July 24, 2006

Kos' Israel Silence

On the latest war Israel is involved in (The Lebanon War? The Hezbollah War? The 2006 War? We need a name.) I'll give Kos a little slack for only writing one front-page post on it.

I too am flumoxed at Israel and the Arabs. Much of it has to do with the honor-shame calculations involved when dealing with the Arab tribe cultures and have been incorporated into Israeli security thinking. David Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle helped, but I'm far from understanding this pre-rational thinking. The Arab-Israeli conflicts are far different than the cool calculations of the Cold War. If one doesn't have anything valuable to say it's sometimes best to keep silent.

What Dean Barnett's Weekly Standard article shows is those Kossites not as politically astute as Markos Moulitsas see Israel, the strongest democratic republic in the region, as a "spreading plague."

Kos can't control completely what webloggers and commenters write. That's just the nature of the weblog beast. Kossites can be seen as early adopter when it comes to technology and politics. What we're seeing is the slow, steady trend of the GOP gaining American Jewish support because of its strong support for Israel.

"Kos, Hezbollah, and Israel" [via Althouse]

[Added to OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam.]