Peace in the Middle East?

The debate on Israel's Gaza campaign continues this morning with Charles Krauthammer's excellent piece at the Washington Post, "Moral Clarity in Gaza." Carl in Jerusalem responds with "Krauthammer on Moral Clarity," adding this:

Krauthammer succinctly states the moral clarity that emerges from examining Israel's conduct of the current war in Gaza and comparing it to the conduct of the 'Palestinians' ....

Krauthammer goes on to state the obvious: Israel wants peace. Hamas wants perpetual war. He's right about that.But Krauthammer wrongly describes the mistake Israel committed three years ago by leaving Gaza, and because of that, he risks encouraging decision makers in Jerusalem and Washington to make the same mistake again.

Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence - the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.

That's nonsense. Israel should never have withdrawn from Gaza in the first place. Every security assessment - without exception - in the summer of 2005 said that once Israel withdrew from Gaza, the rocket fire on Israel's Negev would increase. You see, the 'Palestinians' started firing rockets on the Negev from Gaza when they started the Oslo War in 2000. And they have never stopped.

Thursday night, Charles Johnson presented a couple of graphs of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into the Negev and noted the sharp increase in those rockets since Hamas threw out Fatah in the summer of 2007. But not all of those rockets and mortar shells in 2007 were fired after Fatah was thrown out. And there were actually more rockets fired in 2006 - the year after Israel left Gaza when Fatah was nominally in control - than there were in 2007.

Israel's mistake was leaving Gaza in the first place. Once Israel left, it could not enforce a no-tolerance policy on 'Palestinian' rockets and mortars. The launchers are too mobile. The terrorists - as Krauthammer notes - hide among the civilians and are more than happy to take them along to the 72 virgins. The only reason that Israel doesn't also have rockets and mortars raining down on the center of the country is that when the IDF went into Judea and Samaria's cities during 2002's Operation Defensive Shield, it stayed there. That's the lesson that should have been learned long before the expulsion from Gaza.

Krauthammer - like all of us - wants a 'sustainable and enduring cease fire.' Without IDF troops stationed in Gaza, that won't happen. Because it's not just Hamas that wants a perpetual war against Israel until the Jewish state no longer exists. It's the entire Arab and Muslim world.

I'm inclined to think that perpetual war is the most likely future prospects for Israel and the Middle East, although I'm intrigued by the history of diplomacy in the region. Egypt and Israel have been at peace since 1978. Jordan joined the coalitions of Arab states fighting the Jewish state, but has been a partner for peace since 1994.

Last night I read Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's review of recent books on the peace process at the New York Review. The authors are partisan, and unfair to the Bush administration's Middle East diplomacy, and the New York Review is leftist. Nevertheless, some of the conclusions are interesting and worth consideration:

In Israel, endemic governmental weakness and instability and deepening social fragmentation, combined with the spoiling capacity of small yet increasingly powerful settler constituencies, call into question the state's ability to achieve, let alone carry out, an agreement that would entail the uprooting of tens of thousands of West Bank settlers. The generation of Israeli founding fathers, perhaps, might have succeeded in carrying off such a withdrawal, though it says something that even they didn't try. Their successors, more factional chiefs than national leaders, are not so well equipped.

The graver problem today is on the Palestinian side. If one strips away the institutional veneer—Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, various secular political groupings, the Palestinian Authority—what is left is largely empty shells with neither an agreed-upon program nor recognized leadership. The national movement, once embodied by Fatah and Arafat, is adrift. From its vestiges, the Islamist movement Hamas has flourished and, amid the flurry of negotiations between Abbas and Olmert over a putative albeit wholly theoretical deal, it cannot have escaped notice that the more practical and meaningful negotiations have been between Israel and Hamas—over a cease-fire, for example. Still, the Islamist movement cannot, any more than Fatah, claim to represent the Palestinian people or to be empowered to negotiate on their behalf. The rift between the two organizations, most visibly manifested in the increasingly deep split between the West Bank and Gaza, makes a two-state solution harder to achieve. Israel long complained it had no Palestinian partner and, at the outset, the complaint had the feel of a pretext. Increasingly, it has the ring of truth.

Among Palestinians, moreover, the prize of statehood is losing its luster. The two-state solution today matters most to those who matter least, the political and economic elite whose positions, attained thanks to the malpractices of the Palestinian Authority, would be enhanced by acquiring a state. To many others, the dividends of such a solution—a state in Gaza and much of the West Bank—risk being outweighed by the sacrifices: forsaking any self-defense capacity, tolerating Israeli security intrusion, renouncing the refugees' right of return, and compromising on Jerusalem.

Arafat embraced the two-state solution and sold it to his people. It took him fifteen years—from 1973 to 1988—to turn it from an act of betrayal and high treason to what most of his people saw as the culmination of the Palestinian national movement. He did so with a militancy his successors lack and which seemed to both defy and negate the concessions such a solution entailed. He exhibited perpetual defiance, which was one of the many reasons why the US and Israel distrusted him even in the best of times, and why Palestinians continued to be drawn to him even at the worst of them. With his passing, it is hard to see who among his heirs can acquiesce in the necessary compromises and still pull off a solution.

When word recently leaked of a deal purportedly proposed by Olmert to Abbas in their one-on-one negotiations, the world got a glimpse of how little Israelis and Palestinians have begun to care. The proposal—a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with one-to-one territorial exchanges; a limited number of refugees coming into Israel; a Palestinian capital comprising the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; a special regime for the holy sites—was not ideal for either side. It was probably better for Palestinians than what was suggested at Camp David; arguably better for Israelis than what has been mooted in a series of unofficial agreements over the ensuing eight years. In earlier days such a plan would have generated immense interest and large political waves. It provoked neither. Familiarity has bred indifference. The two-state solution, it turns out, is endangered, not rescued, by being endlessly discussed.

Such changes in Israeli and Palestinian realities have taken place against the backdrop of deep alterations in the regional balance of power. Where traditional US allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia once set both the agenda and tone of Middle East diplomacy, they appear worn out and bereft of a cause other than preventing their own decline. Their energy seems to have been sapped and their regional authority diminished. On issue after issue—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Israel-Palestine—they have proved passive or, when active, feckless, unable to influence events or buttress their allies. Their close ties to Washington damage their credibility without being of much help to the US.

They are progressively upstaged by more dynamic players: those leading the charge against America's allies—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas—and those—Qatar and Turkey—seeking to mediate between the two. All these developments challenge a US strategy that relies exclusively on so-called "moderate" Arab states and leaders, which are losing steam, in order to counter "radical" Islamist states and movements, which are gaining it.

The image of President Obama unveiling his vision of an Israeli–Palestinian settlement to overjoyed Arab leaders and universal endorsement may not, under the circumstances, be quite so alluring. A peace plan that has grown tedious by virtue of repetition is unlikely to generate popular enthusiasm; its backing by fading Arab leaders is unlikely to give it a boost.

The new president enjoys an enormous, perhaps unprecedented reservoir of regional goodwill. Yet it is goodwill based on hope that Obama can break from past American conduct and style, not reinforce them. The surest way to diminish Obama's appeal to the region would be for him to present a plan with no real future in the company of leaders burdened by their past.

There's more at the link, and I'll have more in upcoming essays.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

American Power in 2009

Courtney, my young blogging buddy at GSGF, asked if I was going to write a New Year's post. Well, yes, and I might as well get around to it before the Rose Bowl starts. Otherwise, I'll be online all afternoon, and I want to leave this one on top until tomorrow.

I'm not one for resolutions. I need to lose some weight, and I'm going to work on that, primarily by blogging less and hiking more. My main concern for myself and my family this year, frankly, is economic. No big worries, actually. My job is fine, and my college so far has pledged not to lay off faculty. My wife's also very happy in her new position as an assistant store manager at a major retail outlet in the region. My kids are doing fine, although I do pledge to work harder at helping my youngest son with his learning. He's about a year behind where he should be in school and we're working with doctors and the school staff to pin down the challenges and move forward. No, my biggest worry is the housing market. I'm going to need to refinance at the end of this year. The loan's an adjustable, one of the easier ones to get a few years back when the market was still booming. We have a new home. My neighborhood's development was completed in 2005, and we moved in our current location in early 2006. I haven't checked the papers or talked with neighbors, but I'm pretty sure homes in our neighborhood are selling for about $100 to $150 thousand less than their selling prices, and that might be an underestimate. I'm guessing my mortgage is flat on equity or underwater. Lenders have pulled back, and who knows what things'll be like when they ask for that appraisal? I don't like to think about it because I get anxiety attacks. I will deal with it at the appropriate time. It's not an emergency or anything. But when the loan payments balloon I don't know if we'll afford them and we'll be deciding what to do at that time, although I'm confident that God's goodness will help me though any difficulties. One reason I don't blog about the housing market that much is because I'm in the thick of the difficulties and I wish some things had turned out differently.

So, with that, let me turn to what I want to do this year with my blog, American Power. I thought about doing some big roundup of favorite blogs or favorite blog posts I'd written in 2008. Either way something like that was going to take a lot of work. Just as I was thinking about it, I came across this awesome post at "This Ain't Hell, But You Can See it From Here." Jonn Lilyea, the author, makes a number of insightful observations about blogging, and I especially liked this passage on personal hopes for readership, and the phenomenal community-building that blogging's all about:

We’ve been lucky with traffic, because some of the finest bloggers on the web have cut us a break and sent traffic our way with little prodding. And I’ve got a lot of great readers and commenters who’ve been loyal for months now.

It always amazes me when I’m cruising the internet looking for stuff to write about, I’ll come upon a blog that I’ve never heard of and I’ll see This Ain’t Hell tucked in among some of the big names in the blog roll. It’s so gratifying.

I used to link to every blog that linked to us, but it’s impossible to keep up with everyone these days, but I’ve never turned down anyone who asked for a link - which is obvious by the length of my blogroll. I also used to read every blog in the blog roll everyday - that has become impossible, too. But I do my best to keep up.

If you check the post you'll find one of the most extensive roundups of appreciations and kudos available. I left a comment and admitted that this was the New Year's post I was hoping to write. It's a real beauty.

I too have too many bloggers whom I admire and appreciate. Some of them are professionals or top conserservatives in the right-blogosphere. Jonn at This Ain't Hell has another neat bit that's relevant:

I tried so long to get a link from Blackfive and finally scored on National Airborne Day. Since then I’ve tossed brews back with Matt and Uncle Jimbo and met Laughing Wolf at a barbeque.

What's great about the post is it's humility. I think most serious bloggers - folks who write well and wish to see their essays gain wider exposure - also hope to be seen and linked by some of the top bloggers on the web. Jonn notes also that he finally got a link from Hot Air, for example, and that had to be cool.

I've also been lucky at American Power. I can't name all the top bloggers who have thrown me a link, and I've had quite a few, thankfully. Probably the most generous is Jeff and his co-bloggers at Protein Wisdom. Those guys write well, especially Jeff, and they send a lot of traffic. Tom McGuire linked once and I was astounded at the guy's traffic. People were clicking that link for days. The Other McCain's a generous linker, and last week he sent a lot of traffic my way when his post got picked up at Instapundit (not quite an "Instalanche" on my side, but cool anyway). There may be a few other great bloggers who've sent readers may way who I'm omitting (Tigerhawk sent me a lot of traffic over Thanksgiving weekend, now that I think about it). It's the ones who haven't that confound me. For the life of me, Jules Crittenden, who's always a great read and a font of moral clarity, just won't deign to associate with American Power. I sent him an e-mail with a link yesterday, and that's that. He's into the blogging hierarchy thing. He loves to thank all the big bloggers who send him links, and blows off those down at the lower 9th tier as infinitesimal. I also sent Pamela Geller a link the other day, but I misspelled her name at my post and she let me know that THAT WAS A BIG BLOGGING SOCIAL FAUX PAS. I guess Atlas Shrugs is off the list of American Power benefactors!

In any case, I'm not too serious about it. I think I get more links from the big lefty blogs that I piss off, especially Lawyers, Guns and Money. The hits to my stat counter from the progressives are nice, although I could do without the threats and intimidation in the comment threads.

Anyway, I mostly just have fun getting my ideas out there and building community with regular folks. I don't blog for fame or income (and I don't reallly understand those blog "blegs" for money you see sometimes, which is basically online panhandling). I've built up a whole bunch of friends online who are my best buddies, literally. I can't mention them all, of course, as I'd be here all day. I correspond with Jan at Vinegar and Honey quite a bit. We share our outrages with each other and generate ideas for blog posts. Courtney checks in a lot with reports on balancing the demands of college, home life, and blogging. If I'm forgetting any other regular visitors, just sent me an e-mail and I'll add your link to this post.

Now, as far as what I'm going to do with this blog going forward? Well, I haven't thought much about it. Things will pretty much be the way they are. Readers might have noticed that I like to write in depth on some of the hottest news stories of the day, especially as those events have implications on politics, cultural change, and national security. The gay marriage debate and the Mumbai massacre are the earlier examples, and the current ongoing Israel campaign in Gaza being this week's example. This is when I do my best blogging. I know there's a decline in the variety of blog posts, but the quality of the analysis goes up, as the constant posting on topic is recursive and ends up being like a research topic. Plus, I'm able to get a lot of outrage off my chest and piss off the secular progressives who are intent to destroy this nation.

In fact, that's what I've pretty much always done. While the hardcore progressives are in fact a small percentage of the American electorate, their influence is magnified by their representation in the media, the transnational corporate sector, and in the schools, from K-12 all the way to the elite universities. One of the biggest calamities of Barack Obama's election is that he personally legitmates the secular progressive agenda by his background, ideology, and training (and he successfully suppressed his radicalism during the campaign and has so far abandoned an outwardly aggressive progressivism amid the realities of transitioning to goverment in a center-right polity).

So that's what readers can expect in 2009. This blog, American Power, is a voice of moral clarity. Note though, please, that I am a humble and very imperfect man. I strive to be as caring and trusting as I can be, and I'm working on it. Last year I begain attending church again for the first time in decades. I don't go as often as I like, but it's fulfilling to me to be around people with strong moral values and a respect for traditionalism in family and culture. We are losing this as a society. Not religion, of course, but a true practicing Christianity that take spirtual values as meaningful and life-driving - and I mean as a code by which to live ethically and good.

On the other hand, I'm not one to "turn the other cheek," to let ideological bygones be bygones. I'll fight for my principles in blogging battles, as well as in the campus debates the occassionally erupt at my school - because the views I represent need to be expressed and defended. If I make people uncomfortable, that's just the way it's going to have to be. If I lose readers or traffic because I'm "too serious," well, I have no apologies. One of the things that drives me buggy about a lot of big academic bloggers is their refusal to take moral stands. Daniel Drezner's the worst. A Jewish scholar of international relations, I've rarely seen him get truly outraged at the leftist nihilism and pro-Palestinian Israel-bashing in the academy and online. Perhaps I've missed something at his blog, but I got tired of it, of his refusal as a "blogademic" to ruffle any feathers among the scholarly mandarin-gatekeepers at the top peer-reviewed journals.

In any case, I'm rambling and the Rose Bowl's starting.

Let me close by sending folks over to Paula in Israel, who writes one of the most vitally interesting blogs I've seen in a while. Also, if you're a regular commenter or visitor here who doesn't blog, what are you waiting for? Start a blog at Blogger (for free) and I'll give you a huge shout-out at American Power!

Happy New Year!

Foreign Affairs: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington"

Foreign Affairs has made available the late Samuel Huntington's essays at the magazine: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington":

To commemorate the passing of Samuel P. Huntington, the preeminent political scientist of the second half of the twentieth century, Foreign Affairs has made available this selection of writings by and about him from our pages.

The compendium includes one of my favorites, which I read years ago as an undergraduate, "The U.S. - Decline or Renewal?" The article's powerfully relevant today, with all the fashionable talk of an impending American decline amid our current economic troubles.

I wrote on Huntington's death last Saturday, before Fouad Ajami's commemoration appeared at the Wall Street Journal. Ajami offers an excellent summary of Huntington's major themes, especially Huntington's most important article in the last couple of decades, "The Clash of Civilizations?"

What I found most interesting in Ajami's piece was his personal reflections on Huntington, and the latter's fading scholarly model as the traditionalist political scientist:

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington's final years.

Exposing the Progressive Left’s Revolutionary Agenda

I've been reading Maggie's Farm a bit this past week, and Bird Dog's been reposting some of his older essays during his vacation blogging downtime (this has been an interesting refresher on Antonio Gramsci).

He's got another one up today, "Gramsci Week, #4: "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism." Bird Dog's drawing on the writing of Linda Kimball, who I've not come across before. Here's the introduction to her essay on the New Left, also quoted a Bird Dog's:

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. “The Sixties are dead,” wrote columnist George Will (Slamming the Doors, Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace’ activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay’ rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of subversive organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

I followed some of Kimball's references at her essay. She's a talented writer with a powerful conservative voice. Her conclusion here sums up the driving seniment behind much of my blogging:

It is said that courage is the first of the virtues because without it fear will paralyze man, thus keeping him from acting upon his moral convictions and speaking truth. Thus bringing about a general state of paralyzing fear, apathy, and submission—the chains of tyranny—is the purpose behind psychopolitical cultural terrorism, for the communist Left’s revolutionary agenda must, at all costs, be clothed in darkness.

The antidote is courage and the light of truth. If we are to win this cultural war and reclaim and rebuild America so our children and their children’s children can live in a ‘Shining City on the Hill’ where liberty, families, opportunity, free markets, and decency flourish, we must muster the courage to fearlessly expose the communist Left’s revolutionary agenda to the Light of Truth. Truth and the courage to speak it will set us free.

Progressive Blogs and Zionist Concern Trolls

Readers should take a look at the intra-ideological debate taking place among progressive bloggers on the question of Israel and the campaign in Gaza.

Philip Munger has a post at Oxdown Gazette that addresses the apparently bitter online battles between hardline pro-Palestian progressives and apparently "moderate" pro-Israel leftists. I'm struck by the language Munger uses to describe backers of Israel: "Zionist concern trolls and flamers." The way Munger describes thing, you'd think that bloggers and commenters at Daily Kos had a side gig at Contentions. Recall, of course, that Daily Kos is a blog that hosts the most rabid anti-Semitism online, for example, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel," which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

Wading through the comments at Munger's peace one finds a link to a Jane Hamsher Firedoglake essay on the progressive/moderate debate, evincing classic nihilist form, "The Third Rail of “Israel” Cools in the Blogosphere":

For years, the subject of Israel has been the biggest third rail subject we have to deal with. Any time we wanted to mention Israel in a post we had to alert the mods to strap on their hazmat suits, because the comments section would invariably turn into a shitstorm. Any criticism of Israel was greeted with catcalls of anti-semitism, which would inevitably draw out the anti-semites. The next thing you know, the mods are tearing their hair out and Bill O'Reilly is calling you a Nazi.

It was extraordinarily difficult to provide a place for free speech and open discussion and yet police racism and hate speech. Most people concluded (quite rightly) that the conditions were not right for a mature discussion of the subject, and just avoided it.

But as the current crisis unfolds in Gaza, all that seems to have reversed itself. Although a lot of bloggers are still obviously gun shy, it looks like readers are ready to take it on, and they are doing so without letting the conversation devolve into an endless flame war. I read closely the comments section of Gregg Mitchell's top-rated Kos diary on the diversity of opinion about the Gaza situation within the Israeli press, which commenters reflected in their own disparate opinions. But despite the attempts of a couple of trolls to derail the conversation, it remained remarkably civil.

A series of diaries on the subject of Gaza subsequently made their way onto the recommended list, some critical of Israel's actions and others in support. But one thing is becoming clear - the third rail is cooling off.

Opinions will differ as to why this is happening, and Obama's November victory certainly sets the stage - people really are eager for change. But I would attribute this turn of events to three things ...

Before I discuss Hamsher's "three things," note how her mention of Obama's victory confirms a point I've made for months: The hard-left sees in the Obama administration the wedge to impose its radical secular-progressive on the rest of society. Lord knows they've made great headway. Anyway, it's worth citing Hamsher's additional discussion. She mentions the liberal Jewish lobbying group "J Street" as a new source of "peace" dialog on Israel, alhtough Hamsher's second and third points are really combined huzzahs for Joe Klein, the Jewish antiwar mouthpiece of the journalistic left:

2) Joe Klein: The importance of what Joe Klein did in the face of intimidation tactics from the extreme right cannot be overstated. When Jennifer Rubin of Commentary Magazine called Klein an "anti-semite" for criticizing Israel and the ADL piled on and condemned him, it was pretty much just standard operating procedure for them -- tactics that had silenced many critics before. But Klein was totally (and appropriately) enraged by this kind of thuggery, and fought back publicly on the pages of Time.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

Klein really became the first person in a venue as establishment-serving as Time Magazine to explicitly criticize neocons for their Israel-centric fixations and, much more importantly, for their disgusting exploitation of "anti-semitism" accusations against anyone and everyone who disagrees with their views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, on the Middle East.

Having someone like Klein, in a place like Time, make those arguments without punishment is highly threatening to the neocons' ability to continue to intimidate people away from expressing divergent views by wielding "anti-semitism" accusations. And they know that it is threatening, which is why, once Klein began doing it, they engaged in a full-court swarm to attack and demonize Klein and even insinuate that he should and would be fired for his transgressions on the topic of neocons and Israel.

I got a front row seat to the battle at a BBC dinner in New York with Commentary Magazine's John Podhoretz and Klein:

No sooner had the dinner begun than the two were screaming at each other over the table. "You're a shithead! You're a shithead!" screamed The Pod. "Why don't you just call me an antisemite? That's what you do!" retorted Klein.

Klein never backed down, and he used his perch at Time to expose the intimidation racket they were running, marginalizing them as right-wing extremists. I applauded him at the time, and continue to think that he made a tremendous contribution to the evolution of the conversation around Israel.

3) Leadership: What Klein did to Commentary Magazine and the ADL, Glenn Greenwald has done to Marty Peretz and the neocon propaganda organ he runs at The New Republic. Likewise Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Spencer Ackerman, Paul Rosenberg, Siun, Ian Welsh and Stirling Newberry have done a tremendous job of stepping outside the "usual suspect" sources and taking advantage of a new freedom to explore the subject of Israel from a multiplicity of viewpoints with intelligence and integrity.

Readers may have noticed how Hamsher rounds up the usual rogue's gallery of nihilist leftists and persistently diabolical Israel-bashers (on this, see Noah Pollak's related essay, "The Juicebox Mafia on Gaza").

I rarely use "anti-Semitic" to describe these folks. It almost goes without saying when many of their posts mount the most disgusting demonizations of the government and people of Israel. But it's the larger point people should keep in mind. As I've noted before, the health and preservation of the state of Israel is an EKG on the life of Western civilization. If and when pro-Palestinian "peace" activists prevail in their endless campaign of death and destruction of the Jewish state the rest of the traditional international community can kiss the fight for decency, light, and reason goodbye. Goodness will have been enveloped by the forces of nihilist evil. International postmodernism and the spread of the transnational secular-collectivist state won't be far behind.

This is why I blog. Tune-in here throughout 2009 for updates on the hard-left's campaign of endless recriminations against "Zionist concern trolls" and the normal folks who otherwise want to cherish and preserve the culture and values of modernity.

Geert Wilders: Front Page Magazine's Man of the Year

Geert Wilders has been named Front Page Magazine's Man of the Year:

It’s a safe bet that Geert Wilders won’t be Time magazine’s Man of the Year any time soon. If anything, the unusually coiffed Dutch MP is a favorite hate figure of the Western media, which has spent years vilifying him as a “reactionary,” a “particularly dangerous type of demagogue,” a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.” Wilders would almost certainly plead guilty to the last charge, and with ample reason. His tireless campaign to sound the alarm about the growing threat of Islamic radicalism in the West has turned him into a target of Islamic jihadists and the object of untold assassination plots. A 2006 death threat, one of hundreds he’s received, declared that his “infidel blood will flow freely on cursed Dutch streets.” Al-Qaeda has specifically singled him out for slaughter.

Against this menacing background, it would have been no failing in his character if Wilders had decided that the price of speaking out about Islamic fundamentalism was too high; others in his prominent position would have reached just that conclusion. Instead, Wilders has persevered. Braving daily death threats and sacrificing the security that his critics take for granted, he has opted for the often-thankless task of saving Western civilization from its Islamist discontents – beginning with the valuable reminder that the demands of Islamic zealots are not only not congruent with Western values but are, in fact, in direct conflict with them. For his impressive personal courage, his steadfast political commitment, and his refreshing disdain for the suffocating pieties of political correctness, Geert Wilders is Front Page Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2008.

The steep risks involved in Wilders’s anti-Islamist campaign are tragically illustrated by the fates of two of his countrymen. Pim Fortuyn, the popular Dutch politician who warned against the Islamisation of Dutch society and railed against the “backwardness” of certain Islamic traditions, was gunned down by a crazed animal-rights activist in 2002. His killer later claimed that he had shot Fortuyn in order to defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.

Next on the hit list was Dutch provocateur and documentarian Theo Van Gogh. In 2004, Van Gogh was gruesomely murdered in Amsterdam by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born Islamist who judged Van Gogh’s film on the mistreatment of women in Islam, Submission, to be a crime deserving of death. To Van Gogh’s butchered body, Bouyeri pinned a list of “infidels” who “deserved to be slaughtered.” Among the names singled out for execution was Geert Wilders.

The threats were all too real. Shortly after Van Gogh’s murder, Dutch authorities discovered an Islamist network with advanced plans to kill Wilders, and an internet video surfaced promising 72 virgins to anyone who carried out the deed. As police investigated, Wilders was forced into 24-hour protection, traveling from safe house to safe house to avoid his pursuers. Even today he is never without dark-suited bodyguards by his side. “There’s no freedom, no privacy,” Wilders says. “If I said I was not afraid, I would be lying.”

There's lots more at the link. I like this line from the conclusion:

Geert Wilders has made all the right enemies. At a time when many counsel accommodation of Islamist demands, Wilders remains defiant. In an era of civilizational self-loathing, he defends the West without apology. Despite the threats to his life, he refuses to be silenced. For all this, Wilders deserves the praise of many – including the many in the West who scorn his name.

I wrote earlier on Wilders' interview at the Wall Street Journal. See, "Mumbai: India's 9/11."

Bush Won Legal Fights in War on Terror

President Bush prevailed on most of the domestic legal and political battles over the administration's policies on the war on terrorism following September 11, 2001. The Los Angeles Times reports:

George W. Bush will end his presidency in retreat, forced to compromise on several fronts. Free-market economics have given way to massive government bailouts, and an assertive, unilateral foreign policy has yielded to one more attuned to world opinion. But in his defense of the war on terrorism, Bush has succeeded in beating back nearly all legal challenges -- including those to some of his most controversial policies.

Among them are a domestic surveillance program to intercept international phone calls, the rounding up of Muslim men for questioning after the Sept. 11 attacks, the holding of suspects in military custody in this country without filing charges, harsh interrogations -- some have called it torture -- of suspects arrested abroad, and the detention of foreign captives at a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Because of the administration's successful defense of such policies, they not only will be a part of Bush's legacy but will be around for his successors. Even if Barack Obama rejects or sharply modifies Bush's positions, the precedents will remain for future chief executives.

Soon after Sept. 11, Bush said that as commander in chief he had the "inherent" power to act boldly in the nation's defense, regardless of whether Congress or the courts agreed.

His claim has been much criticized. It also has not been accepted by Congress or endorsed by the Supreme Court. The justices have said the president must act according to the law, not in spite of it.

Nonetheless, Bush's anti-terrorism policies have not been blocked by the courts or Congress. When the Supreme Court struck down Bush's use of special military trials at Guantanamo on grounds that he had no legal basis for creating them, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act to authorize the trials.

When critics claimed the National Security Agency was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting calls without a warrant, Congress passed a law to authorize such wiretapping. The same measure also granted legal immunity to telephone companies that had cooperated with the administration.

Bush's tenure has been particularly frustrating for civil libertarians. They had believed that when the government violated the Constitution, someone could go to court and challenge it. But it's not clear that truism is still true.

Bush's lawyers have succeeded not by proving the constitutionality of the policies but by using procedural barriers to prevent lawsuits from going forward.

When the American Civil Liberties Union sued over the warrantless wiretapping, Bush's lawyers said the plaintiffs had no standing because they could not prove that their phones had been tapped. The government also refused to answer questions about whether the plaintiffs had been tapped, pleading national security.

When civil libertarians sued on behalf of men who said they had been wrongly abducted and tortured by the CIA, Bush's lawyers argued that the cases involved "state secrets." The courts agreed and dismissed the lawsuits.

"It has been a sad story," said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU lawyer. "The government has thrown up roadblocks. . . . We have never gotten judges to rule whether their acts have violated the Constitution or whether torture is unconstitutional."

I say good for the administration!

See also my recent essays on the administration's counterterror policies, "Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again," and "Lawfare" and Bush Administration War Crimes Trials."

Photo Credit: "The military prison at Guantanamo may be the exception to Bush’s string of legal successes. The Supreme Court struck down his policies regarding the holding and trying of prisoners there. But the administration has resisted changes," Los Angeles Times.

Morally Clueless? Megan McArdle on Israel-Palestine

Megan McArdle's the economics blogger at the Atlantic. She's usually very sharp. Today, though, she's faltering. We see this in her essay, "The Problem With Israel-Palestine Blogging," where the fatal flaw of her libertarian (and apparently amoral) epistemology is revealed:

Everyone engaged in it is interested in proving that one side is righter than the other. Since no action in the region has occurred without plausible provocation for 4,000 years or so, this requires constantly shifting the metrics by which you measure whichever side you happen to favor. Point out that Israel is killing a lot of civilians and you are told that they had to do something in response to the Hamas rockets. Point out that practically, the response they chose has absolutely no strategic or tactical benefit, and a huge potential downside, and you are castigated for your lack of moral outrage about Hamas's attacks on civilians. Either Israel is doing this because it hopes to gain something, in which case the whole thing is hopelessly ass-backwards - they are strengthening Hamas and worsening their international political position - or it thinks that it's okay to kill boatloads of civilians purely for revenge against Hamas; revenge for attacks that have so far killed and injured almost no one. This rather undercuts the argument of moral superiority, because guess what? That's what Hamas thinks it's doing.

On the other side, there's a tendency to forget, or forget to mention, that whatever the provocation, a plurality-to-majority of Palestinians constantly and actively wish to kill large numbers of Israelis purely for revenge. Gaza wants to be at war with Israel, and then hide behind the protections of not-quite-war, because they haven't the foggiest hope of winning anything like a real war.

I'm of Northern Irish descent, and I grew up in New York City in a mostly Jewish high school, and so as you can imagine, I've heard all the arguments about who's really to blame about a zillion times. And all I get out of it in the end is that the whole thing makes me sick and sad. I don't see any untainted victims. I see a bunch of people who have been stomped on by history beating up each other in revenge for past wrongs that can't be righted, lashing out whenever they think they can get away with it without losing the foreign funding that allows them to continue the fun. And I don't ever blog about it because one is not allowed to have an opinion on the matter - no matter what I say, I'll be excusing terrorism or, irrelevantly, the holocaust, or shilling for western imperialism.

The saddest, truest thing that I've ever heard about the conflict is a friend who said that it seems to him like a stable equilibrium. In that spirit, I'm turning comments off on this post. Happy New Year.

After all of this, McArdle suggests that it's "sad" there's a "stable equlibrium." Why would one who adopts a position of moral equivalence be "sad" if the Middle East balance of power is at a "stable equilibrium"? Considering that materially Israel is thousands of times more powerful than Hamas and the rump-Palestian Authority, such parity - if demonstrated as objectively true - should be seen as a disaster for Israel's survival as a sovereign state and a boon to those who see Palestinian terrorists as morally equal.

Not only that, McArdle's not very good at posing hypotheticals. If she or anyone she knows has actually said that Israel's response "has absolutely no strategic or tactical benefit, and a huge potential downside," then frankly she has no business talking about Middle East international politics (or she needs to spend some time with Zbigniew Brzezinski). Israel planned, for two years, last weekend's airstrikes down to the finest detail. The overwhelming number of those killed were Hamas terrorists, and the civilian lives would have been spared had not Palestinian rocket depots been set up within civilian residential lodgings. The airstrikes and likely ground incursion have restored strategic confidence to the Israelis, and breaking the Hamas resistance may well be key to success on West Bank diplomacy.

But the "4,000 years" thing is particularly a killer. Conflict in the Middle East - while driven fundamentally by religion - is existentially about national sovereignty, and that systemic element is the basis for this crisis of states and national peoples, which dates back roughly 100 years to, say, the Balfour Declaration. There really was no "Palestianian" people at that times. Bedouin and nomadic peoples of Arab extraction would be the most accurate ethnic designation. The push for a true Palestinian "nation" is a 20th century phenomenon. Prior to this, the Ottoman empire maintained authority across the region, and the grand muftis and Arab grandees enjoyed power, prestige, and privilege under a what was essentially an imperial Islamic caliphate. As for "plausible provocations," since 1948 - when Israel was established with the blessings and legitimacy of international law, embodied by the will of the United Nations, and out of the existential bleakness of the European Shoah - Israel has been in a constant state of siege, fighting at least a half-a-dozen wars and with roughly a third of the nations of the world calling essentially for the elimination of the Jewish state in Eretz Israel.

Much has been written this last few days on Israel's "disproportionate" response. Readers can check my blogging tags below for some of my earlier posts. Here I'm simply going to let Melanie Phillips have the (next to the) last word, drawing on her powerful essay from earlier this year, "This Blog And (Some of) Its Readers":

I have noticed a persistent complaint by some readers posting comments on my blog entries which I think requires some comment and clarification ... They seem to believe that it is wrong for me to write about Israel as often as I do ... Some of these readers, as is painfully obvious from their comments, simply have a big problem with Jews – at least, Jews who identify with and defend the Jewish people. But others, whose instincts may be rather more decent, seem to be labouring under one or two misapprehensions. So let me make a number of things clear ....

... the reason why Israel figures so heavily in any discussion about the predicaments of our era is that Israel is the defining moral issue of our time. It is Israel, and the century-old existential onslaught against the Jewish people in its ancient homeland, which stands at the very centre of the titanic fight by truth against lies, fact against propaganda, freedom against totalitarianism, liberty against slavery, justice against injustice and reason against irrationality in which the entire free world is currently engaged. Israel is the quintessential canary in the mine. It is the front-line in the defence of the free world. If it goes down, the rest of us will go down. Those who are on the wrong side of the Israel issue are on the wrong side in the great struggle for civilisation against barbarism. That is why I return to it again and again.

I would only add that it seems chauvinistic and ethnically-insulting for McArdle to suggest that growing up "in New York City in a mostly Jewish high school" gives her some kind of superior insight to Israel's predicament. Having said that, McArdle's nevertheless smart to close comments on her post. Israel-Palestine's the hottest of the international hot-button issues, and Lord knows it brings out the nastiest of the fever-swamp nasties.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

"Lawfare" and Bush Administration War Crimes Trials

In my essay, "Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again," I suggested that the radical left will "ratchet-up its push for war crimes prosecutions in the weeks ahead."

The funny thing about it, though, is that even the most die-hard foes of the administration's war on terror admit that criminal prosecutions of Bush administation officials are a pipe dream. The most recent essay conceding the point is David Cole's new piece at the New York Review, "What to Do About the Torturers?" Cole reviews Philippe Sands', Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, praisng the book as "the most unusual and deeply revealing take on the subject."

What makes Sands special? It turns out that Sands, a British attorney, professor of law, and long-time anti-American antagonist, is apparently one of the best able to make the case for the primacy of international human rights over state power and sovereignty. For all that, and despite the "deeply revealing take" on the Bush administration's alleged criminalilty, Cole at most is left with recommendations for "an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate" to "assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies."

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's not going to be enough for the left's America-bashers who want President Bush executed at the Hague.

Well, there's more on all of this in the news today, with the Wall Street Journal's report, "Gonzales Defends Role in Antiterror Policies." Of course, all the lefty bloggers at Memeorandum are up in arms about it, for example, Think Progress, TPMMuckraker, Spencer Ackerman, Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, Law Blog, Paul Krugman, Steve Benen, and Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Alberto Gonzales is the left's prime candidate for "torture trials," right up there with the president, Vice-President Dick Cheny, and former Justice Department attorney John Yoo, to name just a few. But trials aren't going to happen. Leftists are simply foaming at the mouth, and they'll be in another uproar when the Barack Obama administration turns the page on the whole affair sometime next year. Robert Stacy McCain summed things up on this recently:

Frankly, I don't even give a damn. If I turned on the TV sometime next year to see Paul Wolfowitz in the dock at the Hague, I'd shrug in mute acceptance, and if I blogged about it, would do so in an insouciant way.

Still, even if the political pressure in the U.S. for war crimes prosecutions trails off, the global human rights (and anti-American) constituency won't let such things go. Since the 1990s, when the increased globalization of legal rules resulted in the establishment of the International Criminal Court, Augusto Pinochet's arrest, trial, and attempted extradition in 1998, calls for war crimes prosecutions against Henry Kissinger, and other efforts to bring "tyrants to justice," global left activism has pushed relentlessly for universal jurisdiction, and the push for torture trials against the "evil BushCo regime" will linger interminably at the fringes of global left activism.

So let me leave readers with a nice response to all of this from Michael Chertoff, the administration's Secretary of Homeland Security, in his essay at Foreign Affairs, "The Responsibility to Contain: Protecting Sovereignty Under International Law."

Chertoff makes a powerful case for the expansion of international law and justice grounded in a legal doctrine of "a consent-based model of national sovereignty." That is, justice in international law will become increasing irrelevant in a world of great-power sovereign states unless international legal regimes become embedded in robust norms of national consent. Chertoff suggests that the global left's "lawfare" against the United States is in fact the biggest impediment to the longstanding global legal order arising out of the ashes of the World War II. In the face of constant attacks on American policy and sovereignty, the U.S. has been increasingly encouraged to reject wholesale the entire appartus of international law. Such an outcome, of course, would deprive the world of the first-mover hegemon that's been at the center of mulitlateral institution-building and the cooperative regimes underwriting world order.

Chertoff's discussion of the left's push for universal jurisdiction is particularly good, and worth quoting at length:

The typical strategy of international legal activists today is to challenge the idea of national sovereignty. This is a revolutionary tactic, particularly because sovereignty has played an important role in the development of the international system for over three centuries. Under the Westphalian model of sovereignty - which dates back to 1648 - an independent state is not subject to external control over its internal affairs without its consent ....

Imposing international legal mandates on a nation without its consent undermines this traditional concept of sovereignty and conflicts with the democratic will. For this reason, international law has often been based on the consent of nations by way of treaties, in which nations voluntarily agree to abide by certain rules, or through customary international law, which infers tacit consent through widespread state practice. To be sure, not all sources of international law are explicitly based on sovereign consent. So-called peremptory norms, or jus cogens norms, are rules -- such as those forbidding slavery or genocide - considered to be so deeply embedded in international law that they bind all nations, even absent national consent.

An international legal framework founded on a consent-based model of sovereignty is advantageous for several reasons. By requiring the explicit or implicit consent of nations before a particular international standard binds them, this approach gains the legitimacy that democratic legal traditions and processes provide. Consent-based international law also allows states to protect their own critical interests by bargaining for or withholding consent from certain provisions of a treaty. Finally, grounding international law in consent acknowledges national differences in culture and legal philosophy by ensuring that international rules fit within an international consensus - one shared by real governments, not merely endorsed by intellectual elites.

Academics, lawyers, and judges who challenge the continued relevance of consent in international law often treat "sovereignty" as a pejorative term or an antiquated concept. Many of these critics depart from the traditional view of international law as consisting primarily of reciprocal obligations among nations. For example, some have argued in particular cases that international agreements automatically confer legal rights on individuals that may be enforced directly without state support or even against the laws of the individuals' own countries. And some further argue that international law is not limited to what is agreed on by nations in treaties or accepted through widespread practice; they claim it also encompasses a set of standards based on highly general and "evolving" universal principles.

For example, the international legal scholar Philippe Sands argues that "to claim that states are as sovereign today as they were fifty years ago is to ignore reality." Sands describes international law as a set of obligations that "take on a logic and a life of their own" and that "do not stay within the neat boundaries that states thought they were creating when they were negotiated." The late Harvard Law School professor Louis Sohn went even further in unmooring international law from consent, positing, "States really never make international law on the subject of human rights. It is made by the people that care; the professors, the writers of textbooks and casebooks, and the authors of articles in leading international law journals." Even the conservative commentator Robert Kagan has called on U.S. policymakers to "welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty," arguing that the United States "has little to fear and much to gain in a world of expanding laws and norms based on liberal ideals and designed to protect them."

Of course, not all who seek to diminish the role of sovereignty in the development of international law are so explicit. International legal jurists and scholars often purport to recognize sovereign consent as the foundation of international obligations but then proceed to "identify" and apply norms or principles of customary international law that are not evidenced by actual state practice. For example, a court may proclaim that there is a rule that prohibits particular government actions without considering whether most nations indeed adhere to that rule. Alarmingly, some jurists rely for support on academics and commentators who do not merely catalog international law but rather seek to influence its development according to their own policy preferences. It makes no practical difference that these jurists may pay lip service to the importance of sovereignty; the effect of their efforts is to undermine nations' prerogative to choose their own laws.

Whether invoked explicitly or implicitly, the most common justifications for rejecting sovereign consent as the foundation of international law are flawed. One argument is that the growing global activity among nations creates the need for more comprehensive systems of international law to govern global conduct. This need, however, does not justify eliminating sovereign consent as the basis for imposing international obligations. Indeed, requiring the consent of nations has not prevented the international community from addressing a host of substantive issues, ranging from trade to arms control to endangered species protection. Moreover, individuals still principally identify themselves as part of a particular national community and resist decisions imposed on them by foreign actors and institutions without their consent. A visible case in point was the rejection of the European Constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the more recent rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by voters in Ireland in 2008.

Another objection to sovereign consent holds that all humans possess certain fundamental rights that cannot be denied, even by the consent of the majority. But the recognition of fundamental human rights raises the harder and more particular question of how those rights should be defined and applied, and by whom. Bodies such as the United Nations include member states that often do not share a common position and whose values often clash with those of the United States and other democratic states. For example, the UN Human Rights Council has passed resolutions urging states to adopt laws combating the "defamation of religions," which would prohibit the type of open discussion about religious and political matters that is protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The UN has also held a conference to examine gun-control provisions, ones that would be at odds with the Second Amendment. And the UN recently passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on capital punishment with "a view to abolishing the death penalty," even though the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld it. Ironically, many of the states supporting such initiatives have a poor record when it comes to respecting the rights of their own citizens.

In short, absent an express treaty or convention, giving international bodies the power to decide what are new and expanded fundamental rights would allow countries to advance nationalist or bloc political agendas under the guise of human rights. It would also empower an often self-perpetuating international legal establishment - courts, advocates, academics, and activists - to "discover" international human rights by relying selectively on transnational agreements that may express only regional consensus or by drawing on philosophical or academic texts that reflect particular intellectual fashions. Such amorphous sources provide questionable grounds for mandatory international obligations.

The remainder of the article sets forth a model of consent-based international law. Chertoff focuses on three core principles of a regime of "reciprocal responsiblity" in international law and protection against emergent threats: nonsubordination of actor's sovereign rights, collaborative security in generally non-controversial international regimes (e.g., global trade and finance), and reciprocal sovereignty.

It's a great piece of policy writing, grounded in realism and respect for the sovereign rights of peoples in democratically-legitimated contitutional regimes, much unlike that wild unhinged rants of the "lawfare" advocates of the global left.

Jules Crittenden, Non-Participating Weblog Finalist

A number of bloggers have noted that they've been nominated as finalists in the 2008 Weblog Awards. I didn't make the cut, and actually, I wondered why. I had a great year blogging, and I'm currently ranked 94 in Wikio's December "top blog" rankings. I don't keep track of these things, in any case, and I probably would have had to nominate myself and then put up a bunch of posts asking readers to vote for me. I'm not really into all of that. Besides, I figured these contests are insiders' popularity gigs, probably not worth the time to an academic blog geek like me.

Well, it turns out Jules Crittenden proved me right. He notes that the Weblog Awards are corrupt in his post, "Best Individual Blog 2008 Finalist":

Very flattering, and thanks are in order to those of you who kindly nominated this site. However ...

... since losing to a site several years ago (that got a major assist from the DU and various GLBT sites, which is fine, but) that did not in fact meet the contest criteria of “new blog,” having existed six months ahead of the cutoff; and being informed by the awards organizer that the rules violation didn’t seem worth upsetting the applecart over, though another contestant had been ousted earlier over some unknown party’s electronic interference; I decided popularity contests that ignore their own rules are not worth participating in. Particularly when there is no money involved. I encourage you not to vote for me, or anyone else. If anyone knows of any popularity contests that do follow their own rules, please don’t nominate me there either, unless there is a big money prize, in which case I’m in.

By no means do I begrudge folks who have fun with these contests. In this case though, the deck is stacked against objectivity and fairness. Of course, some of the genuinely top blogs are nominated and win, but there's also a lot of no-name blogs listed as best blogs at the list, so these competitions do seem kind of silly.

I guess the sidebar widget is pretty impressive to readers, so what can you do?

Gap Year is New High School Elective

I wanted to share with readers this article on the "gap year" for high school graduates, from the Wall Street Journal. It turns out that colleges are encouraging more and more students to take a year off from school, to travel and get work experience. The time away from intensive study serves as a refresher and a primer on life in the "real world."

What struck me about the article is how the gap year seems, frankly, like a privilege of the affluent, and that was just after reading the introduction:

Like many motivated, focused high-school students, Lillian Kivel had worked hard academically and in community service in hopes that her efforts would win her acceptance into a good college. It did. Trouble was, Ms. Kivel's focus was much less clear when she had to decide which college to attend -- the Boston-area senior had applied to 38 schools because her interests were so varied.

At the suggestion of friends, Ms. Kivel decided to take a gap year -- a year outside of academia between high-school graduation and college matriculation. It wasn't rest and relaxation that Ms. Kivel sought, but rather an opportunity to gain life experience and focus her goals. Gappers, as they're called, typically feel that taking a year off will give them a head start in college -- and life. "I [have] the opportunity to explore my interests, like medicine and China, outside the classroom," she says.

Ms. Kivel eventually decided to attend Harvard College, but deferred entrance until fall 2009. Ms. Kivel lived at home this fall and interned at the Boston branch of Partners of Health, a global health outreach nonprofit. She's also serving as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts Statehouse. And she's auditing at anthropology class at Harvard.

To fill her spring months, Ms. Kivel turned to gap-year consultant Holly Bull, president of Interim Programs, to help her sift through more than 100 different programs in China. Ms. Kivel will live with a host family in Shanghai, study Chinese language, history and culture in a classroom setting, and teach English to children. "I have gained so much by ... becoming more responsible and independent [and] exploring my interests," Ms. Kivel says.

Ms. Kivel's example is probably pretty typical for ambitious and enterprising middle class kids. I would expect my oldest son, who is now in 7th grade, to be seeking counseling on his college choices when he gets to that point, not the least of which from myself.

But actually I thought of my students at my college. Community college is so diverse, economically as well as ethnically. The idea of being accepted to an elite East Coast university, and have the chance to postpone matriculation for a year for the opportunity to travel to China, is an extreme luxury at minumum for the majority of students who attend my classes.

Ms. Kivel is expected to spend $12,000 to fund the Shanghai semester, which she'll finance from her earnings and from her parents' contributions. The article notes that financial aid and scholarships are available for gap year opportunities, but the process of research and applying for these resources is "daunting." That alone would be an impediment to the typical student body constituency of community colleges. Just reading a class schedule and navigating the college bureaucracy has been identified as a barrier to advancement at the two-year level, and research has shown, in fact, that proprietary colleges like the University of Phoenix have a better record of providing resources and tracking to keep kids on pace toward educational goals.

In any case, the gap year sounds likes a great opportunity for kids to spread their wings a bit before hitting the halls of the university. As always, I'm just thinking about how we can shift the culture among the disadvantaged (kids and parents) so they'll be able to pursue opportunities like this as well (and more "social spending" is not necessarily the answer).

World's False Moral Equivalence Emboldens Terrorists

As readers know, I've been sick at heart amid the global support for the Gaza terrorists and the demonization of Israel, whose leaders are now not only exercising the state's right to self-defense, but upholding its sovereign responsibility to protect its citizens.

Demonstrations are continuing, sponsored the neo-Stalinist ANSWER coalition, so I wanted to share Alan Dershowitz's vital essay, "Israel, Hamas, and Moral Idiocy":

Israel's decision to take military action against Hamas rocket attacks targeting its civilian population has been long in coming. I vividly recall a visit my wife and I took to the Israeli city of Sderot on March 20 of this year. Over the past four years, Palestinian terrorists – in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad – have fired more than 2,000 rockets at this civilian area, which is home to mostly poor and working-class people.

The rockets are designed exclusively to maximize civilian deaths, and some have barely missed schoolyards, kindergartens, hospitals, and school buses. But others hit their targets, killing more than a dozen civilians since 2001, including in February 2008 a father of four who had been studying at the local university. These anticivilian rockets have also injured and traumatized countless children.

The residents of Sderot were demanding that their nation take action to protect them. But Israel's postoccupation military options were limited, since Hamas deliberately fires its deadly rockets from densely populated urban areas, and the Israeli army has a strict policy of trying to avoid civilian casualties.

The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.

The attacks on Israeli citizens have little to do with what Israel does or does not do. They have everything to do with an ideology that despises – and openly seeks to destroy – the Jewish state. Consider that rocket attacks increased substantially after Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and they accelerated further after Hamas seized control last year.

In the past months, a shaky cease-fire, organized by Egypt, was in effect. Hamas agreed to stop the rockets and Israel agreed to stop taking military action against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire itself was morally dubious and legally asymmetrical.

Israel, in effect, was saying to Hamas: If you stop engaging in the war crime of targeting our innocent civilians, we will stop engaging in the entirely lawful military acts of targeting your terrorists. Under the cease-fire, Israel reserved the right to engage in self-defense actions such as attacking terrorists who were in the course of firing rockets at its civilians.

Just before the hostilities began, Israel reopened a checkpoint to allow humanitarian aid to reenter Gaza. It had closed the point of entry after it had been targeted by Gazan rockets. Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, also issued a stern, final warning to Hamas that unless it stopped the rockets, there would be a full-scale military response. The Hamas rockets continued and Israel kept its word, implementing a carefully prepared targeted air attack against Hamas targets.

On Sunday, I spoke to the air force general, now retired, who worked on the planning of the attack. He told me of the intelligence and planning that had gone into preparing for the contingency that the military option might become necessary. The Israeli air force had pinpointed with precision the exact locations of Hamas structures in an effort to minimize civilian casualties.

Even Hamas sources have acknowledged that the vast majority of those killed have been Hamas terrorists, though some civilian casualties are inevitable when, as BBC's Rushdi Abou Alouf – who is certainly not pro-Israel – reported, "The Hamas security compounds are in the middle of the city." Indeed, his home balcony was just 20 meters away from a compound he saw bombed.

There have been three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets. Not surprisingly, Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers have argued that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians are entirely legitimate and that the Israeli counterattacks are war crimes.

Equally unsurprising is the response of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists.

And finally, there is the United States and a few other nations that place the blame squarely on Hamas for its unlawful and immoral policy of using its own civilians as human shields, behind whom they fire rockets at Israeli civilians.

The most dangerous of the three responses is not the Iranian-Hamas absurdity, which is largely ignored by thinking and moral people, but the United Nations and European Union response, which equates the willful murder of civilians with legitimate self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

This false moral equivalence only encourages terrorists to persist in their unlawful actions against civilians. The US has it exactly right by placing the blame on Hamas, while urging Israel to do everything possible to minimize civilian casualties.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

May God Protect the Soldiers of Israel

Paula in Israel writes about her son, an Israeli soldier, and what she wants to do, and what she'll do, as he heads off to war:

What I want ... is to go collect my little boy and bring him home. I want to lock him in a room and tell Israel that no, you can't have him. I've changed my mind. No, I'm sorry. He's not allowed to play with guns and big things that go boom. No, I'm his mother. I gave birth to him and no, you simply can't take him ....

That's what I want ... And what I'll do, is sit here at my desk and keep editing this document for my client. I'll update the copyright statements and change the installation information to reflect the new platforms the product now supports. I'll answer the phone and I'll talk to my accountant ....

And what I'll do, is tell my heart to settle. I'll tell my eyes to take a moment and look at the next beautiful wave of clouds rolling in over Jerusalem. I'll sign the papers I need to sign; type the words I need to type. I'll tell my younger daughter to clean her room and my younger son that he has to study for his test NOW. I'll tell my middle son he can borrow the car like we agreed, but he has to drive carefully. I won't talk to my daughter because she's old enough to see the cracks in my smile and know that outside, it's all a front ....

And most of all, what I will do is dig deep inside where I store my faith in God and in my country and my people. I will do what every Israeli is doing today, hoping this will end soon, but not too soon that we only succeed in putting off to tomorrow what should have been dealt with today. I will do all of this because we are what we have always been, a nation with no choice but to deal with what our enemies choose.

They chose to shell our cities with rockets and so we must stop them. They chose the path of war, so we will set the scenery around this path. Our scenery will include our air force that will knock out their launching pads; our scenery will include our navy and tanks. We'll eliminate the tunnels they use to sneak into our land and those they use to smuggle weapons and terrorists to harm our people. We will change the scenery of Gaza, so that their training camps will no longer exist.

The world may forget that it was Hamas and Islamic Jihad who chose rockets and mortars and missiles with which to attack us; they may fail to recognize that we use our air force, our tanks, our ground forces and our artillery to protect. For once, Israelis are united in one simple reality. We cannot afford to bend to the world's will, if that means our children live under rocket fire, if that means people are forced to run for shelter with mere seconds to alert them.

We are, above all things, a nation that chooses life. Today, we choose to protect the lives of our citizens. Maybe deep down, what I want is to hide inside myself, but what I will do is what every Israeli is doing today - having faith that we are bringing a better reality to our country by taking its safety into our hands. Our soldiers have our faith, they have our prayer, and they have our love.

May God protect the soldiers of Israel and watch over them as they do what they must. They cannot be defeated because where they go, they will not be alone. They have with them the Defender of Israel.

Read the whole thing, here.

Hat Tip: Israel Matsav.