Two years ago, at a family event, an Israeli guest noticed Wolf Blitzer in attendance and said, "In Israel, we took CNN off the cable packages for being anti-Israel. Now we have FOX which is great."

My younger son, astounded, said, "You banned CNN because you think it's anti-Israel. When will Israel start acting like a real country?"

The Israeli was offended and, after posing for a photo with Wolf, said that America is just as bad for banning Al Jazeera which Israelis watch. Touche!

Anyway, my kid's point was well-taken. Today the JERUSALEM POST, which foreigners consider to be a real Israeli newspaper, fired the liberal columnist Naomi Chazan for being affiliated with the New Israel Fund which is somehow connected with the Goldstone Report which has terrified Israel more than a hundred nukes in Ahmadinejad's pocket.

In case you missed it, there are all kinds of weird Goldstone-related stuff going down in Israel, not just crazy Alan Dershowitz calling for Goldstone's murder.

As for the Jerusalem Post, it it as if the teabaggers here had their own "newspaper." Unlike the other Israeli newspapers widely distributed on the web (Yediot or Ynet, Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv), the Jerusalem Post is an English language newspaper only read in hotel lobbies by American tourists and by a few thousand former Americans, Brits, Canadians and South Africans living in Israel. It has no Hebrew-speaking audience and, as you may know, Israelis speak Hebrew.

Still, it is sad to watch another newspaper sink into oblivion, even if its only a "newspaper."

I saw Avator tonight. great film.

But it is the most anti-American major film ever. The bad guys are clearly Americans. The good indigenous bluish people are a combination of American Indians, Africans, native Latin and Central Americans, Vietnamese, Palestinians (the women ululate during battle), Afghans (when they fought the Soviets) pre-Holocaust European Jews, and pretty much any natives whose civilization gets destroyed by more technologically advanced outsiders.

So the victims are an amalgam of exploited, colonialized and sometimes exterminated people. But the bad guys seem to be...us.

Not to give anything away but the folks in my theater cheered every time an "American" chopper-like thing was shot down by the Third Worldish extraterrestrials. And when that Cheney/Rumsfeld/ Westmoreland guy....Well, you'll have to see it.

Am I getting this movie right? If I am, James Cameron is one subversive dude. But in a good way.

Cross Posted from TPM

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