According to Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair, Time and Newsweek wish to be like The Economist - and Pressmen explains convincingly why they won't. Never ever, not even after Hell freezes over, if you ask me.
I've been reading The Economist, off and on, since my father started bringing it home in, oh I suppose it was 1969. It's by far the most intelligent weekly magazine anywhere, and trumps the dailies and monthlies, too. It is broadminded, arrogant, well informed, snotty, cynical and irreverent of power, preachy, a joy to read and aggravating no end. It's a newspaper that spent its first century reporting on the world from its capital, London; since the sun never set on its beat, it never tired of watching it all. Reading The Economist is the best way I've ever found of keeping abreast of the human story - not all of it, of course, but more than anywhere else.
Yet I'd add some points Pressman misses. The paper's economic ideology: It's fiercely free-market, of course. The Economist really believes that free markets are the best for people; its editors are constantly on the lookout for what will be advantageous for as many people as possible. Whether you agree or not, reading them is a fine antidote to the silliness of capitalism being a conspiracy of the rich to exploit the poor, or the powerful to keep down the weak.
They're rationalist to a fault. They always try to uncover the facts and relate to them. They're as ideological as anyone, but do their best to keep their ideology tied to reality - a trick few others manage.
They have no bylines. We know the name of the editor in chief; if someone dies on the job they'll tell us about her, but of course she's off the staff by then. So there are no egos involved. Can you imagine?
Finally, their style is simply wonderful. Years ago when I was just beginning to write for consumption in English (my first written language as an adult was Hebrew), I purchased their style guide. Their basic admonition to their writers was to pitch their writing as if they were talking to an intelligent audience. Talking, mind you. Which means do without the hi-falutin words when there are simple ones, don't shy away from colloquialisms when they work best, but never forget your audience is intelligent. With one fell swoop they absolved me of the style used by, oh, 89% of academics.
Their positions on Israel can sometimes be outrageous; in 2002 I canceled my subscription they were so unacceptable.
But eventually I went back.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Why Israel?
Yesterday evening I went to a book launch of Daniel Gordis' new book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End.The book is brand new, and as regular readers will know, I'm a wee bit behind on my reading, so I haven't read it yet. Danny's lecture, however, was interesting. He started by saying we should talk about why Israel needs to be here and what the Jews are supposed to do with it; then he said that most of the things we need to achieve don't need to wait for peace, so we really should stop waiting and do them. Apparently the book is his list of goals.
Had he intended this to be an internal Israeli discussion, he'd have written the book in Hebrew, and I'll bet he'd have written a different book. In writing in English, it seems to me, his real discussion is what Israel can and should be for the Jewish people. Though he didn't come out and say this last night, I got the impression he's addressing what he percieves as a widening gap between Israelis - who have zillions of fervently-held opinions about those questions - and American Jews, who are feeling estranged by us rambunctious cousins.
Which might mean the book isn't really about Israel at all, but rather about the Jews outside and how they look in, or don't look in, or should be looking in. Unless the book is very different from how its author presented it - the only way to know is to read it.
Had he intended this to be an internal Israeli discussion, he'd have written the book in Hebrew, and I'll bet he'd have written a different book. In writing in English, it seems to me, his real discussion is what Israel can and should be for the Jewish people. Though he didn't come out and say this last night, I got the impression he's addressing what he percieves as a widening gap between Israelis - who have zillions of fervently-held opinions about those questions - and American Jews, who are feeling estranged by us rambunctious cousins.
Which might mean the book isn't really about Israel at all, but rather about the Jews outside and how they look in, or don't look in, or should be looking in. Unless the book is very different from how its author presented it - the only way to know is to read it.
Post Mortem for Durban II
Claudia Rosett explains why the fiasco of the United Nations "Durban II" conference was inevitable given the way the UN understands the world:
The debacle this week was, above all, a natural product of the U.N. system. The real basis for fighting racism is neatly summed up in five words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." But in the U.N. calculus, it is not the equality of individual men or women that matters most. Instead, the U.N. tends to exalt the "equality" of sovereign states--as if there were no difference, say, between North and South Korea; Iran and the U.S.As an aside: The person who almost single-handedly convinced the Useful Idiots that Ahmedinijad never said Israel should be destroyed - my old friend Juan Cole - seems to have managed to get through this whole week with nary any mention of the event. A blogger's prerogative, of course, to talk about what one wishes and be silent on other matters.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Waging Just War: The Discussion Goes On
Amos Harel, who's a serious journalist who knows his stuff, listened carefully to the IDF officers reporting yesterday, and came away only partially convinced:
But it's an internal Israeli discussion. Back at the time I wrote about the computer systems that enabled the IDF to make those 165,000 phone calls. Outsiders from countries that aren't threatened by armed enemies and haven't had such discussions ought not butt in on this one; even the folks from countries at war might ask themselves if their countries wold go to such lengths, before damning us for not fully succeeding.
In which context you might want to read Ari Shavit's column from this morning. Shavit is a left-of-center columnist with a propensity for pompousness, but sometimes he's worth reading.
The five detailed Israel Defense Forces investigations into Operation Cast Lead reflect a meticulous focus on the trees, and a stubborn refusal to discuss the forest. The probes lasted three months, and were thorough and extensive, but they failed to give convincing answers to some substantive issues regarding the Gaza offensive.
For more than two hours, a group of senior officers presented the findings to the media. The IDF has many good responses for the accusations, some of which came from Hamas and the UN and were proven wrong. In other instances, mistakes caused civilian deaths, but even in the case of 21 family members killed due to faulty intelligence, it is commonly accepted that these kinds of mistakes occur during fighting in difficult environments...I can see his line of reasoning. Making 165,000 (!) phone calls may not be enough, if the recipients move to open areas which will later be bombed because they're open. Harel isn't some pacifist fool spouting nonsense, nor an antisemite out to castigate Israel no matter what. He's part of the internal Israeli discussion about means methods morality and results, and he's saying that the ultimate balance chosen wasn't good enough. Since there will be more wars, we need to get that balance right, as I never tire of saying.
True, measures were taken: millions of leaflets were dropped, and some 165,000 calls were made to Gaza homes, but this does not ensure that the civilians will run, or that they will be protected when they enter open terrain. The army stressed that it fired phosphorus munitions only in "open areas," but did not define this term. Conversations with artillery and infantry troops who participated in the operation suggest that the definitions were fairly loose, and that the required distance from civilian homes became shorter as fighting continued.
But it's an internal Israeli discussion. Back at the time I wrote about the computer systems that enabled the IDF to make those 165,000 phone calls. Outsiders from countries that aren't threatened by armed enemies and haven't had such discussions ought not butt in on this one; even the folks from countries at war might ask themselves if their countries wold go to such lengths, before damning us for not fully succeeding.
In which context you might want to read Ari Shavit's column from this morning. Shavit is a left-of-center columnist with a propensity for pompousness, but sometimes he's worth reading.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about the occupation. If it were about the occupation, it would have erupted in 1967 and not in 1920. If it were a conflict over the occupation, it would have ended in 2000 and not continued to this day. If it were about the occupation, it would be easy to terminate it by means of a full Israeli withdrawal and full Palestinian recognition of Israel after the withdrawal. However, withdrawal is not being implemented and recognition is not being given because the conflict is not about the occupation...
The best illustration of the Palestinian refusal was provided last year. In the summer of 2008, Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) an unprecedented peace proposal: Israel would retain only 6.5 percent of the West Bank (the settlement blocs) and in return the Palestinians would receive full territorial compensation in the Mount Hebron area, in the Beit She'an Valley and in the Judean Hills. Jerusalem would be divided on a demographic basis, with the holy basin to be entrusted to a special international regime. However, Abu Mazen did not accept Olmert's end-of-occupation offer. He rejected out of hand the principle of dividing the country into two nation-states.
Can There Be Any Benefits to Torture?
The New York Times nails the matter: It depends. If the torture of a few terrorists saves the lives of thousands of innocents (and you know they're terrorists when they divulge valuable information about terrorist activity), the case is stronger than if no actionable information is acquired. Scott Shane doesn't know if this is what happened, one way or the other, in spite of trying to find out; the public evidence is inconclusive.
The distinction is important, since it indicates that statements such as "torture is the end of democracy", being bandied about these days, are not necessarily true.
Israel calls this scenario "the ticking bomb", when you know you've got a terrorist who knows the whereabouts of a ticking bomb in a civilian area, or the identity of a suicide bomber who's already on his way. It doesn't refer to a band of terrorists with murder in their eyes but no bomb yet constructed, the assumption being that if you've got one of them, intelligent interrogation methods will extract his knowledge in time to thwart his colleagues' plans even without torture; with the ticking bomb, however, you may need to beat him up now in order to acquire the crucial information now. Which of course then begs the question when a gang of Islamists intent on destroying more tall buildings in the US become ticking bombs: when they're on their way to the airport? Earlier in the plan? When?
Since Israel has been facing these questions without respite for generations, it has had the time for the discussion now being had in the US; over time its answers have changed; there has been a steady distancing from the use of torture in favor of tricky tactics that are even more efficient. But then, if you follow that NYT article all the way to the final sentence, you'll see the advantage - if advantage it is - that Israel has over the US:
The process of learning is the hallmark of democracy, far more than the measures taken during the process are the demise of it.
The distinction is important, since it indicates that statements such as "torture is the end of democracy", being bandied about these days, are not necessarily true.
Israel calls this scenario "the ticking bomb", when you know you've got a terrorist who knows the whereabouts of a ticking bomb in a civilian area, or the identity of a suicide bomber who's already on his way. It doesn't refer to a band of terrorists with murder in their eyes but no bomb yet constructed, the assumption being that if you've got one of them, intelligent interrogation methods will extract his knowledge in time to thwart his colleagues' plans even without torture; with the ticking bomb, however, you may need to beat him up now in order to acquire the crucial information now. Which of course then begs the question when a gang of Islamists intent on destroying more tall buildings in the US become ticking bombs: when they're on their way to the airport? Earlier in the plan? When?
Since Israel has been facing these questions without respite for generations, it has had the time for the discussion now being had in the US; over time its answers have changed; there has been a steady distancing from the use of torture in favor of tricky tactics that are even more efficient. But then, if you follow that NYT article all the way to the final sentence, you'll see the advantage - if advantage it is - that Israel has over the US:
Mr. Obama paid his first visit to the agency this week, and his reference to the interrogation issue made for an awkward moment in which he sounded like a teacher gently correcting his pupils.
“Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”
Can Google Predict the Future?
The Economist is skeptical, but welcomes anyone who can tell us when this mess will be over.
Autism and Genius
The Economist in its science section tells about new research into the connection between autism and genius. One possible connection posited is that people with autism, as they don't know how to manage human relations, have more time and patience for what would appear to be routine actions such as watching a spinning coin or dripping water. Since apparently all it takes to achieve very unusual levels of performance are a mere 10,000 hours of learning, that's four and a half years of doing little else with ones' time, some people with autism may practice "their thing" enough to become geniuses at it.
Perhaps. And, to be fair, the article says more than that.
A few pages on, whether by design of coincidence, there's a review of a book about a painter of genius who certainly sounds as if he was autistic: Ian Fairweather.
Perhaps. And, to be fair, the article says more than that.
A few pages on, whether by design of coincidence, there's a review of a book about a painter of genius who certainly sounds as if he was autistic: Ian Fairweather.
Patrick White, an Australian writer who once visited him, drew on him for the painter in his novel “The Vivisector”, but in his dogged modesty and solitariness Fairweather more closely resembled White’s desert explorer in “Voss”. Whenever he saw anyone approach, he rushed into the bush and hid. “Hell for Fairweather was other people,” writes Mr Bail.
A perfectionist who painted at night by the light of a hurricane lamp, Fairweather destroyed much of his art. The 500 or so paintings and drawings that remain are intensely felt, unsettling and resonate with “a searching necessity”. The act of painting was the thing: “It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.” He didn’t much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of sometimes disowning it, or even not recognising it.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Findings From Gaza
The IDF today presented the findings from its investigations of the Gaza operation. I've looked for the reports themselves, but if they've been put online I can't find them - and it's not likely they'd have been put online in the first place, if you think about it. And if you don't, I'll come to it in a moment. Until then, however, bear in mind that none of the people who will be making utterances about this subject will have read the reports themselves (which are anyway in Hebrew). Like myself, they'll all be responding to other reports in the media. As an historian who is required to relate to documents not hearsay, I recognize the problem.
The investigations themselves seem to have been serious and unhurried. The allegation in the Guardian, say, that Israel wasn't even investigating, seems to have been disproved.
The findings themselves seem about as acceptable as such things can be. The investigators didn't find a single case where IDF troops consciously shot civilians with the intent to kill. So much for that allegation, published in Haaretz and quoted the world over. Which is important, because the entire case for war crimes is severely undermined if there was no intent. Of course, the myriads of hypocrites who care about the laws of war only if they can be used against Israel will be unmoved by the fact that there's no legal case to answer - the folks in Norway who are trying to indict Olmert, Livni, Barak and others, for example.
The findings didn't dispute that Palestinian civilians were killed by the hundreds - an unknowable number between 295 and 457, out of 1,157. In the single worst incident, 21 members of the al-Dahiyeh family in Zeitun were killed when their house was rocketed instead of the intended target nearby. That's what war is about, and if there was no intention to hit civilians, and measures were made not to hit them - successful in thousands of cases and unsuccessful in dozens - it's hard to see where the criminality lies.
The White Phosphorous allegations seem to have been refuted: what use was made of such ordinance was in accordance with international law, say the investigators, and on the 7th of January an order was sent to the units to desist completely from using such shells as the PR damage was felt to be greater than the value of using them.
So much for the facts. Now to the discussion about them.
Israeli Left-wing organizations who haven't read the reports any more than I have are loudly rejecting the findings. If they were serious they would at least have waited a day or to to give appearance they'd read the reports, assuming the army will grant such access, but their actions demonstrate they're not serious. Which is regrettable, because the army - like any organization in the democratic world - is more likely to be careful with what it says if knowledgeable skeptics will be reading its reports and responding to them. That's why democracy is ultimately such a fine system. If, sometime down the line, people with access to the findings begin to tell us what faults they've found in them, I'll be listening, and so will our media, which never misses an opportunity to bash the powers that be and especially the politicians (remember the aftermath of the war in Lebanon in 2006?). But that will be next week, or next month. Not 3 minutes after the findings are first cited.
Some of the critics, in Israel and of course everywhere else, reject the findings automatically because they're the findings of the IDF. Case closed. To which there are a number of responses. One, if the IDF is automatically regarded as lying, there isn't much to discuss, is there. That's an ideological position, not a rational statement. Second, if it's facts you're interested in, there isn't much choice but to listen to the IDF. The people doing the shooting, after all, were Israeli soldiers and Hamas; if it's the Israelis you're trying to convict, there isn't much choice but to ask them what they were doing, what they thought they were doing, what their orders where, what information they had, what conditions they were in when they acted, and myriads of additional very specific questions.
Which brings us to the matter of IDF investigators versus international ones. The assumption of international impartiality in matters of Israel is, of course, so vacuous as to be comic. Yet even if, against decades of experience, it were possible to appoint a commission of Martians to investigate the matter impartially, what sovereign country would allow foreigners free run of its military to carry out the investigation? In order to reach meaningful results, you'd have to know almost everything about the inner workings of the IDF - a condition no army would allow, and certainly not one still at war. The demand that Israel enable foreigners to investigate the minutiae of its army's combat behavior is a demand that it weaken itself dramatically; an Israeli politician who would allow such a thing would rightfully be drummed out of town.
Which brings me to the comparison with any other army. I don't claim to know everything, and am willing to be corrected - as you all know, I don't block comments. So far as I know, however, most armies never have investigations of the sort the IDF just had, in which each and every incident of a war is investigated; painstaking efforts are made to name every single person killed; and at the end of the process, the results are partially made public, while being fully open to parliamentary oversight which includes representatives of the opposition. I'll retract this statement if anyone shows me this is actually standard practice; until then: Israel is more meticulous in investigating its failures than any other army in the world.
The Guardian editorial said Israel has a case to answer? Here's the answer. Now let's see the Guardian admit it, or even acknowledge its existence.
The investigations themselves seem to have been serious and unhurried. The allegation in the Guardian, say, that Israel wasn't even investigating, seems to have been disproved.
The findings themselves seem about as acceptable as such things can be. The investigators didn't find a single case where IDF troops consciously shot civilians with the intent to kill. So much for that allegation, published in Haaretz and quoted the world over. Which is important, because the entire case for war crimes is severely undermined if there was no intent. Of course, the myriads of hypocrites who care about the laws of war only if they can be used against Israel will be unmoved by the fact that there's no legal case to answer - the folks in Norway who are trying to indict Olmert, Livni, Barak and others, for example.
The findings didn't dispute that Palestinian civilians were killed by the hundreds - an unknowable number between 295 and 457, out of 1,157. In the single worst incident, 21 members of the al-Dahiyeh family in Zeitun were killed when their house was rocketed instead of the intended target nearby. That's what war is about, and if there was no intention to hit civilians, and measures were made not to hit them - successful in thousands of cases and unsuccessful in dozens - it's hard to see where the criminality lies.
The White Phosphorous allegations seem to have been refuted: what use was made of such ordinance was in accordance with international law, say the investigators, and on the 7th of January an order was sent to the units to desist completely from using such shells as the PR damage was felt to be greater than the value of using them.
So much for the facts. Now to the discussion about them.
Israeli Left-wing organizations who haven't read the reports any more than I have are loudly rejecting the findings. If they were serious they would at least have waited a day or to to give appearance they'd read the reports, assuming the army will grant such access, but their actions demonstrate they're not serious. Which is regrettable, because the army - like any organization in the democratic world - is more likely to be careful with what it says if knowledgeable skeptics will be reading its reports and responding to them. That's why democracy is ultimately such a fine system. If, sometime down the line, people with access to the findings begin to tell us what faults they've found in them, I'll be listening, and so will our media, which never misses an opportunity to bash the powers that be and especially the politicians (remember the aftermath of the war in Lebanon in 2006?). But that will be next week, or next month. Not 3 minutes after the findings are first cited.
Some of the critics, in Israel and of course everywhere else, reject the findings automatically because they're the findings of the IDF. Case closed. To which there are a number of responses. One, if the IDF is automatically regarded as lying, there isn't much to discuss, is there. That's an ideological position, not a rational statement. Second, if it's facts you're interested in, there isn't much choice but to listen to the IDF. The people doing the shooting, after all, were Israeli soldiers and Hamas; if it's the Israelis you're trying to convict, there isn't much choice but to ask them what they were doing, what they thought they were doing, what their orders where, what information they had, what conditions they were in when they acted, and myriads of additional very specific questions.
Which brings us to the matter of IDF investigators versus international ones. The assumption of international impartiality in matters of Israel is, of course, so vacuous as to be comic. Yet even if, against decades of experience, it were possible to appoint a commission of Martians to investigate the matter impartially, what sovereign country would allow foreigners free run of its military to carry out the investigation? In order to reach meaningful results, you'd have to know almost everything about the inner workings of the IDF - a condition no army would allow, and certainly not one still at war. The demand that Israel enable foreigners to investigate the minutiae of its army's combat behavior is a demand that it weaken itself dramatically; an Israeli politician who would allow such a thing would rightfully be drummed out of town.
Which brings me to the comparison with any other army. I don't claim to know everything, and am willing to be corrected - as you all know, I don't block comments. So far as I know, however, most armies never have investigations of the sort the IDF just had, in which each and every incident of a war is investigated; painstaking efforts are made to name every single person killed; and at the end of the process, the results are partially made public, while being fully open to parliamentary oversight which includes representatives of the opposition. I'll retract this statement if anyone shows me this is actually standard practice; until then: Israel is more meticulous in investigating its failures than any other army in the world.
The Guardian editorial said Israel has a case to answer? Here's the answer. Now let's see the Guardian admit it, or even acknowledge its existence.
The Stuff of Communal Identity
Earlier today, as I was walking by the school for children with severe learning impediments that's around the corner, a child was chatting with the school guard. During the brief moment I was within earshot I picked up the stuttering child's story. "... he was the principle of an orphanage, and when they came they told him could go home now but he said No I want to die with them..."
Is there a Jew in Israel above the age of ten who wouldn't immediately recognize the story of Janusz Korczak? Is there one tenth of one percent of the college-educated adults in the rest of the world, Jews aside, who would recognize the story even if told in its entirety?
If you want to understand the communal identity of a society, talking to 12-year-old children with disabilities would probably be as good a place to start as any.
Is there a Jew in Israel above the age of ten who wouldn't immediately recognize the story of Janusz Korczak? Is there one tenth of one percent of the college-educated adults in the rest of the world, Jews aside, who would recognize the story even if told in its entirety?
If you want to understand the communal identity of a society, talking to 12-year-old children with disabilities would probably be as good a place to start as any.
Nazi Germany Without Hindsight
Barry Rubin has a new blog, The Rubin Report. May he be as popular as Juan Cole, without being as silly. At the moment, his top post contains four interesting letters written in the mid-1930s by a young German woman to a pen-pal in New Zealand (pen pals were a stone-age precursor to Facebook friends, for those who don't recognize the term). The letters have the advantage of lacking any hindsight, and of telling a story of how a young German woman saw the Hitler regime from the inside without realizing where they were going with it. This is the way 100% of human experience actually works. We never know with certainty what the results of our actions will be; then again, we bear full responsibility for them. Complicated.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Were the Americans Worse than the Nazis?
Andrew Sullivan seems to be saying that when it comes to torture, the Americans have been worse than the Nazis. This is so blatantly crap (I don't even apologize for the term) that I can't believe he's saying it. Perhaps he isn't, and I'm reading him wrong. But I don't think I am.
Notice how the Nazis ensured that doctors were present at all times so that they could monitor the captives' response to torture and make sure they didn't die or suffer visible permanent injuries that could embarrass the regime in public (see the Bradbury and Bybee memos for the Bush equivalent). Notice the careful measurement of how many times someone can be beaten (another Cheney innovation). And notice that we are not talking about waterboarding - something even the Nazis excluded from their "enhanced interrogation" methods.
Killing innocent demonstrators and bystanders
More than 400 unarmed demonstrators and even bystanders killed over ten years, and no police ever convicted for any of the deaths, not even on manslaughter charges.
In Britain.
Something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you about how Israel's court system is uniquely evil in protecting its security types from the wrath of the law. Though of course, the British coppers don't really face an enemy, so perhaps they need not be trained in restraint.
In Britain.
Something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you about how Israel's court system is uniquely evil in protecting its security types from the wrath of the law. Though of course, the British coppers don't really face an enemy, so perhaps they need not be trained in restraint.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Hitler, Durban, Holocaust
Jewish holidays begin at sunset and end at sunset. This evening will see the beginning of Holocaust Commemoration Day in Israel (and in some Jewish communities beyond), called Yom HaShoah in Hebrew. The New York Times has a chilling article about the Nazi killing fields in the Soviet Union. A brief reminder of the dimensions of that horror.
Once every 19 years or so Yom HaShoah falls on April 20th, Hitler's birthday. During the Nazi era this was a very important day, with parades and ceremonies. Someone I know who went to an AUstrian highschool in the 1970s once told me that every year on April 20th many of the students appeared at school in brown shirts. In the 1970s.
Of course, we've got the Durban II United Nations anti-racism conference starting today, too. So far it's being boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and New Zealand, because it's got nothing to do with anti racism, and everything to do with antisemitism and shielding Islam from free speech. Iran's president is scheduled to give a speech there today, and the representatives of the UK, France, Austria, and other upright democracies will be there to celebrate with him, as will the Arab folks who recently feted Sudan's Omar Bashir, the indicted mass murderer and genocidaire.
The AP has a roundup on the event, which is mostly reasonable except for this wierd paragraph:
Before you get agitated about the wrong things, however: the content of his hate speech isn't new. People have been saying things like this with regularity for millennia, and some of their listeners have acted upon it will regularity of their own, even if the attempt to kill all Jews was a Nazi novelty. If there's anything new about that sermon, it's that now there's a large international constituency, a broad deep and important one, that fervently tells us the sermon doesn't mean what it says, it's not serious, or if it is it could easily be defused if only the Jews took note and changed, and what have you. That, perhaps, may be new. And perhaps not.
Once every 19 years or so Yom HaShoah falls on April 20th, Hitler's birthday. During the Nazi era this was a very important day, with parades and ceremonies. Someone I know who went to an AUstrian highschool in the 1970s once told me that every year on April 20th many of the students appeared at school in brown shirts. In the 1970s.
Of course, we've got the Durban II United Nations anti-racism conference starting today, too. So far it's being boycotted by Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and New Zealand, because it's got nothing to do with anti racism, and everything to do with antisemitism and shielding Islam from free speech. Iran's president is scheduled to give a speech there today, and the representatives of the UK, France, Austria, and other upright democracies will be there to celebrate with him, as will the Arab folks who recently feted Sudan's Omar Bashir, the indicted mass murderer and genocidaire.
The AP has a roundup on the event, which is mostly reasonable except for this wierd paragraph:
Still, after years of preparations there appears little evidence to validate these fears. The statement of 2001 that is so contentious now was cheered in Israel at the time, as it recognized the Jewish state's right to security.Antisemitism has always flourished on lies, nothing new there. Anyway, the conflation of all these events on one day do rather serve to underline the state of the world. There have been worse moments of time, certainly, but the room for improvement keeps on getting bigger. Finally, the Palestinian contribution: a recent sermon by Ziad Abu Alhaj, broadcast on Hamas television on April 3rd, 2009. Here's some background. Notice that while the man doesn't like Israel, his hatred is directed at Jews, all of them always, his source is (his reading of) the Koran, and he's very clearly calling for world-wide genocide.
Before you get agitated about the wrong things, however: the content of his hate speech isn't new. People have been saying things like this with regularity for millennia, and some of their listeners have acted upon it will regularity of their own, even if the attempt to kill all Jews was a Nazi novelty. If there's anything new about that sermon, it's that now there's a large international constituency, a broad deep and important one, that fervently tells us the sermon doesn't mean what it says, it's not serious, or if it is it could easily be defused if only the Jews took note and changed, and what have you. That, perhaps, may be new. And perhaps not.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Jewish Demographics after the Shoah
There were about 18 million Jews worldwide in 1939, an all-time high. In 1945 there were 12 million. Sergio Della Pergolla, the top demographer for such matters, estimates however that because of the demographic structure of Eastern European Jewry, which was almost completely destroyed, the projected number of Jews had there been no Shoah would now be about 32 million. Instead, it's 13 million (if you're very optimistic: he's counting a lot of people, especially in the West, who are only notionally Jewish). So a loss of a third 65 years ago is now a loss of close to two thirds.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Breathless Report About... What, Exactly?
In Israel, the most important day of the week for newspapers is Friday. So yesterday (Friday) Haaretz had this headline, top of the front page, large letters:
1. Is this news?
2. Is it the full story?
3. Is it important?
First, is it news. Not really. American policy since the summer of 2000, or December that year at the very latest, has officially been something like this; unofficially it has been so for far longer. Israel needs to retreat from just about all the territories taken in 1967, those territories will be demilitarized, there will be an independent Palestinian state, and peace will reign forever after. There's a slight twist in Eldar's report in that someone thinks once this happens the Iranians will also join the swords-into-plowshares brigade, but he doesn't give a source for this so let's let it pass. Actually, this is more or less the position of most Israelis, too - assuming, of course, that moving out of those territories can bring all that bounty. It can't.
Which brings us to the second question, is it the full story? At this stage of the game I'm still giving the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, and that includes the assumption their experts are serious people, not bloggers or journalists. In which case they recognize some of the pieces Eldar left out of the picture. Right of Return, for example, meaning what happens to lots of ethnic Palestinians who are never going to move back to what is now Israel, no matter that their grandparents left here, and the fact this presents a wee stumbling block (in the Saudi plan, too). Or the fact that the elected majority of Palestinian lawmakers come from a party that wants a world without Jews, and so far that group is unable to reach an agreement with the other large Palestinian party. There's the small question of Jerusalem, the one about Israel's defining itself a Jewish state (with legal equality for minorities), the issue of how Syria defines peace, and various other nit-picking matters. I'm not saying peace is a theoretical impossibility - that would be depressing - but I haven't yet seen an indication the Obama administration knows how to create it any more than anyone else.
Is any of this important? No, not really. Even if it really and truly were soon to be the official Obama policy, and included suggestions also about all those other matters, reality has this nasty propensity of not reading newspapers (or blogs, or official memorandums, or diplomatic non-papers and all that stuff). Reality is extremely complex and ultimately unpredictable, it certainly isn't anything that can be neatly planned by some new folks at Foggy Bottom or even at the White House. As (Bill) Clinton once learned, the most powerful man in the world can glower at an unshaven old revolutionary with shifty eyes, and the unshaven fellow can pretend to be looking out the window and hum, and there's nothing the President of the United States of American can do about it. And even if he could, and the unshaven fellow had decided to humor him, it wouldn't make much difference if enough young men back at home were to feel they'd been sold down the river - which is why the unshaven one didn't cave in in the first place.
My point being that some day, I hope, the Israelis and the Arabs will be willing to live in peace, but it won't happen because someone declares it to be a fine idea or a rational thing to do.
Obama wants Israel to hold parallel talks with Palestinians and Syria(The Hebrew was more dramatic). As a general rule, Haaretz isn't too good at separating news from comment, but then who is these days? So this news item, put together by a group of their reporters, starts with a breathless report by Akiva Eldar, an old-timer who really knows his beat, but can't separate what he knows from what he preaches.
The Obama administration is preparing a Middle East peace process that will include simultaneous bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and Syria. The plan is based on the Arab peace initiative that offers establishing normal relations between Israel and Arab League states in exchange for withdrawing from the occupied territories and establishing a Palestinian state.The questions are
The United States will put together a "security package," including demilitarization of the territories from which Israel will withdraw and the option of stationing a multinational force in them for years.
The Obama administration believes that a breakthrough in the peace process between Israel and the Arab states would restrain Tehran's influence and contribute to the diplomatic effort to block Iran's nuclearization.
1. Is this news?
2. Is it the full story?
3. Is it important?
First, is it news. Not really. American policy since the summer of 2000, or December that year at the very latest, has officially been something like this; unofficially it has been so for far longer. Israel needs to retreat from just about all the territories taken in 1967, those territories will be demilitarized, there will be an independent Palestinian state, and peace will reign forever after. There's a slight twist in Eldar's report in that someone thinks once this happens the Iranians will also join the swords-into-plowshares brigade, but he doesn't give a source for this so let's let it pass. Actually, this is more or less the position of most Israelis, too - assuming, of course, that moving out of those territories can bring all that bounty. It can't.
Which brings us to the second question, is it the full story? At this stage of the game I'm still giving the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, and that includes the assumption their experts are serious people, not bloggers or journalists. In which case they recognize some of the pieces Eldar left out of the picture. Right of Return, for example, meaning what happens to lots of ethnic Palestinians who are never going to move back to what is now Israel, no matter that their grandparents left here, and the fact this presents a wee stumbling block (in the Saudi plan, too). Or the fact that the elected majority of Palestinian lawmakers come from a party that wants a world without Jews, and so far that group is unable to reach an agreement with the other large Palestinian party. There's the small question of Jerusalem, the one about Israel's defining itself a Jewish state (with legal equality for minorities), the issue of how Syria defines peace, and various other nit-picking matters. I'm not saying peace is a theoretical impossibility - that would be depressing - but I haven't yet seen an indication the Obama administration knows how to create it any more than anyone else.
Is any of this important? No, not really. Even if it really and truly were soon to be the official Obama policy, and included suggestions also about all those other matters, reality has this nasty propensity of not reading newspapers (or blogs, or official memorandums, or diplomatic non-papers and all that stuff). Reality is extremely complex and ultimately unpredictable, it certainly isn't anything that can be neatly planned by some new folks at Foggy Bottom or even at the White House. As (Bill) Clinton once learned, the most powerful man in the world can glower at an unshaven old revolutionary with shifty eyes, and the unshaven fellow can pretend to be looking out the window and hum, and there's nothing the President of the United States of American can do about it. And even if he could, and the unshaven fellow had decided to humor him, it wouldn't make much difference if enough young men back at home were to feel they'd been sold down the river - which is why the unshaven one didn't cave in in the first place.
My point being that some day, I hope, the Israelis and the Arabs will be willing to live in peace, but it won't happen because someone declares it to be a fine idea or a rational thing to do.
Everybody's Brother-in-Law
David Brooks, just back from a trip to Israel, describes Israelis in a reasonably accurate column:
Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Susan Boyle's Dream
I shall be shutting down soon for yet another installment of Pessach; after the holiday I expect to be very busy with a number of concurrent projects and probably will cut down blogging for a while (I know, I've said this in the past, too). So I'm leaving with a magnificent story, quite off topic, for which I got permission from the editorial board.
Last night we saw the 2006 German film Four Minutes (Vier Minuten). It's a powerful film about a deeply troubled young woman with a troubling story, a troubling old passive Nazi, and a troubled country. The young woman has the gift of magnificent music, though its true measure becomes clear only in the final four minutes of the film.
Still, it's a film. Fiction. Susan Boyle's story, which exploded onto the Internet this week, is true. A few elements must have been contrived, television being what it is, but the fundamentals can't have been. The woman was set up as a fool to be laughed at but didn't lose her dignity; once she blew us all away she didn't, either. So set aside 8 minutes and watch (the embedding has been disabled, so follow the link). And then watch again.
Last night we saw the 2006 German film Four Minutes (Vier Minuten). It's a powerful film about a deeply troubled young woman with a troubling story, a troubling old passive Nazi, and a troubled country. The young woman has the gift of magnificent music, though its true measure becomes clear only in the final four minutes of the film.
Still, it's a film. Fiction. Susan Boyle's story, which exploded onto the Internet this week, is true. A few elements must have been contrived, television being what it is, but the fundamentals can't have been. The woman was set up as a fool to be laughed at but didn't lose her dignity; once she blew us all away she didn't, either. So set aside 8 minutes and watch (the embedding has been disabled, so follow the link). And then watch again.
A Right War, Wrongly Waged
According to the NYT, an airstrike by NATO forces - that would mean Americans, since who else has air power - yesterday killed six Afghani civilians. NATO officials denied killing civilians, in the face of confirmation from the local governor - keep in mind that NATO and the local government are on the same side, or supposed to be.
The bottom of the item tells of an unrelated Taliban atrocity elsewhere. The Times wants us to remember who the Good Guys are, and which the Bad Ones.
They are right of course, but wrong. The Taliban are a blot on the face of humanity, and they and their ilk are the mortal enemies of any reasonable person, including many of their own people and just about all their own women. Yet being at war with monsters doesn't mean you needn't think about how you're waging it; the two are quite separate levels of morality and have been recognized as such for centuries. The distinction is being removed by Useful Idiots and pacifists who would condemn all wars, the just with the criminal, because of their inevitable human price; losing the will and ability to wage just wars means condemning far greater numbers of innocents to far worse. By blurring the discussion the NYT strengthens those who would appease, obstruct, apologize and look away.
It is a sign of the weakness of the American public discussion that we need Juan Cole to call our attention to an article on a Pakistani website tallying the figures from American air strikes in Pakistan (not Afghanistan), and they're not pretty: 14 dead al-Qaida to 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. 14 to 687.
I can think of a theoretical scenario in which killing 14 exceptionally potent mass murderers might justify killing 687 innocents, if by killing the 14 one were saving a million. Is that what the Americans are claiming? Then they should say so and the public should have the discussion. Personally I'd be skeptical: the Islamist murderers are part of a deeply sick culture, and I doubt any specific 14 of them are irreplaceable. So far as I can see, however, that's not what anyone is claiming; rather, no-one is having the discussion at all. I don't even know if the numbers are correct, but there again, you need an open, public discussion to reveal if someone is systematically disseminating bald lies about casualties (a not unheard of phenomenon).
Of course I'm holding this up as a demonstration of the fundamental hypocrisy with which Israel is consistently treated. Yet I'm also calling for a real discussion on the merits of the discussion itself, not only so as to level some rhetoric field. The war against the Islamists is the most important war of our day because of the dimensions of the threat; it's necessary and moral. It must be waged morally, too.
Finally, back to Israel: Israelis are often castigated by their detractors for claiming to be morally superior to anyone else in waging war. Some antisemites pretend this claim is the root of their hatred - an unconvincing pretense. Yet this is precisely what we mean. The Danny Zamirs of Israel are not the Juan Coles of America, and IDF spokesmen generally wait until their fellow officers really have investigated before denying false allegations - or trying to learn from authentic ones.
The bottom of the item tells of an unrelated Taliban atrocity elsewhere. The Times wants us to remember who the Good Guys are, and which the Bad Ones.
They are right of course, but wrong. The Taliban are a blot on the face of humanity, and they and their ilk are the mortal enemies of any reasonable person, including many of their own people and just about all their own women. Yet being at war with monsters doesn't mean you needn't think about how you're waging it; the two are quite separate levels of morality and have been recognized as such for centuries. The distinction is being removed by Useful Idiots and pacifists who would condemn all wars, the just with the criminal, because of their inevitable human price; losing the will and ability to wage just wars means condemning far greater numbers of innocents to far worse. By blurring the discussion the NYT strengthens those who would appease, obstruct, apologize and look away.
It is a sign of the weakness of the American public discussion that we need Juan Cole to call our attention to an article on a Pakistani website tallying the figures from American air strikes in Pakistan (not Afghanistan), and they're not pretty: 14 dead al-Qaida to 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. 14 to 687.
I can think of a theoretical scenario in which killing 14 exceptionally potent mass murderers might justify killing 687 innocents, if by killing the 14 one were saving a million. Is that what the Americans are claiming? Then they should say so and the public should have the discussion. Personally I'd be skeptical: the Islamist murderers are part of a deeply sick culture, and I doubt any specific 14 of them are irreplaceable. So far as I can see, however, that's not what anyone is claiming; rather, no-one is having the discussion at all. I don't even know if the numbers are correct, but there again, you need an open, public discussion to reveal if someone is systematically disseminating bald lies about casualties (a not unheard of phenomenon).
Of course I'm holding this up as a demonstration of the fundamental hypocrisy with which Israel is consistently treated. Yet I'm also calling for a real discussion on the merits of the discussion itself, not only so as to level some rhetoric field. The war against the Islamists is the most important war of our day because of the dimensions of the threat; it's necessary and moral. It must be waged morally, too.
Finally, back to Israel: Israelis are often castigated by their detractors for claiming to be morally superior to anyone else in waging war. Some antisemites pretend this claim is the root of their hatred - an unconvincing pretense. Yet this is precisely what we mean. The Danny Zamirs of Israel are not the Juan Coles of America, and IDF spokesmen generally wait until their fellow officers really have investigated before denying false allegations - or trying to learn from authentic ones.
Thought Processes of a Hamas Apologist
Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald, a popular Australian Guardian-lite newspaper, has an op-ed up at the New York Times. I have the impression that since the NYT bureau chief in Israel is the reasonable Ethan Bronner, the editors back in New York are trying to balance him with ever more foolish commentators.
I don't normally fisk people, but this one cries out for it, starting with his title, "Hamas Comes Out of Hiding", where it has busily been killing Palestinians and doing its best to kill Israelis.
Remember those two, Arafat and Sharon? They really really disliked each other, which is why they refused to make peace at Camp David that time in 2000 when (Bill) Clinton almost thought he might salvage his mediocre reputation and land a Nobel peace prize. Why do Israelis keep on electing folks for whom authentic Palestinian leaders have personal grudges, what with all the pressing complexities in that area?
I don't normally fisk people, but this one cries out for it, starting with his title, "Hamas Comes Out of Hiding", where it has busily been killing Palestinians and doing its best to kill Israelis.
JUST a year and a half ago, visiting Khalid Mishal, the supreme leader of Hamas, was a cloak-and-dagger affair. In September 2007, I climbed into the back of a curtained Mercedes to make the dash from central Damascus to the southern suburbs, where the Palestinian group operated from a high-security enclave reserved for senior officials of the Syrian government...
So Mishal doesn't only reside in Damascus, he lives in the top security area where the apparatchiks are protected from their people. Nice regime, the Syrian one.
As I was subjected to a thorough physical search, one of Mr. Mishal’s aides told me that there was a battery of antiaircraft guns buried deep in a nearby hillside. All my possessions were confiscated, and I gained access to Mr. Mishal’s grand reception room through an airport-style security scanner.
Actually, I rather doubt the antiaircraft batter is deep underground, where it wouldn't do much good, would it. But Mishal obviously lives in style, with his grand reception room.
Today the mood has become much lighter in the Hamas hideout. Mr. Mishal’s calendar is so full that he might soon need a parking lot for the vehicles bringing foreign delegations to visit. My most recent appointment with him, on March 18, was pushed far into the night because Mr. Mishal was busy greeting a group of Greek lawmakers, who were then followed by an Italian delegation. In the preceding days, visitors had come from the British and European Parliaments.Of course, none of those many European delegations is even remotely connected with any past present or future negotiations between Israel and Palestinians. They're not American officials, after all, or Egyptians. They're malicious fools, probably of the Left, who que up on pilgrimage to the top Jew-killer they can find, so as to express their adoration. So long as we're clear about they dynamics here.
In our discussion last month, Mr. Mishal spoke for the first time of the challenges confronting Hamas in the post-Bush era: Barack Obama’s presidential victory; Mr. Netanyahu’s return; the Gaza war; and Washington’s new drive for “dialogue” with Hamas’s regional sponsors — Syria and Iran.
Mr. Mishal rejected the notion that Hamas could get squeezed in any nascent power plays in the region. He interpreted Washington’s pitch to Syria and Iran as an admission of past errors, an acceptance that the United States had to deal with “parties that have proved themselves.”
Proved themselves as what, exactly? As brutal thugs eager to kill whoever's in their way, and to set up their own civilians to be killed when they manage to provoke Israel? Mr. McGeough, clearly enamored of Mishal, never does get around to mentioning any of this nor explaining.
“Hamas is not a card in anyone’s hand,” he insisted. But at the same time, he warned that Washington should not seek to “isolate certain parties at the expense of other parties."So now he's threatening America, unchallenged by his fawning interviewer.
Pressed on policy changes that Hamas might make as a gesture to any new order, Mr. Mishal argued that the organization has already shifted on several key points: “Hamas has already changed — we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections.”That's change, for sure: rather than sulk in the corner, Hamas is willing to participate in Palestinian elections. Whether they'll ever allow future elections to remove them from power is not a question this interviewer might ask. As for the matter of recognizing Israel, McGeough engages in some clumsy acrobatics:
On the crucial question of rewriting the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, he was unbending: “Not a chance.” Khalid Mishal is not Yasir Arafat — he is not looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. Among the Hamas articles of faith is a belief that in renouncing violence and in recognizing Israel’s right to exist in 1993, Mr. Arafat sinned against his people. (Nonetheless, others to whom he speaks have told me that Mr. Mishal has said that “when the time comes,” Hamas will make some of the moves demanded of it by the West.)Let's see: the charter calls for the death of all Jews. Removing Israel is merely a sub-set of that. Still, the interviewer couldn't say Mishal will agree to Israel's existence since Mishal told him the opposite and he want's to maintain his access to the man; so he admits Mishal told him Hamas would never recognize Israel, but then turns around and reassures us that other people told him the opposite, or at any rate, the told him Mishal has allowed them to have the impression that he might perhaps do something demanded by the West, so long as it doesn't impinge upon his fundamental antisemitism and determination to destroy Israel. Which of course raises the question why travel from Syndey all the way to Damascus, if you're going to believe unidentified people anyway. Those, you can invent in the comfort of your kitchen.
Curiously, amid rising calls from politicians and policy makers around the world for Hamas to be given a seat at the Middle East negotiating table, Mr. Mishal made clear that he was willing to bide his time. His message is, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
I suppose there's a connection between the beginning of the paragraph and its end, a full sentence later, but I can't see what it might be.
While it is impossible for many in the West to grasp the calculus in the Hamas strategy of war and terror, the movement has demonstrated that it is disciplined in holding its fire, as it did in the summer and fall of 2008. Likewise, it has proved itself capable of negotiating with Israel — albeit through third parties.
Yes, it's quite inscrutable, isn't it. Hamas can't possibly really mean they want a Judenrein world, yet they keep on saying they do, and insist on killing Jews - ah, but then, when it suits them they refrain... it's so complicated.
Over the long term, Hamas accepts the concept of two states in the Levant, which arguably puts Mr. Mishal’s terrorist movement closer to Washington than Netanyahu is — he now proposes only “economic peace” between Jews and Palestinians.Did you see that? While there's literally no evidence whatsoever for the idea Hamas accepts Israel's existence, and if there were rest assured McGeough would be trumpeting it, at the end of the day it's enough to say they have (long term, mind you), and then turn on Netanyahu as the greater evil, the one whose positions are more war-like and conflicting with American policies than those of Hamas. Hey, I met the man, in Damascus, right after those Italian folks; trust me on this one, otherwise I wouldn't be a journalist.
As for finding himself at center stage with the man who ordered him killed, Mr. Mishal insisted that in the broad scheme of things, Mr. Netanyahu is just one more in a succession of prime ministers. “It’s fate, God’s destiny, but we can’t set policy on the basis of personal grudges,” he told me.
True. Were Israel to elect Gideon Levy its prime minister, with Amira Hass as minister of defense, Mishal still wouldn't change his mind about the need for an end to Israel and the Jews. It's nothing personal.
Perhaps. But not since the personal bitterness between Mr. Arafat and the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have Palestinians and Israelis faced such a leadership dynamic. Once again, personal enmity could swamp the more pressing complexities of the Middle East crisis.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Iron Dome: Folly or Brilliance?
The Iron Dome anti-missile system being developed by Refael, an Israeli military-systems organization, is chugging along. It passed an important milestone last month, is expected to be finally tested sometime soon, and if it passes, full-scale production and deployment will begin. By next summer it may be operative, protecting Sderot and Ashkelon from Hamas rockets, and later on protecting the Galilee from Hezbullah's tender attentions. Add this to the Arrow long-range anti-missile system which is already operative and being upgraded all the time, and Israel is on its way to being protected from what-ever its neighbors will be able to throw at it except mortars and artillery. Mortars either have a very short range (about a mile) or they're large and cumbersome enough, as is all artillery, that drones can identify and destroy them; it's hard to set them up in a school-yard, shoot them off and disappear so quickly the UN personnel can pretend they were never there.
All of which means that each day that passes without rocket attacks brings us closer to the end of that chapter of our relations with our neighbors. They will of course find other ways to attack us, and we'll have to figure out an adequate response etc etc etc. The Palestinians and Hezbullah are very resourceful in such matters; it's in participating in the modern world that they're so dismally inept.
The Arrow anti-ballistic system is a fine thing. If we assume that sometime soon Iran will have nuclear weapons - a reasonable assumption, it seems to me - it will still be useful that they won't know if they have the ability to deliver through our defense systems, while they themselves have no such systems and our nuclear punch is harder. Who knows, maybe five or ten years from now we'll offer our defensive capabilities to the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Germans, heh.
The Iron Dome thing, however, isn't obviously such a fine thing. According to that article, each missile will cost $50,000m, or perhaps less in some scenarios - say, $49,800. A Kassam rocket probably costs $500, and a Katyusha, I'd guess, $2,500. Do the math and you'll see it will be worth the Palestinian's effort simply to get us to shoot Dome missiles in large numbers, for the financial burden. I'm also leery about a defensive strategy that relies completely on technology (I know about technology) rather than deterrence or, even better, the ability to disarm ones' enemies. (The option of making peace doesn't exist).
On the other hand, at the moment it's not obvious what the alternative is. I was in Sderot yesterday, and they've got these concrete mini-shelters strewn all over town; that's clearly not acceptable. Moreover, the law of unexpected consequences could kick in here, too. The Palestinian's most potent weapon agains Israel is the occupation, which is why most Israelis have long since decided to end it. Yet it can't be ended if every time we relinquish control over some territory it immediately becomes a launching pad for missiles against our civilians. Should the Iron Dome system put an end to that tactic, we could go back to the strategy most of us had already agreed upon, of dismantling most settlements and moving back to the barrier. The Palestinians, the Guardian, and Haaretz will continue to squawk that the occupation goes on, but most sensible people will disregard them, and Israel's position will be strengthened in many ways.
All of which means that each day that passes without rocket attacks brings us closer to the end of that chapter of our relations with our neighbors. They will of course find other ways to attack us, and we'll have to figure out an adequate response etc etc etc. The Palestinians and Hezbullah are very resourceful in such matters; it's in participating in the modern world that they're so dismally inept.
The Arrow anti-ballistic system is a fine thing. If we assume that sometime soon Iran will have nuclear weapons - a reasonable assumption, it seems to me - it will still be useful that they won't know if they have the ability to deliver through our defense systems, while they themselves have no such systems and our nuclear punch is harder. Who knows, maybe five or ten years from now we'll offer our defensive capabilities to the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Germans, heh.
The Iron Dome thing, however, isn't obviously such a fine thing. According to that article, each missile will cost $50,000m, or perhaps less in some scenarios - say, $49,800. A Kassam rocket probably costs $500, and a Katyusha, I'd guess, $2,500. Do the math and you'll see it will be worth the Palestinian's effort simply to get us to shoot Dome missiles in large numbers, for the financial burden. I'm also leery about a defensive strategy that relies completely on technology (I know about technology) rather than deterrence or, even better, the ability to disarm ones' enemies. (The option of making peace doesn't exist).
On the other hand, at the moment it's not obvious what the alternative is. I was in Sderot yesterday, and they've got these concrete mini-shelters strewn all over town; that's clearly not acceptable. Moreover, the law of unexpected consequences could kick in here, too. The Palestinian's most potent weapon agains Israel is the occupation, which is why most Israelis have long since decided to end it. Yet it can't be ended if every time we relinquish control over some territory it immediately becomes a launching pad for missiles against our civilians. Should the Iron Dome system put an end to that tactic, we could go back to the strategy most of us had already agreed upon, of dismantling most settlements and moving back to the barrier. The Palestinians, the Guardian, and Haaretz will continue to squawk that the occupation goes on, but most sensible people will disregard them, and Israel's position will be strengthened in many ways.
Learning to Wage War?
You've got to feel for these fellows, the Juan Coles and Glen Greenwalds of the world. Back in 2001, when the Islamists finally managed to catch the attention of the Americans after years of unsuccessful attempts, it just so happened there was a Republican in the White House. How much difference this made to thousands of professionals in the various security and legal branches of the American government I have no way of knowing, but since the Cole-Greenwald brigade disliked many of their actions, they attributed them to the Bad Man at the top. (As did Andrew Sullivan, after a while). Their delirious expectations of Obama were fired partly by his different rhetoric on such matters as waging wars, and interrogating and jailing Islamists.
Alas, it appears the professionals had reasons for doing what they did, irrespective of whether an election had been stolen in 2000; now that Obama is at the top, they're still doing them. So you have Cole who can't understand why American forces are killing civilians in Pakistan, and Greenwald is getting ever more strident about the incarceration issues.
Personally, I can empathize with both of them. Killing innocents is awful, though in some contexts it is inevitable; jailing people without due process seems wrong to me, no matter who's in the White House. Yet they're refusing to see the threat to which those professionals are responding. The enemies of the West these days play by different rules than the enemies of previous generations; while the fundamental rules shouldn't change, applying them is a constant, never-ending deliberation. Israelis have known this for decades, as we've been facing the same enemies for that long; the derision that has been meted out to us for trying to find the correct balance looks ever more hypocritical.
Actually, it seems to me the Americans have not yet found the correct balance - a point on which I may say more later; but at least they're trying. Lots of others aren't, probably secure in the knowledge the Americans are.
Alas, it appears the professionals had reasons for doing what they did, irrespective of whether an election had been stolen in 2000; now that Obama is at the top, they're still doing them. So you have Cole who can't understand why American forces are killing civilians in Pakistan, and Greenwald is getting ever more strident about the incarceration issues.
Personally, I can empathize with both of them. Killing innocents is awful, though in some contexts it is inevitable; jailing people without due process seems wrong to me, no matter who's in the White House. Yet they're refusing to see the threat to which those professionals are responding. The enemies of the West these days play by different rules than the enemies of previous generations; while the fundamental rules shouldn't change, applying them is a constant, never-ending deliberation. Israelis have known this for decades, as we've been facing the same enemies for that long; the derision that has been meted out to us for trying to find the correct balance looks ever more hypocritical.
Actually, it seems to me the Americans have not yet found the correct balance - a point on which I may say more later; but at least they're trying. Lots of others aren't, probably secure in the knowledge the Americans are.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Learning to Wage War
Haaretz has an interview with three Duvdevan soldiers recently awarded medals of bravery for... sparing civilians. It's quite a story.
The fundamental challenge is that Palestinian murderers and planners of mass murder aren't identified as soldiers, as international law requires, nor do they act from military installations. They act from within the civilian society all around them. Which means, either you kill them with some civilians near them, or you don't harm them for fear of doing so, or you figure out how to pinpoint them in their kitchen, say, and nab them while sparing the other family members in the same kitchen. This is the policy Israeli chose for the West Bank, though it's the hardest of the three. A special unit, Duvdevan, was set up to do just that. Since no other army in the world knows how to do this, there weren't any international manuals or training camps, so Duvdevan had to learn on its own, by trial and error; initially, back in the first Intifada, there were too many errors. But the determination to succeed (understandable, given the alternatives), combined with an ever-rising level of professionalism, has forged a unit unparalleled anywhere, that in most cases succeeds:
Interestingly, according to the article, the IDF doesn't generally want to kill these murderers, preferring to arrest them and interrogate them for further information, even though this means that sometime in the future they'll probably be freed, either as part of that bogus peace project we keep hoping will lead somewhere (I certainly do), or in return for a kidnapped IDF soldier at the rate of 1:1000. I was also tickled to see that an important impetus for developing the methods of Duvdevan came from that well-know IDF consultant, Amira Hass:
The fundamental challenge is that Palestinian murderers and planners of mass murder aren't identified as soldiers, as international law requires, nor do they act from military installations. They act from within the civilian society all around them. Which means, either you kill them with some civilians near them, or you don't harm them for fear of doing so, or you figure out how to pinpoint them in their kitchen, say, and nab them while sparing the other family members in the same kitchen. This is the policy Israeli chose for the West Bank, though it's the hardest of the three. A special unit, Duvdevan, was set up to do just that. Since no other army in the world knows how to do this, there weren't any international manuals or training camps, so Duvdevan had to learn on its own, by trial and error; initially, back in the first Intifada, there were too many errors. But the determination to succeed (understandable, given the alternatives), combined with an ever-rising level of professionalism, has forged a unit unparalleled anywhere, that in most cases succeeds:
A.: "There was an alley in the marketplace - all the stores were open and you hurry through the passageway, in order to maintain surprise and not to be 'burned' [identified] along the way. We broke into the house. He didn't understand where we had come from. Mabruk was sitting on the floor. He immediately jumped on his wife, using her as a shield."Sometimes the wanted men escape:
R.: "Half a meter away was an M-16 with a magazine of ammunition inside. Ostensibly we had full legitimization to shoot him, because he was endangering us. But his wife was near him and he wasn't holding the weapon in his hand, so we didn't fire. There was a room there of two to three square meters, with his wife and a lot of children inside. He's an older man, but nobody's fool. He only had to roll over to reach the weapon. All he had to do was turn around with the weapon on automatic and mow down three or four soldiers. A less experienced soldier, who has not been trained for this mission, would have opened fire and killed several children."
A.: "The guys remained calm. The weapon was on the floor. One of us took it from Mabruk. We attacked. He went wild, but we handcuffed him. In the end, the trick was to use selective firing. The fighters identified a woman and children and didn't shoot. It's a matter of a momentary decision. Now another complicated stage begins - leaving the refugee camp with him. It's already 10 A.M. Lots of people are outside. All the punks in the neighborhood had already heard that we came. He had collaborators and friends who would have fired on us as we were leaving. We got out of there very cautiously with the guy."
When they broke into the house, the man's wife was inside. "Although the house looked terrible afterward, the woman was not hurt," says A. "Her only injury was from being punched by the wanted man before he escaped. He apparently suspected her of informing on him."Inevitably, sometimes people get killed - Israeli soldiers, for example:
In another operation, in February 2008, the same fighters arrested Majdi Mabruk, the head of the Popular Front in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp in Nablus. Among other things, Mabruk managed to smuggle an explosive belt into Tel Aviv, to be used to launch an attack on Yom Kippur in 2007; the device was confiscated by security forces. During the manhunt, another terrorist, his partner, killed Paratroops commando fighter Ben Zion Henman. In another incident, while trying to arrest Mabruk, an officer from the Givati commando unit was shot in the neck.At the time, I wrote about Hanemann's death here.
Interestingly, according to the article, the IDF doesn't generally want to kill these murderers, preferring to arrest them and interrogate them for further information, even though this means that sometime in the future they'll probably be freed, either as part of that bogus peace project we keep hoping will lead somewhere (I certainly do), or in return for a kidnapped IDF soldier at the rate of 1:1000. I was also tickled to see that an important impetus for developing the methods of Duvdevan came from that well-know IDF consultant, Amira Hass:
About five years ago, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot was serving as the commander of the IDF forces in the West Bank. Eisenkot, now the head of Northern Command, then called the military approach in the West Bank "an M-16 instead of an F-16." The ability of the IDF to reach the operatives everywhere, to pull them out of their hiding places by the hair, he claimed, is a far greater deterrent to the terror organizations and the Palestinian population than mass shows of Israeli strength.
The West Bank commander based himself on a surprising source: articles by Amira Hass in Haaretz, in which senior Palestinian operatives said that they felt a certain "professional respect" for the enemy only when the soldiers engaged in face-to-face combat with them. The Palestinians considered the use of tanks and helicopters as a demonstration of cowardice on the part of an enemy that surpasses them in its military capability.
Friday, April 10, 2009
"This I (don't really) believe"
Judith Warner has a reflection up at her NYT blog, titled "This I believe", in which she describes her hodge-podge of varying religious or hardly-religious inspirations, which include some residual Jewish fragments.
The result isn't malign, you've got to grant that; in a human history chock-full of religions people were willing to kill for, that's no small achievement. Yet along the way, whatever it is she's describing, it's not something she'd be likely to lay down her life to preserve, either. Actually, the theme of her post is that she has no idea how to pass on a significant religious inheritance to her daughter.
The result isn't malign, you've got to grant that; in a human history chock-full of religions people were willing to kill for, that's no small achievement. Yet along the way, whatever it is she's describing, it's not something she'd be likely to lay down her life to preserve, either. Actually, the theme of her post is that she has no idea how to pass on a significant religious inheritance to her daughter.
About six months ago, I asked Julia and Emilie if they’d consider trying out a Unitarian service one day with me.“No way,” Emilie, then eight, declared, before I could even finish the sentence.
“I think that enough harm has been done in the name of religion,” said Julia, who had not long before studied the conquest of the Incas and had moved on to the colonization of Africa. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”
8-year-olds don't have original ideas, they reflect the adults around them (as do too many 18, 28, and 78-year-olds). Apparently none of the adults in Emilie's world have ever thought to explain to her that in the fundamentally flawed world we live in, religion, when done right, can be the richest source of human dignity, consolation, hope, and belonging she'll ever have. Sad.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
"The other end of these traditions"
Still making my way through Paula Fredriksen's fine book, Augustine and the Jews. A while ago Paula commented to me that my work is at "the other end of these traditions", and here's an example. On page 81, she's discussing how internal Jewish discussions became fodder for something far more sinister:
Though I'd note this describes a dynamic, but doesn't explain the decision to use it. The determination to hate the Jews precedes listening in to their conversations. The reason Haaretz' website is world-famous while the Irish Times' isn't, has to do with the fodder for Jew-hatred one can cherry-pick from Haaretz.
The evangelists, in short, present a fairly typical portrait of Jewish interactions both in Jesus' day and in their own. All the noise, all the argument over scripture, all the fraternal name calling, is one of the most unmistakably things about the Jesus movement and about its earliest literature. Within a first-century intra-Jewish context, such arguments would and did sound like conflicting ideas about the right way to be Jewish. That way would be the way urged by the writer of the text. The gospels, when we regard them as sectarian Jewish literature, deny any legitimacy to "Israel" or as "the people of God" or of "those from above" at odds with their authors' own self understanding...I think you can reasonably say that's a constant dynamic of Jew-hatred from the 2nd century until the Danny Zamir episode of last month, and it's not going to change anytime soon. Jews argue among themselves loudly and stridently, while their haters listen in, indifferent to any context, and choose the choicest quotations with which to damn the Jews.
Do the sectarian texts of these earliest Christians promote negative stereotypes about fellow Jews? Unquestionably. But that is what Jewish sectarian texts do, and that is what polemical rhetoric does. Further, all Jewish texts, beginning with Genesis, include warts-and-all presentations of some of their Jewish characters. In this sense, the gospels are no more intrinsically "anti-Jewish" than is the Bible itself. But again like the Bible itself, the gospels, once they drifted out of their communities of origin into a wider gentile world, were read as a standing indictment and perpetual condemnation of Jews and Judaism as such, rather than as a narrative exhortation to change from the wrong kind of Judaism to the right kind of Judaism (that is, to the author's kind of Judaism). Jewish sectarian rhetoric, shorn of its native context, eventually becomes anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Though I'd note this describes a dynamic, but doesn't explain the decision to use it. The determination to hate the Jews precedes listening in to their conversations. The reason Haaretz' website is world-famous while the Irish Times' isn't, has to do with the fodder for Jew-hatred one can cherry-pick from Haaretz.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Kosher CDOs
In a few hours it will be Pessach (Passover). We've been cleaning for weeks, hunting and destroying all vestiges of chametz (bread, yeast, etc), in the Jewish version of Spring Cleaning. Thank God that's behind us!
A thousand years ago or more, a sack of legumes in Europe was found to contain - horror of horrors! a few grains of wheat. Immediately, the local rabbis added legumes to the list of forbidden food for Pessach. The Sephardi rabbis, meanwhile, didn't loose their cool, and moved on to the next sack. Thus was born one of the more significant differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews: that the Ashkenazi ones eat very little over Pessach, while the Sephardi ones do without bread but mostly get on with life.
A thousand years later, the divide has broadened far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined. The Sephardi Jews (about half of the Israelis), are busy using modern food technology to invent yeast-less alternatives for just about every food product you can think of except whole wheat bread, to the extent that Pessach for them is no more bothersome than a mild itch.
The Ashkenazi folks, meanwhile, have taken the opposite track. Legumes, you see, have derivatives. Vegetable oil, for example. So any food with vegetable oil must be prohibited, obviously. Vegetable oil has its derivatives: sardines, for example, which are canned in it. OUT! CHAMETZ! Modern food processing being what it is, the danger of legume derivatives is, however, far worse even than that. Many types of cheese, for example, are processed in factories within sight of roads on which drivers may travel with sardine sandwiches in their glove compartments: HA! NO CHEESE!
I spoof you not. The art of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives which recently brought down the world economy could easily have been foreseen, had anyone given it any thought, by observing the sheer idiocy with which we Ashkenazi folks root out any shades of memories of that unfortunately poorly packed sack of Humus somewhere along the Upper Rhine in the year 867 Anno Domini.
Chag Sameach - Have a fine holiday. Easter, too.
A thousand years ago or more, a sack of legumes in Europe was found to contain - horror of horrors! a few grains of wheat. Immediately, the local rabbis added legumes to the list of forbidden food for Pessach. The Sephardi rabbis, meanwhile, didn't loose their cool, and moved on to the next sack. Thus was born one of the more significant differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews: that the Ashkenazi ones eat very little over Pessach, while the Sephardi ones do without bread but mostly get on with life.
A thousand years later, the divide has broadened far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined. The Sephardi Jews (about half of the Israelis), are busy using modern food technology to invent yeast-less alternatives for just about every food product you can think of except whole wheat bread, to the extent that Pessach for them is no more bothersome than a mild itch.
The Ashkenazi folks, meanwhile, have taken the opposite track. Legumes, you see, have derivatives. Vegetable oil, for example. So any food with vegetable oil must be prohibited, obviously. Vegetable oil has its derivatives: sardines, for example, which are canned in it. OUT! CHAMETZ! Modern food processing being what it is, the danger of legume derivatives is, however, far worse even than that. Many types of cheese, for example, are processed in factories within sight of roads on which drivers may travel with sardine sandwiches in their glove compartments: HA! NO CHEESE!
I spoof you not. The art of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives which recently brought down the world economy could easily have been foreseen, had anyone given it any thought, by observing the sheer idiocy with which we Ashkenazi folks root out any shades of memories of that unfortunately poorly packed sack of Humus somewhere along the Upper Rhine in the year 867 Anno Domini.
Chag Sameach - Have a fine holiday. Easter, too.
Is Europe Dying?
The Economist reviews a new book by Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age; A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. The central device of the book is the assumption that by knowing more about England in Shakespeare's day, we can better understand him.
Of course, with great writers it often goes the opposite way: their perception about their time is so clear it becomes prescience. The problem, of course, is figuring out in real time which of them has it right, and should be heeded, and which are merely bloviating; most of us resolve the matter by projecting prophetic significance on the artists who say what we think, while decrying the blindness or obtuseness of everybody who doesn't agree with us and our preferred artists.
So, in that spirit, you might want to go read Adam Kirsch, Life on Venus: Europe's Last Man, at World Affairs Journal. His article has a decidedly 2003-ish tone to it, with echoes of the Old-Europe-New-America argument: Europe is dying, America is vibrant. Yet it's an interesting read because while two of his exhibits were written in the 1990s, his central exhibit, Ian McEwan's Saturday, would probably be tagged as more American than European in the parameters of that argument. Kirsch's reading, however, is that McEwan is fundamentally European, and moreover, dying European, in the way he resolves the tension between the barbarians and the civilized with a poem, the beauty of which mesmerizes the barbarian. Bollocks, says Kirsch (well, not with that word).
Maybe it's not such a 2003-ish topic. Earlier this week I poked fun at the Guardian for deceiving itself about Obama's intentions for Afghanistan; since it was the Guardian-wing of America that propelled Obama forward in the initial Democratic primary race (though not all the way into the White House: they don't have that power), the issue may soon surface again; if Kirsch is right, it's the meta-narrative of our generation.
Of course, with great writers it often goes the opposite way: their perception about their time is so clear it becomes prescience. The problem, of course, is figuring out in real time which of them has it right, and should be heeded, and which are merely bloviating; most of us resolve the matter by projecting prophetic significance on the artists who say what we think, while decrying the blindness or obtuseness of everybody who doesn't agree with us and our preferred artists.
So, in that spirit, you might want to go read Adam Kirsch, Life on Venus: Europe's Last Man, at World Affairs Journal. His article has a decidedly 2003-ish tone to it, with echoes of the Old-Europe-New-America argument: Europe is dying, America is vibrant. Yet it's an interesting read because while two of his exhibits were written in the 1990s, his central exhibit, Ian McEwan's Saturday, would probably be tagged as more American than European in the parameters of that argument. Kirsch's reading, however, is that McEwan is fundamentally European, and moreover, dying European, in the way he resolves the tension between the barbarians and the civilized with a poem, the beauty of which mesmerizes the barbarian. Bollocks, says Kirsch (well, not with that word).
Maybe it's not such a 2003-ish topic. Earlier this week I poked fun at the Guardian for deceiving itself about Obama's intentions for Afghanistan; since it was the Guardian-wing of America that propelled Obama forward in the initial Democratic primary race (though not all the way into the White House: they don't have that power), the issue may soon surface again; if Kirsch is right, it's the meta-narrative of our generation.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Obama's Rabbi
Last week Gavin asked me how Jews define themselves. Since I didn't see how I could reasonably clarify that one with less than a small book, I put it aside to wait for a plausible hook to hang it on. Sure enough, one came along, in the surprising story of Michelle Obama's rabbi cousin. Not, as you might think, the story of a Jew who married into her clan, which wouldn't have been all that surprising. No. This is the story of a tradition started late in the 19th century of American blacks identifying with Judaism to the extent they proclaimed themselves Jews; the cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye, is part of an offshoot of the tradition which actually seems to be serious about their Judaism.
I admit I've never heard of the entire phenomenon. Just goes to show you how varied the Jewish world is, I suppose. Assuming they're Jews. Are they? And how do you know? More importantly, who decides?
One of the books I'm reading, Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews, tells about many non-Jews who attached themselves to Jewish communities in the pre-Christian period of the Roman Empire. Judaism was different in those days, but the book makes clear that the gentiles remained gentiles, even when supporting the Jewish communities with funds and participating in their communal activities.
And that was probably the last time Judaism was potentially appealing to large numbers of non-Jews for 18-19 centuries. In the interval, you were lucky if you got through a century with your community intact. There must have been movement on the edges, so there was a definition of being Jewish: anyone with a Jewish mother, or who had been converted halachically - which meant, by a rabbi.
In the second half of the 20th century this changed... twice, and in very different ways. It changed in the US, and it changed in Israel.
It changed in the US because, as touched upon in the previous post, for the first time ever it was possible to be an integral part of mainstream society and Jewish society simultaneously; yet Jewish society was taking on a plethora of new forms that would not have been recognizable as Jewish until recently. This meant a significant number of non-Jews were willing to consider joining the Jews, and intermarriage with non-jews while retaining Jewish identity meant the matriarchal definition appeared too narrow. The Jews lost their consensus on what they were, and then on who they were; today's American Jewry is characterized by a diversity and breadth of expression far greater than any previous Jewish community, including the fractured and disparate one of the final generations of the Second Temple Era. American Jews agree, in a general way, that they have a common history, the kingpin of which is the Holocaust; they sort of agree that being Jewish means having a communal or societal conscience, and they more or less sort of agree that Israel is important. The single most important space for Jewish expression is the liturgical area: American Jews tend to identify by belonging to a temple/synagogue/shul congregation.
Meanwhile, in Israel, it all works differently. Jews are the mainstream society. They speak the ancestral language, Hebrew, as their native tongue, and the national calender is Jewish. The state of war we live in is intrinsically tied up with being Jewish, too. Which means being Jewish in Israel is essentially automatic unless you're an Arab or Druze, and need have nothing to do with liturgy, belonging to a congregation, or any of the fundamental aspects of being Jewish in America; on the other hand, since it's the kind of thing you need the willingness to lay your life down for, it's far more serious than it is for many American Jews. The non-Jews in Israel, and halachically there are hundreds of thousands of them, mostly from the former Soviet Union, are in many ways more actively Jewish than most American Jews, even if they have absolutely no connection with a synagogue.
Which leaves the halachically minded orthodox with two separate battles to lose. In America they've lost the argument about conversion, and are retreating into their own enclaves. In Israel, they're losing the argument, too, though it's a very different argument, and their ability to retreat into enclaves is limited; on the other hand, the demographic dynamic means that within a few generations the problem (if it is one) will largely disappear: The Jews in Israel will be Jews, even if some of their forbears were Slavic non-Jews. I won't hazard a guess as to what will happen in America. Perhaps most American Jews will be African Americans who decided they were Jewish.
I admit I've never heard of the entire phenomenon. Just goes to show you how varied the Jewish world is, I suppose. Assuming they're Jews. Are they? And how do you know? More importantly, who decides?
One of the books I'm reading, Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews, tells about many non-Jews who attached themselves to Jewish communities in the pre-Christian period of the Roman Empire. Judaism was different in those days, but the book makes clear that the gentiles remained gentiles, even when supporting the Jewish communities with funds and participating in their communal activities.
And that was probably the last time Judaism was potentially appealing to large numbers of non-Jews for 18-19 centuries. In the interval, you were lucky if you got through a century with your community intact. There must have been movement on the edges, so there was a definition of being Jewish: anyone with a Jewish mother, or who had been converted halachically - which meant, by a rabbi.
In the second half of the 20th century this changed... twice, and in very different ways. It changed in the US, and it changed in Israel.
It changed in the US because, as touched upon in the previous post, for the first time ever it was possible to be an integral part of mainstream society and Jewish society simultaneously; yet Jewish society was taking on a plethora of new forms that would not have been recognizable as Jewish until recently. This meant a significant number of non-Jews were willing to consider joining the Jews, and intermarriage with non-jews while retaining Jewish identity meant the matriarchal definition appeared too narrow. The Jews lost their consensus on what they were, and then on who they were; today's American Jewry is characterized by a diversity and breadth of expression far greater than any previous Jewish community, including the fractured and disparate one of the final generations of the Second Temple Era. American Jews agree, in a general way, that they have a common history, the kingpin of which is the Holocaust; they sort of agree that being Jewish means having a communal or societal conscience, and they more or less sort of agree that Israel is important. The single most important space for Jewish expression is the liturgical area: American Jews tend to identify by belonging to a temple/synagogue/shul congregation.
Meanwhile, in Israel, it all works differently. Jews are the mainstream society. They speak the ancestral language, Hebrew, as their native tongue, and the national calender is Jewish. The state of war we live in is intrinsically tied up with being Jewish, too. Which means being Jewish in Israel is essentially automatic unless you're an Arab or Druze, and need have nothing to do with liturgy, belonging to a congregation, or any of the fundamental aspects of being Jewish in America; on the other hand, since it's the kind of thing you need the willingness to lay your life down for, it's far more serious than it is for many American Jews. The non-Jews in Israel, and halachically there are hundreds of thousands of them, mostly from the former Soviet Union, are in many ways more actively Jewish than most American Jews, even if they have absolutely no connection with a synagogue.
Which leaves the halachically minded orthodox with two separate battles to lose. In America they've lost the argument about conversion, and are retreating into their own enclaves. In Israel, they're losing the argument, too, though it's a very different argument, and their ability to retreat into enclaves is limited; on the other hand, the demographic dynamic means that within a few generations the problem (if it is one) will largely disappear: The Jews in Israel will be Jews, even if some of their forbears were Slavic non-Jews. I won't hazard a guess as to what will happen in America. Perhaps most American Jews will be African Americans who decided they were Jewish.
50 Influential Rabbis
Newsweek has published its annual list of the 50 most influential American rabbis (and Jeffrey Goldberg nitpicks it here). I can't nitpick it, but I can make some comments, snide or otherwise.
1. What an American idea! You've got Fortune lists of rich folks, halls of fame of the best baseball players, so why not have a list of top rabbis?
2. Only in America, of all diasporas Jews have ever lived in, have they been so at home and part of the surrounding society that it's even vaguely conceivable that a top general publication would think to include them in its remit to such an extent. And even that, only since the 1960s. Where else? Australia, perhaps? Canada? Surely nowhere else, and never before. If you wish, we can argue about this, but don't expect to convince me.
3. As Israelis go, I'm rather well informed about America in general and its Jews, too. At a stretch, I've heard of ten of these 50. I have the ability to string together two sentences about, at most, four. In a Jewish world with two centers, American and Israeli Jews are slowly but inexorably drifting apart; the rest are slowly orbiting around the one or the other.
4. Tho, now that I think of it, I bet 75% of America's Jews don't recognize ten of these 5o, either.
5. The list was put together
6. The criteria used were
1. Has he made a lasting contribution to the Jewish discussion that has been going on for millennia? (A sub-set of this would be, is he an important Posek, articulator of Halacha)
2. Is he important to his community (but often this, too, is a subset of the previous one).
We're talking about rabbis, after all. Arguably, David Ben Gurion was the most important Jew of the 20th century, which demonstrates that Jews can be important to the Jewish world, at least the modern Jewish world, without being a rabbi. But that would be a different list.
PS. Don't jump down my throat for using the masculine. I actually expect women to get there, by and by, but that's a different subject.
1. What an American idea! You've got Fortune lists of rich folks, halls of fame of the best baseball players, so why not have a list of top rabbis?
2. Only in America, of all diasporas Jews have ever lived in, have they been so at home and part of the surrounding society that it's even vaguely conceivable that a top general publication would think to include them in its remit to such an extent. And even that, only since the 1960s. Where else? Australia, perhaps? Canada? Surely nowhere else, and never before. If you wish, we can argue about this, but don't expect to convince me.
3. As Israelis go, I'm rather well informed about America in general and its Jews, too. At a stretch, I've heard of ten of these 50. I have the ability to string together two sentences about, at most, four. In a Jewish world with two centers, American and Israeli Jews are slowly but inexorably drifting apart; the rest are slowly orbiting around the one or the other.
4. Tho, now that I think of it, I bet 75% of America's Jews don't recognize ten of these 5o, either.
5. The list was put together
by Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman & CEO Michael Lynton, News Corporation Executive Vice President Gary Ginsberg and JTN Productions CEO Jay SandersonHuh?
6. The criteria used were
- Are they known nationally/internationally?
- Do they have political/social influence?
- Do they have a media presence?
- Are they leaders within their communities?
- Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements?
- Size of their constituency
- Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career?
- Have they made a "greater" impact?
1. Has he made a lasting contribution to the Jewish discussion that has been going on for millennia? (A sub-set of this would be, is he an important Posek, articulator of Halacha)
2. Is he important to his community (but often this, too, is a subset of the previous one).
We're talking about rabbis, after all. Arguably, David Ben Gurion was the most important Jew of the 20th century, which demonstrates that Jews can be important to the Jewish world, at least the modern Jewish world, without being a rabbi. But that would be a different list.
PS. Don't jump down my throat for using the masculine. I actually expect women to get there, by and by, but that's a different subject.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Talk to Hamas
Shlomo Avineri gets it right:
According to Hamas, the Jews are responsible for all the ills of modern society - the French Revolution; the Communist revolution; the establishment of secret associations (Freemasons, Rotary and Lions clubs, B'nai B'rith) designed to help them gain control of the world by secret means. They control the economy, press and television; they are responsible for the outbreak of World War I, which they initiated in order to destroy the Muslim caliphates (the Ottoman empire), to get the Balfour Declaration and set up the League of Nations with the aim of establishing their state. They also initiated World War II in order to make a fortune from selling war materials; they use both capitalism and communism as their agents...
But perhaps it is nevertheless worthwhile talking to Hamas - not about its contribution to peace but rather about what is stated in its covenant. Perhaps those who espouse the view that we must talk with Hamas will first talk with it about these subjects? Who knows, perhaps it will change its principles? I do not expect this to happen exactly, but I am certainly curious to know what those who think Hamas is the key to peace in the Middle East will say about these things.
And perhaps they are actually correct, perhaps Hamas is the key. If that's the case, it's difficult to expect that peace can be established in our region.
Genocide with Yoghurt
Here's a book review that shows how history has the ability to reach out of the past and rattle us, no matter how much we pretend to be forward-looking.
Last month, while I was visiting my father in Florida, we had dinner one night with my aunt. We were discussing the way Jim Jones had poisoned 900 of his followers with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in 1978, and suddenly my aunt was explaining that another way to poison someone is with a yogurt smoothie. "That's how the Turks poisoned your grandmother's classmates in Constantinople in 1915," she said. "They poisoned the tahn."
This story was new to me, and I am 47. But as a second-generation Armenian American, I've found that it's not uncommon for one of these UFO horror stories to materialize out of nowhere over coffee.
Thus begins Chris Bohjalian's review of Armenian Golgotha, by Grigory Balakian. It hardly sounds like a pleasant read, but well may be a necessary one, especially if you're of the persuasion that knowing history and engaging with it is preferable to having it spring on you unawares.
Hitler, by the way, knew his history. He repeatedly told that what he learned from the Armenian genocide was that no-one cared at the time, and no-one remebered afterwards.
Using International Law in Vain
A law professor named George Bisharat yesterday published a pseudo-learned op-ed about how criminal Israel is. Since his terminology was legalese, and I'm not a legal expert, I decided not to comment on his screed. Fortunately, the folks over at Powerline are all attorneys, and John Hinderaker decided to have a look. His verdict:
There was once a time when it would have made sense to wonder why the New York Times would publish such drivel. Now, publishing left-wing drivel is the paper's business plan. Bankruptcy impends.
Racism, Apartheid, T-Shirts and General Confusion
Remember those horrendous IDF T-Shirts? And it's common knowledge that Israel treats its Arab citizens abominably. So here's a story from Haaretz this morning that demonstrates it all. An Arab professor at Haifa University was thrown out of a restaurant when he complained that a bartender was wearing a shirt encouraging the killing of Palestinian children. Ha! Gotcha.
Though if Israeli Jim Crow is that bad, how is he a professor at Haifa University? No matter.
Until you read beyond the headline, where all the damage is, into the article itself. The proprietor of the restaurant is himself an Arab, and he was the one arguing with the client. He insists he threw no-one out, rather the professor stalked out. The (Arab) restaurateur may have said to the (Arab) professor "IF you're a Palestinian, go to Palestine", implying that he, the (Arab) restaurateur prefers to remain an Israeli. And then there's this:
I'm speculating, of course. But that's the issue. Something happened at Hajaj's restaurant over the weekend, but what it was we don't know. Haaretz has cherry-picked enough of the facts to make Israel look bad, put them in its headline, added a partial description in the item itself, and demonstrated that it cares not at all about its level of journalism.
Though if Israeli Jim Crow is that bad, how is he a professor at Haifa University? No matter.
Until you read beyond the headline, where all the damage is, into the article itself. The proprietor of the restaurant is himself an Arab, and he was the one arguing with the client. He insists he threw no-one out, rather the professor stalked out. The (Arab) restaurateur may have said to the (Arab) professor "IF you're a Palestinian, go to Palestine", implying that he, the (Arab) restaurateur prefers to remain an Israeli. And then there's this:
Hajaj said the bartender had never served in the army and was unaware of the message his shirt conveyed. As a result of the incident, the bartender is no longer working at the restaurant.Now I'm really confused. If the bartender never served in the IDF, where did he get the T shirt? If he can't read its message, who is he? A Phillipino, perhaps? And if he's blameless, why has he been fired? Could it be that Hajaj, the restaurateur, didn't want the attention of the authorities to his practice of employing illegal residents?
I'm speculating, of course. But that's the issue. Something happened at Hajaj's restaurant over the weekend, but what it was we don't know. Haaretz has cherry-picked enough of the facts to make Israel look bad, put them in its headline, added a partial description in the item itself, and demonstrated that it cares not at all about its level of journalism.
Boycott Israel... At Any Price!
Even if it means not diagnosing skin cancer. After all, Israel itself is a cancer of sorts, and must be broken. Anyway, this particular discovery is not yet a certainty, so let's hurry up and divest from research projects with Israeli academics. That way the project will fail, and we'll never know if any good might have come from it, so won't need to have any pangs of regrets for our righteousness.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Iranians and Fools
Jefferey Goldberg has helpfully posted 19 (nineteen) quotes from Iran's president Ahmedinejad in less than four years in which he talks about Israel disappearing. His reason for doing so is that his fellow Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan is casting doubt.
Andrew has made an interesting personal journey over the past few years, from an unusual and interesting conservative blogger to boring and predictable left-wing one. Which is fine: many people don't have the intellectual courage to re-examine their fundamental positions anytime after age 22. I personally stopped reading Andrew's blog quite a while ago. Anyone who regards Juan Cole as an authoritative source for information can't be very serious himself. (On which topic, I recommend the comment left here by someone who took the time to listen to some Cole lectures. If Sullivan can't see the dynamic, it's only because he chooses not to). A. Jay Adler, however, has some more informed comments about Andrew, and the sad direction he is now conforming to. He tells that after Goldberg did his research and posted his findings, Andrew read them and pronounced that
Andrew has made an interesting personal journey over the past few years, from an unusual and interesting conservative blogger to boring and predictable left-wing one. Which is fine: many people don't have the intellectual courage to re-examine their fundamental positions anytime after age 22. I personally stopped reading Andrew's blog quite a while ago. Anyone who regards Juan Cole as an authoritative source for information can't be very serious himself. (On which topic, I recommend the comment left here by someone who took the time to listen to some Cole lectures. If Sullivan can't see the dynamic, it's only because he chooses not to). A. Jay Adler, however, has some more informed comments about Andrew, and the sad direction he is now conforming to. He tells that after Goldberg did his research and posted his findings, Andrew read them and pronounced that
Reading them all, it becomes quite clear to me that Ahmadinejad does indeed want Israel to cease to exist, but equally clear that he is not speaking of dropping a nuke on it.
Well, that's certainly comforting, isn't it? Andrew knows the Iranian fellow is merely talking through his hat, and we have nothing to worry about.
I hope no national leaders, in any country, glean their information from the blogosphere. I write this as a (part-time) blogger.
Pick the Reality You Wish For
The Guardian, this morning:
Contrast the depiction of the UK's top Lefty newspaper, then, with that of the New York Times, the top American newspaper and rather lefty itself:
Nato pact to send 5,000 troops for Afghan polls The agreement in Strasbourg to beef up security ahead of elections is being hailed as proof of a new era of co-operation between the United States and Europe.Deep down in the 17th paragraph of the article there is a toned-down admission that many of the promised troops will be sent to Afghanistan only for six months, and then even this:
Nato members are to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan to boost security ahead of critical elections, as the country's troubled president was yesterday forced into retreat over a controversial law effectively legalising rape within marriage. The outcome of yesterday's critical summit in Strasbourg will be a relief to Barack Obama, allowing the US president to argue that his offer of a new partnership with Europe has reaped tangible results and ensured the burden of fighting the war on terror is more broadly shared. Yesterday he welcomed the deal as a "strong down payment" on securing Afghanistan's future.
Obama is committing an extra 21,000 troops, and possibly another 10,000 later in the year. He knows that he will come under sharp domestic pressure to revert to hard power if the mix of charm and intellectual persuasion he has displayed does not lead to tangible European response.But it's a boring, poorly written article, and one can assume most readers won't get that far down. It does mean, however, that the editors know for a fact that their rendering of the event is not, perhaps, the only possible way of seeing it.
Contrast the depiction of the UK's top Lefty newspaper, then, with that of the New York Times, the top American newspaper and rather lefty itself:
STRASBOURG, France — With protesters raging outside, NATO leaders on Saturday gave a tepid troop commitment to President Obama’s escalating campaign in Afghanistan, mostly committing soldiers only to a temporary security duty...
The Afghan war, too, remained a dividing line for alliance leaders. Despite a glowing reception and widespread praise for Mr. Obama’s style and aims, his calls for a more lasting European troop increase for Afghanistan were politely brushed aside, as they had been in negotiations leading up to the meeting.
As expected, European allies agreed to provide up to 5,000 new troops for Afghanistan, the White House said Saturday. But 3,000 of them are to be deployed only temporarily to provide security for the August elections in Afghanistan.
A further 1,400 to 2,000 soldiers will be sent to form embedded training teams for the Afghan Army and the police.
Mr. Obama is raising the number of American troops this year to about 68,000 from the current 38,000, which will significantly Americanize the war. The new strategy, which the Europeans have pressed for, is aimed at creating larger and better-trained Afghan security forces that can defend the country and allow the West to leave.
The two newspapers are reporting on the same event, so far as I can tell: a big meeting in Strasbourg yesterday. True, there were violent demonstrations only at the NYT meeting, and overall satisfaction and resolute determination in the face of enemies only at the Guardian meeting, but I do think it unlikely that there were two separate events. Or am I wrong?
PS. The NYT article is topped by a picture of violent demonstrators, flying various communist flags. Someone really ought to suggest to those folks that they read Juan Cole's blog: today's fashionable Useful Idiots no longer serve the Kremlin nor read Mao's Little Read Book. Today they cover up for different hateful regimes. Really folks! You're way behind the times!
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Naa, No Antisemitism There...
Antisemtism is notoriously hard to define, and even the better attempts to do so are not accepted by all. I'm not going to try and unravel the issue here, tho two quick comments are called for. First, the reason it's important is that antisemitism contributed immensely to Nazism and the worst war in human history, so even people who intensely dislike Jews feel the need not to be identified as antisemites (Unless they're Arabs; the rules are different for Arabs). My second comment is that since the 1940s the Zionist enterprise has been supported by a majority of Jews the world over, and has created the most significant change in Jewish life since Hadrian's genocide in the second century CE. This means that whether you lke it or not, any consistent anti-Israeli position (not to be confused with empiric criticism of specific Israeli actions) is probably antisemitic, for being against what the Jews as a nation are doing. Yes, even if the antisemites are Jewish themselves, that's obvious.
Antony Lerman, I'm beginning to think, is one of the Guardian's House Jews. Today he explains why that cartoon in the Washington Post isn't antisemitism. First:
Antony Lerman, I'm beginning to think, is one of the Guardian's House Jews. Today he explains why that cartoon in the Washington Post isn't antisemitism. First:
But this cartoon is devoid of standard antisemitic caricatures. Moreover, antisemites in the 1930s were hardly likely to compare Jews with jackbooted Germans.Did you get that? Describing Jews as Nazis can't be antisemitic, since the Nazis would never have compared Jews to themselves. Profound, isn't it? And then:
The ADL and Wiesenthal seem to imply that under no circumstances can you ever suggest that Israeli Jews might act in a Nazi-like fashion. While I fervently hope that Israeli Jews never do act like that, it cannot be taken as an iron rule that they never will. What people or group or individual is eternally immune from such behaviour? So it would be absurd to demand that Israelis should forever be shielded from such an accusation.In other words, there's nothing antisemitic in depicting Israeli actions as Nazi-like, since for all we know, perhaps someday some Israelis will do Nazi-like things; after all, we don't know what the future holds, do we. Of course, given that line of reasoning perhaps we ought to depict the editors of the Guardian in SS imagery, after all, humans having the potential for evil in them, we don't actually know for a fact that none of them ever in the future won't do something that bad.
Killing a Child
A young Arab woman appeared at the gate of a Border Police base and started shooting. The Border Police is a unit with an unusually high percentage of Arabic-speaking Israelis, and they tried to talk to her in her own language, but she kept on shooting. Eventually an officer arrived and killed her. After her death it turned out she was only 16 years old, something that wasn't clear while she was behind the gun.
According to a Hebrew-language report, it's not clear if she was motivated by nationalist considerations or was trying to clear herself of honor defamation, though why shooting soldiers would clear her name of going on a date I cannot say.
Sooner or later she'll appear in a statistic about Palestinian children killed by Israeli troops.
According to a Hebrew-language report, it's not clear if she was motivated by nationalist considerations or was trying to clear herself of honor defamation, though why shooting soldiers would clear her name of going on a date I cannot say.
Sooner or later she'll appear in a statistic about Palestinian children killed by Israeli troops.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Right and Wrong Even Amongst the Shadows
Yesterday a Palestinian man armed himself with an ax and made his way to a Jewish settlement to murder civilians (there's no army base there). Once there he hacked a child to death, started on an even smaller child, was then stopped by a local, but managed to escape. Since the security forces know who he is, it's only a matter of time before he's caught.
There are additional parts of the story, that make for all sorts of shadows, though they're shadows that can work in both directions. Oddly, this blog doesn't seem to attract many pro-Palestinian readers, or even plain antisemites who couldn't give a damn about the Palestinians but love them for their enmity to Israel, but I encourage those who are here to register their comments about those shadows, that I may hold them up to light.
Until then, however, note the fundamental difference between Israel and the Palestinians. Remember the squall of hand-wringing we had recently about some Palestinian civilians who weren't shot? Not to mention the larger question of waging war in Gaza. Compare that to this: the coldblooded murder of children, and silence at best from the society of the perpetrator; in some future round of negotiations the murderer will be sprung from an Israeli jail as a freedom fighter whose return home is a necessary condition of normal relations.
There are additional parts of the story, that make for all sorts of shadows, though they're shadows that can work in both directions. Oddly, this blog doesn't seem to attract many pro-Palestinian readers, or even plain antisemites who couldn't give a damn about the Palestinians but love them for their enmity to Israel, but I encourage those who are here to register their comments about those shadows, that I may hold them up to light.
Until then, however, note the fundamental difference between Israel and the Palestinians. Remember the squall of hand-wringing we had recently about some Palestinian civilians who weren't shot? Not to mention the larger question of waging war in Gaza. Compare that to this: the coldblooded murder of children, and silence at best from the society of the perpetrator; in some future round of negotiations the murderer will be sprung from an Israeli jail as a freedom fighter whose return home is a necessary condition of normal relations.
The Irish Times, Too
Too many things going on these days for much blogging. Pessach is only one of them. Anyway, an Irish reader (Connor) sent me a link which tells that The Irish Times is as bad as the Guardian. Though why they care, one way or the other, is beyond me. They're at one end of Europe, we're beyond the edge of the opposite end, and they're the local newspaper of a small country, without pretensions to be a global brand. Why care about Israel, of all places?
Ah, I hear you asking, and why does CAMERA care about some Irish newspaper? Perhaps because they're from Boston....
Ah, I hear you asking, and why does CAMERA care about some Irish newspaper? Perhaps because they're from Boston....
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Guardian on Twitter
Although I'm not a huge fan of the Guardian, their April First hoax this year was inspired: From now on, the paper will be published only on Twitter. Moreover, they're re-doing their archive in Twitter format, too:
JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?
Concert for Peace: NEVER!
Following my comment about the unfortunate Palestinian response to some of their teenagers playing music to an audience of Israeli Holocaust survivors, Claudio sent me this depressing link.
It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.
In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.
However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.
It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.
It goes on and on. Khalid Amayreh is a person whose primary motivating force is hatred.
I don't know enough about the Palestinians to say how typical he is. He talks similarly to the people in Jenin who got so angry the other day, so he may not be a lone voice in the wilderness.
I'm of the persuasion that Israel should always be on the lookout for whatever policy might lead to peace with our neighbors, and should be willing to pay a reasonable price to encourage it to happen; I'm also of the persuasion that no matter what we do, the ultimate decision is of our enemies. They're the ones who need to decide to live alongside us in peace; a large majority of Israelis has long since wished to live alongside them in peace. Items like this demonstrate that some Arabs, in this case, Palestinians, are so consumed with hatred they'll pay whatever price needed to have it gratified - and since that won't happen, they prefer war.
Since Mr. Amayreh is so involved in Holocaust-Zionism comparisons, malicious nonsense as they are, here's another one for him to ponder.
While the Jewish grievances against Germany were vastly and incomparably greater than any Palestinian grievance could ever be, by 1952, that's less than a decade after the Shoah, Israeli society was at extreme loggerheads with itself about a proposal to accept indemnities from Germany. Ben Gurion the pragmatist sought German funds to help build Israel, recognizing that they would contribute to Germany's international rehabilitation; a large, vocal, and for a moment even violent opposition stated that Jews should never accept anything from Germany; better to slog on with food rationing and hundreds of thousands of refugees in tents, and never give the Germans the dignity of accepting anything from them. We'll put the past behind us and move on, but we'll not forgive.
Ben Gurion won the day, though it was close. By 1965 there were full diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, two years before the Six Day War; the first German ambassador was a one-armed veteran officer of the Wehrmacht. By the late 70s, (West) Germany was Israel's closest ally in Europe. The two national memories are complicated till this day, and will remain so for the next century or two, but they don't interfere with each side's ability to get on with promoting its interests in a reasonably civil way.
A World of Kvetchers
The top item on Haaretz' website this morning is a poll that tells of 54% dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's government. The government was sworn in towards midnight yesterday, and Haaretz goes to press at, I dunno, probably 3:30 am, so either the folks were polled at 1:30 am, or - more likely - they were polled during the final hours of the previous government. I recognize that the stone-age tradition of allowing a government 100 days of grace is hopelessly anachronistic, but perhaps we might wait ten days? Ten hours? A hundred minutes?
It's not only Israel. Over at the Guardian Jonathan Freedman, a (comparatively) sane voice, bemoans that Obama, coming to a meeting in London today, hasn't yet saved the world; matter of fact, he isn't even JFK! As I never tire of mentioning in these cases, JFK was a mediocre president at best and it's not clear why Obamaites think he's a model they ought to be striving for. On a more serious note, the thought that any American president could successfully figure out the job in less than a year, even without global recession, is childish. Two years would be more plausible. For those who lack enough fingers to count with, Obama also is still in his first hundred days.
Sheesh.
It's not only Israel. Over at the Guardian Jonathan Freedman, a (comparatively) sane voice, bemoans that Obama, coming to a meeting in London today, hasn't yet saved the world; matter of fact, he isn't even JFK! As I never tire of mentioning in these cases, JFK was a mediocre president at best and it's not clear why Obamaites think he's a model they ought to be striving for. On a more serious note, the thought that any American president could successfully figure out the job in less than a year, even without global recession, is childish. Two years would be more plausible. For those who lack enough fingers to count with, Obama also is still in his first hundred days.
Sheesh.
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