Israeli Election Blues

Never mind the Palestinian elections on January 25th. What's happening with the Israeli elections scheduled for March 28?

Not much, apparently. Shiloh Musings notes a poll that indicates that more than half are undecided.

Israel Perspectives has conducted his own more informal poll that indicates it's more than not knowing for whom to vote. There is an attitude of : "I don't plan on voting in the upcoming elections. We have no voice in this country, our votes don't count for anything, so why bother?"

In both cases, the problem is the politicians.

According to WestBank Blog the issue cuts more broadly. To put it simply, "In a word, the Israeli electoral system stinks."

She quotes Evelyn Gordon's article Throw the Bums Out, which describes why they can't:

In Israel, people vote for a party rather than an individual, leaving the party to decide which individuals should fill any seats it wins. Thus if, say, the Likud opted to repay Tzahi Hanegbi for having given numerous jobs to friends and relatives of party hacks by awarding him a "safe" slot on the party´s next Knesset list, Likud voters would have no way to oust him, however much they despised his reported corrupt use of their tax shekels – unless they were willing to abandon their party en masse.

Is this really all that different from the 2004 US elections, where:

a) There wasn't 50% undecided. Instead, it was a very close election--the results were not known till the next day when the Ohio vote was settled.
b) There is an attitude of "I don't plan on voting in the upcoming elections. We have no voice in this country, our votes don't count for anything, so why bother?"
c) After the election everyone complains about the system of the electoral college.

With the uncertainties in the US about war and the future, there could be more similarities than differences. But what would have been if Sharon was in control...?

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Israel and Israel Election.

I'm OK, Euro-K

It really did look impressive for a while there when Haaretz reported that the EU was going to suspend payments to the Palestinian Arabs:

The European Union has suspended 35 million euros ($42 million) in aid to the Palestinians, citing their lack of budgetary discipline, the EU's commissioner for external relations said on Tuesday.

The rare sanction underscored intensified foreign donor scrutiny on the Palestinian Authority since Israel quit the Gaza Strip last year after 38 years of occupation. The impoverished territory is widely seen as a testing ground for statehood.

"We have a long-term commitment with the Palestinian people that we would like to improve their living conditions (but) we are not only pumping money into the Palestinians without asking for very clear benchmarks," she [EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner] said.

It seemed like a move the likes of which we haven't seen since Bolton got the UN Security Council to condemn Hizbullah.

But it might be that the EU hasn't learned a thing and still has money to burn. The Financial Times reports:

The European Union is preparing itself for the possibility of doing business with Hamas after this month’s Palestinian elections, even though the group is on the EU’s list of banned terrorist organisations.

On a visit to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank this week, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, commissioner for external relations, emphasised the EU would not take sides in the January 25 vote, in which Hamas is mounting a strong challenge to President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.

The EU is unlikely to cut funding automatically if Hamas emerges as part of the Palestinian government after the elections, an outcome many observers consider possible. “We have been a consistent, and reliable partner for both sides [in the Israel-Palestinian conflict],” she said. “We will continue to offer our support to all those who seek peace by peaceful means.”[Emphasis added]

How does that translate into concrete terms? The EU has provided hundreds of millions of dolllars to the PA during both Abbas' and Arafat's tenure--money that at best was wasted. Caroline Glick provides a typical example from Arafat's time:

The Palestinian Mortgage Housing Corporation was involved in scandal in 1998, when the EU discovered that $20 million it had donated for the construction of low-cost housing in Gaza had been used instead to build luxury apartments
for wealthy supporters of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.

But Arafat could always count on the EU. Glick continues (writing in 2002):

The single largest contributor to Arafat's PA since its inception is the EU. Still today, as the evidence has become overwhelming that the PA is a terrorist entity from head
to toe, the EU insists on continuing its financial support. Just last month the EU announced it was donating another 340 million euros to the PA. This week, the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee, the body responsible for coordinating aid to the PA is meeting in Oslo to put together a new financing package.

While shoveling in money for the Palestinian infrastructure, what does the EU do for Israel? CAMERA reported during 2002 that

The EU reportedly provides much of Beilin's personal funding. According to an investigative report by Yoav Yitzchaki published in the Feb. 8, 2002 edition of the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, Beilin's salary is largely provided by the European Union (EU), as are his travel expenses. Beilin draws an annual salary of 350,000-400,000 NIS ( $80,000-$90,000) from the EU-funded Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF) which he established.

Currently, we hear all about the money the EU provides to the Palestinian Arabs. How often do we hear about the wonderful work the EU is doing with the money it provides Israel? Is it because the money does not go towards Israel itself and infrastructure but to individuals?

Glick notes that besides Beilin

In addition, it [the EU] funds organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights, which recently participated in organizing delegations of foreign activists who were brought here to stand in front of IDF tanks and attempt to force their way through IDF roadblocks.

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2001, when the destination of EU donations to Israel came to light:

European Union officials have defended the support they provide to Israeli leftist organizations, including Peace Now, the Four Mothers, and MK Roman Bronfman's Impact project.

MKs on the right have criticized Europe's intervention in Israeli politics following an investigation by Ma'ariv journalist Yoav Yitzhak that revealed that the European Union provides hundreds of thousands of euros a year to Israeli non-profit organizations affiliated with the Left.

"The European Union has always held a policy of supporting non-governmental organizations that work for peace, democracy, and human rights in the civil societies around the Mediterranean," an EU official told The Jerusalem Post. "The Israeli government is fully aware of this funding and has never complained about it. The EU has never provided financial support for political parties," he stressed.

..."We don't look at the political complexion of the people who apply to us," the official said. "We look at the project and if it meets our criteria, it is a candidate for our support." However, he said, "We don't support projects under the EU People to People program that do not support the peace process." [emphasis added]

Flash back to the present. If the EU does not support programs "that do not support the peace process," how does it justify doing business with Hamas? No problem, according to the Financial Times article:

However, some EU officials talked to Hamas members through informal and hence deniable channels in the past and were always unhappy about the decision to put the group on the terrorist list, a move championed by Israel and the US. EU foreign ministers have consistently refused to take a similar step for Hizbollah, the Islamist Shia organisation that forms part of the Lebanese government.

Their worry is that heavy handed actions by the EU could prove counterproductive, pushing Hamas further from the political mainstream – a conclusion endorsed on Wednesday by the International Crisis Group, a think-tank in Brussels.

“With the prospect as remote as ever of a renewed peace process or a weakened Palestinian Authority cracking down on a strengthened Hamas, the international community’s best remaining option is to maximise the Islamist movement’s incentives to move in a political direction through a policy of gradual, conditional engagement,” the report says. [Emphasis added]

Not a "peaceful direction" mind you, but a political one. And once Hamas becomes a major political partner, the whitewash will begin. Soon the EU will be able to brag that they fund programs by both Peace Now and Hamas.

Nothing seems to have changed after all these years. The EU apparently still has money to burn and doesn't care who gets hurt in the conflagration.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tags: Israel and EU and Hamas.

Science vs. Religion: When Science Crosses the Line

Last week, Jonathan Rosenblum wrote 2 articles on Darwin and Evolution: "Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?" and "Think Again: Charlie Darwin's angels". There has been a lot of debate on Rosenblum's articles at Cross-Currents, Emes Ve-Emuna, and Not The Gadol Hador. I have nothing to add to that.

I just think that it is interesting that some argue that Religion and Science each have their own particular sphere of influence and should not trespass into each other's territory. According to Rabbi Dr. Yirmiahu Luchins, the head the science department at Kushner:

Science is amoral. It does not say anything about how we ought to behave. We do. Whether we find dinosaur bones or not does not tell us whether or not we ought to help a little old lady across the street.

I think he is right--science does not say anything about how we should behave, but historically that is not the way things have worked out. Daniel J. Kevles, a historian of science and society, at Yale University writes about Darwin, Darwinism, and Eugenics in his article "In the Name of Darwin":

Eugenics was rooted in the social Darwinism of the late 19th century, a period in which notions of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were popular. At the time, a growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian analogies of "survival of the fittest" into social argument. Many social Darwinists insisted that biology was destiny, at least for the unfit, and that a broad spectrum of socially deleterious traits, ranging from "pauperism" to mental illness, resulted from heredity.

The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as he put it, getting rid of its "undesirables" while multiplying its "desirables" -- that is, by encouraging the procreation of the social Darwinian fit and discouraging that of the unfit. In Galton's day, the science of genetics was not yet understood. Nevertheless, Darwin's theory of evolution taught that species did change as a result of natural selection, and it was well known that by artificial selection a farmer could obtain permanent breeds of plants and animals strong in particular characteristics. Galton wondered, "Could not the race of men be similarly improved?" [emphasis his]

And we all know where this led. In Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It, Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman write:

Nazi racial ideologies can indeed be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, to the linking of social Darwinism and eugenics that burst on the scene in Germany, arriving from England, where the "science" of eugenics was founded by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton. (p. 225)

Shermer and Grobman give an example of the case of a girl who, along with her mother were found to be "feebleminded." When the girl gave birth to an illegitimate daughter who was also found to be feebleminded, it was decided on the basis of the science of the day that 3 generations of feeblemindedness constituted a hereditary cause and the girl should be sterilized.

A court finally handed down a judgment in the case--a judgment that was used by the Nazis to justify their sterilization program:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing the kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (p. 226-7)

The girl's name was Carrie Buck. The case was took place in the US. The court was the US Supreme Court and the above words were the opinion of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

As Shermer and Grobman note, "In America, a similar commitment to social Darwinism resulted in mass sterilizations of the 'feebleminded' and other 'undesirables.'" From 1907 to 1928 almost 9,000 Americans were sterilized and there were approximately 20,000 sterilizations by the mid-30's.

There are ideas in Science that catch on and are applied outside of their area. Martin Gardner, in his book, The Relativity Explosion, felt the need to write:

If the reader wonders why the book contains no chapter on the philosophical consequences of relativity, it is because I am firmly persuaded that in the ordinary sense of the word "philosophical," relativity has no consequences...as far as the great traditional topics of philosophy are concerned--God, immortality free will, good and evil, and so on--relativity has absolutely nothing to say. The notion that relativity physics supports the avoidance of value judgments in anthropology, for example or a relativism with respect to morals, is absurd. Actually, relativity introduces a whole series of new "absolutes." (p. x) [emphasis mine]

(Apparently Einstein's Theory of Relativity has nothing to say on the relativity of terrorists vs. freedom fighters.)

Neither Darwin nor Science are responsible for the Nazis nor the Holocaust. However, when setting up the boundary between Religion and Science, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea if Science kept to it's side of the line as well.

Technorati Tags: Darwin and Evolution and Religion and Science.

Days of Jewish Juvenescence

Juvenescence, a synonym for 'School Age'
Source: Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1)

Meryl Yourish is writing about her experiences teaching (Hallmark’s got nothin’ on my students), which gave me the idea of digging up a couple of my memories from teaching. I taught for 11 years in a Jewish Day School that followed the Open Classroom philosophy, and had only enough walls to keep the ceiling from falling. Out of curiousity, I once timed how long it took the 1st - 8th grades to do a fire drill, and because of the way the school is structured, it took less than 30 seconds. There's also an electrical socket on the outside of the Aron Kodesh, which I always thought provided an interesting symbolism.

I remember during my first year I was walking down the long staircase that passed by 4 different grades, and saw 2 fourth grade boys handcuffed to each other. There they were in the grade area, walking around handcuffed to each other, with other students and teachers in the area. I had been teaching there for about 4 or 5 months, and I think it was a credit to my ability to adapt to the nature of the school that I was not the least bit surprised--but just a tiny bit curious. I had to get to the bottom of it.

Me: Are those real handcuffs?
One of the two boys: Yes.
Me: Well, where's the key?
The same boy: My mommy has it. But that's OK--he has to come to my house tonight anyway...

I didn't teach them and lost track of them. After a while I forgot who they were. But I made a point every year at graduation to keep an eye out. I can assure you that when the 8th grade graduating class entered the auditorium walked to the stage, not once were any of the students handcuffed to each other.

I guess his mommy did have the keys afterall.

---

One year I was assisting the 6th grade Chumash teacher--taking out students who needed some one-to-one to catch them up on a topic. One day, when I was walking by in the back of the area, one of the students motioned me over. She did not understand one of the words in the Chumash and asked me what it meant. The word was 'slav'--quail. I figured that being a teacher, I was not going to just give her the answer outright, and being that the president at the time was George Bush Sr., I instead asked her, "Well, what is the name of the Vice President." I figured that was a good hint, assuming she was up on her Social Studies.

In response, she looked at me, her eyes wide and whispered, "it means idiot!?"

I mentioned this to her mother at the Parent-Teacher conferences, and she assured me that they didn't discuss politics at home. Maybe that was the problem.

-----

Once a week we had teacher conferences. Towards the latter half of the year there were more and more discussions about helping students getting into High School. One time I remember the principal was concerned about how to write a recommendation for a particular girl. She was a shy, quiet student--whose grades were a little less than average. She had not yet started to hit her stride. I recall the principal agonizing on what kind of recommendation he could write for her. He needed to be able to describe her and her strong points in a way that would make a good impression. I thought a bit and suggested that he use the Boy Scout motto. He looked at me puzzled and asked what I meant, so I recited it for him:

A Boy Scout is:
1. Trustworthy
2. Loyal
3. Helpful
4, Friendly
5. Courteous
6. Kind
7. Obedient
8. Cheerful
9. Thrifty
10. Brave
11. Clean and
12. Reverent

Stunned, the Principal asked me to repeat it why he scribbled it down.

The girl got into the High School she wanted.

Lots of good memories from those years.

Technorati Tag: Hebrew School.

If It's True, Is It Still Hate?

If someone knowingly and falsely accuses a particular Moslem or Moslem group of having terrorist ties, that is spreading hate; but if the charge is true, then that is not hateful--it's a fact, and should be enough to put someone in jail or get them deported from the country.

But how well is the case being made when accusing Moslems of terrorist ties. After all, just last month Sami Al-Arian was acquited on charges he provided support for terrorists.

Take a much smaller case in Florida.

In an article in the St. Petersburg Times, "Are bloggers against hate, or feeding it?", S. I. Rosenbaum sets out to discredit Joe Kaufman and other bloggers whose writing apparently led to the moving of a Muslim retreat. The tone to the direction the article will take is in the sub-title:

Blogs dedicated to protecting America against terrorism are troubling the Muslim community.

That's the theme that runs through the article: the pomposity of the blogs and the persecution of the Moslem community.

From the beginning the focus is on the bloggers, starting with the surreal start of her piece:

It's 4 a.m. Somewhere near Coral Springs, Joe Kaufman is still at his computer.

Blurry with fatigue, he types:

It has been said that 80 percent of all the mosques ... inside the United States are ... tied to a radical form of Islam. ...

One of the American locations that ... influence has been prevalent is the Tampa-St. Pete area of Southwest Florida.

Kaufman is 35, clean-shaven, a lawyer's assistant. He goes inline skating and writes love songs on guitar. But his passion is his Web site, AmericansAgainstHate.com, where he monitors the activities of Florida's Muslim community, looking for terrorist links.

Kaufman's site is only one of a constellation of blogs with names like JihadWatch.com, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, and WesternResistance.com that are dedicated to the surveillance of American Muslims. The blogs link to one another, with more-traveled sites amplifying stories from more obscure ones, like Kaufman's.

He claims he has not found a single mosque in Florida that is not linked to terrorists.

The opening paragraphs are more like something in a novel than a newspaper. S. I. Rosenbaum doesn't address the threat of Islamist terrorism in the US, neither does she at any point in her article address whether any of Kaufman's claims are true--what little she mentions of them.

In fact, when she writes about the retreat having to move, there is not a word about the charges that Kaufman and others have made:

Jennifer Valko opened her e-mail and saw a message of hate.

I will undress you paint your body with pig fat & light you. America is on to you! Watch your back!

It was the Thursday after Christmas. In two days, the Muslim spiritual retreat she had helped plan was scheduled to take place at Cedarkirk, a Presbyterian camp and conference center in eastern Hillsborough County.

That morning, Kaufman had appeared on Fox News to talk about the retreat.

On his Web site, he had posted articles about it. He posted computer-altered images of masked terrorists standing in front of the Lithia campsite.

He said these images were meant to be "tongue in cheek." But some readers took them seriously. Hate mail and death threats poured in to the Tampa Muslim American Society.

The conference center's director also got death threats and closed the center for the weekend, forcing the retreat elsewhere.

Kaufman called the threats "disgusting," saying he gets death threats because of his blog.

"I know what I went through growing up, and it was never my intention to cause any type of hatred against anyone."

But he added, "I can't let it stop me from what I'm doing. ... I'm assisting in the safety and security of the American people."

By the time she is finished, Rosenbaum has pretty much discredited Kaufman and has painted the Moslem community as sympathetic victims.

To find out what Kaufman actually was saying about the retreat, you have to go to his article, A New Year’s Jihad Retreat. Written on December 29th of last year when the retreat was still in the works, Kaufman writes about the MAS (Muslim American Society)-sponsored retreat and the planned speakers. MAS, along with ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America) "have held conferences featuring speakers accused of terror ties and have published material supporting suicide bombings against Israel" according to the Daily News.

One featured speaker at the retreat, he writes, was to be former President of MAS-Chicago, Chantal Carnes, who has praised Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the violent Muslim Brotherhood and about whom former federal prosecutor John Loftus has written was a big fan of Hitler. Kaufman also quotes Daniel Pipes, who writes that:

the Muslim American Society is the U.S. face of the Muslim Brotherhood – the single leading Islamist organization worldwide and, as I noted in "The Islamic States of America?" the MAS is not terribly subtle about its intention of "establishing an Islamic state" to replace the existing Constitutional order. Add to this the Muslim Brotherhood's six-decade history of resorting to violence...

Kaufman writes also of another scheduled speaker, Mazen Mokhtar:

Mokhtar is the Youth Division Head of MAS-New Jersey and the Khateeb (sermon-giver) of Masjid Al-Huda and the Institute of Islamic Studies. Mokhtar is also associated with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

In August of 2004, shortly before he was to speak at a Young Muslims camp in Pennsylvania (‘A Few Good Men’), the U.S. government accused Mokhtar of assisting Al-Qaeda through the use of a web site he had created.

Looks like powerful stuff--facts that Rosenbaum ignores. But in two previous articles, Rosenbaum does deal briefly with some of the issues. On December 31 she writes:

In fact, federal agents searched Mokhtar's New Jersey home in 2004, after a man in London was arrested for using a Web site to fund terrorist groups.

An identical Web site was registered under Mokhtar's name. But he was never arrested.

On Friday, Mokhtar, a computer programmer, said he ran a business selling server space to host Web sites. He never knew what was contained on the site in question, he said.

On his Fox News program, Cavuto also read what he said was a quote from Mokhtar: "Suicide bombing should be encouraged because it's an effective way of attacking the enemy."

Although Cavuto did not say where the quote was from, a 1996 post on the online discussion forum Usenet, signed with Mokhtar's name, contains the words "effective method of attacking the enemy" in a discussion of whether suicide bombing is prohibited by Islamic law.

Mokhtar said Friday that he did not remember writing those words.

There goes Kaufman's case against Mokhtar. Instead of being "associated with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda," we have a man investigated and never formally accused. If there is more to the case against Mokhtar than that, Kaufman doesn't mention it

In Carnes' case it's even easier. On January 1 all Rosenbaum had to do was write:

Chantal Carnes didn't recognize herself.

A friend had e-mailed her a blogger's article. It described Carnes as a supporter of terrorists, a fan of suicide bombing.

Clearly Rosenbaum does not demolish all of the details of all the points that the blogs have been raising, nor does she even address them all--for instance she cheats her readers by mentioning CAIR, but not informing them that 3 members have been found guilty of terrorist ties, as Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, who is also quoted by Rosenbaum, points out. She does not mention that CAIR has been named as a defendant in a class-action lawsuit going back to 9-11 (see update at bottom of that page).

But if charges are going to be made by bloggers on the Internet, they had better be more than mere statements about individuals admiring Hamas or being investigated (not accused), but never charged. Arafat's legacy to the 21st century is not only the creation of the mythos of the "Palestinian People," the confusion between between terrorists and freedom-fighters. We need to be more solid in the claims that we make, otherwise we will see alot more articles like S. I. Rosenbaum's.

Technorati Tag: Terrorism.

Access Verbiage

I happen to be fond of language and trivia--one thing I like to point out from time to time is that the word access was not always a verb. It used to be only a noun--at least that is what my 1970 edition of Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary says:

So I was surprised to see this Calvin and Hobbs on The Curious Jews blog:

Vindication!

OK, so some people are more easily vindicated than others...

Taking a Jab at the JIBs?

(check out SerandEz who also addresses this--actually he caught a number of points I missed)

JC General doesn't like the JIB's, one reason being some of those who got nominated:

So how does a trio of gentiles get nominated for (and in Chuck's case, win) a best "Jewish and Israeli" blog award. Well from what I can see, being either Jewish or Israeli isn't as important being politically in line with about ten percent of the Jews in the United States. That is to say you must be almost almost genocidal in your support of Israel. I'll admit that 10 percent is a guess, but I think it's a good one. While most Jews support Israel, I doubt that more than 10 percent would consider genocide or ethnic cleansing as desirable methods for achieving security. Even the General won't go that far. From what I've seen at the JIB nominated websites, the majority of the nominees are eager to collectively punish brown people as viciously as possible. That might not be in line with the thinking of most Jews, but I guess that isn't the point of these awards.

While he supplies no links to indicate that either LGF or Cox and Forkum actually "would consider genocide or ethnic cleansing as desirable methods for achieving security," he does quote some other blogs--whom apparently he thinks do fall into his guesstimated 10% who are "almost genocidal" in their support of Israel.

I suppose there are some blogs like he describes, but you won't find them by looking at the examples he gives.

The Only in Israel post may be in poor taste--it's not clear the commenters and the post are on the same wavelength--but to actually make his point, JC General should be able to find a explicit post and show it. He doesn't.

True Smooth Stone defends the gist of what Pat Robertson said. He also writes, and this was not quoted by the General:

I don't claim to know what G-d thinks, but I am sure as heck allowed to speculate and Pat Robertson, dopey and a schm_ck as he has been in the past, also has the right to speculate. I am more than willing to trust that what G-d Says and that what is written in the Torah to be unflinchingly true - it would not only be sinful, but also criminal, to carve up the one tiny spot of land given to us by G-d

So Smooth Stone--defending the thought, not the person--believes that G_d is active in the world and JC General takes offense? Just because it doesn't fit his politics?

He quotes Soccer Dad and how he "responds to the news that a the family of a brown child killed by Israeli troops donated his organs to Israelis:"--actually this is way out of context. Soccer Dad starts off with:

I don't mean to be churlish. Really I don't.
It is wonderful that Ismail Khatib chose to donate the organs of his son Ahmed to any and all who needed them and that Mr. Khatib is proud that some of his son's organs went to Jews.
But the coverage of this heartwarning incident strikes me as cynical. [emphasis added]

I don't understand which part of the post which the General does quote--which notes both the carelessness of the child who was carrying a toy gun near soldiers and the duty of Israeli soldiers to protect themselves and innocent civilians--he actually finds offensive.

The Muqata writes about the importance of picking up hitchhikers [as an issue of pikuach nefesh--a phrase the General does not translate, which means "saving a life"] because "there are wild pigs there (the animals and the arabs)" and this is a vote for "genocide or ethnic cleansing as desirable methods for achieving security"?

Zion Report thinks having Arabs hold seats in the Knesset is seen as a sign of weakness and is suicidal--and this the General finds offensive??

Keep in mind too that some of these bloggers live in Israel and deal with the threat of suicide bombers and artillery fire from Gaza from an enemy that supposedly is engaged in peace talks. Those bloggers not in Israel I assume have friends and family--as do I--in Israel. We are not talking merely about matters of philosophy and politics. This is--without exaggeration--a life and death struggle. And the General is offended by name-calling.

If he can find actual posts to back up his 10% number or his accusation--that these blogs, including Little Green Footballs and Cox & Forkum, "would consider genocide or ethnic cleansing as desirable methods for achieving security"--let him go ahead and do so. In the meantime, I think both his position and his attempt to back it up terribly underwhelming.

Rice Does a Bolton

The following appears in a Norwegian paper:

USA threats after boycott support

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with "serious political consequences" after Finance Minister and Socialist Left Party leader Kristin Halvorsen admitted to supporting a boycott of Israeli goods.

The reaction was reportedly given to the Norwegian embassy in Washington DC, and it was made clear that the statements came from the top level of the US State Department, newspaper VG reports.

VG claims that two classified reports promised a "tougher climate" between the USA and Norway if Halvorsen's remarks represented the foreign policy of the new red-green alliance of the Labor, Socialist Left and Center parties.

Norway's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Gahr Støre, responded immediately with written explanations to both Israel and the USA, clarifying the government's stance, while Halvorsen distanced her party's policy from that of the government's.

So John Bolton defends Israel in the UN and Secretary of State Rice defends Israel in Norway.

Now if we can just get the US to defend Israel in...Israel.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Rice .

Sharon and Unilateral Democracy

In Now, Forward: Israelis Must Finish What Sharon Began, Yossi Klein Halevi writes in the Washington Post about Sharon and concensus:

But Sharon had also learned from his mistakes and, this time, understood the need for consensus, especially because a long-term war against terrorism requires the nation's patience and fortitude.

Sharon restored consensus, in part, through uncharacteristic restraint, declining to unleash the Israeli army until he was certain that the left would back him. And so he patiently waited, even as buses and cafes were exploding. When he finally ordered the reinvasion of the West Bank following the Passover massacre in March 2002, a year after he took office, some army reservist units reported more than 100 percent response: Even some people who hadn't been called showed up anyway. It was the antithesis of the Lebanon war, when antiwar demonstrators protested in Tel Aviv while soldiers were fighting at the front.

When it comes to fighting the terrorists, concensus here refers to the popular concensus of the people, and in this regard--yes there was a concensus.

But there is another area where Halevi talks about Sharon's concensus:

...Withdrawing from Gaza was likely to be the first phase of a Sharon plan to establish Israel's de facto borders.

...With Sharon's passing from the scene, there is no father to turn to for protection. We're on our own. Yet, because he has steered Israel away from the impassioned excesses he once embodied, his legacy is clear: on the military front, resolve against terrorism; on the political front, consensus in times of threat and a pragmatic approach that replaces the fantasy politics of the left and right.

Here, the concensus is political and not of the people, and the Disengagement falls into this--the political front--and not the military front. And that is a problem. Why is the Disengagement described as a product of a political and not a popular concensus?

Because it wasn't. But was there really a political concensus?

A year ago Aaron Lerner asked:

Is it "democratic" for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who brought his Likud party a landslide victory in an election campaign that focused on one issue --unilateral withdrawal - to suddenly embrace and implement the very position he explicitly and emphatically campaigned against without going back to the voters?

Is it "democratic" for Likud Party Chairman Ariel Sharon to commit to honor the outcome of a referendum of Likud Party members on unilateral withdrawal - and then ignore the vote when he lost the referendum by a landslide?

Is it "democratic" for Likud Party ministers Netanyahu, Livnat and others who openly say that they know that Sharon's disengagement plan is a terrible mistake that Israel will pay dearly for - but opt to vote for the plan out of personal interests?

Is it "democratic" for Prime Minister Sharon to fire ministers before the vote on the disengagement plan in order to insure the passage of the plan?

The Disengagement was the product of many things, but concensus was not one of them. This is true not only on the popular level, but even on the political level within the Likud the road was far more rocky than implied in Halevi's description. Forever the general, Sharon bulldozed what he saw as the right strategy regardless of the inconvenience of opposing opinion.

Democracy is not a unilateral system. Whether the plan was right or wrong, the Disengagement was carried out in such a was as to sidestep any possible opposition. The creation of Kadima seems like more of the same.

Sharon did not create concensus. He merely bulldozed through--or ignored--the opposition.

Update: Soccer Dad points out that in a post from last year Biur Chametz (Tearing for the purpose of mending?) that not only noted that "In his zeal to push forward the "disengagement" plan, it seems at times as if Sharon is going out of his way to tear Israeli society apart," and lists some of the reasons, but also suggests a reason of his own--namely that Sharon wanted to avoid withdrawing from the West Bank:

How do you withdraw from Gaza without leaving the clear impression that the natural next step is to withdraw from Judea and Samaria? Isn't that the greatest risk of disengagement - that it will naturally be perceived as phase one in a unilateral Israeli Plan of Phases?

The answer: You make the withdrawal from Gaza as painful as possible. You goad your opponents into radical acts of civil disobedience and refusal of military orders. You know some hotheads on the margins will even get violent. You plant - or at least tacitly support others who plant - phony accusations of assassination plots. You let the police preemptively board buses of protestors headed to a demonstration declared illegal. And so on and so on.

And you ask the Americans for a couple billion dollars in aid to finance the massive cost of redeployments, reconstruction and compensation. Let them feel the pain too.

And when, a year or two down the line, the Arabs or the Europeans or the Americans call on Israel to take the next logical step and pull out of Hebron, or central Samaria, you can point to the social devastation left in the wake of the Gaza "disengagement". Impossible, you say. Look what Gaza did to us. We can't take any more, and no government will dare even try.

Is that really Sharon's thinking? I hope so, since otherwise I can't conceive of a rational explanation for his behavior.

Will it work? No, not in the least. At most, it might give us a reprieve for no more than a decade.

I wrote a post last year quoting Hillel Halkin along similar lines:

They have shown us what it takes to move 8,000 Jewish settlers out of a far corner of the land of Israel having no great strategic value or Jewish historical significance. Does anyone care to imagine what it would take to move 60,000 or 70,000 settlers out the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, which sits smack in the middle of this country, scant kilometers from Jerusalem?

Just the physical logistics of it would be mind-boggling. Although the Gaza Strip was easily isolable, thousands of protesters have slipped through the army's cordon. Even with its security fence, this is not true of the West Bank. An attempted evacuation of settlements from it could easily result in tens of thousands of protesters flowing to any one of them. The entire Israeli army couldn't handle this, not even if reinforced by the navy and the air force - and if military insubordination has been relatively minor this summer, it could swell to malignant proportions in such a situation.

In a word, it's not going to happen. The settlers can wipe the tears from their eyes and start smiling. The Palestinians giddily celebrating our departure from Gaza might as well make it as big a bash as they can, because they won't have an opportunity for another one soon.

...A second disengagement from the West Bank is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future - and by the time the foreseeable future is gone, the only politician in Israel capable of carrying out such a step, Ariel Sharon, will be gone too.

Now we know that Sharon had us fooled on this score too, and even Halkin reconsidered the possibility of a second Disengagement.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sharon.

First Terrorist on the Moon?

With all the articles about Hamas launching Kassam rockets, I expect any day now to hear that they have successfully put a terrorist on the moon. Why is it that Israel "fires artillery" but Hamas "launches rockets"? Kassam rockets are also artillery, but how often do we hear about terrorists firing artillery into Israeli cities?

The Jerusalem Post had a very short piece on Friday:

Two Kassam rockets land near Kibbutz Carmia

Two Kassam rockets launched from the northern Gaza Strip on Friday morning landed near Kibbutz Carmia south of Ashkelon.

No one was wounded and no damage was incurred as a result of the incident, Israel Radio reported.

Even the Israeli Press has been calling these rockets instead of artillery. In this case, the rocket not only was 'launched' but also 'landed'--no mention of aliens coming out, but by the same token there is nothing in the short article to indicate that this was a terrorist attack and not a Palestinian version of NASA attempting to send a rocket into space.

The worst case of this is the Washington Post which wrote on January 1st:

Israel has meanwhile declared the northern tip of Gaza a buffer zone and subjected it to regular artillery fire in an attempt to stop the launching of rockets at nearby Israeli towns; yesterday two Palestinians were killed.

Two days of artillery after a warning is "regular artillery fire".
Years of artillery fire at Israeli cities amounts to "the launching of rockets at nearby Israeli towns"--"at" the towns, as if they are just being fired in their general direction.

Why can't the media just say that Hamas is firing artillery into Israel?

Technorati Tags: Israel