General Petraeus: Zionism’s Military Poodle

this hal turner character associated with this story is not very cool in my book.

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6113992

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/5748085.html 

And saw nothing about a $1000 entrance fee. I did however find the good Rabbi's address following 9/11. He did indeed get a few things right, but unfortunately he had to link 9/11 to the holocaust, which our very own LIHOPopotamus would surely not approve of...

That brings me to a third tower of smoke. It is the one that either we or our parents or our grandparents lived through. It is the tower of smoke that rose over the crematoria, that gave the name "Holocaust" to the events of the middle of the past century. Despite the terrible images and memories evoked by that era, there is some consolation in that tower of smoke because we know that we or people close to us have shown the ability to live through a catastrophe marked by such a tower, and to go on to rebuild.

But I am not yet up to talking about consolation. There is another point to be made here. The perpetrators of the events this past week are ideological brothers to the Nazis. Both groups believe that their system, that who they are, is so far superior to others that in pursuit of their goals, they can turn human beings into fodder, into victims, to accomplish their dreams of global superiority. We thought that we had ended such fantasies of superiority after the second world war, or perhaps after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The column of smoke rising in New York and at the Pentagon tells us that we were kidding ourselves. The fight against that unspeakable evil continues.

http://kesher.org/kesher/study/drashot/r_twin_smoke.html

You get the sense he might actually be a truther, but no...

Let me be even more specific: there are times in life when the value of truth is paramount. When that value is the focus of what we are doing, we are probably going to war against those about whom we are seeking the truth. That is what is happening in our world today. Nonetheless, in the midst of that search for the truth, it is critically important not to abandon our love for peace. It is absolutely necessary that we recognize that the values of peace are still essential to all of us. And if, without compromising the war effort, without undermining our opposition to and our attempt to destroy terrorism, we can find a place to strike a blow for peace, we can find a way to inject values of peace within this terrible situation that becomes important in a fundamental way. It is the true indication that we love both truth and peace.

Frankly, if we don’t do that, we run a different risk. That risk is that we will value only the rigorous pursuit of truth; we will become bellicose; we will become martial; we will become aggressive and antagonistic; we will take steps to create a society such as that of ancient Sparta, or others that have existed in history, where militarism and military accomplishment were the only measures of the human being and of his success.

By the same token, we need to recognize that there are moments in time where peace is the ultimate value. At moments like that, we may often jettison a great deal of truth. Often, when we are protecting something particularly precious to us, the only way that life allows us to function is by giving up our search for the truth, and sometimes that is the only appropriate thing to do. Then the question must be: what do we do with the value of truth? If we continue to love truth, if we continue to find places and moments where we can inject truth, if we take a long view and promise ourselves that in the fullness of time the truth will out, if we recognize the damage we are doing to truth for the sake of a peace that may be necessary, then we can still fulfill the verse “truth and peace you shall love.”

The danger, of course, is that we will not follow this course. The danger is that we will make a positive value out of lying to ourselves. The danger is that we will convince ourselves that the falsehoods we are telling ourselves are actually true. The danger is, finally, that we will rationalize these falsehoods and attempt to make them our reality even though we know they are not real. That, too, would be a fundamental violation of the expectation that truth and peace are things that we need to love. Most of all, what we need to recognize is that any time the pendulum swings in one direction or the other, we are out of balance. Something is wrong. Something is not the way it should be. The pendulum swing may be necessary, it may be important, it may even be critical to survival, to justice, to comity, or to a sense of being able to work together, but one must recognize that it is an unstable, out of balance situation. “Haemet veshalom ehavu” (truth and peace must you love), that is the bottom line.

The real challenge for all of us today is that in the midst of a pendulum swing that is truly radical, that moves us towards an extreme. In the midst of what appears to be our going to war -- a just and legitimate war -- the value of peace still has to be there to make its stand before our eyes. Peace still has to be something that we promote, particularly now, when so much of our identity and our agenda are focused on the search for truth and the war that will probably result from that policy.

http://kesher.org/kesher/study/drashot/nopeace.html