Comment Trail October 3 - 10

@ TNR: David Grossman's novel: To the end of the land

@ TNR, Jonathan Chait asks: Why Don't Palestinians Adopt Nonviolence?

@ TNR: A discussion about "The Social Network" (A movie I have yet to see...)

@ The Spine - the condition of the Arab/Israel Peace process

@ Robert Malley on the settlement issue

@ Friedman's doom and gloom scenarios

@ It's complicated: Irish Nobel Laureate Shills for Hamas

Saintliness does not inoculate against antisemitism. Saints are usually people who are willing to die for a very narrow cause or belief usually having to do with pure ethnicity or religion. Just consider who the Catholic saints were/are and for what they sacrificed their lives, or the Muslim shaheeds. So saintliness is hardly a quality I admire in anyone, especially when it's done in the service of so-called suffering of Palestinians. The kind of saintly motivation is so narrow and lopsided that in order to keep itself going it is absolutely necessary to know nothing about contexts, records, history and common sense. Corrigan-Maguire cannot afford to pay attention and learn about the factors that have brought about the current situation in Gaza nor is she capable of exerting herself on behalf of Kurds, who are being hunted down and killed by Turks in Iraq (something that should have bothered her, concerned as she is about international law and such).

I tend to see it as a sort of an acquired autism. Autism's main symptoms are impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication; restricted interests and repetitive behavior.

If you consider the way Corrigan-Maguire is incapable of meeting a question and answering it to the point, in considering a wider context for the Gaza blockade, in repeating the tired excuses for singling out Israel, for ignoring Israelis' suffering, for the need to pretend that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it is pretty obvious that what observe is an autistic behaviour which cannot be explained but as willingly and deliberately acquired.

Update: A Peace Nobel Laureate for Hate / Ben Dror Yemini