Stewart Weiss writes up an explanation of why the IDF is the most moral army in the world:

He also takes some much-needed shots at yeshiva Jews who refuse to appreciate - let alone to pray for - the soldiers who protect them. Read the whole thing.

This story, from the home of the most underrated symphony on the planet, has been getting some press today:

And what did this study find?

See? See? Conservatives are just uneducated liberals. More like children than voters, really. All you have to do is sit them down, read them a nice story, and they magically transform from watching Fox News and supporting people who shoot deer to reading the LA Times and supporting people who shoot cops [ahh... a little Mumia joke to go with lunch -- ed When did this site get an editor? Shut up -- ed].
Except not really.
As any first year Psych student (not to mention anyone with a smidgen of common sense) knows, put people in a group and pretty quickly (certainly in less than a day) they'll start changing their views to conform with the majority of the group. And as any first year Communication student knows, pressure to conform can be especially intense in small-group discussions.

Half the people were Democrats, and I'm willing to take bets that on balance the independents leaned left. For any psychologist the result that people shifted left after a day would be almost trivial.
Now, on the next topic, I'm not even sure if I can marshal the sarcasm necessary to discuss the way that the questions were formulated. My favorite:

That 42 percent of people still agreed with this statement goes to show just how useless in terms of education these little brainwashing chambers really are. It's not that this statement is wrong per se, just that it's totally misleading. Free trade produces jobs because it boosts productivity (because of specialization) and lowers the cost of factors of production (by making cheaper materials available to producers), thereby helping the economy grow. It actually has very little to do with selling our goods overseas.
This was push polling of the worst kind - not only were the questions loaded, but there was group pressure to adopt the consensus view. This is bad social science and it's bad politics. Someone should let the Post Gazette know.

Update from Stan : 1. The PSO really is the most underrated orchestra in the world. They're fantastic. 2. Does anyone else find it amusing that the site author who lives in LA is doing posts on Pittsburgh, when the other author lives in Pittsburgh? I find it doubly amusing since it's 60+ degrees where Omri is and 5 where I am. 3. We have an editor? [Shut up -- ed]

Europe has jumped on board in claiming that the ICJ has no jurisdiction to rule on the legality of the Security Fence. The article doesn't describe the substance of the claim, but I assume that it's the same as Israel's and the US's - that the ICJ's charter probably only gives it jurisdiction in cases where both parties have agreed to be bound by the judgment.
This entire debacle is dramatic evidence of what pro-Israel opponents of the internationalization of law have been insisting for a long time - it is absurd to make elaborate procedures and to work out careful protections in crafting legal guidelines when the overwhelming majority of the world does not actually believe in the Rule of Law. Does anyone think that when the unaligned nations and the Arab block voted to send this thing to the ICJ, they were thinking about legal minutia? Of course they weren't - they were thinking the same thing as they were in Durban - here's another chance to stick it to the Jews.
People would do well to bear this in mind when pushing Israel to accept the ICC (President Clinton, Prime Minister Barak, you should have known better). Unfortunately, I expect that if this case gets thrown out by the ICJ, people are going to use it as proof that international law and its built-in legal protections work, and that Israel should therefore join the ICC. This advocacy neglects a couple of things:

Israel's main line of defense in this case, and the one that, should Israel be successful, will be the one that succeeded, is that it never submitted to the Court's jurisdiction on this matter. Were Israel to sign the ICC, it would not have the luxury of this defense for any matter.

Even in the impossible-to-be-certain-of case that Israel would never lose an ICC case, it would still have to spend diplomatic and monetary capital every time another frivolous case was brought before the Court. This scenario has been played out before - Sharon in Belgium, the Fence at the ICJ, etc. In fact, Belgium is a dramatic example for why the "filter" argument in regards to the ICC is bunk - even if a case never gets to the Court, Israel has to spend resources in the filter stage arguing that it shouldn't get to the Court. That's when it's not spending resources arguing that the filter itself shouldn't be changed.

This is a form of moving the goalposts - it presents another institution that Israel has to be accountable to, another body that gets to dictate the criteria by which Israel has to live. Israel gets nothing positive from submitting to its jurisdiction, only the potential for formally becoming an international pariah.
Anyway, these issues aside, here's the latest from our how - do - they - say - it - with - a - straight - face department:

the Palestinian Authority... accused Israel of trying to politicise the case.

Castro is accusing Bush of trying to assassinate him. This reminds me of the disaffected and marginal activists who haunt the corridors and graduate offices of the academy, largely comatose except for the occasional anti-sweatshop petition or teach-in. They're are so desperate to convince themselves that they matter, that they’re ''dangerous to the Establishment,'' that they construct elaborate theories about how the government is trying to ''suppress them.'' The fact that the government doesn’t even acknowledge their existence is taken as evidence for just how deep and subtle the plot is (or, even more creatively, as proof of how total government control over the media is - because the government knows that if the activists' radical message got out, people would throw off the chains of their capitalist oppressors, free themselves from wage slavery, and flood into the streets to take up a glorious rendition of Workers of the World Unite. Why else would Ted Koppel refuse to take their calls?) Irrelevance is a tough thing for people to handle, whether they’re an unkempt Marxist literature postgrad at Columbia or an unkempt Marxist dictator in Cuba.

UC Irvine's Israel Group is the midst of their Israel Week activities right now, with all of the exciting community building / pissing off Leftist and Muslim student groups fun that such things entail. In addition to pub nights and film screenings, they managed to get a block of Itamar Marcus's time for a lecture and an interview with one of the conservative campus newspapers (campus Jewish groups coordinating with campus conservative groups really warms my heart - it holds the promise that the next generation of Jewish leaders will be more politically astute than the current one).



I haven't received confirmation yet from Merav, the student who leads their Israel group, to put her email up. So for now, if you're interested in attending the lecture or have any questions about UCI's Israel Week in general, please email me and I'll pass your information on to her.

Steven Plaut, on the other hand, is very sure about his position on the prisoner deal, and you know what that means. Listen, complexity is not a vice in this situation - this is the kind of stuff that gets written into ethics textbooks because we're pretty sure that it's structurally impossible to find an entirely consistent and satisfactory answer! The article is too filled with omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright factual inaccuracies for me to just identify a single, overriding flaw, and it is too marginal to be worth fisking. Let me just deal with a couple of things (the "blood on the hands" issue and the deterrence issue), because I've seen these come up in a couple other places:

Factually incorrect: see here and here. Nobody released actually had blood on their hands. Any prisoners with blood on their hands are being held back for information about Ron Arad, and if releasing a murderer to get Ron Arad back is what has to be done, then maybe that's what has to be done.
I have to admit that if I have any concern about this deal, it is in regards to Israel's long-term deterrent and to the possibility that this deal may encourage Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations to carry out more kidnappings. On the other hand, Sharon was pretty clear that Israel would physically hunt down the next group of kidnappers. Of course, self-flagellators like Plaut or doomsayers like the Hatzofeh editorial staff will insist that Sharon is weak and that he'll inevitably cave. I dunno - he's not like Barak (or, I might hasten to remind Hatzofef and their allies, Bibi), ordering impotent helicopter attacks because he is too nerve-racked to take decisive action. The last few people who tested Sharon's "one more time" warning are either dead or well into their third year calling foreign diplomats from the crumbling ruins of a certain converted former prison. That's when they're not busy worrying about getting expelled - again.

UPDATE: Yediot Aharonot agrees with me:

Mark Glenn, notorious anti-Semite, regular contributor to the subtly named Jewish Tribal Review, and favorite of the Indymedia crowd, has published a sputtering and screeching piece of Jew-hatred at the International Press Centre of the Palestinian Authority. This is what the internationally recognized government of the world's 6 million Palestinians is publishing on what amounts to their Foreign Ministry site: an article that suggests that only 6,000 Jews died in Hitler's death camps and which openly gloats about a coming time when the world will abandon Israel so that the Arabs can finish what the Nazis started.
That this filth was published on the PA's English site is news in itself (the other two languages you can read the PA's site in? Arabic and French. Too perfect). Additionally, this article is also elegantly paradigmatic of the "we're anti-Zionists not anti-Semites" strategies that Jew-haters use to deflect criticism. Sure, it is filled with easily dismissible straw arguments and random anti-Semitic provocations (my favorite: the completely out of place "the murder of Christ by the leadership of Israel"). However, there are at least three also seemingly straight-forward strategies that are actually a little more subtle - the insistence that anti-Semitic discourse is actually anti-Zionist discourse, the identification of Jews with Nazis, and the multiple ways of denigrating the significance of the Holocaust - that call for closer analysis (remember, these authors want to avoid saying anything that would allow the label of anti-Semite to stick to them). These strategies deceptively seem plain, and it is imperative that we avoid the mistake made by some critics who tease out one, largely superficial anti-Semitic tactic, describe and thus criticize it, and then declare that they’ve restored balance - all that does is leave more pernicious dynamics still operating.
Which is not to say that Glenn doesn’t slip up and deny the Holocaust or utilize Nazi rhetoric – he does both:


But it is to say that most of the time he’s doing a lot of rhetorical work so that his other statements can express the same sentiments without being so openly anti-Semitic. In the next couple of days, I'll do some analysis of that work, focusing on the three dynamics that I decsribed above.

Anti-Semitism/Anti-Zionism - The currently fashionable way to approach the problem of anti-Semitic statements that are ostensibly or literally anti-Zionist is to point out that as an empirical matter, they partake of anti-Semitism ("sure, you say Israelis, but it’s clear that you mean Jews" is the typical line). This line of criticism is unable to deal with statements that are more subtly anti-Semitic in that they are only sensible when applied to Israel, but that nonetheless gain their persuasive force by partaking of anti-Semitic canards ("Israel destroys the US economy by taking all its money in defense loans" does not make any literal sense if you substitute "Jews" for "Israel," but it nonetheless still operates rhetorically in a field constituted by anti-Semitism).

Jewish/Nazi Identification - Every good Leftist rally has a couple of Sharon=Hitler posters and some flags of swastikas embedded in the Star of David. Early on, the conventional wisdom was that such spectacles were just thinly veiled excuses for people who wanted to wave around Nazi symbols to do so under the rubric of legitimate protest. That explanation never really resonated because the symbols that were being used were clearly doing more work than simply advocating Nazism. Then, in 2001, then-Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior advanced a more nuanced theory that held that Europe desperately wanted to associate modern-day Jews with horrific violence so that they could in some sense justify the Holocaust to themselves. But that explanation was too Freudian to last. So now, such displays are waved off with a snort about how insensitive it is to associate Jews, who suffered so much under Hitler, with Nazis. I'll argue that there's more going on - that the association of Jews with Nazism is anti-Semitic in some pretty fundamental ways.

Holocaust Denial - As Melchior's comments suggest, the stakes in what the Holocaust means are stark. There are a series of increasingly more subtle methods that are being deployed in order to denigrate its magnitude. At the end, I’ll work on elaborating them.

Us:
Them:

Which is one of the many, many reasons why we're on Mars and they can't seem to find their way out of the 9th century.

I don't understand why this is supposed to be criticism of the Bush administration:

Better there than here. Also, they don't seem to be doing too well over there:

Allow felons to vote. Yeah, I dunno - sounds sketchy to me too. On the other hand, they better act fast. At the rate he's going, Bush will find out about this plan and outflank them by offering felons two votes each. Bringing me to my theme for the next couple of weeks: will somebody please wake Karl Rove up from his nap? Thank you.

Someone, somewhere, thought that this was a reasonable statement to make:

Let me be clear on this point: if there was ever a single synapse devoted by anyone in any position of authority to the idea that the debate that could decide the Democratic nomination was not important enough to preempt Friends, then we should just go ahead and wrap this thing up, call off the whole democracy thing, and just admit that we're a bunch of flaming idiots who don't deserve to choose our leaders. Seriously. The fact that we now consider it noteworthy that a presidential race preempts a sitcom is nothing short of terrifying.

Jonah Goldberg has been on a kick recently, posting links clearly designed to ensure that I never graduate from anywhere. His two recent contributions are Fly The Copter and Penguin Batting. I'd add Poke the Penguin to that list.

Before I forget, Jonah has asked that you report your high scores from Penguin Batting to him.

An Iraqi blogger takes issue with Dean's statement that Iraqis are worse off now than under Saddam. He's, um, not happy.

I've often commented about how strange it is that the Left should choose Israel of all places to criticize for constant human rights violations and government-based repression as opposed to say, the Arab world (and I’ve also challenged anyone to present me with an explanation for this phenomenon other than rank anti-Semitism). Let’s play "which of the following does not belong": full equality for women, annual gay pride days, democracy, a liberal judiciary, an even more liberal academia, an unimaginably liberal press, Israel, the Muslim world.
Now, a generous interpretation of why anti-Israel posters can be seen at every. single. Leftist. rally. would mirror the old joke about the drunk who searches for his keys under the lamppost because that's the only place with enough light to search. Of course, I don’t think that those who wouldn’t allow the US to end Saddam’s regime of torture and rape really care all that much about human rights as such, so following in the tradition of the Supreme Court’s "but for" test, I’m going to hold that but for the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, it wouldn’t be getting all this grief.
Either way, the fact that Arab members of Israel's own Parliament are going to the Hague to testify against the country that they have taken oaths to serve is indicative of the wide chasm between Israel and the rest of the world, especially the primitive dictators and fascists so beloved by the anti-Western Left.

Jews have listened to calls for their destruction for so long that by now it’s just accepted as one point on the political spectrum - some MKs restructure the Education Ministry, some go to international forums to advocate the destruction of Israel, and some go to Syria and urge the terrorists in Damuscus (and I'm not using that term in any metaphorical sense – Bashara openly met with Hezbollah) to kill more Israelis.

Itamar Marcus (who has Southern California Jewish college communities all abuzz with his planned trip at the beginning"of February, when he'll be making the rounds, giving lectures, meeting with student leaders, and participating in UC Irvine's Israel week) and Barbara Crook lay out an interesting psychological analysis of the value-system that drives Palestinian baby killers. Their argument is that the conventional wisdom - which holds that Palestinians weigh the positive value of killing Jews against the negative value of losing their lives - is inaccurate. Rather, the value system that drives these murderers places a positive value both on killing Jewish children and on dying as such. We are twice removed from Patton - the goal here is not so much to die for one's country, but if need be merely to die and move on to the next life. Rather than embracing death in a nationalistic cause or for a political goal, the weird congruence of Islam, militarism, and specific history in Palestinian culture has created an almost primitive cult of death.
Marcus and Crook probably overreach at some points - say what you will about the Palestinians, but they have always been one of the more secular societies in the Arab world. That's not saying much, I know, but given the opportunity (and I don't mean a peace deal - I mean the liquidation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad by Israeli force), many older Palestinians that are today too terrified to express their secular nationalistic preferences would speak out. Don't confuse a secular society with a society that would accept Israel - Egypt and Syria were at their most dangerous when they were firmly secular rather than torn internally between Islam and secularism. Israel would thus still need to fear attack from such a Palestinian state, and that state might very likely be terroristic, but it need not be Islamist to be either of those things.
But it is precisely this faith that I place in the desire of older Palestinians to create a secular society that makes the rest of this article so chilling. It is becoming more and more difficult to deny that we're now into the second generation of Palestinian children that are being brainwashed in the most surreal and disgusting ways into embracing death as a cause in itself. They recount this show from Palestinian children's television (this is Sesame Street for Palestinian boys and girls):

These shows, incidentally, are paid for with funds secured for the Palestinians by Shimon Peres, who, willing to try everything for peace in the mid 1990s, went around the world with a metaphorical tin cup begging Western governments to give the PA legitimacy and money. Of course, he wouldn't still be fetishistically funding these programs today when the incitement is so clear, were the decision up to him and not up to the UN and EU like it is.

UPDATE: LGF has some sarcastic comments on this story too.

Cori Dauber is iced in, nic-fitting, and as near as I can tell thoroughly enjoying the Kay testimony and Hutton fallout. In the middle of one of her many, many posts on both of these subjects, she gives a nuanced, media-studies based justification for Fox News. It’s a little too reminiscent of bad postmodernism (double the absurdity to point out the absurdity of things that are less absurd), but it’s not totally unreasonable.

Suicide boming in Jerusalem - at least 10 dead, and 10 more critically wounded. Laura King, the idealistic staff writer who does a lot of the Middle East stuff for the LA Times and with whom we've had run-ins before, manages to make this a story about the firefight between Israeli troops and the Palestinian terrorists who fled into a heavily residential area after shelling them.
Her article showcases her usual disingenuous strategy of building in plausible deniability on a literal level coupled with suffocating bias on a rhetorical level. That bias is expressed through, among other things, tone - graphic depictions of Palestinian suffering coupled with cold and descriptions of the bus bombing; strategic placement of points of view - the Palestinian viewpoint at the top, the Israeli viewpoint at the very end; subtle weakening words and phrases – “according to,” “claimed”; and convenient juxtapositions - following the graph that describes the bus bombing with a graph describing the firefight earlier that day, as if it doesn't take weeks and weeks of advance planning to slip a suicide bomber across the Green Line. The article stays literally true, but it is nonetheless incredibly misleading.
But I'm sure she has equal sympathy for victims on both sides of the conflict. The fact that she never, ever devotes nearly as much time to Israeli victims as to Palestinian victims (and the difference is very, very stark in this article… just try to find a description of Palestinian suffering) is probably just a typographic thing or something – after all, they are the professional journalists, so they know best.

Someone please explain this to me:

What's that Andrew Sullivan? You have some advice?:

It’s OK though – it’s not like religious social conservatives have a history of punishing Republican Presidents through depressed turnout. I mean, the NEA? The NE @#$#@ A? The go-to cover for every conservative fundraising pamphlet for the last two decades? Just baffling.

UPDATE: Everyone over at The Corner is in a tizzy about this proposal, as if it's going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I don't particularly care about this from a fiscal standpoint (it's a drop in the bucket), I just think that it's a complete sellout of the base, an angle that Instapundit is on. I mean, in terms of political symbolism to Christian social conservatives, is there anything more odious than the NEA?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh. He also caught and linked the "no, it's worse for this reason", "no no, it's worse for this reason" discussion going on over at the Corner.

Early this morning, I did a pretty clumsy job trying to explain how significant Ron Arad is to the Israeli national mythology. This morning, Zvi Bar'el of Ha'aretz does a slightly better job:

It really is difficult to explain what Arad means to Israel. Imagine something along the lines of Jessica Lynch times 10 over two decades and you begin to get a hint.

I don't want to have two consecutive posts invoking psychoanalysis, but this is really too perfect. I often talk about the Left's fetishistic insistence on the universal validity of processes that work under equitable circumstances (even when the circumstances under which they worked patently do not apply). An excellent case in point can be found in yesterday's NYT:

There are so many things wrong with this argument that it's hard to get a handle on what the underlying drive that's screwing everyhting up actually is. I'd suggest that it is exactly this idea that a process (elections, resistance to foreign occupation, give and take peace negotiations) that works is valid as such - and that therefore it can be transported across circumstances and contexts. No matter how rigged elections in Iraq were, this argument goes, they were not 100% rigged. Therefore they provided the same experience and served the same function as elections in any Western country, and the people of Iraq are thus ready for elections.
The process has become the desired object - it is fetishism in the strictist sense.

In psychoanalysis, there are two contrasting dynamics in which people obsessively repeat thoughts or actions and which are often confused for one another: (a) repetition of the same action over and over again hoping that it will produce a beneficial result even though it has never done so in the past (the much-quipped definition of insanity), and (b) repetition of the same action over and over again with the full realization that it won't produce anything beneficial, but driven by some need to do it anyway. You can decide for yourself which one of those two dynamics this depressing story out of Thailand is, but it's definitely one of them:

Islamofacist-inspired murder? Check.
Refusal to identify religious motives for violence? Check.
Appeasement of arbitrary Islamist sensibilities and objections to aiding in the War on Terror (the "don't attack on Ramadan -- only we can do that" award? Check.
So really the only question left is, do they know in advance that their actions will only incite Islamist terrorism, or were they literally born yesterday?

Lt. Smash pokes fun at the media and the frogs

AK Sommer does the risque but safe middle aged mom humor thing.

UPDATE: We meant "very young mom humor thing". Dunno how that typo got in there... the hazards of blogging all night I suppose.

Time and bandwidth cannot suffice to express the utter disdain and loathing that deserves to be heaped upon the State Department (where to begin? You start off with "nobody lost China" and even that takes an infinite amount of time to do justice to). Why they've been spared in the aftermath of 9/11 is beyond me - the INS was broken up over letting terrorists into the country, but it was the State Department that gave them Visas!!!!
The story about the story is even shadier: Young, starry eyed conservative activist goes to work for NRO. Young, starry eyed conservative activist does a little digging, uncovering a cable conclusively proving that those duplicitous Arabists at Foggy Bottom are so drunk from all the oil money that they've drinking for the last half a century that they gave visas to 14 Saudis very interested in flight school rather than offend Our Friends the Saudis. Young, starry eyed conservative activist is detained by 8 burly large men and asked to give up his source. Hilarity fails to ensue.

Cheney has been sharply dipping in the polls in the last couple of weeks, seeing almost inexplicably high unfavorables and then going to Europe to try to fix them (why he thinks going to Europe will "temper his hard-line image" is beyond me, but then again, I’ll default to the people who presumably are paid to know why).
But it may be too late - MSNBC is reporting that there's open talk in the White House about dumping Cheney for Giuliani, which would confirm a story that began on the blogosphere a couple weeks ago and that we reported on.
On the other hand, NewsMax has a reasonably sarcastic and pretty devastating response from the White House. Moral of the story: don't believe everything you here, especially if what you're hearing is a discredited two year old rumor. Who knew?

Instapundit has the blogosphere roundup. Short story - Edwards vs. Kerry is the only race that's still a race. Edwards is charming but young. Kerry is a Botox poster-boy but has Senator Kennedy's support in today's Democratic party ("Botox "John Kerry"" = 999 hits on Google and counting). John Ellis over at Tech Central Station provides the brief but to the point upshot: Kerry has to kill Edwards now or he'll become a Trivial Pursuit answer after Super Tuesday (incidentally, that last bit of wit was not off of the TCS post - it was all mine).

The Hutton report has been leaked. Good for Blair, and therefore really bad for the BBC. Everyone will be talking about this today (it's of monumentally more importance than what happened in the second out of like forty Democratic primaries), so this link should be enough to get you on your way...
Also this morning, Blair managed to pass his tuition fees bill in the face of "a seemingly unstoppable rebellion by Labour backbenchers." Apparently, this was a do or die for Blair. Upshot: "victory for the government removes the threat of an opposition vote of no confidence, and leaves the prime minister free to concentrate on his response to the Hutton report," which judging by the way the press is spinning the leak, means doing his best not to gloat over the Hutton report.

UPDATE: OK, I hope everyone can agree that this, if it turns out to be true, is way sketchy. The BBC is apparently buying up Google News in order to direct traffic away from anyone else's stories on the Hutton report (does the Google News algorithm even allow that?). As the iced-in (queue Simpsons haha) Dr. Dauber asked a couple days ago you don't suppose they're nervous. Turns out, they were - and with good cause.

You remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark burns through the Nazi symbols on the outside of the crate that's carrying it? More people should remember that, lest their brutally anti-Semitic works of art get destroyed by mysteriously extreme cold spells.

UPDATE: Or you get sued for playing illegally downloaded music as mood music for the celebration of baby-killers.

I have no idea where to come down on the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah. I do have a couple of thoughts:

If you are certain about this issue one way or another, you haven't thought about it enough. For its part, the blogosphere seems disturbingly unanimous on this issue. A little nuance, and the realization that the desire to "bring the boys home" goes extremely deep in the Israeli psyche, may not be out of the question.

On the other hand, the scope of the deal does seem a little one sided to me. Over 400 Palestinian terrorists, double digit Lebanese terrorists, some more terrorists from random Arab countries, and like 60 bodies - in exchange for the remains of 3 soldiers killed in an ambush initiated by Hezbollah and for the safe return of an Israeli civilian kidnapped by Hezbollah. It's all well and good to talk about how Israel is a humane society that will always go after every single one of its boys and bring them home, and that the Arabs don't care about their boys, but in all honesty the Arabs seem to be making out like bandits in terms of getting back their boys back too.

Arabs cross into Israel, murder Israeli families, get caught afterwards. Then Arabs ambush, kill, or kidnap more Israelis, torture them for years, and exchange them for the release of the Arabs that had originally killed Israelis. It just seems so damn unfair.

Also in the negative column, the release of criminals in order to get back a kidnapped Israeli seems to be the definition of rewarding terrorism. Nasrallah has already said that he's going to kidnap more Israelis. There is a not un-compelling case to be made that this deal will actually lead to more Israelis being kidnapped.

All of these problems present themselves before we even get to the second phase of the swap, which is about exchanging Samir Kuntar - a man who liquidated a family and killed the policeman who tried to top him - for information (??!!) about Ron Arad. Arad is the navigator who went missing in 1986, when he was captured by Lebanese militiamen, taken to Beirut, tortured for God only knows how long, and eventually sold to the Iranians. Israel is set to release the man who tortured and sold him, Mustafa Dirani, in the initial deal (although there's been some movement on that) and then to try to get information about his in subsequent phases. Not so fair to the Arad family, who has certainly suffered while Israel repeatedly failed to bring their boy home.

If you didn't think the issues surrounding Ron Arad's fate (which is clearing up by the day - Nasrallah recently admitted that Arad ended his life in Lebanon) are complicated enough, try to wrap your mind around this ethical quandary. If Ron Arad was tortured and executed by the Arabs like so many other Israeli boys and girls, should Israel release a living Arab terrorist, in exchange for Arad's remains? It is well-known that his mother was adamant about saying no before she passed. On the other hand, there is the issue of what Arad means to the whole State - he is nothing less than a symbol of the Israeli boy that the country needs to get back. His restoration is long overdue, and if a painful price must be paid for the Return of Ron Arad (where that event is meant in terms of its cultural significance) then perhaps it must be paid.

The Leftist Israeli rags that are opposing this deal in the names of the families need to shut the hell up. A newspaper that supported the idea of negotiating with Arafat well into the second year of the current conflict, a newspaper that is more than a little complicit in selling peace-longing Israelis on Oslo, is in no position to give sermons about not rewarding terrorism.

That's all for now. This will only get more complicated as we learn more about the conditions of the Israelis, the names of the Arabs to be released, and the status of negotiations about Arad.

I would have to crunch some numbers to be more certain, but it seems to me that I was able to access information faster online in 1996 (back before the unholy alliance of AOL and Gateway made the online world available to the... achem... general public) even though I was using a 9600bps modem at the time. It troubles me that in this day and age, people who are allowed to vote still think that it's within the bounds of appropriate human behavior to open random attachments and thus, through nothing but their sheer stupidity, to slow the Internet down to a crawl. I blame this on people like dental receptionists who put little heart shaped post-its on their computer and load them up with screensavers that spit out cheery little inspirational messages like "a wise tree bends with the wind." You know who you are.

No, I mean, he really, really, really hates him. As near as I can tell, this antipathy has something to do with Kerry being "fake." Not that this is news, but I think it's reflective of a general trend among bloggers, and I'm worried about a widespread addiction - do they make a patch for this?

UPDATE: Of course, with comments like "Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own" (technically untrue, no?), Kerry isn't really making friends anywhere in the blogosphere.

So as near as I can tell, Dejafoo was the first blog to break the story about how Amazon is going to allow campaign contributions over its site (Stan had a post on it on the 12th). A couple days ago, the story shows up over at LGF. Do we get a hat tip or a link? A single mention? No. No link love for us.

The Left really is a caricature of itself:

Question: Can anyone come up with a Halliburton conspiracy story that is so stupid that you are 100% sure that no one on the Left would make it? Remember to check Indymedia and the Democratic Underground before answering...

UPDATE: Bonus Question: Is there a memo somewhere that requires every stupid article by a stupid Leftist to include one of the following lines: (1) "Cheney w/10 Halliburton" (which, by the way, you have to limit by date when you fire it up on Nexis because otherwise you get too many hits), (2) "number w/5 deaths w/10 since President Bush declared an end to major combat hostilities", (3) "popular vote w/10 appointed w/2 his father".

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Conspiracy Theory Generator has nothing on me.

Pat Buchanan, third party candidate, isolationist, and part time occasional nutjob, has an article arguing that Bush's State of the Union was designed in order to split the socially conservative Democratic base from "their San Francisco wing" (is that a euphemism? - Al Franken on Pat Buchanan: his speeches sound better in the original German). Can you believe that he’s still running "culture war" as a viable electoral strategy?

David Bernstein bloged a couple days ago over at Volokh about Russian emigration, specifically as it interacts with the Law of Return and the Who Is A Jew debate (short story - militant secular Russians who vote for the Likud sweet, ultra-Orthodox rabbis who pervert Jewish law in order to preserve political strength not sweet). You should read this post for his outstanding and absolutely debate-ending argument on why, regardless of how the debate politically turns out, the concept of Judaism by descent is not a racial one.
For his part, Bernstien pushes the Reform definition of Judaism (no, no - not "do whatever the hell feels good and just call it Jewish" - be nice!) His argument is for matrilineal or patrilineal descent, "combined with a demonstrated practical link to the Jewish people, to determine Jewishness." He has a couple of arguments, but ultimately he falls back on the argument that "[t]here is no reason to keep the matrilineal descent rule except that it's existed for almost 2,000 years" and that matrilineal descent does not actually have genuine religious-historical sanction going back to Sinai.
Regardless of where you come down on the debate politically (and I happen to think that Russian immigration to Israel issweet and that ultra-Orthodox rabbis who manipulate religious dogma to hold on to political power do suck), I take issue with his idea that the fact that something has existed for "almost 2,000 years" is not a valid reason to keep it around. Bernstien's argument essentially calls out adherence to matrilineal descent for being an appeal to tradition fallacy (the Appeal To Tradition fallacy, taught to every first year Philosophy or Communication undergraduate, holds that "The appeal to tradition is a very common logical fallacy in which someone proclaims his or her accuracy by noting that 'this is how it's always been done'").
In the case of religion, however, I don't think that this stance is fallacious. In the case of religions that revolve around rituals (e.g. Catholicism), this point is obvious - part of the liturgical and theological significance of the mass itself is that it partakes of the single universal mass which is spaceless and timeless. However, the point still holds true in less ritualistic religions like Judaism. Part of the ethos of going to a synagogue - part of the reason why saying the Shema is so meaningful - is that it establishes a link between us and our ancestors, from those who joyfully sang it on the banks of the Nile to those who righteously announced it on the cliffs of Masada to those who stubbornly recited it on the inside of gas chambers in Europe to those who solemnly announced it at the foot of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The emotion that wells up in our breasts when we proclaim that God is blessed for providing us with the true Torah partakes of the ritualistic knowledge that Jews have been insisting that every 7 days for tens of centuries. We should not be so quick to dismiss the appeal to tradition - sometimes it can be the case that something should be done in a particular way simply because it has been done that way for a long time. Just ask Catholics who feel that masses have lost something since Vatican II changed them into the vernacular ("but it's still the same meaning..." is obviously not the point).
How does this stance apply to the Who Is A Jew debate? Bernstien has little patience for the method by which "traditional rabbinic scholars analyze an issue... essentially reasoning backwards to find plausible language in the Torah supporting the idea that a custom or law has always existed in Judaism, but ignoring contrary historical evidence." I'm not sure why this is an unreasonable approach (or more to the point, I'm not sure what the alternative is). The sanction for Jewish law comes from the Torah (and from the analysis of the Torah by our betters over the years contained in the Talmud). At different historical moments, people have of course interpreted the Torah (and thus Jewish law) in different ways.
But that's OK – Jews recognize that our knowledge of God's law is inherently imperfect, but we're working on it. However, the finding of "plausible language in the Torah" for a particular stance just happens to be the way that we go about constructing Jewish law, and it's not as if that's an arbitrary standard. Contrary historical evidence to a particular interpretation is not inherently an argument against a particular interpretation (although it can be mobilized as such). It does not mean that Jews of that time were necessarily wrong (i.e. the view of Jewish law is not teleological in the sense that modern Jews claim that they’re closer to the truth of the Torah than ancient Jews because we've done more analysis of the Torah) but it does mean that we have a different interpretation which is now more persuasive. That interpretation can be quite creative, such as when the rabbis made it virtually impossible to impose the death penalty despite clear sanction for it in the Torah, but it must nonetheless resonate with the Jews of a particular era.
And this is how we reach the essence of the debate - the essentially rhetorical nature of how Jewish doctrine comes about. The entire debate turns on the plausibility of a particular interpretation to a particular audience at a particular moment in time - and contra Bernstein's slightly pejorative inflection on that term, that's how it should be. There should be nothing theologically disturbing in such a view - fallibility is built into interpretation. If a particular interpretation of Jewish law seems more plausible then it quite rightly should carry the day (and all of the messy factors that go into persuasion - the ethos of particular schools of rabbinical interpretation, the political power of particular yeshivas, etc - are not arguments against this view, but rather inevitable factors in any controversy).
However, describing Jewish law in this way does not mean that anything goes. Quit the opposite - plausibility also implies fidelity to certain norms and traditions, because those norms and traditions in turn affect the ways in which people make decisions.
I'm unconvinced that there is a reason to overturn 2,000 years of Jewish law in order to ease the integration of Russians into Israeli society - it seems that the better alternative is to tell the ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel to knock off their resistance to the conversion of so many people who already consider themselves to be Jewish. But the point I'd make one way or another is that the fact that Jews have done something in a particular way for 2,000 years should be taken into account by modern Jews as a factor in deciding on one interpretation of Jewish law versus another. We should take into account the normative value of tradition in making such decisions, and there should be heavy, heavy presumption in favor of staying the course. Which is not to say that such presumption cannot be overcome (it's well past time that the Orthodox tore the sheet down between men and women at shul, for instance), but it is to say that we should be very careful about dismissing tradition as irrelevant.

Dahlia Lithwick is Slate's Supreme Court watcher, and we like her not because, although she's hardly a conservative, she never misses a chance to take a hysterical pot shot at the 9th Circuit. In discussing the Court’s deliberation of Iowa v. Tovar, she relates the following exchange:

This statement, of course, is not entirely fair to Wisconsin traffic court judges. Check out what Lithwick wrote last October:

Which is why the sooner the 9th circuit is broken up, the better.

Musharraf is increasing the transparency of Pakistan's nuclear program in hopes of smoking out the elements that have been giving nuclear secrets to rogue regimes. He's a little peeved, however, because alot of the actual raw materials that have made their way into countries like Iran over the years could not have come from Pakistan, because Pakistan didn't have the tech yet. He asks:

I'd like to know the same thing.

I was trying to choose a trite phrase to go with this headline... "Fox/Hen House", "Hear No Evil/See No Evil/Say No Evil," "Cold Day/Hell," etc - but the headline really speaks for itself - "Twelve al-Qaida suspects to be tried in Iran"

The Spirit Rover is throwing a temper tantrum, is "restless", and is refusing signals from the ground to turn off.

Here's my reading of the Bush administration in the last few months:

opened up our borders to terrorists in order to provide a boost to a couple of small businesses

given up the most important tool in all of astrophysics for an ambitious government plan that NASA has neither the bureaucratic finesse nor the monetary ability to implement;

used the most solemn speech given by the most solemn office in the world to talk about the use of performance enhancing drugs by athletes;

pandered to bigots whom he apparently thinks constitute his base and in the process pissed off some of his most eloquent advocates (not to mention a constituency in his party that has remained loyal through less than the best of times);

done so by threatening to destroy what has been painstakingly reclaimed of Federalism;
Now, I think that my credentials as a Bush supporter are pretty well documented. And I do think that national security trumps all of these other concerns - we have to stay alive, and we'll figure out the rest later. However, social liberals like myself (and even social centrists) have for a long time been putting up with a lot of this administration's policies because of his moral clarity and bravery in the face of Islamofacism. But there has to be a limit, especially when he's weakening national security with this immigration thing.
Alternatively - and I know that this is the chic thing now - but I was really enamored with Edwards after Iowa. He was respectful, he was genuine, he was genteel. Just a real mench. I’m not about to bail out on President Bush - his administration’s vision for the Middle East is necessary in order to defeat our enemies. But Dick Morris is right on - "if [Edwards] wins [the primaries], Bush is in for a real fight." And if Edwards comes up with a credible foreign policy that takes seriously the threat to us and our allies, and combines it with fiscal discipline and social progressivism, even I’m going to have trouble coming up for reasons to vote for Bush.

In the last 24 hours I have received no less than four copies of this email calling for action against CBS for refusing to air a MoveOn ad during the Super Bowl (being a graduate student in the humanities will unfortunately cause that). Apparently, like an ill-behaved dog, the Left is willing to piss all over the floor (or in this case, my inbox) when they don't get the attention they know they deserve.
As if that wasn't annoying enough, the Left (especially the young, mostly academic MoveOn crowd) has for a long time had a pretty fundamental misunderstanding about what censorship is. The source of this misunderstanding lies in their inability to distinguish either (a) censorship from a private decision not to associate or (b) censorship from a decision of people not to listen to them.
It’s the latter that is most frustrating. Some time around the late 60s or early 70s, somewhere around Berkeley, a bunch of spoiled rotten disaffected little children decided that the rest of the country had an obligation to pay them as much heed as their parents apparently always did, lest they break their toys, sit down in a corner, and refuse to get up. The standard explanation, which holds that these twerps weren't given enough attention as children, is backwards. It is not alienation that drives them. Rather, it is the all-too-long reinforced notion that their petty little temper tantrums will produce not only attention, but motherly, soothing noises about how brave and kind and giving and self-sacrificing they are. Thus, the idea was planted in the minds of bad liberals that not being listened to is equivalent to censorship.
So because these kids' parents bought into the whole "never yell at your child" idiocy, I have to suffer getting four copies of this...

... and this ....

... in my inbox. Think of what the underlying assumption is - CBS’s refusal to help someone spread the Left’s speech is now a violation of right to free speech. I won’t go into the idea that thus cheapening the notion of rights hurts everyone in the long run. I’ll settle for the simple proposition that their parents owe me money for bandwidth. Can I sue for reparations? Think anyone from Berkeley will offer to represent me?

While Old Europe is busy trying to solve the burning of synagogues by banning beards, New Europe is struggling to confront all of the messy civil rights problems that come with a new democracy. This article by Balint Molnar describes Hungary's attempts to deal with discrimination and anti-Semitism through hate crimes legislation, and the pros and cons of such an approach (an issue that we here in the States are still trying to come to come to grips with). The article chronicles some anti-Semitic incidents (David Irving speaking on national radio, open and explicit incitement, etc) and then gets views from both sides on the desirability of hate crimes legislation.
The really interesting, however, part comes at the end, where the author discusses a recent anti-Semitic incident that was a little different from what Hungary usually sees. Apparently, a lawyer representing a neo-Nazi client asked the presiding judge if she was Jewish. The usual condemnations poured in from all the usual places. Unusually, however, they also poured in from the right. The normally pseudo-fascist Hungarian former Prime Minister Viktor Orban also condemned the remarks, and Molnar argues that this is evidence of a "faint red line" that is emerging in civic discourse.
Such lines, which implicitly define the limits of public discourse, are what civil, democratic society is all about. Yes, in theory anything can be said without government censorship, but for a society to survive there must be implicit, unwritten rules that set boundaries on what effectively can and can't be said. A society where anything really does go is a society that will soon, paradoxically, have to move away from democracy in a desperate effort to achieve some sort of boundary. Limits are necessary, and they will emerge either implicitly or through government coercion. It looks like Hungary is moving in the right direction.

I'm skeptical about this report that Iran had ties to 9/11. I'm also skeptical that we can do anything about it if they did (say it with me - "overstretch").

What about this seems weird? Headline:

Beginning and middle of article:

Those stupid Israelis!! Spending all that money on a wall that can be defeated by a simple ladder!! And they're so slow too - they couldn't even catch them!! What a useless project!! What were they thinking?
Last line:
Oh.

Check out how classy Shimon Peres, one of the two Last Great Zionists, is:

One of the main challenges facing Jewish leadership in the United States (especially on college campuses) is that many activists substitute passion for a genuine understanding of politics or diplomacy (the same problem exists on the other side, but since their entire strategy is to make sure that nobody actually learns the actual facts of the situation it works out a lot better for them). At some point I'm going to write a much longer post about this issue, but suffice to say that one of the quickest ways to identify a bad pro-Israel activist is to see whether they'll spout off crap like "Peres is an idiot" or "Peres isn't a patriot" in an effort to perform the way they think a good, rightwing activist should behave. I'm no fan of his politics, but to say that he doesn't have the best interests of the Jewish state in his heart is absolutely outrageous.

DEBKAFile 01/19/03:


Omri 01/21/03:


Ha'aretz 01/22/03:


Someone is keeping track of all of these, right?

Fisking the LA Times on Israel is kind of unfair, but Laura King's article from this morning is just absurd. Of course, it's rare that the LA Times will print outright lies (of course, it’s not like they’re above even that journalistic faux pas – what they are above is actually printing the corrections afterwards). Rather, what you usually get are the journalistic tricks of selective omissions to imply falsehoods and of particular phrasing and descriptions in order to set an unbalanced tone. So lets see what the most anti-Israel paper in the country has for us this morning.

Whether or not there will be forcible resistance to Sharon's coming evacuations is up in the air - it is one of the central political dramas in Israel right now. However, King really wants to paint a picture of crazed fundamentalists - so she’s wiling to overlook such nuances as the fact that the scuffle was not about evacuating settlements, but about the spectacle of Jews destroying a synagogue. It was the religious implications that made the situation so explosive. Remember - omission and tone. In fact, none of the mobile homes were even touched during the demolition – the entire scuffle was only about the synagogue.

Technically true, but completely and totally irrelevant. Yes, the road map requires the dismantling of settlements. No, that does not have anything to do either with this evacuation or (crucially) the coming uprooting of settlements that she had talked about in the paragraph just above and that are somehow supposed to be connected to this (if we assume that the paragraphs are related to each other). The upcoming evacuations are of course being taken unilaterally and not in the context of the Road Map at all, but God forbid that the LA Times acknowledge that Ariel Sharon might be somehow interested in giving up even an inch of the West Bank. This is really kind of outrageous - it's an entirely irrelevant paragraph (and the second paragraph at that) placed there only to begin casting the Israelis as essentially warmongers who must be forcibly brought to the peace table.

This one I'm not sure what to do with. A rhetorical analysis immediately suggests itself - "hauling" (like garbage), "rusty trailers" and "rickety water tower" (because they're primitive religious zealots), "tentacles" (because Jews are slimy and will worm their way into every crevice). But I'll just focus on a single, very interesting inversion - what exactly do you imagine went into choosing the placement of "settlement" and "community"? I think that this is a naked instance of intentional bias - I don’t assume that King came up with these two words off the top of her head, but after pulling out a thesaurus and finding both of them, why do you think she made the choices she made? The outpost, which had 10 mobile homes, she labels a "community." OK, maybe they are. But then in the next sentence she contrasts that "community" with the "settlements" that the outpost residents came from. Those settlements, of course, include Ariel, which is a full-fledged city with 40,000 people. What’s the point of this compare and contrast? It's patently meant to delegitimze any Jewish presence in the West Bank, even well- established ones. Usually it's much more difficult to demonstrate how King’s subtle biasing works in a newspaper article - you have to trace the pejorative adjectives and resonances attached to settlements, and the author can disavow those connotations. But this case is transparent - King clearly selected a word with positive connotations for the outpost which she consistently denigrated above and below this paragraph as merely temporary, but she choose a word with negative connotations for the permanent city from which the residents came. Why didn’t she just choose words with negative valence for both? Maybe she was using a pocket dictionary…
The next two paragraphs are about Lebanon:

It's a minor thing, but this Reuters trick of inserting the caveat "as described by Israel" in front of anything that might possibly reflect favorably upon Israel is getting a little old (Reuters pretty much made this trick famous by using phrases like "Israeli-described victim" to describe babies killed by suicide bombers). And you can rest assured that what Israel struck were in fact (not just described as) terrorist bases - if they had been civilian installations, not only would the LA Times be screaming about it off of the front page, but they certainly would not be writing phrases like "what Lebanon described as civilian villages."

Because you see, if an Israeli bulldozer clearing mines put in the ground by Hezbollah in order to kill Israeli soldiers makes a wide U-Turn in order to get around the mine, the LA Times will (a) fail to mention that part of the story and (b) imply that said wide U-Turn justified Hezbollah's unprovoked attack.
OK, no logical transition (she clearly wasn’t attending writing classes while she was ditching her journalism classes), and we’re back in the West Bank:

For those of you keeping count at home, there have been exactly 3 paragraphs describing the synagogue (out of 4 total paragraphs about the bulldozing). So far we don’t know much about what led up to the evacuation or what it’s implications will be, but we do know that the synagogue was "makeshift," "wooden," "crudely built", and "hut-like" and built next to other "rusty" and "rickety" buildings. I was suspicious before, but now I'm definitely convinced that she had a thesaurus next to her. Nobody who is this bad a journalist and writer could have a vocabulary that extensive. Although on the other hand, these aren’t particularly large words.

Primitive savages. "Followers" of some dead rabbi (I mean, I'll admit that Rabbi Kahane was kind of questionable, but still, it's not like she knows why...) OK, now follow the next part closely - this is where things get interesting and we find out that she’s not just a careless journalist, but is actively dishonest:

Three things: one, the quote that she offers as evidence in no way supports her conclusion that even these extreme settlers won't abide any territorial concessions - it just doesn't; two, a new torah being used in a synagogue is not an “artifact” (Webster’s: n. "applied esp. to the simpler products of aboriginal art" - she needs to get over this settlers are primitive motif she’s got going); third (and this is the bad one), she clearly knows, contrary to her opening paragraph, that this scuffle was over the religious significance of the synagogue, and not of the outpost as such (that’s why she tries to be snide and point out that the settlers were overreacting because all the religious artifacts had been removed (as if the synagogue itself is not of religious significance). She just works so hard to paint the residents as irrational and primitive that she forgets herself! OK, cut back to the Lebanon thing (I told you, she's not so much on the English classes).

Flatly false. The sticking point is over starting the negotiations with or without preconditions: see here and here. Everything else is just confidence building (i.e. it would be nice, as a sign that Syria is ready to make peace with Israel, if they would stop giving Hezbollah orders to kill Israelis).

Incoherent. It’s not a "warning strike" if it’s response to Syria’s responsibility for Israeli deathes. That’s called retaliation (maybe she turned to the wrong part of her thesaurus? I dunno...) This paragraph is just made to make Israelis sound militaristic.
But this paragraph is more important under the "proof of intentional bias" category. In this paragraph, what used to be known as "Israeli described" strongholds suddenly become "known Hezbollah bases". Before I discuss the implication of this, lets get to the next paragraph.

And here is the acknowledgement I asked for earlier that Hezbollah was responsible for laying the mines. Admittedly, it is offset by that annoying "Israeli officials said" Reuters trick again (it's not like anyone is denying< that Hezbollah put those mines down, why the caveat?) - but you take what you can get.
The article then switches to Gaza. So why, in the last paragraphs about Lebanon, is there finally a presentation of all the crucial facts that are necessary to understand what's really going on? More to the point – what is the implication of the fact that fleshing out the situation contradicts the implications made earlier in the article? The clue is given by the fact that there are essentially four sections to the article - Settlements, Lebanon, Settlements, and Lebanon. The last two sections are essentially just reprints of the first two, without any appreciable analytical additions.
But they do serve a crucial journalistic function – they allow King to protect herself from charges of bias or omission? Her response to my initial complaints would be that all of those facts are included at the end of the article. But the end of the article could easily have been incorporated into the beginning of the article. By not including them there, she risks obfuscating the situation in order to set the tone and direction of the piece - and thus it’s final impact - against Israel.