Quotable Words on...Haaretz

From Marty Peretz:-

My judgment is that he knows squat about Israel, maybe because the only reportage he seems to read about the Jewish state is from Ha’aretz, which is to Israel what PM used to be for the United States. Well, you don’t know what PM was? All I can say is that it was not quite the Daily Worker. But let me confess: Ha’aretz is my home page. I am a masochist, and I like to see how far journalists can stray from the facts. Very far. Every day, actually.

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From Marty's Mouth

Marty Peretz, that is, on the Van Jones fiasco:

...last but in this case least: Wouldn't you know it? Jones also has been bitten by the anti-Israel bug. In the old days, when the Russians grasped that Zionism was the one force that could compel the exodus of British power--they called it imperialism--from the Middle East, the communists were for the restoration of the Jewish nation to its territorial home. As soon as the British left, the communists wavered in their support of the return and then they stopped wavering. All the way down to today. Jones' vulgar hatred of Israel is, alas, also a hatred of Jews.

...The correspondent, writing from San Francisco, sets the context correctly: "Mr. Jones was forced to resign when it became clear that he was a complete crackpot who has for years and years said a lot of really crazy, stupid loonie-bin stuff. Very much like the kind of stuff, in fact, that Barack Obama's former pastor used to say each Sunday."

This raises an awkward issue. Part of the electoral enthusiasm for Obama came from just such people drawn to loonie-bin politics. That happens in every campaign. The difference is that, say, in Bill Clinton's race they were marginalized. And they certainly were kept our of office after the electoral victory, maybe even by Rahm Emanuel. And you didn't have to be from the far-far left to be shunted aside...With Jones, we were dealing with someone more like Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. And an utterly ignorant Rashid Khalidi...

Marty Peretz, The Liberal, Uses The F Word

Marty Peretz goes gung-ho:

The government in Jerusalem had made it unmistakably clear that it would no longer tolerate this fire power aimed at innocent civilian life. It had been saying this for months to an increasingly skeptical and apprehensive, not to say, restive public. And to Hamas which didn't seem to care. Instead, it threatened Israel by word and follow-up deeds that confirmed the recklessness - as if confirmation was needed- of also this Palestinian "liberation" movement, the last in the long line of terrorist revolutionaries acting in the name of pathetic and blood-thirsty Palestine.

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning...50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

At roughly noon, another 60 air-attack vehicles went after other Hamas strategic positions. Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. Within hours, Nicolas Sarkozy was already taking up the cudgel of French righteousness and pronouncing the actually quite sober Israeli response to the continuous war on its borders "disproportionate." Enough. What would be proportionate, oh, so so proportionate apparently, are those tried-and-true half measures to contain Hamas that have never worked. Remember that in 2005 Israel ceded Gaza to the Palestinians waiting and hoping that they would make something of a civil society of their territory, civil for their own and civil to their neighbors. It was not to be.

Imagine, the F word and Jews in the same sentence but it sounds so good.