Very well written assessment by a man with brains

Of course a genius can be racist. Hitler was clearly a genius, for example. Guy Bechor, however, is not.

Not at all. He continues to spew inaccurate and racist analysis, and while I have already distanced myself from this blog in its entirety (which you will notice is now an archive) and feel no need to retract anything here specifically, I happen to stand behind most of what I wrote in this post in particular.

I believe in dialogue at eye level, compromising justice, magnanimity and good will. “Ther rest is silence” (Hamlet’s last words).

Bechor has no recognized credentials as a “Middle East Expert” either. He is a lawyer by way of this formal academic training.
Bechor, like all mainstream Israeli “experts” on the Middle East is incapable of understanding or conceptualizing Arabs from a humanistic perspective. For him there are only regimes, and how likely they are going to threaten Israel.
Although post-Mubarak Egypt will have a different approach to Israel, it is entirely narcesistic to think that this revolution is primarily about Israel in any way. It is about Egyptian people wanting to have lives like those in any other part of the world, especially the West.

Hello Jason,
I won’t spend too much time replying to you — last time I replied with a few questions and you never came back, so I assume you’re not here for discussion but rather just demagogical rebuttal. (I’l reply because your demagogy needs rebuttal as well.)
1. The longest ongoing armed conflict in the world today, according to Wikipedia, is the Naxalite insurgency in India. No muslims are involved.
2. Al Qaeda and Hezbolla do not represent nor control the Arab world in any real way (Hezbolla is exception in its influence on Lebanon — which is a tiny country that has suffered serious blows from its neighbors and only recently gotten rid of Syrian control).
3. I have never denied the existence of violent radical Islamic movements. It is also interesting to note that every single one of the conflicts you list is in parts of the world that have suffered Western colonisation at some point in the past couple of centuries, which I think is not incidental.
4. No, I have never equated Hasidic or religious Judaism as a whole with Hamas. But yes, Israel certainly has the same kind of fundamentalists. Our Minister of Justice (or was it his deputy?) has gone on record as saying he hopes Israeli law will one day be replaced by Jewish law (which, by the way, mandates stonings for some things). For current examples of fundamentalism you can always check the Slippery Slope, which aggregates news about such things (amongst others): http://www.hahem.co.il/slipperyslope/en/ – the Tag Cloud on the right-hand sidebar can help find particular types of incidents. Try “racism”, “settlers” or “price tag” (a settler euphemism for pogroms) or the “Closed Society” category. Luckily, the Jewish fundamentalists are only a violent, vocal and influential minority, and do not control the country. However, the current government of Israel has given some of their initiatives frightening amounts of support, and they seem to be growing bolder every week.
5. Judaism has gone through a reformation? That’s news to me. I have no idea about the history of Hinduism or Buddhism but it surprises me to hear they have had reformations as well. I’d love some more info on this.

It’s heartening to see you think so very highly of all Israelis, but like most societies, ours as well has frightening elements in it, and like any society in an ongoing conflict and any society with deep social rifts these elements are not as marginal as they should be. That’s not to say Israel is less free or democratic than post-colonial Arab dictatorships, but insisting everything is fine is generally an ineffective way of solving real problems.