From Small Things

Growing up a punk rock nerd in a mid-sized city with no sports team of its own, my friends and I openly mocked the jocks in high school and their silly obsessions with all things athletic.  It wasn’t always that way.

My Dad, never much of an athlete himself, grew up in love with baseball.  His stories of rookie cards of Carl “Yaz” Yastrzemski, Don Drysdale, and his heroes, Roger Marris and Mickey Mantle, made my young baseball-plauged mind race.  The worst part was always the part where his mother threw them away, not realizing she could have paid for a year of one of her grandkids’ college tuition by packing up that box and sending it our way.

Dad, a quintessential baby-boomer, is old enough to remember the glory days for children in the United States: the 1950s.  Sandlot baseball, his little brother struggling to keep up, putting pennies on the train tracks, hiding under train trestles until the big freighters roared by, and swimming in the rivers only to come out with “bloodsuckers” up and down your legs.  Even then, I longed for such an era.  (Kids that have streaks of melancholy at the ripe old age of 8 for times they never even knew is a another issue, but let’s not even get into that.)

With the help of my old man, I got to attend games at old Comiskey, new Comiskey, Wrigley, and of course, Tiger Stadium.  I remember being allowed onto the field of old Tiger Stadium, with my mom, of all people, to meet the team in an exhibition event.  Cecil Fielder was one of my heroes; he still remains one of the only human beings to ever hit a ball on the rooftop of that great old ballpark.  Travis Fryman, Kirk Gibson, Alan Trammel.  I loved them all.

Most of all, I loved a man named Nolan Ryan.  I’m not sure if it was his ironman reputation or the fact that he could pitch a ball over 100 mph without flinching, but he was my God.  He, like other sports heroes in my life (see Brett Favre), was a normal guy, a family man who was revered and feared by his opponents.  Reggie Jackson, Mr. October, once said that hitting a Nolan Ryan fastball was like drinking coffee with a fork.  Plus, this guy had played in the league since 1967 and fought White Sox catcher Cartlon Fisk when he was in his 40s (can you say BADASS).  It might have helped that I grew up on the street bearing his name, Nolan.  (It also doesn’t hurt to add that he was pretty universally despised in Chicago — both for the Carlton Fisk fiasco by Southsiders and for his fastball pitching for the Astros, a Cubs rival, for many years.)

If memories of seeing Ryne Sandburg trotting the bases at Wrigley and cheering on Frank “The Big Hurt” Thomas is cemented into my brain, the thing I’ll remember most of all is our trip to Nolan Ryan’s house.  Yes, his house.  My Dad had a business trip to Houston, which I begged him to take me on.  Him being the awesome Dad that remembered his own baseball heroes, obliged.  We went about his business in Houston, where we also stopped by in Arlington to visit Rangers Stadium (I still have the Texas-red warning track dirt).  Then it was off to Alvin, Texas we went.  We stopped at a yard sale and talked to the woman manning it.

“Oh, Nolan?  Oh yeah, that’s his ranch right there.  Wonderful guy.  You’re so cute!” she said as she tousled my hair.  I was wearing a full on homemade Nolan Ryan jersey, stirrups, cleats and all.  Dad boldly drove through the open gate and parked on the long driveway.  We rang the bell.  A few seconds later, a sweaty teenager answered the door.  He had kneepads on and a ping pong paddle in his hand.  While my Dad tried to explain what we were doing there, I believe Reece, Nolan’s son, thought I was a pretty dapper young man in my uniform.  He told us Nolan was in Houston shooting an Advil commercial (of course!).  So we left with Reece’s autograph on one of my precious Nolan Ryan collectors’ edition baseball cards.

See?  It just goes to show that a blue collar kid from the blue state of Michigan can go weak in the knees for an Advil-hawking Republican who did ads for the NRA.  Aren’t sports great?

Baseball wasn’t my only love.  Our family, being from the Upper Peninsula and Green Bay, Wisconsin area, were — no surprise here — huge Packers fans.  Even the plastic covering the furniture at my grandparents’ house had a Green Bay Packers insignia on it (how I’d love to get my hands on that thing now).  In Green Bay, my cousin and her family lived a few blocks from Lambeau; my other relatives lived down the street.  We used to walk to Lambeau as kids, before the renovation, and play in the stands, having huge snowball fights.  I don’t even know how the hell we got in there.   Walking to the Pack practices at the Don Hutson Center and seeing the odd sight of 350 pound offensive linemen riding little girls’ bikes with streamers and all will always stick with me.

But things change, they always do.  If the baseball strike mortally wounded my interest in baseball, picking up a guitar for the first time buried it.  How could I be a cool rock fan and like dorky sports teams?  Instead of Packers Starter jackets and Greg “The Shark” Norman hats (yes, I golfed, too), I wore the alternative look: my prized possession was a Smashing Pumpkins ZERO shirt that I bought at a concert in 1996.  As the years went by, punk rock beckoned.  How could you possibly like watching muscle-headed jocks beat each other up on the football field when they wanted to beat you up after gym class?  I wore my studded jean jacket and spikes with defiance.

Moving to Chicago sure helped jump-start my interest in these overpaid athletes once again.  Once I realized that simply saying that you grew up a Packers fan is enough to get a beer dumped on your head, I started to rethink my philosophies.  After all, all my Chicago friends got together on Sundays to drink, grill, cheer the Bears on, and make fun of Green Bay fans.  Why couldn’t I have the same thing?

And it brings us full circle.  All of the rich traditions of our teams, whether they be from the South Side, the North Side, or the Michigan or Wisconsin sides, help us learn more about ourselves.  After all, I didn’t grow up driving 10 hours to visit my family up north every summer for nothing.  And it all started to make sense.

Just last week, at a Cubs game, I started to feel nostalgic again.  This time, it wasn’t just an 8-year-old’s understanding of the world through his Dad’s eyes.  This was real.  All of those sunny days we sat in the box seats, all of those family get-togethers cheering on our boys, and all of those satisfied sunburns I proudly sported as I got back to school the next day with a brand new hat.  I wish Tiger Stadium wasn’t getting torn down.  I wish two of Michigan’s main employers hadn’t just kicked the bucket.  And for the record, I hope Brett Favre doesn’t plan on joining the Vikings — I’ll be one of the many Green Bay fans cheering for his head on a platter.

So, yeah, I like sports.  Even if that one time we walked into our neighborhood bar in Grand Rapids to see jocks doing pushups on the ground while people cheered, “SPORTS!  SPORTS!  SPORTS!”  It’s OK to be excited about the Red Wings in the playoffs.

And it’s even OK to get into trash-talking contests with Sox and Bears fans in their own neighborhoods.  Know how I know?  My Dad told me so.

According to the AP, banks and execs are already looking at ways to get around Obama’s salary cap. What a curveball!  Never would have seen this one coming.

It’s not so much that they are going to try to circumvent the rules, because that’s just what good capitalists do.  It’s because the rules themselves – and the man driving the so-called reform – are making it so easy for the banks and other parasites to keep doing what they have always done: coming out smelling like a rose that while the rest of the garden withers away to nothing.

Everybody, even bourgeois news organizations like the Associated Press, knows that capitalists always win.  First of all, the rules won’t apply to anyone except those with the title “executive” – who are hardly the only fat cats in town.  The AP then admits, “Others note Wall Street typically finds ways to exploit loopholes and figure this time will be no different.”

Right.  So American citizens lose again because we continue to sit back and take it.

The next problem with this situation is that the rules only apply going forward, so all of those bottom-feeders that received (and will continue to receive) hundreds of billions of OUR money can do whatever they damn well please.  And they did – look at the $18 billion stuffed into the already-full maw of these greedy pigs last year… the very ones who are responsible for the current crisis.  These rules should apply retroactively so that terminal preppies like Jamie Dimon can’t buy 5 jets; instead, they can only afford 3.

Other problems with this include the definition of “exceptional assistance” as defined by Obama and the fact that if they disclose their books to government, they can step around the rule altogether.  Further, the writing of the rules notes that “normal” bailouts like the ones handed to Chase & Wells Fargo, are not even bound by the rules – only the more costly “emergency” bailouts.  Well, golly gee!  Thanks a lot, Mr. Obama!  You sure do care about us regular folks!

The article goes on to quote this Alexander fellow, who is a mouthpiece in the true sense of the word:

“We’ve always been a society where extraordinary work led to extraordinary payouts,” said Alexander Cwirko-Godycki, research manager at Equilar Inc., an executive compensation research firm.  For many on Wall Street, the idea of capping pay is “a very foreign concept,” Cwirko-Godycki said.

Extraordinary work!  Yes, let’s hear it for them!  The 2nd Great Depression caused by rampant housing speculation, pressure on the government to de-regulate, the systematic dismantling of the American working class, skyrocketing debt and cost of living… all while these guys get richer!  Clearly, that is some extraordinary work, just not the kind that works for you and me.

The article caps it all off by giving us this send-off:

Still, others worry the caps on pay could influence elite-performing Wall Street workers to forgo ambitions of rising to the executive suite.  “It will certainly encourage those performers down below to say ‘I don’t want a promotion,’” said Patrick McGurn, special counsel at RiskMetrics, a corporate governance advisory firm.

Again… “elite-performing”?  Why do they let these scumbags get away with this shit?  Call a spade a spade, and I call this a big, fat, piece of corporate shill.

From some random upper strata of the interwebs:

The Detroit Red Wings foreign scout flies to Baghdad to watch a young Iraqi play hockey in the new American sponsored league, and is suitably impressed and arranges for him to come over to the US. Ken Holland signs him to a one year contract and the kid joins the team for the preseason.

Two weeks later the Wings are down 4-0 to the Blackhawks with only 10 minutes left. Mike Babcock gives the young Iraqi the nod and he goes in.

The kid is a sensation – scores 5 goals in 10 minutes and wins the game for the Wings! The fans are delighted, the players and coaches are delighted, and the media love the new star.

When the player comes off the ice he phones his mum: “Hello mum, guess what?” “I played for 10 minutes today, we were 4-0 down, but I scored 5 goals and we won. Everybody loves me, the fans, the media, they all love me.”

“Wonderful,” says his mum, “Let me tell you about my day. Your father got shot in the street and robbed, your sister and I were ambushed, raped and beaten, and your brother has joined a gang of looters and all while you were having such great time!”

The young Iraqi is very upset. “What can I say mum? I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re Sorry?!!” says his mum, “It’s your fault we moved to DETROIT in the first place!”

In slightly more uplifting news, Blair Kamin, chief architecture critic at the Trib, wrote an inspiring article about the endless possibilities that surround Chicago as we mark 100 years of Daniel Burnham’s great Plan of Chicago.  While planning at the dawn of the 20th century focused on changing the marshy, chaotic industrial megapolis into a modern city, we now face other problems of huge magnitude.  Among them are congestion and lack of good mass transit management, becoming the hub of our country’s coming high speed rail lines, free municipal Wi-Fi for everyone, growing our own food to prepare for the massive crisis sparked by the speculation of commodities done by our own CBOT/Merc , making the city safer for bikes, homeless and the forced exodus of working class people brought about by gentrification, horrible gun violence, ex-urban sprawl, deindustrialization, joblessness, and drug dealers.  Oh yeah, and all that corruption, police brutality, and Daley’s mob connections as well.

Further, even our brains are being linked to city living without a green side: psychologists are now saying that the brains of people stuck in cities without nature have decreased functionality and endure other harmful psychological side effects.

The focus on these problems are timely.  For years we have seen the negative effects of citizen planning left unchecked.  It’s time for a different tack.  We need to re-build our country from the ground up, starting with our cities.  The coming wave of Change that a candidate campaigning on progressive ideals helped to spark can only become stronger with every day that the oppression gets worse.  Every despicable congressional act, every foreign policy atrocity committed, every natural disaster not responded to, and every child murdered in the streets needs demands an answer.  

The question is, why are we still sitting there blogging and reading about it instead of doing something?

Here’s some news that might be more relevant to the War on Terror than Emperor Palpatine’s insistence that the US was right in torturing people and stripping away our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism (note that Boston.com’s article uses the words “harsh interrogation” instead of torture).  In a move certain to rival the take-it-on-the-chin attitude that summed up the gigantic douchenozzle that was the 110th United State Congress, our new Congress (CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!) signed two separate non-binding resolutions that unquestionably supported Israel – one from the Senate and one from the House.  Apparently, there are about 5 people with any balls whatsoever in our Congress, which include Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, and surprisingly (to me), Ron Paul.

Breaking Swayze news: he’s been checked into a hospital in LA with pneumonia.  He was supposed to give a press conference today about his upcoming show, The Beast, filmed right here in Chicago.  This can’t be good since he’s been fighting a vicious bout of pancreatic cancer and undergoing chemo.  Hopefully, he’ll be alright with a little TLC.  TV Guide tells us that “Swayze’s collaborators on The Beast expressed confidence in his health, noting his ability to run, climb walls, and carry his 190-pound co-star, Fimmel, while shooting episodes in the cold Chicago winter.”  Pain don’t hurt.

Speak of the devil, I had a sweet surprise for me when I woke up this morning.  Point Break was on one channel and Road House was on another.  Don’t think this day could get any better…

Check out To Live and Die in Gaza - by  Laila Al-Arian from the Nation – a human look at a horrible situation.

Here we are, day eight, and Israel is sending ground troops into the occupied Gaza strip.  How much worse can life get for the Palestinian people?  

I heard someone make an argument today that really sticks out as a good example of how willfully ignorant people in the US are of their unwavering support of Israel.  They were making a joke about a cartoon whereby it shows to combatants with rifles pointed at each other.  On the Israeli side, it shows a baby carriage behind the firing soldier.  On the Palestinian side, it shows a baby carriage in front of the firing soldier.  Get it?  Meaning that Palestinians hide behind civilians when attacking Israelis, and Israelis guard civilians from attack.  This underscores a willful ignorance here in the US, and we need to educate ourselves on this issue.  I’ve got five points that need clarification for those who take the “American” stance on this issue.

First, here’s a bit of history.  Socialist Worker’s Sharon Smith shows how the state of Israel, engineered by British colonialism, created a “Master Plan” for the Palestinian people:

In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.

Armed Zionist gangs, including the Irgun, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin, and the Stern Gang, initially massacred 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin. The terror spread to 40 other Palestinian villages as tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland in desperation, with only their clothes on their backs. By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They have never been allowed to return. [emphasis mine]

So where did they all go?   There have been three major historical exoduses of Palestinians, either out of the area all together, or to Palestinian territories the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: one in 1948 as a result of the Palestinian war; from 1949-1956 as a precursor to the Suez Crisis;  and another in 1967 as a result of the Six-Day war.  Many also went to neighboring Jordan and Egypt.  

A quote by Moshe Carmel, an Israeli commander, does well to sum up the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes: “Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered.”

Above: Nascent state of Israel’s boundaries under the 1947 Partition.

Above: Israel’s current boundaries (occupied and “stateless” Gaza Strip and West Bank shown, not including Zionist settlements in Palestinian territories)

Secondly, Gaza is an unofficially occupied area, according to the Hague convention of 1907.  It spells out occupation as: ‘Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.’  So since Palestinians do not belong to a nation-state and Israel has not (up until tonight) formally occupied Gaza, this means that Israel can do whatever it wants to Palestinians without violating the convention.  If you wish to read further on how words are twisted to absolve Israel of any wrongdoing, check out the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ take on the legality of Israeli occupation and strikes.  (You’ve got to love their summation: “the Palestinian-Israeli fighting in Gaza has been characterized by the extensive commission of war crimes, acts of terrorism and acts of genocide by Palestinian fighters, while Israeli countermeasures have conformed with the requirements of international law.”  Laughable if it wasn’t so infuriating.) 

Then, you’ve got the construction of the wall and the illegal blockade of Gaza that won’t allow but a stream of aid like food and medicine into the occupied areas.  The UN says:  ”The construction by Israel, the occupying power, of a wall in the Occupied Territories departing from the armistice line of 1949 is illegal under relevant provisions of international law and must be ceased and reversed.” Since Israel control’s everything that goes into or out of Gaza, the people suffer.  B’Tselem, an Israeli group dedicated to the education of its own people about its government’s treatment of innocent Palestinian civilians, shows on its website, many of the human rights violations found in the occupied territories (it also includes those perpetrated by Palestinians as well).  A New York Times article quotes a Palestinian factory owner, who laments the situation: 

“Mr. Bowab gestured around the nearly empty sewing hall. ‘I miss my workers,’ he said. ‘I miss the chatting. I miss the sound of the machines.’ Then he said: ‘Hamas and Fatah can both go to hell. The stupid Palestinian and Israeli leaders are killing us all. The people of Gaza are not Hamas. They are looking for food, to continue a dignified life.’”

In terms of Hamas being elected, the thugs have taken a page from Prohibition-era gangsters in the US, whereby they exploit their own people’s desperation.   Hamas provides millions of dollars in funding to create hospitals, schools, relief programs, and even sports teams, all of which are desperately needed in the miserable Palestinian slums.  (Even Reuven Paz, an Israeli scholar, estimates that over 90% of Hamas’ activity goes toward support of these activities.)  Pitting Hamas against the Fatah party, seen as corrupt and ineffectual by many, set up the disappointing election of Hamas to the majority in the 2006 elections.   It’s too bad that Hamas stubbornly holds to the idea that Palestinians and Arabs should and will one day control all of Israel again and tries to subvert the piece process at every turn.  

The Palestinian people don’t even have a right to vote in Israeli elections – the government that decides and administers their every waking move – even though estimates point to around 5,000,000 people live in Palestinian territories; which if included in the population of Israel, this equals roughly 50%.

Add to all of this religious fundamentalism and hard-line politicians – on both sides – and you have one giant powder keg.

So what does it all mean?  Three major culprits are to blame: colonialism and imperialism; religion; and the contradiction between what violence a nation-state can do and what violence armed rebels can do.  

Britain’s imposition of Israelis onto Palestinian-owned lands in post-WWII years a show of colonialism not seen since the Crusades.  The continual funding from the United States – estimates of over $108 billion throughout the years – and a refusal to even acknowledge the plight of Palestinian people by the US, has made for a lopsided peace process indeed.  Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich stands alone as one of the few voices of reason on Capitol Hill – he called for a UN probe on the Israeli attacks, calling them “disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law”.  Most Democrats, true to their spineless form, cowered and echoed the president in condemning the Palestinians for this assault in another game of “blame-the-victim”.

Next, militants on all sides – Zionist, Islamist, and even Christian – need to lay down their holy books and realize that we are all human beings.  Maybe after they get their heads out of those books, they would see that we all bleed the same blood.  Religion is ripping our world apart, just as it has for centuries.  Even if you believe in a religious notion, please, I implore you, condemn in accordance to what your religion would, objectively.  No more of this “Israel is God’s chosen people” or “Mohammed wants the earth wiped clean of Jews”.   What would Jesus do?  Would he be bombing and shooting innocent women and children?  Does Islam really advocate killing of innocents?

Finally, let’s have an open and honest debate on what constitutes “terrorism”.  If a state like Iran or North Korea can be a terrorist state, then why can’t the US or Israel?  Because we’re “right”?  Under whose definition?  When the Israelis kill indiscriminate men, women, and children, even targeting mosques, it’s because they are “fighting terrorism”.  But when suicide bombers blow up civilian targets, they are the “terrorists”.  Is it because one side has tanks and guns from the US and one uses whatever weapons it can get its hands on?  The Western world needs to stop echoing Bush’s “you’re with us or you’re a terrorist” call and start waking up to the fact that we are all people with families who deserve human rights.

Remember H. Ross Perot, that whacky little billionaire that ran for president against Bush and Clinton in 1992?  He always complained about the giant “sucking sound” of American industry being lost to Mexico as a result of the burgeoning North American trade agreement.  And while NAFTA has long been a target for criticism by jingoists like Lou Dobbs (I secretly believe this has more to do with his ambivalence towards brown people than any real concern for economic justice) — those in the mainstream Republicrat world have long embraced NAFTA and all its supposed gains.  

But most of those people in Senate offices in Washington and in board rooms perched on top of massive skyscrapers in New York aren’t working for a manufacturing company in the industrial heartland.  Big business, and their buddies in Washington, won a massive victory by convincing the American worker that NAFTA, and “Free Trade” in general by association, were good for America and good for the American worker.

Today we see quite a different picture indeed.  The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution, starting in 1980, dismantled piece by piece, what the American working class had built all those years to fight for a share of their own under our booming industrial days.  Up until then, Americans looked at the massive wealth generated by our corporations (GM, Ford, GE, Whirlpool, etc.) — that sold the world quality American products — and said, “Great, we’re the wealthiest country on earth!  Where’s my piece?”  

Asking that question nowadays gets a good scolding from the likes of those that make more in 5 minutes than I will see in a month’s worth of work.  Be a good patriot, they say.  We’re all in this together.  Don’t be greedy.

So, they eliminate our good jobs by sending them to Mexico (and China, but that’s another story for another day), pushing people far into debt, and then when people finally reach the breaking point, they tell us that “greedy” consumers were the problem.  

Now, I’m not saying it’s a smart thing to take out a loan to buy a $500,000 house if you make an working stiff’s salary.  But didn’t Wall Street just go on a spending spree with OUR mortgages?  Now they’re back at home, begging Mommy and Daddy taxpayer to pay those shopping bills.  So much for all that capitalist “pull your self up by the bootstraps” tough talk.  Want to talk about Welfare Queens?  Let’s have a goddamned coronation!  And we’ll have it right on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, just so all of our contestants can make it!

So let’s have it: the working class in this country, which is at least half of the population of the United States, needs to start standing up for itself again.  We cannot forget that our brothers and sisters over the boarder in a Delphi plant in Juarez are getting the collective bone as much as the single mother from Flint.

The New York Times posted an interesting article yesterday about the plight of the auto industry in Detroit and its effect on the black population of southeast Michigan.  

“If it wasn’t for the factory, the average black would not have been able to survive all these years, especially without an education,” says Claudia Perkins, 55, who has worked in the automobile industry for 33 years and is now at G.M.’s assembly plant at Lake Orion, Mich. said.

The beacon that was working- and middle-class prosperity and workplace democracy brought about by the auto industry’s unions is starting to fade.  The article points out that almost 14% of the auto industry was laid off since last December.

Read the whole article here.

The BBC is reporting that since Saturday, over 360 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip bombing campaign being waged by Israel.  The UN is saying that around 320 have been killed, 62 of which were innocent civilians.  As usual, the Israelis are claiming that the four deaths that occurred as a result of rockets being fired by Palestinian militants during the last three days justify this carnage.  Meanwhile, Hamas, just like other Arab nationalist and “Islamist” movements, seeks to stoke the fires of discontent amongst other Arabs and Palestinians in their desire to completely wipe Israel off the map.

So, it looks like the mainstream media got something right for once: TIME’s prediction in February proved dead on.  What’s next?  Lebanon? 

Sadly, most Christians in the West will tell you that they support Israel because of the Bible.  Doesn’t the Bible have a thing or two to say about loving one’s enemies, and not killing others?  So we continue our unquestioning support of Israel, even if its tactics cause suffering and further destabilization of the region.  Most countries are blaming both sides, but in the US, Barack Obama is talking tough to Palestinians and placing the blame squarely on them for the Israeli attacks.  Huh?

It’s also really sad that in a parallel to the IRA/Northern Ireland debacle, workers on both sides (be they Jewish or Arab, Protestant or Catholic) suffer in the name of religion and a propped-up system of unjust social hierarchy.  We must remember that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth and the religions that justify it (and many other atrocities, like suicide bombings) are the ultimate culprits.  Until people realize that they are fighting the wrong enemy, we as human beings, will be forever trapped in the same cycle of violence that Israel and the Palestinians find themselves in each year that goes by without real change in the region.  

We must also demand Muslims in the Middle East absorb a form of Islam that does not settle for anything less than their every demand, at the consequences of violence if they are not met.  This change can only come from within: clerics, mullahs, and other thought leaders.

In other news, a boat carrying aid and relief workers to Gaza (including Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney) was practically destroyed by the Israeli military in international waters.