"If Halper is right that the young outpost residents are useful instruments of the established settlers and the national government, able to advance a plan the government cannot articulate formally, it is also true that the outpost settlers can be politically extreme, unpredictable and difficult to control. Young settlers sometimes claim lands outside the areas the government has slated for Israeli control; this means that the army has to send soldiers to remote and isolated locations, creating what a senior official in the ministry of defense calls a ''military burden.'' And at the most radical outposts, people talk seriously about replacing the democratically elected Israeli government with a Jewish kingdom or a theocracy. After Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer tried to dismantle 30 unauthorized outposts last fall, the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, issued a secret report warning of threats to his life from young settlers. One does not have to look too far to find evidence of this. Yehudit Shish, 18, who is from Jerusalem but boards at a girls' school in Kiryat Arba, a settlement next to Hebron, cheerily offered from the trailer where her dorm is, ''I would love to see Ben-Eliezer dead.'' Her only concern about such an assassination is that ''if he got shot, someone just like him would rise up in his place and the secular people would support him even more.'' (Ben-Eliezer stepped down as defense minister and was voted out as leader of the Labor Party in October.)"
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
Post a Comment