War Films Just Aren't the Same

I've been thinking about the Jews a lot lately, if folks hadn't noticed.

Not that much more than usual, really. It's just that unlike during the 2006 Mideast war, I don't recall the protests and recriminations against Israel being as, well, exterminationist. Protesters now yell "go back to the oven" at pro-Israel activists, and "Death to the Juice" banners are de rigeur on the leftists barricades. Perhaps we've reached some turning point in international postmodernism. European governments feel the heat from the pro-Palestinian street. The continent's diplomacy is ineffective in the face of a pro-Muslim electoral backlash. Politically correct norms push for "tolerance" while newer Islamist communities reject assimilitation in favor of jihad. Perhaps the end of the Bush administration has empowered the forces of global darkness. Barack Obama inspires hope that the White House won't take sides with Jerusalem.

I'm not sure, but I'm pondering all of this.

I've also been in the mood for movies lately, and I was hoping to see "Defiance" today, but's it's showing in limited release and I would've needed to drive to Los Angeles to see it. I decided to see "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" instead (watch the trailer here below).

This morning's Los Angeles Times featured an interesting piece on the current wave of postmodern WWII filmography. Gone is the moral surety of "Greatest Generation" films like Saving Private Ryan" (my favorite flick), not to mention the real WWII-era films, starting back even before the war began. In the new genre of "morally ambiguous" war movies, American goodness takes a backseat to the "complextity" of the wartime experience. I find this as just another facet of the increasing postmodern sensibility that avoids grand triumphalism.

I was already thinking about what the movies meant for me as a kid on Saturday afternoons when I got to this passage:

Hollywood started making World War II movies before America even entered the war. Director John Ford enlisted his "Stagecoach" star John Wayne for the cargo-ship drama "The Long Voyage Home," and then Ford himself enlisted in the U.S. Navy, making wartime documentaries. Bob Hope got "Caught in the Draft" and "Wizard of Oz" producer Meryn LeRoy remade "Waterloo Bridge." And once America entered the war, Hollywood ramped up production, making dozens of dramas, action movies and flag-waving patriotic pieces that encompassed the events occurring in both the Pacific and European battlegrounds. Even Bugs Bunny enlisted for the cause.

"If you were growing up then, you couldn't avoid those movies," Clint Eastwood said in an interview in 2006 while promoting his own companion World War II films, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." Early in his career, Eastwood starred in two Good War movies of his own, "Kelly's Heroes" and "Where Eagles Dare," the latter an action flick that director Robert Zemeckis remembers as "the one where Clint Eastwood kills more guys than anybody else in movie history."

"That's the way it was with war movies then," Eastwood says. "In some respects, they were an extension of the games boys would play in their backyards when they were kids."

That's how I used to play (green plastic soldiers in the dirt, Germans always the "enemy"). I love Clint Eastwood, too; but I didn't like either "Flags of our Fathers" or "Letters from Iwo Jima," especially the latter, where the film was way too quick to humanize the Japanese and to paint the Americans as war criminals.

Anyway, perhaps there's a cyclical nature to war-filmaking. As for the Holocaust movies, the Times piece says they've reached something of a dead end, although "Defiance" looks to be in the heroic mold of the old-time cinematic favorites.

Oh, and "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"? Maybe I shouldn't have read Manohla Dargis' review in advance, where she suggests we see "the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family."

The Problem of Ann Coulter

I have criticized Ann Coulter at this blog, in no uncertain terms. But she looks fabulous in the video available at Tigerhawk, where she is interviewed on the CBS morning show with Harry Smith:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Harry actually gets to the core of the problem of categorizing Ann Coulter: Is she a satirist, pundit, public intellectual, or comedian? Ann neither writes nor says anything more extreme or offensive than many a left-wing comedian, and she is very often as funny. Her problem - apart from the rank double standard that the press applies to the controversy in her humor compared to, say, Bill Maher, Al Franken, or Michael Moore - is that she wades into serious territory more often than most humorists and often within the same work. To some that makes Ann an "irresponsible" pundit, not a humorist, and it is that categorical confusion that drives the chatterers crazy.

Yes, she does drive the "chatterers" crazy. For example, the nihilist Newshoggers crew in their recent post, "Ann Coulter is Just William Ayers in 6" Heels."

Yeah. Right.

Who Cares About the Palestinians?

Dr. Sanity has emerged from her late-year blogging sabbatical and is already tearing up the web.

Here's this from her post (where she draws on some earlier blogging), "Who Gives a Flying Falafel About the Palestinians?":

If only the world would ignore their continual whining and perpetual victimhood; and appreciate the con game the Palestinians have been playing for decades. If only the world would call them to account for undermining every peace process; breaking every truce. If only the world would focus on the murderous rage and suicidal anger the Palestinians project; instead of focusing on and blaming the objects of that projection.

When I look at the Palestinian situation, I see a bottomless cesspool of swirling self-destructive rationalizations. How many times will Israel have to make honest concessions and take the first step toward peace? How many times will Israelis have to demonstrate their goodwill and willingness to live in peace with these maniacs? How many truces, treaties, aggreements, must be broken - before the world sees the Palestinians for the cheap con artists they are?

And more (with the current outbreak of conflict as context) ...

The Palestinians don't want a state. They just want to live in hate. Like many psychopaths and substance abusers given a "second chance" (and "third" and "fourth" etc. etc.) to turn their lives around by the court, the Palestinian leadership has cynically used numerous opportunities to act out the essential deadness within their souls. At the present time, their national mental state - paranoia, psychotic delusions, suicidal and homicidal behavior; unrepentant aggression and hatred - is unlikely to result in a good prognosis for the future of the Palestinians.

And it doesn't take a psychiatrist to come to that conclusion ....

I don't give a falafel about the Palestinians until or unless they are willing to renounce their hate and violence and stop being the left's favorite victims.

Dr. Sanity links to John Derbyshire, "Why Don’t I Care About the Palestinians?"

All good stuff, and just what we need as we continue to be literally shocked by the campaign of recrimination worldwide against Israel's exercise of the right to self-defense.

Rahm the Knife

After reading the news on Howard Dean's exile to Samoa during this week's DNC power hand-off, and Gawker's piece, "Rahm Emanuel Already Knifing Enemies ," I thought I'd leave readers with a musical interlude while I go out for some fresh air.

Please enjoy Bobby Darin's, "Mack the Knife," from 1959:

Here's some improvised lyrics:

Now, d'ja hear 'bout Howie Dean? He disappeared, babe
After drawin' out all that hard-earned cash
And now Ole Rahm spends just like a sailor
Could it be our Chief's done somethin' rash?

I'll have more later ...

Shabbat Shalom and Come Home Safely

Here's the latest post from Israeli Soldier's Mom (Paula in Israel):

I asked Elie to please try to call me before the Sabbath. He said he would try. Shabbat begins in just over 30 minutes and he still hasn't called. I know I should try to call him but I had an idea. I took my phone and gave it to each person in the house and asked them to send Elie a message. I don't know when he'll open his phone next, but when he does, he will be flooded with 7 messages wishing him, in English or Hebrew, in short sentences or long, a peaceful Sabbath.

"from your cute brother, Davidi," my youngest son wrote.

"Shabbat Shalom from Shmulik," my middle son wrote.

"Shabbat shalom and come home safely," my son-in-law wrote.

My older daughter is busy typing him a message now; next my younger daughter will send one as well. My husband is sending it from his phone and then I'll send one.

Shabbat shalom, by beautiful soldier. I am so proud of you. You are doing what is right and honorable and people all over the world are praying for you. There are those who send words filled with hatred and anger. They are nothing against us because we know a simple truth. If Hamas didn't fire rockets into Israel, we would not now be attacking Gaza.

Paula has been getting nasty anonymous comments, really nasty, as can be expected by those who stand up for right and good. She has a post on this, "Comments on Comments." If you get the chance, stop by and leave a nice thank you for Paula, and please remind her that she is in your prayers.

Thinking About Proportionality

Michael Walzer, who is one of our greatest current thinkers on just war theory, faults the news media, political commentators, and the peace protest racket for abusing the concept of "proportionality" in war. The notion is used far more frequently in favor of the use of excessive force, not as a criticism againt it. Proportionality is used correctly when posed as acceptable levels of civilian deaths in relation to the war's aim: "How many civilian deaths are "not disproportionate to" the value of defeating the Nazis?"

Walzer raises serious questions for current critics of Israel, and this one is particularly good:

Is the attacking army acting in concrete ways to minimize the risks they impose on civilians? Are they taking risks themselves for that purpose? Armies choose tactics that are more or less protective of the civilian population, and we judge them by their choices. I haven't heard this question asked about the Gaza war by commentators and critics in the Western media; it is a hard question, since any answer would have to take into account the tactical choices of Hamas.

We haven't heard this question by critics of Israel because Hamas wouldn't pass the test of fighting a legal war respective of civilian life.

Obama Risks Slide to Protectionism

There are few who know more about international trade policy than Jagdish Bhagwati. The Columbia University economist warns that Barack Obama risks caving into demands on the political left for the repudiation of America's historic commitment to free trade:

In the Financial Times, I argued that, unlike with Hillary Clinton, there were several reasons why one could be optimistic that Barack Obama would follow a pro-trade policy despite “prudential” protectionist talk on the primaries circuit (“Obama’s free-trade credentials top Clinton’s”, March 3 2008). But the US president-elect’s eloquent silence on trade issues – and his failure to balance his protectionist appointments with powerful trade proponents – require that we abandon these illusions and sound an alarm.

Consider Mr Obama’s support for the multilateral trading system. It must be admitted that the Doha round is on hold and Mr Obama could not move it forward even if he so desired. A principal problem is that its completion turns critically on the US making further reductions in its distorting agricultural subsidies. But the issue has become even more difficult with the collapse of commodity prices and hence increases in support payments. Besides, history shows that the freeing of trade is nearly impossible to achieve in times of macroeconomic crisis.

But Mr Obama (unlike Gordon Brown) missed the opportunity, provided by the Group of 20’s affirmation of trade’s importance, to affirm that he attaches the highest priority to closing the Doha round and will work on this urgent task throughout his first year.

More important, Mr Obama has missed the bus on preventing a slide back into protectionism. His pronouncements on the car bail-out disregard the lessons of the early 1930s when the Smoot-Hawley tariff was signed into law and a competitive raising of tariff barriers ensued. We learnt then that tariffs and trade restrictions could indeed increase our national income by diverting a given amount of insufficient world demand to our markets. But then others could do the same to divert our demand to their goods, so that the result was reduced trade and deepened depression. Far better to keep markets open and increase aggregate world demand. So, the architects of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (merged in 1995 into the World Trade Organisation) built into it institutionalised obstacles to an outbreak of mutually harmful trade policies.

But what trade barriers did after 1930 can be done also by subsidies. So we now have strict rules on subsidies as well. Under a 1995 WTO agreement, export subsidies and “local content” requirements are prohibited as directly damaging to trade and all other subsidies that are specific to companies or industries are open to complaint; and this applies even when they are claimed to be environmentally friendly.

Read the whole thing. Obama's cabinet appointments are less encouraging for free trade than meets the eye.

Peace Activists Ally with Hamas Against Israel

David Harsanyi has a great piece up at the Denver Post, "Death to all Juice":

In our nation, even twisted extremists are welcome to express their opinions.

Take, for instance, the young Muslim woman in Florida who used her constitutional right to tell Jews to "go back to the oven!" last week. Or the more befuddled protester in New York who brandished a sign that read, "Death to all Juice." (And I thought we Jews ran the country. Clearly, someone is sleeping on the job.)

These rare but revolting displays of hate do offer the "Juice" a valuable reminder that a secure Jewish state in Israel is a historic imperative.

Nevertheless, it is distressing to hear the large number of supposedly peace- loving critics of Israel in essence defend Hamas, one of the most virulently un-intellectual, illiberal, bellicose, misogynistic, hateful and violent brands of religious fanaticism on Earth.

That's no easy trick, mind you. After all, the magnificently overused "cycle of violence" — a platitude that shrewdly spreads blame equally among the culpable and innocent — has thankfully cliched itself to death. So now, detractors have turned to a feeble argument that claims Israel is guilty of failing to deploy a "proportional" response against Hamas.

It is said that every story has two sides. In this tale, one group has a nihilistic interest in placing Jews in ovens (though Hamas, without Iran, lacks the technological capacity to construct a match, much less an oven) and the other side has a stubborn habit of postponing this fate.

For Israel, there is no choice. There is no political solution. No happy ending. The present circumstance in Gaza refutes the Left's quixotic notion that antagonists can just, you know, hug it out for peace. It also counters the neoconservative idea that democracy will spread among people who place no value in it.

Because Gaza is free. Obviously the Palestinians cannot be placated with an independent state — a gift they never had until Israel handed them Gaza with nary a condition. But this is not a 3,000-year-old war steeped in ancient history, despite widespread perceptions. This was a 20th century battle between Jewish and Arab nationalists. It has turned into a more insidious 21st century war with Islamic fundamentalism.

Hamas will not be romanced by the idea of "building bridges" with Israel. There are not enough conference rooms in Oslo or Davos to persuade Hamas to even recognize the existence of a Jewish state. And Hamas is uninterested in ceasefires, except when it is in need of re-loading rocket launchers — supplied by Iran.

When asked if he could ever imagine a long-term ceasefire with Israel, Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan responded: "The only reason to have a hudna [cease-fire] is to prepare yourself for the final battle."

There's more at the link.

A special thank you to Harsanyi, who sends me his columns by e-mail.

Can Israel Survive Gaza?

Can Israel survive its assault on Gaza?

Tim McGirk provides some answers:

Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has promised a "war to the bitter end." But after 60 years of struggle to defend their existence against foreign threats and enemies within, many Israelis may be wondering, Where does that end lie? The threat posed by Hamas is only the most immediate of the many interlocking challenges facing Israel, some of which cast dark shadows over the long-term viability of a democratic Jewish state. The offensive in Gaza may degrade Hamas' ability to menace southern Israel with rocket fire, but, as with Israel's 2006 war against Hizballah, the application of force won't extinguish the militants' ideological fervor. The anti-Israeli anger swelling in the region has made it more difficult for Arab governments to join Israel in its efforts to deal with Iran, the patron of both Hamas and Hizballah and a state whose leaders have sworn to eliminate Israel and appear determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

Just as ominous for many Israelis is a ticking demographic time bomb: the likelihood that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews in the land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is a catastrophic prospect for a nation that defines itself by its faith. At some point, Israelis will have to choose between living with an independent Palestinian state or watching Jews become a minority in their own land.

As much as any other nation on earth, Israel is based on a dream: the aspiration to establish a home for the Jews in the birthplace of their ancestors. To a remarkable extent, that dream has been fulfilled, as Israel has grown into the most modern and democratic country in the Middle East and a dependable American ally. A strong, confident Israel is in America's interest, but so is one that can find peace with its neighbors, cooperate with the Arabs to contain common threats and, most important, reach a just and lasting solution with the Palestinians. But accomplishing all that will require Israel and its defenders to confront excruciating dilemmas: How do you make peace with those who don't seem to want it? How do you win a war when the other side believes time is on its side? And what would true security, in a hostile neighborhood populated with enemies, actually look like? As is always true in the Middle East, there are no easy answers. But it's never been more vital that Israel start looking for them.

This reminds me of something I read a couple of years ago, from Hillel Halkin, "After Zionism: Reflections on Israel and the Diaspora."

I still remain convinced: there is no better alternative for a modern Jew than Israel. And as a modern Jew, only Israel strikes me as quite real. In this respect, Zionism has not only given Jews a home, it has made of them an honest people.

Halkin's fear is the Jewish secularism in the United States is the biggest threat to the survival of Israel.

But see Halkin's commentary on Israel and Gaza, as well, which was written a little over a year ago, around the start of the cease-fire that just collapsed, "Stopping The Kassams."

(Related: Strategically, Israel's survival is a lot tougher when American journalists and bloggers constantly champion Israel's Arab and Persian enemies and their Islamist propaganda outlets, as does William Kern at the Moderate Voice, "Gaza: Pride of the Arabs - Le Quotidien d’Oran of Algeria")

Barack is No George W. Obama

Christian Brose offers a provocative take on the coming Barack Obama administration's foreign policy, "The Making of George W. Obama." Unlike the most dire predictions on Obama's likely approach to the world, Brose argues, the next president will in fact pursue a foreign policy of continuity from the Bush years of 2001-2009:

The 2008 U.S. election was all about change. But that’s not what we’re going to get on foreign policy, says the longtime speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice. Instead of a radical departure from Bush, we’re likely to end up with a lot more of the same. And that may be just what we need.

I'm a little skeptical of this argument, although we do need "more of the same," at least in terms of moral clarity. I've been gearing up for a longer essay on Brose's piece, but I'll hold off now that I've found this piece at the Guardian, "Obama Camp 'Prepared to Talk to Hamas'":

The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush's ­doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organisation, sources close to the transition team say.

The move to open contacts with Hamas, which could be initiated through the US intelligence services, would represent a definitive break with the Bush ­presidency's ostracising of the group. The state department has designated Hamas a terrorist organisation, and in 2006 ­Congress passed a law banning U.S. financial aid to the group.

The Guardian has spoken to three ­people with knowledge of the discussions in the Obama camp. There is no talk of Obama approving direct diplomatic negotiations with Hamas early on, but he is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracising Hamas is counter-productive. A tested course would be to start ­contacts through Hamas and the U.S. intelligence services, similar to the secret process through which the US engaged with the PLO in the 1970s. Israel did not become aware of the contacts until much later.

Readers might remember that Obama's on record, from the primaries, as endorsing diplomacy with Tehran "without preconditions." I'm sure Barack Hussein is likely to go just as easy with Gaza's diabolical terror-propagandists.

Remember, too, that my guest essayist Norm warned against such a turn, in "Obama Must Recognize Evil.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Jews Face World Double-Standard

Here's Rabbi Marvin Hier at the Wall Street Journal (via Memeorandum):

The world-wide protests against Israel's ground incursion into Gaza are so full of hatred that they leave me with the terrible feeling that these protests have little to do with the so-called disproportionality of the Israeli response to Hamas rockets, or the resulting civilian casualties.

My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can't bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily grant to other nations. These voices insist Israel must take risks they would never dare ask of any other nation-state - risks that threaten its very survival - because they don't believe Israel should exist in the first place.

The backlash against Israel has been intense even for me, and I write about this stuff all the time.

Fox News has reported that a demonstrator aligned with International ANSWER yelled "go back to the oven" at pro-Israel activists at a recent Fort Lauderdale protest, "calling for the counter-protesters to die in the manner that the Nazis used to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust."

Neo-Neocon has more on this, at the link.

Nate Silver: Not Enough Liberal Economists on WSJ Panel

Nate Silver, who was the break-out political analyst of 2008, questions the validity of the findings from the latest consensus-report from the Wall Street Journal's board of economists. It turns out the "worst" forecast from the 55-member board's report projected "only" a 2 percent decline of GDP in 2009.

Silver is quick with a methodogical explanation for this "counterintuitive" finding:

One can find room to criticize the composition of the Journal's panel: it probably does not contain enough liberal economists, and almost certainly does not contain enough what you might call nontraditional economists -- behaviorists or mathematicians or people that think, quote-unquote, "outside the box". Nevertheless, this represents quite a large difference of opinion with the Intrade forecast.

No, who would have believed it? Not enough liberals in the economics professoriate? And worse! Not enough "quants" thinking "outside of the box"! Geez, what's wrong with the American academy? Where's Paul Krugman when you need him?!!

Well, I guess we can add one more example to my paper, "'Depression Fetishism' All the Rage."

Nate Silver's on board the 1930s Depression Economics Express! More cowbell (infrastructure)!

Israeli Soldiers Don't Rape Arab Women, Sociologists Baffled

I googled to see if could find a pdf version of an "award-winning" research report that's discussed at Israel National News. Doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan argues that the absence of systemic rape by IDF soldiers is another way for the Israeli war machine to achieve its military goals by "dehumanizing" Arab women "in the soldiers' eyes." According to the article:

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done.

Also:

The paper was published by the Hebrew University's Shaine Center, based on the recommendation of a Hebrew University professors' committee headed by Dr. Zali Gurevitch.

"I do not have the entire text in front of me," Gurevitch said, when contacted by Arutz-7, "and I don't think we can jump to conclusions based on partial sentences, but I can say the following: This was a very serious paper that asked two important questions: Is the relative lack of IDF rapes a noteworthy phenomenon, and if so, why is it that there are so few IDF rapes when in similar situations around the world, rape is much more common?"

I'd have to look at the research, but Dr. Gurevitch basically asserts that a comparative research design could unpack the causal relationships explaining the presence or absence of systematic military rape across national cases.

Of course, considering the postmodern absurdity of this research, we simply could use common sense like Maggie at Wake Up America:

The article says that the paper's author, Tal Nitzan, "did not consider Jewish tradition as an explanation, ... " Does this mean that no credence was given to the fact that the soldiers may have grown up in homes that gave them a moral compass? Scriptures that condemn it, ... a military that condemns it? That you may face court martial if you rape, ... the disgust of your family and friends, and worse?

Democratic Moral Cowardice on Israel-Gaza

David Frum praises Democratic Party strategist Robert Shrum for endorsing Israel's right to self-defense in the current conflict in the Middle East.

Frum then indicates that Shrum is an extreme outlier in the Democratic Party's ranks, where the great majority of Democratic partisans have recoild from moral condemnation of Hamas' diabolical campaign of destruction against the Jewish state:

Shrum represents an increasingly minority point of view within the Democratic Party. A Rasmussen poll conducted in the last week of 2008 found that while 62 percent of Republicans backed Israel’s action in Gaza, only 31 percent of Democrats did. Almost three-quarters of Republicans blamed Hamas for starting this war; only a minority of Democrats agreed. Republicans are 20 points more friendly toward Israel than Democrats. And while extreme hostility to Israel does not exist among Republicans, almost one in 10 Democrats describes Israel as an “enemy of the United States.”

This is the political environment in which Barack Obama will be forming policy toward the Jewish state. Friends of Israel should find this worrying to say the least.

Democratic revulsion at Israel’s Gaza operation has multiple roots.

First, Democrats are just generally less likely to support military actions by any nation, including the United States. A 2005 MIT poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats would support the use of American troops even to destroy a terrorist training camp. (Compared to 95 percent of Republicans.)

Second, Democrats hold an inexhaustible faith in the value of negotiation. Untroubled by Hamas’ character as a terrorist movement pledged to the total destruction of Israel and the murder of its population, 55 percent of Democrats believe that Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the Hamas rocket barrage.

Third, the more closely Americans follow the news, the more likely they are to support Israel. Yet more low-information voters are Democrats than Republicans.

Fourth, Democratic attitudes are poisoned by the influence of an anti-Zionist hard left, a vociferous faction whose ideology can bleed into outright anti-Semitism. The foreign policy page at the Barack Obama transition website, Change.gov, features many disturbing examples of this trend. There you will find questions and comments like the following:

“How might you propose to hold Israel accountable for their awful record of human rights abuses? My personal sense is that Israeli abuse of non-Jewish residents in Middle East is our #1 problem.”

“The root cause of the world's problems is the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing war crimes perpetrated by Israel.”

“The massacre of the Palestinian people by the excessive forces of Israeli military should be soundly condemned—why is Obama NOT taking a MORAL stand on this holocaust? Shocking!”

“What will you do to help end the illegal and immoral occupation of Palestine, to end the oppression of the Palestinian people by the genocidal government of Israel?

“How will President Obama uncouple the ‘Israeli Lobby’ from the US political process, to prevent its current undue influence over U.S. foreign and domestic policy?”

This last part about the attitudes of the "anti-Zionist hard-left" is really key. In fact, there's more fever swamp comments cited at the piece.

Frum suggests that Obama's key challenge on Middle East policy will be to "overcome the institutional flaws in his party."

Actually, Obama's so far doing a bit better than I expected, but if any policy issue helps to validate the "secret theory of progressivism," the new administration's approach to Israel will take the cake.

Charles Kesler on Samuel Huntington

Maggie's Farm posts (kind of foreboding) excerpts from an essay by Charles Kesler on Samuel Huntington:

Modern liberalism, beginning in the Progressive era, has done its best to strip natural rights and the Constitution out of the American creed. By emptying it of its proper moral content, thinkers and politicians like Woodrow Wilson prepared the creed to be filled by subsequent generations, who could pour their contemporary values into it and thus keep it in tune with the times. The "living constitution," as the new view of things came to be called, transformed the creed, once based on timeless or universal principles, into an evolving doctrine; turned it, in effect, into culture, which could be adjusted and reinterpreted in accordance with history's imperatives. Alternatively, one could say that 20th-century liberals turned their open-ended form of culturalism into a new American creed, the multicultural creed, which they have few scruples now about imposing on republican America, diversity be damned.

To his credit, Huntington abhors this development. Unfortunately, his Anglo-Protestant culturalism, like any merely cultural conservatism, is no match for its liberal opponents. He persists in thinking of liberals as devotees of the old American creed who push its universal principles too far, who rely on reason to the exclusion of a strong national culture. When they abjured individualism and natural rights decades ago, however, liberals broke with that creed, and did so proudly. When they abandoned nature as the ground of right, liberals broke as well with reason, understood as a natural capacity for seeking truth, in favor of reason as a servant of culture, history, fate, power, and finally nothingness. In short, Huntington fails to grasp that latter-day liberals attack American culture because they reject the American creed, around which that culture has formed and developed from the very beginning.

Read Kesler's, "The Crisis of American National Identity," here.

Evil Neocons and the Weblog Awards

I commented earlier on the curruption at the 2008 Weblog Awards. While being honored by peers is a worthy recognition, the politics of the whole thing is a bit unappealing.

Martin Kramer has a post on this, discussing how Professor Juan Cole alleged a neocon conspiracy to implement "regime change" on the Middle East category:

Juan Cole is running two campaigns on his blog. One is against Israel—business as usual for Cole. The other is promoting his blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards competition (Middle East category), where there are ten finalists (I am one).

Yesterday, Cole called on his readers to turn out and vote for him. His pitch? "The 'Middle East' category is dominated by Neocons. Where are Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark), Helena Cobban, Angry Arab, Raed in the Middle, etc., etc. I think the initial nomination voting must have been orchestrated." In other words: a neocon conspiracy! It's even subverted the 2008 Weblog Awards!

So Cole, having raised the specter of the neocons, riled up his supporters, and his vote count rose considerably, putting him in the lead. But at that point, he must have realized that it was unseemly for him to have dismissed the procedures of an award he might even win. (Hey, with all those neocon blogs splitting the neocon vote, he could emerge on top! They've screwed up, like in Iraq!) No problem. Just cut out the offending passage, as though it never existed.

I'm a collector of Cole's retro-editing of blog posts. He'll write something erroneous or outrageous, and then excise it from the record, without so much as a strikeout. In one instance, he made a crude insinuation against me, then deleted it. In another, he wrote that 9/11 was "in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp," which he deleted when it turned out that, uh, Israel's Jenin operation took place seven months after 9/11. He even once explained his "policy" on retro-editing—and then deleted that.

Anyway, below is Cole's original blog post of yesterday, which I retrieved from the Google cache not long before it disappeared from there as well. The prospect that Cole might win this award, in the midst of his wildly biased and hate-filled blogging on Gaza, is one I find repulsive. That the award should go to someone who retro-doctors his blog is likewise repulsive. So I urge readers to vote in the Middle East category, inspired by the principle of ABC—Anything But Cole. Vote for my blog (bit of a long shot), or Michael Totten's (a fine blog, which won last year), or Israellycool (which isn't far behind Cole), or any other sane blog. And you can vote once every 24 hours through January 13. Match Cole's orchestration with your own. Click here to vote.

Question to readers: Should Kramer boycott Weblog Awards altogether, or is the counter-vote campaign the way to go?

American Power wasn't nominated, but there's always next year, and this stuff is important!

Facts on Teen Pregnancy

My commenter Tim is back, and he raised a ruckus yesterday about my post on teenage sexual abstinence.

Tim says: "Turns out Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rates, while New England has the lowest." He also argues that "the top ten states for teen pregnancies are all red states"; and he questions my response that minorities are more likely to become pregnant. Tim thus holds, oddly, that partisanship rather than income demographics is the key to understanding the issue.

Well it turns out that Robert Stacy McCain's written an entry on this, "Teen Pregnancy: Fact vs. Spin":

The Associated Press:

Mississippi now has the nation's highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title, a new federal report says ....

The three states have large proportions of black and Hispanic teenagers — groups that traditionally have higher birth rates, experts noted.

Indeed, and if you take a little time to examine the actual CDC report, what you find is that the birth rate (births per 1,000) for females 15-19 breaks down like this:

White.........26.6
Black..........63.7
Hispanic....83.0

Ergo, states where blacks and Hispanics constitute a large proportion of the 15-19 population will tend to have high rates of teen pregnancy. Furthermore, the category "Hispanic" encompasses many nationalities, with varying rates of teen pregnancy, so that for instance, those of Mexican origin have a teen birth rate of 92.9, while Puerto Ricans have a teen birth rate of 69.3.

There's more at the link.

My question to Tim: Does partisanship correlate with low intelligence?

Palestinian Propaganda

Here's an update to last night's post, " The Necessity of Peace," with a big thank you to Reliapundit at Astute Bloggers for his hard work and moral clarity.

Photo Caption (make believe...) at Flickr:

A picture shows the body of a Palestinian girl found in the rubble of her destroyed house following an Israeli air strike on a three-storey house belonging to a Hamas member in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitun on January 6, 2009. About 30 people were inside the house when it was destroyed by the air raid, neighbors said. Israeli tanks firing cannons and machine guns and supported by helicopter gunships also moved into the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip before dawn, witnesses said.

See also, Lawhawk, "Palestinian Propaganda 101."

European Gaza Diplomacy Fails Test of World Power

This piece on the European Union's limited success in bringing about a cease-fire in Gaza opens a window on the realities of world power, which serves as an important corrective to the endless announcements of the decline of the United States.

From the Times' report, "In the Gaza conflict, the European Union's Diplomatic Efforts are Fractured":

With the U.S. caught in limbo between two presidencies, Europe is trying to fill the diplomatic void by assuming a greater role in the international effort to end the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip.

But a series of high-level official forays appears to have achieved little and once again laid the European Union open to criticism that it punches far below its weight in the diplomatic arena, if only because it can't seem to decide who does the punching and how hard.

In the last few days, two separate European delegations descended on the Middle East. One was led by the Czech Republic, which assumed the rotating presidency of the EU last week, and the other by the man who reluctantly gave up that post, French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Both delegations are urging a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that rules Gaza.

"Pressure should be exerted on all parties involved, including Hamas, in order for the guns to fall silent and peace to return," Sarkozy said Tuesday in Damascus, the Syrian capital, after meeting with President Bashar Assad. "There is no military solution in Gaza."

But European calls for a cease-fire have been rebuffed, reinforcing the impression that the only real power broker in the conflict is still the United States, which has not demanded an immediate truce.

In Washington, President-elect Barack Obama has remained relatively silent on the conflict, deferring to the Bush administration as the government in charge. By contrast, Europe has been beset by a Babel of official voices, which have sown confusion as to what the EU's view is and who speaks for the continent.

An interesting footnote at the story's conclusion is how the radical pro-Palestinian prortests against Israel have paralyzed European governments:

Demonstrations against Israel's Gaza incursion have attracted thousands of protesters throughout Europe.

The anger is feeding concerns about a rise in anti-Semitic violence. On Monday, a synagogue in southern France was attacked by assailants who tried to ram its gates with a car. In London, police are investigating a possible arson attempt at a synagogue, the Associated Press reported.

Related: Stones Cry Out, "The Gaza War and the 'Antiwar' Left."

Depression Fetishism

Here's an excerpt from my latest column at Pajamas Media:

There is no doubt that today’s economic crisis ranks among the most severe we’ve seen in decades, and no one discounts the painful dislocation millions of Americans are feeling amid housing losses and widespread job market instability. But it’s less persuasive that today’s recession equals the fundamental collapse of capitalism of the New Deal era. Indeed, recent public opinion polling suggests that Americans see business journalism as contributing to the economic downturn. As a January 1 Opinion Research Corporation survey reported:

Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe that the U.S. media is making the economic situation worse by projecting fear into people’s minds … The majority of those surveyed feel that the financial press, by focusing on and embellishing negative news, is damaging consumer confidence and damping investment, making a difficult situation much worse.

Careful observers of news and public opinion know that the mass media is consumed by “Depression fetishism.” It’s an affliction of the political left where pundits, liberal economists and far left bloggers endlessly decry “predatory capitalism.” Economic exaggeration and doomsday scenarios proliferate far and wide, with attacks on the Bush administration’s “malign economic neglect” bolstering the case on the Democratic left for a “New, New Deal.” Recall, for example, one of the great national newsweeklies sold magazines with a mock-up of President-elect Barack Obama riding in a vintage open-air sedan, while decked out with a crumpled fedora and an elongated cigarette filter. Can a new National Industrial Recovery Act be far behind?

Blogging, Stephen Walt, and Israel

On Monday I noted that the international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just announced a major relaunch of its website. The magazine has added longtime foreign affairs blogger Daniel Drezner to its blogging masthead, as well as a number of other top scholars, some of whom are just now apparently breaking into the blogosphere.

One of those joining the Foreign Policy stable is Harvard's Stephen Walt.

Walt wasted no time in jumping right into the thick of the flame wars. He wrote a provocative post yesterday using counterfactual analysis, "What if Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War?" Walt asks us to imagine what it'd be like if Israel walked in Palestinian shoes, that is, what if the Jewish state was defeated in the 1967 Six-Day War - and "a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees" and abandoned to a strip like Gaza - what would American policy look like? Would "the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?"

Well, this intellectual exercise generated a little dust-up, of course, with Ross Douthat firing a response at Walt with a direct attack on the "realist" paradigm in international relations, of which Walt is a central contemporary practitioner:

The odd thing is that by Walt's own account, the answer would seem to be "Yes," since presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn't have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something? ...

... this analogy ... is a reminder of why when I say that the American Right needs a new realism, I really do mean a new realism, because so many of the old realists have failed to distinguish themselves in the debates of the decade just passed. That failure is the subject for an essay, rather than a blog post, but for now let me just say that on the one hand, you had figures in the broad realist firmament (from Henry Kissinger to George Will to Chuck Hagel) lining up to support the invasion of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration could have used a serious critique from the right (and then acquitting themselves less-than-impressively, in Hagel's case especially, in the debate over what to do with Iraq once things had fallen apart) ... while on the other hand you had figures like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer deciding that the best way to promote legitimately important "realist" ideas (like, say, that America should be pushing Israel harder to abandon the West Bank settlements, and that American Jews ought to play a more constructive role on this front) was to wrap them up in a farrago of oversimplifications and half-truths, ride the ensuing attention up the bestseller list, and then cry "persecution!" when anyone called them on it.

In turn, Douthat's critique of Walt generated this intellectually dishonest response from L'Hôte:

Douthat is someone who I've admired, but to make a drive-by accusation of anti-Semitism using the stunningly empty "Jewish conspiracy" slander diminishes both him and the Atlantic, and as is always true of frivolous and politicized accusations of anti-Semitism, hinders our ability to fight the real thing. There is a real enemy of anti-Semitism in this world, it is particularly virulent in the Arab world, and those who throw around such accusations withough cause, explicitly or implicitly, do no favors either to the Jewish people or to Israel.

And with that, folks can see how viciously out of control such debates become.

I don't see any "slanders" or allegations of "Jewish conspiracy" mongering in Douthat's post. In fact, Douthat raises one of the most important questions that writers at the nexus of blogging and international relations theory must address: How can a morally competent and responsible theory of American power and foreign policy be developed in post-Bush era? The arguments of Walt and those of the realist paradigm have come to resemble in toto the antiwar left's screaming smears against the "evil BushCo neocons." The key difference is that they ground their attacks on the administration in the scholarly apparatus of "narrow national interests," mounting prestigious yet familiar calls for the "restoration" of constitutional legitimacy and America's "moral standing in the world."

Today's realists, frankly, combine longstanding unhinged leftist attacks with a more surreptitious "traditionalist" idelogical agenda common on the "paleoconservative" right, a paradigm David Frum has identified as comprising "unpatriotic conservatives."

One excellent example of antiwar dogma masquerading as sophisticated scholarhip is Michael Desch's lead article at International Security from Winter 2007/08, "America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy." Desch's piece, not unlike the most vile netroots smears, was egregiously unbalanced (if not blatantly dishonest) in its attacks on the Bush administration. I submitted a detailed research rebuttal to the editors - roughly 3,000 words in length, with full citations - but they declined to publish my response, and did not tender an offer of "revise and resubmit" (copies available by e-mail upon request).

Let me note something about all of this from a professional perspective: My dissertation, completed in 1999, built on some main research findings in the realist balance-of-power paradigm, of which Walt is a leading scholar. His book, The Origins of Alliances (1987), offered one of the most important emendations to the balancing and alliance literature since the work of Kenneth Waltz in the late-1970s. I've loved the realist paradigm - with its grounding in rationalism and the primacy of the national interest - since my days as a political science undergraduate. Walt, as well as his coauthor John Mearsheimer (who I met in 2002 at the APSA annual meeting in Boston), are great political scientists, worthy of emulation.

But I became increasing less enamored of Walt and Mearsheimer in 2003, with the publication of their attack on the Bush administration's build-up in Iraq in 2003, "An Unnecessary War." It became clearer to me over time that realist academic political scientists were basically antiwar peaceniks with mortarboards and tassels.

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, have become central players in the debates on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. Most folks are familiar with the huge controversy over their article a few years back at the London Review of Books, "The Israel Lobby." I had just started blogging at that time, and didn't get too wrapped up in the debate. I read some flurries of the controversy in the pages of Foreign Policy, "The War Over Israel’s Influence," and I recommend Michael Massing's powerful essay reviewing the debate at the New York Review, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby." See also, Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky's, "Stephen Walt's War with Israel."

Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of Walt and Mearsheimer's book that grew out of that debate, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I read the preface and introduction last night, and will continue reading this afternoon. I figured I might as well read the whole thing. With Walt now a major blogger at the Foreign Policy website, who will likely provide ample fodder to the nihilist leftists of the online fever swamps, it seemed like now's a good time to consume the full argument in preparation for even more intense debates in the months and years ahead.

Just a look at Walt's page this morning gives one a heads-up on what to expect. In an essay entitled "It's Time to Redefine 'Pro-Israel'," Walt glowingly cites the well-known Bush administration nemisis and eminent sockpuppet Glenn Greenwald:

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has posted some typically sharp and forceful comments on the gap between American public opinion on the conflict in Gaza and the public stance taken by our politicians.

I'm telling you, if Stephen Walt - who is the Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government - describes Greenwald, who is perhaps the most loathed hardline leftist blogger among conservatives across the blogosphere, as "typically sharp," then there really is something strange going on in academic political science. To put Walt's blogging endorsements in perspective, see Rick Moran's, "Glenn Greenwald is a Pathological Liar."

It's kind of sad, actually, but this is the postmodern world we live in nowadays. Good thing I became a blogger, I guess.

I'll have more on all of this as things develop. For more on my take on Israel and blogging, click here.

Anti-Semitism Sweeps Europe, Threat is Worldwide

The Daily Mail reports on the wave of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain in response to the fighting in the Middle East. Also, Gateway Pundit links to attacks in Paris and across Europe.

The assualts are more significant than a few isolated pockets of unrest. Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Wall Street Journal, says Israel's campaign in Gaza is measured and just, and success there is vital to the preservation of freedom, for the ideology driving Militant Islam threatens all of us:

We fight to defend ourselves, but in so doing we are also fighting a fanatical ideology that seeks to reverse the course of history and throw the civilized world back into a new dark age. The struggle between militant Islam and modernity -- whether fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, India or Gaza -- will decide our common future. It is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Publius Endures Applauds Hamas Rationality

Mark at Publius Endures wades into the debate on Israel-Gaza, and comes up badly bruised:

I think Hamas' actions in continuing the rocket attacks are ultimately rational - it allows them to plausibly declare victory almost no matter what Israel does ....

The fact is that Hamas is fully aware it is severely outgunned by Israel both in terms of manpower and in terms of weaponry. Thus, it has no possibility, ultimately, of winning a military victory over Israel - a fact of which they are most certainly aware. However, it can nonetheless legitimately declare victory if the Israelis are unable to achieve that which they nominally set out to achieve - which is in large part the cessation of the rocket attacks. So as long as Israel is unable, by sheer force, to put an end to the rocket attacks, Hamas will appear the victor to its constituents, as well as to its supporters in the rest of the Middle East and South Asia. Meanwhile, the continued rocket attacks don't have too much of an effect on international opinion because they are rather ineffective at actually killing people - this guarantees that the casualty figures for Israeli civilians will continue to dwarf the casualty figures for Palestinian civilians.

Let's hope that Mark's "fully aware" of it, but his commentary could have been copied from any elementary textbook in international terrorism. As Donald Snow, for example, suggests:

Generally, groups choose terrorism to achieve their ends because they are unable to achieve them in any other way. Most of the time, the reason is that the terrorist objective has little, if any, appeal in the target population. Thus, the population will not embrace the terrorist political demands voluntarily, and the unpopularity of the demand means that it will not be achieved through normal political channels. When the group seeking change also lacks the conventional military power to impose its will symmetrically, asymmetrical acts such a terrorism may seem to pose the only possible means of success. Palestinian suicide bombing exemplifies this line of reasoning.

The problem for Mark, and those he cites at his post, is that their discussion really is stale chatter. Strategic rationality is the fundamental characteristic of political terrorism. Even the individual Muslim's pursuit of fanatical martyrdom is "rational" in the sense of an otherwise irrational action of blowing oneself to bits being justified as a piece to the larger assymetric political objective. Being rational, of course, does not make it okay. And that's the problem when blogging from the libertarian/isolationist mindset: Implacably moral problems in the global politics of good and evil get reduced to simplistic agent/actor self-maximizing cost/benefit analysis. It's an exercise in relativism disguised as sophisticated economic problem solving.

The post might have better, to follow the logic, by laying out a decision tree of available Israeli actions that may well have indeed improved national security (at what point, and under what conditions, is a cease-fire in Israel's interest, and how can Tel Aviv turn Hamas' exploitation of civilian deaths to its advantage?). If General David Petraeus had thrown his hands up in 2007, like our friend Mark (who concludes by saying "the decision to escalate the assault on Gaza was harmful to Israeli interests"), we'd still be losing dozens of soldiers a week in endless suicide bombings and IED attacks in Iraq.

At some point the state must act with decisive force to defeat the capabilities - if not the resolve - of an enemy who exploits the weaknesses of the home state's domestic political constituencies. The case of Israel is a classic example of the balance of resolve ultimately prevailing among the domestic population, where the terrorist goals of accession and capitulation by the target victims have yet to be achieved among the people of the Jewish state. The domestic politics of Israel home defense, obviously, is much more complicated than this. But the rehash of "terrorist rationality" at Publius Endures doesn't much advance the larger terrorist problematic that is the fundamental fact of existence for the nation of Israel.

The Necessity of Peace

I was just struck by this photograph at Wordsmith's post at Flopping Aces, "The Burden of Peace is on Hamas and Palestinians":

A girl was among the dead in the air strike. About 30 people were inside the house when it was destroyed, neighbors said. Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

No one is unaffected by the civilian casualities. But it's precisely images like these which are used by Hamas for diabolical propaganda puposes. Israel has been extremely judicious in abiding by the laws of war and in conducting its campaign with respect for human rights and the prevention of civilian deaths. As Yaacov Lozowick notes:

Hamas has been stockpiling weapons in civilian homes. This is against international law, but since I'm no great fan of international law I mention it only to note all the media outlets who aren't mentioning it - the folks who cannot formulate a sentence about Israel's policies without telling about whatever Israel is doing which is illegal. Those hypocrites, you know. But I digress.

According to the laws of war, placing military ordinance in civilian settings is forbidden because it erases the line between civilians and soldiers, and since getting at the soldiers so as to kill them is permitted, civilians will inevitably also be killed. Hezbullah, Hamas, and the Fatah-based Palestinian terrorists never put any store in any of that just-war theory or practice, since in their self understanding they are victims, period, and no matter what they do will always be justified. Their useful idiots in the West parrot this alongside them, thus demonstrating their rejection of the noble heritage of the Enlightenment.

The practice has booby-trapped Israel, of course. If we hit the terrorists along with their civilian shields, we're damned for waging war on civilians. If we refrain, so as not to be damned, the terrorists are safe, and sooner or later they'll kill Israelis.

The advance of technology, however, has created new possibilities. In the week of air-attacks, the IDF proved it had excellent intelligence, and in many cases targets hit from the air kept on exploding for a number of minutes after they were hit, as the ordinance stored there exploded. More significant, the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they're alive, and it wasn't Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars.

Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.Here's an American website touching upon the same story.

Alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they'll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army wold have done.

Humanitarian warfare ... the burden of peace ... and the necessity.

See also, Jeffrey Goldberg, "The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure" (hat tip: Memeorandum).

**********

UPDATE: From Reliapundit, in the comments:

THIS IS A STAGED PHOTO.

NEED PROOF:

WHY WOULD ANY SANE MORAL HUMAN BEING NOT HAVE ATTEMPTED TO DIG THE CHILD OUT?

BUT THEY JUST STAND THERE, BESIDE THE ARAB/FRENCH PHOTOG.

IS THAT WIRE AN AIR-TUBE?

DUNNO.

ALL I KNOW IS THIS:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053225.html

French TV claims photos from 2005 showed damage from Israel's Gaza operation
By Haaretz Service

Tags: France, Gaza, Israel News

French public television network France 2 on Tuesday revealed they had aired photographs that allegedly showed destruction caused by the Israel Air Force during Operation Cast Lead, which were in fact taken during a different incident in 2005, one in which Gaza civilians were killed by an explosion caused by militants in the Strip.

The footage aired on Channel 2 on Tuesday afternoon showed dozens of dead bodies, including Hamas gunmen and citizens, which the channel said were killed by an IAF bombing raid on January 1st. It later came to light that the channel had instead aired footage of the devastation caused after a truck full of explosives blew up in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp.

A news editor at France 2 told Le Figaro Tuesday that they had "made a mistake by airing those pictures, which he said depict events from 2005.

MISTAKE MY ASS.

THIS CRAP IS LIKE JENINGRAD AND AL DURA.

**********

UPDATE II: The photo at top was featured in today's Los Angeles Times hard-copy story, "30 Palestinians Sheltering in Gaza School Killed."

Israeli Settlers and the Gaza Campaign

Some folks, during all the faux debate and recrimination over Israel's Gaza incursion - which has been decried as a "disproportional" response by the world community - might have noticed arguments suggesting Israel's "settlement policy" as the root cause of the conflict.

Gershom Gorenberg, at Foreign Policy, places the blame on Israel and the settlements, in "The Other Housing Crisis":

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

The more settlers, the greater the danger. The longer the wait, the more settlers. The more settlers, the more hesitant politicians are to talk about evacuating them, much less do anything else about them. It’s anybody’s guess where the point of no return lies.

There's an eery timing to the publication of Gorenberg's essay, which prompted the editors to publish and update by Gorenberg:

At the moment, the temptation is to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a zoom lens that shows the battles in Gaza up-close, in detail. But a zoom lens flattens the picture you see, and entirely leaves out the panoramic view.

In the panoramic view, Israel’s strategic problem remains ending its rule over the Palestinians safely, in order to avoid the alternative of an unstable binational state. That means leaving the West Bank, and giving up settlements.

The update is dated January 5, 2009, and thus it's hard to believe that Gorenberg would fail to mention the international condemnation of Israel's right to self-defense, or Hamas' slaughter of civilian "human shields" for diaboloical propaganda purposes.

In a post earlier this week, hardline leftist blogger Matthew Yglesias also attacked Israel's settlement policy, where he extrapolated the case to Gaza, arguing that the strip is functionally equivalent to "an Indian reservation."

With his inimitable flair, Rick Moran smacks down all this talk of "panoramic views" and "Indian reservations":

The illegal outposts set down by radical Israelis who believe the Bible gives them the right to the land (and which George Bush has demanded the Israeli government remove) are not fueling the violence in Gaza. They are an excuse and not the proximate cause of the rocket barrages. It is pure sophistry to infer that anything except a virulent, nauseating strain of anti-Semitism is what keeps the Palestnians at war with Israel. They hate the Jews because they are Jews and any other greivance they have is pure gravy – sauce for the goose. And their single, animating, national ambition is to kill as many as they can while hoping that someone can come along and kick the Jews out of Israel for them.

This appears not to be complicated enough for Israel’s enemies on the left as there just isn’t enough nuance for their tastes. No good international conflict is possible unless there are “root causes” and “underlying dichotomies” to sink one’s teeth into. The idea that they have nothing to do with the matter at hand is of no consequence. When things are too simple, it is best to try to complicate them by raising straw man arguements or, better yet, just make sh*t up as Yglesias does with his “Indian reservation” analogy.

Gorenberg, who lives in Jerusalem, wrote on the prospects of Israel's military end game last week at the Los Angeles Times. His tone of condemnation against Israel in that piece is about the same. Readers can check the link and make what they can of the argument. As an outside observer, not being on the ground in Israel, it's hard for me to identify with an effort to find so much balance and Jewish complicity. That's why I find it valuable to read Israeli bloggers who are unashamed to lay out the stakes for the survival of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel.

See also, Powerline, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?.

Harry Reid Refuses to Seat Roland Burris

Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to seat Democratic-appointee Roland Burris to Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. The Los Angeles Times reports:

President-elect Barack Obama's appointed successor was turned away when he appeared at the U.S. Capitol to take his seat today.

Roland Burris announced the decision to deny him the seat as he stood before a large throng of reporters and cameras in the rain outside the Capitol building.

Speaking just an hour before the convening of the 111th Congress, Burris said he was looking at a host of options for getting the seat.

"I'm presenting myself as the legally appointed senator from the state of Illinois. It is my hope and prayer that they recognize that the appointment is legal," he said earlier in a nationally broadcast interview.

Burris dismissed the Senate Democratic leadership's position that he cannot be seated because he was appointed by a governor accused in a criminal complaint of trying to benefit financially from his authority to fill the seat that Obama vacated after winning the presidential election.

Burriss said his belief is that his appointment is constitutional and that "I have no knowledge of where a secretary of state has veto power over a governor carrying out his constitutional duties."

Burris also maintained on CBS's "The Early Show" that the announcement by Gov. Rod Blagojevich Monday of a date for an election for a successor to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., proves the governor still has legal authority to carry out his duties. Emanuel will be Obama's White House chief of staff.

"There's nothing wrong with Roland Burris and there's nothing wrong with the appointment," Burris said.

Burris has found little support among fellow Democrats.

The Senate was scheduled to convene at noon Tuesday with its newest members. Yet the controversy over the appointment and the ongoing dispute over election results in Minnesota practically guaranteed that both seats would remain empty by day's end.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that Burris would not be permitted to take his seat because Burris "has not been certified by the state of Illinois," a reference to incomplete paperwork that only touches on the dispute. Senate Democrats maintain that Burris' appointment is tainted because of the charges against Blagojevich.

I'm frankly still trying to figure out the politics of all this. It can't be that Democrats are trying to advance a reformist anti-corruption agenda. On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is set to roll back the GOP's congressional reforms dating to 1995's "Contract With America" under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. As Tigerhawk notes:

Nancy Pelosi is amending House rules to revert to the status quo ante 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the Contract Republicans imposed a series of reforms to improve the "fairness" of the "People's House," including term limits for committee chairmen. As outraged Republicans have observed, this is hardly consistent with the spirit of "hope and change."

Check also Flopping Aces, which has photos of Roland Burris literally being shown the door. I don't normally worry about things like this, but there's some troubling racial symbolism in an eminent black man and state leader being ignominiously forced out of the back halls of a majoritarian white-power institution. The Democrats need to think again.