I tend to more in favour of dialogue than just stumping for your homies but, heck, that could just be me on this one.

Why? Why do we have to "hear" the other side? I'm sick of making "room for debate."
Why are the owners of a restaurant now forced to create "room for debate?" It's their fucking restaurant.

"If the State Department's long-standing policy is to view the settlements as illegal and say it as such then it's pretty hard to argue that it's a viewpoint that doesn't really get expressed in America."

The problem is, the "settlements" are themselves illegal, as they resulted from Israel's refusal to cooperate with the 1947 UN Resolution that created the state of Palestine. "The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own population into the territories it occupies." Israel has been in direct…

No, American policy re: the settlements has been to waffle and try not to say anything too strong in either direction — to half-heartedly call them "illegal" while blocking any UN security council moves to actually declare them illegal.

And since anti-Semitism is still going strong (for example, see the attacks on stores owned by Jews in France during Operation Protective Edge, or the protesters that kept an Israeli ship from docking in Oakland)

Excuse you but what you earlier described DID happen to the Palestinians. You also forgot to add the apartheid system of roads, the inability to travel for work or to receive medical care, the blockading of medical and other supplies needed to live and the outright stealing of land.

Methinks you don't know what "typo" means. It wasn't a typo at all.

THIS. If you do any traveling outside the US at all, even just say Canada and Costa Rica, the coverage is so very different than ours. Much less propaganda, much less pro-Israeli government. The coverage is much more balanced and factual.

Settling people in disputed territory is an old tactic that can be, and absolutely is, planned deliberately. If you can keep settlers there long enough then they are perceived to have some de facto right to be there. The Israeli government is by no means the only one to have used this trick - Britain settled thousands…

No it isn't. It's a small but integral part of a larger story that doesn't get nearly as much airtime in America as the other side does.

Do yyouyou actually understand the intent of settlements? Something about your post makes me think you may not...

Well, the US gives the Israeli military money, which the Israeli military uses to buy weapons from American corporations (among other uses of course.) Then the Israeli military drops some of those weapons on the Palestinians. That is pretty damn supportive.

I think the point of Conflict Kitchen is to highlight the voices that Americans don't generally hear. It's smart to do that with food because it is something elemental and very regional but not necessarily nationalistic. The policy of the United States is to support the foreign policy of Israel, so Americans have…

Venezuela, not Argentina. At no point did I mention Argentina.

Argentina is one of the countries featured by this restaurant in the past, so...by their definition, yes.

Sure, but I am not sure what difference that makes. The point is that for every Medgar Evers who was interviewed "in the name of balance," some Grand Dragon or Wizard or whatever they were called were also respectfully queried as to their opinion: as though a hate group were equitable to a group fighting for civil…

Unfortunately, yes, most Israeli perspectives are anti-Palestinian ones. This comes from someone who grew up with an Israeli father and an American Jewish mother, and I can say that without hesitation. My father/family believes that the only good Arab or Palestinian is a dead one, period.

Just imagine that all of a sudden people might decide you didn't deserve to exist and you get fired from your job, get attacked in the street, and then get dragged out your house and shot while your neighbors stand by curiously and you wonder which of them called you in. And if you run to another country, they…

The most passionate supporters of Israel, at this point, are evangelical Christians.