No response yet from Astaro, the security company providing schools with web filtering software that is blocking Mere Rhetoric. So obviously we left another ticket through their form, since we're patient that way (also because they promise in really big letters to respond to all requests within one business day, but we must have slipped through the cracks).
We've been categorized under "Political Extremism / Hate / Discrimination", and we're not even sure which one they're blocking us for. But we sure hope it's political extremism - "hate" and "discrimination" are so 1990s. In the meantime, we're hoping to start a kind of running list of sites that are, according to Astaro, less politically extreme / hateful / discriminatory than Mere Rhetoric. Today's site: the Democratic Underground, where the phrase "Bush Family Evil Empire" is used so often that it is routinely written by regulars as BFEE. Astaro's judgement: less extreme than Mere Rhetoric.
We're still all but sure that this is a result of their text parsing algorithm not understanding that blogs sometimes copy and paste quotes that they don't endorse. In the meantime, if you want to have some fun finding sites that Astaro considers less extreme than MR, you can use this frontend to their database. If you'd like to urge them to get back to us, their contact form is here.

When Smooth Stone predicted this morning that the MSM would find ways not to mention that San Fran hit and run driver Omeed Aziz Popal is a self-declared terrorist, he probably wasn't counting on Drudge to roll in with "VIDEO: Witness says driver declared himself a 'terrorist'..." (which is actually the same link that Smooth Stone posts).
Let's review: we have a crime that involves an attack on Jews. Many if not most of the elements of the crime are similar to the essential aspects of past crimes generally acknowledged to be domestic terrorism. And we have reports from local witnesses that the criminal explicitly declared himself to be a terrorist. Now, let's acknowledge that not all attacks on American Jews by Muslims are terrorism, that crimes can look like terrorism without being terrorism, and that the witnesses may be wrong - in other words, there's always the chance that there will turn out to be alternative explanations for the multiple indications that this was terrorism. Fair enough. But how do you justify - if, say, you're the SF Chron - not even printing the suspect's religion. What was the chain of logic that justified including "[a]t Frankie's Bohemian Cafe at Divisadero and Pine, a man named William, who asked that his last name not be used, said he had been walking south on Divisadero when "we heard the thump, turned around, saw bodies flying''" instead of the fact that this suspect shares a characteristic with the last few people who committed crimes just like this one.
Instead, we get the increasingly eye roll-inducing "history of mental problems" template. We've now gone through this routine enough times to describe with some confidence what will happen in the day or two after an attack like this, where a lone Muslim man in the United States attacks multiple Jews: (a) local and federal authorities will clarify that, despite the act resembling terrorism in every way, improbably it turns out that terrorism was not in fact committed (b) the vast majority of journalists will neglect to inform readers of the shooter's religion or ethnicity - they probably just figure that it would add nothing to the context of the story, since presumably no one has managed to pick out any similarities between all the Muslim men who have committed mass attacks on American Jews in the last few months (c) the vast majority of journalists will also neglect to print certain things that might, at first glance, seem helpful to readers who want to figure out the suspects' likely motives - things like the suspects' declarations at the scene where they state that they were committing terrorism or fighting against Jews (d) the suspect will be declared mentally unstable.
And so, as we've had to do every other time (because this pattern really has happened every other time), let's go over how sentences and logic work. In English, the operator "and" is available to language users seeking to create complex sentences. For any two well formed statements, there exists a world in which the complex sentence created by linking them with "and" is true. In other words, we can take the two statements "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable" and "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant woman is a terrorist" and combine them. The combined statement is "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is mentally unstable and is a terrorist" (or, more conversationally, "the Muslim man who shot the pregnant Jewish woman is a mentally unstable terrorist"). So when journalists inform us that an attempted mass murderer is mentally shaky, that's both a painfully obvious and an almost certainly incomplete presentation of what they know. "Mental instability" is a definition of a mass murder, not journalism - so filling up the "give the suspect's background" part of a news article by printing information about their mental health is really just a way of avoiding having to convey things that the journalist may find uncomfortable. And since it's almost definitionally true that a terrorist will have some degree of mental damage, the journalist has a built-in way not to have to describe things like family, religion, national background, etc. That a religiously-inspired mass murderer has psychological problems is the perfect journalistic go-to - true and therefore professionally safe, but totally unhelpful. Which is why we've seen volumes of that kind of journalism after each of these incidents.
It just so happens that in this particular case, the guy isn't even mentally ill in any significant sense (oh wait... but the family says diagrees!) So not only did outlets like the SF Chron pull the predictable and usually reliable where they printed "news" of mental instability as a substitute for information about the suspect's background... this time they had a run of bad luck and they don't even have their usual excuse that what they're saying is technically true. No wonder these news cycles are getting so predictable - the journalists don't even bother to check if their apologist narrative fits the facts on the ground. They just get the suspects name, the number of victims, and the time of the attack. Then they insert them into their available, crafted-to-never-ever-ever-ever-mention-religion template, and take the rest of the day off to go brainstorm bumper stickers about how much smarter they are then President Bush.
(nb. We don't really have any evidence to justify the statement that MSM journalists spend significant amounts of time brainstorming bumper sticker slogans. The stuff about how journalists are writing about these attacks using a prefabbed, ideologically designed journalistic narrative meant to obfuscate or exclude clear evidence of terrorism... if that wasn't obvious before, the fact that they automatically used it even though the suspect wasn't clinically insane is a symptomatic slip too far)

UPDATE: We don't think we took sufficient time during the original post to sit back and contemplate the brilliance of the SF Chron mental health article. Imagine you're the journalist covering this. On one hand, you're supposed to be using your paper's carefully designed "mental problems" template (because there certain facts that would just needlessly confuse the public, so why print them anyway?). On the other hand, you can't honestly see a way around printing that "those involved in the investigation... discount any mental illness, saying the 29-year-old Afghanistan native seemed coherent, unrepentant and claimed that he repeatedly drove at pedestrians because he "just wanted to."" Solution? Headline with a technically true statement that reinforces your mental instability frame: "DRIVER'S RAMPAGE THE HUMAN TOLL SUSPECT: Family cites history of mental problems". This way, the 90% or so of people who never really get past the lede of a story can put down the paper, reassured that they don't have to worry about radical Muslims attacking Jews - but maybe feeling a little bit sad about all the recent violent attacks

UPDATE 2: It seems like half of Allahpundit's life nowadays is spent preventing prominent conservative blogs from devolving into swamps of bad conspiracy theorizing. And he's right to be as careful as he's being: it's well worth missing a Reuters hoax if it means that the Left gets to keep their near monopoly on the inane, self-reinforcing cycle of "look at this seemingly irrelevant detail which is the key to a massive conspiracy" / "good job - we're so powerful - don't listen to the people presenting contrary evidence, they're just doing that because they know we're on to them. And so here's his post making the case for this guy is just a regular, non-jihadi lunatic, complete with links to a history of mental problems. Those links don't really surprise us - in proper conspiracy theory fashion, we're well prepared to integrate the fact that the SF Chron is pumping out article after article shoring up their no-terrorism-here framing of the story. The actual fact that Popal had been in a clinic is a little more problematic, but listen - our entire point is that all jihadis are to one degree or another mentally disturbed. The question is why mental instability in some Muslim-American men has expressed itself in violence against Jews, while mental instability in men of other backgrounds doesn't seem to consistently display this kind of symptom.

UPDATE 3: And if all else fails, there's still the psychoanalytic point - just because the press's terrorist-apologizing "mental instability" narrative is coincidentally accurate this time doesn't mean that that's why they choose to report the story that way (if push us a little on this argument and we'll probably give it up... maybe)

MR, 2/13/05:

Slate's Samantha Shapiro, 8/28/06, describing the graduation speech of outgoing Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Ismar Schorsch:

The fact that this is something that has to be explained and debated is very, very worrisome.< br>
[Full disclosure: our personal views on the content of the Reform vs. Conservative vs. Orthodox debates have nothing to do with the blinding empirical reality that you can't make a religion grow by letting people pick and choose what parts of dogma they want to believe. Now, the greatest scholars who argue with precision may justify their violations of Jewish law as still within Judaism, but the rest of us have to either do Jewish by following their example of concede that what we're doing is not a part of Judaism. Which may be fine - but the Reform impulse to turn everything their congregants want to do into a Jewish act seems untenable. Generally, the relationship between dogma and adherent flows the other way. Of all the major religions, Judaism is the farthest from acknowledging a personal relationship with a personal God - it is a collective practice in dialogue with particular, collective historical texts that set constraints on behavior. You can't do what you like and then insist that it's 'your way of being Jewish']

We're very glad that the Fox News reporters got out with their lives ("no matter what one’s politics, all Americans are held hostage when one of us falls into the hands of these thugs" - quite so). We're less glad that the Hamas government has decided against pursuing the kidnappers. But since we kind of suspect that Hamas and this "previously unknown group" of total clowns were working together, we're not really surprised (come on - this was the most amateurish operation ever... forced conversions... seriously?)
It would also have significantly brightened our day if the freed hostages hadn't gone out of their way to celebrate the people who had been trying to kill them:

Here's the thing: we don't think that this is Stockholm Syndrome. These are phrases that are practiced, vaguely echoing communities that are not exactly right-wing ("very beautiful and kind-hearted" is hackneyed, but thanking people for their solidarity is not generally a hallmark of the right). We could be totally wrong about this - and we fervently hope that we are - but isn't it more likely that this is a Jill Carroll situation? Sympathetic Westerners visit the homes of terrorists and discover that apologizing for terrorism has done nothing to decrease their status as "target". We don't know if anyone's done the work on this yet, but surely there's evidence one way or another what these reporters thought of Hamas, et al before their kidnapping.
Either way, now that everyone's more or less safe and sound, can we go back to openly belittling anyone who would be dumb enough to suggest that Americans will like the Palestinians more if they learn what people in Gaza really think about the West? "You need people to be aware of the story" - for crying out loud.

Kofi Annan has just finished up the hard work of spectacularly failing to meet any of the promises that he and the UN made to Israel under 1701. No stronger UNIFIL mandate, no disarmed Hezbollah, and certainly no kidnapped soldiers back. So upon his entrance into Israel, he acted in the natural way that anyone in his position would act - he imperiously issued demands and condescendingly lectured Israeli officials. After he was done with that part of his routine, he really tied his performance together by insisting that Israel should make massive security concessions to Hamas and Hezbollah. Of course he did:

We link how he keeps returning to the idea that Israel needs to allow a wave of free movement in and out of the Gaza Strip. That way - if they really, really need to - the Palestinians will be able to smuggle one or two things out of the Gaza Strip. And if one of those things happens to have a vaguely kidnapped-IDF-soldier shape, well, certainly the Secretary General can't be blamed for that. After all, he did politely request that Hamas let him go. This is really genius: ask the kidnappers to return their hostage, and then take away any incentive they might have to do so. But let's not rush to judgment about Annan's motives or competence - maybe he's counting on Hamas's well-known sense of fair play when it comes to their treatment of Israelis.
Here's our suggestion: if the Palestinians want the Israelis to stop targeting them in counter-terrorism operations, they should stop planning and trying to execute terrorism:

Don't blame the Gazans though - it's the Israeli Occupation of Gaza that makes them feel depressed and violent.

A senior from a Colorado high school emailed us this morning to tell us that his school's web filtering software is blocking Mere Rhetoric:

Screencap:



Just as an intellectual exercise, here is a very brief list of arguably relevant differences between Mere Rhetoric and the Huffington Post:

(1) The Huffington Post recently published a photo of a US Senator that was photoshopped to paint blackface on him. In sharp contrast, Mere Rhetoric has consistently declined to publish racist photos.
(2) The Huffington Post recently featured a cartoon focusing on stereotypically-drawn Jewish figures who eagerly plan to "kill everything that breathes". In sharp contrast, Mere Rhetoric has consistently declined to feature either cartoons with hateful drawings or accusations involving ancient, shadowy, genocide-planning global cabals. Our posts about Hamas's and Hezbollah's and Iran's genocidal intentions don't count - copying and pasting their press releases isn't an "accusation".
(3) The Huffington Post recently hosted a disturbingly enthusiastic thought experiment describing the electoral advantages that the Democrats could gain from another terrorist attack on the US. In sharp contrast, Mere Rhetoric has consistently declined to brainstorm GOTV strategies that rely on the mass murder of civilians.
(4) The Huffington Post recently provided space for a conversation that began as just your typical Leftist collection of lurid and wide-eyed anti-Israel conspiracy theories - but that then somehow devolved into dark suggestions about an Israeli "master plan". In sharp contrast, Mere Rhetoric has consistently declined to deploy rhetoric that is historically implicated in the construction, legitimization, and justification of the Nazi Final Solution.

And that's before we get to the HP's consistent cheerleading for Mearsheimer's increasingly creepy fascination with the Jewish State... Listen, snark aside - this is kind of absurd. Mere Rhetoric is most reasonably somewhere between center-right and right on the political spectrum. We support a two-state solution and the prosecution of genuine war crimes. We supported disengagement when it was happening and we supported Kadima's realignment plan back when there were actually people advocating it. That there are also posts describing the geopolitical, cultural, and moral justifications for a secure Jewish homeland cannot be a justification for accusations of political extremism or hate speech. Quite the opposite - the right of a UN member to continue existing in peace is almost the definition of a centrist position, regardless of whether that member is Israel or not. We understand that there are people on the Left who can't distinguish between our positions and the positions of genuine extremists – if you're looking at Earth from light years away, Los Angeles looks like Tokyo. But we also don't think that those people should be determining what students get to see.

We've written Astaro to request a description of what triggered the "hate" site categorization. Their form promises a response within one business day, so hopefully we'll have more information soon. We're inclined to believe that there's a perfectly innocent explanation for this (no sarcasm intended - these tasks are automated, and we use many of the same words as genuine hate sites... and that's without considering quotes). But the alternative - a politicized attempt to move acceptable discourse far leftwards - is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

UPDATE: There is at least one innocent explanation for this fiasco. It could be that Astaro's text-parsing algorithms can't understand sarcasm. In which case they should under no circumstances let them loose anywhere near the blogosphere.

UPDATE 2: Chances of deliberate agenda-pushing growing dimmer. Astaro's filters don't seem to have any problem with LGF, Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Hot Air, of PJM. Our best guess is that one of these three things pissed off their spider:
(1) we were criticizing a hate site, and copied and pasted a block of text from it as an example
(2) we were criticizing a hate site, and we inserted a hyperlink to the site so that readers could see it for themselves
(3) we were in the middle of a really bitter diatribe and wrote something that was meant to be taken as sarcasm - a rhetorical device potentially lost on Astaro's robot
Anyway, we can't do much about this situation until they give us some sort of response. We're going to stop our speculation until we get a little more data.

In what a neutral media outlet is describing as a "stinging attack on Mr. Blair", Labour MP Kitty Ussher unleashed the following coherent and well-reasoned assertions:

Well first, there's at least one other conclusion that any right-minded person can draw: that the Prime Minister thought that it wasn't OK that Israelis should have to keep dying. But if that didn't occur as an option to the right honorable madame, we'll let it slide.
Now, it's trite to point out that sectarian violence in the Muslim world far surpasses what Jews and Christians do, and while that's technically true we won't belabor the point. But there are two points we do want to make:
(1) Cultures that celebrate suicide bombing don't get to talk about the sanctity of life. Full stop.
(2) Muslim blood seems cheap to other Muslims even in non-sectarian contexts:

Of course, it's quite reasonable to point out that many of the Lebanese civilians who suffered because Hezbollah choose to start a war don't support suicide bombings (although it's not reasonable to blame Israel for their suffering). And in that specific context, certainly the very terse and glib arguments we're offering about who is determining the relative "cheapness" of Muslim blood is unpersuasive. But to speak grandiously about the Muslim world in general and to imply that Jews and Christians are responsible for Bin Laden saying that Muslims love death - that seems a little unfair.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

They're hopeless:

Poor babies. But then again, why do you need a battlefield when you can just create on in Photoshop? Also, they did have access:

How reflexive is the media's instinct to blame Israel? Even when the media makes up things to blame Israel for, it's Israel's fault.

* Way back in 1981, the first President of theocratic Iran explained why the regime was in the process of passing a law that would make wearing the humiliating hijab mandatory for all girls above six. He explained - and we're quoting now - that "scientific research has shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane". Why this meant that all women had to be covered from head to toe was not for Iranian women to question. In the last 10 years, women have been growing progressively more bold and walking around with their faces uncovered. No more:

Direct state control over the body - the essence of fascism.

* We have a close friend and, being the committed progressives that we are, we sometimes try to show her evidence of how reactionary political Islam is. Invariably (and without irony) she says "well of course [insert Hezbollah TV / Iran / Saudi Arabi / etc] is bad, but that doesn't mean..." So in this case, it'd be something like "well of course Iran is bad, but that doesn't mean that..." Perhaps not. But there does appear to be something of this unseemly urge to control women that follows political Islam across international borders:

Good for the girl and her parents for standing up to these pathetic control freaks.

* A pathological patient is one who, because of a mental disturbance, exhibits behavior that is maladaptive. Like not letting in female aid workers after a natural disaster:

Why do they have to always be violent protests? We're not being entirely sarcastic here. They have culture. They have a written language. They have a postal system, as it is. Why can't they just organize a letter writing campaign or something? Just once.

* All of this pathological "not being able to tolerate even the sight of women" thing makes Ahmadinejad's flattery of German Chancellor Merkel's ovaries seem disingenuous. And to be honest, it's not like his letter to her was a model of women's liberation to begin with:

The country that Merkel leads is, among other things, a member of the most powerful and successful military alliance in the history of the entire known universe. It is the world's 3rd largest economy (almost 30 slots ahead of Iran). But Mr. 12th century over here thinks that the Chancellor will be all flattered and get flustered if he compliments her for her "sentiments" and her ability to be a mother. And that wasn't even the part that Merkel found most unsettling. She was reportedly troubled by this passage even more, where Ahmadinejad implies that the Allies made up the Holocaust in order to punish Germany with "guilt":

Pssst... by "Zionists", he means "Jews".

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Not long ago, the intellectual Left realized that there are places in this country where children are encouraged to aggressively defend their religious beliefs. And just as they were getting over their shock at discovering that these "church" things are allowed to exist, along came even more bad news: there are actually summer camps where the exact same things happen. So disturbed were they that two of them - directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing - went out and made an expose about it. The film is called Jesus Camp, and it debuts on September 7:

Oh, it's horrible. Just horrible. If we don't do something about these camps soon, an entire generation of devoted Christian Americans will be put on the track to becoming an active part of America's political future. There's a good chance that one or two might even become lawyers!
Listen, it's not like we support these things. They actually sound like a kind of crappy thing to do to your kid: "Mommy, how come Janey gets to play in the lake but I have to read about the United Nations and the Beast of Babylon?" But who cares? So two decades from now there'll be a couple more lawyers trying to overturn the separation of Church and State. It's not like they're going to get on the Court - you know that Ted Kennedy will still be alive, and you know that he'll have himself wheeled to the podium so he can filibuster.
On the other hand, what would be nice is if we could get talented American filmmakers to make audiences aware that the Palestinians have religion-based summer camps too. Like the Christian camps, the Palestinian camps also teach children to be "soldiers in 'God's army'". Unlike the Christian camps, they mean 'army' in a very literal way:

We understand why filmmakers aren't talking about this though - it's impossible for anyone to track both Palestinian and Christian summer camps. Choices have to be made and resources have to be allocated. And filmmakers seem to have decided that they're going to make a real difference by exposing the Christian camps. So instead of powerfully conveying how Palestinian children are being taught that their highest goal should be to die in a particularly violent and horrific way, American filmmakers are on the front lines alerting us to the coming tidal wave of over-eager prepubescent Christians. Good thing too, because now we'll know what's going on when we see kids going door to door in our neighborhood, asking people to make "donations" so that African children can "eat".

UPDATE: Oh, this movie is obviously going to be not at all smug or condescending::

We're not from that side of the religious aisle so we're only guessing, but without seeing the movie we're willing to bet that the camp members were asking God to give President Bush insight and strength. In other words they were not praying to Bush's cutout as this article, through omission, comes dangerously close to de facto asserting. As opposed to praying to Bush, the campers were almost certainly doing something that (we're given to understand) is pretty common among Christians: they were praying for him.
But listen, this scene by scene analysis is largely beside the point. Maybe this movie is spectacularly balanced, split right down the middle. Maybe these are two of the very few filmmakers on the planet who, when they say they want to start an open discussion, actually do want to start an open discussion (we'll ignore how the suggestion that there is something of concern that evangelicals and secularists need discuss already stacks the deck). But let's play the thought experiment out: maybe these two filmmakers really see a need for public deliberation about religious encroachment into secular life. The question then remains exactly the same: how can a reasonably informed, reasonably logical person look around and pick out American evangelicalism as the most pressing and dangerous theocratic trend?
Rather than being concerned about American evangelicalism, secularists ought to be focusing their energies on opening up discussions about the growing influence of political Islam. Within whole orders of magnitude, there's simply nothing that's even close to as great a threat to progressivism. It is a threat both because of its explicit anti-woman and anti-gay commitments (we can hear it now: 'so are Christians'... hold on) - it's a threat both because of its explicit anti-woman and anti-gay commitments and because many of its adherents have demonstrated a remarkably low threshold for committing acts of violence when they're offended by non-Muslims around them. Already in this country, CAIR is regularly making not very veiled threats when it finds the work of certain artists to be offensive.
A brave filmmaker genuinely concerned about creeping (and creepy) theocracy could start a national dialogue about the tactics used to indoctrinate Palestinian children into Islamism. There would be a film about a kind of religious fanaticism that is dangerous in the near-term both in its intents and in its capabilities. A filmmaker who produced something about Islamist brainwashing in Palestinian summer camps would be well-placed to turn the movie into an index to all kinds of local and global reactionary Muslim movements.
The downside is these filmmakers need to be able to make small-talk when they go to their Manhattan cocktail parties. And in that sense, it's much easier to get everyone laughing and smirking about 'that one scene' where 'those people' were 'praying to the cardboard Bush'. And so it goes.

* Dave Bender just uploaded a ton of pics to his Flickr pool. Many were taken in the last few weeks across the north of Israel, during the war. There are some very well-shot photos of local kids playing on the walls of Akko (at least we think that's Akko). And for those of you not into looking at crumbling Crusader fortifications, there are lots of pictures of really big tanks and guns.

* Michael Totten, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, has a link to a film that originally hit to the blogosphere on the site of Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman. The 25 minute film was shot by Israeli video journalist Itai Anghel, who accompanied regiment 931 of the Nahal on a night raid into an Hezbollah-controlled village. The film itself is riveting - the bravery and loyalty of the soldiers is awe-inspiring.
That said, the film also documents a genuine outrage on the part of Hezbollah's - a violation of very, very basic laws of war. Some people who've linked to the film have chosen to let you find out what it is yourself, while others have chosen to spare you the suspense. We're going spoil it for you, because there's a .001% chance that your computer will crash in the next half hour - and this is something you should know about. After the Nahal troops encountered the representatives from Iran's proxy army, they learned that the Hezbollah fighters were wearing IDF uniforms. The IDF troops had to react accordingly to avoid confusion, and they ended up degrading their uniforms and gear. The frustration in watching this scene is at least two-fold: first, you have to watch these 20 year olds remove safety equipment because the other side can't be bothered not to commit war crimes. Then, it slowly dawns on you that the Israeli troops are in no way shocked at their enemy's crimes.

* Rantings of a Sandmonkey has pictures and personal thoughts from last week's massive effort to move the Ramses II statue out of Cairo. The statue had been perhaps the city's most prominent landmark it was brought there by Nasser in the 1950s as a symbol of indigenous Egyptian greatness. It had since become an emotionally charged, cherished part of the city - one of the last remaining visible markers of what had once been a powerful, secular pan-Arab movement. In its time, Arab armies under the pan-Arab banner came very close to destroying Israel - but today that movement is as absent from daily Egyptian life as the Ramses statue now is. When he gets to the part of the post where he discusses the Islamists who feel no connection to the statue or what it represents, Sandmonkey seems to lose something in the way of subtlety.

* In the last few days, there have been so many anti-American and anti-Semitic anti-Zionist slurs thrown around on MoveOn.org that Bill Levinson actually had to start a new blog just so we wouldn't run out of server space over at IsraPundit.

We've apparently been unfortunate enough to recieve the attention of Len from esoterically.net. Len lives in Dallas and would like everyone to know that he is a liberal Democrat. He awarded us his "stuck on stupid award"(actually, we had to share it with Scott from Power Line... sigh). Anyway, he's not pleased with our little diatribe against the NYT:

Actually, as a matter of fact, no it's not just a "matter of the soul". Faith has never been divorced from physical actions and utterances in this world, either metaphorically or theologically. This has been true for everyone from the most sparkling Protestant thinkers (CS Lewis: a physical weight was removed) to Catholic theologians (Pascal: kneel and you will believe) to Jewish and Christian martyrs in the Bible who died rather than utter blasphemy. The entire tradition of Judeo-Christianity emphasizes the productive intertwining and tension between material corporeality and immaterial substance. The physical movements that congregants enact and the words that they utter mediate their relationship with the eternal. That's why there are readings and recitations in shul and church. That's why Christians cross themselves instead of just imagining themselves crossing themselves. This isn't even a debate. Of course Judeo-Christianity holds that "speaking some words" matters - that's why literally millions of people have been tortured to death rather than verbally deny their faith. How could anyone who doesn't realize that ever be confident enough to engage anyone in any debate about theology - let alone to be as insufferable as Len the liberal Democrat is when doing it.
We know this might be difficult for Len the liberal Democrat to understand: words matter. No, no don't argue. They really do. There's this impulse in some activist circles to pretend that they don't - to pretend that 'what you really believe' is more important than either what you say or what you accomplish. And if our social projects were as routinely disastrous as theirs, we'd hold on to that impulse just for the sake of sanity. But the great religions have been around far too long and have had far too many theological debates for that absurd abdication of responsibility to seem reasonable.
You know what really bothers us? It's not the pathetically self-important stunt of naming an award and then ironically handing it out. It's this insufferable liberal conceit that (1) presumes to walk into a discussion the contours of which one doesn't understand, (2) substitutes feel-good mantras for rigorous thought ('it's a matter of the soul, man'), and (3) is actually sarcastic and arrogant despite being hopelessly out of depth. You see it across the board, from vexing economic problems to brewing international crises to complicated moral questions. There's this unblinking and shameless overconfidence that presumes that people who have been talking about these things for decades and centuries have simply missed a very obvious (coincidentally liberal) platitude that solves everything. As if millions of martyrs and the best theological minds in history simply missed Len's insight that saying you're converting isn't the same thing as converting. It's so obvious, he even asks it in the form of a condescending rhetorical question. It's like you have to be an idiot not to realize that, right? Too bad he hasn't been around through the ages to comfort all those martyrs with his theological brilliance: words don't count.
"Is not conversion a matter of the soul?" What an tool.

Jackie Mason, cofounder of One Jerusalem and among Judaism's most cherished treasures, has improbably managed to increase his tribe-street cred even more by going after Jews for Jesus:

As always, we're of two minds about New York-based activity by Jews for Jesus missionaries. On one hand, it's obviously annoying to have your religion hijacked by theological newcomers who have zero familiarity with theoretical exegesis - but who feel really, really passionately about their beliefs (they're kind of like religious versions of many liberal academics). On the other hand, there's always a chance that some liberal New York Jewish hipster will be passing by, overhear a conversation, and actually learn something about the Old Testament.

Sigh. Obviously:

As always, the frustrating thing isn't the perennial anti-Israel bait-and-switch - where Israel gets baited with something decent, like peace, and then there's a switch to something that's the opposite, like war (or the bait is getting soldiers back, and then the switch is to not getting the soldiers back). The frustrating thing is that everybody always knew that the UN and the Europeans and Israel's Arab enemies would back out of their commitments - and yet negotiations were conducted as if that wasn't common knowledge. If we were an Arab entity negotiating with Israel, we would offer enormous promises of normalization and peace in order to get massive concessions - because we'd be very secure that we could always back out of what we promised, whereas the Israelis would be forced to live up to their deal. Like the Oslo Accords. Or Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. Or the Wye Agreements. Or... hey!

There are days when we manage to convince ourselves that Ahmadinejad knows what he's doing. During those times, we end up believing that while he's pathological and evil, he has a decent grip on reality. So he knows that the Holocaust happened, for instance, but he's engaging in a deliberate rhetorical strategy to delegimitize Israel for theological reasons. But actually, he's just crazy:

No wonder Merkel heaped scorn on the letter.
But the greater problem is this: for any diplomatic strategy to work - any at all - the people talking at least have to live in the same reality. They don't have to agree on everything - in this case, people can disagree about the extent of the Holocaust and still engage in something we'd call communication with each other - but there has to be some sort of common basis. Ahmadinejad really seems to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. Why else would he make this claim to an actual German, except with the belief that secretly she knows it too and is just looking for the political backing to say it out loud? If he's really that far gone, there's a very real sense in which he doesn't live in the same world that the rest of us do. The great events that have shaped our lives and our sensibilities simply don't register with him. He is that far gone.

UPDATE: The German press has a hold of this story now. Ahmadinejad's attempt to make them feel better by convincing them that the Holocaust was a cruel joke played on them by the Allies doesn't seem to be going well. The picture of Merkel that they're running must be her unhappy face, and the photo is captioned "Merkel was not amused by the letter from Iran"

This is really just too perfect:

(1) Sarid's "invitation was rescinded because he is Israeli... the conference... goal is 'bridging gaps between different... peoples'". Ponder that for a little while.
(2) Norway considers not letting intolerant Muslims reject Israeli and Jewish participants - a principle they hold so dear that they urged Sarid to stop being Israeli so that he could go. Why not just offer him a baptism and get it over with? Good to know exactly how much European principles are worth in the face of Muslim Jew-hatred.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

We're quite convinced that Walt and Mearsheimer aren't anti-Semites. How they came up with the preposterous idea that American foreign policy is oriented toward securing Israel's interests is anyone's guess. We're not ready to dismiss a life-long commitment to piss-poor social science as a possible explanation, but there are also more subtle possibilities. Perhaps out of confusion and frustration at their declining influence, they reached out unconsciously for the least controversial position in the American academy: pro-Israel neocons have taken over the Bush administration. But there's one possibility that hasn't been given serious consideration - and it's one that, given their deserved stature in international relations, we're loathe to introduce. But after their stunt today with CAIR, we think that this possibility should at least be in the realm of consideration: they might just not know anything about the US's actual Middle East policy.
Their original paper was embarrassing in its oversights and misstatements:

He might also have mentioned their intellectual dishonesty in complaining about US aid to Israel (aid that Israel was promised so that Jimmy Carter could get a Noble Prize by getting Israel to give up critical land - and security - to Egypt, which the realists supported because it moved Egypt out of the Soviet orbit) and in leaving out the part where Bush Sr. almost cut off aid to Shamir because of Israeli settlements.
All of these oversights might be understood - if not excused - as attempts to put together a coherent and consistent hit-piece. And we're far more willing to entertain the possibility that two professors are being dishonest before we consider the possibility that these two IR giants are just flat ignorant. And yet, Rick Richman's very concise decimation of their CAIR conference makes this twice that they've been egregiously mistaken about the history of Middle East policy:

More dramatically, Bush basically treated Sharon like the leader of a client state when he turned to him during the meeting the two had with Abbas and said "you're going to help this man". We don't know what Walt and Mearsheimer are up to, and we're increasingly of the opinion that they don't know either.

UPDATE: They don't know anything about domestic politics either:

This actually makes things much easier. The reason that Walt and Mearsheimer are wrong about the way Washington works is because they don't know anything about Washington. Done and done.

UPDATE 2: Don't miss this part from the Milbank article:

This is an oversight no social scientist of Mearsheimer's stature could possibly make unintentionally. Seriously, we're not being sarcastic here. Mearsheimer will embarrass each and every reader of this blog with his ability to manipulate data on an Excel sheet - this omission crosses into just sheer dishonesty on his part. Deliberate dishonesty, in turn, is not done without a purpose.

Iran threatens to pull out of nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It's not like Iran being in the NPT is doing anyone any good. The NPT allows inspectors to check out nuclear facilities to make sure they're not being misused - and Iran is already turning away these inspectors. But big picture: Iran might pull out of the NPT? Oh no! Then they might do something really crazy - like putting a Heavy Water Reactor online or ramping up their nuclear program.

Go read our friend Chris McIntosh's sports blog New Fool In Town. Chris is a PhD student in the University of Chicago's IR department. While you're there, feel free to ask him why John Mearsheimer keeps saying anti-Semitic things. He'll find it funny, trust us.

One of the basic questions in science ethics classes involves to what extent a scientist is responsible for what people do with her work. If someone discovers a new polymer and someone uses it to create a toxic gas, is she to be held accountable because she should have anticipated that use? More basically: if someone tells the truth, are they responsible if telling that truth has uncomfortable consequences. Now, Walt and Mearsheimer didn't tell the truth in their dual-loyalty-esque diatribe against the 'Jews and their friends' who supposedly control US foreign policy, but their defense is that they actually believe their piss-poor social science. So when unsavory characters hop on the Walt and Mearsheimer bandwagon, the claim of these two academics is that that it's not their fault if other people agree with their conclusions for different reasons.
So when David Duke triumphantly announces (about Eliot Cohen) that "Leading Neocon Jumps into the fray against Harvard paper and me!", we can imagine that Walt and Mearsheimer would say that it's not their fault that they're feeding racist fantasies because they disagree with the racist's reasoning. They agree with him that the Israel lobby has disproportionate influence on American foreign policy, but not for the reasons that he offers. One would expect them to at a minimum disassociate themselves from such reasoning at length (given that that's the obvious normative danger of their position), but let's not ask too much.
Here's the thing though - Solomonia reported earlier this weekend that Walt and Mearsheimer are teaming up with two CAIR officials to talk about how why the US acted the way it did during Lebanon II. Now we assume - in fact, we're quite confident - that CAIR's reasoning for why they oppose US actions is far, far different from what Walt and Mearsheimer tell themselves their reason for opposing AIPAC is. To that extent, it's fair to ask where they draw their line on proper and improper reasons to fear the Israel Lobby. They'll rub elbows with some people who agree with their conclusions for non-social science reasons (say, a distaste for Jews on the part of some CAIR members) but not with others (say, a distaste for Jews on the part of some of David Duke's supporters).
We don't think that Walt and Mearsheimer are anti-Semites. We just think that they're among the most stereotypical of the once-venerated academic realists: seething with resentment about the precipitous loss of influence they have experienced since 9/11 and very, very pissed off about US policy in the Middle East. For the better part of half a decade, they've been insisting that the Bush Administration's policy of democratization and regime change are undermining global stability - they have all but insisted that if only everyone would heed their advice and go back to propping up Arab dictators, this whole "Muslims want to conquer the world" thing would go away. But they have a problem: the palpable failure of decades of realism in the Middle East - as evidenced by things like global jihadism beginning in the 1990s - has made them sound kind of silly. Their "we should support tyrants" refrain hasn't really caught on. Having literati like Christopher Hitchens evicerate them in print might have been discomforting, but it must have been downright embarrassing when the Secretary of State - herself once a leading light of Sovietology and realism - publicly declared them to be irrelevant. And so a new strategy was needed. Even self-absorbed academics eventually notice when their pretentious tirades about how everyone is naive are becoming pathetic. Their solution: publish a rambling diatribe in a highbrow outlet. Fill the diatribe with the same old complaints about how turning away from realism will doom the US, but this time make a sensational accusation so that you can be sure you'll get attention: scandalously scapegoat someone that opponents of the Iraq War from across the political spectrum can unite in vilifying. Old realist line: "Arabs aren't good at democracy." New realist line: "Arabs are just like us. It's the Jews' fault that we're fighting them". Out of sheer frustration and confusion, Walt and Mearsheimer latched on to the most readily available foreign policy meme in academy: neo-cons control the Bush administration.
Our point is that they should have to be a little more honest in their backtracking. Refusing to endorse people who agree with their conclusions for hateful reasons was a coherent - if unpersuasive - start. But now they've proven that they're so desperate that they're willing to sit down with people who will agree with their conclusions for far more unsavory reasons. So they're back to sounding like anti-Semites, associating with anti-Semites, and having to claim that they're not anti-Semites. At this point, we think we're doing a better job arguing why they're not anti-Semites than they were.

UPDATE: This post has been changed since its original posting. No content has been changed, but numerous typos and outright linguistic errors have been corrected. Thanks to Lynn-B for the gentle email alerting us to these errors, an email that despite its gentleness used school-teacher red to indicate errors. Which was scary. But effective.
But scary.

From the description at the bottom of this article, Magdi Khalil is a political analyst, researcher, author and Executive Editor of the Egyptian weekly Watani International. He is also a syndicated columnist for several Arabic language newspapers, and a frequent contributor to Middle East broadcast news TV. In an article about Lebanon II, he asks Nasrallah several questions. Three caught our eye:

The situation is thus as follows: Even granting Hezbollah's pretexts about the Shebaa Farms being Lebanese lands (which we don't believe and are granting only for the sake of argument)... if even granting those pretexts, it is still the case that Syria is in occupation of more Lebanese land than Israel and it is holding Lebanese prisoners in far worse conditions than Israel is. As recently as this weekend, Hezbollah had been explicit on these conditions:

That being the case, if Hezbollah was interested in the Lebanese cause, they would be attacking Syria at least as often as they're attacking Israel. They're not because their real goal is to wipe out the Jews in Israel:

On July 26th, after Hezbollah had committed their act of war by crossing the Blue Line and attacking Israel, the United States pressured Israel to put the Farms back on the negotiating table, ostensibly because this would sufficiently appease Hezbollah. Maybe they didn't hear the speeches that Khalil is referring to.

Israel got four Hamas terrorists in Gaza with a missile. All well and good, that's not what we're posting about. Instead, we'd like to put on a little demonstration. The first picture below of the car that the terrorists were riding in. This is a vehicle that has been hit by an Israeli missile:


This is the top of the press van that Reuters claimed was hit by a missile. Unlike the car above, it is not a vehicle that has been hit by an Israeli missile:


This another angle of the van. It is still not a vehicle that has been hit by an Israeli missile:


Here's the thing about the anti-Israel media: they lie.

UPDATE: Some of you are arriving here from posts that are not very friendly. We've tried to address some of those criticisms.

We know we said we were done for today, but really, these people have just lost it:

You idiot! You total blistering idiot! Being forced to convert is a harm. It might be the oldest harm short of death - being forced to renounce your faith and your god. Millions of people - literally millions - have died rather than deign to utter words that would force them to give up their faith. No wonder liberal journalists are utterly baffled by fully half of the United States - they don't think having to give up your religion is harmful. We are beyond certain that if Muslim prisoners at Gitmo were forced to convert away from Islam as a condition of their release, the New York Times would not be putting the phrase "released unharmed" into their lede. Way beyond certain.
There's a deeper explanation for how paragraphs like this can get written. It's not really bias, as much as it is the blind spots imposed by any ideology. And within that dynamic are questions about the degree of myopia and the room for self-reflection that particular ideologies allow. But don't worry about that right now. Just bask in the beauty of the phrase "released unharmed... after being forced at gunpoint to say... that they had converted to Islam"

We give up.
PA government spokesman Dr. Ghazi Hamad:

Hezbollah head terrorist Sheik Hassan Nasrallah:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (actually, we think that this one is kind of a fib):

This is getting too weird. We're taking the rest of the day off

At the risk of being dull in our repetition, the IDF doesn't intentionally target media vehicle. They don't intentionally target UN infrastructure (unless you count roads built for Hezbollah by the UN). They don't intentionally target Red Cross ambulances. For some reason - assiduous neutrality - the press seems to be searching for an anti-Israel story to run (the last seven or eight really good scandals all turned out to be hoaxes). So last night, they announced that a clearly marked Reuters van had been hit by an Israeli missile. Except this morning it turns out that there's no way a missile hit that van and that there were no clear markings - because, among other things, the van was in a combat zone... at night!

We'll let others debate out the theoretical and moral merits of converting to Islam in order to save your life. On another register, we're finding it very hard to disagree with this analysis from DEBKA:

This isn't normal DEBKA "we looked into our crystal ball and this is what it told us" stream of consciousness. The Palestinians have admitted that they knew where the reporters were being held all along - and now the media is treating the PA like heros for getting them released. And you remember how rightwing bloggers mocked the media's parroting of the "previously unknown terror group" phrase (because of the known Palestinian tactic of making up new organizations so that their master organizations - Hamas, Fatah, etc - don't get blamed)? That turned out to be true:

It's like they're not even trying any more. They know they can be as shameless as they want and the West will still pretend not to know what's going on - because if anyone actually said out loud that most Palestinian groups were working together most of the time, then it would be much harder to appease the groups one by one.

About 20 minutes ago, Walla (Hebrew) passed on a report from the newspaper Ma'ariv. We can't find this report on Ma'arive's website, so we assume that they're talking about the print edition which just hit newsstands. Apparently, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, quoting reliable sources, says that German mediators have worked out a prisoner exchange deal. This deal is not finalized, but the expectation is that within 2 to 3 weeks Israel will release a still unspecified number of prisoners in exchange for the three soldiers kidnapped by Hamas and Hezbollah. More updates as we get them.

This guy runs a regime that refers to Israel as a two-bomb country. He's said that every resource of his country is devoted to confronting the West, and he considers the destruction of Israel to be the first stage of that confrontation. But he wants you to know that - in contrast to every single other thing he does - his country's nuclear program is actually not a threat to Israel:

That's weird, because less than a week ago he was saying that Iran would lead the fight to destroy "the Zionist regime". So forgive us for not exactly finding his reassurance as comforting as liberals might.

Slow news day:

If they wanted to do real damage, they would have called Adobe to have Reuters's Photoshop license revoked.

In a village that Israel has to raid in order to kill local terrorists, we wouldn't trust "local witnesses" to tell us if it's daylight or nighttime. Here's the thing: we think that it's plausible that they have an incentive to lie in order to make Israel look worse. Now, in the past, we obviously would believe witnesses if their descriptions were confirmed by journalists' observations. Not so much any more.
We don't really think that this is complicated: these people lie in order to demonize Israel. They lie a lot. They lie shamelessly. And a lot of people have always suspected that they lie, but this time enough smart people took enough time to conclusively demonstrate it.
Listen, you shmucks, the IDF doesn't intentionally target media vehicle. They don't intentionally target UN infrastructure (unless you count roads built for Hezbollah by the UN). They don't intentionally target Red Cross ambulances. No Israel commander wakes up and says "let's go ahead and commit a human rights atrocity", and no Israeli soldier targets assets outside the scope of their mission just for fun. Your dark fantasies of evil Jews aside, it's just not the way it works.

Nebraska has a legal problem, and this is the problem: they fired a KKK member because there was a greater than even chance that he wasn't going out of his way to protect black people. Now he's suing to be reinstated. We're not sure about the legal niceties of the dispute, but as a matter of common sense this debate isn't even close: the reason we don't let people like that work those kinds of jobs is because we just don't trust them to put aside their personal views in order to discharge their professional duties... which is probably a great reason not to let troops from Muslim countries defend Israel:

Awesome. Just awesome.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Sometimes, members of Iran's Hezbollah proxy army had to run and hide from the IDF. During those times, we're sure they were happy to know that UNIFIL was doing their reconnaissance work for them:

And now there are thousands more of them on the ground!

Pamela vlogs about US mendacity and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the beach. In a bikini. The woman is a riot - arguably insane, sure, but a total riot.
Phish bowl does the obvious with the bikini vlog, and to be honest, the choreography looks amazingly well-planned. Like Pink Floyd - Wizard of Oz amazing.
When you're done with those two, Chris Hitchens was on Bill Maher's show, and took exception to the pretentious, insular, and self-congratulatory shallowness that passes for New York liberal anti-Bush sentiment.

Just in time for Iran's "we're going nuclear" festivities, comes this charming story: