Ravings of a Feral Genius: Moderate Puzzle

Monday, July 30, 2007

Moderate Puzzle

While browsing idly through links at Antiwar.com I saw the headline that Israel's making the unprecedented step of backing U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Which I ordinarily wouldn’t care enough to post about, but this quote from

Israel

’s prime minister caught my eye:

"We understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderate states and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran."

What? A united front between Israel and the US is vital regarding Iran: yeah, plausible, whatever. But when the hell did Saudi Arabia become a “moderate” state?

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...: The enemy of my enemy and all that.; 2:15 AM
Anonymous said...: It pays both ways!

When Iran sits back down, and Saudi Arabia suddenly and really very surprisingly turns back from a moderate into an enemy state, look for Israel to cite all of those US-made weapons in Saudi Arabia as a reason they need even bigger arms giveaways to Israel.; 3:12 AM
Anne O'Neimaus said...: ...when the hell did Saudi Arabia become a “moderate” state?

Since they haven't overthrown one of our pet dictators (the Shaw), and have continued to more-or-less deal with American Oil Companies...

In Kissinger-era "realpolitik" terms, I believe that "moderate" is not so much a measurement along the axis of religious or social extremism -vs- tolerance. Rather, it is nothing more than a measure of how much a government or group is opposed to whomever is applying the label.

It's yet another case of redefining the terms used in a statement, without explicitly notifying people that the term is being used in an unconventional way, so "the public" will be deliberately mislead.; 1:00 PM

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Jennifer Abel is an American writer who began her career in print media three minutes before the Internet killed the industry. After starting at a small Connecticut daily she moved to the Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly where her journalistic coups included infiltrating a Furries convention and working on a phone sex line (which fired her six hours later). Since then she’s written for, or been reprinted in, dozens of print and web outlets, including Playboy, the Guardian, Salon, AlterNet, Mashable, the Daily Dot and pretty much every website with the words "cannabis" or "legalize it" in the title. Once, when she was young and naïve and needed the money, she unwittingly edited SEO copy for a spammer. However, in light of the spambot comments she’s deleted from her own blogs since then, she figures she’s more than repaid that particular karmic debt. Jennifer is currently looking for professional, non-spam writing jobs; interested editors are enthusiastically invited to e-mail her.

Ravings of a Feral Genius

Monday, July 30, 2007

Moderate Puzzle

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