Hi David Singer,

Your frustration at the juvenile, ill informed, proselytizing, groupthink, anti-everything brigade is understandable. This used to be a forum for debate, argument and substantiation. It is now reduced to a twitter/Facebook level blog for the disenfranchised and those who cannot form their own opinion and are relegated to adopting someone else’s.

Note for Graham Young. You are killing off your own Forum.

In all the years I have contributed to this Forum, I have never seen so much trash being presented as “dialogue”. We are all entitled to an opinion, this is not about suppression of free speech but it is about balance and encouraging thinking people to challenge the considered opinions of others.

David, I don’t have to agree with you or to respond with the opinion of others; I’ve already made it clear that I do not agree with western military intervention in the M.E. or North Africa. My view is to pull our aid and let them get on with it or align themselves with Russia and China. Let them have the problems and criticism for a change.

I do however think it is time for GY to review the balance of contributors, their commitment to analysis, considered review of their positions and the injection of adult conversation rather than the angry, twitter level responses of the socially isolated link wars.

OLO has been usurped by juvenile, reactionary rubbish. I now have difficulty finding anything I can relate to as an argument, let alone feel inclined to respond to. Threads go for single unit responses, if you are lucky they go to tens of responses. History shows this to be a significant change against the trend.

GY, sorry but you are failing your once majority of thinking contributors. This is a classic case of “Fairfax Syndrome”. Please fix it before OLO becomes totally insignificant. Your propensity for publishing so many weak, social, group think platitudes is evident by the number of your best contributors walking away from OLO.

Hi David Singer

I fear I have been somewhat disingenuous, already having a handle on the complexity of Israel's several views on Syria.

Stepping back a bit, we as Australian's have little idea how bad it would be if a neighbour (for arguments sake Indonesia) had 1,100 tons of chemical weapons, but then Indonesia disintegrated from a reliable, though hostile, secular dictatorship into an Islamic extremist free for all. Fortunately Indonesia has no CWs and after Suharto it re-established itself in the direction of stable democracy. But Syria on Israel's doorstep is unfortunately not like Indonesia.

Thanks for the Haaretz article http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.547807. It indicates the humanitarian side of Israel. There are of course many sides.

Regarding Israel's more Realpolitik attitudes to Syria the website of the (Israeli) Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) is very useful (see http://www.inss.org.il/publications.php?cat=21&incat=&read=11464 )

An article (INSS Insight No. 427, May 19, 2013) by Professor Itamar Rabinovich, Vice Chairman of the INSS Board of Directors, former president of Tel Aviv University and a former Israeli ambassador to Washington reveals the complexity of Israel's attitudes - see http://dno8g1zsiv2fs.cloudfront.net/upload/(FILE)1368963793.pdf .

Basically the attitude of the "Pentagon official" that you quote, David, is similar to Professor Rabinovich's.

I'll comment soon on what was in your article, David, rather than what wasn't :)

Regards

Pete

CONTINUED

The pdf for Professor Rabinovich's article (INSS Insight No. 427, May 19, 2013) doesn't seem to work.

It is currently on the INSS site at http://www.inss.org.il/publications.php?cat=21&incat=&read=11464&page=4 and failing that on my own website at http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/israels-realpolitikal-concern-about.html

Regards

Pete

#spindoc

Thanks for your comments regarding the mindless characters who continually pop up with expected regularity to vent their Jew hatred without any effort to address the issues raised in my articles.

I could have their vicious posts excluded from OLO - but take the view that people like them should be exposed for what they are.

The point you make that others may be driven away from OLO because of these ratbags is certainly worth considering.

Do other contributors to OLO feel the same way?

#To plantagenet

I'm sorry that you have had to admit to being disingenuous. Of course Israel's position in relation to Syria was not the subject of my article - and it was mischievous of you to raise it as you did.

We have a civil war in Syria in which eleven nations are involved in aiding the rebels and two nations and a terrorist group are aiding Assad. Surely we need to focus on the issues and complexities these countries have involved themselves in and how they can get out of the quagmire into which Syria has been plunged.

I looked at your web page and it seems to attempt to raise many issues in a responsible manner.

Why do you run it anonymously

Dear Graham Young, let me congratulate you on the progress of your greatly improved Forum now that the brain-dead right-wingers are no longer in the ascendancy.

Some of them are still boring us with their ideological ramblings which seem to derive from Mein Kampf!

When I first started contributing, to say anything negative about the U.S. was ignored. Then it was attacked. Now, more frequently, people are saying what they really think about the U.S. and its warmongering imperialism.

A Forum should be about discussing ideas, different ideas, new ideas, rather than becoming a place where black and white views are rehashed over and over by woefully pedestrian minds to the point of tedium.

More power to you, Graham, and keep up the good work!

P.S. Including a few more ICH articles would really get the ire of the right-wingers and the traditionalists! They might even start thinking!

David Singer,

I'm also somewhat amazed by your expression of compassion for the displaced and oppressed Arab populations of Syria. In order to ease your moral anguish why don't you describe them as "Syrians", then they, like the Palestinians, won't exist, it's simple isn't it?

The obvious explanation is that the Zionists, and their US patron, prefer Assad's regime to a hundred thousand jihadi psychopaths next door. All that effort to get rid of Morsi and the Moslem Brotherhood, then an even nastier horde of barbarians is about to conquer Syria.