If you think about it, the Germans were never going to include the Israelis in anything. Unfortunately, there was still a lot of antiSeminism in Germany, as there is still today.
Prejudice is all the more basis for faulting them for not doing so. It was just stupid, IMO. Who knows more about the Palestinian terrorist mind than the Israelis? The Germans may have had experience with Bader-Meinhoff or whomever it was they were dueling with in those days, but the bunch in Munich were Palestinians. Including the Israelis, if nothing else, would have given the Germans some cover.
it may be correct in your eyes but obnoxious in the eyes of others.
I don't know that "correct" has anything to do with it. We're all here for our own reasons. I am doing my thing just as others are doing theirs. It seems to me that the purpose of many is to hang with comfortable fellow-thinkers in an echo chamber, share their outrage at anything blue that filters in, and swap complaints about those dirty Dems. I've been referring to that phenomenon as the clubhouse. I'm not a member of that club but I recognize its existence and to a large extent respect its value to the participants.
My interests are different, though, and they sometimes are at cross purposes with the clubhouse.
I'm here to hang with people who are different from me so that I am spared the ignorance of my own echo chamber. I think that in a pluralistic society it's important that we are exposed to variety and try to understand different ways of looking at things. I want to gain insight from them.
I was never a grammar teacher, but, like unclewest, I have my experience and expertise--as an analyst and a consensus facilitator--and I have done both effectively in some pretty big ponds. Since I am retired and not getting any younger, I try to keep my mind sharp by engaging those skills whenever I can, which includes this venue. Use it or lose it, as they say.
That background also leads me to be repelled by both mindlessness and polarization. So I occasionally take on some of the more egregious examples of extremism, illogic, or cognitive distortion (like calling a movie on Munich a parable for Iraq) to signal the approach to the roughest edges of the devolution that is common in closed societies. Critical thinking is not the name of a terrorist group, after all. I understand that this is disturbing to those who prefer their comfort zones so. I don't want to rain too much on anyone's parade, just point out some potholes here and there.
You can reasonably view that as pompous, I suppose. I certainly understand how it could be obnoxious. For those who urge more offensiveness, that's not a problem for me. I'm nearly impossible to offend and the offensiveness just gives me more data for insights. From those who engage me without first reading what I post, I get the gift of mental exercise. For those club members who are annoyed by me, they can always try to disabuse me of my practices--I do listen to reason--or use the ignore feature. |
