Richard Silverstein

Mike Huckabee is a rippin’ guitar player fond of Elvis. He’s probably been to Graceland before, but today he’s in Settlerland. Yesterday, he did a gig at the Palestinian equivalent of the Heartbreak Hotel, better known as the Shepherd Hotel, a East Jerusalem historical landmark now owned by American Jewish bingo king and settler financier, Irving Moskowitz. His “gig” was his live FoxNews show which he broadcast from the halls of “liberated” East Jerusalem.

In my blog, we’ve been having a lively debate about the nature of gay life in Israel (see comment thread). It’s terribly sad and ironic that our discussion has been punctuated by this horrible news of a homocidal/homophobic attack on an Israel gay community center in Tel Aviv. A gunman clad entirely in black opened fire with an automatic weapon on a group of gay teenagers who were attending a weekly support group. A boy and girl died on the spot and a third died in hospital.

Hasbara from the Israeli and American media, along with draconian Congressional sanctions legislation are laying the groundwork for either an Israeli or American attack on Iran.

If Tablet Magazine is to be believed, the Jewish world has come a long way baby because the gay porno industry has made the first pornographic film with an all-Israeli/all-Jewish cast.

As you read this, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel just hosted its annual conference in Washington, DC. It’s instructive to see which Jewish “leaders” and organizations have made common cause with this anti-Semitic slimeball.

Just when I think that the IDF and Israel’s far-right religious leadership cannot get any weirder, they surprise me yet again. The IDF distributed to its soldiers a pamphlet endorsed by a far-right pro-settler rabbi and written by the American Orthodox movement. It contained this little bit of Jewish conspiracy theory paranoia:

Today, I’ll review the two more of 30 testimonies in the Breaking the Silence report released earlier this week. The report details egregious violations of the law of war and even IDF regulations by soldiers during the January Gaza war.

Testimony 2 begins with the informant acknowledging that he had no idea what the strategic purpose of his actions in Gaza were. He links this to the ignorance that the Israeli populace as a whole had regarding the goals of the war. And for the first time, a soldier confirms what M.J. Rosenberg claimed to me at the time–that the IDF intended to fully occupy Gaza but later changed its mind:

I’ve just received Breaking the Silence’s new blockbuster report of eyewitness testimonies by IDF veterans of the Gaza war. The Israeli human rights NGO documents IDF activities in the Occupied Territories through engagement with soldiers themselves and taking their testimony of first hand experiences in the field.

Imagine for a moment you’re a general about to embark on a decisive military campaign and your intelligence service secures a copy of your opponent’s entire campaign strategy. You open it and you see his battle plans laid out before you, key forces, weaponry, lines of attack, points of weaknesses, etc.

This is my first post for The Seminal at Firedoglake and I’m glad to be here. I thank Alex Thurston for inviting me to share my perspective on the Israeli-Arab conflict and Muslim-Jewish relations. I’ve written Tikun Olam since 2003. Being a progressive Jewish blogger writing on the subjects I did was a very lonely occupation at the time.