Saturday, January 3, 2009

03 Jan 2009 06:32 pm

Face Of The Day

A Palestinian fireman tries to douse the flames raging at a destroyed printers building in Gaza City on January 3, 2009, following an Israeli air strike. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty.

03 Jan 2009 06:29 pm

Quote For The Day

"Our only language with the Jew is through the gun," - the late polygamist Islamist, Nizar Rayyan, last week.

03 Jan 2009 06:27 pm

Downing Street, Today

People throw their shoes onto the street in front of the entrance to Downing Street in protest against the continued aerial bombardment of Gaza by Israel on January 3, 2009 in London, England. By Oll Scarff/Getty.

03 Jan 2009 05:54 pm

What Are The Israelis Thinking?

It is hard to find any solid strategic argument for entering Gaza and occupying parts of it for an unspecified amount of time. Some in the IDF clearly opposed it; Spencer argues:

Israel should arbitrarily declare victory and get the hell out of Gaza. Hamas will claim victory too. But it was always going to claim victory, and every hour Israel is in Gaza pummeling them without destroying them is an hour that Hamas will be able to claim that more plausibly, just like Hezbollah did in 2006. That's how these types of asymmetric wars work; and also why it's better for the larger party not to launch them.

Continue reading "What Are The Israelis Thinking?" »

03 Jan 2009 05:26 pm

The Israelis Invade

And the rationale is explicated:

The IDF Spokesperson's office issued a statement, emphasizing that this stage of the operation will further the goals of the eight-day offensive as voiced by the IDF until now: To strike a direct and hard blow against the Hamas while increasing the deterrent strength of the IDF, in order to bring about an improved and more stable security situation for residents of Southern Israel over the long term.

How does just war theory defend the deaths of many innocent civilians as a means to increase "deterrent strength"? But notice also the modesty of Israel's apparent war-aims: a more stable security situation for residents of Southern Israel over the long term. They're not optimistic about ending those rocket attacks, are they?

(Photo: Israeli Defense Force troops prepare to mobilize on January 3, 2009 on the Gaza/ Israel border. The IDF have this evening launched a ground offensive in Gaza in an attempt to take control of Hamas Qassam rocket launch sites in the region. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

03 Jan 2009 05:12 pm

What Killed Jett Travolta?

We may never know, but a new report from TMZ says it was the result of a seizure and was discovered swiftly by nanny, Jeff Kathrein, a photographer and fellow Super Adventure Club member:

Police have said the last time anyone saw Jett was when he went to the bathroom on January 1. His body was discovered by nanny Jeff Kathrein the next day at 10 AM. In fact, McDermott and Ossi say it appears Jett went back and forth to his room and the fatal injury occurred "very shortly" before Jett was found on the bathroom floor -- McDermott called it a "small window of time."

McDermott and Ossi tell us two nannies were present on the trip and Jeff was by his side 24/7. There was a baby monitor device by Jett's side and there was also a chimer in the bathroom when the door opened.

An autopsy will not reveal autism, but it might help clear up some details. Quite why a 16-year-old needed a 24-hour nanny and a baby monitor device remains unclear. Kawasaki Syndrome is not among the likely reasons. A reader who copes with seizures writes:

There are many different sorts of seizures. I have the type where I lose consciousness. It sounds like Jett did as well. I had one on Saturday, and so when I heard this news, I immediately thought about my medication regimen, my home safety, and so on.

I have no idea if Jett had autism, but it is established that he had seizures. Typically, if a person has several seizures over a period of time, and has an atypical EEG, anti-epilepsy drugs (AED's) are prescribed. I would wonder if he was taking the appropriate drugs, given their public statements and their supposed religious beliefs. If he was not, they are probably now living in their own capital H hell.

People do die from seizures, and can die in several different ways.

Continue reading "What Killed Jett Travolta?" »

03 Jan 2009 04:21 pm

Freedom In Massachusetts

After decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana, some police are refusing even to enforce the new civil law, because it's too much hassle for too little reward and, in their view, unenforceable. There's a certain whininess involved here, and perhaps a desire by the police to undermine a democratically-backed law. At the same time, a collapse in enforcement might simply reveal this was  hammer in search of a nail and a government in search of a problem.

03 Jan 2009 04:05 pm

Who Broke The Ceasefire?

In my attempt to understand the Gaza blockade and assault, I wrote that Hamas broke the ceasefire first. While this is true in some respects, it is misleading in others on close inspection. Wikipedia's summary of the various competing accounts is here. The best full account I have found is in Ha'aretz. It shows how a reduction of the issue can obscure important nuances:

Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well. Barak gave orders to carry out a comprehensive intelligence-gathering drive which sought to map out Hamas' security infrastructure, along with that of other militant organizations operating in the Strip.

Continue reading "Who Broke The Ceasefire?" »

03 Jan 2009 03:23 pm

The Iraq Question

Leaving aside propaganda, the critical question, in many ways the only question, is whether the Sunni Awakening groups can be integrated into the overwhelmingly Shiite national army and security forces. The answer is that we do not yet know, and that we will only find out once we create a security vacuum for the Baghdad government to fill. The news yesterday was both good and bad: good in as much as Awakening leaders in Diyala were meeting to discuss greater cooperation; bad in as much as one of their own tribal members attended as a suicide bomber:

Friday’s bombing occurred during a lunch meeting at the Yusufiya home of the tribal leader, Mohammed Abdullah Salih al-Qaraghuli, for nearly 1,000 members of the Qaraghul tribe, who had traveled from around Iraq to be there, guests said. The tribe includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Some of those in attendance were former Sunni insurgents who had become leaders of Awakening Councils, groups allied with the government against Al Qaeda.

After Friday Prayer, the tribe ate a communal lunch in a large yard adjacent to the sheik’s house to discuss which 20 members would represent them at a meeting with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Maybe this will help unite the country against Jihadists. Maybe it won't. But this violence is happening with 130,000 US troops still in the country and al Qaeda at an ebb. Do the math.

03 Jan 2009 02:15 pm

Kawasaki Syndrome

A reader writes:

I am a pediatric emergency room physician. We occasionally diagnose Kawasaki Disease (now properly called Kawasaki Syndrome) in young children. There are so many things wrong with the story of Jett's death that I am not sure where to start, but here's a try:

 

1) NO association between Kawasaki and "toxic carpet cleaning chemicals" (or any other environmental cause) has ever been established. Given that these chemicals are ubiquitous in our society, if there were an association I would expect Kawasaki to be much more common.

 

2) As far as I know, Kawasaki disease does not lead to brain injury or seizures.  I suppose one could conjecture that if Jett had untreated heart problems from Kawasaki (which CAN happen) this could have led to a heart attack that led to seizures and death, but it sounds like Jett had seizures for a long time, which makes this a bit of a reach.

 

3) It would be incredibly rare to bump your head and die from a seizure. 

Continue reading "Kawasaki Syndrome" »

03 Jan 2009 02:13 pm

Quote For The Day

"Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit," - Matthew Parris, as shrewd as he is English.

03 Jan 2009 01:05 pm

The View From Your Window

Portland, Oregon, 12 pm.

03 Jan 2009 12:47 pm

"Liberate Gaza"

A reader writes:

Don't you find it odd that the phrase "Liberate Gaza" was in ENGLISH ... using a stencil! Seems more like an advertisement to Western journalists screaming, "Photo Op, Photo Op". 

03 Jan 2009 12:38 pm

Was Jett Travolta Autistic?

Perhaps the autopsy will tell. But listening to the official version of events makes one's head spin:

Travolta and Preston said that their son, who appeared confused or unsure of his surroundings in public, had suffered as a young child from Kawasaki disease, brought on by chemicals used to clean their carpets.

They also said that he had a history of seizures which some doctors said could have been the product of brain damage as a result of Kawasaki, a treatable disease characterised by high fever, skin rash and swelling of the lymph nodes that usually affects children under five.

Unusual, to say the least. Members of the Super Adventure Club do not believe in treating mental illness with modern medicine.

03 Jan 2009 12:23 pm

"The Magic Negro"

Fox News finds a theme?

03 Jan 2009 12:23 pm

Answering Greenwald

Several readers have argued that on two issues, the Washington bipartisan establishment is as out of touch with public opinion as on Israel's attack on Gaza: medical marijuana and the Cuba embargo. One writes:

What about these government bailouts of the financial and auto industries? Or whether to be lenient about the entry and hiring of illegal aliens? Or whether to have tough gun control?

In both cases, if you are part of that sizable faction (or majority) of the electorate that doesn't want the government to bail anyone out or believes that we should deal harshly with illegal immigrants and their employers, you basically have no party to go to even though you're likely to be a Republican (for the first two issues) or Democratic (for the third).  The leadership of both parties favors bailouts and cheap labor and letting guns be relatively easy to obtain - different reasons and different emphases, but basically identical opinions.

What matters, politically, is the importance of an issue to people (is it going to affect their vote?) - not their actual opinion.

And it is on issues where intensity matters that special interest groups legitimately and openly have a role to play. I don't see anything wrong or unethical about the passionate Cuban and Israeli lobbies in Washington. Intensity does matter in a nation's politics. It's just important to ensure that America's national interests are always at the center of the debate, even if the debate is inevitably skewed in one direction or other.

03 Jan 2009 11:12 am

Separate, Unequal

Joe Carter responds to my post:

Extending the exact same benefits is not “codifying inequality.” But for Sullivan, et al., it is not about benefits but about forcing the acceptance of gay sex as “normal” and equal to heterosexual sex. This is an absurd reason and nothing the government should be involved in.

Actually, it is about accepting gay love and commitment as indistinguishable in moral worth and social status as straight love. That's all. Civil marriage is not about sex as such, as any straight couple will tell you. You can have lots of sex without marriage. And you can have a marriage without much or any sex. But you cannot have a meaningful marriage without love and commitment. Only one tiny sliver of humanity is currently and deliberately prevented from having such love and commitment recognized under the law: homosexuals. That's the only reason anyone is having this discussion.

I should say I don't keep up with Carter as assiduously as I should, but it also strikes me that this new post is an evolution of his position. The last time I checked, Carter favored "an expanded form of the proposed reciprocal-beneficiary contracts [as] the model for civil unions in America." Now he favors the "exact same benefits" as civil marriage for civil unions, and backs extending the right to civil unions to every two-person relationship that does not currently qualify for civil marriage.

This is a pretty staggering change in his position, so before I delve into it, some further questions to Joe for clarification. In his preferred policy reform,

a) Could someone be a member of a civil union and a civil marriage?

b) If so, what happens when the legal claims of your spouse and your civil partner conflict?

c) Could you have more than one civil union at a time - say your best friend from high school, your same-sex spouse, and your great aunt? Or do you have to choose one single civil partner?

d) How would anyone be able to tell if the relationships were sexual or non-sexual? If you can't tell, aren't you potentially providing legal protection for polygamy or incest?

e) Could a straight couple choose to have a civil union rather than a civil marriage and suffer no legal penalty?

f) Does not extending the full legal rights of civil marriage to any couple on any (non-sexual!) basis essentially abolish civil marriage as a special category or reduce it to merely sexual behavior?

g) Does this mean you support a repeal of DOMA and a federal civil unions bill, encompassing all the rights associated with, say, immigration and social security?

h) Did you just pull this cockamamie policy position out of thin air because you can't stand the idea of two guys getting it on?

03 Jan 2009 09:18 am

From the Bush PR Wing

This was a striking comment in defense of Bush's mastery of his own government:

"He's a good decision-maker," Bolten said. "If it's important enough to be a presidential issue, we ought to expose the president to more information and more views, and we ought to let him decide."

Who is the "we"?

03 Jan 2009 08:32 am

Malkin Award Nominee

"Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide?" - Melanie Phillips, citing, among others, Glenn Greenwald for disagreeing with her on Middle East policy.

Friday, January 2, 2009

02 Jan 2009 07:28 pm

My Boss's Bro

... could be a senator.

02 Jan 2009 07:25 pm

Face Of The Day

An Israeli soldier takes a position behind a wall on which 'Liberate Gaza' is written during a protest in the West Bank city of Hebron on January 2, 2009 against the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians held angry protests in east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank today after Hamas called for a 'day of wrath' against Israel's blitz of Gaza. By Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty.

02 Jan 2009 07:14 pm

Greenwald's Point

Leave aside the usual huffing and puffing. Can you answer this question for me:

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice?  More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?

Not that I can think of, off the top of my head.

02 Jan 2009 07:08 pm

Yay! We Won!

Every now and again, the jaw still drops:

I’M WATCHING PEOPLE SAY “WHAT A CRUMMY YEAR.” But it wasn’t so bad for me. Work was good. The Insta-Daughter’s health problems were more or less resolved, and the rest of us, including the Insta-Wife, are healthy. Plus, it was the year we won in Iraq. I hope 2009 ends as well.

Me too. Can we win two years in a row? Or did we do that already?

02 Jan 2009 07:06 pm

The Unbearable Glibness Of Glenn Reynolds

A classic:

I’M WATCHING PEOPLE SAY “WHAT A CRUMMY YEAR.” But it wasn’t so bad for me. Work was good. The Insta-Daughter’s health problems were more or less resolved, and the rest of us, including the Insta-Wife, are healthy. Plus, it was the year we won in Iraq. I hope 2009 ends as well.

Me too. Yay! We won! It's over!

02 Jan 2009 07:01 pm

Megan On Israel-Palestine

She writes of the Middle East:

I don't ever blog about it because one is not allowed to have an opinion on the matter--no matter what I say, I'll be excusing terrorism or, irrelevantly, the holocaust, or shilling for western imperialism. 

Or both, as my email in-tray now demonstrates. Sigh.

02 Jan 2009 06:08 pm

"An Offense Against God"

The late Nizzar Rayyan on Israel. Goldblog:

The question I wrestle with constantly is whether Hamas is truly, theologically implacable. That is to say, whether the organization can remain true to its understanding of Islamic law and God's word and yet enter into a long-term non-aggression treaty with Israel.  I tend to think not, though I've noticed over the years a certain plasticity of belief among some Hamas ideologues. Also, this is the Middle East, so anything is possible.

I suspect that's the correct level of expectation.

02 Jan 2009 05:52 pm

The View From Your Window

Lansing, Michigan, 11 am.

02 Jan 2009 03:16 pm

An Old Canard

Conor fisks Mona Charen:

...this weird notion that if you favor gay marriage you simply must favor incest too — does the anti-gay marriage lobby really want to argue that the only problem with incest is that it isn’t traditional marriage? Or that changing marriage in any way is indistinguishable from changing it in the most unpopular ways? Would the anti-gay marriage lobby rather that two 40 year old men marry one another, or that a forty year old man marries his 8 year old daughter? Does the latter seem problematic in any ways that the former isn’t?

Here’s a prediction: once gay marriage is firmly established law, and enshrined in our legal principles, the very same people now arguing that there is no principled or logical argument for gay marriage and against incest or polygamy will somehow discover arguments of that very kind, and make them publicly.

02 Jan 2009 01:50 pm

Some Truths for Now

Well: here's a start. From the perspective of intent, there does seem to me to be moral clarity between Israel and Hamas. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist in peace; Israel refuses to recognize Hamas' right to exist as a legitimate polity in Gaza because Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Hamas also was the first to break a barely-held ceasefire recently. There seems to me to be no question that Israel has the higher moral ground from the perspective of recent events.

At the same time, Israel's actual resources of military and economic power far exceed Hamas's; and its pulverization of Gaza has led to a huge imbalance between the victims of Hamas's war on Israel and Israel's war on Hamas. The Palestinians are suffering something like ten times the trauma and deaths of Israelis. What they have endured in Gaza for the past couple of years must also be taken into account. It is not a function of appeasement or wimpiness or fondness for Jihadism that makes this conclusion inescapable. It is simply being human.

And so you have an excruciating confluence of the questions of proportionality in a just war and asymmetry in the war against terrorism. What renders the current awfulness particularly wrenching is that the immoral means Hamas uses are logical from the point of view of an entity that is committed to Israel's destruction but not powerful enough to achieve it. And the response of Israel is logical from the point of view of a Western country enduring constant terrorist bombardment. Hence the never-ending argument in which both extremes reinforce themselves. This is not, one remembers, a Likud government. This is what the center left needs to do in Israel to stay in power at this point. And it has the backing of Egypt.

The nature of the conflict therefore ensures that Israel will kill and injure and traumatize far more human beings than Hamas can, even though Israel's intentions may be more honorable (and the relative lack of civilian deaths, given the pounding that has been going on in Gaza, is striking evidence for Israel's relative scrupulousness). This means that Israel will continue to lose the war of ideas and that Hamas will benefit from the impasse. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis face a demographic reckoning and the forces of Jihadism gain a new recruiting tool. Abbas is temporarily weakened; and Iran's ideological strength temporarily waxes. Democracy, pace the neocons, is not a panacea: Hamas has more democratic legitimacy, it seems to me, than Mubarak.

This is all horrible news for the Jewish people; and deeply disturbing for the rest of us. America's president and president-elect must ensure that the US is not drawn into this battle on one side or the other any more than is absolutely necessary. The West's interests in the Middle East are not exhausted by a defense of Israel's existence and security, especially when such a position comes allied with Arab autocracy and repression.   

The one silver lining I can see is that Sunni Arab fear and loathing of Iran is still very real, and can be exploited. (If Arab powers are now reduced to acquiescing in the deaths of Palestinian children from Israeli bombs, you can see how vulnerable they feel toward the wave of religious extremism sweeping the region.) The best you can hope for in the Middle East is that one axis of hatred will temporarily eclipse another. Generally speaking, adherents of one religion hate each other more than they do adherents of another sect altogether, so the prospects for some advancement of Israeli and American self-interest in a broader Muslim civil war are real. With Muslim anti-Semitism, of course, we might have stumbled onto a rare exception.

Happy new year.

(Photo: a bombed mosque in Gaza by Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty.)

02 Jan 2009 01:10 pm

Blogger's Block

Yes, 'tis true, dear reader. Your intrepid blogger, after more than a week of living like a normal person, is having trouble blogging Gaza. The various thoughts I would usually have unloaded on the world by now seem to have piled up in what's left of my hung-over brain and created some kind of logjam. Every short post I compose seems stupid upon reflection. In absentia, my internal standards appear to have risen.

This is most worrying for a blogger. I guess I should just start writing things I will subsequently disagree with. And shower.

02 Jan 2009 10:59 am

Moore Award Nominee

"I want fresh salt poured on the wounds of Proposition 8 so that queers will stop apologizing for being angry with the Mormon and Catholic Church, and for boycotting supporters. I want fresh rage directed at Barack Obama for thinking that including a gay marching band in his inauguration proceedings compensates for his having invited a notorious homophobe and anti-Semite to give the invocation," - Nancy Goldstein, Huffington.

02 Jan 2009 09:50 am

Malkin Award Nominee

"Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?    

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man," - Dennis Prager, explaining why it's a husband's job to make money and a wife's job to give him head when told to.

02 Jan 2009 08:03 am

Simon Schama At The Ashmolean

Undergraduate naughtiness, but most amusing:

02 Jan 2009 07:07 am

The Marriage Process Continues

A new bill is introduced in New Hampshire.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

01 Jan 2009 01:36 pm

The View From Your Window

Pine Mountain Club, California, 9 am.

01 Jan 2009 09:23 am

The Champions Of 2008

Your pick for best Mental Health Break Of The Year: two dogs and a soldier.

The Malkin Award Winner for 2008: Ben Stein, writing in National Review.

The Moore Award Winner for 2008: P. Z. Myers, Pharyngula.

The Yglesias Award Winner for 2008: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal.

The Poseur Of The Year is Alisa Shvarts, from perezhilton.com.

In a nail-biter, Victoria Jackson and Kim Crawford will just have to share the first ever - and highly coveted - Hewitt Award.

And the Von Hoffman Award nominee for 2008 goes to Bill Kristol for this fantastically wrong prediction.

Congrats to this year's winners. It was a very tough contest in every category (although weaker in the Moore area than for quite a time). The Crawford-Jackson slugfest went every round and was as brutal as the original Crawford-Davis one, if slightly less nicotiney in retrospect.

Meanwhile, vergessen Sie nicht the following Youtube that captures the real, epic, and eternal victory against Mordor that occurred in 2008. However bad it gets, we will always have Iowa.

God fuck you all.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

31 Dec 2008 04:26 pm

The View From Your Window

Montesquieu-Volvestre, France, 8.03 pm.

31 Dec 2008 04:05 pm

Quote For The Day II

"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum," - Lawrence Wilkerson on the protectorate of Dick Cheney.

31 Dec 2008 02:29 pm

Still Deadlocked

The battle for the Hewitt Award in 2008 remains a tie with 29 percent each for Victoria Jackson for this and Kim Crawford for this. The first ever Hewitt Award is a great honor. It takes Hewittian levels of dishonesty, extremism, agitprop and bile to win it. But you can break the tie here. You have till midnight.

31 Dec 2008 01:25 pm

The Siege Of Gaza: Blog Reax

Normal blogging will resume on Monday, but the Gaza siege and bombardment brings the new year early. Here's a big round-up from the left, right, and various parts of the center. Goldblog's various posts are worth checking out. Here he is talking about whether Israel can break the will of Hamas:

Maybe momentarily. But Hamas will find ways to regain its "honor." Usually, this means exploding buses. The even deeper question: Can Israel force the overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza? I'm not sure why Israel would want to -- it won't be replaced by the Palestinian Authority, but instead by a situation similar to Somalia -- but I think this is impossible, for the moment. The ideal situation, of course, is that the people of Gaza, realizing that Hamas has delivered them hardship, overthrow their government. But Hamas also alleviates the hardship it creates. The group has thoroughly penetrated the social fabric of Gaza. Its schools, orphanages, hospitals and soup kitchens serve the entire population. Hamas is not al-Qaeda. It delivers services, and because it delivers services, the population of Gaza depends on Hamas. I don't see the removal of Hamas as a near-term possibility.

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Israel can always cite cause, but you have to wonder if Tel Aviv isn't simply getting its licks in while it can in order to set the table to its liking vis-a-vis the new administration.

Noah Pollak:

It is interesting that cycle-of-violence fetishists, who are absolutely certain that military action is part of the problem, do not recognize the problem of the cycle of cease-fires. There is an opportunity right now to deal a crippling blow to Hamas, and it will require ground combat, more air strikes, and the maintenance of the IDF’s violence of action. There is indeed a cycle between Israel and its enemies, but the problem is not the cycle of violence. The problem is that every time the IDF is poised to strike a decisive blow against the enemy, the David Grossmans of the world emerge to plead for restraint exactly at the moment when restraint is the last thing that should be considered.

Continue reading "The Siege Of Gaza: Blog Reax" »

31 Dec 2008 12:50 pm

Quote For The Day

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . .

In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest . . .

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification," - George Washington, cited by Glenn Greenwald.

31 Dec 2008 12:22 pm

The Siege Of Gaza

The latest twist in this ancient and hopeless struggle is hard to address without equal measure of distaste for Hamas's religious barbarism and dismay at Israel's apparent determination to commit slow suicide. Gershom Gorenberg captures the agony as well as anyone I've read:

Israelis don’t see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month “calm.” Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the “calm” were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions. When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force.

To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail - especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in. So brinkmanship led to both sides rushing over the brink into the abyss. Olmert, Livni, Barak and the collected generals apparently think that Hamas will agree to reduce violence as a result of the onslaught. A ten-second exercise in trying to imagine how Hamas leaders - or Gaza residents - see the situation leads to the opposite conclusion.

Continue reading "The Siege Of Gaza" »

31 Dec 2008 10:29 am

The Meaning Of The Incarnation

Ross's response to Hitch is pitch-perfect:

Of course a philosopher could have come up with the formulation that God is Love without the assistance of the Gospel According to Saint John, just as Aristarchus of Samos could draw up the heliocentric hypothesis without the assistance of a telescope. But the telescope made a pretty big difference in our understanding of the heavens - and the Gospels, with their claim to bring the nature of God into clearer focus, likewise had a revolutionary impact on how human beings thought about the divine, by making the idea that the Author of the universe actually cares about individual human lives seem much more plausible to first hundreds, then thousands and then millions of people than it had before the evangelists put pen to paper.

I don't think it's possible for a reasoning Christian to take all the contradictory facts, myths and symbols of the various Christmas narratives as literally true. In fact, one test of how serious a Christian is, to my mind, is whether she does or not. But the event of the Incarnation, far greater than any of the obviously mythical details, remains literally awe-some. My attempt to describe my own faith in this regard is in Chapter Five of The Conservative Soul:

The reason I call myself a Christian is not because I manage to subscribe, at any given moment, to all the truths that the hierarchy of my church insists I believe in; let alone because I am a good person or a "good Catholic." I call myself a Christian because I believe that, in a way I cannot fully understand, the force behind everything decided to prove itself benign by becoming us, and being with us. And as soon as people grasped what had happened, what was happening, the world changed for ever. The Gospels - all of them, including those that were rejected by the early Church - are mere sketches of a life actually lived, and an experience that can never be reduced to words or texts or doctrines. And the world as it was - as it still is - was unable to tolerate this immense occasion; and so Jesus was executed and the life more in touch with divinity than any other life was ended abruptly, when it was still achingly young. The existence of such a life was both so wondrous that it changed everything; and also so terrifying it had to be snuffed out.

The point of this incarnation was surely not to construct a litany of offenses by which we are to judge our own lives at any moment, to force us to thrash and writhe in a constant ordeal of self-criticism and guilt. The point was merely to be with us; and by being with us, to show us better how to be human, how better to embrace our lives by accepting the divine around us and inside us. By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live - now, which is the only time that matters.

(Painting: Geertgen tot Sint Jans.)

31 Dec 2008 09:11 am

Faces Of The Year 2008

My final three. The cool:

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama gestures as former candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) speaks during a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2008. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

The joyful:

A girl smiles as she plays around near temporary shelters at a camp for Internally Displaced People in Kibati, just north of the North Kivu provincial capital city of Goma on November 20, 2008. Hundreds of thousands of people living in the region have been displaced from their homes due to armed clashes in the region. This particular camp houses some 60,000 refugees. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.

And the cozy:

A young Meishan pig takes a nap on some adult ones on June 11, 2008 at the Tierpark Friedrichsfelde zoo in Berlin, where the piglets were born on May 3, 2008. The animals are domestic pigs originating from China. By Barbara Sax/Getty.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

30 Dec 2008 08:58 pm

Faces Of The Year 2008

So this time, I get to pick. First off, the faces of war. There are three that I cannot quite get out of my head this year: a mother; a child; and a wounded.

The mother:

Linda Barnett, mother of of slain U.S. Army Sgt. Jon Stiles, clutches a U.S. flag during Stiles funeral at the Fort Logan National Cemetery November 21, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. Stiles, 38, of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, was killed in action in Jalalabad, Afghanistan November 13 when a roadside bomb detonated near his vehicle. He had survived a suicide bomb attack just the month before and had refused medical leave in order to rejoin his unit. By John Moore/Getty.

The child:

The body of five-month old Mohammad Naser Al-Buri lies in the morgue at the Al-shifa hospital before during his funeral February 28, 2008 in Gaza City, Gaza. Al-Buri, who is the son of the UNRWA of Al-shati primary school doorkeeper Naser Al-Buri, was killed while he was sleeping at his home following an Israeli aircraft strike on the home of his family's neighbor belonging to the Hamas Government's Interior Minister, Palestinian medical sources said. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.

The wounded:

Army medics and US soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division carry a wounded Iraqi man after they arrive at their base combat hospital to give him medical treatment on May 16, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq.

30 Dec 2008 12:55 pm

Christmas Hathos Winner

Michelle Malkin provokes the biggest gag reflex. I'm just glad it's over.

30 Dec 2008 12:27 pm

Between Frum And Noonan

It's down to the wire in the last days of the Dish Awards. And David Frum has 31 percent of the votes in the Yglesias Award category, and Peggy Noonan has 30 percent. It's the closest contest. Break the tie, will you? If you haven't voted for one or the other, here's Peggy's entry and here's David's.

There's also a nail-biter in the Hewitt Award category. Victoria Jackson has 25 percent; and Kim Crawford has 24 percent. Put one of them out of her misery.

30 Dec 2008 11:43 am

The View From Your Window

Stillwater, Minnesota, 8.40 am.

30 Dec 2008 11:42 am

A Child Is Born

From the AP:

Bristol Palin, 18, gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston on Saturday, People magazine reported online. He weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. Colleen Jones, the sister of Bristol's grandmother, told the magazine that "the baby is fine and Bristol is doing well."

The governor's office said it would not release information because it considers the baby's birth a private, family matter. Palin family members, hospital employees and spokespeople for the governor's former running mate, John McCain, either would not confirm the birth or did not return messages from The Associated Press.

Monday, December 29, 2008

29 Dec 2008 01:27 pm

The View From Your Window

Highland, New York, 9 am.