"pacified communists "

Monday's Globe is a crashing bore. A good day for filling the OpEd page with a long-winded
editorial, one of many that will inevitably be trotted out before the Globe can claim that its upcoming endorsement of The Presumptive Nominee is both thought out and strictly on the merits. We have seen this liturgy many times before. That may be why Shannon O'Brien is Governor today. A telling excerpt:

"If there is a troubling contradiction in Kerry's foreign policy platform, it lies in the contrast between his get-tough remarks about Saudi Arabia and his desire to "explore areas of mutual interest with Iran, just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam." The clerical despots in Tehran -- who have lately been chastized[sic] for lying to the International Atomic Energy Agency about their nuclear program -- have nothing in common with the pacified communists who rule Vietnam."

If you live here in Boston (and didn’t flee here from Vietnam in the 1970s) I suppose you could view Vietnam's government as pacified. A more accurate description would be "sponsorless" since the demise of the USSR left no Socialist Sugar Daddy to help prop up their economy. Somehow I doubt that people who have remained all these years in Ho Chi Minh City regard them as "pacified" to the same degree.

The most interesting story I found is well buried in the middle of the Local section. It concerns a diverse group that sponsored the display of the shattered hulk of a Jerusalem bus which had been destroyed by a suicide bomber, killing 11. The remains of the bus were displayed yesterday at City Hall Plaza. The mute eloquence of this was somehow provocative and brought out some pro-Palestinian demonstrators (whom the Globe is careful not to call anti-you-know-what).

Many of the protesters were from the New England Committee to Defend Palestine, based in Jamaica Plain.

''I'm here today because this march is a march celebrating racism and apartheid in Palestine, where I'm from," said Lana Habash, a member of the committee.

Asked about her reaction to the bombed bus, she said Palestinians had tried work strikes, protests on the streets, and other methods to decry the taking of their land and acts of violence against them.

''I think when you've tried everything else, there is an international human right to resist," said Habash.

Perhaps next time, since the bus didn’t seem enough to make the point, they might display some photos of the shattered bodies of those 11 people who were slain (and how many were badly wounded?) on a normal morning commute in what is this woman's idea of an expression of the “international human right to resist”.

Sadly, the online edition of the Globe adds further insult by flubbing the caption of the picture of the bus, giving it instead a caption from another story in today’s paper about Boston Public School bus drivers. It says:

Georgeana Felton, operations supervisor at the First Student Charlestown Terminal, posted bus driver schedules earlier this month. Drivers are watching closely as school officials work to overhaul the system’s student assignment policy (Globe Staff Photo / Pat Greenhouse)