Two Brief Thoughts

Thoughts on Palestine and Hamas:

Hamas is accused by Israel of hiding bombs and weapons amongst civilian populations and essentially using them as human shields; most famously, the Israeli government bombed a UN school, justifying this action by the same claim, that Hamas had secreted weapons there.  The UN catagorically denied this, and in this case, was quite right to do so.  That it might happen is much harder to deny, and leaving aside from the moral and strategic considerations of stashing weapons amongst civilians, and whether Hamas actually engages in such a practice, the Israeli accusation bothers me.  The IDF claims it takes great care to warn homes that are to be demolished or bombed ahead of time, theoretically allowing time for the inhabitants to escape.  They warn the soon to be former tenants that Hamas has hidden guns and rockets in their homes, schools, hospitals.  Though the subtext certainly demands elaboration, that those bombed, evicted or killed knew about the weapons, the general way in which these warnings and declarations were reported and issued suggested, curiously, that the guns and rockets had been snuck in, without the tenants knowing that their house had just become an arms depot.  I take it Hamas has been trained by ninjas, then, or Santa Claus.

This is how the takeover will look from your end, Middle America.

During the United States election, a dark episode best forgotten, if only for a moment, much was made by the more…convinced…opponents of Barack Obama that he was not what he claimed to be, that he was, indeed, a traitor of the highest order.  A communist.  A crypto-Muslim.  Well-educated.  Alien to American life and values, the haunting Other; this is all pretty bog-standard, repeated ad nauseum for months and years as if through repetition reality might melt away.  The accusation barely stands up, but stand it does: Obama was a Muslim sleeper agent, programmed to overthrow the United States, throwing off his wide smiled face once ensconed in the White House to reveal the hungry eyes and sprawling beard of the Terrorist, whose phrenology suggests the dim disposition of a common criminal.  And so they stock up on guns, hoping in their paranoid-critical mode to avoid what surely might seem the end of the world.  A thought:  John McCain spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, did he not?  Subjected to harsh tortures and brutal interrogations, so bad he has stood ever more against the use of torture as a reliable means of extracting meaningul information from a prisoner.  And yet, and yet: what if it were not Barack who is the candidate, but McCain, and only the election of the United States’ first black president prevented the rise of a man programmed by communist ‘gooks,’ as he might colourfully call them, to overthrow the government and establish a proletarian dictatorship, Hanoi-style, all of us sent off to work camps and learn humility and toughness after so many years of dreaming soft-bellied bliss.