Our new HateWatch post is now online at Winds Of Change.NET

This entry's highlighted topics include extensive commentary on some of the more acute bigotry, anti-Semitism, and outright idiocy from the last month:

* Religious Hate: Palestinian suicide bombings continue; Islamist murders continue throughout the world; International universities, newspapers, United Nations echo call to wipe Israel off the map; Lebanese actor can't stand even pretending to be Jewish; Christian bigot Phelps continues disgusting protests; Anti-Semitism appears in Western press to varying degrees; Anti-Semitism in Australia; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really is that crazy; Iran bans Western music; Egyptian Holocaust denial; Hezbollah TV airs cartoon of Jews as monkeys and pigs; the plight of women in Islamist societies becomes increasingly tragic and dire

* Idiotarian Seethings: Western Leftists celebrate Hugo Chavez; Howard Dean endorses Code Pink; MSM and Leftist bloggers embrace liberal anti-Bush hoax; Resentful hatred of Margaret Thatcher; Harold Pinter, Western literati pontificate; German archaeologist, former hostage sides with terrorists; Cindy Sheehan - still crazy; Leftist ideological back-patting gets silly with children's book; Katrina idiotarianism continues; Particularly stupid college courses convince academics that they really do matter; Anti-WTO protests neglect puppets, HW disappointed; John Kerry may or may not imply American troops are terrorists; hate groups don't like State Dept Office to combat anti-Semitism; Munich predictably useless

* Race and Culture: War on Christmas gets boring; 80% of US mosques radicalized by Saudi Arabia; Radical Islam in Sweden; Saudi court rules that migrant worker must have eye gouged out; Race riots in Australia; White supremacist Michael Crook sends hate letters to troops; White supremacist David Duke on Al Jazeera: "Israel Makes the Nazi State Look Very Moderate"; Crips founder put to death, hand-wringing ensues

* A Hopeful Note: Political developments in Iraq and Afghanistan; Opposition to anti-Semitism in Britain; Opposition to anti-Semitism in the Ukraine; Signs of Islamic moderation at Muslim summit; Anti-Islamist measures in Germany; Saudi Arabia considers letting women drive

Many liberal Jewish organizations - from humanitarian teams in Israel to service groups in the United States - exhibit a cringe-worthy willingness to demean themselves in exchange for the trappings of international acceptance. Concomitant with that willingness are a series of justificatory rituals, designed to convince themselves and others that their debasement was worth the begrudging nods of faux acceptance that it earned - the more pyrrhic the victory, the more shrill the justifications. So it almost feels unseemly to read Hadassah's June Walker describe the pathetic spectacle of Jews agreeing to hide the Star of David so that they can join the Red Cross as "a new beginning for the world health community". As if giving up all visible signs of Jewish humanitarianism is a worthy accomplishment for Jewish humanitarian groups. Admittedly, here are people trying to answer her - but not enough to counter those who urge Jewish groups to grovel for acceptance from people who can't bear to look at Jewish symbols, let alone at Jews.

It has become at least a little easier - after anti-war marches filled with Nazi imagery, world-wide calls for the destruction of Israel, and the Durbin 'anti-racism' hate-fest - to argue that anti-Semitism is often legitimized through disingenuous claims that it is anti-Zionism. But these are grand political movements deeply marked by anti-Semitism, and the seething hatred and resentment that drives them often explodes into easily identified, open anti-Semitism. It is much harder to identify and describe more quotidian anti-Semitism - the kind that is always beneath the surface of otherwise legitimate political discourse, waiting to be called upon to serve political ends. That kind of anti-Semitism is far more subtle. It is often little more than a combination of resonant phrases ('shadowy cabal') and suggestive images ('bearded Jew') - none of which amount to much individually, but when taken together, do rhetorical work by drawing on anti-Semitic tropes.
The problem then becomes how to carefully identify when an advocacy that's not vulgarly anti-Semitic is still nonetheless either motivated by anti-Semitism or is gaining rhetorical power by appealing to anti-Semitic imagery. To pick out motives it's often enough to check whether Jews or the Jewish State are being consistently and unfairly singled out for criticism. When Israel is the subject of literally tens of UN human rights resolutions while Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China and Iran are not only being ignored but are leading the charge, it's not too much to suspect strong anti-Semitic motives. Similarly, when facts are ignored so as to paint an unnecessarily suggestive picture - such as when 'Israel's security' is singled out as the reason the US went to war in Iraq - anti-Semitism is almost always at least partly at work.
Identifying anti-Semitic rhetorical tropes is a more complicated task. Here, the question is not whether something was excluded (other, far more serious human rights violators or other, more plausible motives for war), but whether what was included is persuasive in part because it calls on anti-Semitic imagery. A recent Washington Post article by Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi can serve as an example. The article is an attack (justified or not) on lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Schmidt and Grimaldi paint a picture of out of control avarice, of a reckless but pathetic schemer utilizing money for petty psychological and political gain.
The bad way to criticize this piece (but one that is unfortunately common) is to accuse Schmidt and Grimaldi of anti-Semitism simply because they called a particular Jew greedy. That method is unhelpful for the same reason that calling out any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic is unhelpful: just as sometimes Israel deserves criticism, so sometimes there are Jews - just as there are Christians and Muslims - who really are shamelessly greedy. But just as some criticism of Israel really is anti-Semitic, so some images of needlessly greedy Jews draw on anti-Jewish tropes.
This WaPo article turns out to be filled with unnecessary references to Abramoff's Judaism, and it places those references suspiciously close to blatant anti-Semitic stereotypes. There is a seemingly random and almost completely irrelevant drop-in about Abramoff's wife converting to Judaism - literally right above a one-two punch of 'he's always been a shady character' and 'he's a lying thief'. There is a weird riff about Abramoff sporting "a beard and a yarmulke" in the middle of two paragraphs about his ruthless financial dealings. There are no legitimate news-related or narrative-related reasons to include those statements - unless one is trying to smuggle in stereotypes under the banner of "details". Of course, anything can be justified as 'just details', but the question remains: why choose those details as the salient characteristics in a story about financial misdealing?
Rhetoric can be anti-Semitic either by leaving things out that would indicate a mitigating non-Jewish dimension or by including facts that misleadingly provide a Jewish connotation. Both tactics should be called out for what they are, and this Schmidt and Grimaldi article probably crossed the line.

In the past, we've referred to the practice of international law - especially in the Israeli context - as a kind of fetish. What we mean is that things that are supposed to be the result of long, legitimate processes (genuine trust leading to a treaty, objective analysis leading to a court decision, etc) come to stand in for the processes themselves. So when the 'anti-racism' conference in Durban becomes an anti-Semitic hatefest, complete with pamphlets based on the Protocols, most of the world still acts as if it is a legitimate gathering - because, well, Durban was an international conference and international conferences are definitionally legitimate. And when anti-Semitic sycophants of despots are hand-picked to become judges in the International Court of Justice and go on to level anti-Israel decisions, most of the world acts as if those decisions are the result of legitimate disputation - because, well, the ICJ is an international court and international courts are definitionally legitimate. Instead of genuine dialogue and the rule of law, we get what those things would normally result in - an international meeting or a court decision. While dialogue and the rule of law might result in conferences and court decisions, not all conferences and court decisions are not always the result of dialogue and the rule of law - but most of the world acts as if they are.
This dynamic was particularly obvious during the Oslo process: the Palestinians regularly violated the Oslo process, but Israel was supposed to act as if the existence of a treaty implied everything that comes with one - commitment to its obligations, a basic amount of good faith, etc. That perverse kind of double-think - knowing that the Palestinians are violating their obligations but believing that they're not - continues up today up to the highest levels of international diplomacy. So the US State Department can place repeated and inordinate pressure on Israel to let Hamas run in the coming Palestinian elections, even though Hamas is obviously prohibited from running by the Oslo Accords. And Egypt can commit in the Camp David Accords to guaranteeing Israel's security while simultaneously allowing Palestinians to acquire - according to this week's figures - 90% of the bombs and missiles fired at Israeli civilians. But if Israel even hints at violating any of their many vague treaty obligations (for instance, reoccupying Palestinian hotbeds of Palestinian terrorism), the international community screeches about Israel being an outlaw state.

When you read "Israel orders end to Gaza rockets", doesn't that make it seem like Israel has ordered an end to its own rocket attacks (you know, the kind of thing you can actually order?) Instead of what Israel is actually trying to achieve - an end to Palestinian attacks against Israel?
When you read "Abbas urges end to Israel attacks", doesn't that make it seem like Abbas is urging an end to attacks by Israel? Instead of what Abbas was actually advocating - an end to Palestinian attacks against Israel?

As general election time nears for Palestinians, it's becoming clearer and clearer who the big winners are likely to be:

Whoever wins the election, of course, will get access to all of the international political and financial institutions that have been built up for the Palestinians over the last decade and a half - billions in aid, worldwide embassies, and UN status. Or, more honestly, billions in untraceable money, the ears of world leaders hostile to Israel, and the diplomatic cover to ensure that nothing is ever done about their actions.

Of course they did:

By "semi-naked", we're pretty sure that they mean 'you can see the women's ankles'. In the West, new communications technologies promise to usher in a new age of breathtaking possibilities, as more information is exchanged by more people. In Saudi Arabia, you can't use your cell phone to express the most meaningless of opinions if it involves the hint that women are people too.

In the same week that Israel gets its first female University President, Saudi Arabia begins to consider maybe letting women drive cars. This is where we'd list Western feminist organizations opposed to Israel and Bush's efforts to reform the Middle East, but frankly progressives' reflexive opposition to anything 'Eurocentric' (let alone, eww, Israeli) is just pathetic. And we don't have that kind of time.

Even if you're the mainstream international media, you can't spend all your time making up stories of Israeli massacres so that you can compare Jews to Nazis. But that won't stop intrepid reporters from blaming Jews for things they definitely didn't do. Just in time for the holiday season: Jews responsible for maybe harassing Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem - not in the Bible, but last week(!!):

Jews are now being blamed for something that they didn't do in a situation that doesn't exist. Yes, if Mary and Joseph were alive today, they'd have to go through security checkpoints just like everybody else. But we also have a feeling that if Jesus was alive today, he'd be kind of pissed off that Palestinians have been engaged in systematic attacks against Christians in the Holy Land. Well, not really because Christianity wouldn't exist yet, but if... well, you see how spinning these stories can get complicated. What a dumb argument.
But this begs the immediate question: if Jews tried to prevent Jesus from getting into Israel, does that get them off the hook for killing him:

We actually have a relatively more important critique of this idiotic story:

We don't mean to get all 'grammatical,' but the word "but" is meant to imply that you're about to contradict something you just said. For instance, we said that we didn't want to get all grammatical, but then we did. Or another example: "liberals believe that marching down streets with giant puppets will stop wars, but in fact they just look like idiots". That has nothing to do with this post, but it's a nice reminder.
So when you're reading a sentence and you encounter that word, you expect evidence to the contrary (definition). Correct use of 'but': "Israeli officials say the 25-foot high wall has been successful in preventing terrorism, but in fact terrorism has increased since it was built". Of course, it would be a lie, but at least it would be passable English. On the other hand, if the author didn't use the word "but," he couldn't give the impression that he was contradicting something said by Israeli officials - and maybe he'll get lucky and readers reader will forget what 'Israeli officials' said by the end of the sentence.
The really infuriating thing, of course, is that the author both knows that the security fence has contributed to a massive decrease in violence and blames Israel for building it anyway:

Follow this carefully: if there was violence, then tourists wouldn't travel to Bethlehem. But because of increased Israeli security measures (read: the security fence), this has been the quietest year so far - and so naturally Israel is to be blamed for the lack of tourists.

Remember those pictures of Palestinians celebrating 9/11? The ones that were suppressed by the Palestinian authorities in a desperate attempt to hide from the world (not to mention the US public) what a decade of development assistance had bought them?
And remember how, when they were confronted with those images, official Palestinian spokespeople said that those very few revelers didn't represent the majority of Palestinians? Turns out, that was kind of a fib too:

Maybe a few more billions in aid - or perhaps yet another UN mission - will make them stop thinking that mass murder is OK.

Is there a reason we've never read this site before? Other than the usual mix of hydrocodone ground up in vodka (not our fault - we read about it on Defamer!)? Smooth Stone is a 3 year old (somewhat JavaScript addicted) pro-Israel blog. Judging by the award banners on the right, we're about the only ones who don't have the site RSS'd. Positives: it is very content rich, and appears to be monitoring all the right sources so you don't have to (IMRA, MEMRI, etc). Downside: an affinity for starting posts with a Rush Limbaugh like "Folks". And no link to Mere Rhetoric.
Across much of the rest of the pro-Israel blogosphere - from liberal Americans to not so liberal Canadians - there is much wailing and knashing of teeth because Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to moderate the Likud. Since both of these sites are written by friends of MR, we'll try to ask this gently: wtf? Seriously, two words: polling data.
Over at KesherTalk, Judith Weiss is basically putting on a clinic on how to embarrass errant filmmakers who unwisely venture into seas they are wildly unequipped to navigate. As we sit here on the USC Annenberg porch (current time: 10:55pm, current temp: 61F), mere feet away from the Spielberg Music Scoring Stage, we think: geez, moral equivalence really is pretty stupid.

In the last month or so, we've received emails alerting us to two book-length works on the Israeli-Arab conflict. The interesting thing here is that they both revolve around Arab intransigence, but for opposite reasons: one believes that Arabs hate Jews because Israel appears weak, while the other thinks that Jews engender backlash in proportion to their successes.
This dynamic is not new - Abba Eban long ago commented that there is a fundamental schizophrenia about Israel in the Arab world: Israel is simultaneously a paper tiger that can be overrun by any sufficiently committed Arab leader and the stronghold of an all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy that is responsible for all the world's harms. Neither of these two books explores the tension in this dynamic - instead, they take a position on one side or the other. Samson Blinded holds that Arab militancy rises whenever Israel appears weak, while The Crux of History argues that global anti-Semitism is a result of the revolutionary kernel in Jewish thought.
What these books do recognize, however, is the over-whelming urgency of the Israeli-Arab crisis. As Iran develops nuclear weapons and openly declares its intention to vaporize five million Jews, the analogies to Nazism are coming to seem less and less hysterical.

Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict by Obadiah Shoher

This work is divided into sections like "The inadmissibility of vacillation", "Prospects for War and Guarantees of Peace- Doubtful", "The Need to Reconsider Values". It seems deeply indebted to works like Paul Eidelberg's Demophrenia: Israel has lost its Jewish character, attempts to make peace with Arab countries is suicide because they will be emboldened by perceptions of Israeli weakness, the only thing Israel can do is kill or be killed, and so on. And like such books, it suffers by putting on pretenses of academic method and rigor - the work would be much stronger if it emphasized its most salient aspects as a catalog of Arab intransigence. The attempts to link the Arab-Israeli conflict to high-level political philosophy weaken rather than enhance the credibility of the work. The author would be well-served to simply stack up all his evidence that Arab publics will never accept Israel - the obvious conclusion being that giving land to maybe-not-so-horrible temporary dictatorships in exchange for pieces of paper is counterproductive.
For those familiar with the intricacies of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, there's nothing particularly new or revelatory in this work. Arab nations have repeatedly violated peace agreements with Israel, etc etc. Furthermore, the sentiment expressed by the work (coated with a thin veneer of Classical studies), is outright-dangerous. There is a kind of unabashed, Stoic acceptance of horrific violence - a kind of 'we're willing to accept the burdens of immorality' realist machismo. It is exemplified in statements like "Israel must occupy the capitals of enemy states... Enemy civilian losses should be ignored," but it drives the entire work. This kind of sentimentalism is as dangerous as it is transparent - enemy civilian losses should never be ignored, if only so that we retain a sense of guilt at the atrocities of war. This kind of 'we must accept the terrible costs of what must be done' ritualism should be called out for being nothing more than a facile abdication for careful thinking and delicate planning. It's very easy for the self-proclaimed realist to declare sagely that compromises and trade-offs weaken Israel, but the psychological satisfaction that he receives from that pure and untroubled position is precisely the reason to be so suspicious of him.
On the other hand, interspersed with awkward and poorly elaborated invocations of Machiavelli, there are some facts and footnotes that make the book valuable both for the total newcomer and for anyone looking to refresh their knowledge of the specifics of Arab intransigence. Ignore testosterone soaked passages like "from the Arab point of view, Israel looks weak, repeatedly asking for peace. She ignores the Arab mentality. Arabs must be forced to the peace table". Instead, use the book as a kind of quick reference regarding the repeated Arab betrayals of Israeli peace deals.

The Crux of World History by Dr. Francisco Gil-White

Dr. Francisco Gil-White, a former UPenn Psychology professor ostensibly terminated for being "too political", is the current director of a center for Historical and Investigative Research. He has placed online the entirety of his soon to be published book The Crux of World History.
A couple of things about the site and the book. Any site that has to prominently display a link to an article titled "Is this website doing 'conspiracy theory'?" is already somewhat suspicious. And the apologia itself is sketchy at best - the main argument seems to be (1) that it's not a conspiracy theory if it's true and (2) that you can look everything up yourself. Of course, the entire point of a conspiracy theory is that it takes seemingly (and almost always actually) disconnected facts and weaves them into a dark plot. "You can see the evidence for yourself" is always the conspiracy theorists' emphatic claim of justification.
We haven't really gotten a chance to go through the entire book yet, but it trashes the ancient Greeks and Romans so it's likely to suck in that newcomer-stumbles-into-highly-specialized-academic-setting-and-offers-revolutionary-new-theories kind of sucking. But we do want to call your attention to the book partly because of Gil-White's online introduction:

We're not sure about his answer, but both his search - and the urgency with which he is undertaking that search - are justified.
We feel kind of bad giving these works these kinds of reviews. Fundamentally, both of the authors are on the right side - Israel faces an urgent and existential threat the magnitude of which has not been seen since the late 1930s. But the solution is neither to abstract the problem into socio-psychological academic-ese or to urge a steely resolve in the face of indiscriminate violence. The solution will have to be muddier, less grandiose, and more pragmatic: slowly establishing defensible borders, constantly urging the world to hem in Iran, developing military technology, etc. The quick solutions are very rarely solutions at all.

We figure that two weeks is more than enough for you, our gentle yet discerning readers, to be deprived of our sunshine. Finals are over, most of our dental work is out of the way, and we haven't written anything yet on all those Palestinians who hatefully celebrated when Prime Minster Sharon - the only Israeli leader in history who has ever completely evacuated land for a future Palestinian state - was potentially dying of a stroke. On the agenda for the next week: HateWatch, American college campuses, and why a movie celebrating suicide bombers - by a man who publicly admits he would be a suicide bomber - pisses us off less than a movie about atrocities committed against Jews by a Jewish filmmaker.

It's rare that moral relativists actually use the exact same language that we use when we're sarcastically putting words in their mouths ('everyone has their own reality', 'we must listen to the voices of the terrorist Other', etc):

This morning, Hezbollah "described their reality" as one in which they'd like to infiltrate across the border and attack Israel. How educational.

Prominent French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has been under half a month's worth of sustained criticism - including the possibility of a media boycott, the threat of lawsuits, and the specter of violence - for identifying the "disgruntled youth" who launched the Paris Intifada as Muslim. In a caricature of Leftist denial, he is being blamed by liberal weeklies for "worsening the social chasms in the country" - as if naming the problem brings it into existence.

Quick - what happens when you let a culture moving towards militant Islam vote?

Final toll: 11 killed, hundreds wounded.

The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece this morning by George Bisharat, "a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco [who] writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East." The article is titled "Should Israel give up its nukes?", and it claims that a recently released Pentagon funded study recommended that Israel do exactly that:

The report in question is the Strategic Studies Institute's downloadable "Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran" and Bisharat is all but outright lying about the its recommendations. There are exactly 500 uses of the word "Israel" in the report, and not a single one of them is used to recommend that Israel publicly dismantle its nuclear bombs. In fact, it says that such a course would risk all out war in the Middle East. The actual recommendations are found in the summary on page 4:

and the recommendation is on pages 16-17:

The bolding is our own, and is meant to call attention to two things:

(1) The SSI report explicitly calls for Israel to "not yet dismantle" any nuclear capability, in direct and undeniable contrast to Bisharat's claim that it calls for Israel to "begin to dismantle its nuclear capability"

(2) The report deals only with Israel mothballing fissile material - not nuclear weapons. This is a critical distinction - it's the difference between Israel resting on its arsenal of 150-200 nuclear weapons in an otherwise de-nuclearized Middle East, and Israel weakening itself by dismantling its arsenal. The SSI report does not believe that Israel actually disarming would have any effect on Iranian motives for proliferation because Iran is not developing their arsenal for defensive purposes. They're developing it to destroy Israel:

The report recommends that Israel trade its ability to produce future bombs for Iran's ability to produce future bombs. Not only does it say the opposite of Israel should "begin to dismantle" anything, but when it refers to "nuclear capability" it is explicitly talking about fissile material and not nuclear bombs!

There's a very specific reason why the SSI authors do not recommend that Israel publicly dismantle its nuclear arsenal - because they think it would risk a regional nuclear war. Bisharat tries to use the report to argue the opposite - that the United States should restore its "international legitimacy" by pressuring Israel to admit and publicly dismantle its nuclear arsenal ("a reversal of our policy would be widely noted regionally" and help "avert Iran's apparent drive for nuclear weapons"). But the report says that such a course would trigger uncontrollable proliferation throughout the Middle East:

And even more strongly:

In answer to Bisharat's claim that the United States can solve Iran's incentive to proliferate by forcing Israel to begin publicly dismantling its nuclear weapons, the report asserts that:

(a) Iran will proliferate for reasons independent of Israel
(b) Israel shouldn't begin by dismantling anything
(c) Israeli should limit fissile production (it doesn't recommend dismantling nuclear weapons in any way)
(d) Israel should avoid publicly disclosing its nukes in any way

At this point, the only imaginable answer that Bisharat could make is that he didn't mean to imply that "nuclear capability" meant "nuclear bombs" or that "nuclear disarmament" meant "disarming nuclear weapons". In other words, he'd have to make the absurd claim that all of the times in his article when he says that the problem to be solved is Israeli possession of any nuclear weapons...

... has nothing to do with the SSI report that the rest of his article is about - that is, about the ongoing Israeli production of new fissile material. He'd also have to claim that when he goes on and on about how "a Pentagon-commissioned study" made up of "experts" and "no enemies of Israel", after "two years of deliberations" - when he goes on and on about how qualified that study is, he'd have to claim that he wasn't trying to imply that they actually agree with any of his recommendations (let alone, you know, vehemently disagree with them). The entire article is a blatant and dishonest attempt to call upon the authority of military experts to endorse something that they think would be a disaster.

But even if he was willing to sink to admitting that he is an abysmally dishonest writer, it still wouldn't suffice to explain away the really egregious dishonesty in the article. The headline pretty much proves that the intent of the article was to deceive Los Angeles Times readers. The title - "should Israel give up its nukes" - is a question which Bisharat asserts that the SSI report answers in the affirmative (in "a sudden attack of common sense", no less!) But the report not only fails to makesuch a recommendation, it declares that such a course risks uncontrollable nuclear proliferation, with nuclear miscalculation and war not far behind. The Los Angeles Times should issue an apology to the SSI and to its readers for the absolutely surreal mendacity of this article.

On the same day that Israeli population centers were again the victims rockets launched by Palestinians... on the same day that an Israeli was stabbed to death by a Palestinian... of course a dozen U.N. agencies and nine NGOs would release a statement demanding that the world raise $215 million for Palestinians.
In other news, the Israeli Air Force assassinated two more terrorist leaders who might well have been using some of the last pile of money the UN sent over to murder civilians.

Syria is considering thinking about talking to Jews just to get the US off their back:

We have a proposal: since Syria is in a position of weakness and Israel is in a position of strength - that is, since Syria needs to sign a formal peace agreement with Israel a lot more than Israel needs to sign a formal peace agreement with Syria - Israel should offer Syria a land for peace bargain. Israel will agree to normalize relations with Syria for, say, 30km of Syrian land on the base of the Golan.

The United States is placing inordinate pressure on South Korea not to sigh a lucrative arms deal with Israel so that Boeing can get the contract:

Money from the export market is, of course, how the Israeli defense industry stays in business and on the cutting edge of new technologies. And the Israeli defense industry is, of course, the only thing holding off Israel's enemies - which outnumber Israel by entire orders of magnitude. If Boeing was actually more efficient, then it would be a good thing for South Korea to purchase arms from them - it would force the Israeli industry to compete, bettering the industry as a whole. But the United States' actions here amount to nothing more or less than forcibly cutting off funds to the Israeli defense industry - while allowing US firms to remain complacent in their lack of competitiveness. It's bad for US defense industries, it's bad for Israeli defense industries, and it's bad for Israel and the US.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

We've got your new poll numbers right here:

We really don't know what to think about Ha'aretz this morning. There are two opinion pieces, each stranger than the last. In the first, Israel Harel sympathizes with the plight of settlers and urges Likud to regroup, arguing that the critical election the one after this one and that the party has a "historic role." In the second, Nehemia Strasler points out the brutally obvious fact that Netanyahu was a fantastic Finance Minister and that the people who blame him for impoverishing the poor have little to no understanding of economics. She goes so far as to single out Peretz and state pretty unequivocally that, if allowed to implement his pseudo-socialist union hack agenda, Peretz would have crashed and/or will crash the economy.
We were getting very worried about the health of the Ha'aretz staff, but then their third opinion piece was a poorly written, sarcastic, and insufferable extended smirk written by Yossi Sarid. Sarid snarkily has "a good word", and he revels in the plight of the Likud Central Committee. Which is something we do all the time, but we don't (a) put on dignified airs or (b) whine about our political martyrdom in the name of a ill-fated and unenforceable negotiated peace settlement. So there are differences.
Not to be outdone in the "what the hell is going on" category, JPost has an article by Larry Derfner which basically humiliates the Israeli Right by unfairly yet hysterically describing "the real meanings of some terms you will be hearing again and again in the election campaign". It's funny because it has just a hint of truth.

Likud

Tzachi Hanegbi's departure, there's real talk of the Likud ceasing to be a party:

Listen, the Likud has had some rough weeks and we don't mean to be rude about this, but seriously - if the only thing standing between your party and "complete disintegration" is a guy who's spent the last two years constantly getting demoted for shady-to-criminal activity, maybe you should reconsider what it is you think you're doing.
But Bibi has a solution - he'll move the Likud further right! Begging the immediate question: how?

Kadima

In the wake of a bombing that has reawakened the public's anxiety about security and given your party - associated as it is with security - the best polling data since it was created, of course you'd want to say that you're going to cut the defense budget:

"More than once" - he wanted to emphasize that he would be cutting defense. Well played.
Tzachi Hanegbi's mother is an unrepentant right winger and she is very, very unhappy about his recent defection from the Likud. There's probably another "he's such a lying crook" joke here too, but we just can't find it. The article's kind of sad - we don't suggest reading it.

Labor

Final enrollment for participating in the Labor primary ends today. Barak will almost certainly not be running, although he won't explain why until a meeting this evening. We don't think he'll tell the truth even then, because saying "I want to be untainted when I pick up the pieces after the disaster that will be the Peretz campaign" would just seem rude.

The Chief of the UN's nuclear watchdog is still not sure whether Iran is really trying to build nuclear weapons:

Or as Ha'aretz (which recently published an absurd editorial claiming that Israel shouldn't defend itself against Iran), headlines this story as "UN nuclear watchdog shows greater understanding of Israel's concerns"
Not to be overly pedantic about this, but technically the gun doesn't start smoking until after it's been fired - by which point it will be too late. But in the sprit of cooperation and public service, we have a hint for Dr. ElBaradei: Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.

Advocates of the New Middle East have always relied on cultural exchanges to bridge the gap between Israelis and their Arab neighbors. And so during the Oslo years you saw an explosion in things like Israeli-Arab summer camps, sporting events, art shows, etc - all obviously opposed by those who don't want reconciliation. As it turns out, cultural exchanges were kind of useless when it came to stopping another war, but just in case there's something to the whole idea of Israelis and Arabs getting along, today's Palestinians isn't taking any chances:

Totally pathological. Just simply and totally pathological.

The IDF announced yesterday that - in yet another effort to avoid harming Palestinian civilians - they would limit their retaliation for the brutal Netanya suicide bombing to targeted killings. Today saw the first retaliatory strike for the bombing (and the first strike in over a month), an attack against Mahmoud Arkan, a commander from the Popular Resistance Committees:

Oh, and his group was also responsible for the murder of US diplomats...

... but despite this the State Department's pet Palestinian leaders did nothing about him:

The United Nations, which recently passed six resolutions condemning Israel for being a threat to peace and stability in the Middle East - not to mention for damaging the lives of Palestinian terrorists - has found itself unwilling to condemn the Netanya bombing:

Algeria, which is currently signed trade treaties with Iran and (wait for it) Syria, is allowed to prevent the United Nations from pointing out that the murder of civilians is something that should be frowned upon. As to the specific pretext of the objection - that the order came from Syria:

There's something about marginal Leftist groups that causes them to passionately fight over the most minute procedural issues, as if by pretending that they constitute a significant body they in fact become one. The closer Meretz comes to beating the Likud in the race to the bottom, the more their petty internal debates focus on party rulemaking.

Kadima

Kadima announces illustrious and not so illustrious acquisitions :
- Social charity goddess Navah Barak, who is Ehud Barak's ex-wife.
- All but confirmed crook Tzachi Hanegbi, who is quitting his job as the Likud's Chairman and bringing himself and his future corruption indictment into Kadima. He claims he's acting out of loyalty, but it's far more likely that he's counting on a close association with Sharon, which has saved him in the past, to save him again:

The reason Hanegbi has a history of supporting Sharon is because he's a political opportunist who will betray whatever modicum of ideology he has for a Ministry appointment.

Pathetic.
On the other hand:
Mere Rhetoric, 11/07/05:

Ynet, 12/07/05:

Yeah, cause we're really above gloating.

Likud

The Likud will be led by Danny Naveh until the election of a new chairman. Downside: constant leadership changes signal to the public that the Likud is in chaos. Upside: no longer being led by the most corrupt Minister in recent memory. Likud's new strategy for proving they have no corrupt politicians: have everybody leave.
Netanyahu is attacking Peretz's atrocious approach to helping the poor by destroying the Israeli economy:

All true. And if Netanyahu was running for Finance Minister instead of Prime Minister, we're sure he'd be a lot more popular right now.
Mofaz accused Sharon of manipulating defense officials outside the Likud and undermining Mofaz inside the Likud. It is kind of a sad situation, because one of the reasons that Mofaz isn't doing well in the Likud is because he stood by Sharon during disengagement. But, Israeli politics being what it is, Kadima officials have made it plain that they literally could not care less.
How bad are things getting in the Likud? Members are defecting to the Labor party.

Labor

Amir Peretz's plans to stack the Labor party with sycophants and personal friends is now pretty much out in the open:

Labor Chairman Amir Peretz was seeking Wednesday to move the Labor Party primaries to early January, upsetting several party members who said they needed longer to campaign... "Why does everything need to be hurried and fast?" asked a Labor MK seeking reelection, who asked not to be named. "While the newcomers have received all this publicity the rest of us have had to fight for the spotlight. The sooner the elections, the greater the buzz around the new party members, and the more likelihood that they will get votes over veteran members."

Ha'aretz parrots yesterday's news about Peretz's showboating refusal to accept his national responsibilities as Opposition Leader and use a armored car - just to make sure that all their readers know that Amir Peretz is for the little guy.

Yesterday it was Akiva Eldar not-so-subtly slipping the phrase "over-hyped debate on the Iranian nuclear question" into a bitter article complaining that all those dead terrorism victims were taking the wind out of Amir Peretz's sails. Today it's the Ha'aretz editorial team declaring that Israel should avoid even talking about Iran's nuclear program because the international community might still work something out:

Sure all those things are nice in theory, but those of us who read newspapers know that Iran has declared in advance that negotiations will fail , Russia just got done selling Iran billions in weapons, and the IAEA isn't going to refer Iran to the Security Council < any time soon. Meanwhile, Iran is building more and more plants with help from more and more countries, while just about everyone now concedes that the mullahs will have nuclear weapons within the next few months. But for some reason it's vitally important to the Ha'aretz editorial board that Israel not upset anyone by suggesting that it has a right to defend itself and prevent its six million citizens from dying in a nuclear first strike.
But if you want the super-depressing article from today's news: even if Israel tried to militarily attack Iran, odds are they'd fail.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

As local Palestinian officials parrot Leftist talking points ('genocidal violence is caused by poverty'), Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is promising yet another crackdown:

Two things: (1) read that part about "similar promises" again. We assure you that when the AP and Reuters writes the story up, it will become 'Israel stopping the Palestinian Authority from fighting terrorism' (2) we wonder if Abbas's recent decision to reward the families of suicide bombers with money will make it less or more difficult for him to reduce the incentive for terrorism.

We often use the term "terrorist sympathizer" as an epithet - a useful shorthand loaded with derision and reserved for a particular way of thinking and talking about terrorism: one that mixes moral equivalence, subtle anti-Semitism, and vulgar anti-Westernism. And it's very easy to treat each suicide bombing in morally absolute terms, the better to avoid moral equivalence. But ease is not an excuse for honesty and it too often obfuscates clarity.
We should never lose sight of two things: (1) civilians on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suffer and (2) terrorist leaders do much of their work by manipulating the weakest and most vulnerable Palestinian civilians into joining the conflict. The Netanya suicide bomber seems to have been one such Palestinian:

It's difficult to know for sure, but it really does sound like the protestations of the bomber's family are genuine. This would be only the most recent in the manipulation of the simple or desperate. Last March, terrorists plucked a pathetic and insecure 14 year old out of the playground where kids were mercilessly teasing him for being simple and promised him that he'd "be a hero". A month later, terrorists coerced a Palestinian mother to become a suicide bomber, because she was going to be murdered in an honor killing for disgracing her husband anyway. The blame in all of these incidents lies partly with the bombers - but the vast majority must be reserved for those who dispatch them.
Being mentally unable to understand the war is no protection inside a Palestinian town either - earlier this year Palestinians tortured a retarded man over the course of two days, putting cigarettes out on his body and eventually killing him because they suspected him of being a collaborator. He later turned out to be innocent.
Is this a call to sympathize with every suicide bomber? Of course not. Are we arguing that large segments of the Palestinian public - maybe even a majority - do not actually support terrorism? Also no. But when Hamas or Islamic Jihad leaders manipulate the simple or desperate to become human bombs, we would all be well advised to recognize and appreciate this additional and disgusting aspect of their pathological and genocidal hatred.
And in fact, it does increasingly looks like the Netanya bombing is one of those cases - a simple high school drop-out's life was ended and his family's world was shattered by terrorists who would never think of dispatching their own children. It could turn out that the family is lying to avoid retribution, which would certainly simplify where our sympathies lie in this case. But even if the facts of this bombing do not turn out to meet the general principle, the principle itself remains the same: the simple or desperate always deserve some measure of sympathy, even if it can never approach the desperate heartache we feel for their victims - or the hatred we feel for the terrorist masters and community leaders ultimately responsible for the savagery.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Ha'aretz, having no real access to a security establishment which hasn't come to any real decisions yet, nonetheless has divined that Sharon and Mofaz will go easy on Hamas for petty electoral reasons. Other potential reasons that Sharon and Mofaz might not pursue Hamas in response to this suicide bombing: (1) Hamas wasn't responsible:

(2) They intend to go after the terrorists from Islamic Jihad who are responsible, and
(3) They've already caught some of those people:

Or it could be because of petty political maneuvering - because Ha'aretz is anything but unfair when it comes to current and former Likud officials.

The Jerusalem Post joins Mere Rhetoric and Meryl Yourish in asking why nobody seems bothered that the main concern Saeb Erekat had after the Netanya bombing was that it would hurt the peace process. Most likely reason: Saeb Erekat doesn't really mind terrorism against Israeli civilians all that much:

Ha'aretz is starting to get annoyingly snide in their news stories. Today's exhibit about military reactions to the Netanya suicide bombing:

Probably not the best trend to establish right when Ynet is getting all snarky with articles titled "Left-wing media? Really?". Count us in the large group of people who would prefer that Ha'aretz keep their editorials on the editorials page, where we can avoid them until we're short on blog posts and need a transparently partisan yet overwhelmingly stupid article to pretend to get angry about.

Kadima

Genuine news about Kadima this morning, as the top of their Knesset list begins to firm up:

In fact, read the whole article - it's short and crammed with good gossip. Don't miss the poll in the bottom paragraph. Spoiler: "the most any poll has predicted for the party thus far."

Likud

Mere Rhetoric 08/28/05:

Mere Rhetoric 11/07/05:

Jerusalem Post 12/05/05:

Settlers - their choice having been made easier by disengagement hero Uzi Landau bowing out this weekend - are throwing their support behind Netanyahu for Likud leader. No surprise. The more significant news is buried in the middle of the article, where Tovah Lazaroff gets remarkable admissions from settler leaders that their views are in the minority and that they have to settle for electioneering and a "light-right-wing" government.

Labor

Amir Peretz is such a stellar advocate for the little guy that he won't even ride in fancy cars - even if those cars happen to be the armored cars provided to the Opposition Leader to keep him safe. It's nice to see that his election showboating isn't getting in the way of his national responsibilities.

The United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the impotent International Atomic Energy Agency - or more specifically its head Mohamed ElBaradei, the man who allowed North Korea to go nuclear and Iraq to almost do so - has realized that Iran will have nuclear weapons in the next few months:

He still is insisting that Israel not defend itself against the country that threatened last month to wipe it out with nuclear weapons, however, because (and this is a quote) "everybody would hurt." instead, presumably, Israel should trust to Iran's rationality or, failing that, the fortitude of the international community.
In other Iran-related news, Russia continues to reject sanctions against Iran, insisting that Iran has only peaceful intentions. Iran therefore joins Syria and North Korea as peaceful countries that Russia is actively shielding from international scrutiny. The US, noticing that with Russia's veto the UN is a dead end, is preparing sanctions outside the UN framework - as if the US didn't already have sanctions on Iran or as if sanctions would stop an oil rich theocracy hell bent on getting nuclear weapons and eradicating 'the Zionist cancer'.

Despite a series of humiliating negotiations and concessions, Switzerland is only "moderately" confident that Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross - the Magen David Adom - can join the international organization:

The holdup is that Syria has objections revolving around Israel's activities - military and human rights - in the Golan Heights. Yes, that Syria.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Hypocrisy is generally considered poor form, and so when someone is accused of being unpatriotic they usually respond with some convoluted answer about "being loyal to the higher principles" of a particular nation of ideology. Salah Tarif, an elected member of Israel's Knesset, prefers to just be openly disloyal:

A member of Israel's government is refusing to even pretend to be loyal to the country, and is being allowed to vote on the laws which will govern the state. Imagine if any Jewish citizen of Iran (one of the very few that weren't expelled) even hinted at being disloyal to the Islamic Republic. And yet consistently, Israel is singled out for mistreatment of its Arab citizens - who not only have the ability to vote and full economic and political rights, but can now apparently exercise them even while being openly disloyal to the country that provides it to them.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

The Washington Post has an truly astounding article by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser. If the article is at all indicative of the conventional wisdom among foreign policy and intelligence elites we are in trouble:

This is exactly the inverse of the good argument against the Bush Administration's approach to the War on Terror. Where people on both sides of the political spectrum have pointed out that 'you can't wage war against a tactic', Brzezinsky is asserting the opposite - that it is terrorism, rather than an openly repeated desire and a very specific plan for imposing Islamic law on the world, that unites disparate groups under Al Qaeda's banner. Prof. Dauber does the work to direct Brzezinski toward some productive holiday reading.

Having threatened to obliterate the five million Jews of Israel with nuclear weapons, Iran is now threatening to attack Israel if Israel keeps talking about defending itself. So now it's official - Iran will attack Israel if Israel tries to defend itself or if Israel doesn't try to defend itself. Just last week, the United Nations overwhelmingly passed six resolutions stipulating that Israel is a threat to world peace. Overwhelmingly.

On the Ha'aretz analysis page, Akiva Eldar complains that the bombing reminds Israelis that people are trying to kill them, taking focus away from Amir Peretz's theatrics about "social and economic issues". She's so disappointed with the Palestinians' inability to realize that they shouldn't be undermining "Amir Peretz' surprise Labor leadership victory" that she even manages to snarl out the phase "over-hyped debate on the Iranian nuclear question". Brilliant.
And over on the Ha'aretz news page, in what can only be called a pathetic attempt to help their favorite candidate, the writers protect Peretz by reproducing only this quote on the bombing:

JPost reproduces the full quote:

An "uncompromising war" on terrorism which nonetheless compromises on issues like accurately assigning blame or retaliating if it hurts the Palestinian Authority.
For what it's worth, Shinui branch heads remain loyal to the party. Except super uber-fundraiser Uriel Reichman, who left for Kadima a few days ago.

Likud

In the news that would have been the top story but for the suicide bombing, police are about to conclude that serial crook and interim Likud leader Tzachi Hanegbi really is a crook. Yeah, no kidding.
Likud hardliner Uzi Landau (or, as some have taken to calling him, "the intransigent rebel who forced Sharon out of the party and destroyed the Likud"), is quitting the Likud leadership race and throwing his support behind Netanyahu. Meanwhile, another of Netanyahu's opponents, Silvan Shalom, is desperately trying to tell what's left of his party that they're too far Right for most Israelis:

We imagine that it's harder to craft a party policy that is not too right wing when all the non-right wingers have left the party.

Labor

For some reason, more and more Labor elites are becoming more and more suspicious that letting Amir Peretz pack the party with his cronies might be a bad idea:

You know, it takes a lot of nerve to oppose the worker's hero - the man who bravely stood up to the ambitious Shimon Peres and took the party back for Israel and for peace. We are very disappointed by these rebel rousers' fecklessness.

Kadima

Today was supposed to be "economic policy talking points day" in Kadima, with Sharon arguing that by torpedoing the 2006 state budget, his political rivals prevented assistance to the poor:

Despite the historically unprecedented gesture in which Israel gave land and resources to sworn enemies, and also to Israeli moves this weekend to weaken security restrictions and ease the life of the average Palestinian, a Palestinian suicide bomber linked to Islamic Jihad blew himself up outside a mall in Netanya, killing 5 Israelis and injuring 35, 14 critically. Guards had pulled him out of the security line outside of the mall, preventing a far larger tragedy.
CNN quotes Palestinian negotiater Saeb Erekat's concern that the outrage "harms Palestinian interests":

Perhaps it's time to consider that one of the gaps between Palestinian civil society and anything that could reasonably pass as sane and healthy is that in a sane and healthy world, Erekat would at least have pretended to regret the horrific loss of life. But to express any sympathy with innocent Israeli civilians might lose the Palestinian Authority what's left of its vaunted 'credibility on the Arab street', and so a suicide bombing in an Israeli mall somehow becomes an effort to "sabotage the Palestinian elections".

UPDATE: One of the murdered was among the security gaurds who pinned the bomber against a wall, having pulled him farther away from the crowd.