Is this a joke? No. Apparently being an anti-war activist means you are suspected of being connected to Hamas, or at least are worthy of being subpoenaed and having your home searched by the FBI.
What is this/that country coming to? Everyone who believes in these (or any) causes should speak out and be a vocal activist so the FBI gets overwhelmed and can re-focus on real threats rather than targeting non-violent human rights defenders. Go to a protest, or maybe just #Rally4Sanity (I really wish hash tags worked in this).
by audrey. 
Local take:
http://www.twincities.com/news/ci_16164223?nclick_check=1
Choice quotes:
‘An FBI SWAT team entered first “and looked for pointy things.”‘
‘Asked whether Kelly had any contact with FTOs, Dooley said: “I have no idea. I guess it’s possible with six degrees of separation that he knows Obama.”‘
It sounds like, here at least, this is *still* fallout from the hugely overreacted to 2008 RNC protests. Weren’t these poor socialists teargassed enough already?
I feel like I should know this – FTO?
Probably foreign terrorist organization.
Removing my earlier comment was something that fits what I came back here to say. You are engaging, for the most part, in an extended family meeting. The family is defined in part by that meeting. Families don’t face facts, they face each other. The family is more important than the facts.
Yet the fact that you let me comment at all shows that you know this family is not okay. You invite passers-by to comment.
But mostly I came back to say that your family conversation is about lynching people on account of their ethnicity (although, as someone said today, behind that may be economic motives).
So the family has a civic responsibility. I turned to the Jewish Daily Forward’s website tonight with an odd conviction that they would comment on the end of the settlement freeze. Odd in that they would be the last place I’d expect to see a frank conversation about Israel. But the story tops their page, as follows:
Getting to a Deal: PA President Abbas’ recent meeting with American Jewish leaders “reflected the growing sense in Israel and the West Bank that negotiations can’t succeed without President Obama’s involvement, and that Obama can’t get in and stay in unless American Jews back off and give him some running room,” J.J. Goldberg writes. Abbas, above right, with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. More Read more: http://www.forward.com/#ixzz10mFYpfPz
The story is called: As Settlement-Building Restarts, U.S. Tries To Push Peace Talks
Some families have more civic responsibilities than others.
Since you’ve invited me in, here’s my advice. J Street may look wacky to AIPAC and AIPAC may look psychotic to J Street, but the lady being evicted from her Gaza settlement put it out there: if we give up Gaza we might as well give up the Jewish state. A nod to J Street is a nod to the end of the Jewish state. The question is how to keep the family together. My advice is not to imagine that the letting go of the Jewish state is going to change its nature by being packaged differently. Do it any way you want, but don’t split your mind by thinking that the contradiction of the Jewish and democratic state can be resolved by repackaging. Think of this as keeping grandma from sticking her head in the oven (David Steinberg joke from the seventies, repeated over and over). There is no way that you want her to stick her head in the oven, no matter what you have to tell her to put it off a minute. Remember what the crisis is. Galileo–“preserve the phenomenon.”
Relevancy is a function of the scope of the original problem and of the degree to which the initial claim grasps that scope.
Foreign terrorist organization would not be an acronym if there were no Jewish state in Palestine. That is the oven, and there is grandma trying to stick her head in it.
I delete what I either don’t want to or cannot understand (literally, some words just don’t make sense), or what I don’t want up here, or what I don’t agree with (not in opinion but in approach). That is my prerogative as the author and maintainer of this space as essentially my personal blog. Engaging in punditry/demagoguery/what-have-you is a hobby, not a profession. Sometimes, a flower is just a flower. I will read your comments but please do respect my decision to remove them – especially as they get excessive.