Barak seeks to regain Labor leadership

[oberliner]

JERUSALEM - Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced on Sunday his much-anticipated return to politics, saying he will seek the leadership of the Labor Party in the first step toward a possible bid for the country's highest office.

The announcement by Barak, 63, one of Israel's best-known figures, immediately shook up the race for the top spot in Labor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's main coalition partner. Labor primaries are set for May.

Barak spent nearly six years in political exile after he was crushed by Ariel Sharon in a 2001 election. The defeat followed a short and stormy tenure as prime minister that abruptly ended after failed efforts at making peace with Syria and the Palestinians.

The former army commando and chief of staff said he would run against the party's current leader, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, whose popularity has plummeted following Israel's inconclusive summer war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_barak_s_return

[IndianaGreen]

1. Peretz is a war criminal, and Barak is an idiot!

In addition to being a war criminal, Olmert is incompetent, a far greater crime than being an idiot. I hope Livni challenges him for the leadership of Kadima.

As to Likud, I wouldn't want them win the election anymore than I would want a Christian Zionist as President of the USA.

[Tom Joad]

2. When has the United States Not had a Christian Zionist as President?

[oberliner]

3. The first hundred years of existence?

And those hundred years were filled with more brutality, mass expulsion, appropriation of land, slaughtering of innocent civilians and ethnic cleansing then anything we have ever seen from any Zionist in my humble opinion.

[Tom Joad]

4. Yes, what the US supports in regard to Israeli colonialism is part of a long

tradition. It is quite rare that the US comes on the side of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist forces, usually only as a result of citizen pressure and/or that the battle has been lost (e.g. South Africa).

Look at what Mark Twain was opposing in the Phillipines, and McKinley's insanity was in no way inspired by zionists. Sounds like Bush's misadventure to bring "democracy" to Iraq.

From Mark Twain:
I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do.

I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

Later Mark Twain signed a statement that read in part:

" steps be taken at once to stop … the killing of prisoners, the
shooting without trial of suspected persons, the use of torture, … the
wanton destruction of private property, and everywhere the barbarous
methods of waging war, which this nation from its infancy has ever
condemned.”

[IndianaGreen]

5. Bush 43 is the first

and hopefully he is the last.

[geek tragedy]

6. So, I guess we root for the idiot then.

Charming set of choices.