I'm not answering for Mick here but you did mention me as well in your post Gene. First I want to say I never said anything about Israel and "war crimes."
What I did was point out that Israel has an extensive (and growing) list of UN resolution violations that we choose to ignore but when an administration wants to "create" reasons for war with Iraq...then we'll point to UN resolution violations. We pick and choose.
The public in the United States has no clue that Israel violates UN resolutions with regularity but Europeans seem to have a far better grasp on that fact...could it be their media outlets are better than ours? Not to mention the resoutions and sanctions that Iraq had been under had for the most part decimated the country. Another issue that for some reason Europeans seem to understand better than we do here in the US of A. We know now Saddam was not only not a threat to us but also had lost control of Iraq. Turns out his own people were playing him for a sucker.
I don't bring up Israel to bash them. I bring up Israel because you can't have an honest discussion of our situation without that topic entering into it. Our sponsership of Israel has led to most of the hatred of the US amoung Muslim nations. You can't back away from that fact. It's not a popular topic, I know, and it's one of those things that if you say something about it shit starts to fly. I don't want to upset or offend anyone but I think the thing is we're not well informed by our media here and they do a shit job.
There are a lot of examples of media myth being accepted as fact...and this particular administration we have in office right now lives by the idea that if you can get it in print somewhere then you can refer to it again and again and it will be printed again and again and suddenly that makes the lie true because so many media outlets have used it. You've seen again and again how they used this tactic to lead us to war with Iraq.
Anyway, I just want to be clear here that I'm not attacking Israel when I bring them up...it's a matter of discussing the facts. I never pointed any fingers.
Reg
