The Council has spoken

The Watchers Council holds a vote every week to choose from among the nominated blog posts. I was forced to miss last week's vote due to the pressures of work. I was unable to make it to the airport in time to catch the customized 767 which has been assigned to transport me to the weekly conclaves, this week the Council met at the hotel Ca' Maria Adele in Venice. However the vote goes on even with missing members and this weeks winning Council post was Why Jews Are Right To Suspect Obama's Advisers by Bookworm Room. Here is a sample:

Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has accused American Jews of McCarthyism for being critical of Israel’s critics. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The pattern, repeated over and over as we learn more about Obama’s advisers, is that one of them speaks fondly of the Palestinians or harshly of Israel, Jews get upset and someone then accuses Jews of making any rational dialog about Israel impossible. Jews, they say, are casting a pall on the debate by insisting on unconditional love for Israel as a prerequisite for any discussion about solutions in the Middle East — and that makes it impossible to achieve a solution, since it essentially cuts the Palestinians out of the debate entirely.

In a normal situation, the Obamanites might have a point. Ordinarily, if the world were focusing like a laser on a dispute between two small, bordering countries about riparian rights (or trade agreements, or power plants, or any of the ordinary disputes that might rile adjoining nations), it would be fatal to a peaceful conclusion if the external mediators entered with a preconceived bias in favor of one of the countries. But what Obama and his fellow travelers fail to understand is that the relationship between Israel and her neighbors is not a garden-variety dispute about concrete matters such as borders and water. Instead, it is a binary, existential dispute that demands the answer to a single question: Does Israel have the right to exist?

Israel and her friends say she does have the right to exist. They believe that she and her citizens should not have to worry daily that they will be utterly annihilated by one big bomb or thousands of small ones. The Palestinians and their friends, however, whether speaking through their charters, their rhetoric, their religion, or their actions, say she does not have any such right to exist — and that this is true whether one considers her as a whole nation or as a collection of individual citizens. The Palestinian side to the “debate” has made it patently clear since Israel’s inception (and before), that the beef with Israel is not about a village or a river or a water well. It’s about the genocide of a people and the destruction of a nation.

The winning non-Council post was Deep Thoughts with Biggie Smalls by Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal. Here is a sample:

As someone whose foreign language efforts usually resemble beluga whale mating calls, I have zero right to criticize non-English primary speakers attempts at my native language. I rationalize this by saying that my love for the English language is just too pure and too right to be tainted by something else, but really, who knows. I guess that synapse hadn’t connected yet before I escaped the womb in a Caesarian jailbreak. I even dated a French chick for a few months and never made any serious progression to learn her language. If a woman can’t make you do something despite all her harassments to the contrary, it probably isn’t meant to happen.

Still, one cannot avoid the very obvious truth that English sounds funny when it comes out of mouths untrained to its’ complexities. That’s not being culturally insensitive, that’s just straight comedic fact. Language – any language – inevitably develops into a multitude of dialects, nuances, and cultural references that can be nigh impossible to understand, let alone replicate. Such is the case for the Gravediggers’ ever-present and always amusing interpreter, Biggie Smalls. A good-natured grandfather who has a weakness for ignoring his diabetes in the name of Pepsi Cola and cannot stand punk teenagers, Biggie causes as much of a ruckus around Anu al-Verona as we do; his diversity due to his heritage in the Heart of Africa and midnight black skin, when blended with his ability to make newfound friends everywhere he goes and the rolling chuckle that follows nearly every statement he makes, has proven to be an instrumental asset in the counterinsurgency fight. Everyone knows Biggie, and Biggie knows everyone.

The other results can be viewed here.