It pains me to have to post this item, Not in My Jewish Name, By Rob Kall.

I am a Jew and I am outraged and ashamed by the acts Israel has perpetrated. I am not a self hating Jew, not an anti-semite, as some religious extremist Jews have accused me and other Jews who criticize Israel.

This is what we said about George Bush’s actions – “Not in my name as a US citizen.”  I have even less control over what happens in Israel, but I want my own government to know that I do not support what Israel is doing.

Even more disturbing is the article posted as a link in one of the comments to the above, Obama’s Timidity and Deaths at Sea by Ray McGovern.

Even before I read the above two pieces, I had commented that Israel’s actions have shown that they have lost their minds.  They have gone so off track that they do not even know how to estimate the consequences of their actions anymore.

I was thinking of the similarity to the incident portrayed in the book and movie Exodus. In this incident, as I remember it, Jewish refugees from World War II were trying to run the British blockade against Jewish immigrants to Israel.  In this case, the blockade runners depended on the modicum of human decency that the British would have to display as this played out in the international press.

I am sure that current day Israeli politicians are well aware of that incident.  Its success was probably what frightened them most about the current attempt to duplicate it by the Palestinians and their sympathizers.

However, given their knowledge of this history, their response was the most foolish thing I have ever seen.

If the Israelis expected no resistance, then what was the necessity of the element of surprise in the commandos boarding the ship?  If the Israelis did expect resistance, then how stupid was it to deposit commandos into the midst of 600 protesters by dropping them one at a time down a rope from a helicopter?

Either way you look at it, you have to wonder how a friend should respond when he or she notices a person having gone off their rocker and starting to engage in indefensible behavior.  At some point a true friend must stop diverting their eyes when they see what is going on.

The incident referred to in this political cartoon could obviously never happen in Arizona. Right? Perhaps the cartoonist is even joking about it happening in Chicago.

Well, maybe not. The local NBC affilliate in Chicago has the story American Citizen Faced Deportation

And now, Gutierrez, who’s fighting for national immigration reform, wants answers.

“You know what this proves to you? That in Arizona, they want everybody to be able to prove they’re legally in the country. They want everybody to prove that they’re an American citizen. Here we had an American citizen, that the federal government, not state authorities, but the federal government, with all their technology and all their information capacity that they have, could not determine, for more than three days, his status as an American citizen. It’s very, very, very dangerous ground to tread,” the Chicago Democrat said.