NYT vs. Guardian (& Juan Cole as a Freebie)

So in the previous post but one I compared the Economist to Juan Cole on Iran. Here's a comparison of the New York Times to the Guardian:

The other day the NYT ran an editorial praising Olmert for reaching out to diverse Arab regimes in attempts to negotiate. To be honest, the real theme of the article seemed to be a criticism of President Bush for being less flexible than Olmert, but still, in order to do that the paper had to enumerate the various things Israel is doing right. Two days later a Palestinian murdered Israelis in the middle of Jerusalem. The summary of the event at the Guardian had the weird title Israel terror: Three killed, 44 hurt as Palestinian runs amok with bulldozer in street. I can't say what the formulation Israel Terror means in English. Anyways, the stage was then given to Seth Friedman, who wrote all about how the attack was all Israel's fault, because Israel always does everything wrong. Juan Cole then piled on with, among other things, an imaginary description about how controversial the construction project is at which the bulldozer was being used. His source for this, I think, is Aljazeera.

Makes you sort of wish Cole and Freedman would read the New York Times.

To be honest, I don't know why I give these people so much attention. Their dislike for Israel trumps any residual ability they might have for dealing with facts or context (the fact that Freedman is an Israeli himself, apparently, is irrelevant. Israelis are not immune from being fools). So while they rant and rave, we get on with life. Contemporary Israel is a miracle, one of the most astonishing chapters in the 3,000 year story of the Jews, and nothing these folks says has any impact on that, so why waste so much attention on them? I really ought to learn simply to ignore them. But I probably won't.

Facts over Ideologies

An article at the NYT claims that as the ideologically driven university professors of the baby boomer generation begin to retire, they're being replaced with a younger generation more interested in facts than in ideologies.

Maybe someday the Juan Cole model really will disappear. This will be good for the world.

Economist: Stop Iran

The Economist analyzes the danger of Iran going nuclear and Israel trying to stop it from doing so. A sober analysis, as only the Economist knows how to do (but doesn't always, alas).

Even if Iran did get the bomb, it would probably not use it for fear of Israel’s bigger, existing stockpile. And in the (admittedly improbable) event that Iran is telling the truth when it denies having any such ambition, nothing would change its mind faster than an Israeli strike.

The trouble is, this logic looks different from Tel Aviv. Given their history, a lot of Israelis will run almost any risk to prevent a state that calls repeatedly for their own state’s destruction from acquiring the wherewithal to bring that end about. Till now, the world has talked a lot and applied some modest sanctions to stop Iran’s dash to enrich uranium. It is time to apply much tougher ones, in the hope that it is not already too late.

Now compare this with the foolish chatter of Juan Cole, on the same topic, and the same day:

It is not clear what would be attacked, anyway. Civilian enrichment labs permitted by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?

Lily Friedman

12:30 AM. We just got back from the funeral of Lily Friedman, murdered earlier today in the center of Jerusalem. I don't know how many people were at the funeral, but it could easily have been 1,000. As we were leaving the cemetery, shortly before midnight, the next one was on it's way in. Bat Sheva Unterman, 34, whose last action in life was apparently to throw her 5-month-old daughter out of her car.

Things You Can Always Rely On

The Palestinian knack of innovation, totally lacking when it comes to positive things such a nation building, society building, or generally creating a better lives for themselves, can always be relied upon to find new ways of killing Israelis. Hamas has praised the act, though it's hard to see how it in any way does anything good for any Palestinian interest conceivable. But then again, since when has Hamas been interested in Palestinian interests as defined in any recognizable rational way?

Meanwhile, another group that can always be relied upon are the folks at the Guardian. I can't link to their front page since it changes every few hours, so you'll have to believe me that their headline about the attack, as posted on their homepage, says "Bulldozer driver shot after rampage in Jerusalem". When you click on the link you get to this article, which has a headline only marginally less offensive: "Man shot dead after Jerusalem bulldozer rampage". That's right. You've got to keep your priorities straight. Those Jerusalemites, they're mighty easy with their firearms, you know, and all it takes is for a bulldozer driver to do a little rampaging, sort of like what a peeved elephant might do, and he'll get shot.

Marxism and Demography

The NYT Magazine has an interesting article about how just about all of Europe but also other countries are seeing birthrates below the replacement rate, and in some cases, breathtakingly so. Not all of the information in the article is new or particularly informative, tho some of it is, especially the part about how the northern European countries have a negative birthrate but the southern ones have a disastrously low one, and why this might be. The thesis: in the north they encourage integration of women into the workplace and encourage men to participate in the work of raising a family, while in the south they encourage the women to work but not the men to contribute at home.

When the article reaches the most significant exception by far, the USA, which still has more births than deaths and totally flies in the face of the international trend, the explanation is that while the US doesn't do much to encourage families to have kids, its flexible work market allows women to drop out and later drop back in.

Israel, probably the most unusual of all, doesn't even get mentioned, but that's OK.

So far so good. What puzzles me most about the article is not what it tells, but what it doesn't. The whole thing is an exercise in (rather hidden) Marxism: the world is run by economic considerations, period. There is no mention whatsoever of the single most important issue, namely what people want. If they feel that having children is important, all the rest will work itself out. If they feel their personal lifestyle is more important, they won't have children. This moves from anecdote to demography when the entire society changes its mind on the matter. Such a decision has to be influenced by many considerations, but ultimately, so it has always seemed to me, the over riding one is how we relate as individuals to the future. Is our world something we inherited in ordered to manage as best as possible so as to transfer it in the best possible condition to our descendants? Or is it the place we spend our allocated years as best as possible, and the future will worry about itself? That rather simple sentence can then be elaborated endlessly, but the essence won't change.

Anecdotal evidence: the segment of society I live in is as modern and as educated as any group, anywhere. Most the people in it have more than the three children we have. I don't remember any of us, ever, not even once, putting financial considerations before the decision to have children. Everybody in my world agrees that having and raising our children is the single most important thing we do in life.

PS. And note that the Germans and the Austrians don't fit into the pattern: tho they're northern in their structures, they're southern n the outcome of not having children. Hint: might this not perhaps indicate the existence of some other consideration, more powerful than anything the Marxists can measure? Now think about it: Germans and Austrians. Austrians and Germans. Hmmm. What might they have about them that makes them different from Norwegians, French, English, etc?

PPS. Also unmentioned, alongside the Israelis, are the Australians. As you know, I just got back from there, and can report that they, also, are still having children. I can explain that, but the NYT couldn't.

Till the End of the Land

Who'd have thunk? The airport at Bangkok has free Wifi access! Just like Ben Gurion, and just not like Warsaw, Frankfurt, Zurich, JFK, Reagan, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney, to name merely those I've been at this year. So I'm popping up over here for a moment, before disappearing for another day or three.

Here's my review of David Grossman's brand new and extraordinarily highly acclaimed novel, Till the End of the Land.

Palestinians Unworthy of Sovereignty

Hamas has announced it will not "protect Israel from attacks by other factions". There is nothing new about this idiotic line of reasoning, of course, and it has been one of the standard canards ever since Israel began disbanding its occupation and transferring power to the Palestinians in 1993.

The question is not if the PLO, or PA, or Hamas, or anyone else, will protect Israel from the more extreme Palestinian forces that will always continue with their anti-Israeli violence no matter what agreements are reached. The question is if whatever Palestinian government it may be will take upon itself one of the most basic of all tasks of government, the monopoly of waging violence. As long as they don't understand that this is a fundamental need of their own, irrespective of Israel, no peace agreement with them will ever hold. On the contrary, the longer they insist on behaving like little children, the more obvious and irrevocable it will be not to allow them a government. Governing is a matter for adults.

[Which doesn't mean Israel should continue to control them. More and more I am beginning to think there will ultimately be not choice but to hand over some sort of control of the Palestinians to the Jordanians and the Egyptians.]

Daf Yomi, Melbourne

As indicated here, it was my intention to continue with Daf Yomi as if I'd never left Jerusalem, simply moving from one shul to the next. Which is more or less what happened: this past week I've been going to the Daf Yomi shiur at the Chabad Yeshiva, 6am, and just as you'd have thought, they're on the same page the folks back in Jerusalem are on. Or rather, they keep on changing it every day, but that's alright. The single most significant difference in style is that while the shiur in Jerusalem tends to be in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, the one down here is in four: Hebrew, Aramaic, English, and Yiddish.

At the end of the shiur, say, 6:40, you can choose which service you want to go to. I've been going to the "Budapest Express" minyan, so named because it was set up some decades ago by some survivors from Hungary, and they race through the service faster than I'd have believed possible. By seven they're out of there, including everything, including a section specially added by the Chabadniks.

Limmud Oz 2008

I've been up to various mischief so far down here in the antipodes. One of the things I did was to participate in Limmud Oz 2008, Melbourne. I gave four lectures there, as you can see by following that link and wandering around a bit. I initially thought I might write them, and post each of them as I gave them, but since I never write the lectures I give, it seemed rather late to start now. As a compromise, I wrote outlines, which I more or less adhered to sort of to a certain extent, at least some of the time, and I've now posted them, over here.

The four theses were:
1. Jews have the oldest living culture in the world, so they have a longer communal memory than anyone else; however, having a long memory is not the result of being so old, rather the insistence on not forgetting has enhanced the longevity.

2. The attempt to create a rich database with biographical information on as many of the murdered six million Jews as possible is an unprecedented undertaking (connected to memory, by the way), undertaken at least initially in adverse circumstances, and now slowly advancing towards completion. How, Why, What.

3. Was the creation of the State of Israel enabled by the guilty conscience of the world after the Holocaust? Answer,not at all, and actually, almost on the contrary. In 1947 the international community set up the Jews in Mandatory Palestine for a second genocide of the Jews in less than a decade. (And all of the hot air about the Palestinians paying the price for the crimes of the Europeans is hogwash).

4. Training soldiers to be moral while waging war is a daunting task, but Israel does it better than anyone else. Here's how.

Tomorrow I'm off to other arenas to do other mischief. Not certain I'll have access to cyberspace, so if you want a laugh you can spend some time here.

So He Killed them. Anybody Would have.

An Iraqi councilman opened fire at some American troops who were at a meeting with him. Juan Cole explains:

A city council member in Mada'in (Salman Pak) abruptly opened fire on Americans who had been in a meeting with him. He killed 2 US troops and wounded 4 other Americans. He had been in India recently because Sunni-Shiite tensions made it too difficult for him in Mada'in. He had only been back one week as councilman. Although there is speculation that he was unstable, my own suspicion is that the continued US military occupation was just too hard for him to take. India has an anti-colonial atmosphere, after all. [my italics]

Sure convinces me. Any other explanation would be anti-progressive, perhaps even neo-con.

An All Male Seder Evening

Apparently a growing number of non-Orthodox Jewish communities in the US are noticing a draining way of their menfolk. Whether this is a lot of coincidence or the beginning of a trend no-one can yet say, but someone has already written a whole book about it. And someone else has "published a men's Passover Haggadah intended for use at all-male Seders" (I kid you not). And they've got other ideas, too, such as

improving athletics programs at its camps and is encouraging synagogues and camps to explore programming for men, including father-son events

Given that the single most central Jewish activity of Jewish men, these past 2,000 years or so, often done with their sons, has been to learn Jewish books, it's interesting that this possibility is never mentioned in the article.

What can I say. Even at the risk of aggravating some of those of you whom I usually don't try to aggravate, I must reluctantly admit that so far as I can see, the best one can say about the long-term survival chances of non-Orthodox Jews as Jews, outside of Israel of course, is that the jury is still out. If it's still out, and I'm not convinced even of that. You want to assure the Jewishness of your descendants? Either be Orthodox, or in Israel, and preferably both.

Arabs want to be Israelis

Anyone with any familiarity at all with the reality in Israel knows that an enormous majority of Arabs living in Israel would never dream of living in Palestine were there ever to be such a country, and it's not hard to fathom their line of reasoning: Israel is a free democracy with an ever-rising standard of living (and at the moment one of the strongest currencies in the world, but that's a different matter), while the Palestinians can be relied upon to screw up whatever chances they're offered with perfect consistency. That's why there was such an outcry among Israel's Arabs when in 2004 Arik Sharon proposed redrawing Israel's border so that the towns alongside the north-western flank of the West Bank be re-mapped into the West Bank. That's why Avigdor Lieberman is perhaps the most hated and feared of all Israeli politicians in the eyes of Israel's Arabs: he advocates a similar move. (And note: not a single Arab would have to leave his home. The border would simply be moved a few miles west, leaving the homes in putative Palestinian territory... shudder...).

Life for Israel's Arabs is far from perfect and leaves much to be desired, but it's a lot better than life in any other Arab country, unless you're a millionaire Saudi sheik or a fully subsidized citizen of a Gulf State living off oil and the sweat of disenfranchised Pakistanis.

It's also a well-known but never mentioned secret that the Arabs in East Jerusalem, who aren't even full Israeli citizens, dread the day the city will be divided and they'll end up on the Palestinian side; when Israel began putting up that evil wall a few years ago, tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled to make sure they were inside it, on the Israeli side, and not outside it, on the Palestinian side. It doesn't take much imagination to understand them: would any of you make a different choice in their situation? Of course not.

Still, having said all that, it's still a bit surprising to read that 77% of the Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, wouldn't want to live in any other country in the world. Not in America, not in Norway, not in Australia, not even in the UK, home of the Guardian. Nope. They want to stay in Israel. Moreover, if you follow the link, you'll find lots of other interesting statistics, almost all of them positive. I recommend.

Now, if you were a person who cares about people and their well-being, a mantle often claimed by the so called Progressives, or the political Left, or Liberals, depending on the country you live in, you would be celebrating all this, and perhaps even commending Israel for having proven that Arabs actually can be productive and functioning citizens in a modern democracy even in the Mideast, and not only when they move to New Jersey, and if so they can certainly be encouraged to do so in France, Algeria, Saudi Arabia or Lebanon. But I wouldn't recommend holding your breath until the praise starts coming in, not from those people anyway.

Getting Warfare Right

Interesting long article in the NYT about the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, otherwise known as KSM, the operational commander of 9/11, and a mass murderer who wanted to murder even more.

I remember wondering at the time where he'd disappeared to. So now we know: it was Poland, because the Poles were eager to help, but also because in Poland there wasn't much chance of anyone on the outside being an al-Qaeda supporter who might try to spring him.

The important part of the article, to my mind, is its descriptions of the deliberations in the CIA on procedure, and specifically on the use of torture. They were suddenly faced with a brand new but exceedingly dangerous new challenge; they didn't have the faintest idea how to deal with it and weren't set up to do so; failure to do the job meant lots of additional innocents would be murdered. So they improvised. As we know in retrospect, some of the improvisations were seriously wrong, and they seem to have been aware of this even at the time, but not aware enough, or not confident enough in their ability to succeed without the torture.

Seen from the perspective of a historian rather than an ideologue, that seems pretty much right to me. Warfare is a nasty business even when you're on the right side of it. The stakes are high, the dangers are acute, and no matter what you do, at least some things will inevitably go wrong. Life and death decisions must be made NOW, not later, because if they're made later people will die first. So it's a combination of trial and error, measuring success vs. failure on the fly, while always trying to adhere to an overarching moral code that directs some sides and is totally irrelevant to others.

The advocates of the moral code are right when they demand that their side get it right sooner, not later, and their watchdog role really is important, because the warriors must by definition focus on the goal of saving the lives of their people and don't always take full account of the moral implications. The role of the warriors, however, is at least as crucial as that of the watchdogs, since if they don't do their job innocents will die. A healthy democratic society manages to balance these things, at least most of the time, or with reasonable success. That's what makes them so different from their enemies, who are often bothered by being foiled, but lack moral qualms. The watchdogs in the democracies must always remember that, too, else their moral equivalence blind them to the utter necessity of waging the war.

Finally, unlike what the political ideologues like to shout all the time, the story being told here isn't about the Bush administration in any immediate way. It's conceivable that had the top been more aware of the moral issues things might have been done somewhat differently, but the discussions for or against torture described here weren't taking place at the White House, they were unfolding at a much lower level, where the war against the Islamsts was being waged.

Educating the NYT Readers

Ethan Bronner of the NYT seems to be stationed in Israel again. I don't always follow these things, but I remember that he was here* some years ago and then he wasn't, but it looks like he's back. Anyway, he's got this piece on how Israelis don't think that the present calm with Hamas will lead to Peace in Our Time. The part that caught my eye was this one:

Sasson Sara, a 57-year-old grocery store owner in Sderot, the town in southern Israel that should be happiest that the Hamas rockets have been stopped, seemed to confirm this contempt for the leadership when the truce with Hamas was announced. “To me, this is an agreement of surrender, like Chamberlain,” he said, referring to British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.

Interesting, huh? Sasson Sara, a 57-year-old grocery store owner in Sderot is probably not an intellectual, I'll bet he doesn't have a Masters degree from anywhere not even Cambridge, and I'm reasonably certain he doesn't spend his spare time reading the NYT or the Guardian or even Haaretz on the Web. But he's got his Chamberlain down pat. Bronner's not certain the readers of the NYT do, however, so he helpfully explains the allusion.


* "here" on this blog generally relates to Israel, where Bronner now is. Me, I'm not "here" at the moment, I'm there, in faraway Australia. Tho in reality, it's not far away at all, it's right here. I can see it out of the window.

Shock and Awe at the Guardian

It appears that a significant majority of the British electorate doesn't quite believe the sacred tenets of the Church of Global Warming.This is very bad if the government is to severely hamper the lifestyle of its subjects, especially since the subjects are voters. True, the educated people generally know the truth and support the rituals, but there aren't enough of them to swing elections.

Me, I've been against pouring gook into the atmosphere since the late 1960s, long before the creation of the Church of Global Warming. But alas, I'm a believer in doing so in ways that play on people's greed, not against it. Find a way to have clean energy cheaper than dirty energy, then sit back and watch the Saudis and other OPEC folks shrivel back to their natural size.

Who Runs the Country?

Tami Arad, widow of Ron Arad if you assume he's long dead, has joined the Shalit family in petitioning the High Court of Justice (Bagatz) to stop the government from allowing supplies into Gaza until Gilad Shalit is returned to Israel.

The claim itself seems reasonable, especially when you remember that Israel will pay for Shalit with hundreds of terrorists. You can't in any way argue with the plea of the Shalit family, not in the remotest, nor even wtih the logic of Tami Arad. Since none of us are quite privy to the agreements made thru the Egyptians with Hamas, there's no way for us to judge if the government is behaving recklessly or not (the court doesn't know this either).

And yet, having said all this, this is yet another demonstration of what many of us have long noticed, namely that the High Court has - purposefully or inadvertently - taken upon itself a role it should never have had, of second guessing the government, indeed, of being a sort of super-government, that vetoes actions of the government when it sees fit.

This is unacceptable in a democracy. The government is elected (indirectly, since we're a parliamentary democracy). The court isn't. The government's job is to run the country. The court's isn't.

Self portrait of an Antisemite

Here's a fine example of why freedom of speech is so important. The parents of Rachel Corrie, ISM activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, have published her letters. Roberta P. Seid has read them carefully, and tells of her findings. They are depressing but also illuminating, detailing the cynicism with which the Palestinians and their useful fools manipulated impressionable young men and women, innocent of any knowledge, into the Palestinian war against Israel. These young people came fervently to believe the worst about Israel, even when the facts staring them in their faces proved them wrong, not to mention all the other facts they willfully looked away from. And of course, at one point in the story there's an Israeli professor in America who encourages Corrie onward on her path of hatred.

Did Rachel Corrie regard herself as an antisemite? I expect not, though I doubt she really worked through her convictions on this issue. But she clearly was one. Her animosity towards Israel was anything but "criticism of Israeli policies". It was overt rejection of Israel's right to defend itself, indeed, even of it's right to define its own interests, formulated with systematic lying. That's conclusive enough evidence for antisemitism. Does it make any difference if she realized the import of her positions? Not in particular. Most antisemites throughout the ages were not articulate nor conscious about it, they simply were.

American Support of Israel

Here's an article about deep seated characteristics of America that explain why it's so supportive of Zionism. It's pretty obvious to me that the author, one Walter Russell Mead, is himself not so enamored of Israel; perhaps this led him to investigate what it is that makes so many Americans so supportive.

Interestingly, I found this article in a bookstore at the airport in Hong Kong. Just the kind of things you'd expect to find at an airport, huh?

Daf Yomi Down Under

In an hour or two I'll be off for a spot of travel down to Australia. The other day I asked a friend in Melbourne (my first and longest stop) if there might, perchance, be any Daf Yomi shiurs in the area. In response he sent me a link to this website, which tells of no fewer than 18 Daf Yomi groups, in Melbourne alone - a town with something like 40,000 Jews of all stripes and flavours. Pretty impressive, if you ask me. So I'll go by and have a peek, perhaps.

This thread, I remind you, began here.

Oh, and by the way: Australia is a rather long walk from here, and it includes some water I'm going to have to figure out how to cross, so blogging may be a bit light for a while.