(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
A kindly reader was both diligent enough to ferret out this lesser virtuoso and possessed of large enough a stock of promethazine to get through a couple dozen of the man's (self-doniminated "The Commander" and shown here exhibiting his many war faces; you can almost make out the faux wood paneling in the furnished basement in which he no doubt lives in the pictures' background) postings (called poepjes in the native tongue of The Commander's progenitors).
The Commander provides his biography for inspection and we accept heartily. He is, it seems, an unemployed dropout, making him far from alone in warblogging circles, and was at some point - he does not give a precise date - promoted from Dungeon Master to full Commander. A lifetime spent shunning real learning and pursuing fantasy behind him, the Commander presumes to tell the people of Palestine what they deserve and why.
In one of his most recent entries, The Commander nearly catches light after working himself into a frenzy over Hosni Mubarak's suggestion that, just maybe, the suicide attacks undertaken against the Israelis have something to do with Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. "Yeah, right. It's all about the occupation; it has nothing at all to do with the fact that the Palestinian militants want to push all the Jews into the sea," he tells us. Perhaps this is what those filthy Arabs want, though it's little more than the pathetic and wholly unrealistic longing of a people dispossessed and repeatedly humiliated.
In the earlier days of the Zionist project, when honest confrontation of reality was both possible and desirable, it was acknowledged by most that if the Arabs wanted to push the Jews into the sea, the Jews wanted to push the Arabs into the desert. Moshe Shertok wrote "We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it..." In all likelihood it is not that The Commander has forgotten this (written in 1914) but that he never knew it to begin with.
Commander, are you even able to see that the Jewish state has been achieved, and that the desire to push the Arabs into the desert has been realized? Israel, despite Ariel Sharon's fear- and warmongering, is in no danger of disappearing as an entity. The Arab fantasy remains precisely that: the indulgence of a beat-down people resigned to squalid concrete hovels that is as pregnant with possibility as those hopes of yours for marriage volunteered in your biography. I put you to such rough usage here because I'm still angered by these words you wrote on a timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state and the cessation of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people: "How's this for a timetable? After two continuous years without any attacks against Israel and I mean none, or when hell freezes over [My italics]." You go, big guy! I always love to see people put their humanity on conspicuous display.
Between your above suggested timetable and your essential instruction to Palestinians seeking the right of return to go fuck themselves, you are asking the Palestinians to surrender completely and share complicity in their furthered humiliation. Have you considered at all what it is you are saying?
