ISRAEL THREATENS TO MURDER PALESTINIAN PRIME MINISTER? BARBARIC? OR A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Israeli fascism has always turned me off-- big time. It makes me so profoundly sad. But I don't want to write about it and how to solve the seemingly intractable Palestinian/Israeli problem today. I want to write about the interesting ramifications of the Israeli threat to kill the Prime Minister of Palestine. Now this I like. I like it a lot.

As nations got more "civilized," leaders and decison-makers (like Mr. I'm-the-Decision-maker) have gotten further and further away from the battlefield or, as it was once called, "the field of honor." Instead we just wipe out whole populations. Today my pal Johnny sent me a heartbreaking story about a group of American soldiers in Iraq who went into an Iraqi home to avenge the horrible deaths of some other soldiers in their battalion. They stalked a young woman, an elementary school teacher, for several weeks before breaking into her home, gang-raping her and then brutally murdering her and everyone in the house, including a child. This I don't like. I don't like seeing American soldiers dying and I don't like seeing Iraqi civilians dying. Now I can't say that I got upset at all when Al-Zarqawi met his very timely demise recently. And I have to say that I'm counting on Democrats winning in November so we can get serious about ending the life of mass murderer Osama bin-Laden.

But I've always felt that civilization made a wrong turn long ago when it separated the consequences of Decison-Makers' decisions from the Decision-Maker's own person. Let's pick a random Decision Maker, a well-known physical coward who can't even ride a bicycle without an emergency triage unit at hand for fear of him toppling over and dying. If he wants to start a war with Kim Jong-il, let him challenge him to fight mano-a-mano and leave the rest of us out of it. Unfortunately, cowardly leaders seem to cultivate a false machismo and deceptive psychological mechanisms for covering up certain manly inadequacies by unleashing mass destruction on ever-growing numbers of individual civilians.

We-- you know, normal people-- have our lives to get on with. So who needs Leaders coming along and starting wars that wreck our lives and bring them no jeopardy at all-- and even make them richer and more powerful? And now at least one particularly offensive one can't ever even be tried in The Hague. I mean I like the idea of Israel murdering Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh. It's a threat to personalize war in order to get his Hamas party's militant wing to free a poor young corporal, Gilad Shalit. I like the idea of Israel murdering Haniyeh a lot more than the idea of invading Gaza and killing hundreds of civilians.

See, this I hate: "Israeli fighter jets bombed 20 targets in Gaza, including the Interior Ministry, which it said had been used by militants to stage meetings, while artillery hit the northern strip with 500 shells in the 24 hours until yesterday morning. Jewish settler Eliyahu Asheri, who was murdered by militants this week, was buried on Thursday as leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees pledged to seize more hostages in the West Bank. No further word has emerged about another suspected Jewish hostage, Noach Moskowitz, who Israeli police said was found dead hours after Mr Asheri's remains were found. Much of Gaza, including two main hospitals, was without power and running water as a UN aid chief warned that the 1.4 million residents of the strip were three days away from a humanitarian crisis." I think killing leaders who fail to find peaceful solutions to problems is a much saner-- and more effective-- idea.

And no offense to Mr. Haniyeh-- who I'm sure deserves a bad fate-- but I have some ideas for a few other leaders who should get precedence (just based on the enormity of their crimes against humanity).