oj Thursday, 13 February 2003 at 11:10

Come, AOG, you know me better than that. Here’s the line in question:

“By Zionizing our battle with Iraq and promising an anti-American theocracy, he hopes to radicalize recruits for a jihad against an American occupation of Arab land.”

The obvious suggestion is that the war is being Zionized and that he therefore hopes to use it. Better editting, which is what I called for, would have rendered something like this:

“He hopes to be able to Zionize our battle.…”

Annoying Old Guy Thursday, 13 February 2003 at 12:47

Mr. Judd;

I had to think about this for a while before I realized the disconnect. You said “Does she really wish to associate herself with conspiracy nuts …?”. My view is that that kind of additional lunacy is in her case just gilding the lily. I don’t think Dowd hates the US that much but I do think she hates President Bush enough to override any reticence in that regard.

However, I think that the deeper issue is that whether we’re really fighting on behalf of ZOG is irrelevant to Al Qaeda and the success of this meme. The only thing that matters is whether the Arab street (their recruiting pool) and the European elites believe it. And of course, useful idiots like Dowd. How is this fundamentally different from the “Israelis are Nazis oppressing the innocent Palestinians” meme? Both have about the same connection to reality but it’s hard to deny the effectiveness of the latter. I read “Zionizing” to mean just this, that as a psy-op it was successful in fostering belief. I suspect that you take it to mean that we really are fighting on behalf of the Zionists, which is an entirely different thing.

oj Friday, 14 February 2003 at 09:58

I just meant that as her sentence was written, and as you suggest, the war has been “Zionized”. Yet she skips right past that without even questioning the validity of the charge. Does she believe it’s a Zionist war? Should we believe it? As usual it’s just a badly underwritten coilumn.