.