Obama vs. McCain, Summary

The New Yorker has an editorial up that starts thus:

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching— that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has— at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity— undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction...

You're free to believe that, of course, but I don't. Not that the Bush's presidency has been the worst in 140 years, nor that the upcoming election is the most important in 80 years (that's Jan Assmann's definition of living memory in his seminal book Das kulturelle Gedaechtnis).

The NYT Magazine offers a rather more level-headed analysis. Michael R. Gordon tried to figure out what the two candidates really think about Iraq and where it needs to go:

The issue was barely discussed in last month’s foreign policy debate. But in recent interviews with The New York Times, the two candidates made clear that they would confront the challenge in starkly different ways.

In the interviews, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain offered conflicting visions of how to shrink the American military presence in Iraq, the best way to encourage further political progress there and what it would mean to succeed after more than five years of war.

They also provided telling clues about how much flexibility the next commander in chief would grant to his generals...

Alas, I don't believe a word of that analysis, either. It's not that Gordon is out of touch with reality, as the editors of the New Yorker apparently may be. Rather, I don't see how anything the candidates have to say these days can be much of an indicator of what they'll do when they find themselves behind the desk where the buck stops. As a voter, I've been watching Israeli politicians for decades as they spend a lifetime saying whatever they say, with or without conviction, and then they do otherwise once they're prime minister. As an historian, I've been watching that happen for centuries, you could say. It's not that circumstances always force leaders into decisions irrespective of where they came from, but it's very often so; to a degree, it's almost always so. And some of the more obvious exceptions - Hitler is at the top of the list, but Lenin is on it also - are the kinds of leaders you'd rather not be living under.

So what's a chap to do? Unfortunately, it seems the best place to go these days is The Economist. If you want cool-headed and dispassionate analysis, that is. They offer large portions of it, most noticeably this week in a very long special report, here if you're reading online, in which case you need to keep on clicking at the end of each page, or here if you want to print it out and read off dead trees. They'll endorse a candidate on November 1st, and I get the feeling they'll endorse Obama, but I could be wrong. Their report is calm, balanced, nuanced, and informative. A-Mechaye, as they say in Yiddish.

Personally, I have decided to sit out this election. I always vote in Israeli elections, as a matter of principle, since it's my society and country. Although I'm a tax-paying American citizen, I don't live there, don't understand many of the issues, and won't pay the price for being wrong, so it seems a bit unethical to cast my vote in local or state-level ballots. Especially as I'm registered in California, where I've never ever lived. Presidential elections are different, however, especially the ones where foreign policy are central, so sometimes I do vote in them. But only when I feel strongly. This time I don't.

Why don't I, in spite of what the New Yorker tells me? First, because as I've said often enough, both McCain and Obama seem honorable men and worthy candidates. It's a choice between two good options.

Second, because of the Amotz Asael criteria. Asael, an Israeli journalist who went to school one year below me, he has suggested that from an Israeli perspective the single most important thing about an American president is that he (or she, someday) keep America powerful. And confident, I'd add. Does anyone know who'll do that better this time?

On the narrow "How would he relate to Israel" question, by the way, there's no discernable difference between the two, so far as I can see. On Iran, which is a crucial issue, I also can't see who will be better - we'll have to wait and see what happens when that buck comes to the Oval Office.

The economic issues I don't understand and rather doubt either of the candidates do, either. So it's a question of which of them will put together a better team of advisers, and then have the intelligence to overrule them. The only way to know that is by electing one of them and hoping.

Some of the cultural issues are beyond me and irrelevant to my life. Gun control, for example. The Swiss and Israelis both prove that you can have an armed populace with little violence, and the periodic rise and fall and rise of American crime doesn't seem much affected by the availability of guns, but I'd never vote for president based on such an issue, which has no connection to my life. I wouldn't vote because of same-sex marriages, either, even though I'm against them. I like the Israeli solution, which gives wide legal equality and freedom to homosexuals, and even recognizes partnerships for all sorts of purposes, but doesn't tamper with the institution of marriage, an institution which goes beyond the legal construct of two people living together.

Abortions are likewise not an issue I'd vote on, though I'm mostly against them but not always - which is the Jewish halachic position. Incest, rape, the real health of the mother (but not her "feelings"), these can all be reasons to abort what will otherwise become a living human being. Framing the issue as one of "choice", however, seems like a cop-out. It's a question of responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility for launching life, keep an aspirin pill between you knees, or whatever other system you prefer. Once it has happened, however, it has nothing to do with "a woman's control over her body", or her choices about what to do with it, since it's the child's life, not hers.

Anyway, the real issue is probably quite different anyway: who decides such matters, the (supreme) court, or the voters? I'm a staunch supporter of democracy, and don't think courts should decide such things. We've got this same question in the Israeli public discussion, with the same groups on each side: those who think they know the truth better than everybody but need the courts to decide because the voters just don't get it, versus those who want the polity to decide.

Yet before you write me off as a die hard Republican, I must add that when it comes to that other major issue in American politics, health insurance, I'm far to the left of them all. No matter what's going on with the economy right now, seen with historical perspective the United States is one of the richest societies in human history, perhaps the richest alongside Western Europe, which has been free of the costs of defending itself for decades because the Americans do it for them. There is no possible defense of the fact that millions of Americans don't have reasonable medical insurance. I don't care how it happened, who's to blame, or even which precise mechanism is chosen to rectify it, nor by which candidate or party. It has to be rectified. But I wouldn't vote on the issue because I don't understand the mechanics of fixing it, and anyway I mostly won't be paying for it nor using it. (Israel has a reasonably good universal health system).

So since I vote on foreign affairs, and have the feeling but not the certainty McCain is a safer bet, why not do what I always do in Israel: focus my attention on all the available data until I can make a decision? Because Obama is black.

On October 16th 1901 - that's 107 years ago next week - President Theodore Roosevelt invited Dr. Booker T. Washington to join him for dinner at the White House. Washington was black, it was an unprecedented event, and Roosevelt drew so much public ire for his audacity that he never repeated it. More than 60 years later, President Lyndon Johnson, he who was hounded out of the White House because the Baby Boomers couldn't stomach his foreign war, was braver than Teddy Roosevelt, and did more than is reasonable to expect from a politician. Barack Obama needs to be qualified enough to do the job; the color of his skin isn't a reason to vote him into the most difficult job on earth. Since I'm not convinced he's qualified enough, I'm not going to vote for him. But then again, I'm not convinced he isn't qualified enough, and actually think that after a disastrous 18-24 months he may learn to do it well; add his race to that and I don't see how I could vote against him.

PS. There is one twist that could make Obama far the better choice. If, as I rather expect, his foreign policies will be closer to what I think they should be, and further from those the Guardian is so fervently praying for, this will have a salutary effect on the way the world operates. McCain can't do that, because he'll always have at least 45% of Americans and 80% of everyone else against his foreign policy.

Creativity Under Persecution

Mishna: When someone has been thrown into a pit, and only his voice can be heard saying "Give my wife a divorce", whoever hears him may write a get (divorce letter) and give it to the wife.

The Gemara then goes into what I insist is a humorous discussion: What if the man's voice is being impersonated by a demon? When the observers saw a human form. Maybe the demon impersonated the human form, also? When they saw the form's shadow. Maybe the demon impersonated the shadow, also? Rabbi Hanina countered with by telling that his son Yonatan told him demons don't have shadows.

At which point one of the rabbis from the school of Rabbi Yishmael put an end to the fooling around, and reminded everyone that it's a serious subject: at a time of widespread persecution, it's necessary to stretch the rules in order not to have women stuck in uncertainty and legal limbo.

You can literally hear the jokers with the black humor - after all, they also know how bad things are, but refuse to be cowed by it; the last fellow is too serious for such things.

The next page adds another dimension to the dire situation and the rabbi's insitence on defining the law no matter how bad things are: in a discussion about how many men need to hear the wish of the husband in order to allow them to write a get, Rabbi Meir has an opinion which is then reinforced by the opinion of rabbi Hanina of Ono, even though he has to send it from his cell in a Roman jail, where he was awaiting execution for his part in the insurgency.

Gitim 65a,b

This thread began here.

See'ya later, Sarah Palin

Vice Presidential candidates are important, I'm told, three times only. The day they're chosen, at the convention, and at the VP debate. Well, Sarah did fine at the first, even better at the second, and my impression (I didn't watch) is that she did quite well at the third.

And that's the end of that. It's pretty clear her boss is going to come in second, which means that on a Wednesday in early November she'll be going back to Wassila, a place none of us had ever heard of until 5 weeks ago. I expect, however, that once there she'll take out a subscription to the NYT, the Economist, and a few other important news outlets. She then has about two and a half years to work on her main weakness this time, namely that she knows nothing about the world and not too much about the USA. She seems intelligent, so 30 months will easily be enough to fix that. Expect her to be back with a vengeance next time round, perhaps even taking on President Obama himself.

In which case, John McCain's most important legacy at the presidential level will have been to invent Sarah Palin. Whether this will be good or not, I have not the faintest idea.

"Nothing Will Hurt Me"

We spent the morning preparing for Rosh HaShana - we're having lots of guests over the two day holiday. The radio was on the whole time, and we listened to the summarizing hit parade of the year's Hebrew songs. Near the top of the list was a song titled "Nothing Will Hurt me". It was written by Erez Stark - whose names means Strong Ceder, and it is preformed by the Knessiat Hasechel rock band. Their name, in English, comes out something like Church of Reason.

In my free and unstructured translation, the words of the song go more or less like this:

Nothing will hurt me, nothing,
Not a woman, nor a terrorist's bullet, nothing,
Because that's what I swore to my brother, my sister, my parents
And I cried by night and took care by day
Because I was afraid something would damage my parents
My father's voice echoes in my head

If anything happens to you
I have no reason for tomorrow
No reason for life
No reason for tomorrow

If you're standing above me now
I must not have kept my word
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry

If anything happens to you....

Nothing will hurt me
Nothing,
Not a woman, nor a terrorist's bullet
Nothing...

----------------------
Erez was killed in action a few years ago, a young lieutenant.

May the coming year be better than the previous ones.

Why was Judea Destroyed?

The destruction of the Jewish communities of Erez Yisrael in the first century of the common era, with the destruction of the 2nd temple at its heart, followed by the genocide of the Jews of Judea 70 years later, were a catastrophe of epic proportions. All the while as they were happening, Jewish creativity never slowed down for a moment; indeed, the mishnaic era is rightfully regarded as one of the peaks in a history of millenia of cultural creativity. Yet while the creativity was never blunted, the echoes of the catastrophe reverberate resoundingly all the way into the main political discussions of the 21st century.

Page 55b of the Gitin tractate launches a long discussion of the catastrophe, its causes, its outlines, and its results. These 4-5 pages deserve a book-length analysis, which I'm not about to undertake. Still, here's the first story, that launches the discussion; it's very well known by many educated Jews, whether they've studied Gitin or not. I find it fascinating on many levels, one of which is the total lack of the feeling of victimization the powerless or weak are so supposed to revel in these days, as if weakness is a moral trophy. Well, those Jews sure proved to be the weaker side, and they sure were persecuted, but for the next few thousand years they told themselves stories about all the things they did wrong to bring their suffering upon themselves. So here's perhaps the single most important story of all, the story of Kamza and Bar Kamza, because of whom Jerusalem was destroyed:

There were once in Jerusalem two men, one named Kamza and the other named Bar Kamza. And there was a third man who's name has mercifully been lost, who was a friend of Kamza and an enemy of Bar Kamza. This man hosted an important social event, and told his servant to invite Kamza. The servant mistakenly invited Bar Kamza. When Bar Kamza arrived, the host threw him out. Bar Kamza, publicly mortified, begged to be allowed to stay, offering to pay the cost of his board, or even the entire cost of the event, but the host refused. Bar Kamza was especially furious that the high society of the time, the scholars, watched this happen and didn't do anything to save him from humiliation, and so he went to the Romans and told them the Jews were plotting a revolt, and this set the whole story in motion.

The moral of the story, the Talmud tells us, is that Jerusalem was destroyed because of sin'at hinam, unnecessary animosity between people. Not, say, occupation, or the heavy weight of Roman rule, or a wish for freedom or liberty or any sort of noble action one could attribute to the Jews or ignoble policy to attribute to the Roman. The Jews were punished, according to their own version, because they deserved it.

Philip Mendes on Benny Morris on 1948

Philip Mendes has a fine review of Benny Morris' new book, here. If you don't have the time or inclination to read the full book, this seems like a reasonable synopsis, and can be useful to counter the many myths (=lies) often told about the war of 1948.

Tsipi Livni?

Gerard Baker has an article in the Times of London speculating that whoever wins the upcoming elections in the US will fail dismally, and things will get better only with the next fellow (gal?). I wouldn't know about all that, but he's got an interesting underlying question: who in his sane mind would want the job right now? The reason I ask is because the situation in Israel could easily fit the same description. The job of Israeli prime minister is easily the second trickiest job in the world, trailing only after that of the American president for the things you can do wrong and the ease of messing up on a grand scale (can you think of any other such position? Let's say the chancellor of Germany screws up, not to mention Canada: who'd ever even notice?). That's in normal times. Right now, whoever's occupying that house up on Balfour st. will have to deal with all of the usual, plus making the decision about Iran. What sane person would want the job?

The other day I got a phone call from a pollster, who grilled me on my opinions and positions (in Israel. She never asked me about Palin). Part of the interview included a long series of questions where I was to rate the aptitude of Bibi, Barak and Tsipi to do this that and the other. Graded between 1-10. I consistently gave Bibi 2 out of 10 (been there, done that) except for as minister of the treasury, which he did extraordinarily well. Barak got a consistent 4 out of 10 (been there, no need to go back). Tsipi? I gave her a consistent 6 out of 10. As I said to the pollster, who groaned her agreement, what do we know about Livni? Almost nothing, but we hope for the best.

The Americans wonder what they know about Obama, and almost all have made up their mind (this way or that) about Palin. Well, Livni has been near the center of our limelight for a decade already, in various ministerial positions, thus trouncing all four American candidates combined, but no-one has the faintest idea if she's up to the job. With the possible exception of the 70-year-olds who ascended to the job between 1994-2001 (there were three of them), the only way we know if someone is up to the job is by letting them have it, and watching them fail.

Livni has the tremendous advantage that she's apparently not corrupt, and not even all that dirtied as a political hack. Exactly a set of abilities that are irrelevant to success at the job she seems likely soon to have. So we hope for the best.

By the way: if and once she gets the job, which seems rather likely, Israel will be the only country in the world with women at the head of all three executive branches: Dorit Beinish is the head of the supreme court, Dalia Itzik is the head of the knesset, and Tsipi. It's nice to be so much more progressive than all those liberals.

An Antisemitic Speech (Yawn)

Iran's President Ahmadinejad has just made an overtly antisemitic speech. Here's the full text of the English version, as published by his own office (I make the point of linking to the Iranian official website because sooner or later Juan Cole will tell us the man didn't say what he said).

He's the president of a largish country, not a blogger from San Francisco or an anonymous comment writer from the Guardian's CIF. He made the speech in the full glare of a United Nations General Assembly session. Many media outlets were there, and each chose to report on the section of the speech they felt most interesting.

Very very few of them put the man's primitive antisemitism at the center of the report; actually, many didn't seem to have noticed it. Although at NRO the did - but then, NRO is hardly a mainstream outlet, is it.

The lives, properties and rights of the people of Georgia and Ossetia and Abkhazia are victims of the tendencies and provocations of NATO and certain western powers, and the underhanded actions of the Zionists...

The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premiere nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.
This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.

BBC Reports from Alternative Universe

Earlier this evening there was another attack by an Arab driver on pedestrians in Jerusalem. 15 of them were injured, most of them not seriously. The attacking driver was shot to death, as is customary in these cases.

The BBC report's title, and I quote: Jerusalem car "attack" hurts 15.

After all, maybe it wasn't an attack? Perhaps the young Arab accidentally careened into lots of pedestrians. Such things happen, don't they?

Update: I wrote this post after 1am, last night, and forgot to link to the BBC report. This morning I see that it has been replaced... by an even more pernicious report. Now the title tells about an attack on troops, while still refraining from saying anything about the attacker (a Georgian militant from Tibet, perhaps?). The article itself goes out of its way to minimize the number of casualties, giving the mistaken impression that they were all soldiers, which isn't true. The severest casualty appears to have been a civilian woman, for example.

Why McCain?

A friend and reader sent me an alarmed e-mail recently, after I said in a recent post that I have a small preference for McCain over Obama - though actually, the thrust of my sentence was that both candidates are worthy.

In that post I had linked approvingly to Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic Monthly profile of McCain. So by way of explanation, here are some of the quotes in the article that I approved of:

His constancy is noteworthy. Nothing in his experience, recent or not-so-recent, has moved him away from his essential belief that the president has a duty to confront perceived threats well before they reach American shores. I asked Kissinger whether he thinks that McCain can be too inflexible on the subject of preemption. He said McCain will not change his mind if he feels that the nation’s defense is at stake. Much of this, Kissinger continued, is related to McCain’s sense of national honor, and personal honor. “He will not do the easy thing,” he said....

In my conversations with McCain, however, he never appeared greatly troubled by his shifts and reversals. It’s not difficult to understand why: tax policy, or health care, or even off-shore oil drilling are for him all matters of mere politics, and politics calls for ideological plasticity. It is only in the realm of national defense, and of American honor—two notions that for McCain are thoroughly entwined—that he becomes truly unbending...

McCain’s father, Kissinger said, saw the world the same way McCain sees it. “He was a military man, not a diplomat. Both men grasp the notion of consequences. From about 1967 on, we were experiencing a national trauma, with obsessive doubts about the fitness of government and with a yearning to just get out of Vietnam and get it over with, with a refusal to look at the consequences. Both of them understood that withdrawal without honor has costs. The son knows this from his own experience and from his father.”

I once asked Lindsey Graham to name something unusual about McCain in the context of the debate about Iraq; he said that McCain believes, among other things, that “some political problems have military solutions.” A related McCain belief that’s even more out of sync with America’s current mood: wars are quagmires only until someone figures out a way to win them...

The Big Lie

The New York Times has an article claiming that people often believe things that are demonstrably false. I expect the timing has to do with the fact (probably even a true fact) that the McCain campaign has been telling more lies recently than the Obama campaign (tho neither side is blameless, and the picture isn't black and white, if you'll pardon the pun). Anyway, the NYT informs us that there are all sorts of mechanisms at work here, and wonders if fact checking has any practical value. (I.e. will it help against McCain...).

One of the people it has interviewed notes that even fact checkers can have biases. Huh. Or should I say, Humphh?

There's nothing much new about all this, of course. The Church spent most of its first 1,500 years systematically lying about the Jews and just about everyone went along with it; even once there was a growing group of, shall we call them fact checkers, the Church mostly kept at it for another few centuries; in some corners it still does. In the previous century Goebbels may have been the world's top expert at demonstrating that if you say something often enough and stridently enough millions will believe you no matter how ridiculous you're being, but he had many competitors and companions in evil. But why reach so far as Goebbels: Have you ever listened to the BBC reporting on Israel? Not too much truth there, is there, especially when you get into body language of reporters and commentators. Regular readers of this blog are regularly exposed to my ire at the Guardian, but that will never make the Guardian any more committed to truth.

Lest you think, as the NYT article subtly suggests, that susceptibility to lies is greater with less educated people or whatever: Bah! The most committed believers (and creators, and disseminators) of the Nazi lies were an identifiable social-economic group that was far more intelligent and educated than the masses of German citizenry. This is probably equally true of the Communists, though I have fewer of the facts at my fingertips. The readership of the Guardian, in any case, is definitely more educated than the average Briton, so apparently the case can be made that more education means more susceptibility to lies.

Just switch on your TV, or reach for a magazine and let your eye flit by the first advertisements you see: if they were really true you wouldn't buy their products. Me, I've had enough contact with marketers to know that telling the truth is never on their agenda, though admittedly, getting caught blatantly lying isn't either. Have you ever noticed how fundraisers never use the word 'problems', for example, always preferring the term 'challenges'? Yep. Of course, that's but a small subset of the nexus between marketing jargon on the one hand, and the pernicious phenomenon of Political Correctness, a theology of lies if ever there was one, invented, mostly, not by McCain's side of the American cultural wars, even if it is grounded by deep roots in Calvinism and Puritanism.

It's vastly better to tell and hear the truth. But don't lets pretend our side is necessarily better at it, unless we can back up this claim with.... facts.

A Non-convincing Wave

I expect most of you have heard about "The Wave": A true story of a very charismatic teacher in a California high school who in 1967swept his students into a frenzy of fascist-like behavior based on charisma, group cohesiveness and discipline.The teacher, Ron Jones, later wrote up the story,and it was made into a fine movie. My old colleagues in the education department of Yad Vashem liked to use the film to demonstrate the potency of group pressure.

Well, it seems the story has now been turned into a German feature film.

Personally, I never found much in this story to be of real significance. The thing about Nazi Germany was that it wasn't the act of a class of teenagers, but rather of millions of adults; it didn't last a week, but rather many years; and the Germans never snapped out of it until the Allies had bombed them back into the Middle Ages, abolished all levels of their state from mayors to the national government, and then slowly started putting it all together again.

Thinking in Politics

I've been greatly enjoying the high drama of the American presidential race. Personally I'm edging towards McCain these days, and Jeffrey Goldberg's profile of him in The Atlantic Monthly has contributed to this, but I could live with either result, since the American voters this time must choose between two honorable and capable men; in spite of the torrents of verbiage that say otherwise, I think both candidates are worthy.

And no, I don't think either Vice Presidential candidate is the issue. Nor are the campaign tactics either side uses or doesn't use.

Still, those torrents are lots of fun. I've become an addict of RealClearPolitics, a website - evenly balanced, so far as I can see - that links to lots of stuff that's being written. One of the more interesting things I've noticed is the degree to which almost all pundits, on all sides of the debate, can't be trusted to tell it as it is. Try as they may, their personal preferences color what they see. The upshot is to emphasize the large extent to which these elections are about cultural issues, not political ones, and most people's likes and dislikes stem from these cultural differences.

Somewhere in my reading I came across this, an article by Jonathan Haidt, a young professor of Psychology from Virginia. He's an avowed Democrat and liberal (in the American use of the term - never forget that the Europeans use the same word for something almost opposite), and he desperately wants "his side" to win elections - but he has managed to go beyond that need and try to be empiric and rational. Although his title, "What makes people vote Republican" literally oozes of left-wing arrogance, his answer is that ultimately, it's the Republicans who have richer thought capacities, and Democrats need to understand this.

Given what it is, a professional article by a young academic, there is more jargon and academic affectation than necessary. Too many of his definitions (or those of his teachers) are not convincing. Still, eventually he gets around to this:

A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

If you have the time, read the whole thing and ponder it. There is much in there that is diametrically opposed to most people's pat assumptions (and pet one, too). It need not be read only in the context of American politics, and it fits much of the Left-Right discussion in many democracies, certainly including Israel.

Despicable Jewish Thugs

I am too busy for much blogging at the moment, but this story needs to be related to. It's about the turmoil near Yitzhar yesterday. In this particular case the violence was started by a Palestinian would-be murderer, but that doesn't change the fundamental structure of the story. There are a small number of well-known Jewish settlements on the West Bank - Yitzhar, Tapuach and the Jewish Quarter of Hebron spring to mind as the most obvious, but there are a few more, only slightly less malicious places - which are dominated by violent evil men, thugs of the worst degree. These thugs terrorize their Palestinian neighbors, and do so mostly unrestrained by the Israeli security forces who are in charge of those areas. The thugs are a blemish on our face and defilers of our honor, but the long-standing inability or unwillingness of our security forces to stop them is even worse, as they have the power to do so, but don't use it.

In future posts I'll go back to facing down our detractors for their indefensible depictions of us, but for today I'm setting aside whatever they may make of this story, and telling it as it is.

Thinking Democrats

Camille Paglia is what the Germans call a Querdenker - someone who thinks across the lines. I generally like Querdenkers for their intellectual honesty, even when the base from which they cross lines is all wrong in my judgment. Right now she has a piece up at Salon which amply demonstrates her Querdenker-ism: while she's a staunch Democrat, she's cheering for Sarah Palin for being a far better model of feminist than what the feminists have to offer. Here are some cute quotes:

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances...

The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end...

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit...

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances...

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

So far, so fun. She's an iconoclast, this lady. Then, at the end, she spoils the whole effect with this strange statement:

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech.

Huh? Democrats think, Republicans don't? That's the fundamental truth?

Mount Tabor

I'm slowly making my way through the Bible with the rather new modern Orthodox interpretation of Daat Mikrah, an interpretation put together over the past 30 years or so, and completed in the 1990s. I started sometime last year, and am currently reading Judges. The other day I sat on the porch of this cabin we rented, high on the shoulder of the front ridge of the Upper Galilee, with most of the Lower Galilee spread out below me, and read chapter 4 which describes the battle of Barak and Sisra, Barak's battle plan having been inspired by the prophetess Devorah.

In modern terms, Barak's army was a militia of infantry, while Sisra had 900 tanks, so Barak convened his men at the top of Mount Tabor, a steep hill, unaccessible to the tanks; once he went down to do battle he was assisted by a fierce rainstorm that turned the valley below into a sea of mud which immobilized the iron chariots. The Daat Mikra interpreter helpfully points out that precisely such a heavy rainstorm occurred at the same place and same time of year in 1953. Josephus wrote the same thing about a thousand years after the event, and two thousand years ago.

While I read I occasionally raised my eyes from the book and glanced at the vista below me; Mount Tabor was the 5th ridge to the south, standing out clearly because of its unusual outline: steep slopes on all sides, cut off from any neighboring ridge.

Such an experience is of course quite standard when you read the Bible in Jerusalem, but I was on vacation, getting away from it all. There is an endless supply of fools who talk about how this is all an artificial construct of cynical Zionists et.al, but at the end of the day, that's all they are: fools.

The Guardian Warns America

Jonathan Freedland (who can at times be rather reasonable by Guardian standards) warns America that if Obama isn't elected, the rest of the world will have had it, and will be fed up. And Mighty Peeved.

It's not clear what the actual implications will be, but apparently they're dire.

On the Passage of Time

Frankfurt airport. Three or four elderly Israeli women and one well-dressed elderly man reached the checkpoint (I think it was the fourth so far) by electric golf-cart: a service offered by the airport for elderly passengers who might have problems walking the distances. The driver of the golf cart was a courteous young woman who seemed heartened by the fact that these particular charges spoke German; and if it was German with a not fully recognizable accent, it made no difference. They were nice old people.

At the checkpoint she unloaded them and assisted them up to the barrier, where she handed them over to the young Israeli security person; this was a dark skinned young woman with whom the elderly man briefly flirted, in a grandfatherly way. “And from where in Czechoslovakia do you come?” she asked him, referring to a country that exists still in his memory but no-where else. Behind the young woman stood a uniformed young German policeman wearing body armor and a sub-machine gun. As the elderly folks passed through he smiled at them, and gave a ghost of a salute.

Do Holocaust survivors think through all the ironies of such moments? Probably not, I expect. This won’t have been their first trip through a German airport, and the novelty will probably have worn off. They seemed mostly interested in getting through the process so as to find a seat in the lounge beyond. But the ironies are there, even if no-one dwells upon them.

Postscript: Someday Israeli air passengers won’t have to be screened through four layers of security more than anyone else. When that happens you’ll know that peace may be a reality. No speech by any politician of any nationality at any venue will do the trick, unless it manages to carry off that one. Putative peace arrangements that leave the need for those special airport precautions are perhaps better than nothing, but they won’t be peace arrangements.

Only Two Americas?

Here's a link to an article that drives the cutting edge for silliness even at the Guardian.

The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over to the essential correctness of your views. But it is true that to small-town Republicans the world is not a complicated place, because they have seen so little of it.

Translation to English: it's not nice to be snotty about Republicans and their voters, but it's inevitable.

I'm not going to parse this piece, merely to link for future use.

Ghosts - and the World that Moved on

September 1st, 2008. The weather is beautiful here in Warsaw, probably the best we've seen in the 9 days since we arrived. It's the 69th anniversary of the German attack on Poland that began World War 2, or at least the European part of it. No sign of this on the streets of Warsaw, so far as I could see. Apparently Polish high-schoolers go to their first day of the new school year dressed in finery, or so it seemed on the tram and the main thoroughfares. I did briefly note a black-and-white film on Polish TV earlier, with a plane dropping bombs, so some people have noticed the date even if by now you have to be elderly in order to remember the original event itself.

In previous posts I've mentioned the Stalinist monstrosity that stands at the very center of Warsaw, straddling the line of the Warsaw ghetto at its south-eastern corner. Here's a picture of it, followed by some ruminations.

First, when it was built it wasn't intended to have all those glass-and-steel capitalist skyscrapers behind it. Nor was it supposed to have that red-and-white roofed structure in front of it, that contains a supermarket and dozens of small stalls that sell perfume, sports shoes and fired chicken. The parking lot in front of the supermarket also wasn't envisaged by the architect. Come to think of it, the advertisement placards hanging on the facade were not foreseen, either.

The Nazis who invaded 69 years ago today also foresaw none of this, although they were the ones who razed all the previous structures and created the large empty expanse Stalin then used. To their real credit, the Poles are busy overcoming their nightmares and are getting on with life.

If you focus on the street to the south of the monstrosity, there's also an interesting story. It's called Jerozolimskie Avenue, and you can't get any more central in Warsaw than that. But back in the 18th century it was a few miles to the south of the city. Jews had been banned from the city for about 250 years, but in the mid-1770s, just as the English colonists in Massachusetts were throwing teabags into the port of Boston, someone allowed Jews to settle in the fields to the south of town. A few years later he changed his mind and threw them out, but in the meantime their nickname for the road leading east from their settlement had stuck, and remains to this day Jerusalem Avenue.

You cannot tell the story of Poland without telling about its Jews. You can't even go to the central train station.

A few minutes walk to the north, not more than one block away from the Stalinist billboard for beer, the ghosts still reside.
On the left, a bland residential building. In the top right hand corner, a new high rise going up, with a crane above it. And wedged between them is a ghost from the past.
















Two buildings that somehow were still standing after the ghetto was destroyed, and are standing still, to this very day. Too fragile for anyone to live in, of course, so the windows are blocked. The ghosts, however, are still there, and haunt us from the dead windows and the bare brick walls.

The Permissible Price of Redeeming Hostages

I know, this post is a bit out of sync. The issue was discussed at length last month, and, for the few of you who follow such matters, the Daf Yomi is from last week. But that's how it is when I travel.

Mishna: It is forbidden to redeem hostages for too high a price, because of Tikkun Olam.
The Gemarah then asks how this ruling fixes the world. Is is that the price of redeeming hostages will be exorbitant, or that paying it will encourage more hostage taking? The story of Levy bar Darga is cited: he was a very wealthy man, who redeemed his kidnapped daughters for the walloping sum of thirteen thousand gold dinars. Abbaye, however, wonders if bar Darga's action would have been sanctioned by the rabbis - and if not, it doesn't teach us anything.

Gitin tractate 45a

The most significant thing about such discussions is the underlying assumption: morality is a matter of right or wrong, not of circumstances. The reason you discuss moral issues when you're not under pressure is to have thought-out answers ready for the times when you need them; when you need them you won't have the presence of mind to think things through.

This thread began here. It's also a continuation of the Tikkun Olam thread that began here.

On Not Knowing History

As I said, the travel this time wouldn't enable me to blog. Still, I've just found a few minutes and also something to comment on, so here goes.

In a few hours Obama will give his big speech in the big stadium. Since news people must produce news 24 hours a day, even when they have nothing to say, and patience is a characteristic that has been lost from the world, rather than wait a few hours and see if he pulls it off brilliantly or merely well, the web seems to be awash with pre-punditry: It'll be a disaster. No it'll be magical. No it'll be boring. No it'll be pure history in the making. Etc etc etc an nauseum.

Here's an unimportant item from the unimportant genre. What struck me about it was this:

Some Democrats insist the GOP approach will backfire. Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said the visuals of tens of thousands of people cheering for Obama can only help his campaign by evoking comparisons to former President Kennedy. "I think he's in that league," Markey said.

How many times does one need to remind people that while Kennedy may have been a fine orator, he was a mediocre president, with a fiasco (Bay of Pigs), a historical mistake (not responding to the erection of the Berlin Wall), one major success (Cuba missile crises), and lots of disappointments, such as not particularly supporting the Civil Rights movement, or allowing the war in Vietnam to escalate. At the time of his assassination, the polls were certainly not convinced he'd win a second term. Is this the big model of Obama's?

New School Year

I'm about to travel, and this time it's likely I'll not have regular Internet connections for almost three weeks, perhaps with an occasional interlude. Eventually I'll be back.

In the interval, many schoolchildren will return to school from summer break. (Not the Australian ones). So here's a short but true story I wrote many years ago, about an event that happened even earlier, back in the days when I was a brand new teacher. After this story took place, I continued to teach for the better part of a decade, proving thereby that when I eventually left it wasn't because they had beat me. They, meaning the rowdy Israeli high-schoolers I was confronting.
----------------------

So here’s a story.

Once upon a time, when I was a very new teacher, first year actually, I had three classes. One was a class of 12^th graders, highly intelligent, very arrogant, very tough to deal with and to control, and very proud of themselves for all this. The kind of class that I thrived on later on, when I knew my trade, but absolutely the wrong place for me to start. They tore me to pieces, spit me out, and had they been my only class that year it would have been the end of my teaching career. Then there was a class (or two?) of 9^th graders. They were little, and new to the school, and we got along alright, and I have no memories of them. And then there was a class of 11^th graders. They weren’t brilliant, but then nor were they particularly arrogant, either. They were unruly, as all Israeli high-schoolers have to be, but they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that maybe I had something to say if they’d allow me to say it, and we generally more or less got along. A chunk of each class went to discipline and riot control, but in most cases a larger chunk went into some sort of educational process. I learned a lot from them, and in the following year I went into my classes as a much more formidable challenge to the gangs.

Anyway, once day sort of near the end of that first year, perhaps in April, as I was leaving the teacher’s room and heading towards the classroom of the 11^th-graders, the principle (headmaster?) of the school walked by me and announced that he’d be joining me in a minute or two, to see how the class went. That much warning I had.

Sure enough, shortly thereafter he came into class, to the great consternation of the rowdies. I began teaching, presenting a thesis and working thru it with the goons – who were all on their extremely best behavior. They responded to questions, they presented thoughts, they discussed the matter…. And after about 15 minutes the material had been covered. So I bullshitted for another 10 minutes, tying our material into what we’d done the previous week, and the previous month, and back in their kindergarten; I suggested where this might take us in the coming weeks, months, and years, and how it might be relevant to them as they graduated, went thru the army, married, raised their own kids, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren…. By now I was pretty desperate, since there were still a good 10 minutes until the end of the period, and what could I possibly still talk about?

Eight or nine minutes before the end of the period the principle got up and left, mumbling as he passed me on his way out that he’d enjoyed the lesson. 3.24 seconds after he had closed the door behind him, a great shout went up from the bastards: “We saved you, didn’t we?!? Weren’t we great!!??.

What could I tell them? The truth? That they had basically screwed me, but that by a miracle things had turned out alright?

The principle, by the way, never visited me in class again, tho I taught there for another seven years afterwards.

Paul Berman: A Clear Headed Lefty

Due disclosure: I am fully aware that all political persuasions produce idiots and criminals; some of the worst ever were produced by the Right.

Having said that, however, let's discuss the fools from the Left for a moment. Throughout most of the 20th century there was a group, somewhere on the left of the Left, whom history calls the Useful Idiots. These were the deluded folks of the Left who lined up to promote Communism while Stalin was murdering tens of millions of his citizens in the 1920-1930; they proclaimed for Mao as late as the 1960s, when he was murdering millions of his people and doing his best to push China back into the middle ages; some of them still go around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts to till this very day, in spite of Che's main achievements being to murder large numbers of people. (It's also not clear who these contemporary idiots are useful to, given the dire condition of the Soviet Union these past two decades or so. But no matter).

The problem the Left has had in more recent decades, however, has been the infection of its mainstream. Loonies are loonies, but so long as the mainstream of the left camp was producing people such as FDR, Truman and LBJ, the loonies didn't really make much difference. Around 1968, however, as they decided to topple LBJ, author of The Great Society program, for not being good enough, something was clearly going wrong. (I'm mentioning only American figures for the sake of brevity. The phenomenon was probably even worse in Europe, and thus was not merely, or even mostly, the result of the war in Vietnam).

These days, and for some decades already, it's the mainstream that's behaving as the Useful Idiots used to; in the meantime, there have appeared new powers that actually can use their idiocy. Nowhere has this been more pronounced and stark than in the recent debacle in Georgia, where much of the Left lined up on the side of the reactionary, non-democratic, international-law-trampling Russians, merely because they're the ones facing the Americans.

The point of this brief and condensed history of the past 70 years has been to put a context on this article, by Paul Berman. Berman is one of the few voices on the Left who hasn't lost his moral compass, not even for a minute, this past decade. He's proof that when it retains its soul, the Left can and should be a power for improving the human condition.

Today, any time some large group of people behaves in a way that defies a logical calculation of potential gains and losses, the people in question are said to be reacting to "humiliation," or what used to be called "ressentiment." Humiliation, though, taken as a political experience, exists only where it has been ideologically constructed, and not otherwise. Germany, having been defeated in World War I, was afterwards said to be undergoing "humiliation"; and yet, after World War II, having been defeated ten times more cruelly, Germany was no longer said to be "humiliated." That was because the German political doctrines promoting a feeling of "humiliation" disappeared after World War II. It was the doctrines, not the experience of misfortune, that had created "humiliation."

PhD as Invective

There's been this spat going on all week at Y-net, between a bunch of rabbis. The details are really and truly not important. They deal with some arcane reason about why when a restaurant is kosher maybe it isn't, but perhaps it is. It's August over here in Jerusalem, it's hot, people's minds get addled, nothing serious.

The funny part of the story is that one of the rabbis wanted to belittle one of his predecessors in the discussion. The one being belittled is our rabbi, Rabbi Dr. Benny Lau. The fellow who wanted to belittle him pointedly refused to refer to him as Rabbi; instead, his article kept referring to the nonsense Dr. Lau is spewing. The effect this had was to change the focus of the discussion: everyone's forgotten the original issue about whether the resaurants are really kosher or not (and a good thing, too), and now they're in an uproar about how offensive it was not to call Mr Lau Rabbi, but merely Dr.

The fray has now been entered by a relative heavyweight, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo: he says that he mostly agrees with the positions of Rabbi Lau, but most of his article deals with the offensiveness of pretending Lau isn't a rabbi, merely an academic. Sherlo, by the way, is my age (we were teenagers together, rather some years ago), which means that he's got at least 20 years to go before he can become a really important rabbi. For that you need a good 50 years of study, at least.

The interesting thing is that not a single participant in the discussion has any problem with the underlying text, whereby the title Rabbi is clearly more important than Dr. They may even be right.

Benyamin Gibli, 1919-2008

Benyamin Gibli was one of the darker figures in the story of Israel's first decade, as two items in today's Haaretz briefly (well, hardly) explain. (One; two). It's probably inevitable for an army to have such figures, but they're not pleasant to have. Gibli, by playing a central role in the Lavon affair, contributed to the toppling of Ben Gurion himself, who in this, as in most things, was ahead of his time. True to character, Gibli apparently never felt he'd done anything wrong.

Arrogant and Uninteligent Journalists

Two years ago this week The Media Line staged an event for the enlightenment of the citizens of Jerusalem. They put together a panel of 8 journalists, two of them Israeli, one an Arab (the head of the local Al-Jazeera office), and the rest Americans and British: Steven Erlanger of the New York Times, and some fellows from the BBC, CNN and others. With the exception of the host there were no women on the panel, which caused an interesting diversion by some peeved feminists. The point of the exercise was to give us a better understanding of how the media operates at a time of war, and how the Israeli establishment doesn't help. The context being the rather widespread impression that while the recently waged war between Israel and Hezbullah had not been one of Israel's finest hours, the media didn't have much to be proud of, either. The Media Line folks wanted to see if they could fix that.

They mostly failed, of course. Jerusalemites aren't fools, generally speaking. What struck me the most was the degree to which most of what the journalists had to say was, quite simply, not intelligent. So the next morning I wrote some questions and sent them to the woman who had organized the event; she responded immediately, thanked me for my time and effort, and said she was forwarding my questions to all of the panelists - so I think it's a safe bet they all saw my mail. None of them ever responded, of course. As a general statement journalists don't feel any need for discussion with their public: their job is to tell us things, while our job is to imbibe and shut up.

So it occurs to me that in honor of the 2nd anniversary of the glum event, maybe I should post my so far unanswered questions, in the hope that perhaps, who knows... naa... it'll never happen...

Hi -

Your panel last night was quite interesting. I would appreciate hearing the response of some of the panelists to the following:

1. Access (1). A number of the speakers felt it to be very important, and they were disturbed that they weren't given it by the IDF. But isn't being with the grunts on the field of battle the worst place to be, if you want to understand a war? All the soldiers see are their immediate surroundings - and even that from a severly limited perspective. The most one can expect to learn from that vantage point is about the ambience of soldiers. And for that, one would need to know the soldiers' language.

2. Access (2): How can one ever achieve true access, if one doesn't speak the language? Yet none of your foriegn-press people seemed fazed in the slightest by the fact that they don't speak the language. Isn't this limitation in their abilities far more severe than any limitation the IDF can impose? (In which context it was fascinating to see that al-Jazeera, of all foriegn groups, has resolved this issue best. And also the only one that made absolutely no pretension of striving for a balanced story).

3. Balance: War is the second most extreme behavior in which a community can engage, because its essence is that one determines to kill people so as to achieve one's goals, while taking the chance of being killed oneself. Only mass murder and genocide are more extreme, because in them the community decides to kill people for their purposes, without the risk of getting killed themselves. Yet just as with genocide, it would never occur to us to seek a balanced description, so the glaringly obvious question not dealt with yesterday evening was, if one is engaged in describing a war, why would one strive for balance? Admitedly, there have been wars in human history where both sides were equally wrong, but the norm is that there is an agressor and a defender. Wouldn't the task of journalists in a democratic society better be defined as the search for the aggressor and the defender?

4. Steven Erlanger spoke at one point about a "legally proportionate war". When asked if there ever was one, he mentioned Kosovo and Chechnya, but what he meant were other cases where the journalists found disproportionality. The question remains, however: has there ever in the annals of war been one that was waged "proportionally"? I think not, but perhaps you will enlighten me.

5. Relevance: Danny Rubinstein spoke of the criteria for newsworthiness: that it be interesting and important. Steven Erlanger spoke of what interests him. I was struck by the fact that truth was not mentioned at all. Shoudn't that be the first criteria? Matter of fact, if one is seekng to understand events, it would seem to be the primary criteia. Do journalists think otherwise? And if they think otherwise, shouldn't they then change their narrative, and be honest about the fact that what they're telling us is not the truth, but rather what interests them?

And note, that all my questions are general, and not specific to the war we just had.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Dr. Yaacov Lozowick

The Idiocy of an Israel Hater

Diane Mason prides herself on knowing Hebrew, but I see very little indication she uses it. In this post she deduces from some quotation marks in a caption on the English side of Haaretz that... oh, I'm not even going to give her the respect of repeating her thesis. Suffice it to say that had she looked at the Hebrew version (and remember, Haaretz is a Hebrew newspaper, with some translators added on) she'd know that there were no such quotation marks, because that whole pernicious method isn't used in Hebrew.

But even if there were: she has taken decades of Israeli social history, contrasted it with one caption in a newspaper, and found her interpretation of the caption more convincing than the entire story of a society. I have no better description for her method and reasoning than idiocy.

The question remains, however: how is it that an educated young woman is willing to broadcast such idiocy?

More on Hebrew, the Language of the Bible, and MBAs

Ori Orbach, Israel's top orthodox satirist, writes about a new translation of the Bible that has just come out, into modern Hebrew. The quotes he brings are all awful, especially if you can read the original. One of the things that often get lost in translations of the Bible is the incredible power of its language. Orbach concedes that modern school children who've never read the Bible may not easily understand all of it, but suggests that rather than stooping to their level, they should be required to work at it until the problem disappears, leaving us all much richer.

(The link is to an article that appeared only in Hebrew. Heh).

This seems to have echoes of a broader discussion: the post-modern claim that there is nothing intrinsically more valuable in high language than in gutter slang. Whatever people speak is their language. You may subscribe to that theory, if you wish, but the price you'll pay will be the loss of high language. Come to think of it, once this idea permeates an educational system and relieves children from the "burden" of working at learning their language, everyone loses, in whatever language. Words such as these, and also these, were formulated by men who well understood the power of language at its best, and had worked hard to achieve it.

In a parallel development, the Technion has decided to attract foreign students by teaching its MBA program in English. This bothers me less than you might think. English really is a the primary language of business, so having the ability to conduct your business in it is no problem. So long as you have a fine control of your mother tongue first (most people only do MBAs many years after they've learned to read, write, and think).

The Impending End of the World

The most cock-eyed scenario yet to come from the Church of Global Warming says mankind is nearing extinction, no less. Even the Guardian feels that's a bit steep, so they allowed Heretic Number One to make a rebuttal. Bjorn Lomborg actually agrees that the world will end some day, and even from over heating, but suggests that since we still have a good 4 billion years to go, perhaps at this stage we'd do better to find cheaper sources of energy.

The German Norman Finkelstein

Her name is Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, and, while she isn't a published historian, her pedigree as child of Holocaust survivors is decidedly better than Finkelstein's: her father was Heinz Galinski, Germany's top Jew in the 1980s. Both Finkelstein and Hecht-Galinski put lie to the canard that Jews can't be antisemites. Apparently, Henryk Broder has decided to take her down, and we should all be rooting for him. (One of the myriad peculiarities of contemporary Germany is that only another Jew could afford to stand up to Hecht-Galinski the Jew).

Broder himself, another child of Holocaust survivors, is probably Germany's most formidable columnist and a fascinating person on his own right. He knows a thing or two about antisemitism, and in the 1980s he wrote a great book called Der Ewige Antisemit (The Eternal Antisemite), in which he devastatingly documented the extent to which already by then the Left had become a bastion of antisemitism, while pretending to hide behind mere criticism of Israel. It was quite an eye-opener, I remember.

Jordanian Antisemitism?

A group of Israeli tourists set off on a tour of Jordan but were blocked at the border because they insisted on bringing their tefillin.

Seen on it's own this doesn't prove antisemitism. It could be a rather bad case of idiocy and ineptitude, which are, after all, universal traits. Still, it's hard to think of any countries outside the Arab world where such a case would conceivable.

The Inexhausible Capacity to Spin Convincingly

I've been reading Seamus Milne, one of the Guardian's top columnists, for years, and in my opinion the man is barking mad. But he's intelligent, and articulate, and his columns often present cogently what many in his ideological corner cannot say as well, so he's worth following. Today he explains that the war in Georgia was caused by American aggression and imperialism, and that Russia is the victim. Russia, the victim of imperialism. You heard me. It even says so in the newspaper.

Fewer Ruminations

This is to announce that Ruminations is changing format. I'm going to be traveling much of the coming month and will not be able to do much posting; even once I'm back I expect to slow the pace of blogging. So far I've aimed at a daily post or more; from now on I'll post less though perhaps the posts themselves may be more substantive. I find the blogging has been taking up too much time on a daily basis, but I'd like to continue using it as a place to formulate thoughts.

Another use I may decide to make of the blog will be as a footmarker, with links to illuminatingly ridiculous items, but without much discussion of them. As I've mentioned already, I'm mulling the possibility of writing a book on how to recognize antisemites. This won't happen until my business is solid enough, but in the meantime, why not mark the evidence for the prosecution?

Tikkun Olam

Set aside the myriad layers of power ploys, hypocrisy, bad faith, obfuscations and general human orneriness and cussedness that confuse the issue. At its fundamental level, an important distinction between Progressives and Conservatives is that progressives think the world can be perfected and the aim of politics is to do so; conservatives don't think the world can be perfected, and prefer social resources to be applied in fixing smaller things. This is one reason why neo-cons aren't really conservatives, and it's probably a reason the Left hates them more: acrimony is often greater among neighbors (metaphoric or real) than among total strangers.

While Jews (and others) would like to believe that Judaism is squarely on their side of the discussion, it isn't, since the Jewish discussion was well underway a millenium or two before the modern discussion ever began.

The case of Tikkun Olam demonstrates this. In contemporary progressive thought, this term is regarded highly, and serves both as a formulation of the progressive ideal as well as proof that Jews are supposed to be on the right (=left) side of the contemporary discussion. The best and most obvious illustration of this being, of course, Michael Lerner's Tikkun Magazine.

Of course, if you go back to the sources, this isn't what they were about at all. An important source of the concept is in the Gitin tractate, which offers a series of rabbinic decisions made "for the sake of tikkun olam". Take the one from today's daf yomi. The subject is the power of a husband to retract a letter divorcing his wife (called a Get) once it has been sent. Strictly legally, in some circumstances this is possible, but the Old Raban Gamliel (there was more than one) decreed that this not be permissible, "for the sake of tikkun olam", meaning he used his authority to override the logic and consistency inherent in the legal system. The Gemarrah then asks how exactly this interference was supposed to fix the world, and gives two answers. If you go with rabbi Yochanan, who was of the opinion that the Get can be retracted in the presence of a mere two men, the danger is that the retraction won't be well known, the woman will think she's free of her husband and will remarry, and her children from the second marriage will be mamzerim (translated incorrectly as bastards, but in reality a far worse status). If however you follow the opinion of rav Sheshet, who thinks the husband needs a full court of three men to do the retracting, the decisions of a court are publicized, and in some cases the woman will think she's still married even if she isn't (the decision hinges upon circumstances), and she won't get on with life.

One way or the other, the Tikkun Olam is not a Healing of the World, it's a mechanism for preventing very specific, though painful, complications. None of which makes the latter uses of the term illegitimate; it merely demonstrates that the latter use may well have started as external ideas, which someone then went looking for in the already existing tradition.

Gittin 33a.

This thread began here.

Never Be Weak

That's the clearest message I can think of from the Russian attack on Georgia, no matter what the precise details of its onset may have been. If you're small and can't take care of yourself, no-one else will do it for you. They may wring their hands and bemoan your fate, and then again, they may not; neither will be of much use.

The second lesson is that the human story continues unabated. All this talk about international law, international organizations, international courts - they all have their uses, of course, and none of them are going to make history stop trundling along in its traditional ruts. Might often makes right, regrettable as that may be. And if the might is being wielded by the right (=wrong) side, even the most outspoken propagandists of the Internationalism Narrative will forget their principles in favor of their dislikes. (Translation: if the bully is acting against America's interests, let us see if we can't justify his being a bully. In the Leader of the Guardian, no less).

A Comment on AIDS

This really is a bit beyond the admittedly vague lines of Ruminations, but I couldn't resist. The Economist has a big article about a recent big international conference on a big problem: AIDS. It turns out that after more than two decades of pouring zillions of $ into research about this horrible affliction, humanity has figured out how to stop HIV from becoming AIDS, but still has no clue about the AIDS itself. Given the ever-rising cost of preventing millions of HIV bearers from tipping over into lethal AIDS, this is a big problem.

In the meantime, however, a number of preventive measures appear ever more useful. We all know about condoms, that's not new, but apparently there are two other measures that are quite effective. The first is monogamy (surprise!). And the second is circumcision. Heh.

Aggression, International Law, and Hypocrisy

A while back our in-house anti-Zionist, faux-Ibrahim, claimed that Israelis and their supporters determine their political positions by the single criteria of affinity to Israel: if the holders of a position support Israel, all their positions will be perceived to be correct; if a position is stated by people who otherwise don't like Israel, the position in question must be wrong. He even wrote a small algorithm to demonstrate how this works.

At first glance this is hardly more serious than most statements made by faux-Ibrahim, but it has stuck with me, and I've been thinking about it and it seems that he may be on to something, though as usual he's got the dynamic all wrong.

If you assume that Weltanschauungen are made of clusters of positions and beliefs - and that's certainly a reasonable, perhaps unassailable assumption - then it's not unreasonable that people who feel strongly about Israel, one way or the other, may carry this over into other fields, too. Why shouldn't unthinking animosity to Israel, impervious to any rational analysis, not express itself elsewhere, also, as unthinking animosities to other things? I mean, once you've got the habit, why limit it to a single subject? Indeed, once one has the propensity for wrongheadedness, why limit its application?

As I've shown from time to time, the world really does work this way, and the foolishness of idea expounders such as Juan Cole and the Guardian expresses itself in many areas. I must say, however, that the present outburst at the Guardian has caught me just a wee bit by surprise. I'm referring to that nasty little war that erupted this week in Georgia.

No matter which narrative you choose to follow, Georgia didn't attack Russia, and the entire drama is taking place within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia. You would think, therefore, that the reportage of the violence would make use of the usual, well-worn vocabulary of International Law, Naked Aggression, Brutal Killings of Innocent Bystanders, and so on and on. You've heard it all before, after all, ad nauseum.

Well, I've just spent some time at the Guardian's website. To their credit, at least they are in an uproar, unlike, say, when millions of Africans in the Congo get murdered. But so far as I could tell, not a single one of the relevant terms has been used, not even once. No-one at the Guardian has made any use of the vocabulary they so routinely use against Israel. At least this opinion piece, by a guest writer, has the essentials right. But look at James Poulus' piece:

Treating the Georgia we see on the map as if it were as sovereign and whole as the state of Israel, or Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, sets us down a path of danger and confusion. But the pro-democracy ideologues confusing big hearts for big brains make this mistake by design.

And then, if you're really into understanding the depravity of the Guardian as expressed by one of their top columnists, go read Jonathan Steele on the matter: It's America's fault.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is only a minor element in a much larger strategic equation: an attempt, sponsored largely by the United States but eagerly subscribed to by several of its new ex-Soviet allies, to reduce every aspect of Russian influence throughout the region, whether it be economic, political, diplomatic or military.

Hebrew and Memory

Isabel Kershner has a fun article in the NYT about Hebrew, ancient and modern. She wonders if perhaps modern Hebrew is developing so swiftly that sometime soon it will leave biblical Hebrew behind, and the two will no longer be the same language. Then again, she admits, the case for this may not be very strong; perhaps it's more a case of general Israeli angst (along, I'd add, a pervasive Jewish propensity to kvetch).

This fellow is a young Israeli linguist who teaches at a university in Brisbane (which is pretty far away). I met him at that conference in Melbourne, where he gave some excellent lectures which I enjoyed no end while fundamentally disagreeing. He thinks Modern Hebrew is so far from Ancient Hebrew that it should be called Israeli.

It seems to me that this is a cultural matter. If you live in Tel Aviv, are secular and know next to nothing about the vast Jewish literature created in Hebrew these past three millenia or so, but enjoy the vitality and exuberance of the local language, you can be forgiven for thinking it's new and going places. If on the other hand that literature is something you engage on a daily basis, it's hard to see how your present language is going to detach itself from the traditional one. English, I'm told, is evolving so rapidly that Shakespeare, who wrote a mere 500 years ago, is already falling out of contemporary English. But then again, what proportion of English speakers read Shakespeare on a daily basis?

Today is Tisha Be-Av, the 9th day of the month of Av, the main day of national mourning on the Jewish calender. At the services yesterday morning we read the first chapter of Isaiah, just as Jews have been doing Saturday morning before the 9th of Av for the past 2000 years:

16. wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds
out of my sight!
Stop doing wrong,

17 learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the fatherless,
plead the case of the widow.

Except that we read it in Hebrew, of course, and any school child can understand it. I have always found it striking that the basic Jewish texts are not heroic paeans but rather stern admonitions about all the things we're doing wrong. Yesterday evening and again this morning we read another section of the Bible, Lamentations, again in Hebrew anyone around here can understand effortlessly (probably better than the rather stilted English):

chapter 2, verse 17: The LORD has done what he planned;
he has fulfilled his word,
which he decreed long ago.
He has overthrown you without pity,
he has let the enemy gloat over you,
he has exalted the horn of your foes.

An interesting sentence. The author, traditionally Jeremiah himself, having recently survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, ruefully admits that this calamitous event was prophesied long before, in ancient times (yemei kedem) - from his perspective, after all, 568 BCE isn't ancient at all, it's the present. 2,600 years later, here we still are, reading his exact words, just as we've been doing ever since they were written, more or less:

chapter 5, 18: for Mount Zion, which lies desolate,
with jackals prowling over it.

Except that it isn't desolate, is it, and there aren't any jackals prowling over it. I know because it's less than two miles from here, and I was last there about a month ago.

It's days like this which underline how extraordinarily foolish some people can be when they rant about the foreign Jewish colonialists who barged in to someone else's land.

Lawrence of Cyberia: Malicious Cherry Picker

Some insights into the ugly mind of an Israel hater. Because of its length, I put it here.

Update: Faux-Ibrahim has demonstrated to me that when Ms. Mason seems to be reading Arabic, all she's really doing is using an automatic translation program. He seems to feel this weakens my case against her. I think rather the opposite.

Calling off the Actuaries

People who manage to live to 100 don't have much to worry about, as it's a well-documented fact that very few people die after 100.

The Rabbis of the Gemarah knew this joke almost 2000 years ago: There's this discussion going on about how to relate to a missive that has arrived from far away, sent by an old man (this was in pre-Blackberry days). One position is that so long as he was younger than 80, we assume he's still alive when the document arrives, but if he's beyond 80, we can't depend on it. Abaye, however, says that if he was 100, we assume he's still alive when the document arrives, since he has a proven track record of not dying. ("Keivan de'iflig, iflig: since he's already lived long, he'll continue to).

Gitin 25a.

This thread began here.

Strategic Change in Iraq

The week of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, I wrote some e-mails (didn't have a blog in those days) forecasting that it would take a decade before it would be clear if the invasion had succeeded or not. By success, I defined a mostly functioning democratic Iraq, somewhat resembling Bulgaria or Slovakia (Slovakia has gotten better since 2003). I admit I didn't foresee the ghastly violence of 2006; nor did I foresee the massive use of suicide bombers by Arabs on Arabs: I sort of thought that kind of insane brutality was reserved for Westerners and of course for Israelis. However, now that we're in the sixth year of that decade, you've got to admit that things are looking cautiously optimistic.

Well: "you've got to admit", if you're into weighing facts. If you're into ideologies ueber alles, you don't have to admit anything, and the Web is full of those sort.

Here are two interesting articles. The first appeared in the NYT on Sunday, and tells about how the Americans are learning from experience and getting ever better at their job; there are all sorts of Iraqis who are stepping up to the challenge, but there is an internal-Shiite dynamic which is beginning to muddy the waters, but this is a challenge, not a knell of doom. My favorite part of the article:

The goals of the surge against Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were political as well as military. The old strategy assumed that elections and the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis would take the steam out of the insurgency and help the United States to manage with fewer and fewer troops. Iraqi politics, it assumed, would enable the military strategy.

This was the result of the Weltanschauung whereby foreign intervention is imperialism is Always Very Bad.

Petraeus’s new approach turned that formula on its head. It postulated that a troop increase — and a strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians — would win over hesitant Iraqis, generate intelligence about the insurgents and give Iraqi leaders the confidence to turn away from their militias and private armies and work together. More than half of the American reinforcements were allocated to the regions surrounding Baghdad that Al Qaeda militants used to mount their car-bomb attacks, while the rest were distributed throughout the city. The theory was that once Al Qaeda was weakened, that would eliminate the rationale that Shiite militias like Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq were needed to protect the Shiite population. Breathing space would be created for political reconciliation. Military action would enable Iraqi politics.

Which proves, that foreign intervention (with bayonets) can sometimes be better than all the other alternatives.

The second article, by Biddle O'Hanlon and Pollack in Foreign Affairs, describes at great length how the American intervention goes about supporting the Iraqi attempts to build a reasonable state. It takes awhile to read, but if you feel you have a stake in the subject, and many of us do, it's worth the time.

The fundamental truth underlying the entire story, to my mind, is that the Americans have basic values that are good for people in general. Rule of law, human dignity, and also the willingness to think rationally and try to figure out better ways to do things when needed; the steel to shoulder the burden doesn't hurt, either. Since these are guiding principles for the Americans, sooner or later they'll bring results.

I'll stop here now and leave room for people to rant about the CIA, Oil Companies, Imperialism, Occupations, and all that stuff.