so it goes

somebody wrote - The Palestinian people clearly knew what they were doing when they chose Hamas. They were siding with extremists, just as the people of Israel did a few years ago when they put the Likud firmly in power in response to the Intifada. Just as the people of Iran did last summer when they put the religious extremist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power and just as the people of Saudi Arabia and Egypt recently did when they voted the Muslim Brotherhood in. Likewise in the U.S. when the American people chose the neoconservatives -- or whatever they preferred to be called -- puttng them into power to preserve them from Islamic extremism.

People everywhere on both sides of this conflict are deliberately and consciously heeding the siren call of extremists in their midst that hate, religious intolerance, death and destruction are the answers to their fears and feelings of victimhood.

In turn, these false prophets mock as weakness and capitulation the one thing which could save us -- our traditional values of faith, hope, love, charity, justice and mercy -- and no one seems to notice that from year to year the fruits of their false doctrines are an ever downward spiraling into chaos, destruction and polarization.

So it goes.