He'll likely never grow to his full potential...

It could have been an informative article. Too bad Fisk wrote it. Someone else might have been able to get past his usual rhetoric on how difficult it is to decipher what simple statements imply -- I mean since he won’t quote a direct source to the short statements he attacks. Many of these statements, though, are quite glaring -- provided, of course, they are indeed quotes:

* Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians?



* Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer - there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."

* Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians".

* Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories".

* Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan - a close personal friend of Mr Sharon - believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".





All well and good, if accurate. But then, the simplest things seem to throw Fisk for a loop:

* Our own John Pilger made a programme for Carlton Television called Palestine Is Still The Issue. I have watched it three times. It is accurate in every historical detail; indeed its historical adviser was a left-wing Israeli academic. But Carlton's own chairman, Michael Green - in one of the most gutless statements in recent British journalism - announced that it was "a tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy is concerned". Why Mr Green should want to utter such trash is beyond me. But what does he mean by "tragedy"? Is he comparing Pilger to a suicide bomber?

Pity. He could be so good, if he could just get past that spiteful little roadblock.

For the record, Palestine is an issue, but certainly not the sole issue. There remains the matter of a United Nations-backed Israel. Why does Israel continue to exist? I can recall that the “Promised Land” was promised, but I don’t recall it ever being given -- not by G-d. These are squatters on foreign property, given the right to defend the land against the rightful owners. There was no deed exchange with Palestine. Merely a gift of land from -- that Western Alliance called the U.N.

Utterly amazing,
Dan (and I [feeling somewhat Splinxian regarding the professional use of punctuation] do think those many questions of his should have those question mark-thingies)