Who is the terrorist?

The "settlers" told by "man of peace" Sharon to "grab every hilltop" continue their good work. From Haaretz:

A number of times from the end of 2000 to the end of 2003, the villagers had no water to their homes after unknown perpetrators smashed the water pipes and threw building waste into the water holes.

Oxfam volunteered to finance the pipes' repair, but they were vandalized again. Oxfam then encased the pipes above the surface with concrete and built an iron cage around the water holes to protect them. However, once again the concrete and pipes were smashed and the drinking water fouled with dirty diapers and other waste.

In November 2003, Italian volunteers helped the villagers seal the water hole openings with concrete. But in a few months the villagers started suffering from liver infections and stomach diseases. The contaminated water was banned for use until January this year, when after heavy rainfalls the pollution was reduced. The villagers started using it again, until 10 days ago.

But remember. The Palestinians need to stop the violence before discussion of a state for them can begin.

A couple of days ago in an editorial in the NYT we were told:

The Europeans need to bend too. They should commit themselves to a much greater role in training Iraqi security forces. And they must join the United States in declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization, because it is, and because the message to terrorists must be one and only one.

To the best of my knowledge Hezbollah has not engaged in terrorism (unless one accepts the new US/Israeli definition of terrorism as any attack on occupation forces) for many years. The occasional anti aircraft fire into the occupied Shabaa Farms is usually (always?) a response to Israeli military aircraft entering Lebanese air space.

In Europe vs. America Tony Judt discusses differences between these two.

America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

Not much, unless they are well-off. The US is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty times the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.[2] A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But 45 million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world's developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Amira Hass on the Israeli occupation and the resistance to it:

That's the upside down method: occupy them, their land, their natural resources, take over their lives and judge them as criminals when they resist us - when they kill either civilians or soldiers. We admit we killed civilians, but the "war" apparently not only justifies our cruelty, it erases it. On the other hand, the war - in other words, the occupation, in other words, the war for the preservation of the loot from the 1967 war: the settlements - does not justify or even explain their cruelty in our eyes.

If the Palestinians had warplanes and tanks so their killing was sterile, they would prefer to use those. And then, even if they killed Jewish civilians, they would not be called murderers with blood on their hands but enemy soldiers. And when caught they would be considered prisoners of war. If the policy makers of the Olso Accords really were thinking about peace the way they are said to have been, they would have freed all those prisoners. But then, like now: those who speak about gestures and then only free Marwan Barghouti's son, even if it was at Abbas' request, continue to operate with the old diskette of the colonialist who throws candy to the natives.

In the process of spreading freedom liberty and apple pie round the world a boy must have some fun too. Here is how Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis has fun with the natives of the empire:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. . . . It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling," he said at the forum in San Diego.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," he added. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

We are told that he is "one of the country's bravest and most experienced military leaders"

I am reminded of General Boykin who also has an "outstanding record":

He told one gathering: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol," Gen Boykin said.

He also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed "the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy".