Fence Hypocrisy

Other Fences in the World, care of Marty Roberts from A7:

Ireland border

Korean border

US-Mexico border

Vatican-Italy border

Holland has a fence to prevent immigrants from leaving the harbor area

India-Pakistan border

Moroccan-Spanish border to keep illegal workers out of Spain

Now, there are no terrorists infiltrating back and forth in these cases. Why the difference for Israel?

Is There an Alternative to Arafat's Leadership?

Barry Rubin pretty well covers Arafat.

Arafat is not a nationalist. If he was, he could have had a state in 1968, in 1979, at several points in the 1980s, and certainly in the year 2000. But he is not interested in the well-being of the Palestinian people, he's interested in the Palestinian cause.

In many ways, one of the keys to understanding Arafat is that he is basically an old-fashioned Islamist, influenced by his early connections with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He believes that victory is inevitable and that God will bring him victory. He believes it would be a sin to compromise, and that he has no right to give up anything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is better to leave the battle to future generations than to make any political settlement that limits their ability to fight for total victory.

Arafat is also a romantic revolutionary, the Middle Eastern counterpart of Che Guevara who glories in struggle and battling against the odds. He has no desire to become a statesman. He prefers to keep the revolution going.

In each phase of his life - in Jordan (1967-1971), Lebanon (1971-1982), Tunis (1982-1994), and the West Bank and Gaza (1994 to the present) - Arafat has ended up destroying his own position because of the belief that violence always benefits his cause, the conviction that he doesn't have to implement his agreements, and the use of extremist front groups to commit violence for which he can disclaim responsibility.

The bottom line is: Arafat will not make a deal. Therefore, either an alternative to Arafat is found or we will have to out-wait him, in order to achieve peace.

Demonizing Cell Phones

NYT article includes a piece taking on the misconception that cell phones are the primary form of driver distraction.

While cell phones have been singled out as a major cause of distraction-related accidents, the biggest diversions are fairly low tech, according to Jane Stutts, the author of the AAA study. Outside stimuli — billboards or accident scenes that inspire rubbernecking — accounted for almost 30 percent of crashes; adjusting the radio or CD player, 11.4 percent; talking with passengers, 10.9 percent; adjusting climate control, 2.8 percent; eating or drinking, 1.7 percent. Cell phones accounted for just 1.5 percent of accidents, the study found.

Islamikaze

Andrew G. Bostom reviews Raphael Israeli's Islamikaze- Manifestations of Islamic Matryrology. Summary courtesy of Daily Alert from the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

In Islamikaze - Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology, Raphael Israeli proposes the creation of an alliance of Western and democratic states (AWADS) that follows six "rules of engagement":
1) Strict control of immigration from Muslim countries;
2) Reciprocal arrangements for controlled immigration, tourism, and educational exchanges to guarantee equivalent, unimpeded bilateral flow, devoid of characteristic Muslim discriminatory regulations towards other races, faiths, or nationalities;
3) Making various forms of assistance contingent upon accountability, progress in human rights, meaningful efforts at population control, renunciation of force/violence in dealing with other nations/communities, and monitoring and controlling incitement to hatred and violence in mosques and media outlets;
4) Terminating all military assistance and weapons sales by AWADS to non-member states;
5) Mosque construction in AWADS nations, particularly projects funded by Saudi Arabia, will be contingent upon reciprocal arrangements to construct religious institutions for other faiths in Muslim nations;
6) The importation into AWADS nations from Muslim countries of books, movies, clerics and missionaries, print media, or audio/video tapes must be reciprocal, contingent upon the unrestricted flow of similar AWADS cultural assets into Muslim countries, and all such assets will be required by law to be devoid of messages that disseminate hate. (FrontPageMagazine)

Art and Religion

Menahem Alexenberg brings an interesting discussion of art and religion.

Christian theologian Thorlief Boman in his seminal book, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, points out that in contrast to Hellenism that can separate a person from his actions, the Hebraic mind makes no such separation. In English, as in Greek, it is possible to make distinctions that are not available in Hebrew. For instance: “I am lecturing” is ani martzeh; “I lecture” is also ani martzeh; and “I am a lecturer” is again ani martzeh. Action, act, and actor are integrally one. A person is defined by what he does. A Jew should not separate an evil man from his aesthetic products.

Hanukkah was not a fight against the aesthetic values of Greece, but rather about their primacy and divorce from morality. Judaism honors art when it is preceded by righteousness. The Hebrew word for Greece, yavan, is spelled yod, vav, nun. Adding the letter tzadi before yavan transforms it into tzion, Zion. The letter tzadi represents the tzadik, a righteous person. Art must be united with righteousness in Judaism. The shadow side of the creative process is acknowledged in the Bible.

EU Parliament Member: Intifada is European Proxy War Against America

From Arutz 7

EU Member of Parliament Ilka Schroeder delivered an address entitled, “The European Union, Israel, and Palestinian Terrorism” at the Center for German Studies of Ben Gurion University on Monday.

"The Europeans," explained MP Schroeder, "supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor, and through this challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power. Therefore, the Al-Aksa Intifada should be understood as a proxy war between Europe and the United States."

Dennis Prager's Ten Lessons

Dennis Prager in the WSJ.

Ten lessons from Saddam Hussein's capture:

1. America is the greatest force for good on the planet. America, with the support of Britain and some other countries, and against the rest of "world opinion," liberated Iraq from evil. If it were up to the U.N. or the EU, or the editorial boards of most major American newspapers, Saddam would still be happily making palaces for himself and torture dungeons for his people.

2. The positive effect on humanity of good vanquishing evil cannot be overstated. When evil people get away with what they have done, it has a dispiriting effect. Even those of us who believe that a just God dispenses justice after this life ache to see justice done here and now. In this regard, it is not only good that Saddam was captured; it is good that he lived in holes, and aware that his sadistic sons had been killed. It is nice to know that he has been suffering.

3. No Muslim or Arab country lifted a finger to help the Iraqi people. This is because the Muslim and Arab worlds do not divide the world between good and evil, but between Muslim and non-Muslim and Arab and non-Arab. Since Saddam was a fellow Muslim and Arab, the fact that he tortured and murdered so many was as irrelevant to the Muslim and Arab worlds as the Islamic regime's genocide in Sudan and the subjugation of women in Taliban Afghanistan.

4. Not everyone is happy about Saddam's capture. Palestinians, for example, are weeping. Saddam was their hero. Iraqis were forced to march with his posters, but Palestinians did so voluntarily. Many on the Left are also not particularly happy. Saddam's capture is a victory for American force and for George W. Bush, and the Left hates both more than it hates Saddam.

5. The Left seeks power, but is incapable of leading because leadership and wanting to be loved are mutually exclusive. Leftists, including liberal politicians, want to be loved and want America to be loved. That was President Clinton's great desire, and that is why, with all his abundant talents, he could never lead. Much of the Left's criticism of Mr. Bush revolves around this issue: "Look at how popular we were right after 9/11 and how unpopular we are now."

6. Most of the Left does not hate evil; hatred of evil is primarily found on the Right. With exceptions such as Tony Blair and Joseph Lieberman, virtually the entire Left finds evil far less disturbing than global warming, smoking, economic inequality, and drug prices. And with the exceptions of "paleoconservatives" such as Pat Buchanan, most of the Right regards the use of American power to vanquish evil as the greatest good the U.S. can engage in.

7. In the Arab world, power is venerated. For years leading up to 9/11, Islamists were respected for their increasing power and America was losing respect as it suffered blows at the hands of Islamic terror. Now America is seen as the powerful one, and is earning the respect once accorded Saddam and Osama. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

8. There are many who respect goodness above all else. But humanity as a whole has far more respect for power, and takes powerful societies more seriously than good ones. That is why China is respected despite its being a dictatorship and its brutal crushing of Tibet. China is powerful. The stronger America is, the more people will take it and its values seriously. As an unprecedented combination of power and goodness, America could reshape the world.

9. The Marxist belief that forces, not individuals, shape history is wrong. George W. Bush is living proof.

10. The reason the president is shaping history is that he has as strong a set of beliefs -- in America's moral mission and in Judeo-Christian religious values -- as those he is fighting. Those who hold bad beliefs can only be defeated by those have equally strong good beliefs.

Why Palestinian Mothers Will Now Be Stopped At Checkpoints

JPost article on the arrest of a Palestinian mother of 7 kids who was transporting a bomb belt for a suicide bomber.

..."because of you and others like you, our soldiers will be forced from now on to examine every Palestinian woman and regard her as a security risk. You have violated the unwritten code that took into account the dignity of the Palestinian woman. You have violated our most fundamental belief that women, and especially mothers of children, remain outside the terrible circle of terror, outside the hunts and searches. You are the first one to destroy the concept. Your innocent friends, on their way to the doctor or visiting their families, will pay the price of your act at the checkpoints."

Some of My Fellow Democrats Are Unpatriotic

Orson Scott Card eloquently analyzes, in the WSJ, why Iraq is not "Vietnam".

Reuters recently ran a feature that trumpeted the "fact" that U.S. casualties in Iraq have now surpassed U.S. casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam War. Never mind that this is a specious distortion of the facts, which depends on the ignorance of American readers. The fact is that during the first three years of the war in Vietnam, dating from the official "beginning" of the war in 1961, American casualties were low because (a) we had fewer than 20,000 soldiers there, (b) most of them were advisers, deliberately trying to avoid a direct combat role, (c) our few combat troops were special forces, who generally get to pick and choose the time and place of their combat, and (d) because our presence was so much smaller, there were fewer American targets than in Iraq today.

Compare our casualties in Iraq with our casualties in Vietnam when we had a comparable number of troops, and by every rational measure--casualties per thousand troops, casualties per year, or absolute number of casualties--you'll find that the Iraq campaign is far, far less costly than Vietnam. But the media want Americans to think that Iraq is like Vietnam--or rather, that Iraq is like the story that the Left likes to tell about Vietnam.

Vietnam was a quagmire only because we fought it that way. If we had closed North Vietnam's ports and carried the war to the enemy, victory could have been relatively quick. However, the risk of Chinese involvement was too great. Memories of Korea were fresh in everyone's minds, and so Vietnam was fought in such a way as to avoid "another Korea." That's why Vietnam became, well, Vietnam.

Based on the very own words of the anti-Bush Democrats, he calls a spade, a spade.

Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?

Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil.

Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.

An excellent analysis of the "goal" in Iraq.

The goal of our troops in Iraq is not to protect themselves so completely that none of our soldiers die. The goal of our troops is to destroy the enemy, some of whom you do not find except when they emerge to attack our forces and, yes, sometimes inflict casualties.

He may even wind up voting for Bush.

I can think of many, many reasons why the Republicans should not control both houses of Congress and the White House. But right now, if the alternative is the Democratic Party as led in Congress and as exemplified by the current candidates for the Democratic nomination, then I can't be the only Democrat who will, with great reluctance, vote not just for George W. Bush, but also for every other candidate of the only party that seems committed to fighting abroad to destroy the enemies that seek to kill us and our friends at home.

The Growing Threat to Israel's Qualitative Military Edge

MK Dr. Yuval Steinitz
Chairman, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Israel has no strategic depth and could face a situation in which its air superiority was jeopardized by guerrilla forces coming from neighboring countries just a short distance away, or even from the Palestinian Authority.

Since a number of hostile countries now possess long-range missiles, Israel must take into consideration the fact that all of its air bases are within range of enemy weapons.

The Egyptians see Hamas as a strategic asset, exactly like the Syrians and the Iranians see Hizballah in Lebanon.

If the Egyptians are not doing everything in their capacity to prevent the smuggling of arms and explosives into Gaza, this is a kind of implicit, tacit support.

Egypt apparently believes that if Israel and the Palestinians continue to bleed together, in the end this will weaken Israel and tilt the balance of forces against it.

The last decade has seen a very sharp rise in military expenditures in Egypt, though that country faces no challenges or threats to its territory from its neighbors. The indoctrination of new Egyptian officers focuses on preparation for a possible future war against Israel.

Unix Versus Windows

Extremely useful comparison and contrast between Unix/Linux/etc. and Windows from Joel Spolsky.

By now, Windows and Unix are functionally more similar than different. They both support the same major programming metaphors, from command lines to GUIs to web servers; they are organized around virtually the same panoply of system resources, from nearly identical file systems to memory to sockets and processes and threads. There's not much about the core set of services provided by each operating system to limit the kinds of applications you can create.

What's left is cultural differences...

What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.

This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that's the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.

Peace Rejected

Mortimer Zuckerman in US News reiterates, once again, why peace is not close in the Middle East.

Hearts leapt that bright morning 10 years ago when the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn and President Clinton declared "the peace of the brave is within our reach." Never has faith been so brutally betrayed, hope so utterly supplanted by despair. Who could have imagined that Israel would now face the worst terrorism in its history, with about 900 people killed in just three years--the equivalent of 50,000 murders a year in the United States?

Today there are headlines once again about formulas for a settlement, but it is clear that the Palestinians are far less prepared for peace than they were a decade ago. Suffused with messages of hate, indoctrinated early in the schools, and subjected to poisonous broadcasts in the media and the mosque, they nurture a culture that longs not for the creation of a Palestinian state but for the destruction of the state of their Israeli neighbors. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Palestinians wanted to see terrorism against Israel continue, even after the creation of a Palestinian state, and in all of the territories, including East Jerusalem. Only 26 percent wanted to give up the armed struggle.

Is it any wonder the Israelis have concluded that the reason the Palestinians reject peace is not because Jews live in the West Bank city of Hebron but because they live in Tel Aviv and Haifa?

Thugocracy. The Palestinian leaders have made no bones about it. Their own magazine stated long ago their aim clearly: "Not to impose our will on the enemy but to destroy him in order to take his place." Palestinians have few qualms in admitting that the original accord negotiated in Oslo was worse than a sham. The bloody bookends are a statement--within days of the signing by Arafat--that Oslo was part of the "plan of stages" to destroy Israel and the June 24, 2001, affirmation by the relatively moderate Faisal Husseini that the Oslo agreement constituted a "Trojan horse," whose pure essence was deception.

Concessions Don't Help

Barry Rubin -- Jerusalem Post
Summary from the Daily Alert Bulletin of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Two disproved propositions underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are: 1) Israel must keep offering the Palestinians more until they accept a deal. 2) If Israel keeps offering more concessions it will win international support and sympathy.

Unfortunately, Arafat is not a nationalist whose appetite would be assuaged by the creation of a state. He is basically a combination of old-fashioned Islamist, who believes that God is on his side and that compromise is sinful, and romantic revolutionary, who does not want the battle to end.

What has instead happened is that the Palestinian appetite grows with the feeding. The more Israel offers, the more Palestinians demand. Experience has taught the Palestinian leadership that as it refuses compromise, Israelis who claim to speak for Israel offer more concessions.

In the West, moderation and generosity are taken as proofs that one truly wants to settle a dispute; in the Middle East they are taken as signs of weakness and of knowing that one's cause is unjust.

The central problem is a Palestinian refusal to settle for anything but everything, either immediately or in stages. The Palestinian leadership and opinion-makers are not people whom Israel will persuade by concessions.

By continuing to insist that the problem is that Israel has not offered enough, Israelis do not prove their goodwill but rather seem to suggest that they are the guilty party. This is also part of the reason for the world's hostility.

Vote for Me, I've Killed More Innocents Than You Have

Students running during Beir Zeit University's student election campaign on how many innocent Israelis they've killed. This is not how many people the organizations killed. This is how many people the students themselves have killed. Fatah also campaigned by blowing models of Israeli cities to which Hamas representatives blew up models of Israeli buses. They rarely discussed issues related to the school.

This is a rather telling quotation.

Hamas said fighting Israel is the only issue. "We are a resistance movement and without resistance we have nothing to do," said Moussa Kiswani, a prominent university Hamas activist.

Beir Zeit (in the West Bank) is considered the MOST liberal Palestinian university. Imagine the others.

Why Checkpoints Stop Ambulances

If anyone still wonders why the Israeli army stops Palestinian ambulances at checkpoints, look no further than this JPost article.

Rashed Tarek al-Nimr, a cousin of PLO executive head Farouk Kadoumi, who worked as a chemist in hospitals in Nablus and Bethlehem, supplied chemicals he took from the hospitals to Hamas for use in making bombs. He told the Shin Bet he used ambulances to transport the chemicals.

He also said that senior Hamas commanders hide inside hospitals to evade capture.

QOTD

QOTD: Abraham Foxman

That being said, there is a dramatic difference between raising questions about current Israeli policies and framing the explosion of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world and Europe in terms of those policies. Indeed, the true linkage of anti-Semitism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the opposite of what Soros and Peres maintain: It is the hatred reflected in anti-Semitism that has made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even harder to solve. Anti-Semitism, far from being a product of the conflict, is increasingly a cause of it.

Baked Alaska

Interesting story from the BBC about a set of Eskimo twins adopted by an Israeli Orthodox family and now entering the Israeli Army. Check it out.

Here is another article from Ha'aretz

"Among the Intuit people, giving children to whites for adoption is absolutely forbidden. Only after one of the tribe checked us out and decided that the extended Jewish family inculcates values similar to those of the Inuit, did they agree to it, and the tribe gave its consent." [says the twins Israeli mother]

QOTD

Thomas Jefferson

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of
opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Democratic Pandering to the Jews

Ben Shapiro explains why Democratic Presidential candidates pander to the Jews.

Why are liberal Jews susceptible to pandering? Because it validates their anti-Judaic lifestyle. Deep down, every Jew still has a spark that resonates to authentic Jewish values and attitudes, values that are clearly in line with the politically conservative position. When prominent Democrats identify themselves as Jewish, or Jewish-sympathizing, it becomes easy for liberal Jews to justify their own betrayal of authentic Judaism.

Belief Through the Back Door

Dennis Prager's route to belief:

Most people come to believe in God through what I call the front door of faith. Something leads them to believe in God. Since that day at Columbia, however, I regularly renew my faith through the back door -- I see the confusion and nihilism that godless ideas produce and my faith is restored. The consequences of secularism have been at least as powerful a force for faith in my life as religion.

Great Idea: The League of Democracies

Jonah Goldberg rocks with his analysis of the problems of the UN and a proposed solution.

People want a goody-goody multinational organization that does nice things and solves bad problems. So, since the U.N. is the only outfit in that business, we keep dusting it off and patting it on the back after each of its innumerable and monumental failures.

One of the reasons it fails is that it's pretty much designed to. There is no vision, no set of shared values that truly unites the United Nations. You can't have a civil rights organization where Klansmen are welcomed as members; you can't have a softball team where half the players want to play basketball, and you can't have a global organization dedicated to the spread of human rights and democracy with nearly half the members representing barbaric, corrupt regimes.

And because the U.N. feels it must be "fair" to everybody, the worst abusers get to take turns determining policies on human rights and weapons proliferation. Right before the war, Iraq was set to co-chair the U.N. Commission on Disarmament - with Iran! And even now the U.N. Commission on Human Rights is chock-a-block with representatives of nations that treat their own citizens like piñatas.

My solution: Competition. Why not create a new multinational organization that has members who share common ideals and that isn't based on the antiquated assumptions of 50 years ago. In this League of Democracies, membership would be restricted to countries with democratic values and the rule of law. This wouldn't be the "West versus the rest" either. Japan, India, South Korea, South Africa and others could be members.

The question is, then, how do we determine who is qualified for membership? What level of representation and what level of human and economic rights are required for entree? To be continued...

It Takes Two to Partition

Summary of It Takes Two to Partition - Yossi Klein Halevi (Jerusalem Post) via Daily Alert newsletter of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

What we've learned about the conflict over this last bitter decade is that the Oslo-era notion of a comprehensive peace needs to be wiped from our lexicon. Instead, we should conceive not of resolving the conflict but of managing its intensity. A hudna isn't merely a means to an end but - at least for the foreseeable future, and possibly for this generation - the end itself.

One compelling reason why a comprehensive peace is now unattainable is the near-total absence, among mainstream Palestinians and the Arab world generally, of the notion that Jewish sovereignty over any part of this land is legitimate. In numerous conversations I've had with Palestinians from all levels of society, the consensus is that Israel isn't the expression of a people returning home but of a colonialist intrusion in the Middle East. The problem isn't Israel's policies but its existence.

Consider Gen. Nasser Youssef, arguably the most moderate figure in the Palestinian security apparatus, who recently lost a power struggle with Yasser Arafat. In the late 1990s, I participated in several long conversations between the general and several Israelis in his office in Gaza City. When we asked how he conceived of peace, Youssef replied that the Jewish people would be absorbed into the Arab nation to which it naturally belongs.

Even Gen. Youssef, then, is merely a tactical moderate, offering Jews protected minority status under a benign Muslim Arab majority rule. At best, the Palestinian leadership sees a two-state solution as an interim stage.

At every level of society in the Arab world generally, a "culture of denial" has taken root which denies the most minimal truths of Jewish history, from the existence of the Temple to the existence of gas chambers. In fact, only in the Arab world has Holocaust denial become part of mainstream discourse.

The strategic implications of that culture of denial is that Israel cannot, at this stage, contract itself into the vulnerable 1967 borders. An approximate return to the "green line" is conceivable only in a Middle East that has renounced its longing to eliminate Israel. And that is possible only if Israel receives recognition of its legitimacy - for now, inconceivable.

Centrist Israelis like myself are convinced that no concession will bring us peace, because the issue isn't discovering the precise point on the map that will satisfy Arab claims but the Arab rejection of any place on the map for a Jewish state.

How Much Use Of Multilateralism Did Clinton Make Use Of?

Victor Davis Hanson on Multilateral Mantras:

President Clinton never really evoked the sanction of the 190 nations of the U.N. when he quite understandably bombed in Serbia and Iraq. The EU and U.N. were not brought in on either incursion — how could they be when they had a proven record of appeasement and inaction in Serbia that had led to a quarter-million Europeans perishing and allowed almost a million Rwandans to die? Neither North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, Libya, nor Iran seemed to care much how many went up in smoke — given that death is what they dish out to their own people all the time.

What's the Difference Between Republicans and Democrats?

Ann Coulter explains on JWR the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Sweet!

The common wisdom holds that "both parties" have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

QOTD: 12/02/03

QOTD: Thomas L. Friedman, www.nytimes.com, November 30, 2003
The Chant Not Heard

Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding an antiwar rally on a day when your own people have been murdered and not even mentioning it or those who perpetrated it.

He also added this.

[T]his war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to an unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot.