In the interest of honesty, we admit that we too have sometimes wished that we could deal with medical bureaucrats this way:

Palestinians routinely travel to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment, where Israeli doctors - being good and human - treat them as patients rather than as enemy combatants.Occasionally, upon being restored to health in Israeli hospitals by Israelis doctors, those same Palestinians return to try to blow up those very same hospitals and doctors. It's a cycle of violence!
(hat tip: Esther)

The Hamas-led Palestinian Authority - an internationally recognized kind of government ostensibly treaty-bound to preventing its citizens from launching terrorist attacks into Israel - has appointed a terrorist as their new Interior Minister

As far as this week's appointments go, we're unimpressed. This isn't even half as good as the UN putting an Iranian diplomat on their disarmament commission.

An Associated Press story just went up saying that Israel might invade the Gaza Strip. The headline trumpets the potential for the IDF to "reoccupy Gaza," but that's because AP writers are mindless drones trained to fixate on anything related to the capital-O "Occupation". The AP's breathless announcement stands in sharp contrast to this morning's analysis from Amos Harel:

Now let's play a game of who are we going to believe about the Israeli military. The bright-eyed AP staff writer using a two-year old "Israelis are evil occupiers" template or the Israeli military correspondent? Even if Amos Harel is kind of a softheaded peacenik, at least he's a softheaded peacenik who people in the IDF will talk to.

UPDATE: Forbes.com has Update 3 (!!!) of the reoccupation news. Helpfully, they provide the byline we were too lazy to track down earlier: Josef Federman. That would be the Josef Federman of factual errors and inflammatory comments about the Holocaust fame.

UPDATE 2: Turns out, the most noticable difference between Federman's first story and his updated story is where he moved the little caveat that the reoccuption isn't actually going to happen from the very last sentence to the beginning of the second paragraph. Maybe he read the morning Israeli papers.

UPDATE 3: There is now another "Israel about to reoccupy Gaza" AP story up, except this one's by Steve Weizman and doesn't even have the "but this isn't actually going to happen" caveat. And that's the one that it looks like JPost choose to post up. We give up.

We pass this story on because it's nice to see an Israel-Hollywood celebrity connection that doesn't have to do with sanctimoniously telling Israelis that they have to learn to live in peace with the poor oppressed Palestinians:

And they say that Israelis don't know how to be sarcastic.
Actually, we just checked, and no one says that. Never mind.

UPDATE: More crazy-pill Hebrew linguistics goodness:

Maybe they should've gotten some advice from Madonna. Because she knows all about Hebrew.

This is not a joke:

Obviously.

Arab members of the Israeli Knesset - charged with doing stuff like making laws and appropriating resources for the defense of the state - are meeting with terrorists:

The critical question being, of course, which nation?

We're annoyed on multiple levels by this Clinton-era / we should engage Iran / we should look like we're trying to reason with Iranian lunatics because that will make us seem smart to Europe article from Slate's Fred Kaplan.
The line "even Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani... has criticized the current regime's harsh anti-Western stance" kind of got us going. It's notthat mentioning Rafsanjani actually added anything to the article - there are other even hard-line clerics who have criticized Ahmadinejad. But there's something ritualistic about the phenomenon of sophisticated lefty journalists desperately and stupidly determined to say something nice about Rafsanjani.
Improbably more ritualistic, however, is this little chant:

With due respect, isn't it England (actually Britain, but who cares) that continues to insist - more firmly than the Bush Administration - that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa? And, with due respect, isn't it Russia that continues to insist - more firmly than the Bush Administration - that Iraq was involved in international terrorism targeting the United States? So why exactly would "false warnings" about Iraq decrease President Bush's credibility in their eyes?
It wouldn't and it doesn't. But isn't it fun to drop the phrase into even the most tangentially related contexts? What? It's going to rain tomorrow? Must be President Bush's false warnings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

UPDATE: Also, French intelligence.

Could be bad...

(hat tip: Stan, who also reassured us that, as a Jew, MR is historically pretty safe)

In Indonesia, Muslims rioted (errr... "lodged a violent protest") because of magazines filled with non-naked women:

What's the best way to deal with Muslim mobs that riot in reaction to things that they don't like? Make sure that they never have to see anything they don't like:

Global Muslim reformation in 5... 4... 3...

Right on time:

Our friends the Saudis.

This snarky two-minute Haggadah from Slate's Michael Rubiner is far less pretentious than the one at the Reconstructionist progressive second-night Seder that we were dragged privileged to attend last week. But both are alike in a very notable omission that they share - a recurring reality of the Jewish experience that many sophisticated thinkers seem literally determined to ignore. It has never really been an exaggeration, and, given Ahmadinejad's rhetoric this weekend, it is frighteningly relevant today:

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 March 2006:

A combination of unfortunate situations has prevented us from consistently posting HateWatch briefings in recent months. We apologize, and now expect to return to a more consistent schedule. This briefing will cover - albeit belatedly - trends and issues that emerged or crystallized in March 2006 and that we expect to be of continuing significance in the months to come.

* Religious Hate: Global Islamist violence; Religiously-justified degradation of women; Threats against Muslim apostates; Literally genocidal anti-gay incitement; Palestinian incitement and the international donors who fund it; Anti-Semitic incitement in the Arab press; Jews who are not so much self-loathing as just kind of anti-Semitic; Some people not sure if religiously-motivated violence on students meant to advance Islamist causes is "terrorism"; Islamists actually have read the Koran; Anti-Semitic arson in the US; Anti-Semitic humor in France and Egypt

* Idiotarian Seethings: March Cartoon Jihad roundup; Jimmy Carter still doesn't understand Islamism; The Muslim world gave us a lot of inventions - most of them a very long time ago; Generally smart conservatives go idiotarian for like a day and a half, attack Jill Carroll; Hamas won't moderate (sorry!); Mearsheimer and Walt glibness; The Academy Awards happened

* Race and Culture: Cynthia McKinney uses race-baiting to excuse her criminal violence; Yale admits Taliban member; American academy more than a little out of touch with prudence, people; Pro-immigrant activists are not very persuasive; Arab news outlet a little gullible about anti-Bush stories

* A Hopeful Note: Intellectuals issue manifestos against Islamism; Israeli-Arab soccer players refuse to boycott Denmark; Southeast Asian Muslims march against terrorism; Wafa Sultan dismantles Islamist cleric; US students agitate against Islamist intimidation; New Hampshire engages in measured, non-sectarian deliberation about gay marriage

We're beginning to think that maybe we're becoming a little obsessive:

Yes, very cute. Now stop using the word Heeb.
While you might think that flippantly sounding like a common anti-Semite makes you seem cynical and jaded, the rest of us end up thinking that you're just trying to hard. And that, motek, is soooo unsophisticated.
Listen: it's not that we don't get the joke. We cracked your code - really we did. It's just that this little "look how confident I am - I can call relgious Jews Heebs" thing just isn't funny.

Sure, it's a gimme...

... but we'll take it: so, when can we expect the International Court of Justice and a wave of human rights protesters to start descending on Saudi Arabi (hmmm... maybe after they get done with Russia's fence?)

From a month ago (but new to us), more erosion of the term "anti-Semitism:

This is from a letter to the The Billings Gazette. The writer is dumb and annoying, but nonetheless the argument is an example of a widespread strategy used in answering accusations of anti-Semitism - Language Log has a blistering post from a couple of years ago addressing such arguments. Only recently, however, has this attempt to make thinking Jew hatred more difficult developed into an explicit global strategy.

Looks like the threat of sanctions turned out not to work:

We're not saying that this actually rises to anything like an argument, but it's certainly something to think about:

You can find other Hadash stories on MR in posts such as Israeli-Arab Parliment Member Sends Anti-Israel Letter To Hague, I Love The Smell Of Treason In The Morning, and OK, See, That's Almost Definitionally Treason. For more on the considerations that guide Israel's Arab parties in general, see Uhh, That's Treason and Is It Still Treason If Arab MKs Mask Their Support for Terrorism With Thin Euphemisms? Now go back up and read that again: "they would definitely prefer Peretz over Olmert".

Remember how for years Arafat's Fatah party would say that all the Palestinian terrorism was being done by non-Fatah groups like Hamas that they couldn't control? It was a great trick - they got to claim that they were doing their best to clamp down on terrorism while they demanded more concessions from Israel in the meantime. Not only that, but they actually claimed that the terrorism was meant to weaken Fatah - so that the best way to combat the terrorists was to strengthen Fatah by giving them land. But that trick doesn't work when Hamas is actually the party in power. Unless...

Last week we joked about how there was evidence emerging of a new Palestinian division of labor. A Palestinian terrorist group takes over the government and presents a somewhat non-terrorist face to the world, while all the other terrorist groups continue their murder campaigns - until those other groups have used their terrorism to gain enough popularity to win an election, at which point everybody switches. That joke is beginning to look less and less like a joke and more and more like an accurate description of Palestinian terrorist and diplomatic strategy.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

There's something about this that sounds vaguely familiar:

OK here's the thing about Arafat's private and public assurances: he lied. We can debate back and forth just how much of the terrorism of Intifada II was directly ordered funded by Arafat, but he definitely had a hand in more than a few murders and bombings. So when to get back to the point: he lied. Having a Palestinian government say "no to terror and yes to negotiations" only gives them more of an incentive to lie - because they know they can demand concessions in negotiations while dragging their feet on the whole "no to terror" part. They've even worked out this division of labor where whoever's not in power can do the terrorism while the Palestinian government can claim plausible deniability.
Clinton should be apologizing for Olso not trying to resurrect it. He should also apologize for pressuring a string of Israeli leaders to give up land while terrorism escalated just so he could get his Noble Prize, but let's start with baby steps. How about no more believing the pledges of Palestinian governments without seeing actions to back those pledges up?

Evangelical Christians are organizing to rally political support for Israel, so of course Abe Foxman is concerned:

We're pretty confident that he meant this:

It's almost like Foxman is being intentionally obtuse just so that he can maintain suspicion between Jews and Christians. We don't want to say that there's a desperate yearning to be relevant involved, but we're pretty sure that Foxman isn't going to stop being "cautious" about evangelical political activity until Mel Gibson makes another movie. So Mr. Gibson, if you're reading this, isn't it about time for you to start pitching in on the ADL's fund-raising efforts again?

Current YNet headline: IDF: Israel has right to defend itself. To some people, unfortunately, this really does come as news.

Having at least temporarily lost the fight to totally defang Congressional efforts at isolating Hamas, the State Department has grudgingly recognized that they're going to have to cut at least some Palestinian aid. Vital Perspectives has a nice little table and summary of the loss of direct aid that the Palestinian government will suffer. They also include a description of this part of the bill:

We'll resist the urge to comment directly on the irony of giving the Palestinians democracy building funds just as you're cutting off aid to them for democratically stating their desire to wipe out the Jewish state - instead, we're much more concerned with how quietly the increase in humanitarian aid is being greeted. Reducing direct aid and offsetting it with humanitarian aid isn't really a cut at all:

For what it's worth, it does look like the US will be sending net $125-million-ish to the Palestinians next year. Which we imagine is a small price to pay for telling the world that you're unrepentant terrorists bent on genocide and having the world respond with "ok, if that's the way you want it, you're only getting half of your allowance this year".

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Spectacular work:

Not exactly the union-inspired youth revolution we were promised.

The Arab press is still salivating about the "prominent professors" who have firmly proven that Jews are undermining the United States for their own selfish interest. We haven't posted on the issue yet, largely because the first couple of weeks have been devoted - as they rightly should be - to undermining the factual basis of the smear (and especially here.). But the actual veracity of Walt and Mearsheimer's data isn't, in the long run, going to be the issue (although of course it's important for people to know exactly why they're wrong). Whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer's hack social science is sound will have no influence on the real winners of their smear - the hate mongers and bigots who are (predictably) getting picking up and amplifying these new spokesmen for the age-old double loyalty canard. They only care that Walt and Mearsheimer are reasonably well-placed academics who seem to agree with them:

Not that it will help (it's not like the bigots care about whether or not Walt and Mearsheimer are qualified - they just have to be qualified-sounding) but Walt and Mearsheimer actually aren't all that qualified to talk about domestic US politics. Contrary to what Juan Cole (and others who somehow get away with describing "cabals" of Jews) have been telling you, this insinuation that there are Jews of dual loyalty undermining the United States was not really a "study" done by field-leading experts. And it's important to point that out.
"Studies" carry a lot of weight with the public. They resonate of objectivity and dispassionate analysis - of the gathering of data and the testing of theories. This is not a study. It does not have variables. It does not have controls. It does not really test hypothesis. It's an oversimplified assumption and an unjustified leap leading to a paranoid conspiracy theory: "since the US is acting against its national interests and since it's actions help Israel, US policy must be controlled by Israel". No high school teacher would allow a student to make such an elementary mistaken between correlations and causations, but there it is, right at the bottom of the fifth paragraph of their LRB article:

"Partly aimed" is a weasel phrase - definitionally true and therefore irrefutable, but meaningless precisely because of its triviality. "The Bush administration's ambition to transform the Middle East" is also "at least partly aimed at improving" most of the following: Kuwaiti security, the relative influence of the Pentagon versus the State Department, the lifestyle of Iraqis, the relative freedom of Lebanon from Syria, what NRO writers can demand for appearing on college campuses. This is not real scholarship.
But more importantly, it's bad scholarship that wasn't even done by field-leading experts. Walt and Mearsheimer are indeed experts in a field - just not in any field that has anything to do with teasing out the strands of domestic political decision-making. Their resumes (their CVs, actually, but never mind) certainly have a certain amount of panache - especially with the New York Times / London Review of Books cocktail party crowd that has been discussing this garbage as "sophisticated opinion". But Mearsheimer and Walt are foreign policy experts. Although they might be well-placed to elaborate on half a century's worth of their (mostly failed) foreign policy initiatives, they have no formal training or credentials in understanding domestic politics. That might help explain why they were so easily embarrassed by Caroline Glick:

It's not that Glick's mockery of this particular footnote does anything to undermine the rest of the paper - but that the footnote actually made it into the paper shows just how out of their element Walt and Mearsheimer are when talking about domestic politics. It's not a critical statement, but it's a statement that would never occur to anyone genuinely well-versed in domestic Washington politics. Academic specialization means that IR theorists like Walt and Mearsheimer can analyze complex game theory equations about nuclear brinksmanship on the Indian subcontinent while still being hard-pressed to name more than a handful of Congressional Representatives. So in addition to being shoddy scholarship, their rant is also trading on not a bit of intellectual dishonesty: even in the best case, where these two really are the experts on national security that they tell everyone they are, they would still be total hacks when it comes to figuring out what contributes to making US policy... which probably goes a long way towards explaining why they sound like total hacks.

Monday morning link dump. Because it's going to be a long week.
* Olmert: I want a broad coalition. The entire known universe: That's nice, but how about instead of that, no?
* Question 1: is there a single party in Israel without a crook?
* Question 2: Who knew that an insurgent party of senior citizens elected by students too stoned to remember that they were supposed to vote for the Green Leaf party would have problems with party discipline?
* Kadima: West Bank withdrawal by 2008. That's an awful optimistic assessment of how long the government will last, given points 1, 2, and 3 above.

To the extent that we're willing to be snarky regarding Jewish movements of all ideological stripes (recent riots by Chasidic Jews: good, because we were afraid that there was still a Jewish subculture in New York that we didn't have a good reason to mock)... anyway, to the extent that we're willing to be snarky regarding Jewish movements of all ideological stripes, it behooves us to pass on news of the genuine direction that these movements are taking. The Forward is passing on leaks from two sources that a decision has been made in the chancelor search at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The flagship of American conservatism has been searching for a replacement for Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, and apparently his successor is going to be Arnold Eisen. The article has more, including gossip on Eisen's competitors.

The top news story celebrating Israeli technology this morning involves Google's purchase of Israeli student Ori Alon's search algorithm. Apparently they beat out Microsoft and Yahoo, who were also interested in the super-advanced technique for prioritizing relevance in text-searches.
By way of contrast, consider the current Al Jazeera Sci-Tech frontpage. There, you can find stories discussing recent the technological achievements in Brazil, America, and China - but the only story celebrating the relevance of technology developed anywhere in the Muslim world this week is this story. The basic idea is that centuries-old desert techniques like big windows and ice-cooling will be really important when global warming arrives, and that the West should be grateful to the Muslim world for showing the way.
In reasonably unrelated news, another day passed where the majority of people in the Arab world would have gladly assented to the violent destruction of Israel.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

There's a serious point about how absurd, biased, and haphazard Ha'aretz's cheerleading of Labor is, but in all honestly we do this mostly because it's fun. Ha'aretz is so overjoyed with Labor's success in the last election that they can't tell whether Peretz is a principled leader willing to stand by his beliefs...

... or a Machiavellian colossus capturing power where it is to be had:

For our part, we're still pretty sure he's a petty a thug. But we've come to terms with the near certainty that he's going to be a petty thug with a high-level portfolio. And by "come to terms with" we obviously mean "have been drinking through" - seriously, you Israeli kids couldn't take a break from protest voting? Just this once?

Commenting at the bottom of a blog post by Shmuel Rosner, Barney Rosen from Hemet, CA worries that "Reform Judiasm is becoming a cult". Naw, cults have loyal members (alternative punchline: naw, cults make you have firm beliefs).
We apologize, but seriously it's not our fault - this new yoga thing really is just stupid..

They really just can't help themselves - even against ostensible left-wingers:

"Supposedly Israel's closest ally" - you'd think that the Times UK could have used some of that famed British charm to hide their fangs for the length of an article. But no.

Nothing much to say:

Often, families will appoint the brother closest to his sister to carry out such murders - presumably, this demonstrates the seriousness of the family's desire to restore their honor by murdering their girl. Suliman seemed to genuinely love his sister - reports are that he broke down when her picture was shown to him during interrogation. People who argue that Westernization can unseat deeply held tribal customs - rather than just making their implementation more efficient - should ponder that this otherwise gentle doctor aided in his beloved sister's murder because she couldn't make up her mind about guys... and that this is such a disgrace that she had to be killed for it.

Lazy intellectual opposition to the Bush administration aside, there are very few social phenomena or dynamics that can properly be called "Orwellian". However, the history and development of the word "anti-Semitism" really is genuinely one of those Orwellian dynamic. More so, it is Orwellian in the most precise sense: it's an attempt to manipulate language in order to destroy concepts. Recent initiatives by the Muslim world and the United Nations have continued the history of the discursive manipulation that surrounds "anti-Semitism" - with the goal undoubtedly being to undermine people's abilities to express opposition to anti-Jewish bigotry.
Although evidence as to when the phrase was first coined is inconclusive, we do know that it was popularized when German Jew-Hater Wilhelm Marr used it in his "The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism" as a substitute for "Jew-Hatred." Marr thought that getting people to adopt "anti-Semitism" would make demonizing Jews sound more scientific and legitimate. Marr would later go on to found the "League of Anti-Semites", creating the first German organization explicitly dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish presence in Germany.
To accomplish this task of making hating Jews respectable, "anti-Semitism" had to crowd out "Jew hating", and to that extent Marr has succeeded absolutely. It is rhetorically impossible to speak or write "Jew hater" or "Jew hatred" without sounding shrill - those phrases sound awkward to all but the most tin ears. Marr guaranteed that the only way that anyone could talk about hating Jews was to do so on terms that already stacked the deck in favor of making bigotry acceptable.
Today, the Orwellian work being done by "anti-Semitism" is done through a new strategy:

Don't underestimate the potential consequences of this new, UN sanctioned movement. "Anti-Semitism" began as a term designed to give Jew haters a way to stack the rhetorical deck in their favor by making their bigotry seem scientific. Now that they've succeeded in crowding out any other way to talk about their bigotry, they want to manipulate word further to make it not about hating Jews at all. The project is literally Orwellian: first hating Jews becomes respectable, and then it disappears as a concept at all. If accusing someone of "Jew hatred" sounds so hysterical that just using it delegitimizes the accuser rather than the accused and now if "anti-Semitism" isn't about Jew hatred but about religious bigotry in general - then there would be literally no word or phrase left that described the world's oldest hatred. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but this project is literally an attempt to undermine people's abilities to express a concept by manipulating the language that they use to talk about it.
The battle over language to call out Jew haters as "Jew haters" has already been lost: "anti-Semitism" is the term that can really be used. That's why it's so overwhelmingly important that any attempt to dilute that term - the only term left to describe the hatred of Jews - be resisted as the Orwellian strategy that it is.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

There is a legitimate cultural studies-ish paper to be written about the different patterns of discourse that mark rightwing and leftwing blogs - focusing, among other things, on leftwing bloggers' penchant for post-adolescent, machoistic vulgarity. But in the meantime, Ann Coulter 1, Alec Baldwin 0:

Remember how, just a couple of days, we poked gentle fun at New York Jewish hipsters for being dumb and shallow? And remember how two of you sent us badly edited, snarky little emails about how we were being unfair? Give us a break:

One might say that the problem isn't that the old structures aren't working, but the opposite - that contemporary American Judaism has nothing to do with "old structures" and that's exactly why the religion is in decline. And by "one", we mean us:

In a world of almost infinite shiny and distracting things, trying to make religion more shiny and distracting than everything else is a losing proposition. A religion that gets rid of "the old structures" is not a religion, it's a fad. Call this the iPod-ization of Judaism - having given up trying to make Judaism into a series of life-cycle events, they're now trying to convince kids that walking into a synagogue is the equivalent of buying the new cool mp3 player. The problem is Apple's marketing department is much, much better at telling kids what they need to do to be cool.

For a long time, the task was to guess which Palestinian terrorist organization was going to murder Israeli civilians based on that organization's ideology. Hamas - very extreme - lots of murders. PFLP - mostly extreme - some murders. Fatah - outwardly moderate compared to the other unrepentant terrorists - only occasional murders.
But it turns out that everyone's been going about the categorizations all wrong. It's not about what each organization believes or their explicit ideologies. It's about who can commit murder without implicating the Palestinian government:

This is a new trick - a Palestinian terrorist group takes over the government and presents a somewhat non-terrorist face to the world, while all the other terrorist groups continue their murder campaigns. And if it so happens that one group commits enough murders to gain the popularity needed to win an election, then the terrorists switch and we start all over again. And they say Palestinians aren't good at bureaucratic division of labor.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

We're not sure what Hamas has to do before the international media will concede that the terrorist organization is really committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Literally every day, some new Hamas official states outright that the organization will never stop trying to wipe out Israel. And literally every day, some main stream media organization pretends that the official didn't really say that:

Of course, there's an entire post in itself to be written about how the Palestinians say "no negotiations" and "if you're not going to negotiate, we won't either" - and how suddenly that becomes "each side vowing to" not negotiate. But that's not this post. This post is just about how Hamas states unequivocally each and every day that they will never stop trying to destroy Israel...

... and how the international media willfully ignores those statements.