Israel, Palestine, and the Blogs
Kevin Drum laments that bloggers stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it “routinely attracts near-insane levels of vituperation from partisans on both sides.”
That statement is true of that issue, but not really in the blogosphere. When I was in college, anti-Israel extremists were all over the place - at one point, one of the student centers hung a horrific banner that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (If you don’t see the problem with that sentiment, find the Jordan River and the Sea of Galileea map.)
In the blogosphere that Political Animal inhabits, there isn’t really much of an anti-Israel fringe. Nobody even links to Indymedia. MaxSpeak (another alumnus of the West Bank of the Raritan) may represent the furthest left anyone goes on the issue.
The danger of discussing the conflict is that if you’re insufficiently pro-Israel, you’ll get linked by the dreaded Little Green Footballs. It’s like an Instalanche or a Slashdotting, except the new viewers all want to kill you.