Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Wisdom from Paul Berman

Joem in the comments pointed me (via Yaakov Lozowick's blog) pointed me to this lengthy interview with Paul Berman, a liberal who gets it. Here is a small sample:

People ought to have noticed by now that any number of humanitarian catastrophes lie just over the horizon and are perfectly predictable - the catastrophes that will follow ineluctably from any future wars in Gaza or Lebanon, or from an attack that Israel, out of fear of the Iranian nuclear program, could conceivably launch on Iran.
Now, if the rest of the world really wants to worry and be upset over humanitarian disasters, there would be every reason to start worrying right now over the prospect of those future wars. A humanitarian logic ought to lead us to ask, how can those wars be stopped, pre-emptively, so to speak - instead of merely deploring them, after the fact. I know that a lot of people would say that, well, Israel ought to dismantle its West Bank settlements and do a thousand other things to allow their enemies to calm down. Me, I've never had any patience for West Bank settlements, and I can picture a lot of ways that Israel could improve.

Still, it would be disingenuous not to notice another obvious reality. An Iran without a nuclear program would be in no danger of Israeli attack. Here is an impending war that rests on a single variable. Why not alter the variable? Equally obvious: Israel is not going to launch a war against any of the groups on its own borders that remain at peace. Why not do everything possible to disarm those groups? Protests, moral pressures, diplomatic pressures, not to mention grand international alliances, not to mention human rights reports! There are a lot of things that could be done. But it may be that, around the world, some of the people who weep over the sufferings caused by war would rather see still further wars than undertake even the simplest and most obvious steps to avoid the wars.

There is more wisdom in this one interview than in a thousand NYT op-eds.

Read the whole thing.

NYT op-ed: Stop using the word "terrorism"

I was going to comment on this insipid piece by Michael Slackman, but others have done it better than I would have.

On the plus side, I got to use the word "insipid."

UPDATE: One more take (h/t joem)

PalArab news roundup

Palestine Today quotes Yediot Aharonot as saying that Hamas established its new headquarters in a psychiatric hospital in Gaza, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn't be attacked.

PalToday also reports that there was a clash between Arabs and Jews on the Temple Mount, as the Jews tried to pray. I'm sure that the prayers were very violent, though, justifying the scuffle. Of course, PalToday says that the "extremist Jewish settlers" "stormed" the mosque. They were apparently arrested by Israeli police for this heinous crime.

(By the way, Arutz-7 reports that Jews managed to pray at an ancient Jericho synagogue, now under PA control, for the first time in nearly nine years.)

Palestine Press Agency quotes Israel's Channel Two that hamas is again managing to smuggle Grad rockets and other weapons into Gaza.

"Peace negotiator" idiots say: "Talk with Hamas"

From Reuters:

The United States and Israel must change policy toward Hamas and engage the Palestinian militant group if progress is to be made on peace in the Middle East, a group of former peace negotiators said on Thursday.
Writing in Britain's Times newspaper, 14 former foreign ministers and peace negotiators said the three-year policy under which Hamas has been ostracized by the international community had backfired and needed to be changed.

"There can be no meaningful peace process that involves negotiating with the representatives of one part of the Palestinians while simultaneously trying to destroy the other," wrote the signatories, who include Britain's Paddy Ashdown, a former negotiator in Bosnia, and Michael Ancram, who helped broker peace with the IRA in Northern Ireland.

Hamas, a militant group whose founding charter calls for Israel's destruction, won a Palestinian parliamentary election in January 2006, defeating long-time rival Fatah.

But the group was immediately cut off by Israel, the United States and the European Union, which regard it as a terrorist organization. Peace negotiations have, however, continued with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fatah.

The letter's signatories said Israel's recent war against Hamas in Gaza had "demonstrated that the policy of isolating Hamas cannot bring about stability."

"Bringing Hamas into the process does not amount to condoning terrorism or attacks on civilians," the letter will say, according to excerpts provided in advance.

"It can strengthen pragmatic elements and their ability to strike the hard compromises needed for peace."

To put it bluntly, these people are idiots.

The desperate desire to see progress towards peace, combined with a penchant to naively believe that every conflict can be solved through negotiations, plus years of obfuscation of the nature of Hamas by "even-handed" journalists and diplomats, cause otherwise smart people to lose their minds.

Here is what they have chosen to ignore:

Hamas is not a movement to create an independent Palestinian Arab state. It is a radical Islamic movement to destroy an independent Jewish state, and then join with other Islamic movements to destroy neighboring Arab states to create a single Islamic 'ummah.

Hamas' goals and means have been stated explicitly for decades, and they have not changed one iota. There are no "pragmatic" Hamas leaders, unless your definition of pragmatic means that they are willing to wait an additional decade or so before their goals are met.

Hamas' and its sister terror groups are exactly the same as Al Qaeda, with the exception that Hamas is concentrating on exclusively killing Israeli Jews in their attacks. Hamas, Al Qaeda and all of the other groups that originally came from the Muslim Brotherhood agree on their goals, their strategy and their tactics. Therefore, to advocate bringing Hamas in for negotiations is the same as asking to negotiate with Bin Laden's more "pragmatic" deputies.

Israel is negotiating with Hamas, through Egypt, to make an accommodation with the de facto rulers of Gaza. This is the way it should be for specific issues that can be solved. But to engage Hamas without the Quartet's preconditions means that these morons are demanding that Israel negotiate its own destruction.

February Rocket Calendar

Q=Qassam (may include Katyusha-style rockets)
QS=Qassam landing short in Gaza
M=Mortar
F=Fatality (F=Gazan, F=Israeli)
(G)=Grad (included in Qassam count, not consistent yet)

M*- Apparently upgraded 120mm mortars
MS=Mortar landing short
P - unnamed "projectiles"
(Paren) indicates unconfirmed Palestinian claims

* - Fatal non-rocket attack

K=Katyushas from Lebanon

Mortars are severely undercounted since they simply don't make the news any more.

Yellow=day Israel sent aid to Gaza

February 2009

Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
4Q 8M	3M 1Q	1Q(1G)	1M		2Q
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
2Q		(crossings closed election day) 1Q	3M		3Q	2M
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
1Q	2Q		1Q	4Q 1M 1QS	1Q 10M	1Q 2M 1K 1KS
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
1Q	2Q		2Q	3Q	1Q	10Q (2G)

A day without yellow doesn't necessarily mean the crossings were closed; I just may not have seen the reports of them being specifically open.

All previous calendars here.

More anti-semitism on Google News

One of the "news" sites that Google News indexes is Pakistan Daily. Here is the first paragraph of an article written there on Wednesday, that argues that Barack Obama is a puppet of the Jews:

Zionist Max Nordau wrote of the psychopathic nature of the ideal Jewish puppet. He stated that the leaders will be psychopaths [M. Nordau, Entartung, C. Duncker, Berlin, (1892-1893); English translation: Degeneration, D. Appleton, New York, (1895); and Der Sinn der Geschichte, C. Duncker, Berlin, (1909); English translation: The Interpretation of History, Willey Book Co., New York, (1910); and The Drones Must Die, G.W. Dillingham Co., New York, (1897); and with M. A. Lewenz, Morals and the Evolution of Man, Lewenz, Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, (1922). Similar prescriptions appear in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.]

Now, most of the world knows that anyone quoting the Protocols is a crackpot to begin with, but what about his other quotes from Max Nordau, who was a prominent early Zionist?

When a person quotes a source, it adds an aura of respectability and believability to what he is saying. After all, how many people would lie about something so specific, when it could be so easily proven that they are liars? So even when one reads an article by someone whose views are reprehensible, the idea that he is a baldfaced liar is hard to grasp.

Luckily, each of the four books this anonymous writer lists is available, in full text, from Google Books.

The Interpretation of History does not contain either the word "Zionist" nor "Psychopath." Neither does The Drones Must Die nor Morals and the Evolution of Man.

The word "psychopath" does appear, twice, in Degeneration, which partially deals with psychology. The word "Zionist" does not appear at all.

Our Jew-hating author thus proves himself to be not only despicable but also a liar who intentionally misleads his audience with made-up "facts."

Yet this site is considered a "news" source for Google.

BTFA: Rock and roll ain't what it used to be

Tonight, I heard a radio commercial asking listeners to buy tickets to see Mötley Crüe at the Bellagio.

That is just so wrong, on so many levels.

Open Adar Thread - User Submitted Jokes Edition

Where you are invited to tell your favorite jokes.

Keep them (relatively) clean.

Afternoon Links

I remain busy, and won't be able to blog much for the rest of the day, but these should keep you occupied (not in the legal sense:)

Sultan Knish goes much deeper on Chas Freeman, and familiarity certainly breeds contempt in this case. Soccer Dad fills out the sordid picture.

Ami Isseroff on how Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds. I'm looking forward to his followups.

Lisa Goldman writes a provocative piece on The Danger From Dubai (h/t Daled Amos).

Richard Cohen's bias and his Arab fans

Richard Cohen's wrote another of his signature op-eds yesterday, where he castigates a minority of Israelis for daring to vote for Avigdor Lieberman. As usual, is it quite dishonest:

The day after the United Nations created the state of Israel, the country's first president, Chaim Weizmann, found time to work on his memoir, "Trial and Error." In it, he issued a warning to the Israeli leaders of today: "I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs." It was Nov. 30, 1947.
Weizmann was an astonishingly accomplished man -- chemist, diplomat, statesman -- but maybe his most uncanny talent was that of seer. Peering into the future, he glimpsed the ugly turn Israeli politics has recently taken and how it is now acceptable to talk in repulsive ways about the country's 1.3 million Arabs. "There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs," he wrote.

Weizmann's admonition may not be known to Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova and now one of Israel's most important political leaders. Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party placed third in the recent election, meaning he will almost certainly be part of the next government. Lieberman is often called a "nationalist." Maybe so, but he is also an anti-Arab demagogue.
The Arabs of Lieberman's antipathy are not Israel's traditional enemies -- either in Gaza, the West Bank or elsewhere in the Middle East. He focuses instead on the Arabs of Israel proper, about 20 percent of the population. They are his fellow citizens, some of them of dubious loyalty, it is true, and most of them with genuine grievances, it is also true. In essence, Lieberman wants to swap them for Jewish settlers now living provocatively in the occupied West Bank. It's half a good idea.

Guess which half? Arabs, according to Cohen, obviously have the right to live anywhere they want in the world. Jews, not so much.

The issue of Israel's Arabs is complicated. They are not Jews, yet they are expected to be loyal to a Jewish state. They are Arabs, yet they are expected to stand by while their fellow Arabs are pounded -- as in Gaza -- by Israeli guns.

Some of whom are fired by - Israeli Arabs.

Cohen purposefully muddies the concept of "loyalty." One can protest against a nation's actions and still be loyal. One can criticize their government and still be loyal. One can even try to change the government legally and remain loyal to the state. But in Cohen's universe, Israeli Arabs have the unique right to demand that their own nation be destroyed, to support Israel's enemies in any way they see fit. Asking all citizens to be loyal - the problematic and mostly symbolic part of Lieberman's platform - is not discriminatory, and it fits in exactly with that Weizmann wrote, despite Cohen's rhetorical gymnastics to indicate otherwise.

Pakistan and India were created in a similar manner -- a population swap of many millions of people. This was the way things were once done.

Who can imagine the untold thousands of people who would have been butchered in Pakistan/India had there not been that population swap? It is never an ideal solution, but it is conceivable that it is better than the alternative - conceivable to anyone who is honest with themselves, and not grandiose moralizers.

Israel, too, engaged some in ethnic cleansing -- or why else all those Palestinian refugees? But the attempt was both chaotic and, as we can see, not wholly successful.

How's that for proof? Take competing claims by both sides about what happened in 1948, disregard the analyses of many distinguished historians, embrace the ones of people like Ilan Pappe, and throw in the existence of refugees as proof of ethnic cleansing! And then say that the existence of one million Arabs in israel today is not a counterproof of the slanderous assertion of ethnic cleansing - rather, it is proof that the genocidal Zionists were not competent to finish the job! Brilliant!

More important, the concept was anathema to important members of the Zionist establishment such as Weizmann.

And does he have a Weizmann quote to back this up? Did Weizmann advocate the return of all the refugees? Of course he didn't - but Cohen pretends otherwise.

It is clear that the world has grown weary of Israel.

Note that the world is not weary of the Arab Israel conflict, it is not tired about the self-defeating decisions made by Arab leaders to keep Palestinian Arabs stateless - in Cohen's world, everyone is only tired of Jews wanting to live in their own state in peace. Is this observation or projection?

Is it any wonder that Al Quds in Arabic trumpets a headline: American Jewish Writer Warns of Ethnic Cleansing Against Palestinians.

Cohen is the Palestinian Arabs' best friend, because he swallows their propaganda whole, with nary a burp.

Indian writer apologizes for not appearing anti-Israel

Distinguished Indian novelist Shashi Tharoor has a weekly column on various Indian issues. At the outset of the Gaza operation, he wrote:

AS Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest, and some empathy.
Unsurprisingly, India's Government has joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted. As Israel demonstrates anew its determination to end attacks on its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled territory, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks in November, have been asking: Why can't we do the same?
For many Indians, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the terrorists' seizure of Mumbai's Chabad House Jewish centre and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But the Mumbai attacks confirmed what has become apparent in recent years: the forces of global Islamist terror have added Indians to their target list of reviled "Jews and crusaders".
...When Indians watch Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some cannot resist wishing that they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable, and the risks of the conflict spiralling out of control too acute to contemplate such an option. So Indians place their trust in international diplomacy and watch with ill-disguised wistfulness as Israel does what they could never permit themselves to do.

The article is clearly about that wistfulness, and while it showed both comparisons and contrasts between India's situation and Israel's, the main point was how ordinary Indians viscerally feel about striking back directly at terror.

But his point was lost on a vocal portion of his audience, who immediately castigated him for even considering that Israel had a reason to react to years of suffering under thousands of rockets aimed at her citizens. So Tharoor was forced to replace a later column with an abject apology:

Many of you have read my article as endorsing Israel's military campaign in Gaza and deplored the article's apparent indifference to the humanitarian tragedy that followed.
I regret the misunderstanding of the intent and thrust of the piece, which was not written as a commentary on the conflict in Gaza. When I wrote the article I was thinking only about india/pakistan - the assault on Gaza had just begun when I put my fingers to the keyboard. (Though the Australian carried it on the 19th, and that was the link forwarded to you, the first paper to use the syndicated column was Beirut's Daily Star on the 8th). Obviously I had no sense at the time of writing of the scale of the israeli action that was to follow and the toll that would be taken in civilian lives. But in any case the article says India cannot, should not and would not do what Israel has done.

It should be noted that by January 8th, the three-week war was well over the halfway mark, as were the number of casualties.

Using the Israel parallel - at a time when my email inbox was brimming with messages of the "why can't we do the same as Israel?" variety - was just a way of bringing greater attention onto India's dilemma and its anguish, while arguing that there is no "Gaza option" for India.
Of course I should have realized that using an unfolding event as a peg would make my argument hostage to the way that situation evolved. Inevitably, some readers would judge the article in the light of what has happened in the two weeks after I wrote it. Had Israel taken out a few rocket sites and withdrawn in 3 or 4 days, as I had expected, perhaps the analogy would have seemed less offensive. But the article was always meant to be more about India's options than about Israel's actions.
Anyway, I am chagrined and chastened...

Even as he admits that his article was accurate - he was getting emails from the wistful Indians he was writing about - the criticisms were clearly so strident that he was forced to apologize for doing nothing wrong.

His crime was that he didn't immediately condemn Israel as a Nazi/fascist/terrorist state, which is apparently de rigueur any time Israel is mentioned in any context.

(h/t Mashi via email)

BTFA: My Name is Earl

For the past few, um, decades I haven't been watching too much network TV. But since I realized that I can watch TV shows on my PDA I have been going through seasons of various interesting-looking TV shows that I missed the first time around.

One of them is My Name is Earl (NBC, Thursday nights.)

The plot of the show is that a petty criminal named Earl Hickey, through an improbable series of events, discovers a simple version of karma that works for him: when he does good things, good things happen to him. So he made a list of everything bad he ever did to anyone else and he tries to make it up to them.

He is surrounded by an interesting array of characters, including his white-trash ex-wife, his improbably brilliant and talented best friend who is now married to his ex, and his dim brother.

The first two seasons of the show concentrated on Earl crossing off list items. With an effective use of flashbacks, some nice plot twists, a wicked sense of humor and some great classic rock, the show maintained its consistency to this formula.

What made it fascinating, though, went much deeper than normal mindless TV fare. Each episode included a real moral dilemma, and Earl had to try to choose to do the right thing with a very unconventional set of tools and constraints. These ethical conundrums kept the show interesting.

The show creators have gone away from that formula in the past two seasons, concentrating more on longer story arcs and less on the moral component of the show. It remains very funny, but it is no longer groundbreaking, relying more on character quirks.

Alas, I have caught up on all the episodes, so now I need to find other interesting TV fare to watch while commuting...

BTFA: Break the Format Adar

Since this is the Jewish month of Adar, where weird and counter-intuitive things tend to happen, I will be occasionally posting clearly unElder-like posts for the next few weeks when time allows. I hope to make them...eclectic.

The posts will be labeled BTFA.

Another wacko Arab theory about ancient Israel

Al-Quds (Arabic) has a lengthy report on Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese professor who has been pushing a theory for decades now that Biblical stories all took place in Arabia, not Israel. Even the Jordan River, he argues, was really the Sarawat Mountains (since he says the word "river" is never used in the Bible) and all Biblical placenames are really names in Arabia, including Jerusalem - in 'Asir, southern Arabia. According to this theory, those crafty Jews renamed Palestinian cities after the Biblical cities during the time of the Hasmonean Kingdom, in the second century BCE, but there were no Jews in Israel beforehand.

The Arabs would use this, of course, to delegitimize any Jewish claim on Israel.

Debunking this is easy, if only from a single archaeological find that was announced yesterday:

The Israel Antiquities Authority on Monday announced the discovery of a large building dating to the time of the First and Second Temples during an excavation in the village of Umm Tuba in southern Jerusalem.

The excavation was conducted by Zubair Adawi on behalf of the antiquities authority, prior to the start of construction there by a private contractor.

The archaeological remains include several rooms arranged around a courtyard, in which researchers found a potter's kiln and pottery vessels. The pottery remains seem to date from the eighth century B.C.E. (First Temple period).

The excavators also found royal seal impressions on some of the pottery fragments that date to the era of Hezekiah, King of Judah (end of the eighth century B.C.E.).

Four "LMLK" impressions (which indicate the items belonged to the king) were discovered on handles of large jars used to store wine and oil. Seals of two high-ranking officials named Ahimelekh ben Amadyahu and Yehokhil ben Shahar, who served in the government, were also found.

The Yehokhil seal was stamped on one of the LMLK impressions before the jar was fired in a kiln and this is a rare example of two such impressions appearing together on a single handle.

Biblical characters from the First Temple period hanging around in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE writing in Hebrew sort of demolishes Kamal Salibi's theory.

"Issues, action, power, self-interest."

I read this passage over the shoulder of someone in a train today:

The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview.Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing -because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power.

Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts.

I know that these words are out of context, but it was still a little bit of a shock to see that they were written by Barack Obama in his Dreams From My Father autobiography.