Wartime Flame Wars

In a post Ben Smith titles "Mideast Conflict Spillover Watch", he points out how a sweet little post on the NY real estate blog Curbed has its comment thread turn into a platform for a lovely little anti-Israel diatribe. The post discusses a newly opened public waterfront park in the Hassid and hipster enclave of Williamsburg, and includes some pictures which have views of some Hasidic parkgoers enjoying the view in the foreground of the shots. The images somehow compel a commenter to leave this sentiment on the thread:

Yep, JEW York has served its 'chosen people' before the rest of the unwashed masses. Send them back to Israel to be cannon fodder of the Hezbollah.

Screw the Amish too.

And when other commenters respond to this idiocy, he lashes out with more of his version of the "facts":

If I'm infuriating any one, who cares...the truth hurts. Try being a Palestinian, living in Gaza, freely expressing yourself. Your house will get knocked down and the Israel government will put you in the streets.

Why arent Americans sick of having to 'protect' a weak nation such as Israel? We believe in 'might makes right'. That means if Israel cannot defend itself without the suport of the good ole USA, too bad, BYE BYE Israel.

There are more Jews in NYC than IN Israel anyways...So why aren't they returning to fight their own battles??? Are you weak?? How can an American Jew complain about Israels situation, OR my opinion of it, if they are'nt DOING something about it?? Hypocrisy disgusts me.

What disgusts me the most is the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Jews against the Palastines...and the genocide aginst the Lebanese.

It takes a BIG Jew to drop bombs on Lebanese civilians.

I mean...aren't you people paying attention??? The Israelites are no better than Machette wielding Hutu's murdering thier neighbors.

No wonder Arabia hates the Jew.

....I'm just sick of Jews getting the US into it's scraps. Any one notice that big whole in the NYC skyline?? Whey are we putting ourselves in the cross hairs again?? For what??

Nice.
Another commenter on the post responds with an amusing rejoinder:

Just an ironic note -- the Hasidim pictured in the park are members of the Satmar sect, whose leaders are virulently anti-Zionist. The chief Satmar rebbe Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979) even went so far as to declare that Zionists had "caused the Holocaust" by taking back the land of Israel before the arrival of the Jewish Messiah.

Also, here's another post, on a Brooklyn-focused blog, about a Brooklyn home that was defaced with red paint because the residents chose to fly an Israeli flag from their front window. That comment thread also turned into a battle between pro-Israel and anti-Israel commenters. Check them out.

These flame wars over the Mideast conflict have been occurring, of course, on a much larger scale on megablogs all over the blogosphere. But it's interesting to see this on a local level, on these blogs with such a narrow focus.