Their Own Self-Interest

Laura Ingraham on countries operating in their own self-interest.

...anytime we start pretending that countries are like friends or family we are bound to be disappointed. Countries aren't people. There is no "family of nations." There is no "global community." To think otherwise is naïve. The world is a dangerous place where each country acts in its own interest. Poland joined the European Union not because they felt some close affinity with the French, but because they thought it was the best thing for the future of the Polish people. Tony Blair sent British forces to Iraq in part because he thought it was in Britain's long term interest both to maintain an alliance with the U.S. and beat back a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

If John Kerry thinks that attending European conferences and pushing Congress to ratify more international accords is going to endear him to the Europeans, he's sorely mistaken. He'd have better luck wearing French cuffs and buying a residence in Provence.

...No amount of turbo-diplomacy can make countries do what is not in their self-interest. The time may come when Europe will take terrorism as seriously as we do. If that happens, we will be reunited with our European allies once again — until the next time when what's good for America isn't good for Europe, or vice versa.

WWKS: What Would Kipling Say?

Dane-geld (A.D. 980-1016)
by Rudyard Kipling

IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:—
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:—
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to says:—

“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”

QOTD: March 24, 2004

QOTD: Wesley Pruden

The peace process, a process that is to peace as Velveeta is to cheese.

The Real Goal

Richard Z. Chesnoff

I remember asking him [Sheik Ahmed Yassin] what Hamas' conditions were for peace and whether Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza would be the first step toward a settlement.

At first, I heard what was almost a giggle. Then his squeaky voice grew sharper and louder: "Make no mistake, there will be no peace as long as there is a Zionist-Jewish state. Our holy goal is to liberate all of Palestine, and if the Jews do not go, they will die. All of Palestine is Islamic land - every inch."

Churchill on Appeasement

Churchill's remark after Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war."

Founding Fathers and Religion

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports," said George Washington.

"Our Constitution was designed only for the government of a moral and religious people," said John Adams. "It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

Mel Gibson and Holocaust Denial

David Frum clarifies what has been bothering me about Mel Gibson's responses to questions of Holocaust denial.

On the other hand, I have to say I was very disturbed by something Gibson said in his interview with Peggy Noonan in Reader’s Digest.

Gibson’s father is of course a notorious Holocaust denier and trafficker in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Noonan offered Mel Gibson an opportunity to separate himself from his father’s views. Here is Gibson’s reply:

“I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France.

“Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.”

Sounds unambiguous, right? Now listen again. Note that Gibson did not say, “Don’t be absurd, Peggy. Obviously it is a matter of historical record that Adolph Hitler and the Nazis deliberately murdered millions of Jews.” Note that Gibson did not cite the universally accepted casualty count of between 5 and 6 million Jewish fatalities. Nor did he acknowledge that Jews were special targets of Hitler’s hatred or that anti-Semitism occupied a central place in Hitler’s ideology.

Note next that Gibson did not use the word “murder.” Instead, he used the generic term “atrocities,” which could cover anything from mass murder to assault and arson. And whatever was the point of that strange formulation, “Some of them were Jews ….”?

Notice finally how Gibson goes on to speak of Stalin’s massacres. Gibson speaks of Stalin's crimes in plain, direct language. For them, he invokes commonly accepted casualty counts. What prevented him from speaking that way of the Jewish Holocaust?

Gibson used equally stilted language when asked a similar question by Diane Sawyer on ABC: “Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenceless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.” Here again, Gibson seems to bypass the issues of (1) the numbers killed; (2) whether those people were deliberately murdered; and (3) whether that murder proceeded from Nazi ideology.

I am not parsing these words so closely to be pedantic. The trouble is that Gibson’s words, whether carefully considered or not, bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to those deployed by genuine Holocaust deniers.

Here for example is the credo of one large Holocaust denial website, www.revisionists.com. (I’m giving the cite so you can verify the quote if you wish. I won't sully NRO with the link.)

“Revisionists” [for so the denier s deceitfully call themselves] “do not deny that there was much Jewish suffering during WW II, that there were many Jews who had property confiscated wrongfully, that many Jews died of disease or starvation in terrible conditions or were killed, that there were terrible brutalities and atrocities committed against Jews by Germans and others. None of this do Revisionists deny. Revisionists do diminish the impact of these facts by pointing out that WWII was the bloodiest, deadliest, most atrocity-ridden conflict in the history of man and that there was criminal behavior on all sides. One need merely mention Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deadly carpet bombing of German and Japanese working class living areas, the Soviet rape of Germany in their 1945 advance, the treatment of German civilians and German POW's after the war. One could go on almost ad infinitum in this recitation of atrocities.”

Did Mel Gibson say even one thing with which these deniers would disagree?

Is Mel Gibson a Holocaust denier? I am not asserting that he is. After reading two interviews, I still do not know. Shouldn’t I know? Sawyer and Noonan both wished to help Gibson out – to give him an easy chance to show that he does not share his father’s disdain for the murdered Jews of Europe. Yet Gibson declined to avail himself of these chances. I can’t help wondering why.

QOTD: Why It's Not Over In Spain

QOTD: Mark Steyn

In his penultimate public appearance, the late Osama bin Laden, broadcasting from his cave in the early hours of the Afghan campaign, listed among his principal grievances "the tragedy of Andalusia" – that is, the end of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492. That's 512 years ago, but the al-Qa'ida guys are in no mood to (as the Democrats used to urge Republicans in the Clinton impeachment era) "move on". After half a millennium, even Paula Jones would have thrown in the towel. But not these fellows. They're still settling scores from the 15th century. They might not get around to Johnny-come-lately grievances such as Iraq until the early 2600s.

Too Late to Save Marriage

Donald Sensing, a pastor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, TN, echoes Jonah Goldberg's belief that the fight against the normalization of homosexuality has already been lost. He also echoes Stanley Kurtz's reasoning that it is the end result of the splitting of childbearing and marriage (although Kurtz also argues that it is a cause as well).

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

Gays Against Gay Marriage

Suzanne Fields describes how many gays are uncomfortable with gay marriage because they don't think they need it and they don't want it.

In the sexual revolution begun in the 1960s, gays were the winners because they didn't feel compelled to apologize to anybody for their promiscuity. It came with the territory. Now these gays worry that they will become the supersized fries of the larger culture, forced to downsize their lives if they don't marry. "It used to be that the whole point of coming out," says Michael Musto, columnist for the Village Voice, "was to stop people asking when are you going to get married and have children."

When gays split up their partnerships, they suffer the emotional pain of all broken relationships, but they don't have to fight it out in the courts and give their life's savings to lawyers and mediators. Some gays worry that the marriage license will deprive them of their avant-garde status. Instead they'll become retrograde, tarnished imitations of the bourgeois coupling they hold in contempt.

QOTD

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/03/14/dl1401.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/03/14/ixopinion.html

"We are not trying to negotiate with you. We are trying to destroy you."

The Argument for Israel

Joey Tartakovsky writes [in Blue Traffic Lights: Israeli Struggle Inspires the U.S.] an effective article about the disproportionality of the focus on Israel in international affairs.

QOTD: May 5, 2004

QOTD: Jonathan Rosenblum

Recently, I was asked by a BBC moderator of a discussion of the Women of the Wall: "But don't you think that a religion must update in accord with the times?"

"Not unless it wishes to be as irrelevant to the lives of believers as the modern Church of England," I replied.

A Number of Passion-ate Reviews [Updated 3/17/04]

Interesting Times: The Difference By Saul Singer

I am happy for the millions who, like Novak, will have their faith strengthened by this film. Christianity provides a powerful religious model that has attracted two billion adherents. It engenders a fear of God that is much preferable to common alternatives such as atheism, nihilism, and paganism. Recently, moreover, the more relevant threats to Jews have come not from the medieval Christianity Gibson seems to favor, but from Nazism, communism, and radical Islam, against which believing Christians are staunch Jewish allies.

But the Christian model is not for everyone. Jews believe that everyone is born with both a good and an evil inclination, that we must struggle to reinforce our good side, and that we can atone for sins through prayer and correcting what we've done. Though faith and actions are important to both religions, Christianity is more faith-centered and Judaism more action-centered. We believe that God judges us more on what we do to bring a better world than on what we believe.

Christianity and Judaism are close in many respects, but if there is any event that accentuates the differences, it is the release of The Passion. This could be awkward, if only because it may be strange to many Christians that Jews have trouble identifying with what for them is a powerful, affirming experience. But it is also an opportunity to explain what may be for some a more reasonable and accessible approach to God and our role in the world.

Islam means "submission" (to God). Christianity is built on being "saved" through faith. Judaism, by contrast, stubbornly tries to preserve free will and personal responsibility in the face of God's omnipotence.

Gibson's Blood Libel by Charles Krauthammer

In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

Essay: Jews and Christians after 'The Passion' By Yossi Klein Halevi

I had assumed - hoped - that the Jewish critics of The Passion were exaggerating. The critics, after all, have a habit of assuming the worst of Christianity, and of underestimating the positive changes in Christian attitudes toward Jews. They turned the Pope's beatification of Edith Stein into a nefarious Catholic plot to "Christianize" the Holocaust, and transformed a debate among historians over the role of Pius XII into a campaign against the church headed by John Paul II, who has devoted himself to Christian atonement for anti-Semitism.

But this time the critics weren't exaggerating. Mel Gibson has produced a medieval passion play, reviving the whiff of deicide at the most vulnerable Jewish moment since the 1940s.

The Passion: Jews and Christians are Watching Different Films by Dennis Prager

When watching "The Passion," Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films.

For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

In order to avoid further tension between two wonderful communities that had been well on their way to historic amity, it is crucial for each to try to understand what film the other is watching and reacting to.

Think Again: 'The Passion' & the Tar Baby By Jonathan Rosenblum

The Catholic Church cannot be terribly enthusiastic about a cinematic presentation of a theology that rejects current papal teaching on the Jews. Indeed, a group of mostly Catholic New Testament scholars, affiliated with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, submitted a study pointing out the departures of Gibson's original script from the Gospels and from papal teaching, as well as the "lurid details" imported from the ecstatic visions of an 18th-century German nun.

While evangelical Protestants will have little truck with such historical analysis of New Testament texts, they tend to overwhelmingly be philo-Semites and, unlike the Catholic Church, continue to view Jews as the Chosen People. With them, the proper approach is that adopted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center: an open appeal to Christians of goodwill to do for Jews what we cannot do for ourselves - i.e., work to ensure that The Passion does not become a vehicle for arousing anti-Semitic furies.

The Wiesenthal Center's "Appeal to People of Faith" expressly eschews any request that Christians renounce or censor their most holy texts. It places the focus on actions, not beliefs. And that is as it should be.

Is `The Passion` Anti-Semitic? By Jeff Jacoby

"THE PASSION of The Christ" is violent, bloody, and sadistic. Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus' last day has to be the most graphic and brutal death ever portrayed on film. It is being described as a masterpiece -- soul-stirring and beautiful. I found it stomach-turning and deeply troubling.I am not a Christian, but I tried to view "The Passion" the way a Christian might view it. I tried to experience it as a message of God's love and mercy, as a depiction of self-sacrifice so complete and all-embracing as to transform human history. I tried to imagine believing that all that blood -- and "The Passion" is drenched with blood -- was shed to wash away my sins. I tried to understand this grim nightmare as an enactment of mankind's redeemer being tortured and killed, to accept that this was the purpose for which he was born, to feel that I, no less than the howling mob on the screen, was responsible for -- and the beneficiary of -- his death. I tried -- but I failed.

Marc Howard Wilson discusses the interesting paradox of the movie being very Catholic yet receiving the backing of (according to him, generally anti-Catholic) Fundamentalist Protestants.

Centuries have passed, and the bulk of Catholics and Protestants have made peace with each other, occasionally uneasy, but peace nonetheless. As one would expect, however, animosity and hostility still drive the attitude of Fundamentalist Protestants toward Catholicism. Go to the Web sites and see how salacious their hatred of Catholics still is: They are damned. Their doctrines are false. Their worship is idolatry. Their interpretation of the Bible is heretical. The Pope is the antichrist. The Vatican conspires for world domination. Catholic political aspirants will be puppets of Rome. The Jesuits plotted with the Nazis to mastermind the Holocaust. How often have I heard a Fundamentalist preacher refer to "Christians, Catholics and Jews," inferring that Catholics are not even genuine Christians?

Some time ago, a Fundamentalist institution honored one of the most vituperatively militant anti-Catholics, Rev. Ian Paisley, with a Doctorate of Humanities. The same institution would allow on campus neither Jerry Falwell nor Pat Robertson, whom most of us consider staunch Fundamentalists, because they engaged in dialogue with Catholics. That very institution is now one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for Gibson's film.

This is precisely the oxymoron: A significant segment, perhaps a majority, of Fundamentalist Protestants think that Catholics are a bunch of hell-bound heretics who subscribe to false doctrine. Likewise, radical Catholics like Gibson have little regard for the integrity and salvation of the Protestants. Yet, somehow in this lunatic world, the most fundamentalist Fundamentalists are actually turning to a fanatical Catholic to teach the world "the Truth" about Jesus and his sanctifying death.

Unilateral Preemption Argument

Jim Miklaszewski reveals why waiting for coalition builiding is not necessarily a great idea.

With Tuesday?s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.

But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself ? but never pulled the trigger.

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

?People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president?s policy of preemption against terrorists,? according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

WAR on Terrorism

BOTW on the case for treating the War on Terrorism as a war and not a criminal action. The second point is right on the mark as well.

The criminal-justice system is designed to value procedure over outcome. This is entirely fitting in a case of pisicide, and it's a trade-off worth making even when dealing with crimes against human beings. But we are at war with an enemy that seeks to destroy our civilization, an enemy that observes no civilized rules of combat. Defining that conflict as merely a criminal justice matter risks tying the hands of the government as it tries to protect citizens from atrocities that could be far worse than Sept. 11.

Civil libertarians, too, should be wary of treating terrorism as primarily a criminal-justice matter. If we are relying on the courts to protect us from attack, judges may be inclined to scale back the rights of terrorist defendants, establishing precedents that would inevitably apply to nonterror defendants as well.

Another Take

Scott Orson Card gives his take on the issue of gay marriage.

The argument by the hypocrites of homosexuality that homosexual tendencies are genetically ingrained in some individuals is almost laughably irrelevant. We are all genetically predisposed toward some sin or another; we are all expected to control those genetic predispositions when it is possible. It is for God to judge which individuals are tempted beyond their ability to bear or beyond their ability to resist.

Marriage FAQs

Here are some FAQ's about gay marriage from the FRC and Family.org.

Against Gay Marriage

Stanley Kurtz writes in The Weekly Standard about the corrosive effects of gay marriage on society, effects that are almost impossible to reverse. In effect, it locks in a separation of marriage from parenthood with all the corresponding ill effects on children.

Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce.

...

If, as in Norway, gay marriage were imposed here by a socially liberal cultural elite, it would likely speed us on the way toward the classic Nordic pattern of less frequent marriage, more frequent out-of-wedlock birth, and skyrocketing family dissolution.

...

What about a patchwork in which some American states have gay marriage while others do not? A state-by-state patchwork would practically guarantee a shift toward the Nordic family system. Movies and television, which do not respect state borders, would embrace gay marriage. The cultural effects would be national.

What about Vermont-style civil unions? Would that be a workable compromise? Clearly not. Scandinavian registered partnerships are Vermont-style civil unions. They are not called marriage, yet resemble marriage in almost every other respect. The key differences are that registered partnerships do not permit adoption or artificial insemination, and cannot be celebrated in state-affiliated churches. These limitations are gradually being repealed. The lesson of the Scandinavian experience is that even de facto same-sex marriage undermines marriage.

...

Both Bech and Halvorsen stress that the conservative case for gay marriage, while put forward by a few, was rejected by many in the gay community. Bech, perhaps Scandinavia's most prominent gay thinker, dismisses as an "implausible" claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy. He treats the "conservative case" as something that served chiefly tactical purposes during a difficult political debate. According to Halvorsen, many of Norway's gays imposed self-censorship during the marriage debate, so as to hide their opposition to marriage itself. The goal of the gay marriage movements in both Norway and Denmark, say Halvorsen and Bech, was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality. Halvorsen suggests that the low numbers of registered gay couples may be understood as a collective protest against the expectations (presumably, monogamy) embodied in marriage.

QOTD: March 2, 2004

QOTD: Rabbi Benjamin Blech

Many years ago I met with Ernest Hemingway. In a remarkably frank conversation, the Pulitzer Prize winner confessed to me that there was something about Judaism that he admired more than any other religion. "From my understanding," he told me, "Judaism, unlike the Christianity in which I was raised, is a religion of life, not a religion of death."

Passion Review

Rabbi Benjamin Blech reviews The Passion.

Interesting review as he covers the gore, the Protestant vs Catholic dynamics, and the truthfulness to the New Testament version.

Benny Morris Exposed

Efraim Karsh exposes the lies and made-up data of Benny Morris who has made a career of denigrating the history of Israel. Here is a typical example.

Morris tells of statements never made, decisions never taken, events that never happened. Consider, for example, the Israeli cabinet meeting of June 16, 1948, about which Morris commits a double misrepresentation: he misattributes a decision to bar the return of the Palestinian refugees to this meeting; then he charges the Israeli establishment with concealing this nonexistent decision!

ICRC's Perverted Priorities

Don Habibi documents how biased the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is.

For North Africa - covering Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco/Western Sahara, and Tunisia - the ICRC has one office in Tunis, a budget of 2,512,613 Swiss francs, and personnel consisting of five expatriates and 10 locally-hired staff.

These are the allocations dedicated to a human rights disaster zone, a population of 82 million and covering an area of 6,048,149 square kilometers.

For Asia and the Pacific - covering Cambodia, People's Republic of Korea, Japan, Laos, Mongolia, People's Republic of China, Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam - the ICRC has a main office in Bangkok, plus two prosthetic limb workshops in Cambodia.

The budget for this region is 5,838,991 Swiss francs, and the personnel consists of 17 expatriates and 43 locally hired staff. These are the allocations dedicated to a human rights disaster zone, for a population of 1.7 billion and covering an area of 13,056,235 sq. km.

For "Israel/Occupied Territories/Autonomous Territories," the ICRC has 13 offices in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Khan Yunis, Majdel Shams, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The budget for this area is 22,407,815 Swiss francs, and the personnel consists of 130 expatriates and 90 locally-hired staff. The personnel numbers and budget have continued to increase dramatically since the Annual Report 2001.

When I checked the ICRC worldwide web page on February 19-21, 2003, they listed a presence of 327 (254 staff, including 73 expatriates).

Not Just the Jews

Mel Gibson believes even his Episcopalian wife is going to hell. Oh, well...

Britain's Elites Converting to Islam

A7 reports that Britain's elites are converting to Islam , including the son of the former director-general of the BBC and the great-granddaughter of a British prime minister.

According to a report by IslamOnLine, an Islamic website, 14,000 of England’s ‘elite’ have already converted to Islam, with more on the way.

However, one of them made this comment that makes it seem somewhat of a rebellion against their parents and something they're doing to be cool. It also doesn't hurt that Islam doesn't seem as "wishy-washy" as Christianity in England.

We’re all the rage, I hope it’s not a passing fashion.