I was having dinner with an old friend the other night. He glanced down at the menu and looked up in disgust. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to have to become a vegan. I can’t eat seafood or meat. We’ve fouled up our environment so much, none of it’s healthy.”

Now, normally, I like to prove my friend wrong, but not in this instance. I was in no mood to argue. Millions of gallons of oil had just spilled in America’s seafood basket; our Chesapeake Bay’s in horrible shape; and we treat our livestock so poorly, injecting them so much, it makes our food supply suspect.  We’ve made such a mess of our land and sea that beluga whales living in the Arctic Ocean are now getting breast cancer.

Everyone, on the left and on the right, seems to be angry at the most current environmental nightmare. There’s a circle of screaming going on, blaming all sorts of people including President Obama, former President Bush and BP.  The anger at BP is understandable.  After all, its brilliantly handled CEO uttered the now infamous words that will spell the end of his tenure (and possibly the end of one of the world’s largest companies), “I just want my life back.”

Well, Mr. Hayward, you can have your life back when we have our seafood-producing, animal-filled, vacation-destination Gulf back.

BP messed up, literally and figuratively, at every turn. They’ve handled this very badly. They should have announced they were bringing in the best people from across the globe; they were going to work with the U.S. government and engineers from every oil company and find a solution — fast. Now, everyone’s mad at BP, as they should be. But it seems no one’s mad at themselves They are taking out their frustrations on others.

Locally, John Phelps owns Carroll Independent Fuel, a third-generation oil and gas company. John and his family are great members of our community. His grandfather was good for the Jews and every other minority long before it was socially acceptable. They donate a lot of money to local charities, and the Phelps family is one of the hardest-working, most honest families I know. I am proud to call John a friend.

I went to get gas the other day and drove past his BP station and filled up at his Carroll Independent Fuel station. I called John on my cell to let him know the CIF had lines and his BP station was practically empty, though only a half-mile away. Drivers are boycotting BP stations.

“I know,” John answered me with concern. “It’s a real problem.”

People think BP owns those stations. It doesn’t; local owners do. The gas coming out of those pumps may or may not come from BP.  The profits go to people like the Phelps family, creating local jobs and paying local taxes.

Besides, which oil company would you prefer supply our local dealer? Exxon, which dumped millions of gallons of oil in Alaska and paid only $500 million in fines, Hugo Chavez’s Citgo, Texaco (now Chevron), which polluted the Amazon so badly children have birth defects and can’t get compensated? Or BP? Oil companies aren’t saints. It’s a dirty business to start with.

We need to stop blaming the oil companies and start blaming ourselves. We’re the ones driving the huge SUVs and living in McMansions.  Americans are 5 percent of the world’s population and account for 25 percent of the oil consumption. We vote for politicians who ensure we have cheap gas for our pickup trucks and our minivans. Oil companies are meeting our demand. Oil’s hard to find and hard to get out of the ground.

The Jewish community is shockingly silent on this issue. Because of supply and demand, we keep oil prices high, helping the Iranians and other terror-sponsoring countries—countries that threaten Israel’s very existence. Yet we think nothing of pumping cheap gas into our huge cars and homes. We scream at Obama, but we don’t let our government raise taxes on fuel to pay for alternative energy subsidies or pass a comprehensive energy bill.

Don’t just blame BP, don’t blame politicians and certainly don’t blame local gas station owners. Let’s blame ourselves and our own Jewish community for its lack of will or desire to do something about environmental disasters and funding terror with petro dollars.

Am I the only one, but does the Mavi Marmara bring back memories of the famed Exodus ship, which launched from the Baltimore harbor in 1947? I’m not talking about good memories either. 

The former steamer SS President Warfield of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company was purchased by the pre-state Jewish military force the Hagannah and renamed the SS Exodus. It set out on a mission to pick up 4,500 Holocaust survivors, temporarily in France, and take them to then-British controlled Palestine.  It was commandeered in international waters by the Royal Navy and the passengers were sent – of all places—to an interment camp in Germany.

The huge international outcry was a lynchpin for the founding of the Jewish State a year later. Back then, the United States had been pressing Britain to allow more Jewish refugees into Palestine through their joint Anglo-American Commission. But when forced to find a better solution to managing the deteriorating situation between Arab and Jewish militias, the UK threw up its hands and said to the new United Nations, “It’s all yours.” The U.N., as the world knows, decided to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Palestinian state.

Two local esteemed local Ph.D.’s in Mideast studies, Robert O. Friedman and Arthur Abramson don’t see the Exodus comparison. They think the Mavi Marmara is different because the Palestinians already have a land they control and they are not refugees seeking a home in a world that does not want them. Yet from an international PR perspective, Israel does come across as the big, mean bully that the British were in the post-World War II years.

A difference for sure is that the impact of this event is being built up on social media (facebook, twitter, etc.) with dueling videos, and many in the world are siding with the Palestinians, whom they view as the underdog.

Some think it may all trigger a third intifada, or violent Palestinian uprising (just like the ones that began in 1987 and 2000).  I believe it may force the U.S. to press Israel even harder to rethink how it’s managing the Gaza and West Bank situations. And there lies a strong comparison indeed.