The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights

Charles Blattberg responded to my post about how international law has not created world peace or anything remotely like it, by e-mailing a link to an article he wrote attempting to explain why this is so. The abstract is here, you can download the entire article at a link in the upper left corner. I admit it's too philosophical for my abilities, though it seems he's writing about a tension which the Talmud resolved some 1800 years ago with the simple statement: "The poor of your town and the poor of another town, the poor of your town come first".

This probably also means the Talmud disagrees with The Guardian, but there's not much novelty in that thought.

Guardian: International Law has Created World Peace

Norm pokes fun at a Guardian leader here. Always a worthy pastime, even if it's not a hard one. So I went and read the piece he finds so sloppy, and noticed an additional oddity in the article:

The current attorney general would do well to remember the damage done during the Iraq affair, when dubious interpretations of resolution 1441 were used to license the course the superpower was already set on. This created the sense that the UN's role was a fraud. Whether it has been right or wrong on Libya, it has proved capable of shared resolve, and shown it can have teeth. The new language of regime change may leave the council descending into accusations of bad faith – and the planet slipping back into a more lawless world. [my emphasis].

If I understand the argument, it seems to be saying that the rise of the UN and international law have made the world a more lawful, and thus more peaceful, place. I suppose this might seem compelling to an egotistical ignoramus in Europe, but does it bear any relation to the human condition? I didn't think so, and did a spot of digging around - well, about 30 seconds of digging, to be precise. Google directed me to this list of the wars of the 20th century, which seems to be hinting that there were more than twice as many wars worldwide in the half century since the foundation of the United Nations as in the half century preceding its creation.

This seems to indicate that abolishing the United Nations and discarding international law might dramatically reduce human suffering. At any rate, that's the plausible outcome if you concur with the Guardian that there's any connection whatsoever between the UN and international law on the one hand, and the human propensity to warfare on the other.

An Italian Rachel Corrie?

Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian ISM volunteer in Gaza, has been murdered by local Islamists. The Israeli Y-net website has an interview with him, in which he explains that his arrival in Gaza in 2008 was the happiest day of his life, because he and his friends had broken a the blockade which began in 1967. (Their boat was allowed through by Israel). He goes on to explain that he's here because it's in his DNA: his grandfather fought the Italian Facists. The interview is only a few minutes long but has enough nonsense in it to fill a very long blog-post.

Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed by the IDF in 2001, yet her name has been widely commemorated, there's a play based on her letters, and she has become an icon of the non-Arab anti-Israeli forces. Arrigoni was purposefully abducted, beaten and hanged, so he should rightfully be canonized even more. I doubt this will happen, but who knows. We'll wait and see.

On another related matter: Salafi murderers are a small minority among Palestinians. But they're there, and if you assume the Palestinians are Arabs or Muslims, their power and popularity could yet grow, as has happened elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Salafists hate all sorts of people, including Italian fools who hate Israel, but they vehemently hate Jews. I think any reasonable person would agree that offering  such murderers uncontrolled access to large numbers of Israeli Jews would be a bad idea. Yet that precisely is what most of the world, from President Obama down, insists is the key to peace, since Jerusalem must be divided and also remain an open city. I apologize for droning on about this matter, but I admit I'm personally threatened by the imbecilic idea.

Finally, a nice little note: The Guardian reports on Arrigoni's murder:

Arrigoni arrived in the Gaza Strip on a boat bringing humanitarian supplies in 2008 that Israel, which enforces a blockade on the tiny coastal territory, allowed into Gaza port. [My emphasis]

Update: Just Journalism demonstrates the British media are being worse on this story than I'd said.

The Guardian's Alternate Universe

The Guardian's Harriet Sherwood, never a reporter to allow facts to interfere with her agenda, charts new terrain of cynicism, backed to the hilt by her editors. Having visited Itamar, she sums up the story of the murder of the Fogel family by informing us that "Israelis and Palestinians [are] in shock" about the massacre.

[h/t CifWatch]

Guardian Readers: Enjoy, Don't Think

Just Journalism has waded all the way through a long, sloppy and meandering item at the Guardian, which basically says that the paper gives its readers what they want, and doesn't challenge their pet likes and dislikes. This means British royals, the church, Israel and (American) Republicans are bashed, but folks on the Guardian's nice list never are (the top example being the ever-worsening regime in Turkey). Read the synopsis at Just Journalism; the original is too long.

Antisemitism in the UK, 2011

Normblog offers a description and demonstration of the Azzajew phenomenon.

One Toby Green - whom non-Brits have never heard of - has resigned from the Green Party - something else the non-Brits didn't know existed. His reason? The party has been taken over by Trotskyite antisemites. (Some of them commented on his post). Some of his explanation is too detailed and insider-ish for the rest of us to follow, but the general outlines are very clear, very convincing, and rather worrying. They can't do anything to Israel or the majority of Jews worldwide who support it, but rising antisemitism can't be a good thing.

Guardian: We Lied about Israel

Well, that's not really what they say. Rather, the Guardian has mumbled something about how it slightly misconstrued something Tzippi Livni once said. No matter that what they did was to carefully edit a document so that it would say the opposite of the truth. Check it out yourself.

Using the Guardian's method it would be possible to prove that Yassir Arafat was a Zionist, that Menachem Begin was a supporter of dismantling settlements, or just about anything you'd like to prove. I'm reminded of a joke I once saw in Mad Magazine, probably 40 years ago, where they showed how anyone can cut words out of a brutal review to demonstrate that the author loves your product. Back then, however, it was intended to be so ludicrous you'd have to laugh.

Recognizing a Jewish State

Elder of Ziyon has been reading the Palestine Papers,and notices a discussion from November 2007 where the two teams discussed agreeing that the goal of the negotiations would be two national homelands. They didn't manage to agree:

TL: I just want to say something. ...Our idea is to refer to two states for two peoples. Or two nation states, Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace and security with each state constituting the homeland for its people and the fulfillment of their national aspirations and self determination...

AH: This refers to the Israeli people?

TL: [Visibly angered.] I think that we can use another session – about what it means to be a Jew and that it is more than just a religion. But if you want to take us back to 1947 -- it won’t help. Each state constituting the homeland for its people and the fulfillment of their national aspirations and self determination in their own territory. Israel the state of the Jewish people -- and I would like to emphasize the meaning of “its people” is the Jewish people -- with Jerusalem the united and undivided capital of Israel and of the Jewish people for 3007 years... [The Palestinian team protests.] You asked for it. [AA: We said East Jerusalem!] …and Palestine for the Palestinian people. We did not want to say that there is a “Palestinian people” but we’ve accepted your right to self determination.

TL is Tzipi Livni, AH is Akram Haniyeh.


Elder comments that the Guardian never mentioned this document in their coverage, but they definitely saw it because they cherry picked one sentence from it. Which is all true, but I think it's only fair to add another observation: this is Livni demanding Palestinian recognition of a Jewish State, a year and a half before Netanyahu, newly installed as prime minister, raised the exact same demand and was universally condemned for daring to destroy the peace process with his outlandish position.


The full document (as leaked) is here.

Seamus Milne Is Correct - and Evil

Seamus Milne lives in a different reality than most people I know. This isn't new - back when I wrote Right to Exist I cited an outlandish article of his to illustrate the oddities the Guardian is capable of. (The newspaper has since gotten worse). Now, however, having spearheaded the paper's Palestine Papers project, he sums up what he's learned from it, or rather, what he always believed but has now had re-confirmed. Any Palestinian leadership which is willing to compromise with Israel so that both nations embark on peaceful co-existence is an evil leadership which must be overthrown; the only way toward peace is to have the Palestinians get everything they demand and the Israelis forced to give it to them.

One doesn't expect better from Seamus, of course. Yet in his present column he is actually more revealing.  His thesis, that the only arrangement acceptable to the Palestinians will mean dismantling Israel, is actually plausible; it may well be correct. Yet note how he couches this:

It's a study in the decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic national liberation movement. Try to imagine the Vietnamese negotiators speaking in such a way at the Paris peace talks in the 70s – or the Algerian FLN in the 60s – and it's obvious how far the West Bank Palestinian leadership has drifted from its national moorings.

The role models for authentic liberation movements? Arafat in his heyday, when his troops were murdering Israeli children in Maalot or Avivim; the communist Vietnamese, and the FLN. Arafat's movement differs, however, in that it didn't succeed, moans Seamus, and the Palestinians must return to those days of glory and achieve the successes of... whom? The North Vietnamese? The FLN?

Seamus Milne hates real people. He hates them with a passion. The only thing he loves are a set of warped and cruel ideas. If millions of Vietnamese have to suffer for his ideas, or generations of them live in a stunted impoverished and primitive country, great; if Algeria is one of the least humane regimes in the world, who cares so long as the French have been vanquished half a century ago by an authentic movement of liberation. This is what needs to happen to the Palestinians, too, and the sooner the better.

Truly sickening. 

A Picture with the Wrong 1000 Words

I'm not going to say much about the so-called "Palestine Papers" yet, if at all. Being a trained historian and archivist, I can easily recognize the potential significance of a sizable collection of documents created during peace negotiations. I can also imagine some of the more obvious pitfalls. In any case, the value lies in a careful reading of the documents along with a solid understanding of their context and relation to other documents. Cherry picking single sentences and cutting them out of context is propaganda, not history; in a better world, it wouldn't even be acceptable journalism. (Hah!)

Anyway, I assume most readers of this blog are fully aware of the fine work being done by others. Elder of Ziyon is looking closely at lots of the hogwash being trotted out by Israel's enemies and their ignorant chorus, and calmly poking holes in it. So I don't need to do that. CiFWatch is documenting how the Guardian has no interest in supplying news, only in bashing Israel and the facts be damned. I honestly don't know how the CiFWatch folks manage to wade through that muck day after day and not lose their sanity. Hats off to them. Robin Shepherd has a magnificent post about how the BBC, Guardian and others are now publicly aligning with Hamas, since the PA negotiators have proven willing to consider some of Israel's claims and thus must be beyond the pale. Anyone who regards Israelis as anything less than monsters, is himself a criminal.

Ethan Bronner in the NYT has an article which, while not always accurate, is reassuring for its lack of excitement. The whole story, he seems to be saying, is yet another anecdote on the long road to wherever it is we're going. This is probably true.

Assuming I should be trying to say something original that you won't get elsewhere, well, the photo at the top of Bronner's article was actually quite tickling:

The caption in the NYT was "Palestinian schoolgirls on Monday near Jerusalem’s Old City. Documents reveal that much of Jerusalem would have remained Israeli as part of a peace deal."

Well, no. The schoolgirls are indeed Palestinian. And yes, they're near the Old City. You can see the wall right behind them. But they're actually in Mamila, on the Israeli side of town, and they're headed deeper into the Jewish side. In other words, this innocent picture of schoolgirls wandering through their town will not be possible if the city gets divided. The pundits all insist it will, of course, because the city will be divided but it won't really; but those are the pundits who look at this picture and haven't the faintest idea what it's about.

Har Homa

A while ago Jonathan sent me a link to this article in the Guardian, by a fellow who says he knows all about real estate in Israel and Palestine. Having read it I'm unconvinced of his expertize, but everyone's entitled to spout nonsense. What Jonathan wanted to know was about this section:

Thirteen years ago, the first Netanyahu administration built the settlement of Har Homa on land inside the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. Har Homa has struggled to find residents and is still largely empty. The head of the residents committee recently claimed it had filled 4,000 properties, but a tour of the development tells another story, with building after building unglazed and cold.

Might I comment, Jonathan asked?

So, first, the part about Bethlehem. Har Homa, and Um Tuba, and Tsur Baher, are all situated in what the Jordanians defined as the Bethlehem county. Not the city, the county. Since the Jordanian control of the West Bank was illegal according to international law, and lasted only 19 years ending in 1967, one might wonder why it's important to mention and if the author's description is helpful. More significant, however, was the part about the empty buildings. I admit I'd never heard that there are lots of empty apartments in Har Homa, rather the opposite, but it never hurts to check. So one evening last week I drove down to Har Home, about a 20-minute drive from where I live. It was early evening, when families with children tend to have lots of lights on, and cars are parked out in front. Lo and behold: most buildings had lights in the windows and cars parked out front. The only place that fit the Guardian's description was at the edge of the neighborhood, where some of the buildings are clearly just a bit short of being populated, in that chaotic stage where the construction workers are still there but the first movers can be seen coming.

I came away with the surprising result that once again, the Guardian isn't the most trustworthy purveyor of facts about Israel.

Yesterday the Guardian joined up with Al Jazeera to launch what they're calling "The Palestine Papers". I admit I don't know if these papers are or are not authentic. However, they tell that the Palestinian negotiators apparently acquiesced to the Clinton Parameters of December 2000, whereby Jerusalem would be divided along ethnic lines: Jewish neighborhoods in Israel, Arab ones in Palestine. Except when they didn't: they were not willing to except Israeli control of Maale Adumim (population of about 40,000), nor of Har Homa. Perhaps because Har Homa is the most recent of Jewish neighborhoods, with construction beginning in the 1990s (and still going on today). There are somewhere betwen 15-20,000 people in Har Homa, but they must leave, say the Palestinians. True, the hill lies less than a mile from the Green Line of 1967, and there are no Palestinian neighborhoods that will be "trapped" between it and Jewish Jerusalem, but it must be dismantled.

So I went down there again today, to look around in daylight. Here's what some of it it looks like from the main road, traveling east.

 This is what it looks like from Um Tuba, directly to the north, and then what Um Tuba and Tsur Baher look like from Har Homa:

 Once you're inside the neighborhood, it looks like a standard large-scale development project. Lots of uniform buildings marching up the roads.

It's a middle class area, with lower prices than most of Jewish Jerusalem, so the folks here tend to be young families, not the top of the professions, a standard mix of orthodox, secular, Russians, the usual. The more enterprising families will move on in a few years, to be replaced by their somewhat younger counterparts; others will stay here for decades and never manage to move up the real estate ladder. It's not a slum, so that won't be a catastrophe for them.

Looking out from their windows one can see the security fence (the winding road) with Bait Sachur, a suburb of Bethlehem, or Tsur Baher, or, if they're pointed west, they can see the hotel at Ramat Rachel, which is inside the Green Line. None of it is very far.

Finally, if they look down towards the bottom of the hill, they can see the new buildings, still under construction, that so impressed that Guardian fellow.

If it makes sense to you that these people must be uprooted so as to have peace, you might ask yourself what peace is for.

Next chapter of this series: Beit Safafa. I assure you that if you've found any of this so far disconcerting, the story of Beit Safafa is even worse. There's nothing in it that fits the universally accepted narrative. The only way to deal with it is to pretend it isn't there: which is what everybody does, of course.

Guardian Regrets Killing of "Palestinian" Man

Well, the actual headline in the Guardian said Israeli military "regrets" killing wrong Palestinian man in Hamas raid. But I think my editing of the quotation marks is better. Or at any rate, no less idiotic.

The Guardian Admits it's Obsessed with Israel

A Guardian blogger has been crunching some numbers, counting how often the paper mentioned which countries in 2010. The UK comes first, of course: it's a British paper. The US comes second, which is a no-brainer. Next come Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries in which there have been or still are fighting British troops, so the interest in them is arguably local. China, the world's largest country and its economic motor in 2010, is the first really foreign country on the list, at 5th place.

Then comes.... Israel.

Ahead of all the rest of the world. Ahead of next door Ireland, the country with the frightening banking crises. Ahead of South Africa with the World Cup. Way ahead of Haiti, where nothing ever happens, not to mention Sri Lanka with its wars, rigged elections and large refugee camps. Congo (remember? The country with millions of casualties in the world's bloodiest war since 1945?) - Congo gets mentioned about one ninth as often as Israel.

Belarus, the last Soviet dictatorship in Europe, with a stolen election and no human rights to speak of, is hardly on the list at all.

What they Tell About Hamas

Haaretz, today, leads with what most interests Israelis:

Hamas will never recognize Israel, Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh said Tuesday at a rally to mark the 23rd anniversary of the militant group's founding.

"We say it with confidence as we said it five years ago when we formed our government, and we say it today: We will never recognize Israel," Haniyeh told a crowd in Gaza City numbering tens of thousands.

Given that no non-expert in the world knows anything about which party won which election in Azerbaijan, Bolivia or Croatia, and the only reason they do know anything about Hamas is because of its relationship to Israel, this is arguably the part of the story that ought to interest non-Israeli media outlets, too.

But no.

The Washington Post simply downloaded the story filed by AP, about the size of the Hamas rally and how popular the party may be. At the very end of the item we learn that Hamas gave out a press release:

In a message distributed to media Tuesday morning, Hamas said it remains committed to destroying Israel, bringing back Palestinian refugees and seizing control of Jerusalem's holy sites.
"Anyone who gives up these rights is a traitor," it said - an apparent dig at Hamas' rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who favors a peace agreement with Israel.

According to Haaretz this was the message of the main speech at the rally, given by the Hamas Prime Minsiter Ismail Haniyeh, not some press release. So which was it? It's a significant difference, one might think.

According to the BBC, Haniyeh said it at the rally. However, the BBC also tucks this in at the end of the item, after carefully insinuating that Hamas merely doesn't like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank

"Today, on the anniversary of its establishment, Hamas stresses that it is committed to the principle of reconciliation," Mr Haniya told throngs of supporters who filled the streets of Gaza City, waving green banners.
"Reconciliation is a must so that the Palestinian people recover their unity in confronting the occupation," he said.

Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 Middle East war. It withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but heightened its blockade on the territory after Hamas came to power in 2007.

No mention of the well known fact that in Arabic, the occupation can easily mean any Jewish sovereignty anywhere in what the Palestinians regard as their land in its entirety. If this isn't such a case, how does the BBC know? And if they know, don't we deserve to know how they know? 

The Guardian simply doesn't report on the event. Nothing. Tens of thousands of Gazans demonstrating in the middle of town, speeches, a major spectacle - not newsworthy.

Sadly, the New York Times comes off worst in this little experiment. Not only is there no mention of the event, when I wrote "Hamas" into their search engine the most recent item I was offered was about a fairy tale. About two weeks ago Ismail Haniyeh apparently told some foreign reporters that if there's ever a referendum about a peace deal with Israel among all the Palestinians world-wide, and the result isn't to the liking of Hamas, Hamas will accept the verdict. Of course, there's no reason to expect millions of Palestinians with limited civil rights scattered over various Arab states to vote for an agreement that will leave them there with no Right of Return, so one might expect a reasonable reporter to spell out that Haniyeh isn't risking much with his statement; but in the meantime he's just said what he really thinks, in Arabic, before a large rally, and the NYT doesn't find it newsworthy.

Spin, Wikileaks, Propaganda

Omri Ceren has been doing a spot of googling. His point of departure is the section of the new Wikileaks revelations that the Saudis and other Arab regimes have all along been beseeching the Americans to bomb Iran's nuclear capacity. Taking that documented fact, he then goes back to see what the various pundits have been saying about the matter all along. Predictably, they were reporting on an alternate universe, one in which the Saudis and others care deeply about the Palestinians, and not so much abut the Iranians.

Andrew Sullivan, in a sign of the changing times, never misses a beat: oops! The Saudis et al have been as strident as the Israelis in their calls for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? Well, remember, they're only Sunni Arab autocrats -  the implication, you understand, being that they're not really to be taken seriously if you're a moral person. Of course, the case can be made that Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad, and all of the Hamas leadership are also Sunni Arab autocrats, but I rather think Andrew wouldn't use the term in their case.

Look, we all have our agendas; some of us even admit them openly (me, I'm a Zionist, and also mostly pro-American; Julian Assange of Wikileaks is anti-American and thinks he's God). Some of us try to write mostly about things we know about. Others: less so (Andrew knows none of the languages, and has no access to decision makers or any relevant players; he lives off website links). And then there are the professional propagandists, the people who have to know they're carefully tailoring their descriptions of reality so as to create a public opinion that will agree with their agenda. The BBC, for example: Robin Shepherd documents - once again, and again, and again - that their editorial decisions cannot possibly be portrayed as an honest attempt to inform the public, and can only be understood as conscious propaganda.

Or is it conscious? Read IsraelNurse's excellent analysis of the Guardian's Harriet Sherwood's first six months in Israel. Just look at the list of places she has reported from, almost all of them Palestinian (she's the correspondent to Israel but she never reports from Israel). On the one hand, she can't possibly be doing the traveling she's doing while telling herself she's reporting on Israel; there's no way she can be as biased as she is without knowing that's what she is. Yet is this truly so? It's a question I've been pondering for decades, and have never quite convinced myself either way: when antisemites frame reality to reinforce their animosities, do they do so in bad faith (i.e do they know they're lying or framing in a deceitful manner), or are they so carried away by their detestations that they lose track, and really begin to believe in their own sincerity? This is not an easy question to answer.

Ghajar as a Test Case?

The significance of the ongoing Ghajar story is that it tests all sorts of assumptions about Israel's conflict with its neighbors.

Last night I had a discussion with a luminary of Israel's so-called human-rights firmament. The kind of person who generally puts the right of the individual above - or at least, balanced against - the right of the government to pursue policies in the national interest. I was of the opinion that the Ghajar case is a fine example: the Israeli government is about to shunt some 1500 of its citizens into a country they have no identification with, while probably negatively impacting their ability to lead normal lives, in the name of a national interest. My interlocutor, however, had no patience for my pleas to take consideration of personal needs of citizens: They are free to move anywhere else inside Israel (and by implication: why do they think it's their right to remain in the town of their forefathers). For my interlocutor, the overriding consideration was ending a piece of Israeli occupation.

When I tried to apply the same logic to other hypothetical cases, such as for example the idea that Israel will swap Israeli-Arab towns along the Green Line for settlement beyond in a future peace agreement, the discussion got too slippery for me to be able to follow it. But perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough.

This article in Haaretz postulates how the reality on the ground will in a few months: Ghajar will be fenced off from both Israel and Lebanon. Sounds jolly to me:

The security situation after the withdrawal is expected to be better than before the 2006 Second Lebanon War, as Ghajar will be defended from the north by a large UNIFIL force - equiped with watchtowers, lighting and a ground barrier that would make infiltration very difficult.

UNIFIL will effectively isolate the village from the rest of Lebanon, preventing open access to other Lebanese civilians, while the IDF will reinforce its contingent in the south of Ghajar.

According to the proposed arrangement, the IDF will retreat to the southern part of the village, thereby implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701. The northern part of Ghajar will fall under the military responsibility of no party, while UNIFIL will prevent residents of the rest of Lebanon from entry. 

The villagers don't sound amused.

If there is anything amusing about the matter, it is surely the way it's being reported by the Guardian. Harreit Sherwood manages to imply that the pain about to be inflicted is Israel's fault. She also manages never to mention - not once - that the residents of Ghajar are Israeli citizens, and she certainly doesn't hint that they are so by choice, having requested Israeli citizenship in 1981, when it was first offered by Israel.

As to the the comments below her story: Israel complying with a UN demand to move back to a UN line is, obviously, a story of Israeli perfidy and naked aggression. Of course.

Destroying Empty Homes

The other day Achikam and I were revisiting some of his stories from the Gaza operation of January 2009. He remembered a case where one evening his tank unit was supposed to give support to an infantry unit which was supposed to move into two nearby high-rise buildings and take positions on their roofs, which offered a commanding view of the area. Once the infantry arrived, however, they learned that the buildings were booby trapped, and the tank crews received new orders: to knock down both structures from afar, as tanks can do and infantry can't.

I never took the Goldstone Report and tried to align any of its particular stories with that one, but it might be possible. Or you might be interested in this article, from the lifestyle section of the Guardian, back in those days, talking about how horrible that there were destroyed buildings in Gaza. The lifestyle section.

Now compare that to this mostly matter-of-fact report about how the Americans in Afghanistan are systematically knocking down homes not necessarily because they're booby-trapped, but because they're empty. (And they're using the air-force to do it, in some cases). Is this because America is uniquely evil, or because war is hell?

Jews Who Are Less Israel's Worst Enemies

AKUS, writing at CiF Watch, notices that the Guardian's CiF is offering less space to its stable of Jewish anti-Israelis than it used to.

Good.

Root Cause: America Fights Back

The Guardian has a long and not very coherent article about Faisal Shazad and how he came to be a (failed) terrorist. The cause? America is killing Muslims.

Of course, other people are killing Muslims too, included mostly other Muslims, but also - at least quite recently - Russians, Serbs, Indians, Chinese and so on. Unlike America, moreover, some of them have been at it for rather a while, and even at times were the aggressors. Not that you'd learn any of this from the Guardian.

Shahzad's reasoning, shared by suicide bombers in Gaza, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, was that his act was a war tactic. Aerial bombing by states cannot avoid killing children. Hence terror bombings by militants that kill children are a logical response. The anti-terror police have a programme (so far successful) to prevent another 9/11, but it cannot address root causes – American foreign policy...

Nothing new here, move on...

Groupthink

Robin Shepherd reads Chris Phillips, a Guardian expert about something or other, and shows that in Phillip's world, if someone - say, Tony Blair - doesn't recoil from Israel in the correct way, there must be something profoundly wrong with them. After all, no reasonable person could possibly not understand the world the Guardianistas do.