I figured it was more a fan tent type of thing

Surely this is so ironic that it must be a hoax.

"surely"?

you are familiar with hamas, n'est-ce pas?

ps. it's totally blogworthy.

while your statement may be true, i saw this on three blogs prior to yours. second tier blogger!

ditto

Blogging by petition? What a super innovation -- I have a whole list of things I want you to blog about. Where should I send it?

i bet it was fresh when i first told marco to blog it. it took me two emails before he posted it! he's a slo-blo!

So blogworthy that the LA Times wrote an editorial about it!

Yeah, but that in some ways makes in less blogworthy. I was hesitant to blog it *because* it got so much attention. But then I got harangued.

By the way: yes, if you bug and annoy me, I may blog something for you. I can't be bought, but I can be threatened.

Also, I can be bought.

I have one word for you: cheddarvision.net.

Wait, is that even a word? Regardless, it is the best blog in the world featuring a 50lb chunk of English cheddar.

Also, a little consistency would be nice. Can you or can't you be bought?

Perhaps you meant cheddarvision.tv? The one you linked to is a spam site.

I would sell crazymonk.org for $524,287.63.

Or one DVD.

Also, I wonder why jbg isn't pronouncing this story blogworthy as well.

good point ingen. i hadn't thought of that. blog that shit!

when i had my own blog, no one paid attention to it. you idiots seem to like this crazymonk, so i have to blog vicariously through him.

i'm pretty sure a hamas version of mickey mouse spouting anti-semitic rhetoric is super-blogworthy. especially because: how can they tell the difference between an anti-semitic mickey mouse and the real mickey mouse?

.tv, .net... who cares? The greater point is what matters: a block of cheese has its own website. The bar has dropped lower than even I thought possible.

Who's read Maus? Part II's epigram is some quote from a provincial German paper about how Mickey Mouse is a Jew, in the sense of vermin. So, um, yeah: IRONY...

Except:
"David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office, said "there is nothing comic about inciting young generations of Palestinians to hate Israelis.""
-That's also ironic.

I love this line from the NYTimes, which also blogged it:
"Hamas, a relatively radical faction regarded in Israel and the West as a terrorist group, is sharing power in the Palestinian administration with its archrival, the somewhat more moderate Fatah party, and each has its own security force."
"Relatively radical" and "somewhat more moderate." Nice hedge.

Within the same area of interest, this was definitely blog-worthy for the fact that it ran as an editorial in the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bishara3may03,0,2351340.story?...

"When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long lived."

Gotta love rewriting the past. Sir, how exactly did you "escape that fate?" By voluntarily staying in a country you were invited to stay in? By not following a self-righteous, hateful, power-hungry terrorist out into the desert and forming the PLO?

Yeah, that's pretty much how it goes JBG. Nice, someone should give you tenure so that we can finally have the definitive account of how spending the next twenty years under a dehumanizing military administration, followed by another 40 years (with no end in sight) as a (maybe) third-class citizen in a country that purports to be a democracy, all the while living on the land you'd, um, been living on all along, is a privilege. Let me know if you need me to write you a recommendation.

And I wasn't trying to bait you by posting that link, and I'm not gonna follow this up with anything further.

Replying to something controversial with something controversial and then saying "I'm not gonna follow this up with anything further" is kind of a jackass way to end a conversation.

No, it's not, because it's an argument that's more or less been had here before, and I don't want to overrun CM.org with it again (and calling it a 'conversation' is a stretch). I wasn't trying to start it up either- I just thought it was an interesting thing to mention as I commented on the mickey story (it's noteworthy for a mainstream American news outlet to run such an editorial, regardless of your views on the subject matter).

No, it is. If you feel that way then you shouldn't respond at all, or simply respond and then not come back and look for further retorts. Responding with something divisive and then acting like you're too high and mighty to continue the conversation with the rest of us is rude.

I truly don't feel high and mighty, believe me. Nothing fills me with doubt more than discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I probably shouldn't've put the link in my comment in the first place. And you are right to call me on my monitoring the comments and all that. Basically all I'm saying is that the last time I really engaged this topic here, it turned into a lot of pointless argument between me and JBG, for which I was as much at fault as anyone else, and I ended up feeling guilty like I was monopolizing CM comment space w/ my own agenda- when I posted the link this time, I was hoping there was some way to avoid a repeat and have a productive conversation. Now that I failed to resist the impulse to include the link, I'll offer this in an effort to have conversation, 'cause I'm really not trying to be a dick:

The point of the article, and the reason I thought it relevent in a discussion of the Hamas kids' show, does not need to go back to the origins of the founding of Israel, but like a jerk I had to put my two cents in once that came up (and yes, I knew it was going to go exactly like that). There are so many games played in the way the American mainstream press reports on this issue, many of them very detail-oriented- hence my pointing out the NYTimes' hedge in my initial commment (#18). So the Bishara article, which also ran relatively recently, is to me a really interesting development- to publish such an article so prominently in the American press is really a noteable event. From my point of view, this is a very POSITIVE development. Bishara is NOT a member of Hamas. He is a secular intellectual, and a very smart one, and important to the Palestinian cause.

His current situation, which he discusses in the editorial, is especially interesting because there's a certain tension in it. His explanation of the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel is something important that needs to be aired, it describes the troubling reality that they actually face, not some terrorist partisanship (at least it should be troubling to anyone who values democracy and human rights and freedoms). As he explains in the article, his difficult situation as a Palestinian politician in Israel has a sizeable history. His current predicament makes things really tricky- did he or did he not pass intelligence to Hezbollah? If he did, he's not going to admit it, obviously, but you can't just say "of course he did." So I was just curious what other people thought, not about validity of his desire for the rights that any citizen of a supposedly democratic country should receive, but about the publication of the article and his particular predicament- lately when the conflict is reported in our country, so much emphasis is placed on Hamas and everything that surrounds it, but there are other stories in there too.

(I should also just come right out and admit that I could've posted this on my blog, but no one reads that and I wanted to talk about it.)

jesse, have you ever noticed that you're kind of a douchebag?

lol