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Winds of Change.NET HateWatch

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: Islamist terrorists commit mass murder across globe; anti-Semitism in Mexico; anti-Semitic violence in Russia; Jew-hatred in the United States grows during holiday season; anti-Semitic campaigning in the Ukraine; anti-Semitism in Britain; Islamists in Egypt torch Church; Afghanistan Islamists murder teacher; Islamofascism gains a foothold in Britain

* Idiotarian Seethings: Leftist adoration for anti-Semitic Hugo Chavez; Ray Nagin is not smart; Muslim kidnappers and the hostages who love them; AP: "terrorists = martyrs"; David Letterman jumps the shark; suicide bombers being recruited on college campuses; British gay rights groups punish gays who speak out against Islamist homophobia; Barbara Streisand does not make good arguments; perverse celebrations of Prime Minister Sharon's collapse; US politicians think Congress is a plantation; Hollywood loves suicide bombers - seriously

* Race and Culture: Muslim violence in France; method behind the madness of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial; British cleric loves Hitler; Holocaust trivialization sweeping Europe

* A Hopeful Note: Al Qaeda in Iraq weakening; Arab and Muslim journalist takes on Holocaust deniers; increased political rights in Turkey; criticism of terrorism in Arab and Muslim press
Omri | |

Hamas Victory - Now Can We Start Worrying About Iran?

Iran thinks that the Hamas victory is great news. Apparently, contrary to the opinions of many European policy-makers and American journalists, apparently the people who talk to Hamas all the time don't think that the group is going to moderate. Kind of the opposite:

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the country welcomes the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council election and hopes the result will strengthen resistance against Israel. The United States and Israel accuse Iran of arming and funding militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But Iran says it only gives moral support to the Palestinian groups. "Iran ... hopes that the powerful presence of Hamas at the [political] scene brings about great achievements for the Palestinian nation," said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi in a statement faxed to Reuters.

When they say "great achievements", they don't mean a "negotiated peace deal". They mean more of what they said a couple days ago - that they intend to put Israel in an "eternal coma" (this was an reference to Prime Minister Sharon's condition... charming).
Belmont links the Hamas victory to a spread of Islamism that includes Iran. But the connections aren't that abstract - Ahmadinejad recently met Hamas representatives in Syria in the interests of advancing a final war between the West and Islam. That's a direct quote:

Speaking to HAMAS leaders in Damascus, the new Iranian President MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD said on Friday that the Middle East conflict has become “the locus of the final war” between Muslims and the West, Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, reported. On the second day of his two-day visit to Syria, NEJAD told HAMAS leaders, “Today, victory in Palestine has become a matter of life and death for the Islamic world and for Global Arrogance (the West),”urging the Palestinians to reject the so-called Israel’s WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA STRIP. “Some point to the withdrawal of the occupiers from parts of Palestine, but this event has already been greatly detrimental to Muslims”, AHMADINEJAD stressed. “If the occupiers stay on even one inch of Palestinian soil, the goal of Palestine will not be realised”, Ahmadinejad told HAMAS leaders, who included Khalid Mash’al, the head of the group’s political bureau.

The nightmare scenario has now become a reality that could happen in half a year: Iran will get a nuke, and they will give it Hamas. Hamas will smuggle it into Gaza, then into the West Bank, and then into Tel Aviv. Millions of people will die. No doubt, the State Department and European diplomats will express their "concern" and "shock" about the "unacceptability" of this act. Who knows - maybe they'll even threaten to impose sanctions on Iran.
Omri | |

Hamas Victory - Don't Pretend to Be Shocked

Despite our earlier castigation of people on the right who are gloating because they've been insisting on the popularity of terrorists for years, we do want to point out that a Hamas victory was relatively easy to predict. We were certainly confident enough to predict a Hamas victory on the eve of the election, and not because we had access to any kind of cutting-edge polling data. 66 regional seats and 66 national seats - the regional seats were between individuals and the national seats were between parties. In the regional elections, Fatah disorganization meant that multiple Fatah candidates were running against single Hamas candidates. There were plenty of predictions that Hamas could sweep the regionals, but nobody drew the obvious conclusion - if Hamas was running 35% to 45% against Fatah nationally, regional sweeps would be overwhelming. We understand why media outlets are all shocked - shocked - by the Hamas victory. Willful ignorance, after all, is hard to give up. But we don't understand why the scenario was never even considered by Israeli intelligence
Even our pessimism regarding the Palestinian public's willingness to give up on its genocidal intentions, however, wasn't enough to convince us that Fatah would lose in national voting. We thought that the best argument that the Left would have after the election would be that "the Hamas victory doesn't mean that Palestinians love terrorism - it was because of Fatah disarray regarding regional seats." Jonathan at the Head Heeb was already hinting at that argument yesterday, when exit polls showed Hamas winning the regionals but losing the national polls. Turns out, he had to kind of take that back when it turned out that Hamas won on the national level too. Poll after poll after poll has shown that the Palestinian public supports terrorism - why is it so "shocking" that they elected terrorists?

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Hamas Victory - What About Negotiations

There are two flavors of "negotiations are still possible" circulating around today. One says that Israel should negotiate with Hamas since Hamas should/will become more moderate. The other advocates negotiating with Abbas and the PLO rather than with the elected, Hamas-led Palestinian government. Each represents one level of the two-level Oslo wishful thinking: since Israel needs a partner who wants peace and can swing the Palestinian public to deliver peace, advocates of bilateral solutions have to pretend that whoever Israel is negotiating with is peaceful and can deliver peace. Neither are true here - Hamas will not stop wanting to destroy Israel, and today's elections conclusively proved that the Palestinian population is overwhelmingly radicalized.
Even if the Palestinian population wasn't radicalized, negotiating with the PLO as if they spoke for the Palestinian public is suicidal. The problem with the Oslo formulation (even in theory) has always fundamentally been its asymmetry: Israel must give up tangible land in return for intangible peace. This asymmetry, however, plays out in a very real way - giving up land makes it easier for the terrorists who 'haven't accepted peace yet' to murder Israelis. This tradeoff happens even in a 'successful' Oslo-type process: presuming that the PLO wanted peace, Israel was giving up land it made it easier for Hamas terrorists to slip into Israel and commit atrocities. And while that happened, Arafat insisted he didn't have control over those Hamas terrorists even though he was ostensibly in control of Gaza and the West Bank. But in a world where the government in control isn't even pretending to be committed to fighting terrorism, this psychological myopia is insane. Saying that Israel should negotiate with the PLO and not the Hamas-led Palestinian government is literally the advocacy that, even though Abbas can't deliver peace or security to Israel, Israel should negotiate with him - and should give up land and suffer suicide bombing. It's an Oslo replay to the extent that it pretends that the parties that Israel is negotiating with can deliver peace, but this time it's just lunacy: it literally calls on Israel to pretend that a person who doesn't have political or social control of the Palestinian public has both of those things. And yet this advocacy that is being heard from the White House (where Bush is urging Abbas to stay in power and negotiate with Israel) and from the West Bank (where Abbas is saying that Israel should negotiate directly with the PLO). Serious people are suggesting that Israel give up land and security to people who by definition can offer them nothing in return, even as people dedicated to destroying the state of Israel are legally in charge of all Palestinian territories. It is the surreal advocacy that Israel hand over land to Hamas, through Abbas.
Then there is the "Hamas will moderate" version. Note that this argument, even at its best, is ultimately still an Oslo delusion - even if Hamas moderates, it was not elected on a moderate platform (quite the opposite, in the last two weeks Hamas went out of its way to clear up any ideas that it might be moderating). This means that the vast majority of the Palestinian public swept into power a terrorist, "no negotiations ever" platform. And that means that if Hamas moderates, they'll lose the support they have now - which would at a minimum prevent them from swinging the Palestinian public towards peace. The Palestinian public is just too far gone.
Not that this 'what if Hamas moderates' debate matters - Hamas simply won't moderate. They announced immediately after the election that they're committed to liberating all Palestinian lands (even the usual journalists are only half-heartedly adding 'but they didn't define what they mean by Palestinian lands' - a particularly silly argument). Hamas's 'political' wing is as filled with terrorists as their 'terrorist' wing. We're not sure how many hundreds of times Hamas can declare their genocidal intentions while the Western media tries to find signs of moderation, but we're confident that we're going to find out.
Some people are arguing that Hamas is going to moderate - not because they want to, but because they'll have to when they're put in charge of day-to-day governing. But these are the same people arguing that Hamas was elected because of their networks of schools and hospitals, not pm account of their continued insistence on terrorism (they have to make that argument, otherwise they have to concede that the Palestinian public is too far gone to let any leader make peace with Israel). So now the argument is that putting Hamas in power and forcing them to pay attention to public utilities will force them to give up terrorism. But no one would deny that Hamas has successfully run their public service networks alongside their campaign of genocidal terrorism - if there was any tradeoff between the two, Hamas would have had to give up one or the other already. Hamas has always had more than enough people to simultaneously serve food in the West Bank and blow up cafes in Tel Aviv. They've proven that for decades, and pretending that the influx of money and legitimacy they just inherited will make their task harder is just incoherent.
Hamas may send out a single, dotty candidate to make sounds about New Age peace during the day, but at night they still dress up 2 year olds as suicide bombers. Hamas members are that far gone. Yet there are plenty of people willing to parse out already parsed statements in a desperate effort to find moderation (Hamas's "tone has changed as well"... oh well that's good).
The ultimate point is that there is overwhelming evidence that Hamas is not going to moderate - you have to discover potentially hidden intent in plainly clear statements or make historically falsified arguments about the intentions of terrorists. Anyone who is declaring that Hamas is going to moderate has to ignore a lot of evidence to the contrary. Anyone who is declaring that Hamas is unalterably committed to the destruction of Israel is just repeating what Hamas's leaders say. People are entitled to ignore evidence in the interest of wild, speculative claims. They shouldn't be entitled to undermine Israeli security on that basis. Israel has no negotiating partner. Anyone who argues otherwise has done a lot of work and twisted a lot of evidence to argue otherwise - their arguments are untenable and their motives for insisting upon them in the face of Hamas's statements and Middle East history should rightly be treated with suspicion.
Omri | |

Legitimately Elected Government Watch - Jimmy Carter's Already Decided

We're going to try to keep track of the steady progression that dominant opinion is going to make from "no contact with Hamas" to "Hamas is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people (so we should give them money and guns, cause that's what Palestinian people need)". The precocious peanut framer that he is, Jimmy Carter is already at the end of the road:

A day after Hamas swept to an upset victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, former US President Jimmy Carter on Thursday said that Wednesday's voting had been orderly and fair. "The elections were completely honest, completely fair, completely safe and without violence," the former president said.
Carter, who led an 85-member international observer team from around the world organized by the 'National Democratic Institute' in partnership with 'The Carter Center,' urged the international community to directly or indirectly fund the new Palestinian Government even though it will be led by an internationally-declared foreign terror organization. "The Palestinian Government is destitute, and in desperate financial straits. I hope that support for the new government will be forthcoming," Carter said at a Jerusalem press conference.

Almost difficult to believe that this man let Iran fall to the Islamo-fascists.
Omri | |

Fashionable, Intellectual Hatred of Israel

The Davos World Economic Forum is an annual conference attended by the brightest scholars and most powerful figures in the world. It is the kind of place where the agenda setters of the world meet to exchange ideas and, in some ways, to literally decide their agendas. It is also a place where rabid hatred of Israel is on display:

he chairman and executive director of the Davos World Economic Forum on Thursday offered a sweeping apology to all delegates for an article calling for the boycott of Israel that appeared in a prestigious magazine issued by the forum. Professor Klaus Schwab, who founded the annual Davos conclave 35 years ago, said he was "shocked" to read, just today, the article that appeared in the magazine "Global Agenda."

The problem is that apologizing for legitimizing vicious discourse doesn't take that discourse back. Once a position is introduced as a legitimate topic for discussion, it can't be taken back because the 'taking back' occurs within the space created by the position. Now the debate is 'should Schwab have apologized?' and, moreso, 'is there anything to this boycott idea?' In some quarters, of course, that discussion will reach the point of 'the Jews got to Schwab - look how they control everything and stifle dissent.' But even where it doesn't, communities are shaped by the things that it is permissible to say out loud - once a topic is explicitly broached, it moves the line of legitimate discussion (even if what's being discussion about is an apology and a declaration of what can't be talked about). These unwritten rules of permissible discourse in polite company are what have been eroded in the highest diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural circles - and it should be no surprise that there are presumably serious thinkers who believe, even in the light of massive Palestinian support for terrorists, that it is Israel that stands in the way of Middle East Peace.
Omri | |

Hamas Victory - Preliminary Thoughts on Reactions

Memo to the Right: Let's have a a little less gloating, shall we? Yes, of course you've been correctly saying for years that the Palestinian public is becoming more and more radical. Yes, you've been accurately skeptical for the last few months about the possibility of Hamas's moderation. But celebrating bad news just because you knew it was coming is what the other side is supposed to do. Memo to the Left: when everyone on the Right was saying that the Oslo process would empower terrorists, this isn't exactly what they meant. They meant that it would empower the terrorist Fatah organization, who would then raise a generation of Palestinians who would end up supporting even more widespread and genocidal terrorism. So on second thought, it is kind of what they meant. Maybe some introspection about this whole moderation thing is due.
Omri | |

Israeli Civil Society Watch - Contrasts

We've posted a couple of articles on Palestinian civil society today, and just wanted to give you some recent news about the health of Israeli civil society. First, much if not most of the Zionist ethos is bound up in the phrase "Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people." And since we've always heard that Zionism is an anti-democratic, fascist institution (which build an anti-democratic and fascist state), we're having some trouble with Israeli jurisprudence that proves the exact opposite:

The Tel Aviv District Court issued on Monday a groundbreaking ruling stating that the Absentee Property Law could not be applied to West Bank lands abandoned by Palestinians during the 1967 Six Day War. The ruling joins General Attorney Menachem Mazuz's February 2005 ruling which rescinded a government decision to apply the law to property in East Jerusalem which is owned by Palestinians who live elsewhere in the West Bank. Monday's ruling, handed by judge Boaz Okun, holds that the state could not declare Palestinian land which was abandoned following the 1967 war as "land under Israel's effective sovereignty."

We're not fans of this ruling, but there it is anyway. Where's that fascist state we were promised? And then from the JPost article about Barghouti there was this:

However, he denied charges that Barghouti received special privileges because of his leading position in Fatah, and said that the interview he gave on Sunday to Al-Jazeera from his prison cell was not something the government could deny him. "The High Court has forbidden the government to stop Barghouti from giving interviews," Ezra said, adding that until now he has not wanted to give them. The one he gave to Al-Jazeera was the first since his arrest in 2002. Ezra also said the government was receptive to requests regarding prisoners if they didn't endanger Israel's security. "He wants his wife to visit him, she wants to meet him... This doesn't hurt the security of the state. Why not allow it?" he said.

Clearly, when international activists choose to march against the biggest human rights violator in the Middle East, their targeting of Israel is based purely on a level-headed assessment of the facts. And not on anything even close to fashionable and institutional anti-Semitism.
Omri | |

"Fragile Ceasefire" Update

Not so much:

The arrests conducted by IDF forces at the West bank town of Kabatiya overnight thwarted a terror attack scheduled to be carried out in Israel within the next 24 hours, the Menashe region brigade commander told Ynet. He added that according to estimates, Islamic Jihad activists strive to carry out attacks in Israel in the coming days, due to the Palestinian elections.
Omri | |

Arab and Muslim Conspiracy Theories - Iranian Holocaust Denial Edition

Iran is shocked and disheartened that anyone would think that their Holocaust-denial conference is anything but a truth-seeking endeavor:

The call prompted strong condemnation from Western leaders. Blair has reportedly branded the planned conference "shocking" and "ridiculous." IRNA quoted Asefi as saying: "People of the world should hear all opinions and choose the best. Such comments are an insult to the wisdom of the people around the world." "Unfortunately, blind prejudice together with political interests and aims have closed the eyes of the Holocaust defenders to the realities of the world, and they reject without any logic a scientific conference," Asefi was quoted as saying.

One should always be wary of radical theories which purport to let the facts speak for themselves. This is more often than not the clarion call of the conspiracy theorist - the one who cherry-picks facts amenable to his theory and dismisses the others as (of course) the trick being played by the conspirators. Ahmadinejad can stitch together every purported gap in evidence as "proof" that the "theory" of the Holocaust isn't credible - and he can dismiss every fact that could plug those gaps as "fabrications" created by the Zionists. The trick of conspiracy theory is to lower the bar for how facts can be credible knit into a "pattern" while raising the bar for disproof to impossibly high (sometimes definitionally impossible) levels.
We've written about the pathological effects that conspiracy theories have on the societies that buy into them, but there are also broader social effects. When no one but raging anti-Semites show up to his conference, Ahmadinejad and his allies will crow that the "Holocaust defenders" were afraid of honest, scientific debate. The genuine Holocaust historians are in the double-bind that conspiracy theories always place genuine experts in: showing up legitimizes the crazies, staying home gives them an open microphone and a claim to have "scared away" the "conspirators". There is literally no solution to dealing with this problem - it is why there are so few ways to deal with conspiracy theorists who somehow end up with a critical mass of followers.
And then there is the problem that most of the "opinions" that will be presented are just flat out lies - and when arguments are premised on lies, there is no space for any kind of deliberation - let alone Ahmadinejad's pathetic pretenses toward "scientific" deliberation.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

US State Department: By "Shun" Terrorist Governments We Mean "Not Shun"

Of course:

The US won't deal with Hamas ministers in a future Palestinian Authority government, but will also not cut off ties with the PA as a result of Hamas's inclusion, diplomatic officials said Monday. According to the officials, the US formula for dealing with a PA government following Wednesday's elections would be based on the "Lebanese model." In Lebanon, the officials said, the US continues to have strong ties with the government in Beirut even though Hizbullah is part of it. It does not, however, have any contact with the one Hizbullah minister.

What a stupid policy. Anyway, this is from yesterday's MR:

"The American administration has promised Israel that the United States will not recognize any Palestinian government in which Hamas participates, government sources in Jerusalem said yesterday."... We expect a slow progression from "will not recognize" to "government legitimately elected by the Palestinian people". And soon thereafter, the United States will "reluctantly" indeed recognize a Palestinian government in which Hamas participates.

In fairness to you and to us, this isn't exactly a difficult story to cover. Barak at IRIS Blog is also covering it, and Meryl followed the same 'no is not really no' process when the EU played it last week. But you'd think they'd at least wait more than a day to start backtracking. Just for appearance's sake.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch I - We're Not Sure About This 'Election' Thing

As Palestinians prepare to go to the polls on Wednesday, final electoral strategies are solid. In the past, Palestinian "militants" have attacked international donors, members of other Palestinian groups, and - of course - Jews. Then last week, the ruling Fatah party adopted a new strategy: attack people from your own party. While we expressed a healthy amount of skepticism as to the potential of this new tactic, the Fatah seems committed to seeing it through:

Less than a day before the Palestinian legislative elections, gunmen from a split faction of the ruling Fatah party on Tuesday shot dead an employee in the election headquarters of a the Fatah candidate in the West Bank town of Nablus. Youssef Hasona, 35, was gunned down while hanging posters of Ghasan a-Sha'aka, who is a former mayor of Nablus. Several armed Fatah groups in the town support a-Sha'aka, while others have opposed his candidacy. In 2004 a-Sha'aka's brother was murdered as part of the faction feud.

Gentle readers, we give you the lead-up to the future "legitimately elected representative government of the Palestinian people". Disaray within Fatah means that in most of the regional elections (which determine half of the 132 member parliament), multiple Fatah candidates are running against each other and splitting the vote. But if members of the ruling Fatah party keep shooting election workers, the Hamas's impending and unprecedented electoral victory might still be put off.
But probably not.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch II - Why Can't Jailed Terrorists Be Ministers Too?

Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra has announced that Israel won't allow jailed Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti to serve as a Minister in the Palestinian government - no matter how many votes Barghouti's mass-murdering reputation brings him:

The government won't allow jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti to serve as a minister in the Palestinian Authority following Wednesday's elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. "He won't be a minister from prison. How can he be a minister from prison?" Ezra said. "There is someone sitting in jail who has been elected mayor of Kalkilya. [Do you think] he serves as the mayor of Kalkilya? He is in jail."

Barghouti has a lot of two things: Jewish blood on his hands and popularity among the Palestinian public. Those two things are not, we suggest to you, unrelated. Oh, and he's also committed to preventing any future peace deal with Israel (because, according to him, it would discredit Arafat's legacy). We really don't know why Ezra's banning him from representing the Palestinian government. The symbolism would have been just so perfect.

UPDATE: Terrorists are really popular:

Muhammad Shehadeh, an Islamic Jihad activist from Bethlehem who has been wanted by Israel for 12 years, has become one of the city's most popular candidates for this week's parliamentary election. At the age of 43, Shehadeh is running as an independent because of Islamic Jihad's decision to boycott the vote. His election motto is: "No homeland with injustice."
Shehadeh is not the only fugitive who is vying for the vote. Jamal Abu Rob, one of the senior commanders of Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, is also running in his hometown of Jenin. Nicknamed "Hitler," Abu Rob became famous a few years ago for killing Palestinian "collaborators" in public squares.

Seriously - this society is nothing if not ready for a healthy, democratic state. What's so weird is that the New York Times has repeatedly assured us that Hamas's massive popularity is because they're "against corruption" and has nothing to do with terrorism. Which leaves unexplained why all these other terrorists are really popular too.
Omri | |

We Don't Think That's True - US Promises to Shun Palestinian Hamas Government

Mark the date and time:

The American administration has promised Israel that the United States will not recognize any Palestinian government in which Hamas participates, government sources in Jerusalem said yesterday. The sources said that American envoys who visited here about 10 days ago told Israeli officials that recognizing such a government would violate American law.

The article goes on to say that:

Israel has also received similar messages from Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign policy official, and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos, who visited Israel last week, the sources said.

What it doesn't mention, of course, is that the Europeans have already backtracked on this promise. We expect a slow progression from "will not recognize" to "government legitimately elected by the Palestinian people". And soon thereafter, the United States will "reluctantly" indeed recognize a Palestinian government in which Hamas participates.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Carter is Blindingly Clueless

Former US President Jimmy Carter - who believes that Hamas is run by "so-called" terrorists - isn't done helping in the Middle East:

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is meeting with Meretz-Yahad Chairman Yossi Beilin, at Beilin's home. During the meeting, Carter said that when Arafat was elected in 1996, the former U.S. president asked him to open a dialogue with the Hamas in order to gain recognition of the PA. A meeting with the Hamas was scheduled, but Hamas leaders cancelled at the last moment.

Not to be overly 'historical' on the point, but it turns out that opening a dialogue with Arafat as bad. It gave him the legitimacy to build up arms and international political capital, which he eventually use to launch a well-planned and well-financed war. So Carter's idea turned out to be not so much good as bad. And so it would seem that doing something like that again would be (at least presumptively) not so much good - as bad.
Omri | |

Herzliya Conference

The annual Herzliya Conference is happening this week, which partly explains why nobody is putting out any of the usual breathless, wide-eyed speculation we know and love from the Israeli press - there's nobody around to interview. The conference brings together all of the most important people in Israel for chit-chats and presentations about the most pressing political and military threats facing Israel. Literally anybody who's anybody from anywhere - academia, army, politics - attends to hear lectures and exchange sometimes startlingly frank views. You can listen to the lectures here.
Omri | |

Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World

The persistence of conspiracy theories throughout the Arab world - take today's declaration from Basher Assad that Israel was behind Arafat's death - is something that's generally just taken for granted. The phenomenon is such pervasive and is such a part of the cultural landscape that it's not uncommon to hear Arabs joke about the Arab propensity for conspiracy theorizing - but of course, the theories work anyway:

Deflecting increasing criticism for his administration's role in the assassination of former Lebaneese prime minister Rafik Hariri, Syrian President Bashar Assad claimed Saturday that Israel was responsible for the death of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yassir Arafat. "Among the many assassinations that Israel has carried out in a systemic and organized manner, the most dangerous one was the assassination of Arafat," Assad said, addressing a conference of Arab lawyers.

Often, those conspiracy theories are used in just the way that Assad used them - to deflect blame away from failing Arab regimes and towards Israel ("no electricity? Israel cut it"... "unstable currency? It's the Jews"). But conspiracy theories also have a pernicious effect on the way a society thinks and acts - they are a way of thinking that prevent rational discussions about anything, not just about whatever corrupt regime happens to be in control. So it's not just that Palestinians in the West Bank who trade theories about how Israel poisons their wells miss fixing whatever it is that's actually damaging the water supply - it's also that not looking for the most obvious problem and fixing it becomes an entire way of thinking. Conspiracy theories are not just dangerous for the supposed conspirators, now picked out for extermination through no fault of their own, but debilitating to the conspiracy theorist. And when we here them, sure they induce eye-rolling on our part - but they're also both the result and at least some of the cause of the pathologies afflicting Arab societies.
Omri | |

Iranian President: Jews Hate Israel Too

Iran's President, consumed by hatred towards the Jewish state, doesn't think that Jews really like Israel either:

n a new attack on the existence of Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has challenged Europe to take back the Jews who emigrated to Israel, adding that no Jews would remain in Israel if Europe were to open its doors. Ahmadinejad delivered the challenge after arriving in Syria for a two-day visit on Thursday. Addressing Europe, he asked: "Would you open the doors of your own countries to these (Jewish) immigrants so that they could travel to any part of Europe they chose?"... He added he was confident that no Jews would remain in Israel if European countries allowed them to immigrate.

In addition to being a genocidal lunatic, Ahmadinejad is also bad with numbers: Israelis are the most patriotic people in the world: 85% of the population would be willing to fight and die to defend the country, and that includes figures drawn from the 20% of people in the country who are Israeli-Arabs.
Iran, of course, is more than willing to help Israelis make up their minds by funding the wave of terrorism that has been going on during the "fragile ceasefire". Russia, of course, refuses to take any significant action against Iran - because apparently it's too early to tell whether they're up to anything.
Omri | |

France: Nukes Against Terrorists OK, Killing Individual Terrorists is Bad

How can it be the case that France is in favor of using nuclear weapons against terrorists, but is against highly precise pinpoint strikes at terrorist leaders? We believe that it has something to do with the fact that it was Israel conducting the pinpoint strike against a Palestinian terrorist. We could be wrong though - maybe mathematics, physics, and ethics just work differently in Paris (that's not really that fantastic a joke, because ethics do work differently in Paris...)
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - The Terrorists Going to Get Elected

With the Palestinian elections just days away, Hamas and Fatah are running neck and neck:

The ruling Fatah Party and the Islamic group Hamas are running neck and neck ahead of Palestinian elections next week, according to a new poll released Friday. Hamas has steadily closed the gap with Fatah, which has dominated Palestinian politics for decades, and the two movements are virtually deadlocked, according to the poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center.

A terrorist organization who's primary mission is to help other genocidal lunatics wipe Israel off the map is now drawing tens of thousands to their rallies. Most of the things that can be said about this phenomenon have been said, but it's probably important to keep in mind that the Palestinians get more money from the international community than any other people anywhere else on the planet, and that the United Nations regularly holds events in favor of Palestinian rights and pours its own billions into Palestinian coffers.
Omri | |

Jimmy Carter: Hamas Made Up of "So-Called Terrorists"

That can't be true, can it? Former US President Jimmy Carter didn't really refer to Hamas as "so-called terrorists" did he? Turns out, yes:

Former US president Jimmy Carter expressed optimism Friday over Hamas's participation in next week's Palestinian parliamentary elections. Carter told CNN in an interview that although Hamas were "so-called terrorists," so far "there have been no complaints of corruption against [their] elected officials." He conceded that "there is an element within Hamas who deny Israel's right to exist," but compared the current situation to negotiations with the PLO, which was still outlawed as a terrorist organization during his presidency.

Almost impossible to believe that he didn't understand the gravity of Islamo-fascism in Iran or believe in the existence of Arab states' genocidal intentions toward Israel. The "element within Hamas" that wants to destroy Israel happens to be the "element" that finances, controls, and sets the agenda for the terrorist organization. So, with all due respect to the former President, he has failed to comfort us.
Omri | |

New York Times Mourns Loss of Beautiful and Delicate Flower Who Happened to Also Be Palestinian Suicide Bomber

The New York Times has a heartwarming story about the tragic yet touching life of the suicide bomber who tried to commit mass murder in Tel Aviv yesterday. If you're at all concerned about the plight of the poor Palestinians or about the existential torment that is existence in general, you really must read it. The literary devices in the story ("blew a large hole in his circle of family and friends, who did not see this coming") are worthwhile in themselves, but really, the entire story is a nuanced and worthy argument for why terrorists suffer exactly as much as the civilians that they murder.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-19

Geocartigraphy Institute poll: Kadima 40, Likud 13, Labor 21, Shinui below the threshold. It's nice to see Labor get a bump from their primaries - but it's never good when you literally need to remind voters that you exist in order to get them to consider voting for you.
Yedioth Ahronoth poll: Kadima 43, Likud 12, Labor 21. All of the Reuters stories describe this as Kadima "widening its lead". Since Kadima was polling at 52 over the weekend, we have no idea why they're writing this. Well, we do, but it's no a polite idea, and this is a Family roundup.

Kadima Actually, the real reason they're doing it is because the YNet story about the poll includes the phrase "rise of one seat compared to the previous poll", but they mean the previous Yedioth poll - which leapfrogged Kadima's high water mark this weekend. Despite the misleading headline, Kadima has been losing momentum this week.
Shimon Peres is confident Kadima will do well. Obviously, this is not a good sign for Kadima supporters.

Labor
Labor had their primaries, and now Ha'aretz has the accompanying puff-piece (lede: "a hard night's work, a fresh list of high quality... this is the week of Amir Peretz." - if blind wishful assertions were credibility, Ha'aretz would almost be taken seriously). People who aren't as confident about quality the fresh list: Labor giants , who ditched the first post-primary meeting because of their problems with the list.
Labor's new #2 is begging Barak to return to Labor and save it. He's even offering to give up his hard-fought #2 slot if Barak will take it. Only Peretz is insisting that he can do just fine without a former Prime Minister helping him out. For his part, Peretz is waiting for "good will" from Barak. But he announced Wednesday night that he's not going to give Barak either a slot near the top of the Labor list or the promise of a Defense Portfolio. Which means that he's going to be waiting for Barak to return to the Labor party until about March 29th (at which point, presumably, the Chairman position will be open). JPost says that Barak will get a ministry but no slot on the ticket.

Likud
The Likud has hired Schwarzenegger aide John McLaughlin to help them in the campaign. As of three days ago, Schwarzenegger had a 40%/51% approval/disapproval rating in California. We don't even know where to begin. Suffice to say, when a party's #2 has to warn the party against collective ritual suicide, perhaps the train has strayed a little bit off the tracks.
Omri | |

Hollywood Helps Out In the Middle East

We've convinced that there are very sound reasons to declare that the suicide bomber buddy movie Paradise Now is a decent film. We're equally convinced that the film's recent Golden Globe win had nothing to do with any of those reasons. Instead, what happened is that Hollywood glitterati decided that we were entitled to their opinion, and so they took some time off from gossip rags and speed balls to give it to us. We're glad that they took time to enlighten us about the 'humanity' of Palestinian suicide bombers 'resisting' the Israelis. And we're also glad that so many people could feel so good about themselves for the brief 25 seconds that they spend listening to the acceptance speech - which apparently had very little to do with peace. There's nothing like blustering about the legitimacy of other people's violence and the necessity of other people's deaths to make resentful, impotent, wannabe activists feel like they're on the front lines. We're skeptical that 10% of the cheering crowd- convinced that they were doing their duty to world peace by applauding for a speech which pointedly did not advocate peace - could find Israel on a map. We're quite sure that no more than 1% of them know the first thing about the West Bank - at least, they don't know that the Palestinians have yet to declare a state there. Which is kind of an important thing to know about the area.
Charles Krauthammer has expressed his displeasure with that other Hollywood contribution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, Spielberg's execrable propaganda piece Munich. In his review, Roger Ebert commented that Spielberg really loves Israel. That's nice. But we're sure everyone would appreciate his love a lot more if he didn't produce lies that experts are convinced will undermine Israel's diplomatic - and thus military - prospects. This is the problem with Hollywood celebrities - even if you grant that they mean well within their own myopic, narcissistic standards, in the final analysis they still end up making the world worse. Then they talk to their therapists about it while the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of their naive garbage.
Omri | |

Suicide Bombing in Tel Aviv

At least 10 injured.

UPDATE 1: (06:16am PST) YNet's Hebrew page lists the injuries at 14 now, and the English page has an update to the effect that the blast occured at a fast food stand near the city's central bus station.

UPDATE 2: (6:20am PST) Ha'aretz reports 16 injuries but no deaths other than the suicide bomber. No claim of responsibility
Omri | |

Another Arab Country Violates Another Treaty Obligation

You know how sometimes we point out that Arab countries tend to violate the peace treaties that they sign with Israel with something approaching regularity? It's because they do:

Jordan has prevented Orthodox Jewish Israelis from entering the country in recent weeks for fear they will be the targets of terrorist attacks, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. Israeli and Jordanian authorities have been in contact over the Jordanian policy not to admit Israelis who wear the Orthodox Jewish garb of prayer fringes and skullcaps, ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. Jordan on Monday refused to allow a group of eight Israeli tourists from entering the country after an inspection at the border crossing revealed prayer shawls and phylacteries.

The phrase "full normalization" must mean something different when it's in reference to the Jewish State. Or to Jews.
Omri | |

Palestinians Make No-Violence Pledge. Only with Each Other. And Only Till After the Elections.

After the elections, in which you can be quite sure that Hamas will win a huge number of votes and a substantial amount of power, they will start attacking Israel again. At that point, we fully expect the media to write that Israel's subsequent actions will be threatening "the informal no violence pledge" that Hamas took before the elections:

The two main contenders in next week's Palestinian parliamentary election pledged to avoid violence on voting day and work together afterward, but a Hamas leader ruled out peace talks with Israel. The no-violence pledge came Wednesday in Gaza, coupled with a promise that the ruling Fatah and its main challenger, the militant Islamic Hamas, will work together after the January 25 election.

What we don't expect to see anything resembling an acknowledgment of this part:

Earlier on Wednesday, Hamas ruled out talks with Israel and threatened to kidnap Israel Defense Forces soldiers, following Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' statement that he would rather resign than let extremists block his peace agenda.... At a Hamas campaign rally in Gaza, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar ruled out negotiations with Israel. Hamas "is not going to acknowledge the ownership of any inch of Israel on this holy land," he said. "We are not looking to Israel as a partner now or in the future."

Not going to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist? But wait, we were told that Hamas has dropped their call to destroy Israel. Apparently not so much. And yet, there's at least one person who isn't giving up hope:

"I struggled and fought for Hamas to come to the legislature," Abbas said, adding that he doesn't mind if Hamas joins parliament as long as he can keep working for peace. "Maybe Hamas will change its policy, no one knows," he said. "Maybe it will say it will accept negotiations."

We know! Call on us - we know! The only people who still say that Hamas might "change its policy" are people the willfully ignorant. And liars.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup 2006-01-18

The Knesset interrupt their recess next week because 25 MKs thought it would be funny to call everyone back to declare that Palestinians firing missiles into Israel are not nice. We agree with the sentiment, but it hardly seems like an issue for legislative deliberation.
Labor primaries have ended. We've been making predictions about them for weeks. Turns out, we were right.
Your poll numbers:

The latest pre-election poll gives the Kadima party the largest number of mandates that a party has received for several years and shows that Labor is on the skids. According to the Ma'agar Mochot survey published in Globes, the Kadima party would receive 52 mandates, nine short of an absolute majority, if elections were held today. The Likud party soared to 21 seats in the poll, while Labor's support dropped to 12 mandates, about 50 percent from the previous polls.


Kadima
Kadima got around to officially appointing Olmert as their chairman. Good for them. They've also made Cabinet appointments to replace the outgoing ministers. Nothing really interesting - Mofaz kept the Defense portfolio and Olmert kept the Finance portfolio.

Likud
The Likud will call for defensible borders through a negotiated settlement. Mini-rant: we don't understand the Israeli Right's obsession with "negotiated settlements" as opposed to unilateral withdrawals. This is a group of people who take it as axiomatic that the Palestinians will cheat on any negotiated settlement. Now, if you also take into account that Israel has to give up more in negotiated settlements than in unilateral withdrawals, then isn't the result of any negotiated settlement a situation in which Israel has given up more than they would have otherwise, but still for nothing in return (because the Palestinians will cheat)? The plan also includes some probably substantive differences about holding on to hilltops and certain parts of the Jordan Valley - differences that are surely worthy of discussion, but this visceral reaction against unilateralism makes no sense.
There's also some very suggestive unrest in the Likud:

But Netanyahu made enemies by not working on behalf of the three Likud ministers, Education Minister Limor Livnat, Health Minister Dan Naveh and Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz. The ministers said that by forcing them to resign ahead of the vote, Netanyahu sabotaged their chances of getting elected to top slots on the list. Instead Naveh, who was expected to be third or fourth on the list will only be eighth; Livnat was only advanced to the top 10 because the tenth slot was reserved for a woman; and Katz lost his image as a key player in the Likud central committee when he fell to 12th on the list. The ministers said in closed conversations that they were outraged at Netanyahu, who had told them he would work on their behalf but didn't. They said that Netanyahu tried to destroy the political careers of potential rivals as he did in 1996 when he refused to appoint Ariel Sharon to the cabinet and gave Benny Begin the lowly science ministry. "Bibi will have to watch his back from now on or he is liable to find a knife in it," a source close to one of the ministers said. "This is war. He wanted a faction of yes-men because he knows that he will lose the election and he is afraid of getting toppled."

So let's see if we understand this: rumors are that Netanyahu seeks to undermine the Central Committee. He's planning to expel eight activists from the party for trying to topple him. And we've already discussed how he's committed to territorial concessions. Gosh, between his conflicts with the Committee, his suppression of internal dissent, and his diplomatic plan, the only difference between a Likud led by Netanyahu and a Likud led by Sharon is about 20 mandates.

Labor
Big winner: Yitzhak Herzog. Full list:

With some 90 percent of the votes counted in the Labor primaries to rank the party's Knesset list, MK and former housing minister Isaac Herzog appeared the big winner Wednesday morning, overtaking MK Ophir Pines-Paz to claim the number two spot on the list after Labor Chairman Amir Peretz... After Pines-Paz came Ben-Gurion University President Avishai Braverman, MKs Yuli Tamir, Ami Ayalon, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, Matan Vilnai, Ephraim Sneh, journalist Shelly Yachimovich and MK Dan Yatom.

Remember when we made fun of Ha'aretz for announcing a revolution of youthful, party enthusiasm in the wake of the Peretz nomination? Remember how we said that they understood less about electoral politics than "stoned teenagers whose only source of political knowledge comes from watching reruns of the Daily Show". Yeah:

It remains unclear how many of the candidates on the list will actually enter the Knesset. Opinion polls have varied widely as to the party's predicted showing in elections in late March. Recent polls have put Labor's strength at around 17 seats inn the 120-seat Knesset. An unexpectedly low number of registered Labor members turned out on Tuesday to vote. Just 55 percent of the 116,948 registered party members voted in the primaries.

This is where we'd also make fun of Ha'aretz for assuring the Israeli public that "he large number of voters will reduce the effect of [corrupt] deals" between Labor factions associated with Peretz, but that would make us insufferable.
We have in the past - in perhaps something less than a circumspect manner - indicated our belief that Amir Peretz was showing something of an overly warm political appreciation for his former union buddies. One can find our opinions on the subject here ("allies and sycophants"), here ("stacking Labor with union friends"), here ("mobbed-up thug... ran a union filled with other, less successful, mobbed up thugs" - that one was probably unfair), or here ("sycophants and personal friends"). In fact, we've been downright tedious with this whole "Peretz is stacking Labor with his union friends" thing. And by "tedious" we mean "right":

Senior members of Kadima party said in response to the results of Labor's primary elections that... "Labor has today officially become an office of the Histadrut (labor federation) and its representatives have become hostages of the big (labor) committees."

Oh, and we're not done:

Likud Spokesman Ronen Moshe said in response to the results of the Labor primary elections that "the victory of Amir Peretz's deal in the elections for the Labor party's Knesset list completes in practice the takeover of Histadrut (labor federation) over the Labor party."

MR: always glad to accept credit for abusing our readers' patience with the obvious and then taking credit for it. Which doesn't change the fact that Peretz is a union hack filling a once-proud party with his union hack friends. In case we hadn't mentioned that.
Ha'aretz has an editorial which purports to claim that Peretz isn't a 1950s era socialist because Avishay Braverman, his favorite for Finance Minister, has essentially announced a platform of free market reforms. Except the Braverman didn't so much "announce" that platform as discussed it in an interview that got put on the last page of a single newspaper. And it wasn't so much a "platform" as his professional opinions as an economist, which he admits in the interview aren't necessarily politically viable. So that's like Peretz renouncing his socialist economic platform, except whatever the opposite of "announcing" is. The only good thing left for Ha'aretz to say about the party they're committed to shilling for is that the party will betray their own principles. Sad. Or funny. But definitely either sad or funny.

Minor Parties
Poraz, having been humiliated by Shinui's 'youth revolution', isn't coming back. Lapid hasn't said whether he's going to quit - or what he's going to quit. The good money is on him leaving with the other victims of the Shinui voters' enthusiasm and founding a new party.
Omri | |

Boston Globe, Trying to Whitewash Hamas, Contradicts Itself. In Same Sentence.

We have some friends who live in New England. Those friends have some friends who we sometimes have the pleasure of dining with. Unfortunately, that latter category also occasionally contains particularly obnoxious specimens of fashionable liberalism. Specimens who, armed with a New York Times editorial but lacking the basic grace not to discuss politics at dinner, insist on having 'debates' about the Israeli-Arab conflict. And inevitably, the conversation devolves into us having to explain that, no matter how much they believe Noam Chomsky, it is simply not the case that Israel murders tens of thousands of Palestinians a year. but lacking the manners which would inhibit friends - for reasons genuinely beyond our abilities to reason - often try to engage us in 'debates' about the Israeli-Arab conflict.
We are then forced to wonder: how can people be so obliviously stupid? Sometimes, the answer involves relatively nuanced discussions - ranging from the sensibilities embedded in insulated political communities to the effects of unconditional grade-school affirmation on a generation of otherwise mediocre, shallow 'activists'. But other times, we're inclined to believe that most of their problems come from just being willingly fed near-lies. Consider yesterday morning's apologia for Hamas by Boston Globe staff writer Anne Barnard. Most of the article displays the usual feel-good liberal themes about Hamas (the election will moderate them, their support has nothing to do with their desire to kill Jews, etc), and that's of course tired enough. But right in the middle, the contradictions become so blatant that Barnard has to sound like an idiot just to make them work.
The only people who believe that being elected by a majority of Palestinians will make Hamas moderate are people who who refuse to listen to Hamas:

Ahmed Bahr, a senior Hamas official who is running on the Hamas list, said his movement would not abandon the armed struggle against Israel even after it entered the PLC. "We are not running in the election for money or positions or prestige, but to carry the rifle in one hand and the motto of reforms and change in the other," he said.

These enlightened staff writers are the ones who insisted throughout the Oslo years that putting Arafat in control and giving him billions in aid would cause him to give up terrorism. Throughout those years, Arafat repeatedly incited hatred and violence against Israelis, and then of course he went on to start that whole "war" thing. Yet these liberals - not embarrassed at all that Arafat ignored their patronizing insistence that they knew what he 'really meant' better than he did - are now shamelessly insisting that they know what Hamas 'really means' better than Hamas does.
The rest of the article repeats and amplifies the current chic talking point that all the Boston, New York, and Los Angeles cocktail party liberals have been passing off as nuanced analysis: Hamas is gaining support because they're the anti-corruption party, not because Palestinians want to destroy Israel. The last time we addressed this nonsense, we sited all of the polling data that indicated the exact opposite. But Barnard is so certain in her conclusions that she feels comfortable citing and then (in her mind) refuting that polling data:
Sixty percent of Palestinians oppose continued attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, and 80 percent favor continuing a truce with Israel that has brought 10 months of relative calm, he found. Yet in the same survey, 86 percent also said armed struggle brought Palestinians their greatest recent gains in the conflict.

Read that again: "continued attacks" and "continuing a truce" - in the same sentence! Barnard is baffled that a majority of Palestinians favor "continuing a truce" in which they get to launch "continued attacks"! Of course they do - it's the best of all possible worlds: murder Israelis, and then, when Israel goes after the terrorists responsible, whine about how Israel is threatening some kind of shaky truce or fragile ceasefire. Then she has the unblushing gall to transition with "yet" - as if the numbers in the second sentence (that say that 86% of Palestinians believe in armed struggle) somehow contradict the numbers in the first sentence (that say that a lot of Palestinians like their strategy of pretending to stop their "continued attacks" as long as they get to call it a "truce").
Maybe we're overanalyzing liberal anti-Israel activists: maybe it has nothing to do with the echo-chamber of the Left or with a perverse resentment that celebrates "resistance" in far away places by exotic "marginalized" groups. Maybe they're just too dense to realize that they're openly contradicting themselves.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Mid-Week

If you've noticed that we've been decreasing the pace of our medical updates, you've probably also noticed that there's unfortunately not much changing on a day to day basis. The Prime Minister underwent a tracheotomy on Sunday - although he is breathing on his own, he is still being aided by a respirator and the tube was damaging his throat. The tube was then connected directly to the trache, but it malfunctioned overnight and had to be replaced.
Reports from his family to the effect that he had opened his eyes have been declared by doctors to be of "no medical significance". The Prime Minister remains comatose, and the longer he remains comatose the worse the situation becomes. He now has very little chance of ever awakening, and almost no chance of regaining even functionality.
Omri | |

True Scope of What Lt. Uri Binamo's Murderers Were Planning

Early this month, we wrote a kind of memorial to Lt. Uri Binamo, who was murdered at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank preventing suicide bombers from entering Israel. The army has just learned the true extent of the tragedy he averted at the cost of his own life:

A suicide bombing that killed an Israel Defense Forces officer and three Palestinians south of Tul Karm on December 29 had been planned as a double suicide bombing in a city in the center of the country, security forces said Tuesday. The IDF said Tuesday that officials realized only in retrospect the scope of the thwarted terror attack: The Islamic Jihad bombings were supposed to take place simultaneously, during Hanukkah vacation. IDF officials had at first thought that only one suicide bomber was in the taxi, but security forces discovered in the course of their investigation that one of the Palestinians killed in the blast had also intended to carry out a suicide bombing.

The belts were filled with 10 kilograms of explosives, packed with nails and shrapnel. The terrorists were heading to crammed halls, packed wall to wall with running and laughing children. Words fail to express what the extent of this planned atrocity demonstrates about the moral abyss of Palestinian terrorism - but for some reason most fashionable opinion leaders insist that we're supposed to remember that this is "resistance".
Omri | |

PA Chairman: Rejecting Israel's Existence 'Part of the Fabric' of Palestinian People. This is Not News

After years and years of hearing that all but like 1% of Palestinians are good and peaceful people, we're almost ready to believe it. You know who's not ready to believe it? Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas:

Abbas, who was speaking to local reporters on the first anniversary of his election as PA chairman, said he would honor the results of the parliamentary election, scheduled for January 25, even if Hamas should win. "I was under heavy pressure to prevent Hamas from participating in the election," he said. "But the pressure failed because I insisted on the right of Hamas and all Palestinian factions to take part. These groups are part of the fabric of our people and their political forces."

Hamas is "part of the fabric" of the Palestinian people. But Hamas continues to reject the right of Israel to exist. Does that mean...
Now of course, if asked outright, Abbas would never really say that destroying Israel is part of the fabric of the Palestinian people. He would say that such views are only held by the tiniest and most marginal minority of Palestinians. Yet let him be just a little less careful, and he says essentially the same thing. Which, of course, follows the dynamic of most dialogue about the Israeli-Arab conflict - even when everyone knows what the situation really is, the Arab side can mouth the most transparent platitudes and everyone is expected to behave as if those platitudes are genuine. That's why there's so much shock when Iran's President comes out and says out loud that his country seeks the destruction of Israel - even though everyone knew that that was always their policy. There is a charade being played out, but it's a charade with a twist - in a normal charade, the one perpetuating it has to actually try to deceive the other side. In the Arab-Israel conflict, Israel's enemies only have to go through the motions of perpetuating a charade, and everyone else only has to pretend to be deceived - but the results are the same.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Israeli-Arab Fifth Column Watch - Is It Treason Yet?

Iran, as you may have heard, has become a bit of a problem lately. Especially with Israel, what with the whole "they're going to nuke everybody there" thing. And so, if an Israeli citizen - with all of the civil, political, and economic rights that any Israeli citizen has - chose to spy against his country, surely that would be treason, right? And if he came from a community where it seemed like his sentiments were supported, surely that community would be treated with justifiable suspicious, right? Right?

The State Prosecution on Monday handed the Haifa District Court an indictment against a former local council head of the Western Galilee Arab village of Fassuta on suspicion of having been recruited by Iranian intelligence to spy in Israel. Jirias Jirias, 57, has been charged with conspiring to give information to an enemy, contact with a foreign agent and attempting to cover up his crime. The Foreign Ministry announced Monday morning that the charges do not include 'grave' acts of espionage on behalf of Iran, as earlier reports claimed. "The accused maintained contact with Hani Abdullah Mitawali, an agent for the Iranian intelligence known for locating Israeli and Palestinian agents on behalf of Iran. Mitawali acquainted the accused with Iranian intelligence officials on two different occasions, and during the meetings that took place in Cyprus, they asked Jirias to enter Israeli politics and acquire research information on Israeli society and government," states the indictment.

Only in Israel could an enemy state really believe that someone openly hostile to the state could get himself elected to a position that would put him into contact with sensitive information. In any normal country, politicians aspiring to high office have to at least pretend to be patriotic. Not so in the case of Israeli Arab politicians. They can visit countries Israel is at war with, they can advocate violent revolution against the state, they can openly call for their followers to undermine state security, and they can outright refuse to pledge allegiance to the state they make laws for and decisions about - and yet, Israel can do nothing but continue allowing them to serve. Certainly, if Israel took any kind of systematic action against these politicians, the country would be accused of racism by all of the usual, fashionable European outlets. The State Department would probably express "concern". And so, despite the fact that Israel's Arab citizens enjoy more political, social, and economic rights than the Arab citizens of any other country in the Middle East, they continue to elect borderline traitors to national offices and outright traitors to community offices.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - If We Asked You "What Do Death Threats Really Mean", Would You Call Us Sarcastic?

Among the very, very many reasons why we think that the coming Palestinian elections are going to go somewhat less than fabulously, today's might be least funny and most obviously troubling:

Ten days ago a fax was received from the Al-Aqsa Brigades in Jenin recommending that international observers of the Palestinian elections stay away. Two weeks ago a Nablus hotel owner where the observers intended to stay was threatened if he hosted them. Less than three weeks ago an Italian aide to a European parliamentary delegation was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip and released hours later.

Farbeit from us to belabor the obvious, but there's no reason to try to kill election monitors unless you plan to rig an election. Which is what Palestinian terrorist groups are planning to do. And by terrorist groups, we mean the ruling, 'moderate,' internationally recognized Palestinian ruling party:

The key, said Michael Murphy, country director of the observer mission of the US-based National Democratic Institute, is to know if the threat is real. In an accusing interview with The Jerusalem Post, Murphy suggested that leaders in the Palestinian Authority are behind the recent chaos in the territories.

So while we're really glad to see that the EU is pretending to consider beginning to rethink the unaccountable billions they give to the Palestinians, maybe it's time for someone to point out that the current ruling party isn't exactly made up of eager little democrats either. Meanwhile, the election observers are spending their time trying to puzzle out what all those death threats are really trying to convey:

"All the threats and kidnappings have been of a political nature," said Murphy. "It appears that they are saying that international elections observers are not wanted here. But we want to understand beyond that."

International humanitarian organizers are always trying "to understand beyond" the obvious, brutal surface of terrorism. Rarely, however, is the deeply counter-productive silliness of their sensibilities so obviously. In an effort "to understand beyond" what the Palestinians are trying to convey with all of those death threats, Murphy is willing to entertain the possibility that "it appears that they are saying that international elections observers are not wanted here". Oh, you think so? Yes, it certainly does appear that way, doesn't it? Hey, you don't think - you don't think that maybe that's it? That maybe, instead of a some reason "beyond that", it's just that the Palestinians don't want the people they're threatening to kill to stick around?
Palestinian terrorists say "leave our land or we'll kill you because we don't like you", and the international looks for some meaning beyond that. The targets differ - Jews, election monitors, etc - but the strategies of denial remain the same.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-16

The Labor party is complaining about US interference in Israeli electoral politics, which is kind like us complaining when people have multiple martinis at lunch: sure, it feels good to be judgmental, but no one can really take you seriously. This is the party that hired the Clinton election team to steer Barak to victory and was more than willing to make political hay out of the Clinton administration repeatedly snubbing Netanyahu in the run-up to the election. Oh, and they just hired Democratic advisers again. Then again, hypocrisy doesn't really make you a liar - it just makes you a hypocrite. But a hypocrite it makes you nonetheless.
We've moved updates about minor parties to their own section, since it made no sense to lede with the parties that matter least.

Kadima
Friday poll data shows Olmert with - get this - a 71% approval rating. Kadima is at 42 and 43 seats depending on the poll you're looking at. Old conventional wisdom: Kadima would fall apart without Sharon. New conventional wisdom:

"He is going to be prime minister after the election, unless something incredible happens," said political scientist Abraham Diskin. "This first week was crucial and he passed it (the test)."

We especially like the fact that Israeli media has gone back to referring to Peretz as an "ex-union boss" rather than, say, "Labor Chairman".
Tzipi Livni will be appointed Foreign Minister following the resignation of the Likud ministers. So much for Peres demanding the post as a price for his continued support - although, in fairness to critics of our favorable Peres coverage, we didn't think he'd get the number 2 slot either, which he did end up getting. On the other hand, there's something to be said for his argument that it is in Kadima's best electoral interest to have him just below the top of the list - he is Israel's most successful #2.

Likud
The list is so bad that Kadima announced that they were literally insulted that Likud voters thought that this list was good enough to run against them.

Labor
In our last political roundup, we joked that Labor should return to their strategy of saying that there's no difference between Kadima and Likud, because that strategy worked so well for the US's Ralph Nader. So they did:

The Labor party's PR headquarters said in response to the results of the Likud's primary elections that they clearly prove that Likud has decided to become a branch of Kadima. "After the elections there is a chance that the two parties will constitute a social and political right-wing party. The members of the Likud Central Committee have not changed and they continue to present the public with a team that will continue to serve Likud and Kadima's go-getters," Labor officials said.

We have no idea what the YNet people are translating as "go-getters," but surely that can't be right.
Is union hack Amir Peretz planning to formally stack the Labor party with allies and sycophants? We think he might be:

The party was agitated Monday by rumors of a "mega deal" between party chairman Amir Peretz' camp and MK Benjamin Ben Eliezer's camp. The victims of the deal would be the veteran Knesset members and those identified with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Their names will be omitted from the list of candidates which both Peretz' and Ben Eliezer's supporters will support.
Party sources said Monday that the reported deal between Peretz and Ben Eliezer's people could become a coalition to keep Barak out of the party leadership. The deal reportedly includes adding Arye Amit - whom Peretz brought into the party - to the list supported by Ben Eliezer's people. In exchange, Peretz's people will add Ben Eliezer's confidant Danny Atar to their list.

So with Israeli voters placing their disgust with corruption near the top of their priorities, Peretz is indeed positioning the Labor party at the cutting edge of Israeli politics. Not necessarily in the way that he'd like to, but no publicity is bad publicity. Unless the publicity makes it look like you're the kind of party that voters hate. Then there is such a thing as bad publicity.
Hey, maybe the move to criticize Kadima for using US influence to move voters will work out. Sure, hiring Clinton's spin team to run their campaign won't help in selling that line, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right?

Minor Parties
The National Religious Party has chosen its Knesset list. Since they're currently polling at a threshold three percent (and well below it in some parts of the margin), nobody really cares. Sad, but true.
Shinui is obviously in a panic, since all their most important people left in the little 'youth rebellion' that their 170-member guiding committee staged last week. Now many of the ten sitting Shinui MKs (read: the people with experience, read: the people who matter) are considering quitting Shinui and forming a party not controlled by idiots. The people who would be left behind are proposing a compromise that would essentially reverse the primary elections - specifically, Avraham Poraz would regain his #2 slot on the Shinui ticket, and Tommy Lapid would get something more than the narrow mandate that he received last week to lead the party. Problem: Ron Levinthal, the candidate that ousted Poraz from the #2, won't accept the deal. He'd rather be at the top of a party that will get like five votes than accede to the people who built Shinui from the ground up. What is it about pride and falls? We keep forgetting.
Drama a little further left on the political spectrum, as Haim Oron beats Ran Cohen for the #2 slot on the Meretz list. The problem with Meretz's electoral chances is that they still haven't recognized the whole "we're way, way far Left" thing that they've got going on:

"The Meretz Party has outshone all other parties by the decency and quality of our primary," said Beilin. "We showed that there can be politics without hate and without all the dirt." There was a feeling of renewed optimism in the Meretz party as wide-eyed supporters gushed over the possibility of rising to ten mandates at the expense of the Shinui Party. "We have our chance, now that Shinui is going to pieces," said Dror Morag. "We can pick up those votes, especially now that we stand as the only two parties on the left."

Meretz is arguing that Peretz's recent stance of bilateral negotiations with the Palestinians - coupled with his 1950s era state-union socialism - isn't a Leftist position. And even if this doesn't bode ill for their political prospects, it definitely says something about their sobriety.
Omri | |

Iran Anti-Holocaust Conference - Pervasiveness as Legitimation

It's easy to castigate Iran's President as a lunatic, albeit a genocidal one with a nuclear weapon and cutting edge ballistic missiles. With his Holocaust denial conference, however, we're beginning to suspect that there's very much something to his suggestion last month that there is a strategy behind his anti-Israel rhetoric. Don't make the mistake of thinking that he's simply stark raving mad - what he is doing is precisely introducing the most vicious anti-Semitic lies and the most genocidal of intentions into the spectrum of public discourse. The market-place of ideas aside, it quite simply matters what is being discussed and what isn't. Ideas can be defeated, but discourse leaves its mark. Ahmadinejad will be castigated, but someone will ask why he's being castigated for expressing ideas. And then someone will protest that he's being shouted down. And then somebody will give voice to the suspicion that maybe there is something unseemly behind the vehement opposition to him. It's the classic problem with answering conspiracy theories - you don't want to legitimate them with reasoned opposition, but refusing to address them allows the conspiracy theorists to insist that their opponents are 'afraid to debate them'. So no one of any public respectability will show up at Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial fest - but everyone who does show up will insist that the reason why only one side is represented is because the other side is lying.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - How Does Voting Work Again?

Is it a democracy if you don't get to choose who to vote for:

The Palestinian Authority's West Bank security chief has sent a letter to PA security forces instructing them to vote for Fatah candidates in the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The letter, signed by Tarek Zeid, was sent more than two weeks ago, and said that the early voting for security forces would take place in the security barracks.

Obviously, this is no worse than Hamas members killing people who disagree with them (or who are Jews), but it does undeniably lack something in the way of the Jeffersonian spirit, no?
Omri | |

On Pathetic and Hateful Leftist Tantrums for Attention

Unless one is a professional contrarian (we're thinking Chris Hitchens attacking Pope John Paul II the week that the Pope passed), strict propriety imposes the expectation that one will refrain from attacking the ill or dying. Social conventions being what they are, there are few rational reasons for these norms to exist - if you dislike someone's past with cause that past doesn't go away as time passes - but they are nonetheless and properly adhered to as markers of respectability.
But since PM Sharon collapsed, the international vilification of him continues - it remains only somewhat abated and still largely wrong:

Compared to past international media coverage of Ariel Sharon, which on a number of occasions in recent years has gone beyond personal demonization to outright anti-Semitism, the reporting on Sharon since he suffered a massive stroke last week has been relatively benign. Sharon the butcher, the bulldozer, the war criminal, the "successor of Hitler" has suddenly been humanized in several usually hostile quarters such as the BBC. But only up to a point. Even amid this improved coverage, as Sharon lies fighting for his life many articles in the Western media have retailed untruths, almost in passing, as though they were incontrovertible historical facts: Sharon initiated the second intifada, Sharon ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and so on.
According to a Google search, there were over 24,000 articles published on Sharon in the 24 hours following his stroke last Wednesday night. But only four days later, in Monday's Washington Post, was there the first mention of Sharon's protracted and successful libel battle in the 1980s against Time magazine for its inaccurate suggestion that he had encouraged the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Equally, there has been almost no reference to the fact that the Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out by (Christian) Arabs against (Muslim) Arabs, in response to massacres by Muslims, and virtually no indication that the Palestinians themselves had carefully planned the 2000 intifada. This is by their own admission.

This refusal to adopt the circumspection demanded by age-old norms of propriety is often accompanied by a snide, smirking kind of brashness: "maybe everybody else is willing to pretend - but I'm not going to keep my mouth shut just because he's dying." This is a kind of intentional obtuseness - cheap moral exhibitionism conveyed through vulgar and intentional insult.
There will always be a few people like this. Pathetic "activists" and neglected "radicals" want for attention, and they inevitably try to abuse the better sensibilities of others to get it. They're the social equivalent of a ill-trained dog ruining furniture. But the problem is particularly widespread and acute in relation to Prime Minister Sharon (even far Left Jews participate in this shameful posturing). The notion that cheaply slandering him is within the spectrum of "enlightened dialogue" is accepted at the highest levels of intentional diplomacy and has reached something of a shibboleth in the lowest poseur circles of self-styled activists and radicals. Of course, the demonization is only in the rarest of circumstances based on factual claims - we will commit to the claim that literally none of the unshaven, unbathed college students handing out pamphlets in front of cafeterias understand the nuances of ICJ jurisdiction or the brute reality of what happened Sabra and Shatila. But being able to throw out a cheap line about Prime Minister Sharon being a war criminal has been a badge of respectability and a handshake of recognition in certain Leftist communities for decades, and change happens only at the most glacial of paces in these self-enclosed and self-justifying swamps of moral fashionability.
And so, if what you pathetically tell yourself about yourself is based on being "unconventional" and chanting the words "Sabra and Shatila", you'll take every opportunity to be vulgar and to demonize Sharon. A time when everybody else is trying to act decorous turns from a time to follow suit into an opportunity to be particular offensive - all the better to prove to yourself that you remain, in this dark night of Rumsfeld-ian fascism, an unafraid voice for the oppressed. Pathetic.
Omri | |

US Continues to Exercise "We Were Just Kidding" Clause for Israeli Treaty, Human Rights

The United States continues to pressure Israel to abrogate its rights under the Oslo Accords and to allow Palestinians to vote for Hamas in East Jerusalem. We wonder if the imposition of the pressure goes anything like this: "sure, you signed a treaty... but come on, nobody really expects Israeli treaty rights or Arab treaty obligations to be enforced... oh, don't act so surprised... Egypt allows weapons smuggling in violation of Camp David, normalization with Jordan is a joke in violation of that peace treaty, the UN notoriously exceeds the legality of its already pro-Palestinian mandates." Probably not, but at least that would be more honest:

American envoy to the Middle East C. David Welch said Friday during a visit to Ramallah in the West Bank that the United States firmly believes that Palestinians everywhere are entitled to vote in the January 25 Palestinian legislative elections, Israel Radio reported. "We want to ensure that residents will feel safe and free to vote," said Welch.
Welch, along with U.S. deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams, met Friday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. The radio also reported that chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Abbas emphasized during the meeting the importance of the Palestinian vote particularly in East Jerusalem, which Israel has threatened to ban. Abbas requested Friday Israel remove checkpoints to allow free movement of candidates and constituents.

So the Palestinians think that what Israel should do is (a) open up all movement for any Palestinian within the West Bank and (b) remove restrictions on Palestinians entering and leaving the rest of Israel by particularly giving them access to East Jerusalem. Well, that would be reasonable, except for all of the terrorists who would take these humanitarian gestures - as they have taken so many past ones, especially the lifting of curfews and the removal of checkpoints - to send waves of suicide bombers into Israeli cities. How about instead of giving terrorists a symbolic victory by allowing Hamas electoral activity in East Jeruslaem; and how about instead of allowing terrorists to commit an actual atrocity by letting them into Israeli cities... how about instead of those things, Israel asks that it be protected as promised by treaties and that the Palestinians control their terrorists before Israel effectively opens up all its borders? Too unrealistic, you think?
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch I - Is Attacking You Own Ministers Good or Bad?

We think it's probably bad:

Palestinian gunmen demanding jobs in the Palestinian Authority, opened fire Thursday night on Interior Minister Nasser Yousef's house and the Palestinian Cabinet building, wounding a police officer, Palestinian officials said. The gunmen were from the ruling Fatah Party, Yousef's own movement.

There's lots of talk about the risk of a civil war among Palestinian factions. We're not sure it counts as a civil war if you're literally shooting your own commanders. Isn't that just mutiny? Also, we're not convinced that you can have a civil war if you have no cohesive society or state that everyone is ostensibly a part of (ergo "civil" from "civis", meaning citizen). Isn't that just anarchy?
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch II - The Definition of Palestinian "Concern"

We tend to think that a society that consistently produces pathological people must be in some way fundamentally and deeply rotten in its core. Remember all of those articles about Palestinians "being concerned" about Sharon's health? There was even talk that Palestinians were beginning to recognize that Sharon was the only Israeli leader that had ever given the Palestinians land in the Gaza Strip or West Bank for a state (although no one bothered to point out that he was the only leader of any country - Egypt and Jordan included - that had ever given the Palestinians). Turns out, those reports neglected to mention the opinions of the Al Aksa Brigade, the armed wing of the ruling, moderate Fatah faction in control of the Palestinian government:

Senior members of the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades criticized the Palestinian Authority on Monday for conveying well-wishes for ailing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to Army Radio. Jihad Jaara, a Palestinian gunman who was banished to Ireland as a result of his taking part in a standoff with Israel Defense Forces soldiers at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during Operation Defensive Shield in the spring of 2002, said that he hopes Sharon survives so that he would live out his days on his deathbed in paralysis "so he can feel death every day".

Charming. Ditto for all those moderate Palestinian intellectuals who are supposed to be the vangaurd of the New Middle East:

"I believe that he should not die before he is tried for the massacres he committed in the past decades - he should be tried in the present life, not in heaven," said Abdul Rahim al-Shaik, a philosophy professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

The most sympathy for PM Sharon could probably be found in the Palestinian street, where they can look around and know that their "moderate" officials and terrorist "leaders" are tiny and petty compared to the giant that Sharon was.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Weekend

The Prime Minister remains in an extremely worrying coma - despite being cut off from sedatives, he has yet to open his eyes. He remains in serious but stable condition, with promising brain activity in both of his lobes. His blood pressure and body temperature are remaining steady. Furthermore, the pressure in his brain from blood has also been relieved, at which point doctors removed the tube that had been draining blood from his skull. That none has returned is - obviously - a very good sign. Yet doctors, perhaps chastened by how quickly their very circumspect updates got spun as 'good news' last week, continue to explicitly emphasize that the Prime Minister's life remains in danger.
Omri | |

Bolton Sends Letter about UN Approval of Map Wiping Out Israel

Ambassador Bolton sent a fairly biting letter to the United Nations, complaining about the recent map that they hung up showing all of Israel replaced by a Palestinian state:

US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton sent a letter to Sec.-Gen. Kofi Annan complaining that a map that omitted Israel was hung at an annual UN meeting. In the letter, written on January 3, and revealed on The New York Sun on Friday, Bolton wrote: "It was entirely inappropriate for this map to be used. It can be misconstrued to suggest that the United Nations tacitly supports the abolition of the state of Israel."

We're very glad that there's someone in the United Nations willing to point out that it's rude - at a minimum - to display maps which, in the current political context, all but explicitly endorse the forcible destruction of a member-state. But we're confident that many of the other member-states - if not most - would be quite happy to see that forcible destruction. Bolton is being overly polite, then, in suggesting that the map risks someone "misconstruing" the UN's true stance regarding the abolition of the state of Israel:

The convention, which was attended by Annan, was conducted on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, held on November 29 - the anniversary of the 1947 date when the UN ended the British mandate over Israel, a move which effectively led to the establishment of the Jewish State six months later.
The UN Chief Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric thanked Bolton on behalf of Annan for bringing the issue to his attention. He noted that the decision to put up the map was reached by a committee, and not by Annan personally. "This gives a very unfortunate impression that the United Nations favors replacing Israel by a single Palestinian state, which is not the case," Dujarric said.

So the excuse that the UN's Chief Spokesperson gave is entirely this: "please don't blame the UN Secretary General alone - the decision to celebrate the destruction of Israel was made by several UN member-states who were in charge of an event of such importance that it was endorsed by Sec. General in the form of his presence, speeches, and laudations... so it's not that the UN favors replacing Israel by a single Palestinian state, but merely that the member-states that happen to have a lot of authority and can command the assent of the Secretary General favor replacing Israel by a single Palestinian state."
What a disgusting joke. When Annan saw that he was about to endorse a conference in explicit violation of the UN charter (the one that goes on and on about the sanctity and security of member states), he should have walked out. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but that's his job - to represent the ostensible values of the United Nations. Instead, he quite happily participated.
Yet this is the organization that sees fit to pass resolutions and stack international courts and then take it as proof that Israel is an outlaw state when it refuses to obey its dictates - as if legislation and jurisprudence are inherently legitimate by virtue of the process itself, not by virtue of the neutrality, objectivity, and basic good will that are supposed to legitimate them.
Omri | |

Ha'aretz - Hypocritical and Desperate

Ha'aretz, where every computer is programmed with the a macro to insert the phrase "the Rabin legacy", has recently taking to baring its fangs whenever anyway suggests that Prime Minster Sharon left a lasting, positive mark on Israel that should be recognized during the election season. Even comatose, they continue to blame Sharon for Palestinian muddles and settler recklessness: "Israel's semi-comatose leader continues to paralyze the whole political system". This is really upsetting, because we were really starting to get some respect for them after they came out yesterday urging Israel to sign a peace deal by negotiating Israeli land away to an imprisoned Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Seriously:
There is one body in Palestinian society that is able and willing to conduct negotiations on a permanent status agreement, a group that truly has moral authority within its society and potentially political authority as well. These are the prisoners - both those who are currently in prison and those who are already out - mainly the ones from the Fatah, whose leader is Marwan Barghouti.

Listen, there are ways to prove this proposition is silly: clearly, the people you want to be risking Israeli security to by giving land away are not ones who are only "potentially" able to maybe some time down the road gain "political authority". In the meantime, it would be hard to ignore all those bothersome terrorist groups who don't recognized that authority and are nonetheless murdering Israelis by taking advantage of whatever concessions have been granted. But logical argument kind of misses the point - Barghouti is sitting in an Israeli jail for the murder of Israelis. Ha'aretz has totally given up even on reasonable peace proposals - they've now defaulted to "just please try something we haven't tried before."
Things we have tried before: having the 'international community' monitor Palestinians after a withdrawal. Sure, it didn't work in 1967, when Secretary General U Thant "promptly acceded" to Egyptian demands that he get UN peacekeeping forces out of the way of Egyptian tanks poised to roll into Israel. It also didn't work a couple of weeks ago, when EU monitors ran way from the Gaza-Egypt crossing that they were supposed to be keeping terrorist-free because, again, they were faced with Arab violence. But maybe this time...
Omri | |

Weekend Blog Roundup / Link Dump

You should read the post with reflections on Sharon posted at Canis Iratus. All of it.
We've also discovered the absolutely charming Alexandra of All Things Beautiful, which has been nominated for Best New Blog in the Weblog awards. The blog is as gracious and elegant as its creator, and is well worth your time.
Two new blogs Israel-related blogs we've been following recently: through Lynn we found Israel Perspectives, and then through Israel Perspectives we found the Muqata. The former is Ze'ev's personal blog and the latter is a group blog he's on that also hosts David Gerstman of Soccer Dad and quite witty ("you just need a place to unwind - a place where everyone (not just the Shabak) knows your name"... come on, that's at least worth a chuckle).
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-13

Shinui was already polling just at the threshold for entrance into the Knesset. Their primaries just occurred, and in Shinui that happens according to votes in their 170 person ruling body (kind of like the Likud Central Committee, only with no access to politicians able to bribe them). This ruling body decided to destroy their party:

The Shinui party found itself facing a major split Thursday after the party council confounded predictions by ousting one of its founders, MK Avraham Poraz, from the No. 2 spot in the elections for the list of Knesset candidates. The shock result immediately caused Poraz and four other party MKs to withdraw from the race, and Shinui chairman Yosef Lapid is considering quitting the party. As expected, Lapid was reelected to the first place on the list. But the 170-member ruling body gave the second spot to Ron Levinthal, a Tel Aviv councillor who has led the party's internal opposition to the Lapid-Poraz duo. Lapid, who bitterly opposed Levinthal's election, has said several times in the past that he would not remain in Shinui if Poraz were not reelected as his deputy... Lapid immediately abandoned the convention hall, telling one MK he was "going on vacation." And half an hour later, Poraz and four other sitting MKs announced that in light of Levinthal's victory, they would not run for any position on Shinui's list.

Kind of puts Lapid's promise that "the flow of voters to Kadima will stop, and Shinui will regain its power soon" in perspective. Well, this is what happens when you put kids in charge of politics. Shinui's youth vote was all about switching generations and elevating Levinthal. The problem with adolescent rebellion, of course, is that someone still has to pay the rent. Currently, it doesn't seem like any of the people who left Shinui will be going to Kadima, but one can always hope.
The rest of our roundup has Kadima way up, Labor and Likud way down.

Kadima
Improbably, polls continue to show Kadima still gaining momentum. This is largely because the rest of the Israeli political spectrum is committed to implosion, but it also must have something to do with this:

It would be very difficult to find a more loyal team than the circle of aides and advisers around Ariel Sharon, but less than 24 hours after his massive stroke they were already briefing reporters on what a wonderful prime minister Ehud Olmert is going to be... Olmert has inherited the best spin-doctors in Israeli politics, who have been planning since Thursday how to carry out what they now see as Sharon's legacy, ensuring Olmert's ascendancy and, even more important for them, making sure that not only will Binyamin Netanyahu not be elected as the next prime minister, but that his defeat will be so humiliating that he will be forced to leave politics forever... In comparison, Peretz is in for lighter treatment. He will be portrayed as unworthy due to his inexperience or, as the aide put it, "Israel doesn't need another unready prime minister," a reference to the not-so-successful premierships of Ehud Barak and Netanyahu.

Crossing anyone in Israeli politics is always a risky affair, "forgiveness" not being their forte. But crossing one of the most tightly knit and loyal political cliques in Israeli history seems, in retrospect, to have been a particularly incautious idea - look below for what some of Omri Sharon's friends did in the Likud this week. These people used to have goals and purposes - in light of Sharon's collapse, they feel that they now instead have duties and obligations.

Likud
Primary season in the Likud is always a party. Several parties, in fact - filled with music and free food and promises of political favors (rumor on the street was that Netanyahu banned the music and free food this year). Primary results were very gratifying - most of the 'rebels' who drove PM Sharon out of the Likud party got trounced like the pathetic burnouts that they are in today's primaries:

Many Likud "rebel" MKs who opposed the disengagement found themselves without a realistic place on the party's Knesset list on Thursday, as the members of the Likud Central Committee voted to determine the party's candidates for the March elections... MK Uzi Landau, the erstwhile head of the anti-pullout "rebels" and former leadership candidate, made the 14th place on the list... Associates of former MK Omri Sharon who remained in the Likud were among those making political deals Wednesday, meeting at a Petah Tikvah cafe to choose seven "rebels" for a "hit list" of candidates to avoid, as punishment for creating a rift in the party.

At times like this, we like to gloat:

Sharon suffered a humiliating personal defeat in the Knesset today, when two of his cabinet promotions were rejected by a coalition of Arab parties, far Left members, and Likud rebels. We wonder... whether the Likud rebels who spitefully choose to oppose Sharon on these relatively minor issues are at all uncomfortable with the fact that they've effectively ruined their political careers.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. You can tell that there's a problem when AK Sommer - who despite her protestations we consider to be the blogosphere's uber Israeli insider - has not the slightest bit of a clue who the Likudniks just picked to represent the top of their Knesset list.
The rest of the Likud is in a freefall. Netanyahu ordered the four Likud Cabinet Ministers to resign. They said "not so much." Netanyahu said "how about yes?" So then they said "OK, we'll quit on Sunday". And Netanyahu said "no seriously, do it now". Then only two of them quit. Then three of them quit. Finally all of them quit. Kadima's reaction: mostly amused.

Labor
Also in freefall: the Labor party. Which means: time for more MR gloating.. This particular case of electoral vertigo might have something to do with Peretz's new campaign platform - sure, Hamas is running the Gaza Strip and Islamic Jihad is dominating the northern West Bank, but that's no Israel for Israel not to give land to Fatah. As if they'd be able to keep it out of the hands of the more straight-forward terrorist groups for more than a couple of weeks - assuming that the land isn't immediately taken by Fatah's own Al Aksa Brigades, who have been shooting at their own ministers lately. Maybe Peretz should just go back to saying that there's no difference between the center Kadima and the right Likud - hey, it worked for the Nader people!
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - End of Week

The Prime Minister is almost breathing on his own. The blood that had been pooling in his brain is now almost entirely absorbed.
He has also had a successful procedure to insert a permanent injection in his arm. We have no idea what that means.
Unfortunately, on the eve of Shabbat, the Prime Minister shows no signs of coming out of his coma.

Doctors at Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, said Friday morning that his condition was unchanged: serious and stable. He continues to be hooked up to a respirator, while also breathing on his own, and his life continues to be in danger.
Omri | |

Ha'aretz Bias Gets Kind of Silly Sometimes

The entire Ha'aretz editorial board is sick and tired about all this attention being paid to Sharon's well-being. And they want you to know that. At length. On another page, Amir Oren does not think that Olmert should be allowed to run Israel, because Olmert was once acquitted of campaign finance irregularities that he claimed to have no part in. Presumably, Oren would prefer that Israel be run by Peretz, on the justification that Peretz has always been in total control of all of the campaign finance irregularities that have occurred while he's been in charge of the unions.
Omri | |

Palestinian Prime Minister is a Moderate!

These statements got reported everywhere as Abbas calling for a halt in violence:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said during a Gaza press conference, "The hudna (ceasefire with Israel) must continue in 2006; it is a gift we are giving to our people." Abbas also condemned the recent Qassam rocket fire towards Israel, saying, "I want one person to tell me what good these rockets bring; they fall in our territory and cause Israel to respond and kill our people." (Ali Waked)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but his statements leave open the very real possibility that if the rockets from Gaza were falling in Israeli territory, that at least would be one good that the rockets were bringing. In the West, moderate anti-war types are liable to at least pretend to be across-the-board pacifists. In Palestinian communities, a moderate is someone with the moral fiber to point out that the violence being unleashed against Israel isn't sophisticated enough to do any good.
Omri | |

The Absurd Amount of Aid Given to the Palestinians and the World Bank's Priorities

This is just so nice of them:

The five years he has spent in the World Bank's offices in the A-Ram neighborhood, on the northern border of Jerusalem, have been the worst years for the Palestinians and their Israeli neighbors since the occupation. Roberts warns that if all of the parties involved do not act more courageously, the worst of all may be yet to come. He says he is returning to the World Bank's headquarters in Washington, D.C. with major concerns. To put it simply: The PA is on the verge of functional bankruptcy.

Because obviously, the worst that could happen is for the PA's absolute misuse of international aid to cause them bankruptcy. That's apparently worse than the fact that a lot of that misuse ends up financing missiles shot into Israeli homes and suicide bomber belts exploded in Israeli cafes. And then there's this:

Roberts notes that the amount of assistance the Palestinians are getting - $5 billion in five years, or $300 per capita annually - is the highest granted to any entity since World War II. "To maintain the deep involvement of the donors, and their diplomatic attention, as well as the desire of the private sector to invest additional money, the PA must improve its performance," Roberts states.

And they're using it so well.
The international community's aid to the Palestinians is totally disproportionate to either what they require or what they, according to all the standards used to decide these things, deserve - so we have to wonder, is there something else driving the constant flow of money into the Palestinian Authority, so much of which ends up in the hands of terrorists dedicated to the destruction of Israel?

[Cross-posted to Israpundit]
Omri | |

Why All Those Pieces of Paper Don't Really Matter

So Israel signs a bunch of agreements and, in the course of ten years, gives up a lot of tangible things to the Palestinians - money, weapons, and, you know, land. In return, all the Palestinians have to do is promise to stop killing Israelis. They never really did that, but at times they kind of pretended. Hamas wants you to know that this whole "pretending to not want to kill Jews" agreement thing ends right now:

Uncompromising message: Hamas will not honor agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority should the Islamic group win the upcoming elections, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar told the New York Times.

But hey, Europeans overwhelmingly believe that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. And if the Europeans commented on it, it must be true.
This story throws into stark relief the particular problem in making virtually irreversible concessions to thugs and autocrats - when they're replaced by other thugs and autocrats, you have to start all over. Except when you're giving away something for nothing, your bargaining position definitionally gets worse every time. Which is one of the many, many reasons why land for peace negotiations with Syria and/or surrendering the Golan have always been such spectacularly stupid ideas.
Omri | |

Terrorism Figures Published

Meryl has this year's terrorism figures:

If you do see these numbers referenced, you can bet the farm they will be quoted as showing that the “truce” is working. It is not. It is a sham, it has been a sham, and it was meant to be a sham from the get-go. The numbers don’t lie: 2,990 terror attacks in a year breaks down to eight terror attacks per day, with another 1.5 attacks per day foiled in some manner. It is hardly a "truce" when terrorists try, ten times a day, to murder Israelis. Remember this the next time you read that Israeli defensive actions are "violating" a "shaky truce" that has "held" since the last year.

We have little to add, except that we'd like to take this opportunity to compare tactics of snark. Meryl is most often found being sarcastic about media hand-wringing regarding Israeli "violations" of some imaginary "shaky truce". Fair enough, but we're more partial to the vaunted "fragile ceasefire" that Israel always seems to be "threatening". Obviously, our sarcasm is inherently funnier – but link based confirmation being the essence of blogging, we'll let you settle this for yourself.
Omri | |

Feminism in the Muslim World

What counts as "women's empowerment" in the Muslim world? We don't judge, we just report:

Women’s Empowerment Reaches Haj
MINA, 10 January 2006 — For the first time in the Haj season, a young Saudi woman managed to rent a stall selling food and drinks at Mina. Al-Madinah daily reported that the young saleswoman is getting help from her nieces, and though she sleeps in a nearby camp the stall is open for 24 hours. She added that the profits are very high due to the location of the stall that is on a main pedestrian street where lots of pilgrims gather.

Except article goes on to say "of course, she can't sell food and drinks to women, because they're not allowed near Mina. Or out of the house, really."
Except it didn't.
(Hat tip: Meryl)
Omri | |

Egypt Creates, Criticizes Gaza Chaos

So Egypt is probably more than a little responsible for all of those weapons that have been finding their way into the Gaza Strip:

Since the pullout, Diskin said, Palestinians have smuggled three anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza compared to none before disengagement. He added that close to 200 RPGs and tons of explosives were also smuggled into Gaza on a monthly basis. "It is clear that our withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor and our reliance on the Egyptians has proven to be a failure," committee chairman Yuval Steinitz said. "The Egyptians are not acting like the Jordanians, who prevent weapons from being smuggled across the border. They sometimes stop the smuggling and sometimes don't, but in reality their behavior has drastically increased the amount of weapons smuggled into Gaza." Terror organizations, Diskin said, have used the last few months to build up their military forces and to develop long-range Kassam rockets.

And now they're acting all surprised and getting pissed off at PA Chairman Abbas because people are actually using all those weapons that they allowed across the border:

Egypt threatened to withdraw its support for the Palestinian Authority if the PA did not act to control the rampant anarchy in the Gaza Strip, according to a report in the London Arab newspaper Al Quds. The report claimed that following the incident at the Rafah border crossing in which two Egyptian soldiers were killed, Egyptian authorities delivered the threat to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as part of a specially delivered message. Egypt also threatened to withdraw its support for the peace process if the PA did not take the proper steps to restore order to Gaza.

Now, admittedly, Abbas is not on our Hanukkah card list. But Egypt's activities against Israel place them in at least a healthy amount of tension with at least a couple of treaties and not a few signed agreements. Someone should probably point that out, and also point out that you don't get to throw the glass of milk against a wall and then cry about all the liquid on the ground.
Omri | |

Political Attacks Against Sharon - Can We Be Bitter Yet?

JPost has a pretty decent roundup regarding the remarkable loyalty of Prime Minister Sharon's closest political advisers, and an overview of how they intend to ensure that the Prime Minister's vision for Israel is carried through. Part of it will make it into this afternoon's political roundup, but in the meantime, this paragraph was buried at the very bottom:

On Monday the Sharon team sent up a trial balloon of the "blame Bibi" variant. An anonymous source blamed Education Minister Limor Livnat for her vigorous attack on Sharon's probity last week - following the report (since discredited) that the police had proof of a bribe Sharon accepted from his friend Martin Schlaff - causing the prime minister distress that might have brought on the stroke that evening. The fact that the story, which has no real proof, got onto the front page of the country's most popular newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and subsequently the morning radio shows, will only embolden the team to start focusing its fire higher up, straight at Netanyahu.

As a rule, we always expressed skepticism at any rumors that Sharon was about to be arrested for corruption charges. When the rumors hit two weeks ago, we didn't bother mentioning them. After the PM's collapse, however, we did blog this:

Recriminations are beginning. Hospital officials have linked his conditions to his legal troubles. Not to sound bitter, but if this wave of investigations against the Sharon family implodes like the last one, they may have just murdered a Prime Minster.

The advisers going after those who drove PM Sharon to distraction are at least partially motivated by politics. But we imagine that they're also motivated by not a little bit of anger. How could they not be?
Omri | |

Israel Reacts to an Idiot

The Jewish State has kindly informed the Rev. Pat Robertson that, so long as he is committed to his relatively unnuanced theological opinion regarding the motives of the Almighty, Israel will have nothing to do with him:

Tourism Minister Avraham Hirchson has shunned US evangelical leader Pat Robertson shortly before the two were to sign a major funding deal for the Galilee Christian Heritage Center after Robertson suggested that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was a punishment from God for the Gaza Strip withdrawal, The Jerusalem Post has learned. "The minister has very strong views on this and cannot accept what was said," Tourism Ministry spokesman Ido Hartuv said. "We reconsidered the deal and realized that we cannot sign with Robertson or anyone who supports his views."

The project will go on, and Israel will continue to develop its ties with evangelical communities seeking to explore their historical heritage. Without Pat Robertson. Good.
Omri | |

Ha'aretz Wonders If Hamas is All That Bad - Turns Out, Yes

Does it ever seem like some Ha'aretz correspondents have never met a terrorist without a sould bent toward moderation? Hamas puts out their election platform (yes, apparently, they have election platforms now), and Ha'aretz excitedly announces that Hamas platform mentions armed struggle, but not Israel's destruction:

Hamas published its official platform for the upcoming Palestinian elections, which proved to be more moderate than either its 1988 charter or public statements made by its leaders throughout the ensuing years. The document makes no mention of the principle that has been Hamas' raison d'etre since its founding: the destruction of Israel and establishment of a Palestinian state on all territory west of the Jordan River in its place. However, the document's introduction comes out strongly in favor of armed struggle. "Our nation is currently at a stage of national liberation, and it has the right to act to regain its rights and end the occupation by using all means, including armed resistance," it states. "We must use all means in order to support our people and establish a state whose capital is Jerusalem."

The correspondent wonders out loud whether Hamas is committed to such a state being "confined to the West Bank and Gaza." Let's see if we can find an answer to that. Could it possibly be the case that by "end the occupation" they mean the presence of any Jew in any land east of the Jordan River? Might they possibly consider all of Israel to be "occupation territory"? We think they might!

"These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land. The words come from a statement issued by the armed wing of the militant group Hamas... The reasons Hamas reject the roadmap are hinted at in the statement above. "1948" refers to the whole of Palestine as it was during the British mandate, before the State of Israel was established... Hamas considers all of Israel as occupied territory


[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

UPDATE: This is beginning to wear thin. Guardian headline: Hamas drops call for destruction of Israel from manifesto. No, no they did not.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Hamas Closing In

With the land reserved for a future Palestinian state increasingly falling into anarchy, we have this question: is allowing a massive influx of weapons into the Gaza Strip (a) helpful (b) unhelpful?

"The amount of weapons and explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt has grown drastically, by more than 300 percent," Diskin told the committee, which convened in his Tel Aviv office. "If before the disengagement they smuggled in 200 to 300 rifles a month, they are now smuggling in close to 3,000."

New polls show Hamas just outside the margin going into the upcoming Palestinian elections:

The Islamic militant Hamas is closing in on the ruling Fatah Party ahead of Jan. 25 parliament elections in the West Bank and Gaza, according to a poll released Wednesday. Fatah won 35 percent support, compared to 31 percent for Hamas, said Nader Said, who conducted the poll for the West Bank's Bir Zeit University. In a Bir Zeit poll last month, Fatah won 36.7 percent, compared to 20.6 percent for Hamas. Said said the latest poll would be released in greater detail on Saturday. He said it had an error margin of 3 percentage points and was conducted last week among 1,500 respondents.

Then there's this:

The EU observers are concerned about the security situation during the January 25 parliamentary election, but said Wednesday they have contingency evacuation plans if the situation gets out of control. "What we need is an early warning," Mathias Eick, spokesman for the EU's 186-member election observer mission, said. "It is not a matter of stopping (the violence)."

Here's our contribution. Memo to Mr. Eich: early warning. There will be violence.
And people say we're not helpful.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Wednesday Night

Doctors will be lowering the Prime Minister's sedation to the lowest possible levels. The Bulldozer continues to recover. He is moving his right side more, and there have been infrequent but consistent movements on his left side. There are even signs that he recognized his son when Gilad came and spoke with him. Of course, there improvements are still slight, and Sharon's condition remains extremely serious.
Omri | |

We Get Mail - Sharon's Medical Bungling Edition

Regarding this medical update (which, to be honest, we thought was pretty mild), we recieved this email from a disapointed young lady, subject: "Now you are just being inflammatory ... Stop it!":

You are doing a disservice to everyone who reads that and you are dishonoring Sharon by doing so. Show me your medical degree, dude, or shut up on the judgement of the medical care Sharon received. As I previously stated, he got the highest STANDARD OF CARE possible for his condition. If they had NOT given the thrombolytic medication and he had another ischemic stroke, I bet you would be screaming and whining just as you are now. Take off the tinfoil hat and PAY ATTENTION to the FACTS! Report the WHOLE story or leave it alone!... You are beginning to sound like a moonbat. Unreal!

In between there was a bunch of stuff about how the PM's condition is difficult to diagnose.
This morning brings us this statement by the Prime Minister's surgeon:

In an interview recorded for the Channel 2 program "Fact" Wednesday night, one of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's surgeons, Professor Felix Umansky, said that the hemorrhaging Sharon suffered when he had a second, massive stroke last week was likely caused by blood thinners prescribed after his first stroke on December 18. Doctors at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, discovered that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered from a vascular disease when he was hospitalized with his first stroke. Administering blood thinners to someone suffering from this disease greatly increases the risk of cerebral hemorrhaging. Despite their knowledge, Hadassah doctors decided to put Sharon on blood-thinning medication following the stroke.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup 2006-01-10

Hey you remember how, like a week ago, all of the political parties in Israel were kind of getting along? Yeah? Not so much. The Likud has filed a petition with the High Court to the effect that the Prime Minister's replacement has to come from their own faction and not from Kadima.
Someone (that "someone" being Sharon friend and adviser Reuven Adler) suggested that Sharon remain the head of Kadima. This is what happens when polling data gets in the way of good sense. And having a heart. Labor officials: Kadima knows no limits (also: cynical and irresponsible). Meretz officials: Kadima has no conscience. This isn't going to help with all of those people who are pissed off that Kadima is on the TV all day.

Kadima
Exciting headline: Barak says Olmert is best man to lead Israel. Turns out that headline should have been "Barak says Olmert is best man to lead Israel for the next three months, until the election, and only if you limit it to members of Kadima... unless you count Peres, but he's not really good at winning elections". But that would have been an informative headline rather than a wildly implausible one. Ah well.
New polls show Kadima with a remarkable, "Ehud Olmert is your high water mark enjoy it" 44 Knesset seats:

Senior Kadima officials, however, believe that these results still reflect the popular identification with and support for Sharon, and that some of the respondents are transferring their support and affection for the prime minister to his replacement and his party, despite being aware that Sharon will not return to lead it.

Oh you think so? The other stats you need to know from the poll:

Most of Kadima's strength is coming from Labor, Likud and Shinui - 35, 51 and 60 percent, respectively - of the people who voted for those three parties in 2003, who now say that they will be putting a Kadima ballot into the box come March 28.


Labor
Only 9% of respondents polled consider Labor's Peretz as "the most suitable person to deal with Israel's security and diplomatic problems". This isn't really news (let alone surprising), but we like to take any chance we can to remind everybody that Labor primary voters are pretty stupid.

Likud
JPost comments that Netanyahu is hoping for a relatively moderate list that he can sell to the Israeli public (and that won't rebel on him if he ever needs to make diplomatic concessions):

Because he wants a relatively moderate slate, Netanyahu endorsed MKs Michael Eitan and Yuval Steinitz, who both backed disengagement. To attract support from Russian immigrant voters, he wants Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein on the list. He needs Ehud Yatom on the list because he is the Likud's only former security official.
Uzi Landau and former Finance Ministry director-general Shmuel Slavin are also on Netanyahu's preferred list because of a personal history between them. Netanyahu endorsed coalition chairman Gideon Sa'ar because Sa'ar is seen as a rising star in the party. Sa'ar is expected to finish first in the race and win the third slot on the Likud list behind Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.
A Dahaf Institute poll in Yediot Aharonot predicted that Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, Landau, Health Minister Dan Naveh, Eitan, Steinitz, MK Gilad Erdan and Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz would round out the Likud's top 10.

There is also more speculation in the article that the Likud is going to be getting back some of the voters who originally fled to Kadima. But here's your inside-baseball moment for the day:

A hawkish group in the central committee called the Forum for Safeguarding Likud Values circulated a list of candidates who would be loyal to the Land of Israel… Among the names to keep in mind for the future are Emanuel Weiser, who is running for the 19th slot on the list, reserved for a candidate from Tel Aviv; Gabi Avital and Yariv Levine, who are competing for the 20th slot that is reserved for a candidate from the Coastal Plain; Shimon Gafsou, who is running for the 27th slot, reserved for a candidate from the North; and Slavin, who is running for the 31st slot, reserved for a Jerusalemite.

In other news, Netanyahu is calling on all factions to pass the 2006 budget and avoid a financial disaster. Of course, this is Ha'aretz's coverage of this story: "sure, Netanyahu is being 'responsible and statesmanlike' by doing that, but gosh do we hate him".
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Tuesday Afternoon

What began as minor movement on his left side (which is significant, remember, because the right side of the PM's brain was most significantly damaged) has turned into movement of the left hand and is being described as a major change.
This is great news, especially given that the Prime Minister's breathing and blood pressure are normal and stable. He is "not in immediate danger". Regarding the latter, however, no immediate danger doesn't mean that PM Sharon is not still in critical condition - he is, and anyone implying that his condition is less than severe or serious is simply being irresponsible. Furthermore, his improvements are drops in an ocean - he has suffered a major stroke, and even partial recovery will take months. No one is expecting him to ever return to political office.
Still, Prime Minister Sharon is alive, stable, and ever ever so slowly improving.
Omri | |

NYT Has Literally No Clue What They're Talking About - Virtually Lies About Israeli Stance, Ends up Recommending that the US Violate Treaty Obligations

Alternative headline for this post: "NYT Finds Mid-East Arab Election They Can Endorse"
The New York Times has published their contribution to Middle East diplomacy, urging the Bush administration to pressure Israel not to interference with Hamas's election campaigning. This is a thinly veiled anti-Israel hit-piece in the tattered sheep's clothing of an editorial. You can tell that there's something going on other than 'policy recommendation' because the article literally advocates that the Bush administration "must continue" doing what it's already doing. Yes, the Paper of Record took time to issue an urgent editorial exhorting the administration to... not change anything! Maybe, just maybe, a different motive is at work here (stop rolling your eyes - we don't mean "anti-Semitism" - it's much closer to fashionable, reflexive, myopic, unreflective, trite Leftism).
We're not even all that concerned with the logical acrobatics that the reader is expected to perform so that these six paragraphs gain even a minimum of plausibility. For example, the article claims that Hamas is so popular right now because of the social services they provide. And it also concedes that Hamas is currently a violent, rejectionist organization. But for some reason, having Hamas win the election will force them to have to provide... social services - which will make them... less violent (?!) But seriously - that's the argument:

We can only hope that if Hamas wins a share of power, Palestinians will expect the same of it as they did of the P.L.O. If the Islamic militants persist in provoking Israeli incursions, roadblocks and assassinations, their welcome will soon wear thin.

Every sentence on this paragraph - and at least one sentence clause – is at least in significant tension with some other part of the article (as well as with reality, but again, we're still on the "internal contradictions" part of this post).
"If Hamas wins a share of power"? In the preceding paragraph the article argued that Hamas already has a share of power ("many of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the municipal elections"). Yet that presumably has done nothing to moderate the group.
"Palestinians will expect the same of it as they did of the P.L.O."? In the preceding paragraph the article asserts that the expectation of the P.L.O. when they arrived for their first election was that they were terrorists ("the Palestine Liberation Organization... once seemed even less acceptable than Hamas"). That assertion can't have been in the context of the P.L.O. of the distant past - before they participated in elections - because that wouldn't really have much to do with the expectation of Hamas as it relates to, well, to participation in elections.
"If the Islamic militants persist in provoking Israeli incursions, roadblocks and assassinations, their welcome will soon wear thin"? Two paragraphs above, the article staked its entire position on the claim that Israeli interference in Palestinian internal affairs increases Hamas's popularity ("the more that Israel and the United States are perceived as meddling in the vote, the more Palestinians will seek to defy them... if Hamas is forced off the ticket... Hamas will come out with an even higher standing among the Palestinians"). For this not to be a contradiction, somehow the NYT would have to convince you that forcing Hamas's leaders "off the ticket" would make the organization more popular, but assassinating those same leaders would make the organization less popular.
And yet, believe it or not, the most mendacious part of this editorial - worse than the transparent agenda and worse than the internal contradictions - is how very close it gets to outright lying about the Israeli position on Hamas's participation in the upcoming elections:

The messy thing about democracy is that people tend to vote for the candidates they want - a point that seemed lost on Israel yesterday when it threatened to ban Palestinians in East Jerusalem from voting in the scheduled Palestinian elections if Hamas took part. Israel is concerned about a strong showing by Hamas. That's understandable, but democracy doesn't work this way. Israel allowed Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote in Palestinian Authority elections in 1996 and to vote earlier this year, when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president. Israel can't just decide to take away that right because it's afraid of who may win next time.

The patronizing condescension is surpassed only by the inexcusable obfuscation. We think that the rhetorical strategy is meant to help the reader get over the shock that the New York Times has finally found an Arab election in the Middle East that they support (old slogan: "All the News That's Fit to Print"; new slogan: "Endorsing Only the Arab Elections that Terrorists Will Win"). But when you finally dig through the insufferable smugness of "Israel can't just decide.... because it's afraid of who may win", there are actually real claims being made here - they just happen to be demonstrably false. The full paragraph is:

Israel is concerned about a strong showing by Hamas. That's understandable, but democracy doesn't work this way. Israel allowed Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote in Palestinian Authority elections in 1996 and to vote earlier this year, when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president. Israel can't just decide to take away that right because it's afraid of who may win next time.

Now, when one reads this paragraph, one might well get the impression that the only difference between the election of 1996 and the current election is that Israel had "decided to take away" the ability of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote because Israel is "afraid of who may win". This impression, of course, would be false. The real difference between the election of 1996 and the current election is that the current election campaign is in explicit violation of the Oslo Accords while the 1996 one was, well, not:

The Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, pursuant to the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. Oslo Interim Agreement, Annex 2, Article III (1995) outlines eligibility for PA elected office:
The nomination of any candidates, parties or coalitions will be refused, and such nomination or registration once made will be canceled, if such candidates, parties or coalitions:
(1) commit or advocate racism; or
(2) pursue the implementation of their aims by unlawful or nondemocratic means.

So three minutes of research demonstrates that the Israeli concern is at least somewhat plausibly about something other than "who may win" (well, it takes three minutes if you know something about the situation - admittedly, we don't expect the NYT to actually know anything about the situations they deign to sagely advise everyone about).The problem isn't necessarily with who is going to win - it's much more basic, and has to do with who is running right now. The reason that Israel is interfering with the election is because it's being conducted in explicit violation of the Palestinians' treaty obligations. Which also means that when the Times urges the "the Bush administration [to] continue to" pressure Israel to back off Hamas, they're urging that the United States abandon its Oslo commitments (old slogan: "All the News That's Fit to Print"; new slogan: "Endorsing Only the Arab Elections that Violate US Treaty Obligations").
Not that it matters at this point, but obviously the paragraph that includes the line "many of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas in the municipal elections did so not because they approve of Islamist terrorism" is either trivial or misleading. If all that's meant is that Palestinians can like an organization which has built its entire existence on destroying Israel for other reasons ("Mussolini made the trains run on time!"), then the writers owe each reader the 1.5 seconds of their life that it took to learn that you can like an organization for reasons in addition to the reason you already like them. If it was supposed to not so subtly imply that Palestinians don't support terrorists, then it's kind of wrong: as of two weeks ago, 65% of the Palestinian public supports terrorist attacks against Israel. Of course, the editorial is unclear whether it's trying to be trivial or misleading (plausible deniability is a beautiful thing). But one thing is certain - the NYT editorial board thinks letting Hamas have access to international legitimacy and billions in aid is at least worth trying out. Old slogan: "All the News That's Fit to Print"; new slogan: "Endorsing Only the Arab Elections that Threaten Israeli Security".

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Memo to Egypt: Palestinian Peace Pledges Not Really Reliable

Seriously though, you should be very, very skeptical:

Egypt agreed on Sunday to reopen its border with Gaza Strip after Palestinian militants reached an agreement with European officials in which they promised to keep the area calm. The border was closed last Thursday after Palestinian gunmen belonging to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the Fatah party's military wing, shot dead two Egyptian police officers and injured some 20 others. During the incident, two bulldozers driven by Al-Aqsa militants demolished segments of the wall separating Gaza from Egypt.

MR will be operating a betting pool as to how long it will take for these terrorists' "promises" to become "negotiated agreements that Egypt has violated". Which will become "a justification to take action". We can be so confident because it's happened so many times before. Betting will stop as soon as the next wave of bulldozers leave the gate. Or crash into the gate, as the metaphor goes.
Omri | |

On "Security Cooperation"

The IDF now has to capture terrorists who mysteriously manage to leave Palestinian prisons. Because "he escaped", you see. And yet, the Palestinian Authority and its international allies are consistently and totally mystified whenever Israel gets fed up and refuses to boost "security cooperation" (read: information on the location of terrorists) with "Palestinian police officers" (read: people who'll tip those terrorists off).
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Tuesday Morning

Doctors are meeting against to assess the PM's condition. They've been reducing his sedatives, and he shows limited reations. He is moving his right arm and his right let (don't bother - all the jokes have already been made). However, earlier reports of paralysis are starting seem more and more credible.
Barring a rapid deterioration, another press conference will be held Tuesday afternoon.
Oh - one more thing. For those of you who want to get pissed off, this is the current Ha'aretz headline: PM was suffering from undiagnosed brain disease that made use of blood thinners extremely risky.
For those of you who want to get really pissed off, the headline right below it: Diagnosis could have prevented hemorrhage.
Probably no reason to run a full diagnostic battery on the Prime Minister's brain before prescribing pain killers.
Omri | |

A Pause and a Thank You

As the week begins and our semester kicks off, a note about the hectic pace of the tragic last few days. The Prime Minister remains in critical condition, the Palestinians continue to launch missiles into Israel, Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons... and Europe continues to blame Israel for the first while wallowing in their impotence regarding the second. Given a wish that would change only one of those things, we're not sure which one we'd eventually choose.
Many of you who have come to MR looking for news about Sharon both in words and in your donations. We'd like to express our thanks for both publicly. Others have asked questions - about Israeli news sources, the political day after, etc, and usually we answer those emails privately.
This morning, however, we received an email that bears public answering - something to the effect of "is it OK to keep pestering [MR] by email"? Of course of course of course. We take it as axiomatic that people's support for Israel - and thus for the West and in opposition to Islamofascism - exists in direct proportion to their knowledge about Israel. Our tiny contribution is providing whatever clarification or information we can provide. And we say "tiny" not out of any humility - Golda's warning being to the point here - but to emphasize that, unlike some bloggers on the other side, we don't really believe that the halls of power are quaking in fear because of the rage that the blogosphere can bring to bear on them (although we don't believe that the Rumsfeld regime has cast America into a dark night of fascism comparable to the gulags of Soviet Russia, so maybe we're out of touch… ) But whatever delusions the DailyKos or the Democratic Underground denizens may have (and although the latter's disgusting celebration of PM Sharon's decline bears some discussion), this is a blog, we try to provide information. Questions are welcome.
We now return you to bad news and snark, the second having proven recently to be a poor defense against the first.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Monday Night

The Prime Minister is responding to stimulation and reacting to pain. However, doctors emphasize not only that he remains in serious condition, but that these in themselves don't tell us much about his cognitive functions. Repeating what we heard this morning, waking him could take a couple of days.
Meanwhile, Professor Martin Rabay (being the only person in Israel not to realize that the army of doctors opining about the PM's condition are now being openly mocked, since they don't have access to a lot of important things… like the patient), is going around telling people that despite what all those "doctors" who are "actually at the hospital" say, we can now conclude that PM Sharon is paralyzed on the left side of his body. Dr. Rabay could be right, so we're passing it on. But it doesn't take a PhD in neuroscience to realize that this guy went "blood damages the right side of the brain, that means paralysis on the left side of the body... and if I say that I'm basing it off of cryptic clues in recent reports, people will think I'm intuitive."
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Who's Afraid of Some L'il Ole Elections (Not Europe!)

Terrorists from Fatah offshoots are threatening to start killing people stop the Palestinian elections from happening. Terrorists from Hamas are threatening to start killing people to make sure that the Palestinian elections happen. The entire situation will probably not be helped by the fact that the Palestinians have been letting in all kinds of bad people into the heart of the territories:

Weapons experts in Palestinian terror groups who have undergone training in Lebanon, Syria and possibly Iran have recently infiltrated the Gaza Strip, a senior security official said on Sunday. The official said that after Israel pulled out of Gaza, several Palestinians who had attended training camps run by Iranians and Hezbollah members entered the Strip, apparently from Sinai.

The fact that a lot of those people have actually been high-ranking Hamas terrorists will probably help the situation less. Israeli officials think that there might be some problems with the Palestinian elections, while just about everybody knows that Hamas is going to win.
Meanwhile, terrorists of all stripes are threatening to shoot journalists who talk about terrorists of all stripes who are shooting people:

Several Palestinian journalists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have received death threats from various armed groups over the past few days because of their coverage of the state of lawlessness and anarchy in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas. Deputy Information Minister Ahmed Suboh condemned the threats, pointing out that a number of press offices had received letters containing threats against journalists. A journalist who asked not to be named told The Jerusalem Post that groups affiliated with Hamas and Fatah were behind the threats. "We are taking these threats very seriously," he said. "Many of the journalists are afraid."

So what could be more appropriate than for Europe and the United Nation to announce that they're commiting millions more in funding and training to the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood employees of international organizations in Gaza - money that literally gets tithed directly into the coffers of those terrorist organizations. Awesome!
Omri | |

Hey Gals, Check This Out - Reporting Saudi Torture Gets Maid Tortured More

Are we shameless enough to post a week-old story as "news" just because it exemplifies how badly the poor and marginalized fare under militant Islam? We're pretty sure we are:

Meet Nour Miyati - an Indonesian woman working as a maid in Saudi Arabia, who has just had fingers, toes and parts of her foot amputated due to gangrene. Miss Miyati's hands and feet developed gangrene because her Saudi employer (slave master) tied her up for a month as punishment for not cleaning the house as well as expected. Now, Miss Miyati has been sentenced by a Saudi Islamic Court to 79 Lashes for "falsely accusing" her slave master of mistreating her... A judge later sentenced the sponsor’s wife, who admitted to beating Miyati, to 35 lashes. The husband was found innocent due to lack of evidence against him.

How could any court possibly conclude that accusations of mistreatment were "false"? It was a man's word vs. a woman's word, so it wasn't that hard to know who the liar was. Well, technically it was a man's word vs. a woman's word and lots of pictures of abuse and medical evidence of maltreatment. But seriously, who you gonna believe - a Saudi man, or your own lying, kuffar eyes?
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Monday Morning

YNet headlines with "Sharon's moment of truth"

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's doctors will meet Monday morning for a final assessment before attempting to bring the ailing PM out of deep sedation. Barring any changes in Sharon's condition overnight, the doctors will embark on the slow, sensitive process that will hopefully see the prime minister emerge out of the induced coma. Only then will doctors be able to perform the needed tests and assess the damage sustained by the PM's brain.

We think that there's supposed to be a press conference-thingy in about 25 minutes - 7am Israeli time, 9pm PST. If that's true, we'll bring you updates. If not, we'll bring you updates when there are updates.

UPDATE 01: (Sun 10:14pm PST) As Prime Minister Sharon's condition remained stable over night, doctors today will begin bringing him out of his induced coma. We'd have more information to give you, but Channel 10's morning show folks are in a deep discussion with some psychologist about how you can tell a children's emotions based on round shapes in their drawings. Seriously.

UPDATE 02: (Sun 11:45pm PST) That was bad intel - discussions among doctors are ongoing. The PM will be given a series of tests. If after that he seems to have remained stable, then the process to bring him out of his coma will begin.

UPDATE 03: (12:32am PST) Doctors have begun to rouse PM Sharon out of his coma. They hope to get a response from the PM within literally minutes of reducing the doses that have kept him under.

UPDATE 04: (1:05am PST) YNet reports that the Prime Minister is breathing on his own, but Israeli TV says that doctors caution that "this does not indicate any change in his status", which remains extremely severe. Challen 10 also passes on a quote to the effect that it could take "hours or days" before we know more. Bumping this post to the top...
Omri | |

Fun With Headlines - Reuters Says Israeli Concession is Actually Israeli Denial of Rights (UPDATE: ... And Then Tries to Cover It Up)

Israel has decided to reverse their previous decision and to allow Palestinian candidates to campaign in East Jerusalem. This is obviously a huge concession by Israel, which annexed East Jerusalem decades ago and considers it the undivided capital of the Jewish State. Not only is the concession considerable, but Israel is also under no obligation to grant it, since Palestinian political activity in Jerusalem is explicitly prohibited by the Oslo Accords - a treaty that the Palestinian Authority is bound to and that the US ostensibly guarantees (the US, incidentally, has been "playing a major role" in pressuring Israel to accede to the Palestinians' demands regarding East Jerusalem). Anyway, Israel has decided to make this huge concession, allow Palestinian candidates to campaign for the Palestinian elections in Israel's capital, etc - they've only left the requirement that the politicians who are campaigning can't be calling for Israel's destruction at the same time (something that Hamas has notably insisted it will continue to do).
So of course Reuters headline for this story is... "Israel limits Palestinian campaign in E. Jerusalem". That's the perfect description for this situation! This headline is still not our favorite - the recent ABC News headline about Israeli efforts to limit the massive missile barrage from Gaza at the end of last year ("Israel's Sonic Booms Terrifies Gaza Children") gets that honor. But this one's close. These people have no shame.

UPDATE: The old headline is being rewritten to the damn-with-faint-praise "Israel lets some Palestinians campaign in E. Jerusalem" on various Reuters feeds (including the one we linked to above). We had to do a little searching to find a site that still had the original, outrageous headline. As of 1:29am PST, there are still a few sites that haven't gotten around to erasing this evidence of outrageous bias. The UK Reuters feed, for example, appears to be a little slow and still has the old headline up. We expect that to change reasonably soon, so here's a screenshot for posterity:



ANOTHER UPDATE: Because we are not very bright, we didn't realize that we had another tab with the original page open (this alone should give you a good idea of our organization acumen). Regardless, here is a screenshot of the original Reuters Alertnet feed that was linked to above, including the URL. You can go there now and see for yourself that the headline has been modified. How pathetic.

Omri | |

The Left's Pathetic Ignorance and Hatred of PM Sharon

Juan Cole - Michigan professor and popular Leftist "hey, he's got a PhD" quote factory - is in many ways typical of the academic Left. He is so immersed in his insular, self-congratulatory community that he simply doesn't find out when certain slogans and catch-phrases turn into absurd, self-denying caricatures of themselves. Marxists who still speak of the "objective" or "self-evident" demise of capitalism are a little like that, although there are no real Marxists outside of the Ivory Tower so that example doesn't work. Democrats who insist that the Killian memos are "fake but accurate" are a little closer, although that misses the academic dimension we're trying to capture. Regardless, Cole suffers in the same way that all people who live in a political and cultural echo chambers suffer - he doesn't know how stupid he sometimes sounds.
From Cole's New Years predictions:

The Israeli-Palestinian struggle will continue in staccatto (sic) fashion, because the Israeli government remains expansionist and land-hungry. Because the Sharon government refused to negotiate with real live Palestinians over the Gaza withdrawal no framework for peace was erected. Israeli troops will go back into Gaza from time to time.

Why "expansionist and land hungry?" Surely, anybody coming to the situation for the first time would observe that in the last decade, Israel has done virtually nothing but give away land. In the north, the country has withdrawn from Lebanon. In the east, 98% of Palestinians were living under Palestinian rule when they started their most recent war. So when trying to demonize Israel, why would anybody drop "expansionist and land hungry" as the most likely adjective?
Simply because that's always been the catch-phrase for demonizing Israel. It's old school, 1980s "Israel wants to invade Jordan and kill all the Palestinians" Chomskyesque, Saidesque libel. But between posts from ZNet, articles from The Nation, and speeches from the anti-Semites at ANSWER, Cole can go entire years without ever having to encounter a reasonable (or new) opinion about Israel. So he just never got the memo that PM Sharon was really giving away land. Either that, or Cole really believes that there are still settlers in the Gaza Strip. Which we think even he would agree would make him pretty stupid. So, in an effort to slip in a libel against Israel 'not negotiating with the Palestinians over leaving' becomes the same as 'not leaving.'
Now, we're actually a little closer to Cole than makes us comfortable - we actually agree that PM Sharon did not have some epiphany and embrace the idea of Palestinian statehood. Rather, the Prime Minister realized that there is an international front to the Israeli-Palestinian war, and that if he did not redeploy on that front he would be overrun. But that doesn't mean that there are still settlers in Gaza. It doesn't mean that the Palestinians don't have their own land for their own state. It doesn't mean that the phrase "expansionist and land hungry" is any less stupid.
Hatred of PM Sharon is so deeply ingrained on the Left that language becomes collateral damage. We understand what Cole's trying to say - that Sharon didn't give the Palestinians enough for a viable state. Ignorant, but grant it for the sake of argument (that's what happens with these rabid anti-Zionists - to borrow a line from Ann Coulter, you have to accept the small lies just to get to the ones of Holocaust denying proportion). But the particular way that Cole abuses language is revelatory - why that particular accusation? Because in the community he writes for, the truth of that phrase is taken as a given - that it's patent nonsense tells you much about the community in which Cole feels comfortable asserting it as a self-evident fact. Because that nonsense was once the fashionable party line, and because nobody's really told the academic Left that the party's over, it persists as a symptom of ingrained, unreflexive ideology. The Left's mental block regarding PM Sharon can be described precisely: in an insulated community where hatred is embraced because it is fashionable and not because it is connected to any facts, changing the facts will not change the hatred. You can't reason a community out of what it hasn't been reasoned into.
PM Sharon did historically unprecedented, dramatic things - risking his political and physical life in the process. He provided strength and hope during one of the darkest times in Israeli history, and he did while preserving his and the state's humanity:

Despite being besieged by murder-bombers and hounded by the Europeans, the United Nations, and many in our state department, Mr. Sharon nevertheless did what all such gunslingers do. He said "no more," and plowed into the West Bank to hunt down, kill, or capture the culprits. He barked out that he probably should have had Arafat shot years ago. He promised to bring a terrible retribution to the West Bank, which harbored, cheered, and aided killer bombers. He said all that and more — without make-up, scripts, or damage-control spinners and handlers.
Yet the reality was that his soldiers were far more humane than Russians who blew up entire neighborhoods in Chechnya. His men probably killed fewer civilians than did our outnumbered and trapped heroes in Mogadishu. Unlike the Kuwaitis, Sharon did not ethnically cleanse Palestinians; unlike the Jordanians he did not murder them in the thousands; unlike the Syrians he did not wipe out an entire town and pave it over; and, of course, unlike the Arab heroes, Nasser and Saddam Hussein, he did not gas civilians.
No, he sent combatants house-to-house, to pry out killers from boobytrapped parlors, in narrow streets where gunmen shot and then ducked into living rooms. No matter — he was Mr. Sharon and his soldiers were Israelis, and so the world dammed this new Sherman come alive. A corrupt international community that ignored thousands who were beheaded, incinerated, and blown apart in the Congo, Bosnia, India, and Rwanda has demonized him for a "massacre" in which less than a 100 Palestinians were killed in efforts to apprehend the murderers among them.

Remember that when you read Chris Hitchen's attack piece on PM Sharon - it'll help you understand why he's writing it, and why he doesn't know better. For a Hitch article, the whole thing is uncharacteristically muddled and disorganized. It also includes the on its face idiotic phrase "a wall is a wall is a wall" and an exhortation to read a lie-filled Chomsky book (how sadly predictable). But at least Hitchens recognizes that PM Sharon - for reasons of his own - created facts on the ground that are beneficial to the Palestinians, and to that extent he is far less bound to easy Leftist catch-phrases than people like Cole. In steadily moving away from the Leftist echo-chamber of his previous years, he can see a little beyond the horizon of fashionable phrases when reality insists that he do so. But old habits die hard.
Omri | |

Former Israeli Settlers Come to Pray for Sharon

We've been quite harsh on Jews who are claiming to see in Israel's tragedy and PM Sharon's grief some sign of divine mandate, as have some other bloggers. You should know that those lunatics are not representative of even the Israel far-right:

Avi Farhan, who was evacuated from the Elei Sinai settlement during the disengagement last summer, has arrived at the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital to express his support in the prime minister's family and wish Sharon a speedy recovery. "We all pray he will return to being the same Arik, the same bulldozer," Farhan said. "We need to separate between the personal relation to Arik Sharon, and the pain we have experienced as a result of the pullout," he said. (Miri Chason)

Quite right.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

The Creation of a "Human Rights Violation" - How to Get Rid of that Annoying Context

So the IDF gets a credible warning that terrorists from Nablus are about to attack soldiers at a checkpoint, just like they did last week. The danger and confusion were so significant that at one point there were believable reports circulating that Israeli soldiers had been abducted and taken captive by terrorists. So of course, the story is now that Israel has committed a massive human rights violation by closing the checkpoint. When lines did form, incidentally, Israel reopened the checkpoint to let Palestinians through. Under the shadow of a credible terrorist threat. A week after an attack on a checkpoint. So two days from now, this will of course be described as an Israeli human rights abuse. Of course it will be.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup 2006-06-08

The National Religious Party will not join the rest of Israel in taking a break from politics and just supporting the budget. Apparently, you can afford to be petty when you have no chance of coming out like a real party in the next elections.
Meanwhile, everyone has kind of figured out that polls are totally useless so soon after PM Sharon's collapse. So they've apparently stopped doing them. No polls numbers for you today.

Kadima
We had this whole paragraph ready to go about updates and leaks regarding Peres's chances of staying in Kadima and endorsing Olmert for Prime Minister. It was going to involve a lot of fairly decently-researched history about recent betrayals by Peretz and ancient conflicts with Olmert. Some kind of funny jokes about the legendary bitterness of Israeli politicians were going to get thrown in. Alas, Olmert's gain is MR's word count's loss: Peres endorses Olmert:

In a major endorsement, elder statesman Shimon Peres on Sunday voiced support for the leadership of Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the successor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Ehud Olmert was nominated by Ariel Sharon to become acting prime minister when the need for it arises. I supported it then and I support it now," Peres told an international conference of Jewish parliamentarians meeting in Jerusalem. "If Arik Sharon is not able to return to his responsibilities, Ehud Olmert will continue to head the government and I shall support him again," he added.

For what it's worth, the Israeli press's treatment of Peres has been insufferable in the last few days. From the day after Sharon's collapse, you could hear phrases like "what does he want? He wants the #2 slot", "he'll demand to be Foreign Minister", and "of course he'll exact a high price.... it's Peres...". We're inclined to believe that Peres was genuinely trying to take some time to come to grips with the potential death of a man that he's worked with to build a nation for the last six decades. And that he's justifiably pissed off that everybody was implying otherwise.
In fact, it looks like Peres isn't even going to get the Kadima #2 slot - that spot will probably go to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. He almost certainly also won't get the Foreign Ministry or be named Deputy Prime Minister - both positions that all the commentators sagely announced would be the minimum price for his support. He'll get what he's always said he wants: the lead in negotiating a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Regardless, this is the political news of the weekend and, with the possible exception of Kadima appointing Olmert as the new party head, the most significant political announcement since PM Sharon collapsed. The credibility that Peres brings with him as Israel's last remaining senior statesman (an honor that always seems to neglect Tommy Lapid, but nonetheless one that Peres is routinely granted) is significant. But perhaps more important is the public perception that Kadima is a full-fledged and stable party, having quickly appointed an heir to Sharon who has held the party together.
Annoying leftist and Ha'aretz harpy Akiva Eldar has some advice for Kadima. Don't advocate a unilateral withdrawal: announce that you'll negotiate with the Palestinians and give up land! This will make the Palestinians stop thinking that violence can push Israel... into giving up land. Apparently, he's being paid to publish articles that advise politicians to become wildly unpopular by undertaking courses which make no sense. This really has no place in a political update, but it's not enough for its own post and it really had to be pointed out. So if you were just looking for poll numbers, we owe you 20 seconds of your life. Sorry.

Labor
Peretz: Peres and Barak should come home. Turns out not so much, huh? Labor is still trying to figure out how to craft a message in a post Sharon world. Partly, they're playing the responsible opposition and offering to help Olmert. But at the same time, the knives are beginning to come out as they deploy surrogates to accuse Olmert of campaigning during what is supposed to be a break while the Prime Minister fights for his life. As if presenting fiscal data is campaign- well, ok, it is campaigning, but so is publicly attacking someone for campaigning.

Likud The Likud is kind of facing the same problem, simultaneously promising to support Olmert while complaining that his determination to appoint new ministers is a political move. Could be - or it could be that Olmert is listening to Israel's Attorney General and highest legal adviser, who says that he has to appoint new ministers soon.
Our "what a total prick" award comes from the Likud, and goes to former Sharon confidant and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin. Rivlin took time out of his busy schedule to slam the Likud for staying in the government and giving Olmert some support:

"The Likud must quit the government and battle Olmert head-on, with more determination than in the struggle against Ariel Sharon," Rivlin told Haaretz. "The Likud can help Acting Prime Minister Olmert maintain government stability from the opposition," said Rivlin. "But our continued participation in a government headed by Olmert until the elections, as some of the ministers want, constitutes support of Olmert's policies, which are policies of the left."

In the past, we've expressed regret that PM Sharon doing what he needed to do caused personal pain to Rivlin. Turns out that was our bad.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - End of Weekend Edition

Doctors met over the weekend in order to discuss the next step to take in treating Prime Minister Sharon. It was decided that the Prime Minister should undergo another CT scan in order to assess whether or not he is improving, and that scan was conducted on Sunday. Always with the caveat that the Prime Minister remains in extremely critical condition (stable and serious), the good news is that the CT scan shows continuing improvement. That has to be contrasted with what is probably the most realistic medical assessment of the situation that has emerged in the last two days - that reports in foreign media (and passed on by us) are inaccurate in their optimism. There will be permanent damage, but its too early to assess what that damage will be. No matter how much we would wish otherwise, the Prime Minister will be impaired to an extent that will prevent him from returning to political life. Doctors will meet again Monday morning. If at that time the Prime Minister remains stable, they will begin taking him out of his medicated coma in order to assess the damage caused by the stroke. The purpose of keeping him under is to give his brain and his body some time to recover from the trauma, but obviously an extended coma carries with it its own risks. In previous tests, shining light on his eyes caused his pupils to dilate, which demonstrates that his brainstem is still working. Obviously, when tests begin happening, we'll try to carry reports as they're carried by Israeli media sources.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Ray of Hope

The man is a force of nature:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chances of survival are "very high", one of the PM's surgeons said in an interview with Israel's Channel 2 Saturday evening... Jose Cohen said in the interview. "Tomorrow (Sunday) is the day of truth, tomorrow we'll know whether everything we did really helped him (Sharon) or not."... Responding to a question about Sharon's prospects of survival, the doctor said: "I think they are very high now, very high. I'm rather optimistic on this front. We're praying there are no complications, such as infections – the fear of any patient who is hospitalized for a long time."
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup 2005-01-07

We have literally no confidence that what we tell you today will be true in like five hours. Since some of these articles were posted before newspapers went offline for the Sabbath, we're not even sure whether they're true now. The only slight, ego-saving excuse that we can find for our confusion is that we're pretty sure no one else has any idea what's going on either. We're not talking about fundamental ideological confusion. We mean like who's in what party, what's their place on the party list, and who are they supporting. This is like fluidity in the days following the Big Bang that created Kadima and realigned Israeli politics, where what we think is going on is based on what analysts think a politician said, what they think their tone was when they said it, and a coin flip.
Except much sadder and without the confidence that everything will work out at the end.
Shimon Peres remains the fish that everybody is trying to catch. Peres walking out of his meeting with Olmert: "I haven't finished my business with Olmert". One Channel 10 commentator was so flustered he actually had to switch to describe the interview: Peres is playing "hard to get".
We love anonymous sources:

A senior Kadima figure said Thursday the party would suffer a huge blow if Shimon Peres were to lead it. "Should, heaven forbid, Peres lead Kadima, everything will fall apart immediately," the senior figure said. "We must choose [Ehud] Olmert in no more than a week, rally around him, choose an inner circle of five or six, and erase any signs of internal strife or disputes over places."

Incidentally, how tied is Ha'aretz to the Labor party? The text of the article uses the phrase "coming home" in reference to Peres's return to Labor. Not as a quote. As a description. The article call Labor "home".

Kadima
All of Kadima's MKs except Peres have united behind acting PM Ehud Olmert as Kadima's candidate (incidentally, we have no clue why this article says Peres has committed to supporting Olmert; he hasn't). He will be given the control over setting the party election list that Sharon would have had. Now he has to make sure that he still has a party left to elect. To prevent poaching from the Left - and hold on to the mandates that Sharon was taking from Meretz and Shinui - Olmert is moving to makes Peres a minister to keep him in Kadima. To prevent poaching from the Right - and hold on to the mandates that Sharon was taking from the Likud - Kadima has appointed former Likud #3 Tzachi Hanegbi as their election chair. Although there were plenty of rumors that Netanyahu had sent feelers out to him, right after he was appointed Hanegbi suddenly declared his unconditional support for Olmert. Don't get us started.
There are still no polls which have a hope of accurately describing how voters will actually treat a Sharon-less Kadima. There's just no way to accurately gauge how people feel about the party which culminated the Prime Minister's career while he lies ill in a hospital. Kadima will lose some votes - the only question is how many. The number that was being thrown around on TV is that no less than 20 mandates were drawn from the Likud to Kadima "entirely because of Ariel Sharon." That may be true initially - Sharon may have been the force that broke those voters' ties to the Likud - but, now that they're in Kadima, they'll need a reason to reestablish those ties. Now that their inertia is in Kadima's direction, another force needs to be applied for them to go back to the Likud.
Kadima MK Roni Milo published an article calling Kadima the last chance for Israel's Center. Not technically true, but perhaps the last chance for a while.

Likud
YNet declares that Olmert's "major battle will be waged against Netanyahu and Likud." Two weeks ago, Netanyahu would have won or lost based on his ability to paint PM Sharon as a leftist. Now, the strategy is to paint the PM as the most responsible and respectable figure in Israeli history, and to drive a wedge between the public's perception of PM Sharon and their perception of Olmert. Netanyahu has about two months to transform Olmert into the "father of the disengagement, who led the beloved Arik away from the hero's own better instincts.

Labor
From YNet's "we don't know anything but we really do" roundup, we reproduce the Labor section in full. Because it's funny. And true:

Meanwhile, Amir Peretz must decide on the Labor party list for the March elections. Currently, due to what Labor officials refer to as "ethnic pride," Peretz is refraining from phoning Ehud Barak and opening a campaign to unify the ranks. Instead, he turned his daughter, Shani, into his closest and most influential adviser. But there are those who are quick to compare Shani to Omri Sharon, and usually the conclusions are not in favor of Peretz’s daughter. Now the Labor chairman must decide on a plan for his election campaign, which currently lacks any substantial direction. "The days are numbered, and we must start moving," Labor officials said recently, even prior to Sharon’s hospitalization.

It's not so much "ethnic pride" as "an insistence on stacking Labor with union friends", but the basic gist is correct.
Omri | |

Sharon Health Update - Stable but Critical

Israel is waiting in a kind of limbo right now, where no news is good news. And there really has been very little news. The PM remains in stable condition, but his condition remains "serious and life-threatening".
Another CT scan was administered on Saturday, and the results yielded "cautious optimism" because of "significant improvement". However, the Hadassah director later issued a statement that said that the CT scan only found "small improvement", and we're pretty sure he was talking about the same scan. The PM's condition remains, obviously, extremely serious.
The extent of the damage is still unknown, largely because you can't reliably test for brain activity while the patient remains sedated. The decision about when and how to remove the PM from anesthesia will be made Sunday.
Omri | |

Jews Who Are Celebrating a National Tragedy

It's public airing of laundry time at MR. We're not theological scholars, but we're pretty sure that the rabbis who say that it is incumbent to pray for Sharon are obviously right and that these people are raving lunatics:

Far-right activists took credit Thursday for the severe deterioration in Ariel Sharon's health, claiming that a pulsa denura - Aramaic for "lashes of fire" - death curse they instigated against the prime minister in July was the real catalyst behind his current state of health. "I take full responsibility for what happened," far-right activist Baruch Ben-Yosef, one of the participants at the July pulsa denura, told The Jerusalem Post. "Our pulsa denura kicked in. Nothing could kill Sharon and he said his ancestors lived until they over 100 years old but we got him with the pulsa denura."

Yeah, because Baruch Ben-Yosef is a geopolitical and diplomatic expert - he clearly has enough knowledge to gauge whether PM Sharon was right to unilaterally leave the Gaza Strip now so as to head off a State Department imposed settlement later. But who cares about the pluses and minuses of disengagement - this is outright repulsive. The sensibilities of any rational - not to mention any genuinely religious - human being should recoil. Seriously. Disgusting:

Right-wing extremist Itamar Ben Gvir held a party at his Hebron home to celebrate the deterioration in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's health. Some 20 Right-wing activists attended the event. "The prime minister wanted to have a second disengagement and expel Jews from Hebron. Those who hurt the Land of Israel are hurt by the Land of Israel," he said.

Again, we make no claim at theological sophistication. Disputation based on chapter and verse is obviously beyond us. But on Pesach, Jews are commanded to mourn the suffering of their enemies. We find it difficult to believe that it can be appropriate to celebrate the physical suffering of the leader of the Jewish State.
Omri | |

On Greatness

For the last few days, we have been glued to Channel 10, even though - once Sharon was tranfered to ICU - there was obviously nothing new that the commentaters were going to offer. Not only nothing new to say - nothing new to do. The same script played out over and over again: Shalom - Shalom Shalom - what's your reaction - I'm praying for Sharon - what do you think will happen politically - this is not the time to be discussing politics - but that's a legitimate discussion - no it's now - thank you - l'traot. And yet we sat watching the badly buffering for hours, for no particular reason. Allison Kaplan Sommers has the reason:

Left-wing or right-wing, even if you felt like men like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon were wonderful — or if you felt that they were completely wrong, completely misled, overly violent or completely corrupt, you never doubted for a minute that their absolute top priority was the security and well-being of the State of Israel and its citizens. Every success and every mistake they made flowed from his deep determination to see this country survive, thrive, and succeed. With figures like these as Prime Minister, we felt that there was someone watching over us. And when they vanish suddenly, whether by the hand of an assassin or the fickle hand of fate, it leaves us devastated, deeply insecure and very worried about the future.

More than the short-term fate of Israel, the emotional impact of this tragedy comes from watching greatness leveled. There is deep sadness in watching the demise of heros, and Ariel Sharon was among the greatest of heroes.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Biting the Hand that Feeds You is Not Smart. Really.

Ignore for a moment how sick a society has to be to have children handing out sweets to celebrate the death of any human being. How about the Palestinians' total and complete inability not to destroy whatever parcel of land or infrastructure they're given:

Egyptian police arrested some 100 Palestinians who swarmed across the Gaza Strip border on Wednesday after gunmen bulldozed a path through the barricade lining the frontier, Palestinian witnesses and officials said. Earlier, two Egyptian soldiers were killed and 37 wounded as thousands of Egyptian security forces were said to have withdrawn from the border with Gaza as they were unable to flow of Palestinians across the border.

First, they heap hatred on the man who gave them the land for a state in the Gaza Strip - then they antagonize and murder the people who are supposedly going to play a major role in funding and supplying that state. There is no conceivable way that antagonizing Egypt is anything but devastating for Palestinian interests. And yet, there it is. The Palestinian Authority's consistent policy of releasing violent terrorists leaders probably has something to do with the ongoing violent terrorism emerging from the Gaza Strip:

Palestinian police on Thursday released a suspect in the kidnapping of three Britons in the Gaza Strip after gunmen went on the rampage demanding he be freed, a spokesman for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said. Also on Thursday, authorities succeeded in restoring calm to the Rafah border crossing, after Palestinians bulldozed the border wall. The ensuing riot killed two Egyptian troops and injured dozens more.

At the risk of trying your patience with the staccato "sarcasm - quote - sarcasm" pattern of this post, one more please. Given that the Palestinian Authority is not only unable but unwilling to stem terrorism in Gaza, do you think that Turkey's decision to donate five million dollars to Gaza "projects" will (a) help or (b) hurt stability in the region?
Omri | |

Palestinians Probably Going about "Democratic State" Thing All Wrong - Letting in Terrorists Instead of Voters (Opps!)

The Palestinians are really doing a fantastic job laying the groundwork for a democratic state. Letting in terrorists with no skills at building things but plenty of skills in politics as murder is normally not conducive to a civil society, but maybe they've got a trick for making it work:

One of the founders of Hamas's armed wing, Izzaddin al- Kassam, on Sunday returned to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing. Palestinian security sources told The Jerusalem Post that Bashir Hammad, who fled the Gaza Strip in 1992, arrived at the Gaza Strip on Sunday afternoon. They said Hammad had been wanted by Israel since 1988. The sources said that at least 45 Hamas and Fatah fugitives have returned to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah terminal since it was handed over to the Palestinian Authority four months ago. Among those who returned to the Gaza Strip are Ahmed al-Milh and Fadel Zahar, brother of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.

Then again, now that it is official Palestinian policy not to punish terrorists who violently break Palestinian law, we're not sure that these power-hungry Hamas terrorists will see fit to allow for fair, free, and non-blowing-up-voting-stations elections:

Palestinian authorities Thursday released a militant held in connection with the kidnapping of a British family in Gaza, a day after his followers went on a rampage and smashed holes in a wall along the Egypt border. The Gaza-Egypt border crossing was calm, a day after two Egyptian troops were killed in the melee.


[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

In Memory of Lt. Uri Binamo

The last time I saw Lt. Uri Binamo was last May, in a house in Carmel. He was spending a day off from the army by accompanying his parents - old and dear friends of my own - as they paid a shiva call to my family. Although his parents have three beautiful daughters, he was their only son and so he came along to provide strength and support. His head was shaved and he was wearing a simple white t-shirt with a Magen David Adom emblem printed on it. I remember thinking him warm and friendly - later I would learn that he often spent his furloughs in hospitals visiting sick and wounded soldiers. My memory of his visit is poignant and pointed - for the last week and through today, his family has been sitting shiva in memory of him.
Uri was buried last Friday at the Beit Almin military cemetery in Haifa, after being murdered at a checkpoint that the army had set up outside Tul Karm. Army intelligence had received a tip that the Islamic Jihad was dispatching a suicide bomber from the northern West Bank into Israel, and had heightened security measures accordingly. At 9:15am on Thursday, a taxi approached the checkpoint that Uri's unit was guarding. Since he was the platoon commander, Uri approached the taxi to inspect it. He immediately noticed something suspicious about one of the passengers, and ordered the men in the taxi to step out. He then ordered the Palestinian who had aroused his suspicion to remove the overcoat that the occupant was wearing. When the Palestinian refused, Uri took a step towards the taxi. Then the terrorist detonated the belt he was wearing, killing Uri instantly.

Some years before, almost from the beginning of his army service, the IDF had begun working to sell Uri on a military career. The evening before his death, a superior had urged that he become a company commander - there was no doubt that such a position would mark the beginning of a meteoric rise through army ranks. Even so, the IDF knew that they were going to have a tough time holding on to Uri – he was looking forward to a life in medicine. Already, he was spending his spare time as an ambulance driver. He talked a little about medical school. His life was going to be spent saving lives.
But no one ever thought that saving lives would require him to make the ultimate sacrifice. The bomber that Uri stopped was a 19 year old Palestinian boy. Strapped to the terrorist was more than 10 kilograms of explosives, packed into a belt filled with nails and iron scraps. He intended to blow himself up at a Hanukkah party that the Islamic Jihad had picked out - a tight, enclosed hall filled with running children, where the mangled shrapnel would inflict the most destruction. With his body - at the expense of his own devastated family - Uri saved the lives and the innocence of hundreds of children and tens of families.

Children's lives and children's innocence. We must not lose sight of either of these, because in them we find the true scope of what Uri was protecting and what he left us. Both are precious in themselves, but each represents something larger that the Arab war against Israel seeks to annihilate.
Survival and culture. The gun and the theater.
Life and humanity. The body and the soul.
Existence and a worthy existence.

The angry secret no one will say out loud is that Uri did not have to die to save those children. There are alternatives - alternatives which countless other armies have not eschewed. The IDF could place the West Bank under permanent curfew, with Palestinian towns indefinitely locked down except for supplies deposited at the gates. The army could exact collective retribution for the murder of Israeli civilians, with Palestinian villages invaded and demolished because of the terrorists they nurture, dispatch, and celebrate. Virtually any other country would have crossed those lines long ago. Israel never will. Not only by virtue of grandiose ethical obligations or by recourse to inherent systems of ethics. Simply because doing so would betray the legacy of Uri Binamo and soldiers like him. He and they were taken from us while they fought to secure Israel for life and for lives worth living. For children’s' lives and for children’s' innocence - what that Palestinian terrorist was trying to destroy and what Uri died protecting.
But the indignation and the injustice of it all refuses to go away. No other nation would risk a precious boy by sending him to inspect a taxi very probably filled with murderers, on the off chance that they're shoppers going to a distant market. No other army would risk such a wonderful son by demanding that he check a car very probably filled with terrorists, on the slim possibility that they're a family going to relatives. No other culture would do so much - day after day, year after year - to spare the innocent among their enemies only to watch as their mercy was answered with barbaric savagery.

You have to understand - Israeli culture refuses horror. Though soldiers are killed on borders, children still walk to school and couples still go to parks. Though malls are attacked, shops are still crowded and theaters are still filled. Though busses are destroyed, taxis are still hailed and subways are still boarded. Constantly assaulted by death, Israelis continue to live a life of joy. Many see in this a cultural defiance - a conscious strike against terrorism - where Israelis laugh and sing and date and marry as a refusal to accept their enemies' terms. In a way that's true, but there is something far more basic going on. Israelis live joyfully simply because they've never lived any other way - because it would not occur to them to live any other way. Born and raised in war, the country has never really grown up. Under a fragile and incomplete veneer of cynicism, there is a warm and charming immaturity.

In spite of everything, Israel is a country that has never lost its innocence.

That is why Israel has the most moral army in the world. Not because it was designed that way - although it was - and not because the Jewish State will not do to others what has been done to Jews - although it won't. It's because, in its own innocence, Israel can't but trust in and protect the innocence in others. Israelis - long battered and weary, frequently torn and wounded - would comment that they find it anathema to do anything but work to protect the innocent. In another army, Uri would not have walked up to that taxi - either the taxi would never have been on that road, or it would have been shot at from a distance. But Uri did so because he was an Israeli officer, and it would not have occurred to him to do otherwise.
But do not make the mistake of thinking that this is a kind of pacifism or, worse, some base ethic of physical self-sacrifice. Israel will not allow another Holocaust to occur. It will not allow Jewish blood to be spilled with impunity. The great pains taken so that Palestinians can live their lives are not the result of some obscure philosophical calculation balancing survival and humanity: the protection of the Jewish nation is and will always remain the sin qua non of the Jewish state. Full stop. But while discharging that duty, Israeli nature intrudes into and shapes strategy and tactics. Actions that would devastate the innocent are abandoned before they are started - it never occurs to anyone to go down those roads. And so a Palestinian public that nurtures terrorists in the dark of night is allowed to live a life worth living in the light of day.

And yet ferocious thoughts still intrude. On the day that Uri was killed, my mother spoke to Avi Binamo, Uri's father. She could do nothing but express forlorn and inadequate sympathy. But in response, Avi talked to her about Uri and about the family. He entreated her to convey to me and my siblings his and his wife's greetings. And in the final minutes of the conversation he urged her to hold us close, to cherish every minute she spends with us, and to keep us safe. It was a spontaneous outburst of emotion and concern - a passionate and undeniable insistence on friendship and kinship, love and life, in the face of a horror that no parent should face.
At almost the same time, celebrations were underway in the West Bank village of Atil. Loudspeakers atop mosques blared the name of Uri's killer. Tents were erected and feasts were prepared. Sweets in celebration of murder were handed out by Arab children.
This is what Israel is fighting.

The questions will not go away: why does Israel fight this inhumane abyss with such care and hesitation? Was Uri taken from us because his country refuses to answer atrocities with proportionate ferocity?

These questions do not yield answers, but nonetheless they will not suffer themselves to be suppressed. They demand confrontation, struggle, perhaps an uneasy peace - but never resolution. Abstract morals will not provide a buttress for us against the visceral anger of seeing one father losing a beloved son and another father celebrating his child-bomber's suicide. Empty platitudes will not hold as our shield when we are overwhelmed by disgust at seeing one mother torn by gasping sobs and another mother laughing along with well-wishers. There is nothing to guide us in coming to grips with this loss. There is no answer, no cheap slogan, no easy solace to be found in Uri's death.
He saved countless children from savage murder? The terrorists would never have gotten that far but for Israel's leniancy. He sacrificed himself? It's not fair that the best and most selfless are the ones cut down.
There's nothing to be learned here. It's a sick joke to even try to find a reason why a suicide bomber so filled with hate would kill a young man so filled with love. We should refuse to find meaning in Uri's murder. It's vulgar blasphemy to sanctify this violence with significance. What happened at that checkpoint was mindless - a terrorist's savagery is devoid of any deep lesson. Uri fulfilled his duty that day not because his actions can be rationally explained or justified, but because there was a terrorist in a taxi going to kill Israeli boys and girls, and Uri was an Israeli officer who stood in his way. He did not do his duty in deference to some higher purpose, but because it would never have occurred to him to act otherwise. In his solemn innocence, he expresses the bright innocence of his country even as he saves the naive innocence of so many of its children. But because of his enemy's mercilessness, his friends and family have been shattered.

Haunted by questions but finding no answers, all that is left for us to do is mourn. For myself, I recall a confident soldier who lent strength his parents and comfort to my mother. I reflect on a gentle officer who told my siblings how rewarding working for Magen David Adom is. I contemplate a vibrant guitar player who lounged around a campfire and joked with friends. And I see a quintessential Israeli - warm and agile but not without an air gravity.
When Uri was with loved ones, it didn't matter if they were in a cafe or in a hospital. When he was contemplative, it didn't matter whether he was in a living room or on the battlefield. He took no notice of these differences in place and context - life was to be lived regardless of time and place. He did not so much block out the tragic reality of hospitals and battlefields as find them irrelevant - unnecessary details in the task of expressing joy and providing warmth.
And so, mourning Uri Binamo in all these ways, we might begin to realize how and why Israelis cling to their humanity despite unremitting Palestinian atrocities: because that's how Uri fought and how he would have continued fighting. He would not have had his family, his people, or his country protected in any lesser way - not out of appreciation for his enemies, but out of inexorable fidelity to himself. Not because he would have found the alternative unacceptable, but because he would have found it unthinkable.

In anger and in sorrow, we remember a beautiful young man - beloved of his family and friends - who was unjustly taken from us.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Evening Update

UPDATE 40: (7:26am PST) Press conference in ten minutes. "... the CT scan has been completed... there is a chance they've reduced the pressure... there are wild rumors circulating... we'll know more in a little bit..."

UPDATE 41: (7:28am PST) They removed the Prime Minister for the CT scan without totally closing the wound. There's a discussion going on now as to what that means - the doctor being interviewed is of the opinion that they just wanted to see if there was anything else they had to do before closing him up finally.

UPDATE 42: (7:29am PST) While we wait, the text of that Drudge-linked World Tribune article:

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the most powerful Israeli leader in 50 years, has died. He was 77.
Sharon was declared dead by physicians at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital before 1 p.m. Israeli time [6 a.m. EST], Middle East Newsline reported. Authorities have already been notified of the death, and a government announcement was expected to be issued over the next hour...
A computed tomography scan taken on Friday morning showed little to no brain activity in Sharon. At that point, Sharon's son, Omri, called aides and senior officials to the hospital to prepare for an announcement of the prime minister's death.

That doesn't fit what we're hearing about a CT scan that just finished - nor does it make sense given the very specific details leaked which describe the PM's medical state during that scan - but there's no way to know how much of that is unsubstantiated rumor. We're hoping for the best, but it might be too late.

UPDATE 43: (7:35am PST) "... the surgery managed to relieve pressure... pressure in his brain has returned to normal... he was transfered for a CT scan to get an idea of his brain activity... they are testing for brain activity... from there, he will be passed on for further treatment... despite the successful surgery... the PM's condition ranges from severe to critical..."

UPDATE 44: (7:42am PST) Contra that World Trib article, the recent CT scans showed "significant improvement". The doctors don't really know what that means - they're discussing out whether it means that the right hemisphere which was damages is recovering, or whether is something about communication between the lobes. Nonetheless, the phrase is "significant improvement"

UPDATE 45: (7:52am PST) Drudge has changed the text of his link to that World Trib article. New text: "MIDEAST FALSE REPORT 'SHARON DEAD'..." No kidding.

UPDATE 46: (7:54am PST) Another doctor they got on the phone: "... despite this good news, the damage is undoubtedly extensive..."

UPDATE 47: (7:55am PST) Channel 10 is taking their news off the air for Shabbat. The Prime Minister remains alive and stable.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Third Surgery Over

UPDATE 27: (5:08am PST) Walla reports that they are finishing up the surgery and sewing the PM up.

UPDATE 28: (5:20am PST) The surgery is over. The PM is being given another CT scan to see if they successfully stopped the bleeding.

UPDATE 29: (5:50am PST) Previous reports were wrong - the PM is still in surgery, and will be given a CT scan after he's done.

UPDATE 30: (5:55am PST) More reports that the surgery has ended. Things seem particularly grim: reports are coming in of US officials preparing to attend the funeral, and Olmert has returned to his residence in Jerusalem.

UPDATE 31: (6:07am PST) The CT scan is being performed (or has been performed). Walla says that results will be revealed first to the family, then to Olmert, then to the public.

UPDATE 32: (6:29am PST) The PM is reported as being in stable condition. He has undergone one scan, and is to undergo another one shortly.

UPDATE 33: (6:46am PST) The PM is in the CT now.

UPDATE 34: (6:53am PST) Literally nothing. Just waiting.

UPDATE 35: (7:03am PST) "... there are a lot of rumors going around... the blood pressure fluctuations and additional bleeding are not good signs [oh you think so, doctor?]... there is talk that they're thinking of withholding treatment... but that's not true... the condition of the PM is still quite severe... we're praying for a miracle... the condition is very, very severe... but they were praying for a miracle two days ago, so you can't gauge the condition based on that... they are talking about bleeding in a different part of the brain..."

UPDATE 36: (7:06am PST) "... how do you decide when to bring someone out of a coma... usually, we keep someone under a coma for a period of time to let the brain revive... but we can't test his condition when he's intentionally in a coma..."

UPDATE 37 (7:10am PST) We're waiting on results for the CT scan. The Director is supposed to come out any moment and give the results [so presumably, the family and Olmert have been informed]

UPDATE 38 (7:18am PST) By "announcement any minute" they meant "not for a long time." Instead, there's a lecture being given on the finer points of neurophysiology and a philosophical discussion about how them more we know, the less we know we know. In the meantime:

"Palestinian groups in Gaza Strip watching news regarding Sharon's deteriorating health carefully, will apparently celebrate with Qassam rocket firings at Jewish towns if PM dies. Terrorist: We will target Olmert with a lot of might"


UPDATE 39 (7:23am PST) Drudge is reporting that the PM has died. That's not unlikely, but whoever wrote that article is obviously taking a guess - Channel 10, Walla, and Ha'aretz don't have leaks to that effect yet. But it's not unlikely. Tragically.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Tragedy

UPDATE 14: (3:28am PST) There has just been a discussion about whether or not the family is prepared to instruct the doctors to cease trying to save Sharon. It appears that the family has left it up to the doctors - "it is the decision of the entire country"

UPDATE 15: (3:31am PST) The PM's fluctuating blood pressure is of particular concern. Up till now, his vitals have been largely stable. It is the changes in the blood pressure that triggered the additional tests, with the subsequent discovery of more bleeding in the brain - which triggered this third surgery.

UPDATE 16: (3:55am PST) They're away from speculating wildly improbable about Israeli political scenarios and are back to interviewing doctors. Except those doctors appear to be hack psychologists... she literally just asked about Israel having a father complex regarding Sharon... And he muttered something asinine about "certainty"… He just switched to English to drop the phrase "rising to the occasion"… This is embarrassing and awkward… No one has anything to say, but nobody wants to go off the air...

UPDATE 17: (4:00am PST) No kidding: "How do we explain this to the children?" Our answer, which involves magnificent greatness and solemn duty, is apparently not the "professional psychologist's" answer. His answer has something to do with coloring books.

UPDATE 18: (4:04am PST) A real doctor: "when blood enters the brain, the body attempts to compensate by increasing pressure in the brain to push it out... so they had to do whatever they could to reduce the pressure, and then stop the bleeding..."

UPDATE 19: (4:07am PST) "... if this was just about reducing pressure, they should've been able to use the old opening and it should've taken 10 minutes... what worries me is that it appears that this is a new source of bleeding... then they have to be using chemicals to establish homeostasis..."

UPDATE 20: (4:10am PST) "... up till now, the damage had been limited to the right sphere... this is not the dominant sphere... that's not where memories, language are stores... a man who has only had the right sphere impacted can function, talk... the left hemisphere is now in danger... now they're trying to save what they can of that..."

UPDATE 21: (4:13am PST) A little relief outside the operating room. It looks like people have been given some sort of news that the surgery is ongoing, but is progressing well. Unfortunately, this follows the explanation from the doctor being interviewed (Dr. Feldman), who explained that part of Sharon's brain had been damaged both by blood and by inflammation - he's talking in terms of "trying to save" parts of the brain that haven't been damaged.

UPDATE 22: (4:19am PST) The Channel 10 feed just cut out. Of course it did.

UPDATE 23: (4:31am PST) Now relying on web updates. The latest update from Walla is just a confirmation of the "the surgery is going alright" news from earlier.

UPDATE 24: (4:43am PST) Sharon's family and advisers are all at the hospital. We're assuming that Walla is updating just a little behind what's on TV, etc. Memo to the Channel 10 folks: not having a competent IT person on staff today. Good budget cut. Incidentally, Dave from IsraellyCool is using the same IT company as Ch10, and his site just went down. He's blogging updates from his his podcast site.

UPDATE 25: (4:52am PST) Walla: No announcement expected from the Hadassah directory any time soon.

UPDATE 26: (5:04am PST) How awkward and uncertain are newspeople in Israel right now? Walla's latest 4-line update is a quote from Sharon's last interview.
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - Urgent - Prime Minister Rushed Back Into Surgery

YNet reports that Prime Minister Sharon has been rushed back into surgery after a CT scan revealed more bleeding in his brain. Aides and family have been rushed to the hospital.

UPDATE 1: (2:42am PST) Israeli newspapers are grim. JPost: Sharon's condition deteriorates. Ha'aretz explains that the plan was to keep him sedated, but they had to do emergency surgery.

UPDATE 2: (2:45am PST) Channel 10 is explaining that there was new pressure that the doctors had to relieve.

UPDATE 3: (2:46am PST) Hospital Director: "new CT scan discovered changes in his brain chemistry... This was coupled with fluctuations in the PM's blood pressure... The surgery is meant to stabilize the blood pressure and relieve the pressure on the brain." He refused to take questions.

UPDATE 4: (2:54am PST) Channel 10's doctor: "this pressure can kill... they can't stop the bleeding... this may be over in a couple of hours"

UPDATE 5: (3:00am PST) Channel 10 cutting to the hospital: "... more and more aides are arriving at the hospital... they want to be next to the operating room... his two sons are here, Gilad and Omri... there is a chance that [someone - a Chief Rabbi] will arrive at the hospital to lead a prayer..."

UPDATE 6: (3:02am PST) Channel's 10 commentator: "the surgery wasn't because more damage was being done [this is silly...] but just to fight over what was left un-damaged... this isn't going to fix anything... the aides are there because, they told me, because they prefer to be there - together - than alone in the empty Prime Minister office..."

UPDATE 7: (3:13am PST) They're replaying the interview from the hospital. In between, there are interviews where everyone's agreeing that it's not the time to be interviewed. There is not supposed to be another update until this new surgery is complete.

UPDATE 8: (3:14am PST) Another doctor: "this was small bleeding, but it's such a bad sign that there's still bleeding that, if this was a normal person they would have given up by now [just like we heard last night]..."

UPDATE 9: (3:15am PST) Yet another Channel 10 doctor: "the dominant hemisphere of the PM's brain was not damaged the first time... not it looks like it might get damaged... that's why he was rushed to surgery..."

UPDATE 10: (3:18am PST) "How far away are we from the PM being declared permanently incapable, and Olmert officially taking over the office" "No one wants to say it, but we're very close"

UPDATE 11: (3:21am PST) From some doctor at the hospital: "... the second that there's bleeding in the brain, there's increased pressure... it looks like that's what happened here... you can't allow the pressure... they're using a tube to drain the brain and decrease the pressure... when the pressure drops, they're going to try to stop the bleeding again..."

UPDATE 12: (3:22am PST) "This surgery could last two or three hours... normally the length of a surgery doesn't tell us anything, it's a technical matter... but there was so much damage the first time... it's impossible to permit oneself to think this way, but... I don't want to say it... if this wasn't a PM, they would have given up already"

UPDATE 13: (3:25am PST) There is literally no one who is talking except in a way that implies we're seeing the final hours of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's life.
Omri | |

Fashionable European Leftists Can't Forgive Sharon

And by "forgive" him, we mean "stop pathologically hating him". Woland passes on this shameful story:

For about 10 minutes that I had the patience to watch [Sky News] I watched so called experts compete in who will make a bigger monster of a sick and probably dying man. One of the "experts", a round faced man with thinning gray-white hair, was telling the audience how for the last five years Ariel Sharon "has put a veil on the world eyes"... That [while leave Gaza] Sharon was securing Israel true interest - the [W]est ]B]ank, effectively expanding the [W]est [B]ank settlements while pretending to oppose it, and cutting of Jerusalem and Arab towns and lands by building a security fence.

We have little to add. Except to note that, among the worst trespasses the Prime Minister committed according to these people was that - although he gave the Palestinians land for their own state - he also worked for Israeli security and prosperity. These British 'experts' apparently see a zero-sum tradeoff between Israeli and Palestinian interests. If Sharon was still holding onto something for Israel, then he must necessarily have been taking something away from the Palestinians. This places such experts in opposition to Israel peacemakers, who believe that Israelis and Palestinians can live in a mutually benificial peace. On the other hand, it places them on the same side as the most radical Palestinian terrorists, who think that there's a zero-sum relationship between Jews and Arabs, and that one side has to be destroyed for the other to prosper.
Omri | |

International Agreements Don't Really Apply To Israel

This is a little old, but the fetishistic hypocrisy of international law always bears notice. When you're the WTO and your only reason for existing is to enforce international trade rules, those rules are presumably important. But not when they involve anti-Semites who hate Israel (but anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism):

Saudi Arabia announced yesterday that it would maintain its first-degree boycott of Israeli products despite joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). An official at the Commerce and Industry Ministry denied reports that the Kingdom had lifted the boycott. “The Kingdom has lifted only the second and third degree boycott of Israel in accordance with a decision taken by the GCC summit 10 years ago,” the official said, adding that the Saudi accession to WTO was not linked to the lifting of the boycott.

More of the fetishism of international law - everyone knows that Israel isn't protected by international law, but Israel is expected to behave as if it does. It's not really fair or legitimate, but everyone is supposed to act as if it is.
Omri | |

Tragedy Fails to Stop European Hatred, Palestinian Attacks Against Israel

The Prime Minister of Israel lies on his deathbed, likely suffering permanent medical damage from his stroke. It's unknown whether he'll ever emerge from his coma. Palestinians have three responses - some have expressed concern that now no one will give them any more land, some have tried to murder Israelis (repeatedly), and some have celebrated. But did they really march little children through the streets, handing out candy and celebrating another human being's death? Of course they did.
Think what you will about Sharon's role in Palestinian history - it is an assumption of any civilized culture that death is something that children should be shielded from at least for a time. And say what you will about the value of shielding children from the hard realities of life, a culture that forces children to literally celebrate death is sick.
And apparently touched by how Palestinians handed out candy to celebrate the pain of the only man to ever provide them land for a state, Norway's Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen called on her fellow citizens to boycott Israeli products. Because clearly, what with all the celebrating the tragic illness of a man who uniquely pushed the peace process foward, it's the Palestinians who are on the side of peace. Hey - we don't want to go out on a limb here - but do you think that there might be something other than dispassionate geopolitical analysis driving Halvorsen's anti-Israel stance?

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
Omri | |

Sharon Medical Update - PM Sharon Still in Coma

Prime Minister Sharon's brain likely suffered great damage during his stroke. His brain appears active and his condition is stable, but he remains in a medically inducted coma that he may never come out of. He will remain in that coma at least 48 hours.
Recriminations are beginning. Hospital officials have linked his conditions to his legal troubles. Not to sound bitter, but if this wave of investigations against the Sharon family implodes like the last one, they may have just murdered a Prime Minster. Regardless, this ought to piss you off:

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed concerns about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s critical condition, saying he had advised Sharon to cut down his work hours after he had suffered a mild stroke. (Yitzhak Benhorin)

What was that phone call like? "Prime Minister Sharon, you really should stop working so much on the diplomatic and military situation. Also, I'm getting ready to lead yet another diplomatic offensive against Israel in the General Assembly. Rest well." Kofi Annan advising Prime Minister Sharon to relax is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad advising Prime Minister Sharon to relax - they're the reason for his stress. We tried to think of a more clever analogy, but we're genuinely depressed by PM Sharon's condition. He literally worked himself to death trying to keep Israel safe.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup 2006-01-05

What everyone's concerned about: Prime Minister Sharon's health has unfortunately not improved. In addition to being nationally and culturally tragic, his medical condition has precise legal and political consequences. While Sharon is "temporarily incapacitated," Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert runs the country. The moment that doctors declare that attempts to revive the Prime Minister have failed (that is, the moment that PM Sharon moves from being "temporarily incapacitated" to "permanently incapacitate") a new leader has to be deliberately chosen. And as the Attorney General notified the cabinet this morning, according to the new Basic Law, Olmert is not the only Kadima MK who be so chosen :

If the prime minister is prevented from filling his post, the government will be authorized to elect one of its members, who is also a member of the PM's faction, to replace him in office.

This article is a little vague - the Cabinet chooses who will run the country, and there are three restrictions on who that person can be. The person has to be a member of the PM's own faction, a Member of the Knesset, and a government minister. So for instance, Shaul Mofaz isn't eligible - he is a member of Kadima and he's a minister, but he's not an MK. Peres isn't eligible either - although he's a minister and an MK, he's not a member of Kadima. Tzachi Hanegbi also isn't really eligible, but that's probably because he's a shameless criminal who had to resign from the Knesset. That's not really relevant, but it's fun to repeat.
This Ha'aretz article does a slightly better job mapping out the various options and challenges facing the government:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is currently defined as temporarily incapacitated, but should this definition change to permanently incapacitated, the cabinet will have to meet immediately to choose an acting premier. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz said this during a special cabinet session called Thursday to discuss the legal implications of Sharon's condition... In this case, the possible candidates would be Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Meir Sheetrit, Gideon Ezra and Abraham Hirchson. The other two Kadima ministers, Shaul Mofaz and Tzachi Hanegbi, are not MKs...
If Sharon is declared permanently incapacitated, the Kadima ministers will presumably decide among themselves who should become acting premier and use their cabinet majority to get their choice elected. However, if they cannot agree, the four Likud ministers - who have postponed their planned cabinet resignation in light of Sharon's illness - could wind up casting the decisive votes. That would create a bizarre situation - the acting premier, who would also presumably be Kadima's prime ministerial candidate in the elections, would effectively have been chosen by a rival party.

The other important opinion that Attorney General Mofaz gave during the cabinet meeting was that elections absolutely will can and legally can not be postponed. So Israel will choose a new Prime Minster on March 28, for better or worse. There is nothing that can derail the election short of a legal finding that war has made voting impossible. We know you've heard differently today. Please disregard that. It is incorrect. We promise.

Kadima
The Ha'aretz article linked to above ends with the following paragraph:

[Mier] Sheetrit [a Kadima MK]… hastened to make his preference known: "In my belief, Olmert can lead Kadima in the elections and establish the next government," he said

This seems weird to us, since everyone else (including most of Ha'aretz's political experts) interpreted Sheetrit's call as a direct challenge to Olmert for the leadership of Kadima. One political junkie, unable to conceal his joy at having a close election and a relevant life, went so far as to say that Sheetrit was asking the right question - although "perhaps" he "ran a little too fast". Watching Sheetrit make that challenge on Channel 10 was kind of absurd. All the commentators went nuts as soon as he said that the party leadership has to be decided ASAP (because it was obvious that he was challenging Olmert) - then he immediately backed off and said that it was inappropriate to discuss politics while Sharon's health was in question. Then he repeated his challenge again. And backed off again. On that very program, Roni Bar-On (who's quoted in the Ha'aretz article that correctly describes Sheetrit's comments as a challenge to Olmert) threw his support behind Olmert. But that won't be enough - very soon, Olmert is going to have a leadership battle on his hands. It's impossible to know the contours of that battle until more people show their cards.
We believe that predictions of Kadima's demise have been exaggerated. Political scientists and observers of the highest caliber are declaring that Sharon was the only glue holding Kadima together - but it bears noticing that most of them have been skeptical about Kadima from the beginning (Daniel Pipes, Daniel Drezner). Not that they're necessarily wrong - just a little too quick. In fact we - with our perhaps exaggerated idea of Sharon's power and relevance - might at first be inclined to agree with them. But for the fact that we simply can't figure out where all those political superstars in Kadima are going to go. Labor is already stacked with Peretz's sycophants. The Likud is still dominated by the Central Committee and by Netanyahu - neither famous for their magnanimousness in victory. Even if Kadima MKs wanted to jump off the Kadima ship, they're not going to do it if jumping overboard means they'll drown.
The next few days will be critical, but as one commentator on Channel 10 said this morning: Israel needs a Left, a Right, and a Center. Kadima was created for very specific reasons - the populism and myopia of Labor's base, the lunacy and nepotism of Likud's Central Committee - and for very broad reasons - in matters of life and death, the answers become clear and the center usually has them. None of those reasons has passed with Prime Minister Sharon's illness.
Polls trying to evaluate a post-Sharon political world gave Kadima 40 mandates with Olmert, 42 with Peres, and 38 with Livni. We're going to be as gentle as we can be regarding these polls: they're utterly useless. These numbers are quite soft. Something about sympathy for a beloved Prime Minister on his death bed. But analysts last night did make some other astute comments on this question: let's say that an Olmert-led Kadima only gets 32 mandates. That's still wildly enough to win the election. The question, of course, is whether there will be an Olmert-led Kadima by the time the elections roll around. Or a Kadima.
The X-factor right now is Shimon Peres, Israel's most successful electoral #2 and its perennially losing #1. To have a chance in the elections, Olmert has to keep Peres in Kadima at all costs - Labor is already trying to poach Peres back. In Olmert's favor: Peres does not easily forgive betrayal, and Peretz stabbed him in the back in the Labor primaries by running against him and beating him. In Peretz's favor: Kadima may fall apart, and Peres is nothing if not politically shrewd enough to get out early. Whoever gets Peres will get the minimum 5-6 mandates that come with him - and will decide whether Kadima looks like they're holding together or falling apart.

Labor
In the last 24 hours, the text of Shimon Peres's original explanation for leaving the Labor party has been parsed and analyzed to levels worthy of biblical exegesis. He originally said that he was leaving for Kadima because (and this is crucial) he believed that Sharon was the only person capable of bringing peace to Israel. Now that Prime Minster Sharon is incapacitated, he is arguably the most important political prize in Israel.
With Labor's chances dramatically improved, moreover, politicians who choose to sit this election out might come back. Specifically, Ehud Barak might return to vie for the Defense Ministry. The decision he faces is pure game theory: if he comes back early, he might secure a promise from Peretz for making him Defense Minister - but if no one follows back and Labor loses anyway, then he looks like an idiot. If he waits to see if other people are returning to Labor and only joins when it's safe, he could get beaten to the spoils.

Likud
As we argued yesterday, contrary to popular wisdom, the political beneficiary of Kadima's decline is the Likud. And we're kind of inflating our egos unfairly - in the last 24 hours even the conventional wisdom has flipped, and suddenly there's talk of a Prime Minister Netanyahu. And now things get a little weird, because the Likud - which is still in the government - has an incentive to push that very government toward the Left. That would typecast Olmert as a Leftist and set up the Likud as the real rightist party in Israel - but then they would be a rightist party that had pushed a government to the left.
Netanyahu has a much harder job winning back Likud MKs than Peretz has winning back Labor MKs, because those Likud MKs left because of disgust with the party itself. But Netanyahu has an advantage that Peretz does not: many of the Likudniks that he's wooing (Mofaz being the most prominent example) don't really have much of a home or many prospects for success in Kadima. That is, unless Olmert gets to them first and promises them success. So nothing has really changed from yesterday: Olmert's will succeed largely to the extent to which he acts quickly (barring, of course, a dramatic decision by Peres to return to Labor, which would take almost all of the momentum out of Kadima’s sails).
Omri | |

Pat Robertson Thinks God Deprived Israel of Its Leader

Of course he'd say that:

The Reverend Pat Robertson says Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's massive stroke could be God's punishment for giving up Israeli territory... [He] told viewers of "The 700 Club" that Sharon was "dividing God's land," even though the Bible says doing so invites "God's enmity." Robertson added, "I would say woe to any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course." He noted that former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Robertson said God's message is, "This land belongs to me. You'd better leave it alone."

Cheapening Prime Minister Rabin's memory was a nice touch, we thought. Robertson joins the genocidal lunatic wildly popular in nuclear-armed Iran in wishing ill to Prime Minister Sharon in this difficult time.
Elsewhere in the "how dumb is he" column, consider this: the two Chief Rabbis of Israel blanketed the air waves yesterday, elaborating upon the specific words and Biblical passages reserved for praying for the leader of the Jewish State. They unceasingly begged people to keep Sharon's full Jewish name in their supplications. These are men of the greatest holiness and the highest theological sophistication. They are basing their conclusions on the work of other great holy men and imposing theological minds. But Pat Robertson -not a Jewish scholar, incidentally - apparently has enough confidence in his understanding of Jewish prayer, the Jewish State, and the numerological significance of various Pslams to conclude that God choose to deprive Israel of a beloved leader during a time of greatest peril. This is because Pat Robertson is an idiot.
Omri | |

On Prayer

This morning, exhortations to pray are being heard across the entire Israeli political spectrum, from religious leaders to secular politicians. In Israel - where national and religious identities are intertwined - prayer is as much a social phenomenon as a sectarian commitment, is as much a cultural ritual as a religious experience. The call for Israelis to pray has a therapeutic function unique to a modern society with an incomplete separation of church and state - it brings Jews together as Israelis and Israelis together as Jews. In Iran, religion determines the state. In the West, the state circumscribes religion. But in Israel, the two spheres exist in an interdependent tension - the Holocaust proved that Judaism needs a Jewish state to survive while the tumult of the late 90s proved a Jewish State needs Judaism to stay vibrant.
In many ways, this tension was crystallized in Prime Minister Sharon himself. Throughout his life, he remained a man deeply devoted to Jewish immigration, to Jewish identity, and to Jewish Statehood – but he also lived a personal life very close to secular. For the vast majority of his political career, he was the flag-bearer of religious Zionism – until he decided that the security of all Zionism required abandoning the Gaza settlements. No one can know to what extent he genuinely prayed, but it's certain that he understood the importance of Israelis coming together to pray for him.
Today’s entry at the mostly left-wing, largely secular Ha'aretz is therefore as appropriate as it is devestating and heartbreaking:

Say a prayer for the prime minister.
Say a prayer for the man who could not be broken.
Say a prayer for our shattered present. Say a prayer for our shuttered common future.
Pray for the man who could not be stilled. Pray for the man who could not be swayed.
Say a prayer for the future only he knew.
Say a prayer for the people he has left behind. The Jewish People, the people he loved, at times despite himself, despite them. The people who could not bring themselves to love him.
Pray for those of us who once embraced him, and came to curse him.
Pray for those of us who once cursed him, and could not bring ourselves to forgive him.
Pray for those who call themselves religious and see in this, the hand of God.
Pray for those who call themselves non-religious and need now to pray.
Pray for the leaders who, unable to replace him, will now succeed him.
Pray for a miracle. Pray for all of us. Pray that we may know to heal each other.
Pray for this land. That it may know the peace that he never will.

Arik Melech Israel.
Omri | |

Palestinian Reactions to Sharon - Celebrations Begin

True to form, Palestinians have begun celebrating and shooting into the air in reaction to PM Sharon's illness. You know - we don't mean to be bitter - but it says something that this is how the Palestinian public reacts to the near-death of the single world leader who finally gave them land for a state (as opposed to, say, all those brave Arab leaders who never deigned to create a Palestinian state during the decades that they controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip). When you consider how deep the pathology of hatred and resentment must run in Palestinian civil society, it's no wonder that the entire committee running their elections just quit.
Omri | |

Israeli Reactions to Sharon - Unity and Dignity

In a nation often torn by bitter and lifelong personal and political divisions, both Labor's Peretz and the Likud's Netanyahu have ordered their parties to cease political activities until further notice. They have counciled waiting and prayer instead.
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Disaster Updates - Medical Post-Op

UPDATE 42: (12:00am PST) A second CT scan has confirmed that doctors managed to stem the bleeding to PM's brain. He has been transfered to intensive care. Condition described as "severe" but stable.

UPDATE 43: (12:47am PST) In the context of a political discussion, someone on Channel 10 drops "at the hospital, people told me that if a civilian had shown up to the hospital in Sharon's medical condition, he would have not have been treated him. His condition was that bad. So they're asking for a miracle".

UPDATE 44: (1:57am PST) Channel 10 medical update: "Nothing has changed".

UPDATE 45: (3:07am PST) Martin Fletcher on Imus: "Doctors are saying that there is zero chance that he'll emerge from this without serious damage"

UPDATE 46: (3:28am PST) Sharon publicist Eli Landau on Channel 10: "none of us our children... we all know what the situation is... from everywhere, I'm hearing the same thing... the situation is critical" (the word that everyone keep quoting as "severe" is the Hebrew word "kashe", which means "hard" and does translate literally as "severe" - which is also the word that the hospitals have been using in their English statements - but it's being used in a tone much closer to "critical")
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-04

First what we do know: First, Ariel Sharon's political career is over. He will not recover fully from this operation, but even a miracle will not allow him to either run for or to execute the duties of an office. Channel 10: "for the next few hours, every Israeli is going to be a doctor. And they're listening to what the real doctors are saying, and that's that Sharon won't be Prime Minster at least for the next few months." Second, there will be elections in Israel on March 28th because last month President Katsav acceded to Prime Minister Sharon's request to dissolve the Knesset. But that's exactly all of we what we know right now.
Before this tragedy, Israel was already in a kind of double political limbo: not only had the Prime Minister just dissolved the government - so the executive and legislative branches were lame ducks - but the lame-duck government itself was controlled by a party that had never been elected. Sharon, having left the Likud party to form Kadima, managed to convince an incredible number of Israeli personalities and ministers to abandon life-long commitments and come with him. Several of the most powerful officials in the Israeli government right now have thus never been elected as members of the party that they're ostensibly members of. But Sharon was on track to guiding Israel through the government-less, party-less limbo. His own personal popularity was going to bring enough votes to ensure that the same people - but not the same party - remained control. After his series of chaotic electoral tricks, Israel was supposed to have a soft landing where everything fell into place without any dramatic changes. But without Sharon holding everything together, Kadima is a party with no base and no infrastructure - and now with nothing to make voters ignore that.
The legal situation is unprecedented. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert not only takes control of a country that has never voted for him, but he takes over as the representative of a party that he doesn't lead. Kadima has never had a public discussion over who should lead it, let alone a formal primary (Sharon was personally deciding the order of Kadima's election list, and Kadima was supposed to grow party roots during the next government). Adding Sharon's responsibilities to his own previously substantial ones, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - a former Likud member who left with Sharon - now holds more cabinet portfolios than the rest of the cabinet combined. Channel 10 asked a legal expert for his opinion about what Israel's bodies of laws says about this situation. Answer: "in my opinion, this is totally beyond the scope of anything the law has to say." Awesome!
In the meantime, politicians across the spectrum are declaring that they're praying for Sharon's fully recovery. And as very-lefty Yossi Beilin said on TV this morning, prayers "aren't nothing". Netanyahu and Peretz mean those prayers. Everyone is very, very nervous about the chaos and uncertainty that Israel is about to face. The Likud has all but officially canceled their plans to resign from the government on Sunday (where they are still technically ministers), while Peretz - who had already taken Labor out of the government - has placed himself "at the disposal" of Olmert.

Kadima
Even while Sharon was healthy, Kadima was a 'virtual party'. It had no elected leader and, to be totally technical, it probably had no actual members. Just a bunch of people who were going to be come members when they were elected in March. Despite this, yesterday morning Israel time brought a poll that showed them winning more than one-third of the Knesset. Now nobody knows.
All of the analysis that we've been hearing this morning links the party's continued viability on Olmert's ability to (a) become powerful very, very quickly and (b) get the party to somehow officially designate him as its leader very, very quickly. Odds that either of those things will happen are difficult to determine - for instance, nobody knows how or where Kadima would hold primaries (or who would vote in them). There are a lot of really talented politicians who have risked their political careers on Kadima, and they probably can't go back to their old parties (Peretz was already stacking Labor with his union friends before Kadima existed, while everyone knows [Netanyahu] to be vindictive and petty). So there are a lot of really big brains with an incentive to make Kadima work.
But even that may well end up being a problem - too many egos and no one able to manage them. On Channel 10, Ariel Doad (definitely misspelled) - presumably an expert - was unequivocal: "Kadima is dead". That may be too quick - Olmert has three months to prove that he's able to lead the country. But he has to act quickly to demonstrate that he's even going to be running as a leader of anything. If he fails, Kadima will either fall apart of appoint someone else as head - someone on Channel 10 just said that Kadima's only option might be Shimon Peres, although some bloggers have been throwing around Shaul Mofaz's name this morning (Jonathan Zasloff, Meryl). We literally have no idea what the election would look like in either of those cases. Certainly Kadima will not get the astronomical mandates they were thinking of just 12 hours ago.

Likud
The Likud is led by Netanyahu, who managed to permanently piss off the party's natural, working class constituency when he was Treasury Minister. Those votes were all supposed to go to Kadima. These are working class people, mostly secular and mostly right-wing. Exactly Kadima's demographic. Now they have to choose to either vote for a middle class party (e.g. Shinui - not working class), or a religious party (e.g. Shas - not secular), or a left-wing party (e.g. Labor - not right-wing). Or they might hold their nose and vote for Netanyahu. But they probably won't do that. Where they will go is anyone's guess.
Likud was supposed to get trounced in the coming election. There was no reason to vote for a right-wing, secular party while Arik Sharon was guiding Israel along a measured but security-minded path. The talk has been that Labor will recover many of the votes they've lost to Kadima in the last weeks, but its the Likud ex-pats who are going to be looking around and scratching their heads.

Labor
Here's the problem with Labor getting back some votes: Amir Peretz can be seen as an Oslo-style, terrorist appeasing, union thug. Not everyone sees him as all of those things, but most people see him as at least one of those things. Labor's fortunes had been dropping precipitously in recent weeks, as voter excitement over a change in Israel's political climate gave way to the realization of what that change was. Security still dominates Israel's agenda, which disadvantages Peretz in two ways - he concerns himself mostly with domestic issues and, when he deigns to discuss foreign policy, it tends to be in terms that... er... do not appeal to people looking for a strong leader. If Olmert comes out of the gate looking strong, it could turn out to be that only a trickle of voters will return to Labor.

Sharon was not the only Israeli alive capable of negotiating the diplomatic and military situation that Israel finds itself in - he was the only one capable of handling the political crises that he put Israel into and that he intended to lead Israel out of. What will happen to the politicians who left careers in other parties to join him - planning to ride his popularity until Kadima could grow roots - is anyone's guess.
Omri | |

Disaster - Israeli Morning Updates

UPDATE 33: (8:10pm PST) Channel 10 has finally started their morning news show. Latest medical information: "the surgery is over... the doctors are going to give a press conference soon... but things do not look good... they aren't even waiting for him to recover, because that will take a couple of days... I don't know what that means - whether there is permanent damage or not..." And, in the context of the medical bungling that occured in trying to get him to a hospital (he was driven rather than flown to a hospital farther rather than closer to him): "he question is not whether Sharon will suffer permanent and irreversible damage, but how extensive that permanent and irreversible damage will be."

UPDATE 34: (8:30pm PST) Channel 10: "we know that he's still under... we know that they've finished the surgery... what we don't know is whether there has been any brain damage". It looks likely that decision to drive him to Hadassah hospital was responsible for addition pressure and blood impacting his brain.

UPDATE 35: (8:40pm PST) "The situation is no beter than it was three hours ago."

UPDATE 36: (9:00pm PST) CNN finally cut away from pretty-boy Anderson Cooper emoting into hour #9 with miners' relatives - to tell viewers that the extended length of Sharon's surgery is a sign that bleeding was worse than originally expected. This in contrast to the expert that Channel 10 has on right now, who says that nothing can be read into the length of the surgery. Oh good - he's back to emoting!

UPDATE 37: (9:05pm PST) Press conference. MORE SURGERY! "... brain operations are lengthy... the Prime Minister is anesthetized and on a respirator... surgery for several more others... still bleeding in the head... serious situation"

UPDATE 38: (9:06pm PST) CNN is swarming the Hadassah director. He's going to repeat what we just heard.

UPDATE 39: (9:07pm PST) CNN's Dr. Gupta just described the PM's situation as "dire", invoking the phrase "uncontrollable bleeding". He didn't directly blame the condition on the anti-clotting blood thinners that Sharon has been taking, but it seems like another example of what we've been hearing all day - that prescribing that medication to the PM was nothing short of criminally stupid (and by hearing, we mean reading - since IRIS blog was saying that five and a half hours before Hebrew outlets got it).

UPDATE 40: (9:09pm PST) Channel 10: "once bleeding in the brain does start, if a person is on these kinds of blood-thinning pills that Sharon is on, there is nothing that the body can do to defend itself."

UPDATE 41: (9:12pm PST) Channel 10: "anchor: doctor, the situation has become critical? doctor: yes... [5 second pause] anchor (not knowing what to say) yes"
Omri | |

Disaster - Medical Updates

UPDATE 24: "... we don't know much more than the doctors do at this point... surgery will continue into the next hour... updates then" Channel 10 is signing off their coverage, which probably means that Ha'aretz and Walla (who have been crediting just about every other story to them) are also going to slow down. Last updates: Half of Sharon's body is paralyzed. He is disoriented and having trouble speaking (we're not sure if this means that he's been taken off the respirator that he was on earlier - or how he could be out of anesthesia so soon, for that matter). The prognosis for a full recovery is not good, but his political career is almost certainly over. Ehud Olmert has assumed full control of the Israeli government.

UPDATE 25: (5:05pm PST) Channel 10 just cut in with their hourly update. Medical update: Doctors are still insisting that Sharon will live, but surgery continues into what is the fourth hour to relieve pressure on his brain. No word about the Prime Minster's mental state. Earlier, of course, the overwhelming political consensus was that Sharon's political career is over.

UPDATE 26: (5:25pm PST) Surgery is expected to end within the hour.

UPDATE 27: (5:26pm PST) Walla is reporting a statement by PM Sharon's spokesman: The surgery is proceeding "as expected" (we don't know what that means either), but he adds that the Prime Minister is "stable."

UPDATE 28: (6:05pm PST) Channel 10: "they thought that the surgery would end soon, but now they don't know when it will end… we don't know anything certain… all we know is what Gissin said… but [stability] doesn't really tell us much… all we know is that he's still undergoing the procedure…"

UPDATE 29: (6:06pm PST) Ma'ariv's Hebrew site has a ticker that just quoted officials "close to Sharon" saying that the first stage of the operation is over and that blood was successfully drained.

UPDATE 30: (6:50 pm PST) The scandal regarding PM Sharon being driven to Hadassah hospital instead of one nearer to his ranch has already generated a full article (still only the Hebrew articles though). Walla has an update on the Prime Minister's medical condition: grave but stable.

UPDATE 31: (7:05pm PST) Channel 10 hourly update: "at Hadassah... surgery expected to end soon... fifth hour of surgery... nothing new... they're closing the incision they've made into his head [confirming Ha'aretz's ticker that doctors are now cauterizing the wound]... relieved pressure... the results are starting to trickle in... but everything is still up in the air at this stage... the doctors will know more when he wakes up, so that they can gauge his mental state..." Then they played that Gissin clip again, with a new part we missed before: "in a democratic state, there are always contingencies for transferring power"

UPDATE 32: (7:45pm PST) Walla is now reporting information that IRIS Blog posted four or five hours ago - blood thinners given to Sharon after his last stroke were reponsible for this one: (crude tranlsation) Dr Shtreifler (sp?) the head of the neurological department in Rabin's Medical Center claims that the shots Sharon got 'definately did not help' his present condition. Another (anonymous) doctor said that there is a good chance that there is a connection between the blood thinners and current stroke.
Omri | |

Sharon's Health Problems Bungled

We'll be able to do a slightly more thorogugh analysis this morning's medium-term consequences after the Israeli morning shows "figure out" (read: "decide") what those consequences are going to be. In the meantime, Channel 10 just did a recap of the long trip that Sharon took last night - from one hospital to another, always in a car - and it does indeed have the makings of a scandal. Barak at IRIS blog argues that the Prime Minster's health has been mishandled from the beginning, and that these medical mistakes were partly responsible for today's tragedy.
Omri | |

Predictable World Reactions to Sharon - White House Worried, Palestinians Celebrate

The White House sends prayers and good wishes, while Palestinians are disgusting in their open euphoria:

A radical Palestinian leader in Damascus, the Syrian capital, called Sharon's health crisis a gift from God. "We say it frankly that God is great and is able to exact revenge on this butcher. ... We thank God for this gift he presented to us on this new year," Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Syrian-backed faction Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a small radical group, told the Associated Press.

Of course the AP would describe the celebrations as limited to "radical Palestinians", as if the overwhelming number of normal Palestinians who fired shots of celebration into the air at the news of Sharon's last stroke have developed a sense of propriety or the hints of a conscience.
Omri | |

Disaster - Updates

UPDATE 16: Channel 10 reporting from the hospital: "he'll live".

UPDATE 17: Something about "relieving pressure" on the brain. The @$^% Channel 10 feed cut out again.

UPDATE 18: YNet has a little more. Original reports were of a brainstem hemorrhage, which presumably would have been critical (?). The bleeding was not in the brainstem, and this is apparently a very good thing.

UPDATE 19: More political updates: commentators are confident in Ehud Olmert's abilities to win over the public. They aren't sure why they're confident, but it has something to do with the... er... unique way that Israelis approach their politicians.

UPDATE 20: Channel 10: "We'd all like Sharon to completely pull through and return to politics, but it's time to say this: that's wrong"

UPDATE 21: The makings of a scandal: "why wasn’t the Prime Minister flown to the hospital... they were convinced that driving would get him to the hospital faster... why was there confusion as to what hospital to take him [the closer hospital or the hospital that had treated his other stroke recently]?... the symptoms were very severe, but this wasn’t recognized at first... they thought he was just feeling bad… it was in fact extremely critical"

UDPATE 22: Terrible news is tempering the euphoria of a couple minutes that Sharon would likely live. Half of Sharon's body is paralyzed, he is having trouble speaking, and the prognosis for a full recovery is very poor.

UPDATE 23: Ehud Olmert's home is being transformed into a 'sterile zone' - structures are being put up to block the view into the house and jeeps are rolling in for consultations.
Omri | |

Disaster

All our thoughts are with Prime Minister Sharon, his family, and Israel.

UPDATE 1: Brain hemorrhage:

Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital Director-General Prof. Shlomo Mor Yosef announced that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered a brain hemorrhage and has been rushed to surgery.


UPDATE 2: Walla (Hebrew) is reporting a leak from the hospital to the effect that this is a "dramatic event that will be over in a few hours". We have literally no idea what that means - if Sharon is stable (doubtful since he was rushed to surgery 30 minutes ago) or if the worst is expected.

UPDATE 3: YNet: : "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's condition is very serious... severe stroke. Walla (Hebrew): Sharon suffered damage to several bodily functions and its reasonable to expect he will not be returning to normal functionoing any time soon.

UPDATE 4: Worse and worse. Walla (Hebrew): "Sharon suffered massive bleeding in his brain and everyone can understand what that means". This is devestating.

UPDATE 5: Sharon's people are now speaking of needing a miracle.

UPDATE 6: Things "don't look good". Sharon's condition is life-threatening. Security has been boosted around Ehud Olmert's residence in anticipation of him assuming the office of the Prime Minister.

UPDATE 7: Political stuff - Likud will obviously put the knives away for a little bit. Netanyahu's statement is out - praying for Sharon's recovery. Shas's chief rabbi - another political opponent - is calling on the nation to pray for Sharon's well-being.

UPDATE 8: Sharon is entering his second hour of surgery.

UPDATE 9: Walla now has a full story up. Before they were talking as if the question was when PM Sharon would emerge from surgery. The headline of the full story: Sharon fighting for his life.

UPDATE 10: YNet reports Sharon is still in surgery. Walla's got a statement from Sharon's personal doctor, but it's unclear if these are the same people. The Walla update also has a quote to the effect that the doctor expects Sharon to emerge together and in peace from the surgery, which is intentionally ominous sounding.

UPDATE 11: Yeah, YNet is now reporting the the statement from Sharon's personal doctor, so that previous statement was a seperate hospital spokesperson. They've also translated the verb as "hopes" instead of "expects" like we have it.

UPDATE 12: We finally got the Channel 10 feed working off of Walla. They're talking about the political consequences of Sharon's condition. Kadima is already making contingency plans. There was a question on this just emailed to us, so quick synopsis: elections are set for late March in Israel after Sharon's request to dissolve the Israeli government was granted by President Katsav last December. The expectation had been that Sharon would personally lead his new party - Kadima - to an (at least recently) unprecedented level of control. However, that relied on his personal popularity with the Israeli public. In the short-term, Deputy Prime Minister Olmert will take over the government. In the long-term, even the talking heads on Israeli TV are baffled right now.

UPDATE 13: Not that this is either here nor there, but the news anchors are absolutely terrified. They're interviewing someone who's praying on the air, and they're asking him what the most appropriate prayers for people to give are.

UPDATE 14: Channel 10 "... blood in the brain... I expect that they gave him some sort of [MRI]... they knew where they were going before they went in"

UPDATE 15: Political updates: it looks more and more likely that Likud will call off their decision to leave the government (they were going to formally resign this weekend). In the meantime, the government goes on: transfer of power has occured to Deputy Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, and he will presumably lead the country either until Sharon recovers or until the elections in March. Channel 10 is pointing out that Olmert technically wields unprecedented power - because Sharon was doing so much and he was already doing so much, he now has more responsibilities than any other Prime Minister in history... The end of the Sharon era.

UDPATE 16: Channel 10: "He'll live" (!!!)
Omri | |

Iranian President Claims Islam is Not a Religion of Peace

In what was undoubtedly his intention, Ahmadinejad is boasting that he's unpopped the cork of genocidal Muslim violence against Jews:

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 03 – Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a parliamentary committee that his remarks calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and describing the Holocaust as a "myth" had a profound impact on Muslims around the world, providing a "shock" that was needed "to awaken the Muslims who are in a state of lethargy", a government-owned news agency reported on Tuesday... "Some in Iran and abroad thought that we were making these speeches without a specific plan and policy, but we have been pursuing a specific strategy in this regard", the Iranian president told a group of Islamist student activists in a midnight meeting last week, according to the Persian-language website Khedmat, which was launched by Ahmadinejad’s campaign team during the presidential elections last year. "The wave [that these speeches created] has a lot of supporters among young people in the Muslim world and it will continue to move forward", Ahmadinejad said.

In a continuation of recent "maybe we will and maybe we won't" misinformation, today Israel is claiming that yes, it can destroy Iran's nuclear weapons. This, of course, is in sharp contrast some of the best public military analysts in the world, who beg to differ because they think that Iran has passed a point of no return. Thanks Europe!
Omri | |

Arab Fifth Column Watch - OK, See, That's Almost Definitionally Treason

Not content with all but pledging allegiance to a country that Israel is at war with, Knesset Member, law-maker, and Israeli citizen Mohammed Barakeh is now calling patriotic Arab-Israeli citizens traitors to a higher Arab cause:

MK Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash-Ta'al) harshly criticized Israeli Arab citizens who vote for Zionist parties on Tuesday, saying, "These are people who are bribed or receive benefits," he told Haaretz. "They are mistaken if they think that will be the source of their life preserver."

We admit, this is only the suggestion of treason. Zionism is the belief in the right of Israel to exist, but maybe he's saying that the Zionist parties themselves should be rejected for reasons other than Zionism. It could be what he's saying.

"I am not loyal to the country. The country must be loyal to me. The country is supposed to serve the citizens, rather than the citizens worshipping the state," he said.

Is it really too much to ask that on be loyal to a country that elects one to national office? We're not asking for all Arab citizens to be loyal to Israel - even though we are asking that, and even though Arab citizens in Israel enjoy more political, economic, and cultural rights than the Arab citizens of any other country in the Middle East - but he's a member of the Israeli parliament. This is like a member of Congress pledging loyalty to Iraq - and getting reelected!
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US Gives Israel More Bad Election Advice: Let East Jlem Arabs Vote in Palestinian Elections

Not at all discouraged at having forced Israel to let Hamas run in the Palestinian elections and then realizing it was a huge mistake, the United States is now pushing Israel to turn their capital into a voting booth for people who want to destroy Israel:

US President George Bush President George W. Bush wants Palestinian elections to go forward as scheduled this month with no delay and thinks Palestinians should be allowed to vote in east Jerusalem, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Tuesday... The controversy over Jerusalem erupted the moment the campaign started Tuesday morning, when Israeli police scuffled with a series of Palestinian candidates trying to canvass for votes in the busy plaza outside the Damascus Gate leading into Jerusalem's walled Old City... "Any Palestinian activity in Jerusalem is forbidden," police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

Turns out, when you look it up, he's right - the Oslo Accords does make Palestinian political activity in Jerusalem illegal. So why is the United States actually pushing Israel to accept patent violations of international agreements? Because international law works differently in the Israeli context - everyone knows that Arab agreements with Israel are going to be violated, but everyone is expected to act as if they don't know that.
Omri | |

Hamas is Very Charming, Wants to Destroy Israel

First, ovious copyright infringement:

Meanwhile, Palestinian candidates held a parade led by an actor in a Mickey Mouse costume, sang songs about the return of Islam and plastered the streets of the West Bank and Gaza with political posters as they kicked off their parliamentary election campaign Tuesday. Leaders of Hamas insisted the vote must take place Jan. 25 as scheduled, despite an Israeli ban on voting in Jerusalem, shooting down Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' suggestion that it be delayed.

Second, obviously total lunatics:

"Islam is the solution" and "One hand resists and one hand builds" read some of the Hamas signs... Hamas candidates and about 200 supporters marched to a cemetery in the West Bank city of Nablus to pay their respects at the graves of three Hamas leaders killed in fighting with Israel. "We ask all Palestinians to join us to create an Islamic state. The Islamic state is on the rise," said Sheik Hamed Bitawi, a Hamas candidate. They then marched to the center of town, unfurled a giant Palestinian flag and the green flag of Hamas and sang: "Islam has returned, Islam is here."

Which is why all of Israel's top intelligence minds are worried sick that Hamas's popular support is now going to be supplemented by the typical groveling - not to mention the financial and diplomatic largess - that the international community typically displays for the 'legitimately elected representatives of the Palestinian people'. Just at a very basic level, consider the following: the Palestinian police forces were brought into existence, funded by the United States, trained by Europe, and given arms by Israel in order to fight terrorism. Now they might end up actually being controlled from the top-down by Hamas. How much terrorism-fighting do you think they're going to be doing?
Omri | |

Hey Gals, Check This Out - Iran Doesn't Like It When Women Write. Or Talk.

Iran has begun a crackdown on media outlets, shutting down women's newspapers. We're not sure what constitutes a woman's newspaper in Iran, but it's probably a place where women can print and share advice about how to continue living some kind of intellectual life in the context of suffocating Islamism. Because if it was about how men should control women, we doubt that the government would have shut it down.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-03

The National Religious Party will run alone in the election. When you couple that with the poll that says that 25% of Israeli voters may switch their votes between now and the election, that means that theoretically, NRP could end up with -4 mandates (give/take).

Kadima
All three Israeli newspapers are screaming about new legal problems for Prime Minister Sharon, with JPost going as far as claiming that police have actual evidence implicating Sharon in bribe-taking. YNet is a lot more circumspect, literally putting the headline and the blurb in question marks. We'd pass on what Ha'aretz is reporting, but it's more fun to wait for their editorialists to preen tomorrow morning and watch them turn out to be wrong. Again. Like they always are. In response to the scandal, far Lefty Yossi Sarid is calling on Sharon to immediately quit politics - everyone else is more or less waiting for the investigation to progress. But because they ALL want you to know that they're waiting for the investigation to progress, it's almost impossible to get any other political knows (10 of the top 15 headlines on YNet are people saying that they want to know the truth - which is an important and surprising clarification).

Likud
In other obvious news, members of the Likud want you to know that they're leaving the government and that there's nothing anybody can do about it. Which is important for absolutely no reason.

Labor
Ha'aretz - displaying their typical level-headed analysis of the far-Left's electoral chances (how's Prime Minister Mitzna doing these days?) - is asserting qua wishing that everyone is afraid of Peretz. Why? Because of "fluctuating" polls. What the editorial doesn't mention is that those polls have been fluctuating consistently downward. Is there something at the Ha'aretz offices that gets added to the water during election season to make everyone extra-shameless? Just the thought of tomorrow's opinion pieces declaring the end of Sharon's career is enough to make us wish for illiteracy. Theirs and ours.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Abbas Sulks A Lot, Fails to Stop Terrorism

Yeah, whatever:

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said Monday that the upcoming legislative elections due on Jan. 25 may be delayed if Israel bans Jerusalem Arabs from voting, reported the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television. "We all agree that Jerusalem should be included in the elections" and "if it is not included, all the factions agree there should be no elections," Abbas was quoted by the satellite channel as saying in Doha, where he is on a visit.
Meanwhile, Abbas urged Palestinian militant groups not to abandon the truce with Israel, which they agreed to last January, saying "I appeal to all Palestinian factions to continue to respect (the truce) while we are organizing elections... Everyone must show restraint and not give Israel a pretext" to continue its policies in the Palestinian territories, he stressed.

OK. We know that Abbas has some problems with "language" and "meaning." For instance, he seems to believe that the word "all" in the phrase "all agree" means "except for Jews". But this is getting absurd - when Palestinian terrorists seek to blow up children's parties in orgies of genocidal violence, that is not a "pretext" for going after terrorists! Seriously - it's not like Israel is looking for excuses to risk their soldiers' lives in daily arrest raids and checkpoint operations. It's not like the soldiers themselves wouldn't rather prefer to be eating loof and sitting on base. Quick, easy test - who is infiltrating and blowing up whose cafes, and who is not bombing whose apartment complexes? "Pretext" indeed.
In other 'Israel shouldn't get to defend itself' pronouncements, Abbas grandiosely declared that "Israel left the Gaza Strip and has no right to return.". He then added "except maybe the right to self-defense, but United Nations resolutions have firmly established that Israel doesn't get that right". Also that "the Holocaust didn't happen". He really didn't say that second part. Or the third part. Though he seriously doesn't believe that the Holocaust happened. And the United Nations really has all but declared that Israel doesn't have a right to self-defense. So he could have said them. But he didn't. The first part about Israel not having any right to respond to daily bombings of their civilians by Gaza-based Palestinian terrorists - that part he did say.
Omri | |

EU to Iran: We're Still Thinking of Sanctions. Don't Think We're Not.

How totally useless:

The European Union could impose sanctions on Iran if efforts to take the Islamic republic to the United Nations Security Council fail, warned Austrian Ambassador to Israel Kurt Hengl, whose country assumes the EU presidency Sunday. "If Iran, instead of saying, 'We want to talk,' says, 'We don't need to talk, do what you want,' Europe will have to do something," Hengl told The Jerusalem Post.

Iran says that their response will be "crushing" if the United States or Israel dare to stop them from trying to get the weapons to launch a crushing (and genocidal) attack. And with a shiny new military furnished courtesy of Russia, that threat is not exactly empty. Best part of the arms deal was the Russian denial:

Russia rejected Israeli claims that Hizbollah is using Russian-made missiles sold to Syria... A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said Russia monitors the weapons it sells in a way that does not allow for the transfer of arms as Israel charged.

Seriously - because there's no way that Russia would ever supply missiles to be shot at Israel.
Omri | |

Quartet Getting Iffy on Hamas, Media Still Confident

Even the peace-at-most-costs Quartet is beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with having Hamas in a Palestinian government. We agree - we just wish they wouldn't have spent the last half a year preventing Israel from doing anything about it). The Australian isn't fazed though - they know in their heart of hearts that Hamas is "key to the peace process. This despite that fact that Hamas spends their time alternating between declaring their intention to wipe Israel off the map and lying about their intention to wipe Israel off the map.
Omri | |

Munich is Cheap Propaganda

A film that claims to depict concrete historical events but instead excludes facts in the interest of political goals is patent propaganda. According to Spielberg, Munich has two goals: to spark discussion about the moral cost of violence and to promote the Middle East peace process. Although the second goal is unrealistic anyway - not even Spielberg believes that the film will change the diplomatic situation in Israel - it is worth mentioning that Munich neglects current Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's role in financing the massacre. But dishonesty relating to the peace process is a minor issue. The more significant concern is that Munich uses small historical inaccuracies, Spielberg-esque narrative dominance, and un-Spielberg-esque editing tricks to tilt dialogue in favor of moral equivalence. The film gives the impression that there are imprecise but ultimately dispositive similarities between terrorists and those who bring justice to them.
The heavy-handed theme of Munich is that Palestinian terrorists and their Israeli pursuers find unity and equality in each other's mutual humanity - that, since both sides are torn by conflict and doubt, both sides are ultimately more similar than dissimilar. But already here, there is a disjunct: to achieve the humanization of the Israeli soldiers, Spielberg has to paint a demonstrably false picture of a cruel Israeli state taking men away from their families and sending them on endless missions of violence. To achieve the humanization of the Palestinian terrorists, all Spielberg had to do was dehumanize the murdered Israeli athletes. Israelis are humanized by blaming an abstract entity, Palestinians by ignoring real victims. Only thus can the moral planes between murderers and their pursuers be leveled.
This move is not just morally problematic – it's probably factually incorrect. The doubt that Spielberg needs both sides to feel probably didn't exist. In the broadest sense, it's highly unlikely that the Israeli agents were actually wracked by doubt: these were the same operatives who hunted down Nazi war criminals. They were inclined to see the Munich massacre as an extension of that same genocidal anti-Semitism and global indifference: the West Germans had refused to provide adequate security, the East Germans had actively foiled rescue attempts, and the British told the Israelis that they had it coming. For the rest of the 1972 games, Olympic officials refused to lower flags to half-mast in mourning because Arab States complained. The import of Spielberg's dishonesty regarding Israeli motives cannot be over-estimated. Not only does it establish that Munich is basically wrong on its face, but it renders dishonest Spielberg's most significant pathos-inducing device: sympathy for the Israeli operatives.
This leaves Spielberg with two options: either he's being honest about Palestinian motives but dishonest about Israeli motives (in which case the film is definitionally biased) or he's being unfair to both sides (in which case its wildly fabricated). The latter is probably much closer to the truth. Munich mastermind Mohammed Daoud insists that Spielberg is being dishonest in implying that the terrorists wanted to be spared execution. This not-so-surprising revelation does not exactly help Spielberg’s image of family-devoted terrorists who contain a passion for life, but even more importantly, it's kind of second dropping shoe. It turns out that Spielberg is wrong on both counts: the Palestinian terrorists were unremorseful about murdering innocent Israelis, and the Israeli operatives were unremorseful about punishing them for it.
In addition to this overarching tension with reality, Spielberg weaves a number of smaller dishonesties into his broader 'at the end of the day we're all the same' platitude. Regarding the day to day depiction of operatives' lives, the consensus of experts is that Munich is almost indistinguishable from fiction. Former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter described it as a children's story with "no comparison... in reality" A forthcoming book will provide evidence that obliterates the depiction of revenge-minded Israeli leaders. And Mossad veterans consider the idea of a hit-team isolated in the field for months to be wildly implausible. The last point is perhaps the most significant - Israeli intelligence protocol insists that, for the sake of operatives, no team is left in the field more than a couple of days. But Spielberg wants to club the audience with a trite conflict between family and country (Avner's first and most severe doubts are grounded in his separation from home). Munich all but dares the viewer to conclude that protecting one's homeland is worth destroying one's family. That dare doesn't really work if the audience knows that Israeli missions are designed to ensure that operatives are quickly brought home to their children.
Worse for Spielberg - if the audience knows that Israel cares about its soldiers, then his entire project of equivocation through scapegoating collapses. Demonizing the Israeli state enables Spielberg to externalize blame away from his sympathy-evoking characters: if he can blame vague entities, he doesn't have to blame real people. Whether it be the media in the first 15 minutes of the film or the state of Israel for what feels like an eternity, the root cause of nihilistic Palestinian atrocities is located anywhere but in nihilistic terrorist ideology.
Outside of the plot, there are some un-Spielberg-esque cinematic concessions that Spielberg makes to smuggle his message into the film. Instead of individuals, Munich is filled with metaphors and analogies. He can thus partake equally of abstraction ('it's not just about Munich, it's about violence in general') and plausible deniability ('sure the film isn't entirely accurate, but it's about what the characters stand for'). This is Spielberg letting his desire to sermonize get in the way of his better film-making instincts: Jurassic Park's Sam Neill had more concrete fidelity.
And finally, it is a typically powerful Spielberg narrative that both makes and suffocates the film. Narrative devices furnish Munich with some of its most evocative - and its cheapest and most dishonest - tactics. 'Most evocative' because cut shots after missions, split second cliff-hangers, and saccharine tension combine to create the effect of endless and unresolved violence - an effect not reliably achieved through speeches. 'Cheapest' because the impression is that Israel pointlessly sent young men to hunt down other young men - as if there is no purpose behind Israel's need to demonstrate that Jewish blood can not be shed with impunity. And 'most dishonest' because Spielberg insists that he is trying to start a balanced debate, but he uses the narrative to contradict and overwhelm any balance. Yes, a conscience-stricken Israeli hit-man is contrasted with Arabs wildly dancing in celebration of murder - but then Spielberg soaks the film with so much sentimentalism that by the end, Israelis and Arabs are united as equal victims. The script might speak of Israeli self-defense, but the film shouts only of mindless violence. In this sense, Munich is a testament to Spielberg's genius - a lesser filmmaker could not have negotiated the tension. The hypocrisy would have been obvious.
The most accurate criticism of the film is not that it's anti-Israel. Munich is not really against anyone, and neither is Spielberg. But this pretense of intellectual nuance is precisely why the film and its director are profoundly mistaken. Equivocating between terrorism and counter-terrorism is not intellectual courage but ethical laziness. That Palestinian terrorists believe they're defending Arabs and Israeli soldiers believe they're defending Jews does not mean that murdering athletes at the Olympics is morally equivalent to bringing justice to terrorists. "Palestinians kill, Israelis kill" is not rigor - it's trepidation in one of the great challenges of our time. Instead of taking a side Spielberg relies on false narrative tricks - 11 athletes killed, 11 terrorists killed. The actual number was probably 18 terrorists killed. So why doesn't Spielberg heighten the Israeli retaliation for effect? Because that wouldn't scream 'it's an equal and never-ending cycle of violence!' in the same overwrought way. That isn't a starting point for reasoned debate – it's facile pretension as an exercise in profundity.
Spielberg, troubled by political criticism of Munich, apparently called Roger Ebert up to discuss Munich's ability to situation arguments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He's also described Munich as a "prayer for peace". But arguments are premised on lies are no foundation for dialogue and prayers that refuses to distinguish between killers and their victims is blasphemy. Spielberg should be ashamed of himself, and of his cheap propaganda.

[Cross-posted at I Just Saw]
Omri | |

State Department Bias Discussion

Over at IsraPundit, a Ted Belman post on Prof. Gil-White has elicited an extremely active discussion on how to mitigate the State Department’s seemingly anti-Israel practices. We've looked at some of Gil-White's theories before and emerged unimpressed, not impressed), but this discussion bears some attention. An excerpt from our most recent comment:

There is such a thing as institutional memory, especially in the halls of Foggy Bottom. Practices and sensibilities are incubated and enforced by everything from eye-rolling of friends in hallways to the body language of superiors during meetings to the promotion of like-minded deputies in offices. That the United States has an a vaguely pro-Arab and anti-Israel policy is far better explained by reference to norms that describe ‘dispassionate analysis’ and ‘diplomatic respectability’ than it is by invoking some sort of age-old, psychological desire to exterminate Israel. No one at the State Dept. wakes up and says "I'm going to try to destroy Israel today". Rather, ingrained assumptions about how an analyst acts, what leaders are given a wide berth, what priorities should be triaged, etc all contribute to a climate inhospitable to Israeli interests. During the Cold War, it might have made sense for the United States to sacrifice Israel in order to win Arab backing.... But in an age of global Islamist terrorism, US interests and Israeli interests align - conventional wisdom at the State Department just hasn’t caught up yet.
If this less grandiose but far more plausible theory is right - if it's not about agenda, but about sedimented institutional practices - then the solutions being proposed will have to be rethought. Rather than radical political change, those who think that the State Department is misguided have much slower and more painstaking work ahead of them. Future leaders have to be instilled with three elements: (a) a clear understanding of the concrete situation in the world, (b) an understanding of diplomatic practice, and (c) the thick skin to resist Foggy Bottom's subtle Leftward pull. Future diplomats must be incubated in the same way that conservatives incubated future Supreme Court justices – they must be familiar with knowledge about the world, they must have an understanding of how that knowledge is produced, and they must be equipped with the ability to defend their beliefs. Among other things, this task will require reorienting conservative campus leadership from its current, ‘activist’ obsession.
Omri | |

Palestinians End Truce They Never Started. AP Blames Israel, Comes Frighteningly Close to Outright Lying

This AP headline and lede are just unreal:

Truce with Palestinians formally ends; Israel kills 2 in Gaza 'no-go' area
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Two Palestinians were killed in Israel's first deadly airstrike in a Gaza border area it recently put off limits, just as a truce that has drastically reduced violence formally ended. Israel said its air force attacked militants about to fire a rocket at Israel late Saturday. Israel declared the northern Gaza-Israel border area a "no-go" zone last week to stop extremists from launching rockets, warning that Palestinians entering the area could be shot.

Reading it, you wouldn't know that the Palestinians are the ones who actually ended the truce. Also, you wouldn't know that their so-called truce included 2,990 attacks.
And among the many, many reasons why you wouldn't know that from the article, the main one is that Sarah el Deeb from the AP (who wrote the article but is not credited on the Baltimore Sun page) gets startlingly close to being an outright liar:

A spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas, Mushir al-Masri, threatened revenge against Israel. However, he did not rule out extending a truce declared in February that formally expired at the end of 2005.

The exact opposite is true - Hamas and three other terrorist groups called off their own truce at the end of the year and immediately started launching attacks. It's not like they were subtle about it either - see: here and here and even the Palestinian government's own webpage here! Of course, she never comes out and says that Hamas didn't actually end the truce with a barrage of missiles - she just says that al-Marsri threatened revenge in a way that implies that those missiles were revenge for Israel ending the truce. Come to think of it, Israel never had a truce with the Palestinians the way the headline implies - it was the Palestinians who unilaterally declared a truce with Israel (a 2,990 attack truce) and Israel who - glad for the chance to live in peace for a little while - backed off so as not to disturb that truce. So if the headline is not an outright lie, it is at best sheer nonsense meant to imply a lie.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

UPDATE: We tracked down the fuller version of this article: It's a treat on multiple levels:

Early Sunday, armed Palestinians also stormed a social club on the Gaza City beach, injuring a Palestinian guard and throwing two explosive devices, security officials said. Known as the U.N. club, the facility is the only place in Gaza City where alcohol is served... Islamic fundamentalists object to sale and consumption of liquor, but it was not immediately known who the attackers were.

Whether it's funny because "throwing two explosive devices" counts as legitimate Palestinian "objection" or because she holds out the possibility that the attack might have been by fundamentalist Quakers, it's definitely funny. Less funny is this part:

Hamas has largely kept the cease-fire... and hinted it could continue... Islamic Jihad, which carried out all six suicide bomb attacks since the truce went into effect, released an ambiguous statement noting that the cease-fire had expired. It was not clear whether the group would participate in talks to extend it.

The implication that Hamas called off their suicide bombers would be another lie - it's just that the IDF and the Shin Bet intercepted all 29 Hamas suicide bombers before they could Israel's cafes, nightclubs, and malls.
Omri | |

MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-02

2005 is over. So is Israel's 16th Knesset. So are more than a few of Israel's minor parties - Shinui's election chairman has resigned (something about getting no votes). End of the year roundup time.

Likud

Benjamin Netanyahu is pithy:

"Kadima plans to 'go backward' and withdraw from most of the territories."

The statement is kind of a pun on Kadima, which means "to go forward" in Hebrew. We say kind of a pun, because puns aren't supposed to hurt your brain when you hear them.
Having lost to Netanyahu in the Likud primary, Shalom is urging Likud members to unite behind his former opponent. That's nice, but tensions between Netanyahu and Shalom aren't going to be resolved with a couple of press releases - they're already having spats over when to quit the election. Either way, Shalom is guaranteed the second slot on the Likud list.
Incidentally, we're of course gratified that Likud's new rules prevent criminals from running on the party list. We're not sure that that rule could leave any party with 120 people to put on a Knesset election list, but with polls being what they are right now, that's not really Likud's problem. Speaking of the Likud election list - in what can only be an effort to prove correct the critics who say that Likud is becoming a marginal, far-right organization - Netanyahu is urging his supporters to put Uzi Landua as high as possible on that list. Nothing says "we're sorry for forcing the Prime Minister with a 65% approval rate to collapse the government" like putting the guy who led the fight towards the top of your list.

Labor

Labor has also finally come up with a mall tested, focus-group confirmed election slogan - "Amir Peretz, because it's about time. The Labor party.". This proves one of two things. Either the Israeli voter responds only the most hackneyed, 'please club me over the head' slogans, or someone found a random sample of Israeli mall shoppers who were all, by coincidence, mildly retarded. Meanwhile, Peretz has issued a statement in which promises that he will "not target [Sharon's] corruption or his family". Which is kind of like when we say "we don't want to say that Peretz is a mobbed-up thug, but he ran a union filled with other, less successful, mobbed up thugs," except we don't have pretensions toward running a country. Although with 40% of former Labor voters leaving the party, Peretz better not have any of those pretensions either.

Kadima

Kadima's election list is closer to being done than it was a day ago:

Several days ago TV's Channel 2 published a tentative top-ten list, according to which Finance Minister Ehud Olmert is the prime minister's number 2, followed by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, former Shin Bet security service chief Avi Dichter, Transportation Minister Meir Sheetrit, former Laborite Haim Ramon, Vice Premier Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Tzachi Hanegbi and Avraham Hirchzon.

Finally, let's all agree to put to bed this 'Sharon is a liar' meme in the new year. Channel One actually ran a story that said that Sharon is wildly popular because people think he's a liar. The argument is that when the Right hears Sharon say Leftist things, they assume he's lying to the Left and that when the Left hears Sharon say Rightist things, they assume he's lying to the Right. We're always reluctant to state the obvious, but people generally don't like liars: so if everyone thought Sharon was a liar, they'd first assume that he was lying to them. Sharon is not the most straight-forward man, but there's a difference between 'lying' and 'changing your mind after 30 years of building settlements in Gaza'.
Omri | |

MR Identifies Root Cause of Terrorism

The Turkish press and the far Left agree: Bush is not addressing the "root causes" of terrorism. Do you think that by "root cause" they mean "anti-Semitism? Because they should.
Terrorists in their own words:

Walid Shoebat: "There is no wall in the area where I grew up that was not filled with graffiti, with slogans such as 'we knock on the gates of heaven with the skulls of Jews.'"
Zak Anani: "The problem is not land. It is generations of hatred passed from one generation to the next."
Ibrahim Abadallah (raised in Dearborn, Michigan): "My hatred for the Jews permeated my heart. I hated the Jews with all my heart, my soul and my passions. Anything I could do to harm the Jewish state, the Jewish people, I would do."

Hey, question - if the enemies of the Jewish state are anti-Zionist because they hate Jews, does that make anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?
Incidentally, these quotes came from a conference at Princeton, where usually only unrepentant ex-PLO terrorists get the proverbial microphone there - the repentant ones are usually not allowed. Not that that has anything to do with how stupid the 'root causes' argument is, but it's something we thought you'd like to know.
Omri | |

MR Makes Its Point - Ahmadinejad (Metaphorically) Wants Monkey Army

In an apparent effort to gin up 'reader involvement', Ha'aretz has started putting that garish new "Make Your Point" banner at the top "Make Your Point debates" (memo to Lynn-B: heh). On one hand, we kind of resent the fact that we're supposed to care that "meow" thinks we "HAVE GOT TO LOVE FEIGLIN" or that "Geoff" thinks the Likud equals "No Platform". On the other hand, we like hearing ourselves write, and Ha'aretz is actually asking people to opine on What is truly behind Ahmadinejad's statements?.
Here is our answer: he is crazy. Total batshit crazy. Stalin -ordering-his-scientists-to-create-a-monkey-army crazy. Seriously, that crazy.
Listen. There's a serious point here: people tend to assume that other people are basically like themselves. So it's sometimes difficult to imagine that the people in charge of entire nations can be fundamentally irrational. This mental block has real consequences: for a decade, Yasser Arafat openly declared that he had no intention of ever stopping terrorist attacks on Israel, but international diplomats insisted that just one more concession would make him change his mind. We could be making that point. Instead of making that point, we're spending our time trying to get Google hits on 'monkey army'.
Omri | |

Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Police Officers Rampage to Protest Lawlessness

Seriously, they're not even close to a state:

About 200 policemen stormed government offices in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on Monday to protest at the failure of the Palestinian Authority to fight growing lawlessness, witnesses said. The incident was the latest sign of chaos in Gaza, which has suffered growing internal unrest since Israel withdrew last September after 38 years of occupation. Firing into the air as they ran through the streets, the policemen raided government offices, courthouses, an election office and the municipality building in Rafah.

Police officers. Raided government buildings. To protest lawlessness. Instead of, you know, doing their job to enforce the law. Awesome.
Meanwhile, recent polls show that Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party seems to have developed a big lead over Hamas rivals - but members of Fatah are so convinced that they're going to lose the upcoming elections to Hamas that they're considering resigning from Fatah. Also, somebody should tell the YNet folks that "pressurize" doesn't mean what they think it means.
Omri | |

Arab Fifth Column Watch - Treason's Just Another Word for Anti-Zionism

As a reminder for those just joining us: Israel is in a state of war with the country of Syria, which - every single day - supplies military and financial support to terrorist organizations that regularly murder Israeli soldiers and civilians. So there's a word for when elected officials in Israel's Knesset pledge support for Syria:

Knesset Member Mohammad Barakeh (Hadash-Ta'al) expressed his support of Syria, claiming that "a strong and resistant Syria will bring closer the day in which Jerusalem will become Palestine's capital." Barakeh... spoke during a rally of solidarity with Syria in Nazareth.

This is but the latest in a long line of Arab members of Israel's governing body - people whom the state allows to vote on bills related to the security of the nation - who have all but explicitly supported Syrian aggression against Israel.
In fact, the sheer boldness of Israeli Arab hypocrisy - enjoying what Israel provides while working to undermine it - has now reached such proportions that Israeli Arab Knesset members refuse to pledge loyalty to Israel, while their constituents openly threaten armed revolution against the state. Have we mentioned that Israel's Arab citizens enjoy more political, social, and economic rights than Arab citizens of any other country anywhere else in the Middle East?
Omri | |

Soon to be Nuke-Armed Iranian President Really Is That Crazy

Apparently, someone has pulled Iranian President Ahmadinejad aside and explained that yes, contrary to his lunatic Holocaust denying statements, the Holocaust really did happen. Not allowing himself to be deterred from his Jew hatred by reality, Ahmadinejad is bravely pushing on with his special kind of crazy:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president who has said the Holocaust was a myth, now has charged European countries sought to complete the genocide by establishing a Jewish state in the midst of Muslim countries. "Don't you think that continuation of genocide by expelling Jews from Europe was one of their aims in creating a regime of occupiers of Al-Quds (Jerusalem)?'' Iran's Islamic Republic News agency quoted Ahmadinejad saying Sunday. "Isn't that an important question?"...
In October, Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."... Last month, Ahmadinejad said the Nazi destruction of European Jewry is a myth. After outrage over the comments, he said Europeans, if they insist the Holocaust occurred, should cede some of their territory for a Jewish state.

It's a good thing that the international community is prepared to back Israeli or US force in preventing this lunatic from getting nuclear weapons and making good on his threat to nuke five million Jews. And by "good thing" we mean "predictable", and by "prepared to back" we mean "obviously going to condemn".
Omri | |

Palestinian Terrorists Kidnap, Blow Up Palestinian Terrorist Sympathizers

International peace activists devote themselves to physically protecting terrorists, while the depth of United Nations mendacity regarding Israel regularly reaches surreal proportions. So of course it makes sense that Palestinian terrorists would kidnap peace activists and blow up UN buildings. One almost begins to suspect that - rather than using it for any instrumental purpose - Palestinian "militants" are devoted to violence as an end in itself.

UPDATE: Of course:

“Italian citizen Alessandro Bernardini told reporters after being kidnapped and later released by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza. "I will never change my idea about the occupation," he said. "I am with the Palestinian people."
Omri | |

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