re: #35 Stanley Sea

Truthfully, I’m more concerned with the event that CL spoke of, because I still don’t know what happened.

However, regarding your comment—there is a trick to reading about Israel and the Middle East. Most of what you read, a vast quantity of what you read is written by someone with a very strong agenda. And most of the verbiage is smoke and mirrors. On the one side, there are media organs like the Guardian, the BBC, and CNN that will not be giving you a clear picture. There are media organs on the other side, which I read, but I have to read them very carefully. So, I’ll check out Arutz Sheva almost every day, but I won’t post 99% of what I read—because of the smoke. I’m to the point of simply deleting the Rubin Report before I read it, since I get his essays in my email.

The problem with Israeli politics is that it’s so local (small country). Many Israeli politicians do not see themselves communicating to a world audience. And so there is Lieberman.

At this point, we are heading into a very dense woods that allows no sunlight to touch the ground. However, lets say that you actually want to try to have some understanding of the region. I would advise that you follow the trends of international trade, science and technology. Ignore the politicians. Definitely ignore the religious leaders (this is a very well documented Jewish tradition).

You will note that Ha’aretz pretty much covers politics and rarely has any economic or science news. And that is because what they really want is for the Labor Party to become a major player once again. There’s more, but there’s always more. The bottom line, politicians come and go very quickly, so do their words. But university research has the staying power.