Merry Christmas!

Every year about now there's a discussion in the US about how insensitive it is to talk about Christmas, since not all Americans are Christians. I've always found this discussion silly. True, Hannuka is the same season - but Hannuka is a very minor holiday on the Jewish calender. And there's this Kwanzaa thing, that apparently comes from Africa, but I'll bet, without knowing the facts mind you, that if someone does the research they'll find that Kwanzaa is even less central to the identity of most Africans than Hannuka is for Jews. Christmas, on the other hand, is a very important holiday for Christians, right up there with Easter, and that's why its' traditionally important in America, which after all is and always has been deeply influenced by things Christian.

I even have the sneaking suspicion that the new fad of pretending it's season of holidays rather than the season of Christmas, may be emanating from those parts of the American public that would be eager to set aside the Christian elements of their own identity. But I can't prove that.

One of the many impressive things about the US is that American Christians have gone further than any previous group of Christians in ridding their religion of its major antisemitic baggage. That's good, and it's a reason many Jews feel so comfortable in America and love their country. But it's still a Christian society in many ways, and if people wish to mark a major Christian holiday, why kvetch?

Jeffry Goldberg has a post up about this. I differ from him in that I prefer not to live in a society that's mostly Christian, but I expect that if I did live there my sentiments would be exactly the same as his; even as things are I mostly agree with him. (Due disclosure: I often agree with him).

It's the Jews, Stupid

Mark Steyn is a talented columnist, with the ability to make his serious points in humorous ways. He is, however, far to the right of center, which isn't necessarily bad but it means, more or less by definition, that most people will often disagree with what he writes.

When it seems he's one of the few people around noticing that the murder of Jews in Mumbai was central to the whole attack, indeed, that bloodthirsty hatred of the Jews is central to the entire Islamist program, we've got a problem. The Jews do, yes, but so does everyone else, too. Because history is replete with movements that put hatred of the Jews at their epicenter, and none of them ever ended up contributing to the well-being of mankind or even of most individuals in it.

One could make a plausible case that violent hatred of Jews (as against the mere garden variety of the animosity) is a reasonable litmus test for the general destructive potential of a political movement, and this has been true for at least 1000 years.

Fortunately, the New York Times today carries a similar op-ed. Which means you don't have to be a right-winger to see what's happening in the world. Some centrists see it, too. Not all of them, and I can't even say if the mainstream does, but enough people to get a hearing in the New York Times.

Away

I'll be offline for a bit, until sometime next week. In the meantime, don't do anything you wouldn't want to see reported on some blog.

Be Armed and Trained

David Ignatius at the Washington Post talks about the technicalities of the attack on Mumbai, and admits it would be hard to stop a similar attack elsewhere.

Many years ago - about 30 - I knew a retired combat colonel who remarked that terrorists wouldn't be able to kill innocent citizens if the citizens were armed to fight back. That was many years before the advent of the suicide bombers, and he might have modified his statement a bit, but if you think about it, the fact that whenever a Palestinian terrorist uses a method that doesn't kill him immediately some bystander does it for him does rather make the point.

Not everybody needs to walk around armed to the teeth. But yes, in cities with a reasonable random sprinkling of armed and trained fighters among the citizens, Mumbai-like attacks will be far less lethal. Sorry, but that's the truth.

No Peace in Palestine

If you followed and remember the details of the Oslo so-called Peace Process (most people either didn't or don't), you'll be familiar with Aaron Miller. From the Israeli perspective, he was one of the sterner figures in the American camp of negotiators.

He recently explained why peace won't happen anytime soon between Israel and the Palestinians. He claims neither side is ready; the Palestinians aren't capable of delivering (this seems his main point); and there's no Israeli leadership that could cut a deal.

I beg to differ on the third point. The pattern from Saadat onwards, including Netanyahu in 1996-9, has always been that when an Arab leader appears who is capable of delivering, his Israeli counterpart will rise to the challenge. Especially since the Israeli electorate will always back the move, and given we're such a pro-active electorate, that's the crucial consideration.

There is no scenario in which a Palestinian (or other Arab) leader makes a credible offer of peace and the Israeli electorate turns him down. But I don't see the opposite, either: no Israeli leader can make a real offer unless there's a real Palestinian (or other Arab) leader to make it too.

Extremists - 2

The Pakistani terrorists who decided to murder Jews as part of their hate of things Indian certainly reminded us of how fundamental antisemitism is to their Weltanschauung. Now however, it appears that murdering wasn't enough, they also tortured their victims before murdering them; and the Jews were tortured worse than all the others.

Israel has its violent and ugly extremists, and a showdown with them will come. Their ugliness, however, isn't even remotely similar to these monsters. Nor is their number similar.

(I found this through Jeffrey Goldberg's important blog).

Extremists - 1

The violent wing of the settler movement must be stopped. There is no excuse for what they're doing, and I'm not going to offer any ifs or buts. Their behavior is a scandal, and the fact that our organs of state have allowed them to go from unacceptable to even more unacceptable is an even larger scandal. A few hundreds of them have been rampaging for months uninterrupted, and they've been on the scene for years already. We all know exactly where they are, the police must know most of them by name and if it doesn't someone high up should be fired. The events in Hebron and elsewhere in the past few days demonstrate that the longer the rabid edges of the settlers are unchecked, the worse they'll get and the greater the pain of stopping them will be. But stopped they must be.

In the long run, I insist on being optimistic on this issue. Perhaps it's just because of my sunny disposition, but I'd say it's a reading of facts. The entire settler movement long since lost the support of a solid majority of Israel's voters, but the antics of the present fanatics are merely creating revulsion. To get a feeling of that you need to read Yediot Acharonot, the largest-selling paper, which isn't in Englsih and mostly isn't on-line.

The Rest of the Government

Obama has appointed Hillary Secretary of State.

Had he said so during the campaign, I'd have voted for him, since as you may remember my main reluctance about him had to do with his aura of not recognizing how nasty the world really is. Clinton doesn't have that handicap.

The funny thing about all this is that in most democratic countries, this whole issue would have been moot. When you've got a parliamentary democracy (most democratic countries do), there's no winner-takes-all scenario, which means that the top person must live with all the other almost-top persons in some sort of a coalition. This means that the voters largely know, when they vote, not only who the top person will be, but more or less how the top team, i.e. the entire cabinet, will look. True, the political pundits always spin thing so they look dramatic, but that's what pundits do for a living, so what do you expect.

As proof of this thesis, remind me, say, on February 1st 2009 and ten days before our elections, to tell you who'll be in which position by the end of March, after the mandatory 45 days of political haggling are over. I may not be able to predict with full accuracy each position of each minister, but I don't see why I shouldn't be able to give you the names of most of the ministers, with a reasonable guess of who will be in which job or which of two.

Alexandroni

Alexandroni was one of the original 12 regiments with which Israel started, back in the War of Independence. Which is why some towns in Israel have a street named after it:

Post Colonial Hypocrisy

I don't know if the locals prefer to call their town Bombay or Mumbai. I'm willing to assume they prefer the latter. For a few centuries, however, the English name was Bombay, until sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, when someone (who?) decided this was a Colonial name, and disrespectful of the natives, so we all traipsed over to Mumbai. Or Beijing, or what have you.

But notice, this consideration is offered only to some natives, not to others. It would never occur to anyone that we must say Warszawa rather than Warsaw, Praha rather than Prague, and interestingly, not al-Halil rather than Hebron. Not to mention Jerusalem, which was called Yerushalayim while the distant forbears of the English speakers were still camping in forest clearings, nor el-Quds, the name given to the same town about the time the English language was still half a millenium away.

Which Murderous Bastards?

Due disclosure: I've been at scenes of terrorist attacks, and I've been to war. So I'm personally empathetic to the sentiment of the American GIs in WWII who invented the term Snafu (Situation Normal All Fucked Up).

I doubt the same can be said of Ms. Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND corporation, cited in today's New York Times, in an article that tries to understand who those murderous bastards in Mumbai are:

[S]he insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.”...

“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.

“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized.’ But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad,” she said. “Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. ‘Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”

(Predictably, this article was cited approvingly over at Daily Kos).

How do you even start? The shooting in Mumbai isn't even over, no-one knows the number of the dead yet, nor the number of attackers or even if any of them have been arrested and if so who they are, and from the other side of the world Ms. Fair knows who they're not and what their agenda is. For all I know, she may even prove to be right, eventually - a week from now, or a month, or a year. Equally likely, she'll prove to be totally wrong.

Then you've got her "context" explanation: the Indians are nasty to their own Muslims, so of course, the Muslim extremists are murdering tourists, normal folks in Mumbai some of whom must themselves be Muslims, and Jews. Two hotels, a train station, a hospital and a Chabad house: that's pretty much what you'd expect from irate Muslim Indians, isn't it?

Where do they grow these "experts"?

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

According to Mohamed el-Baradei, talking about Syria and whether it was or wasn't engaged in a nuclear program

"There is one thing called investigation, another called clear-cut proof of innocence or guilt ... and all of you, even if you are not lawyers, know that people and countries are innocent until proven guilty," he said.

Nonsense. Pure and unadulterated nonsense. There is no doctrine of innocent countries until they're proven guilty, nor has there ever been one, nor should there ever be. It is a sad reflection of the level of public discussion that the man was able to get away with such a statement and no-one called him for it.

Obama has Learnt from the Romans (Good!)

Charlotte Higgens tells that Obama's magnificent oratorical skills are built on the principles of Roman oratorical methods. I recommend highly.

Cultural creations are generally forgotten by the next day. The ones that last millenia generally have a reason for surviving. Jewish tradition is based upon reading and re-reading ours; Western civilization had its canon. The fact that the 2oth century lost almost all of its cultural baggage, and the early 21st century has forgotten they were ever there, is not to our credit.

On the Audacity of Being Human

Someone e-mailed me this as a gag. But I don't think it's merely funny. To me, the showdown between a large snake and a curious and fearless child epitomizes a fundamental characteristic of mankind.

Academic Freedom and its Limits

Stanley Fish at the NYT approvingly reviews an upcoming book that looks at the constitutional and legal aspects of academic freedom. Each of us has their own pet case of this academic or that who was removed or should have been removed for the outlandish positions they were taking - nay, the outright stupid and dangerous positions. Matthew W. Finken and Robert C. Post suggest that academic freedom requires protection for viewpoints no matter how disturbing, as long as their academic methodology is solid - but not when the methodology is specious.

For us historians this would mean, I suppose, that you can't invent sources out of whole cloth. But what about a historian who plows through thick files of documents, and cherry-picks the few pages that fit their thesis while quite overlooking all of the rest? (I'm thinking of a specific historian, whose books are widely acclaimed and sold, but there must be quite a few of them). I'm not so certain the authors' solution is all that easy to implement. Once you get into the airy disciplines such as literary criticism, things will have to spin out of control.

But it's a nice thesis.

The Guardian Waltzes with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli film about the events and memory of the First Lebanon War of 1982, has apparently just opened in London - and the Guardian is fascinated. The film is listed here, and reviewed here here and here: wildly favorably in all cases. This isn't surprising, given that it's an anti-war film, but the Guardian reviewers seem mostly to be getting the complexity. This is especially stark in Phillip French's review, which contains a mixture of the outlandish alongside the fair:

What we have here are atrocities comparable with many on the Eastern Front in the Second World War that form part of the Holocaust...

But we must note that a similar inquiry could not have taken place in any Arab country, nor a film like Ari Folman's be made there.

I haven't seen the film, by the way. But I saw the war.

Hillary Outdoing Bill?

Jeffrey Goldberg wants Hillary to be Secretary of State, because he thinks she has a real chance of succeeding with the Israelis&Palestinians. (In spite of her husband not succeeding. Or perhaps because she watched from close up). He also links to an earlier interview with her that focused on Israel-Palestine.

Well, it's nice to hope, anyway.

Historians Can't Lie

I've noticed that "Bush Legacy" articles are quite in vogue these days, as columnists try to get in one last dig at the outgoing presidency. Of course, there's a wee problem in the exercise, in that by definition, the legacy will get written, or written and re-written, by folks who aren't writing right now. I mean, that's sort of the point, isn't it? The assumption that a future generation, firmly embedded in a reality that's different from ours, will look back at this moment with its own perspectives, not with ours.

But we of the chattering class, we've got to chatter. So here's an interesting example of the genre: Kevin Libin suggests various things about the Bush presidency that might look different in the future, but ultimately expects they won't make much difference because (today's) academics really really don't like him, and it's academics who write the history books. (My italics added).

I rest my case.

Polls Can't Lie

The other day Haaretz published the results of a public opinion poll (not online, can't link to it). As usual in such cases, one of the many questions is "who did you vote for last time?" which the pollsters then use to seek trends. In this poll, however, the response was probably the most interesting item in the whole poll. According to how people say they voted last time, Likud won 25 seats in the Knesset, rather than the 12 who were really elected (and even that 12th was only by a margin of 160 votes).

Talk about re-writing history.

Merely Following Orders

You'll remember, of course (if not from personal experience) that the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and later war-crime trials claimed they were merely following orders. In all the many thousands of such trials this line of defense was never accepted, but it did catch broad public attention.

Eichmann tried it, too, at his trial in Jerusalem. Quite strenuously, as a matter of fact.

A number of years prior to his trial (which took place in 1961) the Israeli courts had dealt with the matter with Israeli war criminals, most importantly the ones from the Kfar Kassem murders. The Supreme Court made the distinction between illegal orders and categorically illegal orders, the first being ones that soldiers must follow, the second being one that soldiers are forbidden to follow, and will be court-martialed if they do; the court also gave the helpful definition that what marks the categorically illegal orders is that a black flag flies above them. (I wrote more about this in Right to Exist).

Of course, as you'd expect, none of this happened in a vacuum, and actually the discussion began some 2,000 years earlier.

We're in Kiddushin these days, I remind you. The Gemara discusses various aspects of messengers fulfilling precepts. This started with the question if a man is allowed to betroth a woman via a messenger, who will bring her the contract or money required for the betrothal. Quite rapidly, however, the discussion broadens out to include the question if a man can tell someone else to transgress, and if so, who bears responsibility. The answer given on page 42 of Kiddushin is that this can't happen: ein shaliach le'dvar aveira: a man cannot be a courier for a transgression, but bears responsibility for whatever he does.

On the next page, 43a, the discussion becomes even more explicit, when a Braita (a Mishniac text, i.e. before the 3rd century) states that if a man sends another to kill someone, the responsibility is on the killer alone, not the initiator. Shamai the Elder, however (about 2,100 years ago) disagrees,and brings the story of the prophet Nathan who admonishes King David for having engineered the death in battle of Uriya, so as to marry her widow, Batsheva: Nathan sees this as murder, in spite of the fact that there were actually two other agents between King David and Uriya's death, Yoav the general, and the Amonites who actually did the killing, on the field of battle.

The Gemara then goes into a discussion about whether murder is the same as lesser transgressions, in a fascinating precedent for the 20th century distinction between illegal and categorically illegal. Except, of course, that the Sages see it from the opposite direction: the killers are clearly criminally responsible, the question is to what extent criminal responsibility can be ascribed to the initiators.

(By the way, if you've never read that book, Right to Exist, you ought to. Since I had to work with an editor, and it was published through a real publishing house, it's much more serious than a blog. Many people, including the reviewer of the New York Times, felt it to be a good book.

(Und wenn Sie es auf Deutsch lesen wollen, das geht auch.)

As I always mention, this thread began here.