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Morris Dancing

   It wasn't until today that I saw Benny Morris' piece in the Atlantic that Artapraiser posted.  There are distortions in Morris' take on the Arab-Israeli conflict that I'd like to address.

Reflections--Somewhat Belated--on Israel's 70th Anniversary

The debate about the events in Israel/Palestine in 1948 will be going on at least until there is an Arab-Israeli peace, and maybe longer than that.  But I think humane, reasonable people who know the history will agree that what Jews did to Arabs in 1948 was very bad indeed. There were about a dozen massacres, many expulsions, and 700,000 people exiled and dispossessed.(If you need sources, check Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem and Walid Khalidi's All That Remains).

The Search for Black Confederate Soldiers part II

Okay, I've got some stuff that seems fairly credible to me, from Ervin L. Jordan Jr's Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia. I'll refrain from mentioning anecdotal evidence, and stick to stuff for which Jordan cites documentation, either Confederate Official Records or newspaper articles published either during the war or soon after.

The Search for Black Confederate Soldiers

 I've only just started looking in earnest for evidence of African-American soldiers in the Confederate army. William Richter(The A to Z of the Civil War and Reconstruction) claims that they were all over the place, but he cites no sources, so forget him.

Ichabod

I used to admire Noam Chomsky. Since 9/11 he has been a douche. I'm going to try to demonstrate this, using Chomsky's commentary on the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Chomsky's theme, as you might expect, is that while the Paris killings were bad, the West does worse, and dash it all, nobody talks about these other crimes.

Chomsky starts out by equating the Charlie Hebdo murders with the Nato air strike on a Serbian television station during the Kosovo War. Both were attacks on journalists.

I Resolve the Middle East Crisis and Win the Nobel Peace Prize

  Now that Mr. Netanyahu has(indefensibly, I think) pulled out of the peace talks, we are back to square one on the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Although we may not know how to get to a peace settlement, many of us have a clear idea of what a just settlement would look like. So to stimulate a little discussion, I will humbly present an outline of what I think would be the most practical terms on which the sixty-six year old feud could be settled--even though nobody asked me.

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