Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

The world does revolve around the US to some extent, but those American media pundits take it to a whole new level in their imagination.

Putin is not terribly concerned about what some overpaid dumb ass in New York or DC would think of his actions.  In case this is news to those Americans who mysteriously think they are smart, he is a Russian politician, and his primary concern is Russia and Russians.  Now he depends on the votes and support from the Russian silent majority who tend to latch onto Russian chauvinism to forget how miserable their actual life is, and therefore has to maintain the pretense that he is fighting for all Russians anywhere in the world, even though he wouldn't - he would easily throw the Russian rebels in Ukraine under the bus if that's what it takes to keep Russia (and himself) reliably dominant in the geopolitical game.  It's not easy to keep the balance, and all the international affairs come into it in that preexisting context.

One of the biggest problems is that those Americans talk as if Russia = Putin, and Russian people and domestic politics don't exist.  And it's not just with Russia.  They display that tendency with virtually any country/region in the world.  Somehow it's always mostly about America, and everyone in the world is supposed to be obsessed every morning with what Obama might think of them. 

I've already resigned myself to the realization that it's an incurable disease, though.  I'm not bashing "America", as ordinary, normal Americans don't quite think like they do, but I guess that's what living in the self-sustaining ego bubble of the D.C./NY media world does to you.  Basically, the higher up on the scale you go, the dumber you get.  Their mind will forever live in that weird Disney Land until the kingdom comes.

[miscmisc]

I'm still (pleasantly) amazed at the fact that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book written by French economist Thomas Piketty, has shot up to the top of the best seller list and remained there for week after week.  It's a thick, thick book on wealth inequality (you'd be a fool to try to read it on Kindle or such).  Its conclusion, in a nutshell, is that the inequality has been widening since the 1980s, and at this pace, we are likely to go back to the wonderful 19th-century economic caste system soon enough.

You do need to have some knowledge on statistical techniques and basic economic theories in order to understand the arguments made by the author, but it's selling like particularly delicious hotcakes.  If you allow me to be over-dramatic, it should remind you of another book with a similar name - Das Kapital, by Karl Marx.  It was and still is one of the hardest books to understand, but it dwarfed the Bible in terms of sales back in the 19th century.

Of course, it's a little silly to compare Capital to that behemoth of a book.  These are totally different books in terms of scale and weight.  Das Kapital was a much, much, much hotter best seller book, too, of course.  But it's hard to ignore the sign of a certain Zeitgeist.  Das Kapital became a best seller largely because of the actual economic conditions of that time, and the Zeitgeist that they created.  And that's what Capital touched in our time, apparently.

Piketty has been on this issue for well over a decade, publishing numerous papers in academia, which has led to this magnum opus.  And the reactions have turned out to be way more than he had hoped for, mostly positive.

The word "inequality" is pretty much an offensive curse word for the wealthy.  So any time anyone brings up this issue, you must expect them to try fiercely to destroy it.  Books like Capital are like Martians invading this planet as far as they are concerned.  Or a Hiroshima, a Holocaust, you name it.

But strangely enough, the usual suspects - the right-wing economists, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc. - were largely silent for a while.  Then, the Financial Times, usually the most "left" of those economic/financial publications, decided to take a bite, publishing articles to denounce the book as editor Chris Giles claimed that his team had found "serious errors" and even data manipulations in it.

It goes without saying that those two-cent "economic experts" in journalism only made a fool of themselves.  As Paul Krugman put it, Giles "tried to compare apples and oranges, and the result was a lemon."

The negative campaign won't stop regardless.  It's a Holocaust time for the wealthy, and they will try to resort to anything to discredit this astonishing best seller book.  They will throw all the same old nonsense arguments at the wall, and as long as a few of them appear to some gullible free-market types to stick, it's good for them.

But it won't easily change the Zeitgeist.  The invisible force coming from underneath is too powerful.  Money can't subdue it.  Ordinary people are onto it.  They are onto the fact that something is deeply, deeply wrong with today's global economy.  They might not start communist uprising or any such thing in the foreseeable future, but the narrative is changing.  This book would've never sold like this if it had been published a decade or so ago, and certainly not in the '90s, where people actually bought en masse such mindbogglingly stupid "economic" books as The Lexus and the Olive Tree, written by none other than Tom Friedman, the "Michael Jordan of wrong" as John Dolan put it.  Holy shit, that was a stupid decade.

I don't know if this new mood is the sign of the beginning of dismantling neoliberalism.  But one can only hope.


Krugman:

OK, I don’t know what Giles thought he was doing — but I do know what he was actually doing, and it’s the same old same old. Ever since it became obvious that inequality was rising — way back in the 1980s — there has been a fairly substantial industry on the right of inequality denial. This denial didn’t rely on any one argument, nor did it involve consistent objections. Instead, it involved throwing many different arguments against the wall, hoping that something would stick. Inequality isn’t rising; it is rising, but it’s offset by social mobility; it’s cancelled by greater aid to the poor (which we’re trying to destroy, but never mind that); anyway, inequality is good. All these arguments have been made at the same time; none of them ever gets abandoned in the face of evidence — they just keep coming back.

Look at my old article from 1992: every single bogus argument I identified there is still being made today. And we know perfectly well why: it’s all about defending the 1 percent from the threat of higher taxes and other actions that might limit top incomes.

[miscmisc]

To be perfectly honest, I have more than a few problems with Piketty's arguments (and I say that even though I haven't nearly finished the book yet).  In a nutshell, I don't think he goes far enough.  I think he's still kind of caught in the dominant narrative of the last few decades.  I guess I've gone far too left over these years to fully accept mainstream economic thinking (there is nothing even remotely radical about Piketty's arguments and theories).  I have the same kind of frustration toward the book as the one that I have toward Paul Krugman, for example.  They just don't go far enough.

But few will actually read the book anyway.  The most important thing is the simple message, as Joseph Goebbels said, and the book has got it. 

[miscmisc]

Jeez, the inaugural party for the new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was full of the same old oligarchs who flourished under Yanukovych.  They may have chopped the head (Yanukovych) off, but the rest of the body remains alive and well, under the new head.

Whenever I see those ex-Soviet/Eastern European oligarchs, I remember a high-class Romanian prostitute, who had entertained that sort of men a number of times, calling them "peasant swines".  She told me how incredibly philistine, shallow, boring and generally repulsive in bed they tended to be.  "They aren't evil, but worse.  I almost wish they were actually evil," said she.

But then, we are all Ukrainian one way or another.  It's a stupid world that we live in.

[miscmisc]

So, Mosul, the second biggest city in Iraq, has been overrun by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham).  The Iraqi military simply fled the city after little fighting, seeing no chance to push back the Islamist force.  That country is now in an advanced state of civil/sectarian war.

And what are the Americans doing?  Well, of course, frantic PR campaign for damage control, using the media like their magic hat, trying to come up with all kinds of excuses for this colossal clusterfuck that they largely created by themselves.

Dexter Filkins @ New Yorker, supposedly one of the most "balanced" and "fair" journalists who has covered Iraq (for the sole reason that he argued that America's Iraq business wasn't going particularly well - Duh! x 10,000), effectively says that it's all Maliki's fault, and that America tried hard to stop this.

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/iraq-extremists-mosul-american-invasion-legacy.html?mobify=0

At first, they failed, and the civil war began in earnest in 2006. It took three years and hundreds of lives, but the American military succeeded in tamping down Iraq’s sectarian furies, not just with violence but also by forcing Maliki to accommodate Sunni demands. Time and again, American commanders have told me, they stepped in front of Maliki to stop him from acting brutally and arbitrarily toward Iraq’s Sunni minority. Then the Americans left, removing the last restraints on Maliki’s sectarian and authoritarian tendencies.

Yup, the US government, who described the increasing cooperation between Sunni and Shia "worrisome" not so long ago, "tried hard to stop this," all right.

It's so reassuring that "American commanders have told" him so. Obviously that's all you need.  I tell you that I'm the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte trying to conquer Europe once again.  Believe it.

Seriously, the commanders tell the embedded "journalists", who are under the military protection 24/7 for their "reporting", all kinds of things.  They know those "journalists" are their bitches.

Jeez.  Vietnam War all over again.  Everything that the US military and MSM says and proposes regarding Iraq (and Ukraine/Russia, for that matter) sounds like a carbon copy of what the cold war warriors said back in the 60/70s about Vietnam.

We've witnessed neocons' grand ideas crumble in the face of reality one after another, with literally millions of casualties in the process, for years and years now.  The cold war guys back in the days at least had a real, tough opposition in the Soviet Union.  Yes, its threat was exaggerated, but its potency was also real.

But our contemporary (mostly keyboard) warriors, the neocons, have no such thing.  All they've got is pure phantom enemies borne out of their own pathology/reflections, and what's worse, the damage that their delusion has done to the world is creating a REAL force to destabilize the world.

I don't know why we still allow those neocons, by far the biggest threat to our world, to keep their basic human rights even.

[miscmisc]

Very, very, very good article that touches on the Vietnam syndrome that I've described:

my.firedoglake.com/barryeisler/2014/06/13/iraq-vietnam-and-why-us-foreign-policy-elites-wont-stfu-2/

[miscmisc]

Interesting article @ NYT about three tanks that the Kiev government claims crossed the border from Russia.

www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/world/europe/ukraine-claims-full-control-of-port-city-of-mariupol.html?hp

The US State department endorses that Kiev claim:

The State Department said Friday that Russia had sent tanks and other heavy weapons to separatists in Ukraine, supporting accusations Thursday by the Ukrainian government.

A convoy of three T-64 tanks, several BM-21 multiple rocket launchers and other military vehicles crossed the border near the Ukrainian town of Snizhne, State Department officials said. The Ukrainian Army reported Friday that it had destroyed two of the tanks and several other vehicles in the convoy.

“This is unacceptable,” said Marie Harf, the deputy State Department spokeswoman. “A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs.”

The T-64 is an obsolescent tank no longer in active use by Russian forces, but still stored in southwest Russia.

“Russia will claim these tanks were taken from Ukrainian forces, but no Ukrainian tank units have been operating in that area,” the State Department said Friday. “We are confident that these tanks came from Russia.”

First of all, "no Ukrainian tank units have been operating in that area" is a blatant lie.  Too bad we have the internet today.  Pics of Ukrainian tanks on active duty in the very area are all over the place.

And judging from the footage of the allegedly Russian tanks, they look to me like T-64 BV's, the upgraded version of the old Soviet T-64, built exclusively in Kharkiv, Ukraine. 

Russia scrapped all of its T-64s a while ago (replaced by T-72s), while the upgraded version of them, BV's, are still active in Ukraine.

I'd like to see the proof that there are some "still stored in southwest Russia".  Exactly where?  And even if there are, they can't be BV's.  BV's are pretty much exclusively Ukrainian.

And there was news from Lugansk a few weeks ago that the rebels captured some weapons and equipment after a clash with the Ukrainian military, including tanks.

So, the point is: they aren't even trying.  And by "they", I mean the State Department and its clients in Kiev.

Not everyone is a history/military buff (if you have no knowledge on military/warfare, you are not much of a history nerd) like me, and the elites in the mainstream media are obviously too busy to bother to do such advanced things as, you know, checking and researching and stuff like that.  But I wish those liars tried a bit harder when they lie.

It's pretty clear to me that the US, Kiev and part of the EU desperately want Russia to get openly/officially militarily involved in Eastern/Southern Ukraine so as to officially paint Russia as The Enemy Of The Democratic World.  I doubt Putin is foolish enough to get caught in such a clear trap.

[miscmisc]

Here's a bloody good article about... well, it's hard to sum up what it's about.  But the title should be interesting enough.

Jihad vs. World Cup
pando.com/2014/06/25/the-war-nerd-world-cup-vs-jihad/

Ever since I "moved" to Europe, I've had a number of opportunities to talk to European Islamophobes.  Whenever I challenged their views, they would go, "Oh, you wouldn't get it, 'cause you grew up in a country with few Muslims around you (unlike we)."  Well, I may have, and I do admit that I've never lived in a Muslim-majority country either.  But one thing that I can say about myself is that I have a very reliable BS detector inside my head.  And it beeped very, very loudly whenever I heard their descriptions of "Muslims".

I suppose that it's not that they are lying.  Many of them seem to genuinely believe that their "culture" will be taken over by the alien one.  A vicious, alien one.  Any minute, unless they Act Now.  They would throw verses from Qur'an at me to prove how sinister and fundamentally irreconcilable that culture is. 

I was always tempted to quote from the Bible back at them to "prove" how "fundamentally irreconcilable" their religion is too.  But no one seems to read scripture nowadays.  One thing that I've learned in my life is that Christians don't read the Bible.  For a good reason, actually.

The point is that most people bend their belief system to enjoy their life or stay out of unnecessary trouble in their communities.  Even those who think of themselves as very religious routinely have to put the literal messages of the belief system aside, whether they admit it or not.  Otherwise, all of us would be living among the Amish. 

Islam may be a slightly stricter religion than many others, but having those Jihad-minded types represent the culture is an absurdity of the highest order.   Come to think of it, what the Muslim Jihadis tend to describe as the "decadent Western culture" doesn't sound quite like the actual one, either.  And interestingly, disproportionately many of the Jihadis did grow up in the "Western" culture.  That sort of a simplified world view can be very attractive to the unhappy, alienated (and perhaps discriminated) youth growing up in a rich country (or a rich, "Western" part of their country) after all.  That doesn't make their view toward the "Western" culture any more authentic.  As a famous philosopher once said, you make your own reality from the things around you, and your room is bound to be different from your roommate's even though they are physically the same room.

Basically, those Islamophobes and Jihadis are playing the same game.  That happens when they share the same problem.  And that problem, to me, is mostly personal, existential, and stupid.  Has very little to do with "religion" or "culture" in actuality.  Some of them may only need to get laid.

I've met many different people, in many different places, and from my personal experience, religion or "culture" is not the first thing that shapes who they are, no matter what they think of themselves.  The #1 factor, instead, is always the social class where they belong.  The only "irreconcilable" - albeit probably not "fundamentally" so - culture that I have encountered is the one of the super wealthy.  I felt a bit like I was talking to aliens in terms of sensibilities.

For that reason, and perhaps for that reason alone, I think of myself as a bit of a social Marxist.

And of course, those Jihadis will never succeed as long as they are naive enough to go against football, a religion that they simply cannot beat even if they become powerful enough to retake Jerusalem.  I may be from a country where football is not even the #1 sport, but one thing I can say about myself is that I don't quite live in my own imagination to the exclusion of the actual reality, unlike those people.  I still remember the first thing that came out of an Afghan guy's month when asked about the Taliban rule - "They banned everything - like football."

[miscmisc]

Oh, and here's another one, though it's not a good article, but good news (for me anyway).

Secret Recording Reveals Polish Foreign Minister Thinks US Alliance Is ‘Worthless,’ ‘Bullshit’
news.firedoglake.com/2014/06/23/secret-recording-reveals-polish-foreign-minister-thinks-us-alliance-is-worthless-bullshit/

“The Polish-American alliance is not worth anything. It’s even damaging, because it creates a false sense of security in Poland,” Sikorski allegedly said.

“Complete bullshit,” the tape purportedly records Sikorski as saying. “We will get a conflict with both Russians and Germans, and we’re going to think that everything is great, because we gave the Americans a blowjob. Suckers. Total suckers.”

Yeah, Radoslaw Sikorski, the husband of that neocon idiot Anne Applebaum.

This should prove that I was right - contrary to what the Reuters journalist said ("Poland is now a major player in the EU, backed firmly by Germany's trust!"), the Germans only tolerated Sikorski's neocon-ish Poland, and now deeply regret that they gave him such a prime role.

I hope that Poland and the Baltic countries will gain something slightly better than a lousy T-shirt from allying so slavishly with the American neocons.

[Jofeljoh!]

Ann Coulter is a cunt: www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/26/ann-coulter-soccer_n_5534494.html

but since it's Ann Coulter I don't know if it's worth a rant or just 'oh, there's some more bullshit ramblings of that moron.'

[miscmisc]

Soccer = European = socialism = anti-America
Soccer = Latin American = Hugo Chavez (never mind baseball is huge in Venezuela) = anti-America
Soccer = by far the biggest sport in the Muslim world = anti-America

Any way you try to see it, soccer = very bad, of course.  What's worse, even some of the US Nat players, like Jarmaine Jones and Fabian Johnson, who were born and raised in Germany, speak English in some weird Euro-fag accent!  Not real 'muricans!  Good God, no real 'murican has a name like "Fabian" for God's sake!  Can't possibly represent our great nation, can they!?

Coulter is a professional troll, to the point where you might even suspect that she is a liberal mole planted in the conservative pundit world.  She sold all the human decency for her "profession" a long time ago.  It's been so long that I think she no longer loses even a second of sleep over all the horrible, inhuman things that she says.  She's a real pro unlike the likes of Laura Ingraham, who still try to pretend that they aren't circus freaks.

Pretty much all the contrarian misfits who started their "careers" at the conservative college publications modeled after William F. Buckley Jr's National Review, like Dartmouth Review (Dinesh D'Souza, Laura Ingraham, etc.), Cornell Review (Ann Coulter, etc.) are freaks.  Not to invoke Churchill's misquoted words - "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brain." - as I'm an "old Liberal", but there is something wrong with you if you dedicate so much of your energy to conservative thinking when you are around the college age.

But at least Coulter makes it very clear that she trolls for her living.

Having someone like her mention it in such a thoroughly negative way is a positive for the subject, actually.  It's pretty much reverse PR.

[miscmisc]

Israel is flaring up again, and it seems that people, including many non-Israeli Jews, are upset by the scenes of so many Israelis acting like total racist bigots - or "Nazis", if you will.

But what's really upsetting is that they are upset now.  Quite a few people, including me, have been warning them about the sharp rightward shift in the Israeli society over the past few decades.  You could've felt it even in Tel Aviv, by far the most liberal, "Western" place in the country.  They simply didn't listen to us.  They were in denial.

Racism/discrimination in Israel always had two layers: 1) Jews against Palestinians and 2) the Ashkenazi (= "European") Jews against the Mizrahi (= "Asian/North African") Jews, with the Ethiopian "black" Jews even further down the list.  The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi division has been somewhat blurred due to mixed marriages over the decades, which is a good thing, but it's still there.  Having parents originally from, say, Iraq is still a negative factor if you are an Israeli Jew.  The Mizrahi remain poorer, more likely to be unemployed than their Ashkenazi counterparts (the Israeli economy is a neoliberal hell where ordinary young people, even Ashkenazi kids, usually work for absolute peanuts), and the settlers who live in the cheap housing in the illegally occupied territories are overwhelmingly Mizrahi, too.

And it should be no surprise that the most hardline anti-Arab racist element in the Israeli society today are not the most powerful and wealthy group that is the Ashkenazi, but indeed the poorer, discriminated Mizrahi, even though many of them are culturally a lot closer to Arabs than they are to the Ashkenazi Jews' Yiddish culture.  Their parents/grand-parents were Arabic-speaking people from the Arab world, after all.

In other words, the "second-class" Mizrahi are the political cannon fodder in the right-wing Jewish crusade against Arabs.  That's usually how a right-wing movement works anywhere in the world - the frustrated group looking for the weaker to release their frustration over; the most existentially insecure group clinging desperately to the fiction of ethnic unity, securing the simplistic construct of "Us vs. Them".

And they have been actually winning the hearts and minds of many Ashkenazi kids as well.

This is truly a logical consequence of zionism, an Ashkenazi project from the beginning.  The Jewish State, as defined by the zionists, require the citizens of being racist against Arabs, no matter how hard they denied/sugar-coated that, and the Mizrahi have been only faithful to that principle.  That fact is now out in the open.

Some Ashkenazi elites may be secretly scared of the fascist tendencies of their youth population.  But they are the product of the Israeli education.  And those yesterday's elites are also too scared to voice their concern, hence "secretly", because being labeled as "leftist" in Israel today is akin to being labeled as traitor.  Even the socialists are tongue-tied.  But they are certainly responsible for creating this culture.  I wonder who in their right mind could deny that the current state of the Israeli society is basically apartheid.  They had it coming, and the political power is now firmly in the hands of the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing Ashkenazi who keep inciting the population to violently complete the zionist project - that is, total ethnic cleansing to create a pure Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world while grabbing as much land as possible.

I personally think that the situation is hopeless.  It won't end well.

[miscmisc]

ABC News shows the images of Palestinian victims in Gaza bombed out of their homes, and called them Israelis "trying to salvage what they can".



Now, I don't want to believe that ABC has stooped so low that they now think they can get away with such a stupid, childish lie, so let's say it was just a mistake.  But even if that's the case, the question is why they made such a stupid mistake.  And I think the answer is clear: they got the narrative before reporting anything, and did a lousy job of getting all the stuff fit into it.  And that narrative is that Hamas is sending gazillions of missiles into Israel from Gaza, threatening the lives of thousands of Israelis.  I'm sure that they wouldn't mind some viewers erroneously thinking that Israel is only the victim, and Hamas is the irrational aggressor there.  But even if most of the viewers know better and think that it's just a conflict between two opposing sides, there is still this assumption that they pose roughly the same amount of threat to each other.

And that's totally untrue.  The conflict between Israel and Hamas makes Brazil vs. Germany look like the most evenly-contested game in the world.  If it was a football game, the scoreline would be something ridiculous like 112 - 1 in favor of Israel.  Always.  And the majority of those "112" are civilian deaths.

There's a certain amount of schizophrenia among the Israeli elites when it comes to their military capabilities.  On one hand, they brag endlessly about how mighty and awesome their military is, and on the other hand always make sure to play up how threatening their foe is.  The latter is to cover up how overkill their reactions always are and how it practically becomes one-sided bullying in the end, and more importantly, the lack of any sort of a plan for peace.  It almost seems as if they are not interested in peace at all.

So, the US mainstream media basically plays along the narrative convenient for the Israeli regime.  Hamas sending missiles into Israel proper is somehow as/even more Shocking! Scary! as/than the IDF bombing Gaza back into the stone age, claiming scores of civilian lives.

Most people may be uninformed on this kind of matters, but I don't know for how long this can go on.  Many, many people are onto the bias and deception now.

This kind of shit is exactly what plants the seeds of antisemitism in the minds of many who wouldn't have otherwise cared about it one way or another.  I can't blame them for thinking that Jews control all the media and crap like that, because the media themselves indeed pour gasoline into the fire with shit like this.  I sometimes even suspect that the media elites are on a long-term conspiracy to bring back old-fashioned antisemitism for real, in this roundabout way.

And that kind of deep-seated mistrust and paranoia among many people, even outside their "enemies", is far deadlier for Jewish people than the missiles from Gaza in the long run.

[gols]

Great posts miscmisc. I actually didn't know about the different levels of Israeli society - so yet again I have learned something new from this thread!

[miscmisc]

Israel is a country that appears on international news so often, yet few people know much about it.  Even many of the Jewish people in the US (and Europe) often display utter ignorance.  I've been there a couple of times because I have a few Israeli friends, and there are things about the country that you simply cannot understand unless you actually visit and stay there for a while (I ended up staying there for a long time by accident when I was there for the second time).  Well, that's usually the case with most countries in the world, I suppose, but Israel is really a unique case in that the media have been absolutely disastrous when it comes to reporting the reality over there.

I criticize Israel a lot, but Tel Aviv is one of my favorite places in the world.  It's a great country in many ways, with so many friendly people (and hot, hot, girls).  But it's a sand castle held together at the expense of Palestinians and many others.  Tel Aviv is a great place in the same way Calcutta was back in the days of Raj.

Unlike the British imperialists, most Jewish Israelis have nowhere else to go. They would have to stay there no matter what.  The Arabs will have to accept that fact, too, no matter what.  However naive and wishy-washy this may sound, we must find a way for them to peacefully co-exist.  But unfortunately the Israelis have burnt so many bridges down over the decades.  Yes, I think Israel did the burning much more than the Palestinians did.  It's very clear to me.  They behaved far too often like arrogant colonialists.  The Six Day War got them really carried away.  It was a great military success, but has proven to be a political disaster in the long run.

They have few real friends left now.  Sure, one of them is the US of A, but if they think that they can keep the US tied to their back forever, they are deluded beyond hope.  Even many, if not most of, Jewish Americans have turned against them now, because the way Israel behaves and is today goes directly against their traditional Jewish American liberal values, which have a lot to do with the memory of the Holocaust, and drove them to support the Civil Rights movement back in the '60s for example.  Seriously, you must ask yourself why they would ever honestly support the de-facto apartheid system installed in Israel today, now that they understand the reality on the ground.  Calling them "self-hating Jews" or "antisemitic Jews" (huh?) won't stop them.  It's futile.  It should be really, really alarming that their biggest defenders in America today are the neocons and Christian fundamentalist bigots (and those sad Islamophobes in Europe).  They may not be losing the PR war yet, but certainly not winning it either.  With such allies, the prospect of gaining much support from the majority of (sane) people is severely limited.

They must find their own initiatives to find peace, but it's absolutely nowhere to be seen.  Not even a hint of that on the horizon.  With the racism and mutual hatred escalated to such a degree, I'm very pessimistic.  Even my friend's mother, a great lady, has turned against Arabs and Muslims now.  She used to be much more liberal and calm.  It's ironic and dangerous that the mainstream-ization of bigotry and racism and the emergence of the most right-wing government in the history of Israel occurred during the relatively peaceful time where there weren't many incidents of terrorist attacks, let alone an actual war.

There's no reason to be optimistic, even though I don't say so in public.