If Obama Is Serious

You couldn't have said it better. The Obama administration needs to be balanced to acheive any sort of sucess in the middle east. Being one sided and biased will not accomplish peace but instead foster hatred and bitterness which will just result in more terrorism. I hope and pray that Obama is sincerely interested in peace and humanity and not just gaining political prestige and power.

The Borgen Project has informative statistics on addressing global poverty.

$30 billion ends world hunger
$550 billion is the US Defense budget

This organization has the ability, resources, and policy-makers to suppress the threat of global poverty by enacting legislation here in the US, which is tied to the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. Please support organizations such as The Borgen Project so that we may rid the world of poverty.

Thank you for this wonderfully sane article. Israel merey exacerbates the danger to itself by pursuing policies and practices that further punish the Palestininans beyond human endurance. What people with any self-respect would not attempt to retaliate against the kind of oppression Israel has visited upon Gaza? he US should withhold financial aid to Israel until it adopts a more equitable and humane position on the Palestinian situation, and the evangelical Christian lobby should be ignored when pressing for Israel's acquisition of more land on the West Bank through illegal settlements. Religion and biblical prophecy ought to have absolutely no place at the negotiting table.

I agree with the author of this story that the U.S. has got to stop it's blatant one-sided support of Israel. The Israelis are nothing more than well supplied thugs. How can we keep supporting a country that indiscriminately kills innocent people all in the name of security? Does security mean killing over 500 people and making 1.5 million more live in poverty? Does the firing of rockets into israel , which have killed 1 person in a year justify the killing of all of those innocent people? When I hear the Jews bemoaning their treatment under the Nazis nowadays I have no sympathy for them because they are doing even worst to their neighbors. The U.S. Gov't has got to stop being bambozzled by the Jewish lobby in this country and demand that Israel conduct itself like a civilized country instead of the regional bully that it is.

We really need to make Puerto Rico and Guam states. I think that they both really want to become states and have proper representation.

Isreal is US 51st state so whatever it does it is OK from US point of view, Mullahs in Tehran know that the only way to stay in power is warmonging against Jewish state...so nothing will change for a while as Mullahs are getting the bomb and may give it to Hamas....

Palestinians cannot possibly want independence, because at this point they are incapable to fend for themselves. They do not have infrastructure or an economy, but most importantly they lack a culture that promote sustainability and independence. They have had multiple opportunities in the past to become independent, yet they consistently refuse any solution offered. What they really want is for other countries to sustain them while they spend all their energies fighting Israel. Do you really need to get tougher on Israel to solve this problem?

This reporter is a fool. Anyone who believes that this is anything but a bunch of thugs backed by Iran casusing problems for Israel a fool. The new Pres should be telling the folks in Gaza Get out or get peaceful!

The tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors is not due to "occupied territories" because when five Arab armies attacked Israel in May 1948, Israel did not occupy any of these territories. In response to a proposal following the Six Day War by the Israeli national unity government to exchange land for peace with the Arabs, the Arab countries met in Khartoum and came up with three "nos": No peace, no recognition and no negotiations.

There is something more important than America's image, and that is been honest, doing the right thing ??? treat your friends as friends and terrorists as terrorists. For 60 years grasping for the slightest hope of peace, Israel has given up to Palestinians land, money, weapons, water, electric power; and it has released criminals and terrorists, built roads, provided medical care, and many other things and over and over again in an effort to prove to the world its good intentions. On the other hand, what have the Arabs done for peace with Israel, other than sign a few useless agreements with no intentions of keeping them?

The United States need to take a stronger stand against Israel. If the United States tell Israel to stop. Israel will. While that is not happening, hundreds of civilians are getting killed. And the latest incident at the UN school, I remember in Lebanon Israel fired at the UN observation post killing 5 or 6 UN personnel. It looks like a warning for the UN to stay out of the conflict, and last meeting at the UN United States obstructed any move to stop the fighting. Put one and one together, I get that Israel and the United States are in together in this conflict. Israel wouldn't have made a move of that magnitude, unless the United States knew about and probably approved it.

Peace in the middle east is the same as the unicorn - a myth. There never will be peace in the middle east as long as there are palastinians/arabs/muslims that see nothing but hate for everyone else in the world, and as long as the Israelis keep poking the former with a pointy stick, teh former will poke back Face it, if they wanted to make peace, they would have done so a long long time ago. If PEBO wants to get tough with Israel, just pull the plug on all the tax dollars you and I end up spending there, along with all the other support. Don't just suspend it, stop it for good. No US help/aid.weapons sales, etc. to any nation or group in the middle east. And if folks here object to the idea, then they have split loyalties. If the jewish and muslim communities don't like it, then pack your bags and get on a plane and go defend your homeland, because you don't have the loyalties to be a US citizen. There is absolutely no reason why this country shoul;d baby sit Israel, Gaza, Jordan, Syria or any other country or group. They are all grown up and can fight their own battles.

PARIS ??? Signs are mounting that the conflict in Gaza is starting to spill over into violence in Europe's towns and cities, with assaults against Jews and arson attacks on Jewish congregations in France, Sweden and Britain.

Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, on Monday night. A Jewish congregation in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, also was attacked Monday night by someone who "broke a window and threw in something that was burning," said police spokesman Leif Nilsson. Neighbors alerted rescue services before the fire took hold.

Someone also started a blaze outside the premises last week. And on Sunday slogans including "murderers ... You broke the cease-fire" and "don't subject Palestine to ethnic cleansing" were daubed on Israel's embassy in Stockholm.

In Denmark, a 27-year-old Dane born in Lebanon of Palestinian parents is alleged to have injured two young Israelis last week, opening fire with a handgun in a shooting that police suspect could be linked to the Gaza crisis.

France has Western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities and a history of anti-Semitic violence flaring when tensions in the Middle East are high. In 2002, some 2,300 Jews left France for Israel because they felt unsafe.

President Nicolas Sarkozy warned in a statement Tuesday that France would not tolerate violence linked to the Gaza crisis. A day earlier, his interior minister said she was concerned about the prospect of contagion and met with the heads of the two main Muslim and Jewish groups and police officials to stress the need to "preserve national unity."

Damage to the synagogue in Toulouse was limited to a blackened gate, and there were no injuries even though a rabbi was giving a course to adults inside, authorities said. They said unlighted gasoline bombs were also found in a car nearby and in the synagogue's yard. A local Jewish leader, Armand Partouche, said he believed the assailants had planned to torch the synagogue, but fled when the building's alarm went off.

"It could have been very, very serious," Partouche said in a telephone interview. "There were people inside; there could have been deaths."

United Nation's School Hit by Bombs and 34 Killed !!!

This is Pathetic and Evil as it gets !!!

GAZA CITY, Gaza ??? Palestinian medics said 34 people were killed in an Israeli strike outside a U.N. school in the northern Gaza town of Jebaliya. The United Nations confirmed 30 were killed and 55 injured.

An Israeli official says Palestinian militants fired on Israeli soldiers from the courtyard of a U.N. school where dozens of people died in fiery explosions.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he said the army is still drafting the country's official response to the incident.

The Israeli official said "hostile fire" was directed at the soldiers from within the school. He said soldiers returned fire and multiple explosions went off, presumably emanating from munitions stored there.

John Ging, head of Gaza operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said most of the casualties at the U.N. school in Jebaliya, where some 350 people had taken refuge, were outside the building. He did not say whether the artillery came from Israeli forces.