President George W. Bush kicked off the week by reaffirming his vision of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it was widely seen as an attempt to divert attention from his debacle in Iraq rather than a commitment to sustained diplomacy.
What do all the current threats facing the Middle East — the Hamas takeover in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah\’s bid for power in Lebanon, political turmoil in Iraq and imminent nu- clear weapons in the hands of a radical dictatorship — all have in common? Answer: Iran.
Not only has the Supreme Court thoroughly abandoned a decades-old tradition of upholding the liberal gains of the 1950s and 1960s, it has become the premier bulwark of conservatism now that Democrats have retaken Congress and the White House is weakened to the point of impotency.
Jews bemoan the lack of context, the one-sidedness, the over-simplification and the focus on blood and gore that marks quite a bit of the media coverage of Israel. And the Muslims? To them, the media paints all Muslims as terrorists, offers superficial understanding of Islam and focuses on violence over culture and accomplishment.
The British Union cares less about journalists or freedom of the press than it does about blindly condemning the Jewish state…it has everything to do with anti-Israel bigotry.
I was not entirely comforted. I recalled a conservative propaganda movie about Islam warning people of taqiyya, the Muslim \”mitzvah\” of deception, in which militant Muslims put on a peaceful disguise for Westerners.
The \”Genocide and Religion: Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders and Resisters\” Synoposium went deeper than many such conferences by examining as many as possible of the various groups involved in a genocide — the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders and resisters — all of whom can be found in every such conflict, past and present.
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