The idiotic Christian-right and hardcore Zionst crowd in the U.S is almost as culpable for this state of affairs as the Israeli Right is, imo.

The pathway to peace lies in addressing each of them with an honest and forthright effort.

After reading Don from Hawaii's rational analysis of the situation in Israel/Palestine, I was reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book The March of Folly.

Tuchman explores  "one of the most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests".

There is no doubt in my mind that forcing people from  their homes and collective punishment is counterproductive.  It will destabilize Palestinian society further which will only increase support for terrorist groups like Hamas.

His beef against Democrats is that theirstatements of grief and astonishment do not specifically admonish the Israeli government to use restraint in its response to the attacks.

Mr. Plitnick seems to be taking a leap in equating the use of the word "unprovoked" in condemnation of this terroristic act against civilians in pursuit of political aims with providing license for a disproportionate or unlawful response by Israel.

KeysDan: "It has been said that the first casualty of war is the truth.  The fog of war can be that--a lack of clarity or it can be a warring strategy."

Wartime and its attendant clampdown / blackout of information bring uncertainty, particularly to those who reside at or near the front lines, where imaginations and fear can run wild. The dissemination of misinformation certainly doesn't help matters any.

I'm reminded of a not-so-amusing home front story from the Second World War, popularly known today as "The Battle of Los Angeles" and "The Great Los Angeles Air Raid."

The incident in question took place on the night of February 24-25, 1942, less than three months after the Japanese Navy's surprise attack on Hawaii, and only one day after the Japanese submarine I-117 surfaced off Santa Barbara, CA to shell the Ellwood oil field at Goleta with its deck guns. Further, 14 U.S. merchant ships had been attacked by Japanese submarines off the California coast between Dec. 7, 1941 and Feb. 24, 1942, with five of them sunk.

So, quite understandably, residents along the Southern California coast were on considerable edge, which approached paranoia since nobody really knew at the time where the main Japanese battle fleet might be. (That fleet was actually heading into the Indian Ocean to raid the British naval base at Colombo, Ceylon, known today as Sri Lanka.) Rumors of an imminent Japanese military invasion of California were rampant throughout local communities.

On the afternoon of February 24, the Office of Naval Intelligence issued a public warning that a Japanese attack on California could be expected within the next ten hours. What basis that office had for issuing that warning has never been determined.

Later that evening, nervous citizens began to call in reports of flares and blinking lights in the vicinity of the region's many defense plants. It was enough to prompt local military officials to call an official alert at 7:18 p.m., which was later lifted three hours later.

But at about 2:20 a.m. in the early morning hours of February 25, air raid sirens suddenly began wailing throughout Los Angeles County, an immediate regional blackout was ordered and thousands of air raid wardens in the L.A. area (including my grandmother and my then 17-year-old uncle) were summoned to their posts.

At 3:15 a.m., a jittery crew of soldiers from the Army's Coast Artillery, who were manning a couple anti-aircraft batteries at Fort MacArthur near Palos Verdes, heard what they thought were enemy aircraft approaching. It was later determined that what they heard were two U.S. Coast Guard cutters towing barrage balloons into position just off L.A. / Long Beach Harbor in the dark.

Those soldiers opened fire toward the general direction of the noise. Units manning other nearby coastal batteries took their cue from the anti-aircraft fire and likewise began to fire indiscriminately into the night sky. Very quickly, other coastal batteries in their immediate vicinity began to do the same. A chain reaction occurred as coastal batteries up and down the SoCal coast from Dana Point to Pacific Palisades, each one prompted by neighboring batteries, opened fire into the black of night against an approaching imaginary enemy.

The anti-aircraft fire continued nonstop over L.A. for over an hour, with several thousand shells being fired in all. Several buildings were damaged in the Torrance area when shellfire hit them because battery artillery crews failed to set the fuses properly before firing.

Citizens panicked, and three were killed in auto accidents resulting from the confusion, while another two died of stress-induced heart attacks. For their part, my mother and her two sisters got out of bed and climbed up onto the roof of their house in Pasadena, CA to watch the barrage, which lit up the night sky.

Local newspapers rushed out special editions the next morning that served only to misinform everyone as to what had actually happened. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, held a press conference in Washington later that same morning to assure everyone that it had all been a false alarm, which of course satisfied practically nobody in SoCal.

Accusations of a cover-up started flying in local newspapers after Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall issued a public statement later than afternoon, which intimated that that the incident might have been caused by enemy agents using commercial airplanes to induce mass panic among the region's two million residents.

U.S. officials only learned after the war from Japanese military records that the Japanese never had any intention to invade California, and the Imperial Navy had never sent aircraft over the state, even on reconnaissance missions.

But for decades afterward, there were many SoCal residents who still insisted that the Japanese had launched an air raid on L.A. in Feb. 1942. Such is the power of rumor and misinformation to embed itself into the public consciousness, particularly in a vacuum of official uncertainly, contradictions and silence.