The Coast Guard has new information about the mysterious deaths of two of its divers in the Arctic Ocean. Four months ago, Jessica Hill and Steven Duque were part of a scientific expedition collecting data 500 miles north of Alaska. But something went wrong after the two plunged into the icy waters through a hole in the ice for a training mission... After the tragic dive, the families were told by investigators that something pulled the two divers down - but what it was exactly could not be explained. After the incident, Duque's family, including his sister, went to Seattle and visited the ship's crew to look for answers.
Let's go over that middle part again: "something pulled the two divers down - but what it was exactly could not be explained". We didn't think they wrote sentences like that about the Arctic, except in movies where ALIENS INVADE EARTH and EVERYBODY DIES.
* Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes: During times like this, we like to revisit the words of one Prof. Juan Cole: "PS As for Friedman's main point, that Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, it is bizarre." Totally bizarre! Douchebag.
The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy. The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.
Paris is about to get its first architecturally significant tall building in a decade and a half:
Morphosis, the Los Angeles architectural firm headed by 2005 Pritzker prize-winner Thom Mayne, have sent us images of their competition-winning tower for the La Défense business district in Paris.The design, called the "Phare" (beacon), was declared the winner of the architectural contest on Friday 24 November. At 300 metres high, the 68-storey tower will be slightly shorted than the 320m Eiffel Tower when it is completed in 2012.
This is to be a mark of French chic, culture, progress. A beacon of the French culture. And what's the architectural inspiration for the building? What is the aesthetic that has been chosen to embody France in steel and glass? Over again to Josh Stein at Gridskipper:
Reclaiming its place as an architecturally forward city, Paris just announced the winner of the contract to build a hulking office space at La Defense. The tower, when it is completed in 2012, will rival the Eiffel Tower in height and in sheer looking-forwardness finds its closest ally in the gentle curves of the Institute of the Arab World.
But hey, probably nothing to worry about. It's not like Josh knows anything about architecture. Or like he's the editor of Gawker Media's Travel and Architecture blog of anything.
Spiegel is reporting a Fuhrer/furor over Santa Claus figures in tight formation in store windows raising their arms in what seems to be a Nazi salute. The figurines, which have been spotted throughout Germany, are clad in Nazi colors (red and white), all white and have an outstretched arm.
There's a picture attached. It really is a couple lines of Santas all hieling an imaginary North Pole fuhrer. It's a furor about a fuhrer.
We got our form-letter announcing the launch of isRaelli, the new Israel blog being run by a bunch of folks out of the New York consulate, so we dutifully went to check it out. Initial reactions:
(1) It's an Israeli life blog, not a politics blog, seemingly closest in content to Israelity. So on one side, you've got an Israeli life blog being written by people in Israeli and edited by AK Sommer, PJM Middle East editor. On the other side, you've got an Israeli life blog written by New Yorkers and edited by someone who is not AK Sommer. Hmmm...
(2) As far as we can tell, there's only minimum snark. For instance, in 23 Questions To An Israeli in NY, nowhere does the query "how the hell do you put up with all these NY Jews thinking that the Wailing Wall is somewhere in the LES" ever come up? That's going to be a problem.
(3) 2001 called. Something about a web design...
(4) Too many gratuitous movies and jpegs inserted just to generate content. That's our trick, and we're kind of bitter that they're pulling it off with so little subltly. Because that too is our trick.
(5) Typos everywhere. Lynn is going to have an aunerism.
This is really just bitterness because Israel started an officially blog, and instead of going after media bias they're posting YouTube videos in posts like Virtual Aquarium and Israel Gone Wild. In fact, they call themselves "the new and improved Israel Video Blog". Memo to the New York consulate: we already have something like that. This just seems like an effort to "make people like Israelis", which is so far past where the issues are today that it seems like of frivolous.
Still, we dutifully RSS'd it like we're supposed to. But we're skeptical that we're going to be posting much about it.
A man who was attacked by an alligator this morning was naked and smoking crack at the time, Polk County deputies who rescued him said today. The alligator had the man in his jaws when deputies arrived at Lake Parker in Lakeland about 4 a.m. today. They were called by nearby residents who reported hearing a man yelling for help. The first deputy on the scene was unable to free the man, Adrian J. Apgar, from the alligator's mouth. It wasn't until 3 or 4 of them were in chest-deep water that they were able to pull him free after the tug-of-war. Apgar, 45, of Polk City, suffered a broken arm, partially amputated left arm and trauma to his left leg. Doctors are trying to reattach the arm at Lakeland Regional Medical Center, where was listed in critical condition. "We don't know whether he'll make it or not," said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd... Judd said Apgar told deputies he was smoking crack-cocaine at the adjacent park, but it was unclear why he was naked or why he was attacked by the alligator.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who has in the past compared Israeli policies with those under apartheid, has been named to head a United Nations fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanun, where an IDF artillery barrage killed 19 civilians earlier this month, UN officials said Wednesday. The Nobel Peace laureate will travel to Gaza to "assess the situation of victims, address the needs of survivors, and make recommendations on ways and means to protect Palestinian civilians against further Israeli assaults," according to the president of the UN Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso De Alba
The mission will report its findings to the Geneva-based body by mid-December, the statement said. The Beit Hanun tragedy on November 8, which the IDF said was caused by stray shells, came after troops wound up a week-long incursion aimed at curbing Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from the town. The 47-state council earlier this month approved a resolution that condemned "gross and systematic" human rights violations by Israel in the occupied territories and ordered an investigation into the Beit Hanun incident.
ONCE. Once in a decade long genocidal battle that the UN insists on calling a "liberation struggle", even though itt began when 98percent of Palestinians were already liberated. Once despite facing conditions that no other army on the planet faces and acting with ethics that no other army on the planet displays. ONE EFFING ARTILLERY goes off target, and instead of hitting the apartment building that the terrorists have turned into a missile launching pad, it hits the apartment building next to it. ONCE. And it's instantly "systemic" human rights violation that the entire UN gets to talk about for a month and investigate for a year.
Thousands of attempted suicide bombings, each seeking to murders dozens of Israeli civilians and maim hundreds more. Nothing. Dozens of successful suicide bombings that did exactly that. Nothing. A decade of terror and horror woven into the fabric of one of the most willfully joyful nations on the planet. Not a single UN investigation. Not one.
But 19 Palestinians die because terrorists decided to use them as human shields, and Desmond Tutu gets to show up and "investigate the Zionist entity":
Tutu has not kept his opinions secret against Israel regarding its policies dealing with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. He has said that Zionism has "very many parallels with racism."... In an article in The Nation entitled "Against Israel" in June, 2002, Tutu and co-writer Ian Urbina compared the "Israeli occupation" to the former apartheid government. They said they actively supported the practice of divestment from Israel as a form of protest "aiming at the end of Israeli occupation." And they drew an additional parallel to the "similar moral and financial pressures on Israel" that were used to protest the apartheid government.
Gee - wonder what he'll find. Consider this: the nudge-nudge wink-wink of anti-Israel international diplomacy has now reached such an absurd level that the genocidal maniacs out to delegitimize the Jewish state don't even have to pretend to be unbiased any more.
You know, why not just get it over with and appoint Ahmednejad to dig through the dirt and see if he can come up with evidence of Israeli war crimes? At least it'll give him a chance to visit the Holy Land before he tries to nuke it. Which is also something, incidentally, that the UN has roundly failed to condemn.
It's the perfect Slate headline: it's contrary, it's incindeary, and it even ends with a question mark. Also, it's brutally stupid:
Because he hasn't built gas chambers or tried to exterminate an entire race.
If we were teaching class, we would now say: good question though, let's move on.
Since we're not teaching class, we can point out that "Hitler wore pants, Bush wears pants, so Bush is Hitler" is a very, very dumb argument. Substituting "took away civil rights" for "wore pants" doesn't make the argument any better, incidentally.
It's good to see who the left is willing to call Hitler-esque though. Last week a CFR lackey published an editorial in the LA Times insisting that Ahmadinejad is not comparable to Hitler. This week Slate puts out an article saying that Bush is comparable to Hitler.
* Quebec recognised as a nation within Canada: It's becoming increasingly obvious that Canada is not a real country. Can we take the conservatives and the ski-slopes in the Western half yet?
* AMERICAblog: In face of concerns about their safety, Bush twins snub US embassy officials in Argentina: John in DC is pissed off because the Bush twins are making it hard on the Secret Service and the State Department by... refusing to leave the territory of a US ally because people there don't like them. Screw that. Quadruple their security, and have them prance up and down the streets to their hearts' content. Civis romanus sum - things haven't gotten that bad where the First Daughters can't walk around in public. If they have, there's some serious recalculating that policy makers better be doing, and it better involve the phrase "saturation bombing". Seriously, we understand that the left's instinct is to cut and run whenever ANYBODY is angry with Americans - but this is effing absurd.
* We're just kidding about that saturation bombing stuff. Mostly.
* Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign: Nope, we don't care if the homeowners association is fining her for being vaguely anti-American. And you know why? Because it's hysterical. If Borat gets to be anti-Semitic because it's objectively funny, then the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs gets to fine stupid moral exhibitionists.
The lawmaker poised to cause the Bush administration's biggest headaches when Democrats take control of Congress may just be a grocer's son from Watts who's hardly a household name off Capitol Hill. Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record) has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee. In January, Waxman becomes committee chairman - and thus the lead congressional hound of an administration many Democrats feel has blundered badly as it expanded the power of the executive branch.
See, Erica Werner isn't being biased by accusing the Administration of blundering badly. She's just reporting on what many Democrats feel. It's news! And they're not just investigations, they're searing investigations.
About a week ago we commented on Amnesty International's weird fascination with everything Israeli. During that post we commented that their casualty figures were... er... drawn from a testimonial community regulated by epistemic norms that were not exactly trustworthy. We linked to a CAMERA video on YouTube demonstrating said lack of veracity, but embedding on the video was disabled at the time. Through various people in CAMERA who are good enough to return our emails and IMs, that's now been fixed. Human rights organizations lie:
Of course, this is wasted on all of you since we're sure that each and every one of you clicked through on the original post. And by "each and every one" we mean "approximately ten percent".
We have absolutely no idea what this is about, but we got a wildly inappropriate giggle out of it: 10:49am, someone from Haifa got to MR by searching Google for Meryl Yourish video. For the record, the only other hits we ever get for video are for "Jewish Girls Gone Wild". Anything you'd like to share, Ms. Yourish?
Via Hot Air, we just found out about Nabil, an Iraqi blogger who has been putting his life on the line for years to provide testimony about Iraqi life - for good or ill. Now his life has become literally unlivable, and he's asking for help:
After living 3 horrible years in Iraq and witnessing all what I've witnessed, I realized that I can't live in this country anymore, I can't live in a country where some gunmen prevent me from going to school, where corrupted policemen will kill me just because of my religion or what's written on my ID, where religion bigots will have me killed just because I wear jeans, or shorts or because I shave my beard everyday in the morning.
The only thing that I want is to finish my studies, and to work and to create a good life and to be a good man who can be helpful and successful and to live the rest of my life in peace.
New Zealand is a great country, I think it's the best place for me to study and work in, and that I have great friends there whom they offored to support me make my dream happen...As soon as I can have residency Visa to New Zealand.
Please, help me make my dream, Please Save my Life! If you're interested in helping me escaping Iraq..you can do that, by donating money, there is a paypal button on the top of side bar on the right. Thanks to anyone who would help me.
The Paypal button is indeed on the top-right. In just three clicks you can - and you should - send him some cash.
We've recently taken to describing ourselves as "militant progressives", which elicits laughs from our liberal friends right up until we declare that it's because "sometimes, you have to bomb countries out of the Stone Age" - and that we're serious. This morning's OneJerusalem Conference Call was with Will Marshall, who describes himself as a "progressive internationalist" - close enough to be both suggestive and interesting. And since the Republicans have become the Party of James Baker, new voices are both welcome and needed. Allen Roth (One Jerusalem) was as always running the call, and Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues) was also on the line. The audio will be on the One Jerusalem frontpage later today or tomorrow.
Will Marshall is the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, and he's the Editor at Large of the new Democratic magazine Blueprint. Blueprint seems to be a kind of center-left The New Republic, focusing specifically on foreign policy security initiatives. The PPI just published With All Of Our Might, a collection of essays by some of the leading intellectual lights of the center-left. The goal is to articulate a positive vision for a reinvigoration of what used to be called Truman Democrats.
We'll give away the ending: we're sympathetic but quite unhopeful about the prospects of a robust, American liberal opposition to political Islam. At stake, we submit to you, are two fundamental questions. But before we get to them, we do want to emphasize again how overwhelmingly critical it is to foreground our sympathy and support - more than our disagreement - with what the PPI is trying to accomplish. Most importantly, there is the fundamental issue that everyone's on the same side in the fundamental battle of the next hundred years. Perhaps just as significantly, however, we really do seem to be approaching a political situation in which there will be no mainstream support for Israel keeping up its fight against the genocidal opponents that threaten it - there's more than a little reason to hope that making a compelling case to the center-left could serve as the foundation for new tactical alliances.
(1) As a domestic political matter, are there any prospects for a broad revival of liberal internationalism?
We've made no secret that we view the Congressional flip as more or less a classic, mouth-frothing plebian revolt: an explosion of destructive resentment in the form of a revolution that will very quickly consume its children.
Every party and ideology has its populists and ideologues. Certainly the Republican party is not immune from crazy. The difference is - and we don't understand why this isn't an obvious, argument-ending observation - that the Republican base is quite content to confine its policy demands to a limited set of domestic policies. As long as national Republicans are willing to toe the line on abortion, immigration, gay rights, and judges, the Republican base remains more or less content.
That's not the case with the Democratic base, which literally brags about having bought the Democratic party (there's a separate essay to be written, incidentally, about liberals' projection of their own worst traits - deliberative ugliness, secret machinations, buying candidates, etc). Furthermore, the liberal base not only thinks it's in control - it actually is in control - Harry Reid made an election-day video for the DKos Denizens all but acknowledging their control of the party. We've seen nothing since then that contradicts the idea that top party leaders feel indebted to the netroots.
And that's a problem, because the netroots are totally batshit crazy:
Will Marshall's solution to delineate between the Congressional and the Presidential wings of the Democratic party, observing that Congress always ends up being more ideological than the President. Fair enough, but Rick Richman put the problem bluntly: can a Truman-style Democrat (assuming that this is a meaningful phrase) get out of the Democratic primaries? Marshall seemed pretty confident that one could, but we remain unsure as to exactly why he thinks that (although that could be - and we're not being sarcastic here - because our stupid cell phone 2-in-1 handsfree went out for 10 seconds - we'll have to review the transcript). It seems that he thinks that Pelosi losing the Murtha thing means that it's not all about the Iraq War.
Which is fair - but precisely not the issue. The issue has to do with liberal fascination with and feting of the most ruthless, genocidal maniacs on the planet. The liberal fascination with Ahmadinejad is just one example - it's not just the netroots who love this guy. The CFR - not unrepresented in PPI publications and in the book - is also enamoured with the idea of this powerful, anti-Western populist. Forget the whole "genocide" thing. And that's the intellectuals at CFR - that's before we even get to the "Ahmadinejad has a pretty sweet hipster style" bloggers.
The contemporary control of the Democratic Party by netroots activists is not, however, terminal. The netroots will fizzle out just like every populist surge fizzles out - no matter how well organized it is. If nothing else, their parents will eventually shut off the electricty and force them to get a job. We're more concerned about what a reinvigorated liberal internationalist would look like. More than whether one is possible...
(2) Intellectually and institutionally, is broad revival of liberal internationalism desirable?
When the neocons started crafting their positive vision of their own ideology, they referenced old Wilsonian internationalism minus a single crucial element: the belief in multinational institutions and treaties. The idea is that you can have as many good intentions as you want, but none of that matters if you provide a forum that levels the playing field between the US and despots, dictators, and tyrants. Bilateral treaties and alliances among friends of similar ideology are all to the better - but having to go to the United Nations to win over cynical thugs - whether through coercion or bribes - makes progressive internationalism impossible.
You could look at this as a broader issue of commitments and sensibilities: it's grounded in the left's refusal to give up on the pretenses of negotiating with people who don't respect negotiations, from the United Nations down to the Palestinians. It's diplomatic fetishism, where the appearance of negotiations substitutes for what negotiations ought to represent - a willingness to come to the table (rather than a footdragging maneuver to buy time to rearm or go nuclear). So in With All Our Might, there are chapters devoted to reinvigorating democracy promotion by Larry Diamond (awesome idea - let's try it in Egypt!) and to restoring the UN by Anne-Marie Slaughter (super - how about giving Venezuela an expanded role!). In Will Marshall's terms:
Deemphasize the military component, and emphasize the... political and diplomatic components
Same old same old. But Larry Diamond or Anne-Marie Slaughter are not nobody bloggers: these are some very, very big brains. So it's not enough (and it's frankly inaccurate) to say that they're not "just wrong". Quite the opposite - they're wrong in all kinds of complicated, tangled ways, produced by an interplay of institutional inertia, disciplinary assumptions, and personal sensibilities. But fundamentally wrong they are, and you can tell that this is true because on the whole they embrace silly notions like the idea that if we explain our lifestyle more to an Arab world that hates it, that Arab world will like us more.
The reason that the neocons wanted to give up on these pretenses is because - practically, materially, as a matter of effects - they end up in the same place as realism does. You end up having to balance the lesser of some pretty significant evils just to get a little peace and quiet. Stability becomes the default, desperately talking and pretending nothing's wrong becomes the method.
There is no tangible, material difference between James Baker pressuring Israel from the Right and State Department-DLC sophisticates pressuring Israel from the left. Will Marshall was stunningly revelatory - almost to the point of Clinton-era caricature - on this question: "there's no partner with the Israelis to negotiate with but... we need to be actively engaged in other sorts of diplomacy". Which is exactly how you end up with John Kerry - who Will Marshall proudly held up as a supporter of the broader War on Terror - suggesting that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to send Jimmy "Israel Is An Apartheid State" Carter to Israel. Because who's better at getting Muslim and Arab radicals to uselessly talk than Jimmy Carter?
Underneath this new liberal internationalism is a cluster of mistaken assumptions, entrenched by page after page and article after article in leading foreign policy journals: the idea that the Bush administration has been hands off in Israel ()not really), the idea that the Bush administration has been unilateral (insulting), and the idea that there are allies out there just waiting to join us in the global war against Muslim extremism (demographically problematic for them, to say the least). It's an ideologically and institutionally myopic.
But - and here's the crucial point - Will Marshall thinks there's tons of daylight between liberal internationalism and neo-Realism ala James Baker. He thinks that organizing a coalition is significantly different from Bush style unilateralism. But the point is that he's wrong, and he's wrong because the starting assumptions are wrong - there is no difference between failing to get the Palestinians to genuinely make peace and never starting in the first place. Or actually, there is a difference - but it doesn't end up positively for the people who brought Arafat to the White House.
But Allen Roth and David Goder are quite right in bringing center-right pro-Western bloggers into dialogue with people like Will Marshall. The stakes in the war against political Islam are too high to let partisanship get in the way either of fruitful intellectual dialogue or of contingent political alliances. But, again, more importantly: Will Marshall and his allies on the center-left are fighting the good fight against isolationists and neo-Realists of all stripes. They're frighteningly wrong in some respects, but they remain critical to constructing a centrist coalition dedicated to protecting the West against the threat of jihadism.
When there's a real interest in moving forward through dialogue - not the fake, foot-dragging style of international diplomacy – then there's a chance for genuine sharpening of argument. There are not many conservatives who could go more than a couple rounds with the folks that the PPI has mobilized in their publications, and that's reason enough to encourage conservatives to engage those authors and publications. And if the center-left arguments can't be addressed and answered (and we want to be very clear on this - we think they can be) - then they should be adopted. Because that's how useful strategies and political visions are formed.
Three reasons we get to blog this video of Buddy Rich, the world's greatest drummer, in a drum battle with Animal on the Muppets in 1981:
(1) He was Jewish. This blog's core demo is Jewish and interested in Judaism. Ergo...
(2) It was posted on Hot Air yesterday morning. The blogosphere is an incestuous swamp. Ergo...
(3) It is totally awesome. We know you love awesome. Ergo...
Eh, yeah - the implication that America is crawling with racists and anti-Semites is obviously false and misleading, especially compared to the countries that the people who sniff at this film consider to be beacons of tolerance. But it was still kind of funny. And as long-time readers know, if it passes the laugh test it's in. No exceptions. We've gotta have some consistency around here, and after we start talking about Olmert's new peace plan that's going to be few and far between.
We're supposed to be impressed that the company that employees Keith Olbermann - the liberal success story, now with almost one-fifth of O'Rielley's viewers - has chosen to declare Iraq a civil war. We'll start calling Iraq a civil war when they start calling France a civil war - given that it's actually a case of French citizens fighting French citizens rather than a foreign-bred and funded insurgency, we think that at least the claim makes sense in the French context.
We do have a question though: if a Muslim sectarian conflict has now risen to the level of a civil war in Iraq, does that mean that NBC is saying that there are ways to interpret Islam in ways other than as a Religion of Peace? Because if so, we expect to see CAIR call for anti-NBC boycotts any minute now - because CAIR is nothing if not consistent, and would never pass up criticizing a news story just because that news story made the Bush administration look bad. Right?
UPDATE (4:00AM PST): We didn't catch this the first time, but the FishBowl LA blurb points out that Oblbermann said in an interview that he doesn't want to become a left-wing version of O'Rielly or Limbaugh. With due respect, his ratings would need to increase by entire orders of magnitude before that would even begin to become a potential worry that he should consider entertaining.
Major press outlets and major center-right blogs have begun to form into what might end up being a critical mass against James Baker and his Realist friends selling out the Cedar Revolution. But if Lebanon will be shielded from their machinations, whatever will the US give Syria in exchange for taking a six month break from raising hell in Iraq? Not to spoil the ending:
As Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem arrived in Baghdad for a landmark visit to Iraq on Sunday, Damascus was reportedly set to demand that Washington press Israel over the issue of return of the Golan Heights, as the price of its cooperation with the Bush administration on Iraq. Moallem is the highest ranking Syrian official to visit Iraq since the U.S.-ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and a major step toward restoring diplomatic relations, Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman said. Media reports have said that former U.S. secretary of state James Baker's report on Iraq policy will recommend that the Bush administration engage Syria and Iran in discussions over Iraq.
At least John Mearsheimer will be happy that real people are talking to him again. Unless you count David Duke as a real person. Which we don't.
As far as we know, Rantings of a Sandmonkey is the only site on our blogroll with an editor who actually believes that there's an Israeli-Palestinian "cycle of violence". Posts like his commentary on TIME giving Tariq Ramadan an editorial are more than enough to recommend him despite this (albeit significant) ideological misstep:
Time magazine courts Traiq Ramadan
They have him write a piece on the Pope's visit to Turkey and how he is the dark, and lot's of bullshit like that. Oh, I am sorry, does it show that I dislike the man the MB consider as their own Edward Saeed? Apologies all around. It must be because I know that his father, Hani Ramadan, is the reason for the creation of the global MB structure and the guy who convinced the saudis to start exporting wahhabisim all over the world. Or maybe because Traiq Ramadan is a hack whose PHD in Islam proposal was such a pile of shit that got rejected, which prompted him to write his magnum opus Islamophobia, and accused his Islamic professors of being islamophobic of all freakin things, which of course made them cave, cause they are european pussies, and can not possibly tolerate being-even wrongly- labeled intolerant of anyone for their religion. And now Islamophobia is the term de-jour for anyone who critisizes anything at all in Islam or muslim behavior. That is, of course, unless you are a muslim yourself, which is why apparently I can do it! But yeah, him and his father are both assholes and are one of the main reasons why we are in the shit we are in right now. But does anyone really care, or pay attention? Noooo! After all, the man has a PHD, and invented the new "anti-semitism". We must give him some credit and respect for that! Right?
In fairness to TIME, it's still not as bad as when the Washington Post allowed Hamas arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh to obfuscate / justify his genocidal ideology in their pages. Close though.
By Ravi Nessman, Associated Press Writer 4 minutes ago. Jerusalem - Israeli troops shot and killed a Hamas-linked militant in a West Bank raid early Monday, endangering a day-old truce that stopped five months of Palestinian rocket fire and Israel operations in the Gaza Strip . The surprise cease-fire deal appeared to be largely holding in Gaza early Monday, with no reports of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. The killings angered Palestinian militants and raised concerns of a violent response from Gaza.
By Ibrahim Barzak Associated Press - Rocket fire from Gaza died down Sunday after a daybreak cease-fire, raising hopes for an end to five months of bloody destruction and a new opening toward peace talks. The surprise truce was supposed to take effect at 6 a.m., but in the four hours that followed, 11 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israeli towns and villages, and some Palestinian militants threatened to keep up the attacks. Israel did not retaliate, saying it wanted to give the truce a chance.
And all of this in an effort to make it seem like Israel is the one that's endangering the ceasefire by killing the people who are trying to ruin the ceasefire. Brilliant! If we keep this up, we can blame Israel for everything. See how neat and tidy that is?
Of the many disagreements between MR and the left, one of the most fundamental involves the sources for global instability. We tend to say that Palestinians who endanger Palestinian civilians and murder Israeli civilians are responsible for the deaths of civilians, while the left prefers to blame Israel because they can't be bothered to remember what happened yesterday (seriously, dealing with these people is like arguing with Memento).
Another difference is that the left always demonizes Israel as the greatest source of regional instability, arguing that Israel's arms imports cause arms races across the Middle East. We, on the other hand, insist that Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country on Earth. Now without peeking, whose side do you think is supported by the data in Richard F. Grimmett's CRS Report for Congress, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1998-2005":
Table 1H gives the values of arms transfer agreements with the Near East nations by suppliers or categories of suppliers for the periods 1998-2001 and 2002-2005. These values are expressed in current U.S. dollars. They are a subset of the data contained in Table 1 and Table 1C. Among the facts reflected by this table are the following:
For the most recent period, 2002-2005, the principal purchasers of U.S. arms in the Near East region, based on the value of agreements were: Egypt ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($4.2 billion), and Israel ($2.5 billion).
The only interesting thing about this is that the 1997-2004 report still had Israel slightly ahead of Saudi Arabia in arms purchases from the US. Good to see that two Middle Eastern countries with large populations that would like to see Israel destroyed are firmly ahead of the Jewish State in arms acquisitions. Now at least neither of those countries are about to go nuclear. Except of course, we've been literally screeching that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are going nuclear for the better part of a year:
What's the difference between our conspiracy theories and the left's conspiracy theories? Ours sometimes turn out to be true:
Six Arab states join rush to go nuclear - Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, UAE and Saudi Arabia seek atom technology... But at least the Democratic party is committed to restoring our image with those people. So that they'll like us a little more when they sell their nuke technology, their enriched uranium, and their scientific knowledge to people who are literally - literally – the enemies of Western civilization.
It's enough to actually kind of scare you.
But anyway, yeah - the liberal canard that the US disproportionately funds the Israeli military is as factually incorrect as it is suspiciously pervasive.
Islamist candidates swept to victory in Bahrain's parliamentary election, splitting the vote between hardline Shiite and Sunni Muslims while female and liberal candidates fared poorly in the U.S.-allied kingdom, preliminary results showed Sunday. With several races headed for runoffs, Saturday's vote appeared to reinforce the sectarian divide between the Persian Gulf island's governing Sunni minority and the underprivileged Shiites who make up two-thirds of its 700,000 people.
Allahpundit sums it up quite depressingly: "Not a single seat went to a secular liberal". Awesome.
And now let's check back in with Professor Cole, the most quotable of the myriad public intellectuals that we're honored to have in our intellectual public sphere:
PS As for Friedman's main point, that Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, it is bizarre.
Totally bizarre! They've been doing a GREAT job of fighting jihadi ideology. Totally awesome job!
Yesterday evening, we posted on a CTV story (the "C" is for "Canada", ya'll) that seemed to make the word "ceasefire" a synonym for "Palestinians firing a ton of rockets at Israeli schools and hospitals - and Israelis not responding". But a quick check on Tammy Bruce shows that (a) we should've pointed out that this was an edited AP wire and (b) that Reuters was running the exact same absurdly biased and stupid equivocation. But check out who's responsible for the inexcusable and unjustifiable bias in the Reuters story. Could it be our old friend Nidal al-Mughrabi. Why yes, yes it could be:
By Nidal al-Mughrabi. GAZA (Reuters) - A ceasefire between Israel and militants in Gaza took hold on Sunday and despite Palestinian rocket attacks in the first hours, Israel promised restraint. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the deal could help revive peacemaking that collapsed six years ago before a Palestinian uprising began. For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate, instructed security chiefs to clamp down on rocket firing by militants from the coastal strip into Israel.
Seriously, could we please do some sort of review of basic effing material existence here? A ceasefire does not "take hold" if there are multiple "Palestinian rocket attacks". That's not what ceasefire means, for crying. Out. Loud. That's the opposite of a ceasefire. That's "Israel not responding to Palestinian provocation"... maybe! But it's not a ceasefire, because - you see - fire hasn't ceased. It's just not what that word means.
Yoko Ono has published a full-page ad in the New York Times begging for the world's forgiveness for the suffering inflicted by blah blah blah. All you need to know: at no point did she apologize for breaking up the greatest band in the history of the universe, ergo she is still doomed to burn in hell for eternity.
Sorry, but those are the rules. You can look it up.
Gaza ceasefire holds after troubled start. Despite a rocky start, a truce between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip appears to holding. Palestinian militants fired three rockets into Israel just before the truce took hold at 6 a.m. local time on Sunday. Eleven more were fired in the four hours after the ceasefire took effect.
Firing eleven rockets at Israeli schools and hospitals is NOT A CEASEFIRE. We're sorry. It's not. It's the opposite of a ceasefire. Really. You can look it up.
In response to this bold bid for regional hegemony, the United States has apparently resolved . . . to intensively negotiate with itself and its chief European allies about how it might "engage" Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Assad. Should a U.S. ambassador return to Damascus, once the uproar over Mr. Gemayel dies down? Should the administration drop its demand that Iran obey a U.N. resolution ordering it to suspend enrichment before talks can begin? While the debate goes on, the Western effort to sanction Iran for its nuclear program is stalled and all but forgotten. No punitive action against Syria is even being discussed. Those most focused on rescuing the Iraq mission -- such as the Baker-Hamilton study group -- are most interested in the engagement option. We, too, have supported including Iran and Syria in a regional diplomatic initiative to promote an Iraqi political accord. But it's vital to keep in mind that such an effort has a low probability of ending the bloodshed in the near future, even if all parties cooperate. What's more, no attempt to reason with Mr. Assad and the Iranian mullahs will succeed unless they perceive that the United States and its allies wield sticks as well as carrots.
And thus are turning points in public discourse made.
Another Arab blog that is wildly wrong on many issues, but provides an emphatically useful perspective on others. This one from the Lebanese blog The Beirut Spring:
My friend was shocked when I told her about what Syria did in the North, where people were seriously harassed under Syrian tutelage. And I’m not talking about regular political assassinations and bogeymanship, I’m talking about mass humiliation and utter disregard for human dignity. Lands stolen and plundered, Men ordered to send their wives to Syrian officers, mothers were given machine guns and forced to kill their own children. Cars were stolen and sold back to their owners, phones were tapped and mass scale harassments were taking place. If you add that to the regime’s history with the Sunnis (Mass wiping of Hama, shelling beb el tibbene, killing muftis, installing the Karamis to rule Tripoli) you would understand why Hariri’s murder and its consequences are not just an excuse for Sunnis to grab power, it’s a loud, resounding ENOUGH from an entire sect. This is no longer about Hariri, it's about a straw that broke a camel's back.
Thankfully, the United Nations passed hundreds of resolutions condemning these Syrian abuses. Otherwise, it would have no moral authority to criticize Israel for mistakes made in the heat of battle. Ditto for the human rights organizations that make their business demonizing Israel. Oh, the UN never passed a single resolution against Syrian human rights atrocities in all those years? Well that's weird...
The man that the Democrats won't let be our voice to the UN:
They prefer someone who will be more conciliatory - in that "listen to all sides, even the ones who want to protect Syria and Iran" kind of conciliatory.
We were originally going to title this "Somewhere, Right Now, Pamela Geller Oshry Is Getting Hot", because she's got a little bit of a crush on Ambassador Bolton... then we noticed that she apparently had this video blogged like two minutes after it was posted... then we noticed that she's actually the one who posted it. So there you go.
Lebanon has just taken a historic step to remove the shackles of Syrian influence in their country. They have approved a UN tribunal to investigate the Hariri murder - this despite a campaign designed to destroy the cabinet by literally murdering so many members that it would have to dissolve itself. What's the Associated Press headline and lede?
Cabinet decision pushes Lebanon to danger point - Lebanon's political crisis moved toward a new danger point Saturday as the U.S.-backed government approved an international tribunal for suspects in the 2005 assassination of a former prime minister Rafik Hariri despite warnings of mass protests by its opponent Hezbollah.
Yeah, because that's the significant and salient part of the story. That the "US-backed government" is pushing the country "toward a new danger point". That's the take-away that you want the 90-plus percent of people who never get past the first paragraph to get.
Shahin, president of the imams' group, called for a boycott of US Airways after an agent and his supervisor, without giving a reason, refused to sell him replacement tickets Tuesday morning. "I'm not going to stay silent," Shahin said. "I came to this country to enjoy justice and freedom." The US Airways supervisor told Shahin that his tickets had been refunded and that he would have to go to another airline. The supervisor offered Shahin a customer service phone number.
... and not a single one of them asks why he couldn't have made the request on September 10, 2001? For shame:
Of course, Allahpundit - snark be upon him - gets close with his best boycott evuh comment. But other than that, nada.
Sorry. It just takes more to get any outrage these days. Imams linked to Hamas charities are not going to crowd pardoning turkeys out of the news cycle. Just not unique or newsworthy enough. There has to be something more. Example: this loony spokesman had expressed skepticism that Muslims were involved in 9/11. Now that's getting close, but it's still not enough. Did he actually go on an explicit rant about Jewish involvement? No, no he did not. So he's not even crazy enough for the DKos comments section. "Mildly crazy" is just not enough to stand out of the crowd. Sorry.
Our new liberal foil blog, the LAist, demonstrates one of the left's more annoying habits: sanctimonious preaching that is not just wrong, but wrong because of something they did. To wit, this complaint about the sentence for Iraqi civilian abuser Cpl. Jerry E. Shumate Jr:
The other was a plea bargain engineered down in Camp Pendleton. Marine Lance Cpl. Jerry E. Shumate Jr. was accused, among other things, of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in relation to the murder of an Iraqi civilian, Hashim Ibrahim Awad, in April... LAist has great respect for our men and women of the military, but if the tables had been turned and the victim had been an American civilian ruthlessly and knowingly murdered by a squadron of Iraqis, there would be outrage if one of the soldiers who pulled the trigger got less than two years for his death..
First of all, any liberal who uses the phrase "we support our troops, BUT" has obviously not talked to anyone to the right of Chris Hitchens in at least a year. That is what we refer to as a "self-caricaturing phrase" - because merely using it makes you a caricature of yourself, you see .Second: that last part would be true, but for the fact that when Iraqis ruthlessly and knowingly murdered American contractors and hung their desecrated bodies from a bridge, the heart, conscience, and trendsetter of the left declared "screw them".
The acts Shumate has been convicted of are reprehensible. But the side that has the moral authority to pass judgment on him is the military fighting for justice from its soldiers and for the Iraqis. Not the American left, which seems to reserve its humanitarian outrage only for acts committed by Americans.
Selling out Israel during Iraq I is one thing - people have a short memory. Selling out Israel during Iraq II is also not exactly a base-eviscerating move either - you're unlikely to see Tucker Carlson shedding any tears if the State Department succeeds in destroying Israeli strategic depth. But destroying the Cedar Revolution for peace in our time a relatively quiet American retreat is going to piss off a lot of people:
Instapundit thinks Bush’s new “realist” approach might lead him to reprise Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia by basically ceding Lebanon to Assad in exchange for a little peace and quiet in Iraq. If he does, I’m off the Republican bandwagon forever, and I won’t be the only one. I leave you with a photo from today’s funeral. In the center is Amin Gemayel, former president of Lebanon; on the right, Saad Hariri. One has a dead father, the other a dead son, both in all likelihood at the hands of a regime we’re now seriously considering doing business with.
At least John Mearsheimer will be happy that real people are talking to him again. Kind of.
MR reader Merav, sending us this Reuters story from YNet , comments: "I can't believe they did it. If this doesn't start a revolution, I don't know what will":
Iran has been suspended from all international soccer activity because of government interference in running the game in the country, world ruling body FIFA said on Thursday. The move comes just five months after Iran took part in the World Cup finals in Germany and a week after they secured a place in the 2008 Asian Cup finals, winning their qualifying group by beating South Korea 2-0 in Tehran. An Iranian news agency said Iran did not accept the decision and described it as "completely illegitimate." Fans in the soccer-mad country were stunned.
No national soccer is enough to make us almost feel bad for the average Iranian. Unfortunately, polls show that the average Iranian supports Ahmadinejad, so they can spend the next few years watching reruns of Saturday morning cartoons for all we care. Except their cartoons are also viciously anti-Semitic, so that might not help:
Sure it's not soccer - but it's still Jew-demonizing fun for the whole Iranian family! And that's at least something for the Ahmadinejad supporters to hold on to in these dark, soccer-less times.
I give thanks O Lord for Dick Cheney's Heart, that brave organ which has done its darn-tootin' best on four separate occasions to do what we can only dream about.
O Lord, give Dick Cheney's Heart, Our Sacred Secret Weapon, the strength to try one more time! For greater love hath no heart than that it lay down its life to rid the planet of its Number One Human Tumor.
I give thanks O Lord that we're getting to kick The Lame Duck when he's down. Thank you too Lord for making impeachment unfeasible so's we get to kick him and kick him and kick him, have him to kick around for two more long years, kick him so bad his stupid quacking beak comes out his own greasy-feathered DA...
It goes on for several more smirking and insufferable paragraphs. Don't try to figure out if more disrespect is being shown to the Vice President or to religious people in general. And you know what the real frustration is? These people actually think they're funny - and it's the pathetic and parochial echo chamber of DKos and the HuffPost that makes them think that.
On this Thanksgiving Eve, we're thankful for the blogosphere - which has replaced academia as a place where the petty ugliness of people like Tony Hendra can be bloviated more or less harmlessly.
It seems like Hezbollah's vow to topple this government one way or another has taken a new and deadly dimension. They will of course deny any involvement, and quite possibly blame the jews for it
Video: Hezbollah blames Israel for Lebanese assassination... One more element of absurdity — the Phalange party, to which Gemayel belonged and which his family dominated for decades, was allied during the Lebanese civil war with … Israel.
And yet, there are still plenty of people who think it's true. Usually we'd go to the DKos comments section to find them, but as near as we can tell there's no post up yet about the one of the most significant geopolitical events to happen in the last half year. Can that be true (that's an honest question - we think that we might just be missing it - it has to be there?)
Matriarch who lost grandson in conflict with Israelis turns into suicide bomber. The oldest Palestinian suicide bomber, a 64-year-old widow, lived in a one-room shack and had so many grandchildren that relatives lost track of the number, but her daughter said Fatma Omar An-Najar was driven to lay down her life in an attack on Israelis Thursday because one grandson was killed and another disabled in clashes with troops.
Hey, you know what matriarchs who lost grandsons haven't turned into murderous lunatics? Every. Single. Israeli. Grandmother. who's lost a grandson to Palestinian viciousness.
Her oldest daughter, Fatheya, said she and her mother had taken part in rally at a Gaza mosque three weeks ago, where women defied a cordon of heavily-armed Israeli troops to create a diversion for besieged Hamas fighters to slip away. "She and I, we went to the mosque. We were looking for martyrdom," she said. A veteran Hamas supporter, she sheltered fugitive militants during the first Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993, they said.
Ah - not only was she a suicide bomber this week, but last week she was a voluntary human shield. What a charming woman. Definitely a worthy target for journalistic fawning.
A black mark on every two-bit politician and human rights activist who has ever sworn Never Again:
When the fighters came, the mothers of Jebel Maun could not protect their children. Screaming toddlers were ripped from their grasp and shot; older children who tried to save their brothers and sisters were hunted down. "Four children escaped in a group and ran under a tree for protection. An attacker came and shot at them, killing one of the children," said a witness in an account to United Nations staff. Another group, aged five, seven and nine, tried to run away. The five-year-old fell down and was shot dead. Another boy stopped and told the attacker: "You killed this child. Please let me go." It was no use. He too was killed, one of more than 20 children who died that day. Local people in the Darfur region of Sudan put the number of dead in the attack earlier this month at 63, mostly old men and children. The African Union, which has a peacekeeping force in Darfur, said 92 people died in the eight villages attacked.
In the last couple of years, Sudan has been a member in good standing on the UN's human rights watchdog. This is despite the Sudanese government's - and let's not be coy and pretend otherwise - undeniable complicity in the Darfur genocide. Their willful complicity qua footdragging in the Darfur genocide certainly has nothing to do with:
(1) Chinese arms interests
(2) Russian concern about access to oil
(3) The way that many theocracies in the UN are theocratic in more or less the same way that the Sudanese government is
The UN spent the last two weeks looking for new ways to condemn Israel. But they're not obsessed about the Jewish State or anything like that. Their focus is best explained as a rational calculation on where the world's worst human rights atrocities are taking place.
From that day forward, Brent viewed himself as a foot soldier in a war against racial and economic oppression. In the Black Panther Party, to which he pledged allegiance, he rose to the rank of captain and served as bodyguard for prominent party member Eldridge Cleaver. The Panthers offered a free breakfast program for children, protected the elderly from street crime and demanded fair treatment of African Americans and others.
The irony of Brent's life was that he was deeply committed to a cause many viewed as just, yet engaged in acts that many also considered criminal. Brent was with other party members in 1969 when he robbed a gas station and then shot and wounded two police officers. After his arrest and release on bail, he stepped onto a Boeing 707 in Oakland, pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and ordered pilots to take him to Cuba.
Most people would mention the part about shooting police officers in the cause of fomenting a race war before the part about free breakfast programs for children. Because, you see, lots of people seek to feed hungry kids - but not many people go around shooting police officers in the cause of fomenting race wars. So in a very crude, explaining-this-to-second-graders kind of way, the part about the police and race wars and stuff is more significant. So it should be mentioned first, because it's the part that matters.
But we only get to true weasle art in the next paragraph, with the "acts that many also considered criminal". Well yes, in a very technical way, that's true: many people do consider shooting police officers criminal. But the phrasing leaves open the possibility that there are also reasonable people who don't consider those acts criminal. Hell, it implies that those people exist. Which is kind of dishonest, because they don't.
The rest of the obit is all about how he didn't kill that many other people, and about how his sister suffered while he was in Cuba because "Brent was her only sibling". Don't bother reading it - it's saccharine, sentimentalized tripe that could only get published in a world where journalists have allowed romanticized, thuggish anti-Americanism replace ethics. It's like we're being punished because thousands of hand-wringing, soppy, liberal arts chicks never fulfilled their dream of banging Che Guevara.
You gotta ask yourself: when Western progressives demonize an Israeli state under siege by genocidal Islamic states, do they justify it by ignoring the real world or by totally shutting down anything that approaches reason or logic.
In a precedent-setting ruling, the High Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that five gay couples wedded outside of Israel can be registered as married couples, Army Radio reported. A sweeping majority of six Justices in favor and one against ruled that the common-law marriages of five gay couples obtained in Toronto, Canada, can appear as married on the population registry. The gay petitioners sought to force the state to give equal recognition to common law marriages of heterosexual couples to those of gay marriages, which can be performed in certain countries.
Prominent Islamic scholar Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi has slammed Egypt’s culture minister, Farouq Hosni, for his recent remarks against the Islamic veil... Qaradawi also criticised Hosni for what he called pro-Western views. "The minister views women’s compliance with the Islamic teachings as a ‘retrogressive’ act and wants them to stop covering their hair which he likened to flowers that should not be veiled. This means that he wants them to blindly imitate the Western civilisation which has indulged in bestial pleasures, sanctioned gay marriage and condoned nudity," he said. "We have our own civilisation which has its own philosophy and principles. We will never be a part of the Western civilisation as the minister wants us to be."
Let's go over all that one more time:
(a) "prominent Islamic scholar"
(b) "bestial pleasures" = "gay marriage" = "nudity" = bad
(c) "gay marriage" is "part of the Western civilization"
(d) The Islamic world "will never be part of the Western civilization"
Now, you can continue to parrot Juan Cole and insist that vast swathes of the Muslim world are teetering on the brink of progressivism. Or you can listen to prominent Islamic scholars who think that gays are evil and swear never to accept them.
Oh, plus: they drop houses on gay people. That's a huge counter-example to the "warmonger make up violent versions of Islam" theory, in our humble opinion.
