Reply #14: The Americans who are like Pipes aren't just Jewish Americans...

[Violet_Crumble]

Conservatives would love him with a passion for obvious reasons. Their 'support' of Israel is a matter of convenience for them. They get to indulge their bigotry against Arabs while veiling the Antisemitism that most of them feel, and also get the added advantage of knowing that Israel cops the flack if it does the dirty work of the US for it...

As for Americans who identify as being left-wing and who seem to adore Pipes, I've noticed at DU and a blog I hung out at for a while before arriving here that they're way more extreme and hateful in their views than Israelis tend to be. I've found most Israelis I've encountered online can discuss the conflict without frothing at the mouth the way some US liberals do. I suspect that it has something to do with them usually not falling into the trap of attempting to dehumanise or turn either the Israeli or the Palestinian populations into symbols like many of the Americans do. Israelis have much more riding on genuinelly wanting a peaceful resolution (though I think some have a way to go before they realise that peaceful resolution must also be a just one for both peoples) while Americans have the luxury of distance. So for Americans like those, both populations stop being normal human beings and start being nothing more than symbols eg. Palestinians are raving terrorists and Israelis are eternal victims. They appear to totally oppose any attempts to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians and imo want nothing more than the bloodshed to keep on going so they can keep their cheer-squad routines going...

I posted an article a week or so back about how Israeli diplomats here were the first in the world to vote in the election. In the article it said that Israel had had to take the step of not allowing Israeli citizens who resided overseas to vote coz of the tendency of Americans to try to inflict their extremist views on Israel. Folk like Pipes and his ilk aren't 'supporting' Israel with their attitudes, they're trying to sentence Israel to an unending existance of bloodshed and conflict, and Israel and the Palestiniand deserve far better than that...

Violet..