blogroll

One of the blogs that I read on a regular basis is called Israeli by Day, American by Night. Today I was catching up on some reading and saw this post about bulldozers and construction in Jerusalem and the aftermath of the two recent bulldozer attacks.

Now, I strongly suspect that at least one, if not both, of those attacks were not "terrorist" attacks, but cases of individual men just snapping under the strain of life. That happens everywhere, and when it does it doesn't get political overtones unless there is an ethnic twist. For those of you who haven't noticed, it was in the USA during the 80's that the term "going postal" was coined, and I think that's just exactly what happened here, too. No one started fearing the postman or claiming that postal workers were terrorists. They were mostly white postmen shooting up their coworkers, too, so there was no reason to pull the race card. The problem is that our bulldozer incidents did have an ethnic twist, so there is absolutely no objectivity about the situation.

The post at Israeli by Day is fantastic, because it shows both how this can happen, and how events like these effect ordinary people afterwards.