Israel’s May 31 attack on the flotilla of boats, resulting in the death of nine peace activists seeking to break the Gaza embargo has brought protest from orthodox Jews.

An orthodox group called “Neturei Karta” protested at the White House and released this message:  “We express our profound condolences to the families of the murdered innocents, as well as our heartfelt wishes for speedy recoveries to all those wounded by the Zionist occupational forces. May Heaven send you complete and swift healing.”

Wikipedia reports, about this Jewish Orthodox group, “Neturei Karta believes that the exile of the Jews can only end with the arrival of the Messiah, and that human attempts to establish Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel are sinful. In Neturei Karta’s view, Zionism is a presumptuous affront against God.”

Orthodox Jews, at the White House, protest Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla that resulted in nine deaths.

Neturei Karta’s position is that that State of Israel is illegitimate:

We find it imperative to clearly declare that the State of “Israel” does not represent the Jewish people, and certainly not the Jewish religion. They have no right to speak in our name, nor in the name of the holy Torah. They profane the Holy Land with their abominations, slaughters and countless other actions that emanate from this illegitimate State. Furthermore, the actual existence of this State is illegitimate as the holy Torah strictly and explicitly forbids any Jewish rule over the Holy Land. When the Zionist movement arose a century ago, our rabbis all warned us not to have any connection with them.

The Sunday ABC show “This Week” featured a roundtable with George Will, Liz Cheney, Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas.

Jack Tapper, the moderator, noted that the United States was the only Western country in the world that refused to condemn Israel for  its actions that caused the death of nine people on a flotilla bringing relief supplies to Gaza.

I thought Arianna made a good point when she emphasized that the suffering in Gaza is “a real humanitarian disaster in violation of the Geneva convention that prohibits collective punishment.” I felt that Markos muffed his chance to say much of anything of significance.

What was interesting was the energy and zeal with which Liz Cheney and George Will defended the indefensible. You would think to hear them talk that the flotilla carrying supplies for Gaza was laden with scud missiles and weapons and  that this violent confrontation in international waters was required for Israel’s self defense.

According to Liz Cheney it is Israel that is being attacked.  With a straight face, she said, “When we don’t stand with Israel in the face of this kind of attack by Iran, by Syria, by Turkey, we send a very clear message that those nations can if fact attack Israel with impunity, that they can threaten to destroy Israel with impunity.”

George Will seemed lost in the forest of his own thoughts.  He seemed to argued that Israel’s indefensible actions were needed in order for Israel to defend itself and that anyone who might question Israel is only seeking war.  He said, “The next war becomes likely, all because people are trying to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s self defense …”

Liz Cheney’s Comments:

Israel is under attack by Hamas which uses Gaza as a platform from which to launch attacks against Israel. They want to destroy the state of Israel and they are supported in that by Iran, Syria and, now, it looks like Turkey, as well.  This flotilla, had it really been committed to providing humanitarian aid, could have taken the Israel government up on its offer to dock and take that relief in.  They didn’t do that.  It was clearly a propaganda ploy. You had members of the Moslem brotherhood that were on board, you had people who were armed, ready for Israeli commandos to arrive. The United has to stand with Israel.  The United States, in a choice between Israel and Hamas, tries to stand above it, which is what this president likes to do on every issue, sort of be detached, and say, on the one hand, as he said in his Cairo speech a year ago, “on the one hand you have the holocaust and on the other hand you have Palestinians living under occupation.” That kind of moral equivalence is not only wrong and shameful, it is dangerous for the United States of America to not be standing with Israel.  When we don’t stand with Israel in the face of this kind of attack by Iran, by Syria, by Turkey, we send a very clear message that those nations can if fact attack Israel with impunity, that they can threaten to destroy Israel with impunity, and the United States won’t stand by its most important ally in the Middle East.

George Will’s Comments:

To the extent that that fiction called the international community makes it impossible for Israel to conduct this kind of boycott to keep Hamas from becoming re-amed, two things happen. You hasten the coming of the next Middle East war, because scuds are coming from Hezbellah in Syria from the North, weapons will pour into Gaza — from which 6000 rockets have already been fired at Israel. So Israel again will have to take active defense and go again into Gaza and Southern Lebanon.  Furthermore, no Israeli prime minister is going to allow a two state solution, if a Palestinian State, based on the West Bank, cannot allow some kind of armed presence on its eastern border to prevent a new influx of arms into the new Palestinian state.  Therefore,a two state solution becomes impossible and the next war becomes likely, all because people are trying to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s self defense.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner and Columbia University professor, writes that big banks are pushing hard to stop any government regulation on derivatives. He writes that, “the Obama administration and the Fed, in opposing these restrictions, have clearly lined up on the side of big banks,”and writes that if, after this huge financial crisis, our democracy cannot deliver new regulation for such dangerous banking practices, it will be “a sad day for democracy.”

Excerpts from Stiglitz post, “Financial Re-Regulation and Democracy”:

• There is almost universal agreement that the crisis the world is facing today – and is likely to continue to face for years – is a result of the excesses of the deregulation movement begun under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan 30 years ago. Unfettered markets are neither efficient nor stable.
• Most of those responsible for the mistakes … have not owned up to their failures.
• Banks that wreaked havoc on the global economy have resisted doing what needs to be done. Worse still, they have received support from the Fed, which one might have expected to adopt a more cautious stance, given the scale of its past mistakes and the extent to which it is evident that it reflects the interests of the banks that it was supposed to regulate.
• We need to “hard-wire” more of the regulatory framework. The usual approach – delegating responsibility to regulators to work out the details – will not suffice.
• A court of law will decide whether Goldman Sachs’ behavior – betting against products that it created – was illegal. But the court of public opinion has already rendered its verdict on the far more relevant question of the ethics of that behavior. That Goldman’s CEO saw himself as doing “God’s work” as his firm sold short products that it created, or disseminated scurrilous rumors about a country where it was serving as an “adviser,” suggests a parallel universe, with different mores and values.
• The problem of too-big-to-fail banks is now worse than it was before the crisis. Increased resolution authority will help, but only a little: in the last crisis, US government “blinked,” failed to use the powers that it had, and needlessly bailed out shareholders and bondholders – all because it feared that doing otherwise would lead to economic trauma. As long as there are banks that are too big to fail, government will most likely “blink” again.
• The US government would be remiss to leave things as they are. The Senate bill’s provision on derivatives is a good litmus test: the Obama administration and the Fed, in opposing these restrictions, have clearly lined up on the side of big banks. If effective restrictions on the derivatives business of government-insured banks (whether actually insured, or effectively insured because they are too big to fail) survive in the final version of the bill, the general interest might indeed prevail over special interests, and democratic forces over moneyed lobbyists.
• If, as most pundits predict,these restrictions are deleted, it will be a sad day for democracy – and a sadder day for prospects for meaningful financial reform.