Donna,
You don't have to be a journalist to be loved.
John Steinbeck was a "marked man" in my area when he wrote Grapes of Wrath.
Now they have museums in his name.
Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) was well loved in the Midwest.
Jailings, beatings and death have always been following the footsteps of people who would publicize the problems of society... Because there are people who profit handsomely from those problems, IMHO... quite intentionally.
Ya' know... when I typed that note I almost used the name "Michael", but I don't know. I checked with www.namebase.org and it finds Michael Parenti, but he doesn't connect to Christian Parenti... However, Christian Parenti's name turns up blank on a namebase search, so It's still "I don't know".
In regard to Israel, the whole situation is so emotionally charged that it's impossible to make any sense of it. The conspiracy minded part of me says that somehow, that "emotional charging" is on purpose.
My take: The Jews that repatriated to Israel were expecting the "land of milk and honey", but the global powers that helped them achieve it were thinking"client state".
It is a very difficult situation in a number of ways.
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, NY in the '60s, the Jews emigrating and settling in my neighborhood, near Brighton Beach, with it's Eastern European/Russian Jewish community, were mostly from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon... etc. Many of their families had lived in that area of the world for centuries.
They got caught in the crossfire. The Arabs developed a reason to mistrust them (in a political, not religious, context), and the Western European Jews that were emigrating treated them like second class citizens... or worse... Land was expropriated, and other laws created a "caste" system that is still very much existent within Israeli society.
I think initially the European Jews had an ethnic and cultural version of "victim syndrome"... that should be expected.
But now... in 2005, I believe they are trying to play a guilt trip on the world. Unfortunately, over time, they've developed quite a list of atrocities committed of their own, and much of the world has lost sympathy. That doesn't mean that anyone has forgotten about Aushwitz and Belsen-Bergen, or how that might have come to pass, although that's the rallying cry whenever anyone speaks badly of their policies.
As a nation... If they expect to remain a nation, it's time to grow up, stop blaming past circumstances, or current critics, for their problems, and learn to cooperate with their neighbors, whose animosity has been well earned over the last 80<?> years.
The Orthodox groups need to add Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth) to the required reading list in schul.
As I was saying in a post the other day about the replacement of indigenous Iraqis with western world Iraqis... that is essentially what has happened in Israel.
I think it is a model of what we are trying to accomplish in Iraq, which is where the Jew/neocon thing kind of comes together with American foreign policy.
A slow culturally inexorable change towards the westernization of Iraqi society. I call it a form of "ethnic cleansing", although I'm not sure that is technically correct terminology.
Leigh
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