Dealing with Hamas

Remember last year when Israel arrested some high Hamas officials in the West Bank? Everyone condemned that action, of course. Well, according to this article, Abbas is now warning that if Israel sets the men free, he'll disband the PA, no less.

Again: if Israel deals with this group of Palestinians, that group will do its utmost to block the effort. Keep this in mind the next time you read one of those calls for negotiations with Hamas.

IDF Violence in Context

As a general statement, critics of Israel can be divided into two groups: those who see the flaws and criticize so they'll be corrected, and those who see the flaws and deduce they're so serious Israel's sovereignty must be curtailed or worse. The very large second group can likewise be divided roughly into two groups: the ones who don't know what they're talking about, and the ones who willfully look away from what they know. That second group is made up mostly of Israelis themselves, because in order to know what's going on you need to know Hebrew, and you need to see the full context, and those two are hard to do from far away - so we're talking about the Amira Hasses and the Gideon Levys and a large chunk of the so-called "human rights" mafia. The first group is everybody else, and as we all know, it's a very large group.

Here's an example of what context means.

Yesterday a Palestinian child, 11-year-old Ahmen Moussa, was killed by a shot to the head. The IDF concedes that the shot came from our side, so this isn't one of those cases where responsibility for the death is contested. The full circumstances are not clear, and could range anywhere from the intentional and cold-blooded shooting of a child to a stray bullet accidentally shot from an IDF weapon as its bearer was ducking Palestinian projectiles (one of which took out the eye of one of the IDF troops at the same event yesterday).

So far so bad. Even once the immediate context is clarified, however, there's still the broader context. For example, the fact that this article appeared on the front page of Haaretz this morning: Amos Harel (a serious and knowledgeable reporter), "Israeli security forces losing control in the West Bank".

Recent protests around the village of Na'alin in opposition to the separation fence seem to show a loss of control... However, a series of events - the shooting of a bound Palestinian protester; two Military Police probes; and as of Tuesday the suspension of a battalion commander - show a worrying and dangerous downward spiral. The fact that these happenings are taking place under increased scrutiny by the international media encourages the opponents of the fence to ratchet up the conflict. Apparently, it also increases pressure on IDF officers, who are having difficulty keeping events in check.

No mincing words there. The situation is bad, and seems to be getting worse. And indeed, at the end of the article Harel calls for changes to be made:

The situation in Na'alin is the kind of problem that requires the personal attention of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as of GOC Central Command Gad Shamni. In an interview in 2004, Ashkenazi, then deputy chief of staff, said: "My greatest concern is that the IDF will lose its humanity because of the continued fighting." That has not happened to the extent Ashkenazi feared, but neither does the chief of staff's campaign to restore discipline to the IDF after the Second Lebanon War seem to have been a great success in view of the events in Na'alin.

So, the most important newspaper in the country is using its front page to demand of the head of the army that he get his act together. So far so reasonable. What I found particularly interesting, however, was this short passage:

According to IDF statistics, the boy who was shot Tuesday was the first Palestinian citizen to be killed in the West Bank this year, after the killing of 34 terrorists (the Palestinians count a number of civilians killed, but they, too, concede that the number is low). That figure reflects more care in this matter than in previous years, along with a lessening of friction with the Palestinian population. The control by PA security forces in the West Bank, as well as security coordination with the IDF, are improving.

34 dead fighters and one innocent civilian. That's one too many, of course, but it's also the sign of an army that's waging a low-level war with significant care not to harm anyone but the armed fighters facing it. During the same period 11 Israeli civilians have been murdered in Jerusalem, which ought to remind us that the IDF isn't waging a campaign against an imaginary foe; earlier this week they killed a terrorist who had dispatched a murderer into Israel some months ago and would have done so again if he'd been able to. The lessening of friction with the Palestinian populace: doesn't sound like a brutal and callous army to me, rather an army trying to figure out how to do things with as little damage as possible. The growing coordination with the PA indicates that there are another positive aspects to the story, too.

And did you see the comment about the small number of dead civilians the Palestinians claim dead at the IDF's hands, while the IDF refuses to take responsibility? Interesting, isn't it? Sometimes IDF troops kill innocent Palestinians and set up inquiries; other-times Palestinians try to blame Israel for deaths Israel didn't commit. How are you going to know who's right? If you automatically believe either side, you're potentially putting your preferences before truth. If you try to follow past experience you'll have to agree that the IDF officials don't generally lie, but that doesn't automatically mean they'll never screw up. Especially as in some cases the truth simply isn't knowable, as for example when the corpse is hurriedly buried and there's no possibility to do an autopsy to determine the type of bullet that did the killing.

Then of course you have the unquantifiables, such as how the general Israeli populace sees the whole story and its parts. If you want to damn Israel, surely you need to know that, too? Well, I can't tell you, because I don't really know - which in itself is an interesting finding.

Juan Cole on AIPAC

Here's a tidbit from Informed Content:

Russia just defeated the US in the race for Central Asian gas. The US bet on a gas pipeline through Taliban territory in Afghanistan and Pakistan to India while trying to sideline Russia and Iran! Putin is rivalling the emir of Kuwait as a fossil fuel master of the universe. The only question is when some big power will get hungry enough for natural gas to defy AIPAC's congressional boycott on developing Iran's oil and gas fields. It is likely that future historians will date the end of America's superpower status from that date.

I admit I'm not certain what his point is. The obvious statement is that AIPAC is hurting American interests, but the broader one seems to be saying that it's AIPAC that's shoring up America's superpower status, since when someday someone defies them, that will be the beginning of the end etc. But surely Cole can't be saying that, can he? I mean, AIPAC may be an effective lobby, but it doesn't have the power to determine world history; that's the kind of thing the more fervent antisemites believe in. Or is he assuming that AIPAC controls lots of countries, and the first of them to break its grasp and build oil fields in Iran will topple America?

Very curious. If any of you can explain it to me I'd be obliged.

PS. As I've been saying, global warming or not, someone needs to wean us of our dependency on fossil fuels. And, yes, better Americans or Israelis or both, than Russian Chinese or Arabs.

Jews Expelled from Arab Countires

The Guardian (!!!) has an article about the fact that the Jewish-Arab conflict created two groups of people forced out of their homes, without their property, into a new land. Though, of course, that's where the similarities end.

I especially like this sentence:

The Jewish state, which struggled to take in 600,000, many of them stateless, is both a response to Arab antisemitism, and the legitimate political expression of an indigenous Middle Eastern people. Half Israel's Jewish population is descended from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands.

Sort of puts a dent into the Zionism=Colonialism thesis, if half the Israeli Jews are local Mideasterners. (And most of the other half were refugees from Europe, or, more recently, escapees from the Soviet block).

Prison, Interrogations, Torture: Israel and Palestine

There are various ways to figure out how a society does things, and what it does about things that go wrong. One way is to look at the legislation and compare it with the reality. You can measure the reality through systematic monitoring efforts, or you can look for the exceptions and assume they tell the greater truth. You can see if funds are invested in the monitoring or if the monitors are endangered by their very activities. You might benefit from following the long-term trajectories: does the society try to do better, or is it indifferent? Of course, the very essence of what are regarded as infractions are illuminative. Are powerful men who build palaces from public funds the norm, or do capable elected leaders get booted out for delinquencies in the funding of their campaigns?

The system used by many of Israel's critics has none of this sophistication. Faux-Lawrence, to give one rather insignificant example, never aims at context, he merely collects tidbits that fit his template. Sometimes he uses Haaretz, while disregarding what any reasonable reader knows, namely that Haaretz - like any media outlet - reports the exceptions, not the norm. It's the "man bites dog" principle: a dog biting a man doesn't get into the paper, but a man biting a dog does (or, if you want to take that one further: when a bulldog mauls a child it does get into the paper, but the entire lives of thousands of bulldogs that never bite anyone will never be reported). Our own in-house skeptic, here on this blog, faux-Ibrahim, uses the same methods, which is perhaps forgivable given that he knows nothing about Israel beyond what he can find in English (or Spanish) on the web.

Israel has armies of critics, many of them homegrown, whose entire professional careers are dedicated to finding the exceptions and damning us for them. The finding is actually a reasonable occupation, one we should welcome, since by telling us where we're going wrong we know what needs to be corrected. The damning, mostly done in English for the benefit of foreigners, is a bit more problematic, but we live with it. Given the extent of the effort to show us how wrong we are, the findings, while regrettable in themselves, are not fundamentally awful.

Anyway, here is a link to an official government document, researched and written by employees of the state, submitted to the relevant officials and then put on the web so that anyone can see, right next to the reports from previous years so that readers can compare. The document is a report on how our prisons are run, and it's uncomfortable reading. Even if your position is that prisoners aren't supposed to have a good life - a reasonable position - the gap between what should be and what is, is greater than we should be allowing, no matter what the objective reasons for it might be.

Now, compare this to two reports about our neighbors the Palestinians. With them, it transpires, torture is the routine, not an exception. Pretty much as you'd expect from a society that regards the murder of innocents as a legitimate way of war. And it's not being monitored by the PA, either, and certainly not by the Hamas officials in Gaza.

Palestinian Students at Israeli Universities

The Committee of Heads of Universities in Israel has sent a sharp letter to Minister of Defense Barak disputing a document put out by his ministry specifying the conditions in which Palestinian students may study in Israel. (The article is in Hebrew. Here is a PDF of the letter itself). The need for the limitations arose after the court struck down a more general decree forbidding Palestinians to study at Israeli universities; the court put academic freedom above security considerations. (Can Iranian and North Korean students freely study at American universities? I have no idea).

The heads of the universities are supported by the Minister of Education, so the argument is between two government ministries; actually, given the hierarchy of government ministries, the argument is between minister number 1 from Labor vs. minister number 2 from Labor.

The issues a society argues over can tell you a lot about the larger picture. In this case, for example, note that the Palestinian students under discussion are not Israeli citizens who happen to be Arabs: those can study whatever they want, obviously, if their grades are good enough. The question is if Israeli universities must offer training to Palestinians who are effectively at war with us, in fields that will give them improved tools to damage us; and the second question, irrespective of the field of study, is if Palestinians who otherwise would not be allowed into Israel, must be let in merely because they've managed to be accepted to a university.

I'm not certain which side of this argument I'm on. Somewhere in the middle, probably: there certainly need to be categories and limitations: studying at an Israeli university isn't a fundamental human right (Someone very close to me was recently rejected); on the other hand, ensuring that our security fellows don't go overboard is a reasonable demand.

The Ultimate Pole (or...?)

The Economist has an obituary for Bronislaw Geremek, "Polish historian and politician", one of the handful of people who formulated Polish history in the second half of the 20th century, and thereby also European history.

He was also a Holocaust survivor.

Capitalists to the Rescue

It's no coincidence that the high priests of the Church of Global Warming tend to come from the political Left: these are the people who simultaneously want to revolutionize the world, while controlling the masses, meaning the people who live in it.

Meanwhile, some top-tier capitalists have taken it into their heads to rid us of the curse of fossil fuels by appealing to our selfish interests: our spare cash. Thomas Friedman tells the story of two of the more prominent of them, but there are growing numbers of their lesser colleagues in greed, all of whom wish to vastly enrich themselves by having the rest of us save a bit here and there. Even worse, look at their identities: an Israeli and a Texan. Hard to think of less likely places to look for world-savers if you're a progressive Nation reader or a Guardianista. Oy.

The Descent of Man (or, some Jewish men)

Most of you will be familiar with this, but it's cute:

Moses: Law is everything (head)
Jesus: Love is everything (heart)
Marx: Money is everything (stomach)
Freud: Sex is everything (lower)

Einstein: Everything is relative

The Guardian on Obama on Israel

The Guardian, like many other organs of the Far Left/Progressives, has sorrowfully accepted that a President Obama won't pursue all the policies they'd like him to. No one who tried to do that could ever be elected president of the United States (or prime minister of the UK, for that matter, but that's another story. Hint: After hounding Tony Blair out of office and installing a "better man", here's what they have to say about the new one. But I digress).

So, Obama, even if elected, probably won't try to impose an international boycott on Israel, even the Guardian understands that. But they haven't quite lost hope that perhaps he'll do something, anything, that they might be able to cheer, even as they admit that the auspices aren't so good. Just in case someone on his staff reads their leaders, however, they spelled out for him what's needed:

To deliver a two-state solution, Mr Obama will have to persuade Israel to halt all settlement construction, before handing back a viable West Bank - not one fragmented by settlements, exclusive roads for cars with Israeli number plates, nature reserves, military restricted areas and over 600 checkpoints, barriers and other closures.

What makes this statement so truly and authentically idiotic is that had the Palestinians agreed to the dictated terms of President Bill Clinton from December 24th 2000, which Israel agreed to, they would have been in the seventh year of their independence already, the settlements would have been gone, there would have been no exclusive roads for Israelis or any of the other things on that list... not to mention that as recently as September 2000 there weren't any roadblocks and barriers, because they are measures implemented by Israel after the Palestinians chose violence over statehood.

No one expects the Guardianistas to remember things that happened 2000 years ago: that's a trick of the Jews. But 2000 days ago? Is that really so hard?

Presedent Obama, President McCain, President Chomsky - whoever. The Israeli electorate has repeatedly said, most recently in the elections of 2006, that it's ready for the two-state solution, including the disbanding of most of the settlements etc etc.

So what does the Guardian say the Palestinians must do?

A genuine negotiator has to say unpalatable things to them as well, especially about the need to control militant groups. Israel is never going to accept a Palestinian state unless it can guarantee the security of the Israeli state first.

Yes, this is true. But it's hardly enough. There are those two sticky issues of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian demand for an Israeli acceptance of their Right of Return. Small things, not worthy of being mentioned in a Guardian leader, but still relevant to the matter, don't you think? And since there will be no peace until they are resolved, and there's nothing an American president can do to make them go away no matter what his name is or hers, it's hard to see why anyone expects his identity will change much around here.

Good vs. Evil in the Middle East

A Kuwaiti newspaper comments on how it's better to have Israel as your enemy than it was to have Saddam's Iraq. The murderer Samir Kuntar went home fat and with a university degree, while the (mostly innocent) Kuwaitis arrested by the Iraqis went home in little plastic bags of bones.

Meanwhile, the NYT has yet another story in its lengthening series of stories about how the right side is slowly winning in the long struggle to move Iraq from one of the world's most malign dictatorships to a functioning democracy; this time the story is from Sadr city: yes, even in Sadr city, where Moktada al-Sadr reigned supreme only last year.

It is a remarkable change from years past, when the militia, led by the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, controlled a broad swath of Baghdad, including local governments and police forces. But its use of extortion and violence began alienating much of the Shiite population to the point that many quietly supported American military sweeps against the group. (My italics).

It appears that when given a real choice between a rule of brutal thugs and a rule of civilized government, many people prefer the latter. Since in spite of everything said to the contrary, the Americans in Iraq represent the rule of law while their enemies are bloody thugs, over time the American vision of how life could be will prevail.

Someday this will happen in other parts of the Arab world as well. Perhaps even with the Palestinians, one hopes.

On Being Grownups

Anyone who looks forward to a day when Israelis and Palestinians will live alongside one another with civility - and any reasonable person should be looking forward to such a time - will be disheartened by the new round of internal Palestinian bloodletting in Gaza.

The Hamas people hate the Fatah people, the Fatah people hate the Hamas ones, and they all hate the Israelis. Fine. Hatred is an emotion, and it's not always easy to determine which emotions one harbors. It's a sign of adulthood, however, that you're able to subordinate your emotions to your coldly calculated interests. Wouldn't it be nice if for once the Palestinians would shelve their hatreds for long enough to begin building a better future for themselves? I even have a sneaking suspicion that if they were to do so, the Israelis might take notice and try to help, given that our lives would be easier and more pleasant if the Palestinians behaved as adults. But even if there were no Israeli recognition of the fact: wouldn't it be worth the Palestinians' effort simply to improve things in their society to the limited extent they can do so on their own?

Echoes of distant horrors

The final Mishna of the 6th chapter of the Bava Batra tractate deals with the construction of burial graves in Judea and the Galilee, which is where the Mishna was created. The following Gemarah is somewhat unreal, since so far as I know there weren't any comparable burial graves where it was created, in Babylon, which is today's Iraq - a flat and muddy place, with no rocky hills into which to dig burial caves. Yet these pre-Iraqi rabbis deliberated the elaborate details of the caves as if they were a part of their everyday experience. In a way, they were: Erez Yisrael always appears in Jewish literature with an immediacy not accorded to the actual environment of the scholars.

The whole section is rather morbid, yet a page or so into it it take on some even darker hues, when the rabbis discuss what happens when an orderly burial cave is found to have a disorderly pile of hastily buried bodies in its anteroom. The rabbis deliberate this matter for a page or so, and then move on to other matters.... But wait, what is it they're talking about? Why would a society with a clear burial tradition suddenly deviate from it into chaotic behavior? Unless, perhaps, the chaos is far more extensive than mere burial customs? Perhaps these dry discussions are skirting around an historical period of widespread violence, mass death, and hurried burials of mounds of corpses in old cemeteries?

Such as the Judean wars against the Romans, at the time of the Great Revolt in the 1st Century, and even more so the Bar Kochva revolt of 135 when the Romans committed an effective genocide of the Jews in Judea, killing perhaps 900,000 of them. Events of that magnitude can't be swept out of the communal consciousness, and tend to pop up in all sorts of unexpected spots.

And there they remain for as long as the communal memory keeps going. In the case of the Jews, almost two millenia and going strong.

Bava Babtra tractate, pages 101-102.

As always, I note for the benefit of readers who don't understand what I'm talking about, that this thread began here.

Randy Pausch, RIP

Prof. Randy Pausch has died. He was a brave man.

More on the Church of Global Warming

Last year the British Channel Four broadcast a film (which I haven't seen) called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Apparently it touched an extraordinarily sensitive nerve, because the other day the Guardian's Bishop of Global Warming, George Monbiot, wrote yet another column against the program, titled Global Warming is a Brutal Truth. It's worth reading, as it gives a good perspective into the sanctimonious mindset of the high priesthood of the Church of Global Warming.

It is not just because The Great Global Warming Swindle is at odds with the entire body of scientific knowledge on this subject that I have bothered to contest it. It is also because it is consonant with the entire body of human self-deception. We want to be misled, we crave it; and we will bend our minds into whatever shape they need to take in order not to face our brutal truths.

Speak for yourself, George.

You can also go to the Wikipedia article about Monbiot, and read the sorts of things he advocates:

Monbiot asserts that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" and that there is little time for debate or objections to a raft of emergency action he believes will stop climate change, including: setting targets on greenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a 'personal carbon ration'; new building regulations with houses built to German passivhaus standard; banning incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other inefficient technologies; constructing large offshore wind farms, replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; closing down all out-of-town superstores and replace them with warehouses and a delivery system.

Reduce UK airport capacity by 90%: that'll do the trick. Though, truth be told, there are elected governments out there who are already diligently beavering away in their attempt to have us all live by the precepts of the Church. Those of you who have been in Norway know that it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. As recently as 80 years ago the entire area was blighted by deep poverty and everything that went with it, but now it's inhabited by wealthy healthy people, thanks to oil offshore and the tourists who stream through in their cars. The locals also drive a lot, because, sort of like Los Angeles only far more so, you can't go anywhere unless you have a car. Well, the local politicians have decreed that driving is a luxury that people shouldn't indulge in.

"At a time when climate change is beginning to seriously impact the planet, and when Norway's carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, we politicians must take steps to meet these challenges," Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said

Those of you who are old enough to remember the 1990s may be able dimly to recollect an era when none of this had ever been dreamed up yet. Moreover, it's beginning to seem possible that the unborn children of today - say, the ones who will reach school in the 2030s - will also not be familiar with any of this, because by then we'll have forgotten it because it will have been proven wrong. Here, for example, is an article by an Australian scientist that's been making the internet rounds this week. He says that the globe was getting warmer last decade, it isn't now, and fossil fuels probably aren't relevant one way or the other.

PS. I've said before and I'll say it again: in my opinion, pumping millions of tons of gook into the air is probably a poor idea. Since the Saudis and their ilk, supported by the Russians and Chaves, control most of the reserves of the stuff, there is a terrific incentive to wean us of it. However, the way to go is to invent better alternatives, not to wreck the rather comfortable world we live in.

Play with human nature, not against it.

Why Do They Kill Jews?

Khaled Abu Toameh has been talking to various Palestinians, and has heard that all three Palestinian men who committed attacks in Jerusalem so far this year had a similar motivation: they had been in trouble for something, they had become a source of embarrassment, and they had to redeem their honor and that of their families. What better a way to do so than to murder Jews, and if they died in the process (as they all did) they'd have the further honor of being Shahids.

I've said this before and I'll continue to say it until it changes: Palestinian society is severely sick. Not every Palestinian, of course, and it doesn't have to be permanent, but right now, that's the situation.

(Hat tip: Kai).

Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, and Nadia Abu el-Haj

A friend sent me a cutting from The New Yorker with the story of the attempt to block Nadia Abu el Haj from getting tenure at Barnard. The story isn't online, but the detailed abstract is here. My friend wanted my opinion, which I dutifully wrote down - and here it is:

I especially enjoyed – if that’s the word – the long article on Ms. Prof. Nadia Abu el-Haj. I haven’t read her book, I must say, so my ability to have an informed opinion on the matter is a bit cramped – though it doesn’t seem that most of the people in the story felt impaired by such considerations. Still, the story as told in the article raises interesting questions.

Generally speaking, I’m in favor of freedom of speech – one reason I tend to dislike the whole concept of political correctness is my heartfelt conviction that freedom of speech includes the freedom to be nasty, offensive, and to lie with a gusto. Has Ms el-Haj done any or all of these? I don’t know, but she may well have. More serious, to my mind, is that her basic assumptions – Zionism as a colonial project – seem silly to me, so that I could imagine that her entire argument is flawed from its start. But that’s clearly not a reason to shut her up. If we locked up all our fools, who would run our governments for us?

So trying to block her for talking nonsense sounds wrong to me.

On the other hand, there was a position clearly expressed by some of her allies in the controversy, whereby the public – taxpayers and philanthropists – must pay for the upkeep of the university, but dare not have any opinion about what’s taught there. This I find strange. Freedom of speech doesn’t necessarily have to mean freedom to live off the public purse. You want to talk nonsense and make a living from it too? Find a publisher, sell your books, go on the lecture tour, sell tickets, get employed by a think tank that’s expressly there for fools of your ilk and funded by the folks who like you. The distance between getting locked up for your opinion and having to make a living on your own steam so that you can express your opinions, seems to me rather significant.

Finally, a word about content – not the content of this book, which I haven’t read, but the content of some of what goes on at some universities, and much of which being influenced by the malign shadow of Edward Said, some of whose stuff I have read. There is, these days, a pernicious set of ideas being propagated by some people at some universities and in some media outlets, which is deeply offensive and threatening to liberal and rational humanism; and since liberal rational humanism is the least worst system man has so far devised for organizing society, undermining it is a bad idea. The propagators of these ideas need to be branded for what they are. They shouldn’t be locked up, they shouldn’t be shut up, but there is no harm and probably much good in setting them up for public shame and ridicule. Especially as they so love to mete out the same to whomever they don’t like.

A Place of Very Little Hope

Barack Obama was at Yad Vashem earlier today. At the end of his visit he commented that "ultimately, this is a place of hope".

Which of course it isn't, or shouldn't be.

Israel is ultimately a place of hope. The ability of the survivors of the Shoah to forge positive lives for themselves, many hundreds of thousands of them, is not only a place of hope, it's a deafening rebuke for all the fools who like to excuse victims or perceived victims for their consequent weaknesses. And yes, the designers of Yad Vashem's museum and grounds succumbed to the temptation and allowed their story to be caught up in the inspirational power of Israel, and at times they are carried away by the justified triumphalism of some survivors; by doing so, they diminish the story they're supposed to be telling.

But Obama, we're told, is extraordinarily intelligent, and sees farther and clearer than most of us. He should have been able to see through the distractions that were set in his path, and he should have been able to set aside the innate optimism of a liberal politician and of the black man who is poised to break the ultimate glass ceiling, and he should have recognized that Yad Vashem is anything but a place of hope. If there is hope for humanity it is in spite of that story, not as a result of it.

Teaching Hatred

Anne Applebaum has an interesting story about how the Saudi education authorities are inculcating hatred in children, and disseminating it as far and as wide as they can.

Now remember: there are no Israeli occupiers in Saudi Arabia. For that matter, there was never much of a European colonial domination of the area, either. You can hardly regard the Saudis as being part of an impoverished "South", can you. All in all, none of the standard templates for explaining away unpleasant non-Western behavior are much use when dealing with the Saudis. What you're left with is that they may simply believe in what they say, from choice, not necessity.

If you can live with that concept, the next thing will be to ask if there might be any connection between what the Saudis say and do, and what others in the Arab world say and do. Especially do.

The BBC on "Terror"

A few blocks away from here another Palestinian has decided to kill Jews at random in the name of his people's rights, or some such idiocy. I walked across that intersection about two hours earlier; my wife drives that route every day. George Bush stayed at the hotel one block away twice this year; Barack Obama will be there tonight.

The attacker was shot within seconds, which shows that while Palestinians learn from one another how to kill Jews, the Jews learn from one another how to kill killers, in this case even before he managed to kill. (Update: the 2nd shooter, an officer, is not Jewish. He's probably Druze, or an Arab Israeli).

And the BBC? They never learn anything. As you see when you follow that link, according to them it was an "attack", not an attack, and also:

Israeli police called it a "terror attack", although there was no immediate claim of responsibility by any Palestinian militant organisation.

Maybe the poor driver's foot got stuck on the gas pedal, and if only someone had been nice to him he would have found a way to lift it and we would have been able to commiserate with him how hard it is to live under Israeli occupation and also be racially profiled.