I think you've misread me as a kind of Likudnik. No. I think you come to this conclusion by reading the last sentence only.
My point was similar to yours: someone from outside America bombarded by anti-American propaganda might have more of those illusions shattered in a college town at an academic conference than, say, by visiting an evangelical conference in Springfield, MO.
The point isn't that Israel and the US are good and Iran is bad. It's that when you travel enough, letters like this become almost tautological. There are educated and interesting and informed people everywhere and that may or may not have anything to do with the quality of their government.
Indeed, I bet a visit to Israel would result in the same kind of ruminations along the lines of how can so many quality people support thugs like Bibi and Lieberman.
You could have written the same thing about any number of countries, including the US. People think Americans are ill-educated, violent, and subject to crazy laws and a Christian crypto-theocracy, but if you came here and visitied say, Ann Arbor, South Bend, Davis, Cambridge, MA or any other number of college towns, you might have those preconceptions undermined. You might even find a few winks and nods about a third party president from a cab driver.
But in the end, it doesn't change the fact that lurking in the nearest exurb is a reactionary dominionist tea party member cheering the wars in Iraq and Afganiatan.
Nor does what this guy wrote change the fact of Iran's support for terrorists and their flouting of the IAEA.
Are you saying that the "history of hundreds of years of European conquest and rule of, and emigration to, the Muslim world" was a bad thing? If so, why is what you're saying ironic instead of a case of two wrongs making a right?
It's worse than that. It's not just that they won't marry say, a Jew to a Muslim. It's that they get to say who is a Jew in the first place. This has resulted in—wait for it—the descendants of Holocaust survivors being told by the Chief Rabbinate that they aren't Jewish and so can't be married in Israel to another Jew.
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I think you've misread me as a kind of Likudnik. No. I think you come to this conclusion by reading the last sentence only.
My point was similar to yours: someone from outside America bombarded by anti-American propaganda might have more of those illusions shattered in a college town at an academic conference than, say, by visiting an evangelical conference in Springfield, MO.
The point isn't that Israel and the US are good and Iran is bad. It's that when you travel enough, letters like this become almost tautological. There are educated and interesting and informed people everywhere and that may or may not have anything to do with the quality of their government.
Indeed, I bet a visit to Israel would result in the same kind of ruminations along the lines of how can so many quality people support thugs like Bibi and Lieberman.
You could have written the same thing about any number of countries, including the US. People think Americans are ill-educated, violent, and subject to crazy laws and a Christian crypto-theocracy, but if you came here and visitied say, Ann Arbor, South Bend, Davis, Cambridge, MA or any other number of college towns, you might have those preconceptions undermined. You might even find a few winks and nods about a third party president from a cab driver.
But in the end, it doesn't change the fact that lurking in the nearest exurb is a reactionary dominionist tea party member cheering the wars in Iraq and Afganiatan.
Nor does what this guy wrote change the fact of Iran's support for terrorists and their flouting of the IAEA.
Are you saying that the "history of hundreds of years of European conquest and rule of, and emigration to, the Muslim world" was a bad thing? If so, why is what you're saying ironic instead of a case of two wrongs making a right?
It's worse than that. It's not just that they won't marry say, a Jew to a Muslim. It's that they get to say who is a Jew in the first place. This has resulted in—wait for it—the descendants of Holocaust survivors being told by the Chief Rabbinate that they aren't Jewish and so can't be married in Israel to another Jew.