re: #258 Lincolntf

Completely unacceptable.
I presume you’re indulging your deepest fears with that post, and if I had the same fears I’d also post it, so I’m not criticizing you. But there are still bedrock principles in this country that even Obama won’t breach.
U.S. Forces actively fighting against Israel (the logical conclusion to sending them to Gaza) is not going to happen.
Guarding against tendencies is one thing, and we should do it, but inventing shibboleths to oppose is a waste of time and energy.

Well, I don’t know so much about Shibboleths in this case, but don’t forget, this Powers character is on-record about just such a thing:

Power made her most problematic statement in 2002, in an interview she gave at Berkeley. The interviewer asked her this question:

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

Power gave an astonishing answer:

What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing—or investing, I think, more than sacrificing—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

She dresses it up as a “thought experiment,” but the meaning is clear.