The Cuba thing is a no-brainer – just knock if off!
It makes us look like idiots (which we've been) maintaining a Cold War embargo against this teeny weeny Communist island, especially at a moment in America's history when nearly our entire economic fate hinges on whether or not Communist China continues lending us money.
Besides, if our goal – as we claim – is to liberalize Cuba, what better way than to empty out half the private colleges in the US each spring break onto Cuban beaches? Americans Gone Wild -- Cuban style. Let those good times roll, baby.
Of course there was one little problem -- someone was already living on that land at the time. But Europeans had grown accustomed to resettling indigious non-whites whenever they got in the way of their agendas. The usual solution was to to arbitrarily redraw borders. So once again Eurpoeans, joined this time by Americans, got out their maps and compasses and protractors and carved up another hunk of the earth that was, at the time, inconveniently occupied by non-Europeans in order to, once again, accommodate the needs of -- Europeans.
Let me pause here before I lose half my readers. By now those of you who hold to the “Israel right or wrong” position may by now figure I'm anti-Israel. Wrong. Read on.
Let's see, where was I? Oh, so, the Palestinians were summarily jerked around in ways that, had the same thing been tried on Americans in say, Montana, would have evoked a, “And just who the f..k are you? Oh, and get the hell out off my land before I shoot your ass.”
Anyway, that's the Pizzo Cliff Notes version of the origins of the piss fight that began 65 years ago. Sure, each side has its own heavily annotated version of these events, but that's it in a nutshell. (And boy, do I mean nut-shell!)
Some Palestinians swallowed hard and tried to live with a new reality over which the world community had decided they had no say. Others fled their homeland, meaning the end of the Jewish diaspora and the beginning of aPalestinian diaspora.
Understand, I'm not arguing for or against the formation of, or the right of Israel to exist. I simply treat the existence of Israel the only way it can or should be treated, as a reality.
I am also not arguing that displaced Palestinians, and their progeny, possess some inherent “right of return.” Because that that's not going to happen any sooner than Israel's demise.
So, here we have both parties to this piss fight locked in a circuitous dynamic that demands they piss into each other's tent, each time in retribution for a prior pissing session. And this goes on day in, day out, year in, year out, decade in, decade out. And each time the world is asked to feel sorry for the side on the receiving end.
From time to time all this relatively low-boil pissing escalates into full-blown s--t fights. We are seeing one of those right now in Gaza, where lingering superiority of European weaponry hopes to clean the Palestinian's clock in the name of “teaching them a lesson they will not soon forget.”
Which of course is precisely the problem –they don't forget. They never forget. Neither side does.
In order to break this ruineous cycle everyone involved needs to sat down and administered a stiff dope slap to get their attention. Then they need to come to terms with the following immutable facts of life- their lives - both of them:
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