Plan of attack

I can only witness the tragedy of Gaza from the knowledge I have gained from years of historical and foreign affairs reading, from the personal contacts and information that are readily available on the internet, and least significantly from the local evening news programs. That is more than sufficient to provide me with the overall context and the understanding of the language used in order to form a strong idea of what is really happening in Gaza.

Evening news

The tight, absurd parameters of “peace,” as they are drawn by the military model we continue to believe in, make real peace —neither bitter nor temporary — impossible even to imagine. God save us, for instance, from New York Times editorials, which inflict as much damage on civilians as F-16s.

“Israel must defend itself,” the paper intoned a few days into the bombing attack on Gaza that quickly left 350 people dead, expressing regret only that the action was “unlikely to weaken” Hamas. The editorial affected a neutral assessment of the situation that failed to mention either the Israeli occupation of Palestine or the month-and-half-long blockade of Gaza that preceded the bombardment and, among much other deprivation, left the region’s few hospitals drastically undersupplied with medicine, gauze or even space to treat the flood of newly wounded.

Few government employees have more important responsibilities than the federal air traffic controllers whose primary job is to protect the safety of the ever-growing number of air travelers. Yet few federal employees are more badly treated by their government bosses.

The bosses, who run the Federal Aviation Administration – the FAA – have been mistreating the controllers since at least 1981. That’s when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,500 controllers who, seeking to improve their onerous working conditions, struck in violation of the law that prohibits strikes by federal employees.

It’s been downhill ever since for the controllers. The Bush appointees who’ve been running the FAA for the past eight years have adamantly refused to grant controllers even the basic right to bargain collectively for a contract that would guarantee them decent working conditions.

The controllers’ working conditions are so bad that nearly one-fifth of the controllers have quit over the past two years, reducing their number to the lowest level since 1992.

That has left many traffic control towers badly understaffed and has forced

To the Editor: As voters in this Great State of Ohio, we demand the following of each and every newspaper in this state:

1. Inform the readers in a non-partisan nature of allegations of voter fraud.

2. Inform the readers in a non-partisan nature of lawsuits filed by each political party, the reason for those suits, and the outcome of those suits.

3. Inform the readers in a non-partisan nature of the reported number of questionable registrants.

4. Inform the readers in a non-partisan nature of how the Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner is intending to resolve those issues of voter fraud and questionable registrants before the election.

5. In light of the recent Supreme Court decision defending Secretary of State Jennifer Bunner’s decision NOT to turn over state databases to county election boards in order to validate registrants, we demand in a non-partisan nature that you report HOW these 88 counties intend to properly determine the validity of each registrant.

Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six Day War in 1967. And he wrote: "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them."

The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government's stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.

Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned that "the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."