Sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend, but I felt both personally and socially drained. The fact is, I came to a point where I no longer wanted to think about the hurricane, and so I kind of stopped paying attention to the news cycle.
As to the lack of Batman-blogging, well, I’d assume you’d all be pretty grateful for that.
Anyway, in some rare non-Katrina news (you mean there’s a world outside of New Orleans? Nofuckingway!), the last Israelis have left Gaza. And for the Middle East, it seems that things are going well; BBC reports only one casualty so far, a Palestinian shot by Egyptian border guards.
One thing that leapt out at me as I’ve been reading about this story, was the play it was getting in American news sources (and it is, even if you have to search for it a little bit). Specifically, the opening paragraphs from the New York Times:
Palestinians moved into the former settlement of Neve Dakalim today after Israel ended its 38-year presence in the Gaza Strip, setting fire to the main synagogue and ripping out aluminum window frames and metal ceiling fixtures.
The Palestinian flag and the flag of the militant group Hamas flew from the synagogue roof.
The floor, still slippery from the cooking oil that Israeli resisters had spread last month to try to impede the police who pulled them from the building, was covered with broken glass.
BBC News described the same incident with this sentence: “Thousands entered the former Jewish enclaves, some setting an abandoned synagogue ablaze in a settlement.”
Sensationalising much?
I don’t know that it means anything; but the bit about cooking oil was just a bit much. Oh well.
For what my opinion is worth, I am not terribly optimistic: Israel seems to view this as the most generous and selfless thing they could ever possibly do, and the Palestinians are (not unreasonably) angry that the Israelis are keeping them on such a short leash. And apparently Hamas is making some noise.
I could go into a snarky atheist rant right now about how sick it is that people have gone to such lengths to control a patch of sand in the middle of a bigger patch of sand just because Yallahweh told them they had to, but lots of smarter writers than me already have. So instead I’ll just say: at least they can all agree that Jesus sucked.