This year the Palestinian Diaspora will be sixty years old.  During the war that began in 1947 and concluded with the establishment of the State of Israel, a quarter of a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes at gunpoint and driven across the borders of the neighboring Arab states, where they became refugees - an event they now refer to as the Naqba:  the Catastrophe.  Despite UN Resolution 194,

that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible

the State of Israel has never allowed them to return.  In 1967, hundreds of thousands more refugees fled the West Bank.  Most of both groups remain, with their descendants, refugees to this day, four million persons without a state of their own.

Or a Vice-Principal.  Or a Cat-Herder.  Or a Complaints Department.  Or a Flak-Catcher.  Or a Butt-Kicker.  Or a Moderator.  Whatever you want to call it, this site needs it.

DKos is supposed to be self-policing.  But self-policing isn't working.  People are spending too much time fighting with one another than preparing to fight the Republicans.  I have seen several of the admins declare that they are stressed.  This system is breaking down under the weight of 117,000 contentious registered posters.

It's time to realize that self-policing is a failure and bring in a full-time, dedicated cop.

Actually, I am not planning to leave DKos, but I must face the possibility that I will soon be banned in consequence of a flamewar into which I have been dragged.  Flamewars are ugly things, unpleasant to the uninvolved, and this one has been spread so widely, into so many different diaries, by posters of such extreme prolixity, that I really doubt the admins, if they really exist, would be able to sort it all out.  I, of course, am confident that I am not the initiator of the conflict, but then I know the others will say the same thing.  Whose word can be trusted under such circumstances?  So I will not blame the admins or Kos if they decide, at last and far too late, to employ the simplest solution of banning all the parties involved, including myself.  No one is perfectly innocent of all sin, and I do not claim to be an exception.

In Arabic, the word is "shabab."  The youth.  The young males on the streets, at the barricades. The ones who throw rocks and shoot off AK-47s in the air – or at each other.  The fact that the Israelis have adapted the term - as "shababnikim", which fills me with a shiver of etymological awe – for their own unruly young settlers, is only one indication of the universality of the phenomenon.

It is as old as tribal humanity.  For many young men, there is nothing more cool, more self-affirming, more expressive of being a man, than to strut around openly in the streets in an intimidating manner – preferably with a weapon.  The tendency is expressed in different ways, depending on the culture.  The US urban streetcorner has its gangbangers.  England's soccer hooligans are notorious.  In Italy, the equivalent soccer gangs are known as "Ultras" and their violence may well lead to the abolition of the game, which has become little more than an excuse for rioting that has grown deadly.  These are just different manifestations of the shabab.

The only thing worse than having a batshit-crazy president running amok with nuclear weapons is having two crazy presidents.  Caught between George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world is in a perilous position, sliding down a slippery slope towards war - likely to be the first war since 1945 in which nuclear weapons will be used.

In an interview published today, Ahmadinejad declared that he does not fear an attack on Iran:

They are aware of Iran's strength. I believe they will not do such a stupid thing, and its masters won't as well... Everyone knows that the Zionist regime has nuclear weapons while Iran abides by the international laws," the Iranian president said.

Of course, by "the Zionist regime's masters," he means George W. Bush.  And if he believes that Bush is not too stupid to attack Iran, then Ahmadinejad is too stupid to be running around loose, giving speeches.  And so, it seems, the real rulers of Iran are starting to conclude.

I came home last night from the local anti-war vigil in time to see Russ Feingold on Olbermann's show.  Olbermann brought up the subject of Iran, and I was unhappy to hear Feingold repeat the same old Bush line:  "No options are off the table when it comes to Iran."

NO!  Dammit, no!  What we need to do is take the option of making war on Iran off the table.  We need to take the option of a pre-emptive strike off the table.  We need to start working towards peace, not spreading war even further.

Later in the show, Olbermann did his Special Comment, and he said what I wish Feingold had said, what I hope Feingold heard him say:  "this is madness."

[UPDATE:] A sign of sanity:  Defense Secretary Gates and General Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there are no plans for an attack across Iran's borders at this time.

[UPDATE:]  elishastephens has a diary http://www.dailykos.com/... about Howard Dean not getting it, either

If I keep reading Thucydides is my brain going to turn to stinky blue cheese and leak out my ears?  

OK, I admit I'm a tad bit slow sometimes making connections when it comes to names.  Kagan.  That's the neocon, I know that.  In fact, it seems there are more than one of them.  That's where my problem comes in.  Last night, I'm reading ryan t's diary about PNAC, where he lists some of the original members, and I see:  Donald Kagan.

Donald Kagan???  Is that right?  No, that can't be right.  It's Fred, isn't it?  Or Robert.  So I go to the bookshelf, look at the titles of the definitive modern history of the Peloponnesian War, full of my bookmarks, notes, underlinings.  That Donald Kagan?  The classicist?  The historian?  Say it's not so!

It's so.  It's the same Kagan!  The others are his spawn, but he's the original neocon.  I never made the connection.  It never occurred to me that this could be the same guy.

When comedian Michael Richards made headlines by launching into a racist diatribe full of hate speech, there was a lesson to be learned:  any toleration of this sort of language only increases its currency.  In the ensuing debate over this incident, some people made the point that some black comedians and rappers frequently use the term N-word in their acts, and that this gives the impression that the term is acceptable.  In the wake of the "Kramer" incident, there is a growing consensus:  this is a word that should not be used by anyone and never be tolerated, wherever it appears.

I believe this would be a good principle to be followed here at DKos.  It doesn't matter whether racist hate speech is being used by actual racists or by freeper trolls trying to smear this site as racist:  it should never be tolerated, whenever it appears.

Unfortunately, I have seen a definite increase in the use of hate speech here on DKos recently.  Toleration of this language will only make it worse and lead to a toxic atmosphere of acrimony and hostility among us.  We are all supposed to be on the same side here, we are all supposed to be liberals.  Hate speech is a violation of the deepest liberal principles.  Let's put a stop to it.

This is not the first diary I have written concerning Jimmy Carter's influential new book Palestine:  Peace Not Apartheid  But today I have seen my views and sentiments confirmed in a moving tribute to Carter by prominent Israeli historian Tom Segev, in today's Ha'aretz.

It is titled "Memoir of a Great Friend," for Segev also recognizes in Carter a man who has a profound friendship for Israel and has always wished the nation well, as he wishes for all peoples of the Holy Land.

Keep telling a lie long enough, and it develops a kind of vampiric immortality;  it can't be killed.  So it is with the lie that we can see repeated by warmongers everywhere the nation of Iran is mentioned, as a diarist has done here today:  "Iran's avowed intention of wiping the state of Israel off the map [along, unavoidably, with its inhabitants]."

The people who repeat this lie ignore the many statements to the contrary by Iranian officials, that they have no intention of attacking Israel.  No matter how many times the Iranians repeat this, the warmongers are selectively deaf to their denials.  All they can hear is the single statement by Iran's current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Israel will be "erased from the pages of history."

Ever since the publication of  Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid the right-wing hatemongering machine has been working overtime to smear this great liberal humanitarian.  Unfortunately, some of the Democratic Party leadership and even some persons here at DKos have added their voices to this chorus of hate.

But when they do, they will find themselves in the company of the worst of the right-wing reactionaries and wingnuts, the most odious and loathesome creatures of the blogosphere, and the lowest layer of scum at the bottom of the barrel of neocon punditry.

I am a life-long pessimist, and the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has not been such as to alter my disposition.  Frequently events are reported in the news, such as the election of a new Israeli government, that cause many people to exclaim in hope:  Maybe now there will be peace!

And there is never peace.  Someone, on one side or the other, always manages to screw up the chance for peace, if there ever really were one.

So I do not now want to express unseemly hope.  As I look at the news, the cease-fire which is little more than a day old has already begun to crack around the edges.  I know that it is possible that by the time you read this diary, the thing may have already fallen apart.

Still, it is possible that the speech given today by Ehud Olmert might be an opportunity from which something resembling peace might arise, if the rejectionist voices can be silenced, if they can refrain, as they historically have not, from throwing up some obstruction.

On My Daily Kos we have a problem . . .

And it is called Space and Time.  Not enough space on the FP for all the worthwhile stuff posted here, not enough time to read it all.  Someone may work hard, spending a lot of time in research to write a work of substance that would benefit us all to read, only to see it scroll off the Recent Diaries list in an hour so two.  This is discouraging.

To solve this problem, Kos in his godly wisdom has instituted the Recommended Diaries list.  But I have noticed that the same authors tend to appear day after day on this list, leaving most of the rest to languish in obscurity and scroll rapidly away into the Darkness.  There is still a problem.  But today I realize how I, at least, could help solve it.

UPDATE:  So this Highly Unscientific Survey has produced some interesting ideas, but the concensus clearly seems to favor the status quo.  I will maintain my resolution about my own recs, but no one seems overwhelmingly enthusiastic for any of the other solutions discussed.

In bad news for the apologists for Israel who reflexively declare that because their favorite nation can do no wrong, and therefore any use of cluster munitions by the IDF in Lebanon was perfectly legitimate according to international law -- oops.  It seems the IDF is now Shocked!  Shocked!  to discover that these weapons were in fact used against civilian areas, contrary to international law.  In other words, the IDF did commit a war crime, not once, but thousands of times during the war.

UPDATE: I would like to thank the participants in these comments for making this discussion a civil and productive one, free of flames, unpleasantness, and the Ususal Suspect Trolls.  While the people here tonight may have disagreed, they have been able to do so while respecting each other's opinions.

Beirut, Lebanon (AHN) - Five Shiite ministers resigned in protest from Lebanon's Cabinet Saturday. The ministers were upset when talks to give the Hezbollah party more power fell through.

What is the possibility that this might bring down the Siniora govt and lead to new elections?

What is the possibility that Hezbollah will take the majority if they do?

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista guerrilla leader who ran Nicaragua in the 1980s, regained power by winning the Central American country's presidential election, an early count of the votes showed.

http://www.bloomberg.com/...

World War II was American power at its peak.  German prisoners being transported by train to POW camps stared out at the industrial plants as they passed and asked themselves:  How could we have ever challenged such a nation with such productive capacity?

But follow the same route now, and everywhere you will see ruin:  derelict plants, abandoned factories, rusting scrap heaps.  The region that used to be the heart of American power is now called the Rust Belt.  The muscle of American industry has atrophied.  The forces of globalization have rotted it away.  Manufacturing is no longer the engine of the nation's economy, and as industrial capacity declines, so does our military capacity.