Max Blumenthal did another great job of allowing people to express themselves honestly.

Watch a report from Channel 4 in London for the type of reporting you would never see in the US.
Meet the children left to die among the bodies of their parents and families

Two very important points: one is that he identified Israel’s incursion into Gaza as the reason the cease fire was broken. Another is the very scary point made by former National Security Persian Gulf Director, Hillary Mann Leverett, that with Hillary Clinton as secretary of State — with her advisers “we may long for the days of George W. Bush.”

The absolute silliness of the US media and US politicians in talking about the massacre Israel is carrying out in Gaza is wonderfully satirized by John Stewart and The Daily Show. Well, the politicians at least.

See the full episode here

Mayor Bloomberg is priceless. He actually got on a plane and traveled to Israel to show support for the Jewish state in this time of desperation and need. It’s not easy carrying out a massacre of a civilian population while being supported by the world’s only superpower and cheered on by that superpower’s vast media network.

But Mr. Bloomberg was welcomed home by shoe throwing New Yorkers as he should be.

Later in the show his guest was David Gregory, the new host of NBC’s Meet The Press. David was let out of John’s little satire but he is clearly vying to be the new face of Israeli propaganda in the US. But I think George Stephanopolous has him beat.

Let’s compare Sunday’s shows to see.

George Stephanopolous
Guests include: Israeli president SHIMON PERES
Senate Minority Leader, MITCH MCCONNELL
Senator DICK DURBIN, democrat

All guests fully supported the massacre and parroted Israeli talking points with precision. There were no challenging questions. Much of John’s material came from that show actually.

David Gregory and Meet the Press
Guests include: SEN. HARRY REID, Majority Leader
RICHARD ENGEL, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC
NBC News

We’ve seen Richard Engel’s reporting on Gaza, especially with Rachel Maddow.

Worse than Rachel, who may not know better, is Richard Engel who does or at least should know better and provides only the zionist perspective of this history in addition to some extremely racist comments.

According to Engel, the reason for the disconnect between the Arab governments and the Arab people is the ignorance of those people and the education of the Arab elite in Western countries. Could it not have something to do with the corruption of those governments? Where does one begin???

We would like to focus on and help Rachel with the history she so painfully struggled through, which we hope was written by someone else. It is our sincere hope that she take the commentary and suggestions below as constructive and take this as an opportunity to get acquainted with the facts as opposed to the myths that are repeated to us over and over again.

TRANSCRIPT AND COMMENTARY OF THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW ON GAZA

“You undoubtedly saw the headlines today. “Israel launches third day of attacks on Gaza.” “Chaos in the Middle East.” “Arab-Israeli Conflict Erupts.”

(This opening is launched in Maddow’s usual cheerful, punchy fashion, against a background photo: plumes of black smoke surge out of one doesn’t know where – it is Gaza, but she doesn’t say it. Superimposed on this evidence of savage air war is a banner, WIDE WORLD (in black) OF SCARY (in red.) It is as if we were entering the world of the Muffets. This sets the visual tone for what follows.

“Again?” asks Maddow. “Yes. Again.” (Implication: this has been going on for so long that you’re all sick to death of it, as am I.) This also supports a narrative, Myth #1, that this conflict has been going on for thousands of years and myth #2: is too complicated for you simpleton US viewers to understand. Both of these are lies which are meant to stifle discussion and to keep us from asking questions.

“Now, there’s a reason these headlines are, uh, so familiar. Um. Here is where Israel IS. [Large global projection] It is a tiny country, a Jewish state, right smack dab in the middle of the Arab world, surrounded on all sides by Arab nations many of whom do not recognize Israel’s right to exist

(underline here indicates Maddow’s verbal underscore.)

Well, uh, that’s not quite right. Yeah, Israel’s little. But it happens to be the world’s fourth greatest military power backed by the world’s only superpower and despite occasional protestations, supported by all of Europe. It has been handsomely underwritten by the US from Day One. According to Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington and reported in the Christian Science Monitor: from 1973 to 2002, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today’s population, that is more than $5,700 per person.

The US gov’t was apparently convinced that in Israel it had found the proper billy club to beat any unruly natives into submission in an area that contained, as one State Department spokesman put it in 1945, “the greatest material prize in human history.” Oil. Israel also became an important ally in the Middle East during the cold war as Arab countries leaned toward the Soviet Union.

As for that ‘right to exist.’ Well, we’ll give Maddow a small break on this, since the phrase has been so bandied about that even smart journalists unwittingly use it (or maybe bot so Unwittingly). But since Maddow is so super-smart and so principled in all other arenas, we expect she’ll understand us when we say that “right to exist” isn’t something accorded to any other state on the planet. No state has a “right to exist.” States have the right to be recognized by other states. And – this is important – to be recognized within established borders. The thing about Israel is that since 1967 it has refused to declare its borders. This is because, since Ben Gurion and earlier, the Zionist aim has been total hegemony in what used to be historic Palestine. The UN in 1967 passed Resolution 242 which calls for Israel to retreat to its pre-1967 borders (in other words, to where it had expanded after it conquered all the Arab armies in 1948, gaining considerably more land than the UN gave it in the Partition Plan of 1947 (the Jewish minority was granted 55%, the Arab majority 45%.) But Israel has never wanted to do that, thus it has ceaselessly settled the West Bank, major bone of contention for the Palestinians and their leadership since the most fertile land and aquifers in what remained of historic Palestine after 1948 lay there.

To summarize simply: the UN, built and created in part to end colonialism and the acquisition of land by war, both supported and then condoned colonization of Palestine and the resulting expansion of the Jewish state of Israel through acquisition by war.

It is very important to understand that until Jewish European colonization of Palestine began there was no history of conflict between Jews and Muslims or between Jews and Arabs. In fact the Spanish Renaissance was the result of Jewish Muslim cooperation. It was the Catholic monarchy of Isabella and Ferdinand II who dispelled both. So please stop saying that this conflict has gone on for thousands of years.

Back to Rachel
The verbally underscored “many of whom do not recognize Israel’s right to exist” evades the reality that Egypt and Jordan most certainly have recognized “Israel’s right to exist.” In addition, Israel has the cooperation of Saudi Arabia and other Arab States who are now obligingly allowing it to carry out – in the words of Israeli Under Defense Minister Matan Vilnai last spring, a shoa — a holocaust: the word is taken very seriously in Israel, since it denotes the total destruction of a people – in this case, in Gaza.

Israel was, in a sense, conceived by war. The day after it declared its independence in May, 1948, it was attacked by five neighboring countries – Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. What followed were decades of endless wars fought on and near Israeli soil. A war with Egypt in 1956, another with Egypt and Jordan and Syria in 1967, another with Egypt and Syria in 1973, one with Lebanon in 1982, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Hard to keep up with the manifold distortions. “In a sense” is unwittingly accurate. Israel was actually conceived in a European Nationalist movement, Zionism, which wasn’t endorsed by all Jews by a long shot. It was essentially (in the Europe of that time) right-wing. It was opposed by Jewish “liberals” and “lefties”, since it seemed to fall in with the anti-Semitic tenet that Jews were a separate race. Most European Jews wanted to be citizens of their own countries. Of course, then World War II took place, and the destruction of Europe’s Jews. But even Maddow and her producers can access a rich trove of books by Israeli historians (Simha Flapan’s THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL:MYTHS AND REALITIES, or Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s ORIGINAL SINS: REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM AND ISRAEL, and find evidence that Zionists who had already colonized Palestine by World War II didn’t want Jews to flee Europe elsewhere. Or, as Ben Gurion famously put it, if he had to save all the Jewish children by having them go to the US and elsewhere, or half by sending them to Palestine, he’d save only half.)

Also: Israel was really conceived in Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet was a strategy devised by Ben Gurion and “The Consultancy” – a circle of Jewish figures in Palestine who would go on to lead Israel once it was a state. Ytzhak Rabin. Yigal Allon. And others. Plan Dalet meticulously laid out what the Haganah (pre-state Jewish army) and two terrorist groups, the Irgun (led by Menahem Begin) and the Stern Gang (led by Itzhak Shamir) would have to do in order to expel as many of Palestine’s Arabs as possible. The details are all in Ilan Pappe’s THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE. Purposeful, premeditated massacres at Deir Yassin and other villages are graphically described in this book which relies on Ben Gurion’s and other Israeli leaders’ diaries, Israeli army and government archives. Not easy reading. From the description of Deir Yassin: “As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.” All such citations are meticulously footnoted. A journalist who claims to “speak truth to power” and root her programs in morality and ethics has a responsibility to read this book and other information about Israel, which has cranked out its hasbarah (public relations, propaganda) 24/7/365 ever since 1948.

As for the wars, 1967 was not a defensive war, as even Moshe Dayan laughingly stated. It was a pre-emptive war. A book written by Zeev Maoz, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies’ head and no radical, DEFENDING THE HOLY LAND: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ISRAEL’S SECURITY FOREIGN POLICY, is huge and Maddow will not want to wade through it, but to put it in a nutshell it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt (again, the documentation here contains no ‘ums’ or skirtings of fact, but is the real deal – Israeli Army, Government archives, etc) – that none of Israel’s wars were defensive but all “wars of choice—or, worse, folly” to quote the dust-jacket, with the possible exception of 1948. (Maddow should know that Eisenhower cut off Israel’s aid in 1956 when Israel invaded Egypt. That was not a defensive, but a pre-emptive war. Nasser had tried to nationalize the Suez gulf, Israel, France and England then conspired to invade. Longish story. Someone of Maddow’s intellect should know it.)

And on top of various military entanglements with its neighbors, Israel has also been embroiled in various uprisings within its own borders [Rachel emphasis], among the Palestinian people. You will recall that famous handshake at the white house (photo of Arafat and Rabin with Clinton) right? between Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ytzhak Rabin, agreeing to a Declaration of Principles that said the Palestinians would be allowed to govern themselves in two areas, in the West Bank…and another tiny sliver of land along the Mediterranean sea, that’s known as the Gaza Strip. The war being fought at this hour is in that little sliver of land, the Gaza Strip, it’s actually only about twice the size of Washington, DC.

“…within its own borders??” Um, not-so-much and, indeed, not-at-all, Ms Maddow. The first and second Intifadahs took place on occupied soil: the West Bank and Gaza. These are not “within Israel’s borders” although admittedly Israel would like them – or at least the West Bank – to be Israel forever (minus the people of course), Including Jerusalem, which according to UN resolution 194 was to be an international city, It resolves that “in view of its association with three world religions,the Jerusalem area, including the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns…should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control”

We are cognizant of the fact that years ago a directive went out to American journalists to change the lingo and call Israeli settlements “Jewish neighborhoods.” But that didn’t change the fact of international law (Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949) under which occupiers are forbidden to occupy the soil of the conquered which was affirmed in the International Court of Justice decision in 2004.

Now, Israel withdrew from that land (Gaza) in 2005, but they still control the air space, the territorial waters, and the Gaza-Israeli border.

Well, she got that right. But left out that these facts mean that despite the constantly repeated talking point “that Israel turned Gaza over to the Palestinians in order to support a peaceful Palestinian Israeli co-existence and got 6000 rockets in return,” Israel never ended the occupation of Gaza.

They’re currently enforcing, uh, er, enforcing an embargo on the Gaza Strip.

The verbal stumbles here perhaps arise from the fact that Israel’s siege of Gaza, intensified in 2007, has really been ongoing from 2005. It has been so savage that there was a 75% overall malnutrition rate among the general population and a 46% anemia rate among Gaza’s children. Writing in the Israeli newspaper HaAretz, Gideo Levy captured the attitude of Israel’s leaders toward the Palestinian population The team, headed by the prime minister’s adviser Dov Weissglas and including the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discussion with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on ways to respond to the Hamas election victory. Everyone agreed on the need to impose an economic siege on the Palestinian Authority, and Weissglas, as usual, provided the punch line: “It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die,” the advisor joked, and the participants reportedly rolled with laughter. And, indeed, why not break into laughter and relax when hearing such a successful joke? If Weissglas tells the joke to his friend Condoleezza Rice, she would surely laugh too.

Ms Maddow should look at statements about the results of the siege by Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur to the UN on the Occupied Territories. The siege was denounced by many human rights organizations including B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, as a war crime

Once the Palestinians achieved, er, some degree of independence there, they did what independent people do—what the US in fact encouraged them to do. They held elections [verbal underscore]. And in those elections the ruling nationalist party, Yasir Arafat’s party, Fatah, was defeated soundly by Hamas.

Now, Fatah was no League of Women Voters (cynical knowing underscore) but say what you will about them they did [verbal underscore, grimace, almost wink] begrudgingly accept, theoretically, Israel’s right to exist.

We can well understand why it would be “begrudgingly” though we suspect this adverb was tossed in gratuitously and without grounding in understanding. In fact the Oslo Accords of 1993, under which Palestinians gained autonomy over governance of their persons [stuff like garbage collection] but not of the land itself, were concluded. Arafat agreed to this. He also agreed not to discuss the settlements. And Israel’s settlements, which by then ringed every Palestinian town, village and city, fulfilling a plan drafted in the late 1960s by Minister of Labor Yigal Allon, later to be Deputy Prime Minister, the Palestinians were to be separated and isolated by ever-growing settlements for which their land would be confiscated. This plan was steadily accomplished until, by the First Intifada, all Palestinian living centers existed in nooses of settlements, highways on which only Israeli’s and foreign tourists could travel and militarized checkpoints. The infamous Separation Wall, which snakes through the West Bank, further ensures that Israel’s boundaries are ever-expanding. Rather than being built on the pre-1967 borders of Israel, it digs deep into the West Bank, encircling the settlements so that these are now, de-facto, annexed to Israel, while Palestinian villages and land are diced up and kept out. In 2004, The International Court of Justice at the Hague opined that the “wall” was illegal and should be dismantled.

We don’t know why Rachel says “theoretically.” The PLO accepted, very untheoretically, “Israel’s right to exist.” It’s fact – as in “facts on the ground,” which is what Israel has always called colonizing Palestinian land, as in Ariel Sharon’s famous quote “Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” to settlers – it’s fact, not “theory,” that after the parties agreed in Oslo, Norway, in 1993 and Arafat and Rabin shook hands at the White House, settlement population in the West Bank expanded. Another Israeli violation of international law but, hey, who’s counting? However, it would seem that Rachel’s colleague on MSNBC, Keith Olberman, is a little more aware of this stuff than she is. Catch up, Rachel!

Hamas (big verbal underscore to emphasize the invidious contrast) – not-so-much! Not so much at all. The charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel.

Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the European Union. The net result of that election for Israel? Yet another neighbor bent on its complete destruction.

It is true about Hamas’s charter. It’s also true that Israel’s pre-state leaders planned for the total Jewish domination of Palestine, most of which is now Israel. It is also true that Israel funded Hamas going back to the 1970s, because the ‘no one to talk to’ then was the secular PLO. Further, it’s true that Hamas has offered Israel 10, 20, and the latest is a 30-year truces, if only Israel will withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. It’s also true that Hamas won the elections in Gaza because the PLO had become terminally corrupt by the early 1990s, and Hamas was a relatively uncorrupted movement that supplied Palestinians with social services and support. Finally, it is also true that Elliot Abrams and counterparts in Israel fomented a civil war in Gaza between Hamas and the PLO, by attempting a coup to oust Hamas, (not first for Abrams of Iran Contra infamy) and Hamas finally won the day.

So contrary to another oft repeated talking point that Hamas took control of Gaza in a brutal coup. It is more accurate to say they pre-empted a US/Israel sponsored Fatah coup.

Israel says that rockets and mortars lobbed from Gaza into Israel have killed 9 Israeli civilians since the beginning of this year.

Some facts: . Rockets from Gaza have killed between fourteen and twenty Israelis in eight years. Israel’s military arsenal killed 4228 Palestinians between 2000 and 2007. During the same period, 1,024 Israelis died – that was a 4:1 ratio. (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.). The ratio later rose to 25 Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Palestinians’ higher death toll is widening as we write. According to the website, “Remember These Children,” between September 29, 2000 and January, 2008, 1,050 Palestinian and 123 Israeli children were killed.

A shaky ceasefire between Gaza and Israel that had been brokered by Egypt, that expired just, a little more than a week ago. On Saturday, then, there was a surprise broad-daylight coordinated air assault by the Israeli military on what Israel says were military targets in Gaza. This elides another fact omitted by Rachel: Hamas kept the ceasefire. It was Israel that broke it by killing six Hamas militiamen on November 4. The ceasefire agreement, by the way, required Hamas not to shoot rockets but it also required Israel to lift a siege that was making life unbearable for 1.5 million people. Israel did not comply. Hamas did. Until Israel killed the militiamen.

Another round of headlines that scream CHAOS IN THE MIDDLE EAST! CHAOS IN THE MIDDLE EAST ERUPTS AGAIN! [BILLOWING SMOKE AND FLAMES, NO SUBSCRIPT SAYING WHAT IS BEING DESTROYED, BUT LEAVES THE AUDIENCE TO GUESS: PROBABLY GAZA] More than 300 dead on the Palestinian side in the last 3 days, 3 confirmed dead so far on the Israeli side.

Israel’s critics decry a disproportionate response to the rocket fire. An emboldened Ayotallah Khameini says that any Muslim who dies in Gaza would be deemed a martyr. [background, unclear, a swirling crowd.] Israel’s defenders decry the Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and, of course, the unprovoked missile fire into southern Israel.

Well, uh, “unprovoked” is just cow-paddies. Not only did Israel break the ceasefire. Not only had there been a siege of medieval savagery against Gaza. Not only had Gazans been forbidden to work in Israel after 1993. Not only had Gazans, after 1967, been permitted to work in Israel as “hewers of wood and porters of water,” so to say, marginal laborers, but had been prevented from developing their own economy….one can go on and on about this. See Sara Roy’s articles in The London Review of Books. The daughter of holocaust survivors, Roy is a senior researcher at Harvard and one of the world’s experts on Gaza. Sorry, Rachel, but, to quote you, “not-so-much” unprovoked. There have been decades of provocation preceding the rise of Hamas, decades of provocation that made a relatively comfortable population destitute and despairing.

Today Israel’s United Nations ambassador said that the goal of Israel’s military offensive is to quote destroy completely [her emph] Hamas. That’s one goal. Another goal is to completely destroy any civilian police infrastructure [hence the initial attacks on policemen attending a graduation ceremony] and any supporting infrastructure, period. The ultimate goal is to reduce all remaining Palestinians either to a reserve labor force that will work in “industrial zones” as impoverished Mexicans do on the US border, or to force them to leave (fulfilling “the Jordanian Option” so often on the table for what used to be “the right wing” but what is now the general consensus. Drive ‘em out! Make life so horrible that they’ll all leave! The ultimate goal is – a land for the people, throwing out the people who had the land.

Meanwhile, Palestinian rocket fire into Israel continued, despite the massive Israeli military attack. Indeed. Repeatedly, it has been proven that Israel’s perennial strategy, violent force, does not work. Now, what would the alternative be? Now, as President Bush refuses to interrupt his last vacation as President to say anything about the Middle East tinderbox he purports to focus on so intently, is there hope that our new Presidential leadership – and our country, could make a difference there – or, or is this a situation in which there will always be violence. Which precludes a political solution. And without a political solution we can’t have anything but more violence.

D’ya think that our kids, and their kids, and their kids, will inexorably, inevitably, read the same headlines from the Middle East that we do now and that we have for so many years?

Joining us now is NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, Richard, thanks for being here.

(Engel appears, smiling, jovial.) So, I have to sort out the Middle East!

Rachel: Yeah, let’s hit it! (Giggles, drops her head in laughter.)

As the situation in Gaza approaches the shoa Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai promised last spring (shoa means holocaust, a very serious word in Israel), this atmosphere of romper-room joviality isn’t quite the tone one would have expected.

Engel: Um, to get right into it…

Rachel: Please…

Engel: I think the situation in Gaza is explosive. It appears to be contained, but people in, in Gaza and in Israel expect that there will be a ground offensive and that it could be fairly soon, it could come in the next 48 hours or so. Yes, and that materialized.

Rachel: Does this mean that this is going to go on for a very long time, is there any possibility that that could be, even if it is a massive ground incursion, could it be a short one?

Engel: Probably. The Arab world, it seems that a lot of Arab states, in particular Egypt, Saudi Arabia, gave a green light to this offensive. So while there’s a lot of uproar in, in the streets, the Arab governments aren’t saying very much. And Israel’s foreign minister was in Egypt, meeting with Egypt’s president (Hosni Mubarak, hated by a majority of the pop) the day before Israel began this offensive.

Thus giving the lie to poor Israel surrounded by all those vicious Arabs. US clients are in league with Israel, as Engel goes on partially to point out.

So there is a lot of uproar on a popular level because the media, the television, all the newspapers, it’s a constant drumbeat of horrific images coming out of, of, uh, out of Gaza. Well, there’s that drumbeat because Al-Jazeera has its reporters in Gaza, unlike the West, and the images are horrendous. To make one weep.

Even, we wager, to make Rachel Maddow weep. Take a look: it is not hasbarah. Moreover, it’s being beamed 24/7/365 to Arab and Muslim worlds who will hate us and Israel way more than before because of the massacre Israel is wreaking, with sublime approval by Bush, by the US Senate.

So the Arab governments can only tolerate so much for so long.

Rachel: why would they have green-lit something like this/

Engel: they don’t support, ah, Hamas. They preferred the Fatah government, the Palestinian Authority which rules the West Bank. If you look at the map which you’ve, eh, provided me again, I’m so sorry, love, there’s Hamas government there, and then, in the West Bank, you have the Palestinian Authority. So two governments, two rival states, in a state that isn’t even connected to itself [and whose fault is that? Surely not the Palestinians.’] and the moderate Arab states, the US allies, the Sunni states in general, support the government in the West Bank and not Hamas. Hamas is really close friends, have turned out to be Iran and Hezbollah and some friends in Syria, and that’s about it.

Again: Vanity Fair last April ran an article by David Rose,” The Gaza Bombshell,” that reveals George Bush and Elliot Abrams’s successful plot to incite civil war between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza. Not very pretty tidbits along the way are revelations of Fatah’s corruption and violence against the Palestinian people in Gaza via a strongman named Mohammad Dahlan. But Rachel or her producers can read the article itself, available online. Not a pretty picture, but showing that the strategy here is no different from, say, the US overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mossadegh, in the early 1950s, or similar “regime-changes” from leadership democratically elected by the people to puppet governments receptive to US corporate interests.

What the US wants in the regions it controls is “good little natives” and compliant client regimes that will allow the Unocals of the world to exploit their national resources. What the US and Israel do not want are restless natives who demand to own the land, to exploit it themselves – as was proved when Nasser tried to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956 and Israel invaded (Eisenhower stopped him, of course, but no other President has been so bold since then.)

Rachel: So the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, which as we can see on the map is a much larger territory, than the Gaza strip, they are not on, uh, Hamas’s side. [MAP AGAIN]

Engel: They were shooting , yesterday, at demonstrators, Palestinians, who were coming out in support of Hamas.

Yes, Engel, dear, they are shooting. That’s what the US depends on its puppets to do. Think Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, or the Contras in Central America, or the bloody successor to Indonesia’s democratically elected leader overthrown by the CIA in the early 1950s, Suharto, whose forces murdered 100,000 people making the rivers run red with their blood.

Rachel: Are we in a situation here both in the Palestinian territories and in the surrounding governments, where the people want something very different than the leadership?

Engel: Across the Arab world there’s a big disconnect between the. uh, people want and the leadership wants. Unfortunately it is a region where there is a large problem of ignorance, of poverty, of chauvinism, of all the terrible things you have in the, in, in, in the developing world, and a leadership of an elite that is mostly Western educated. So there is a huge discrepancy and that comes out when there’s a time of crisis, like what you have now, when there are millions of people in Egypt, who are horrified and want to act, about what is going on in Gaza, but the leadership in, in Cairo, is in a position where they, they, they don’t want to act.

There is truth to what Engel says. All respect, but we suspect his preference is for those nice, Western-educated leaders as opposed to the poor, down-trodden rabble who’ve always terrified the powerful. But yeah, that’s the basic picture. The Western elite rulers are hated by their populations because they think – ignorant poor chauvinist fools that they are – that their oil is theirs; that their olive trees are theirs; that their farm-land shouldn’t be turned into industrial zones and that they shouldn’t be turned into reserve labor forces to serve the US empire. Maybe they hate their own governments because they know better not because as Richard says “they are ignorant.”

Rachel: Right, and we see these giant demonstrations in Beirut, we had the Yemeni government say that they had a million people turn out demonstrating…

Engel:…You will not see Egyptian F16s flying over Gaza anytime soon nor will you see the Jordanian military invading to, uh, to take off the military pressure.

Too true. They’ve both ‘got it’ on this score. The elites are sort of on the run from their wretched-of-the-earth populations which, as the wretched of the earth often do, rise up and rebel. Witness Iran (we installed the Shah after we overthrew the secular, democratic Mossadegh. Then came the big bad Islamists, supported by the “rabble.” And so on. And so on. And so on, to use Rachel’s terminology.)

Rachel: but we have this situation in the Gaza Strip which is a small area, a very densely populated area, where the Israelis say Hamas is firing rockets, um, under cover of the civilian population, and if there are civilian casualties it’s because Hamas is essentially hiding among the civilian population there,

Uh, Rachel, Gaza is 140 sq miles jammed by 1.5 million people. Hamas is a popular movement and (here we agree with Engel), a people’s representative, a government, not an army. Remember: it was democratically elected by the people. It lives among the people. Hamas are real, living and breathing Gazans even though you and we may wish they were, say, an ideal secular democratic force. They live there with their mothers, fathers, wives, and children. (Israel has not been averse to targeting their leaders in the leaders’ homes and bombing homes, children, wives and all, to smithereens. This took place recently: those of us watching videos and English Al-Jazeera, rather than, say, MSNBC, to get a sense of what the Arab and Muslim worlds see, saw the small bloodied bodies and the rest of the carnage.)

Engel: well Hamas members are civilians, so that distinction, is, it’s not a uniformed army. There are probably, according to US intelligence estimates, 10,000 fighters. And then there’s another 15,000 or so people who belong to the Palestinian Security services. So we’re talking about 20, 25,000 fighting force, 10,000 of which are dedicated directly to Hamas.

But these are people who are from Gaza, I’ve spent a lot of time in Gaza, it’s a densely populated area it’s one of the most densely populated in the area. So if you’re in northern Gaza, most ….have their positions around the edges of Gaza and most of the fighting has been, so far, in this northern portion of the gaza Strip.

Rachel: So looking at the geographic considerations here, um, the political considerations here, what’s already happened, the divides that we know are there, the fact that it’s a hot war there, there is bombing going on right now and there are casualties the casualties are still unfolding, we’ll be looking at a lot more if there’s a ground incursion, Is there any point where it’s possible for there to be a break in the violence, retaliation, revenge, retaliation, violent cycle?

Engel: I think this will be left up to, and a lot of it has to come down to American leadership, and it has to come down to what is now the new American administration to be coming in. And if I were in their position, and I’ve heard grumblings that they are interested in doing this, you might want to dust off that Baker-Hamilton report, the Iraq Study Group report which was criticized at the time because it didn’t call for the surge in Iraq. And a lot of people didn’t agree with the fact that, er, since it was against the surge, people have tried to discredit it. A lot of the rest of that report, ah, I think is, ah, very interesting, and has, ah, some incredible, um, value to it. It talks about a grand bargain in the Middle East. And if you look at the map, you talk about this dangerous geography we have, Gaza is just one of the main contentious points. Then there’s the West Bank, the Golan Heights. It’s mostly about land. And about creating some sort of bargain. And I think that a new administration that goes in with a more pragmatic approach, not trying to conquer and achieve peace through ideology, through spreading democracy, but through looking at the actual real estate that needs to be swapped…the aggrieved populaces that need to be addressed, I think there is a chance to start a new approach, and eliminating as a direct threat Hamas and its missiles from the Gaza Strip, in an odd way could end up helping moderates if this operation doesn’t prove to be a terrible bloody massacre.

Yes, well, there’s the rub. When is a “terrible bloody massacre” a massacre? When is it really “terrible?” And When will the international community do something about it?

After a powerful report by CNN chief foreign correspondent Christianne Amanpour about civilians, especially children being killed by the Israeli assault, Rick completely ignores the report and focuses on the usual Israeli talking points. The mantra of Hamas hiding among civilians continues with Rick providing a platform for an IDF special forces soldier to whine about all the extraordinary measures the Israeli army must take to avoid civilian casualties.

One ton bombs dropped on apartment buildings, depleted uranium, phosphorus, and in the case of Lebanon: millions of cluster bombs left strictly for the children and other civilians of Lebanon. And they call it “purity of arms.”

This is probably due to the grief he took for allowing Mustapha Barghouti to challenge another mantra in this massacre “Hamas broke the cease fire by firing missiles into Israeli towns and Israel is defending itself.”

Rick conducted his own investigation.

Israeli army declares ancient city of Hebron a “closed military zone.”