Dave Winer completely misses Glenn Reynolds’ point about the way the Palestinians fight Israel,
Glenn Reynolds asks a poignant question. “What would things be like for Palestinians now, if Israelis or Americans thought like Arabs? They wouldn’t be like anything at all, of course. There wouldn’t be any Palestinians.” Bada-boom.
Of course it’s just as true that there would be no Palestinians if we thought like Nazi Germans or Klan members in Glenn’s home state of Tennessee.
Which misses the point which was that while there are Klan members in Tennessee (and Michigan and California for that matter), those folks don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of influencing American politics. Similarly, even though Israel is under constant attack by terrorists, there is no serious movement in that country to respond in kind. Israel could simply wipe out entire neighborhoods in retaliation for suicide bombings, but instead it usually goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, allow the moral equivalent of the KKK element to dominate. In fact Reynolds himself has pointed to numerous incidents where Arab media outlets and web sites of terrorist groups like Hamas chose to run anti-Semitic commentary from American racists.
Imagine a place where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are regularly reprinted in newspapers and television commentators openly repeat the Jewish blood libel myth.
Welcome to the Middle East.