I was once talking to an old Pakistani man who had been living in America since the 60s. We tend to believe that somehow we have more authentic knowledge of things than the older folks just because we have better sources of information at our disposal. However, I believe the opposite is true.

The people before us may not have been getting their information as quickly as we do, but they sure had a better understanding of things, especially politics. This old man was telling me about George Bush, the senior one.

He was saying that the main reason Bush had lost was because he got tough with Israel by trying to prevent it from building settlements inside the occupied territories.

The Israeli lobbies inside the United States got into action and punished him. I laughed off the old man's argument by saying that a foreign country and a mere lobby cannot be so powerful that they'd influence an American presidential election. Boy, was I naive?

I spent years after that........

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