Posts
James Taranto in Best of the Web:
'...What's really objectionable about Klein's Saturday evening post, however, is the implication that higher education and military service are morally equivalent. We did spend several years in college, and we did it for the same reasons that most people do--to improve our employment prospects and to kill time while we figured out a direction in life. As a former college student, we can attest that going to college is not a patriotic act but a self-serving one.
Nothing wrong with that, but society has no moral obligation to reward self-serving actions. If the Dream Act made it possible for illegal aliens to earn citizenship by serving honorably in the military, and no more than that, we would support it unreservedly. Perhaps the act's higher-education provisions would have economic benefits. But if so, why does Klein need to rest his argument on a false equivalence between soldiers and students?..."
***Conflating the promise to attend college with actual service in the defense of the nation is absurd.It's not even clear why the "reward" for being illegal is citizenship. If something extraordinary is done, like serving in the military ( not merely promising to do so ), it's more the case that this is the appropriate reward. If the justification is merely to allow illegals to come out of the shadows, it should be sufficient to provide permanent residency without the ability to use citizenship as a justification (under the misguided Family Unification policy )for bringing in countless relatives. ***
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Palestinians don't even pretend that peace is possible but the Left (everywhere) ignores this
http://tinyurl.com/2d94lh5
Bringing Bibi Downby Caroline Glick 12/17/2010
...Last Friday, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief peace negotiator with Israel published an op-ed in Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he declared eternal war on the Jewish state. This he did by asserting that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that does not permit the immigration of some 7 million foreign Arabs to Israel will be "completely untenable."
So as far as the supposedly moderate chief Palestinian negotiator is concerned, a peace deal in which Israel cedes Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians as the Israeli Left desires will not be sufficient for the Palestinians. Unless Israel also agrees to commit national suicide by accepting 7 million foreign Arabs as citizens, the Palestinians will continue to wage their war. With or without a Palestinian state, as long as Israel exists, the Palestinians will continue to seek its destruction...
***Incredibly, the Left everywhere, even in Israel, ignores this statement ( indeed, it is because they could be expected to ignore it that Erekat could afford to be so candid )and blithely proceeds as if this admission and the actual position behind it don't exist. It's not just the Left ( e.g. the NY Times et al ) but the U.S. State Department as well. (Of course, this includes Barack Obama whose antipathy to Israel transcends even his Leftist nature. )We have already seen from the WikiLeaks information that other Arab governments care much less about the Palestinians than they do about the threat from Iran. Privately, they probably find the Israelis easier to deal with than the always-obstreperous Palestinians. The only cultural feature to distinguish Palestinians from other Arabs is not language, religion, literature or other usual characteristic: it's that they have historically always been a pain in the ass to everyone.It's no accident that "Black September" refers to Jordan's reaction to them and that other Arab countries have been singularly unwilling to assimilate Palestinians into their societies (or even to expel hundreds of thousands of "guest workers" after the Palestinian leadership endorsed Saddam's invasion of Kuwait). ****
http://tinyurl.com/28guqlx
Erekat Pulls Wool Over 'Guardian' Readers' Eyes by Gil Ronen
...What Erekat failed to note was that the Arab world bluntly rejected Bernadotte's plan for peace between Jews and Arabs and opted for war against the nascent state of Israel instead...The Arabs refused to accept even this plan, however, and the Jews rejected the plan after the Arabs did.
Bernadotte noted in his journal that the "Palestinian" Arabs had little desire for independence."The Palestinian Arabs had at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak. It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan."
...it was the Arab side that was first to reject Bernadotte's generous***i.e.generous to the Arabs*** plan. The Arabs then launched a genocidal war against Israel - and lost it. The result included many more refugees, whom the Arabs now wish to put back into Israeli territory, along with their descendants. ***Erekat refers to the Palestinians as the oldest and largest refugee group but, by uniquely including descendants, he makes the two points tautological.(If you identify two rabbits, the more time passes the more rabbits you have.) Actually, more Jews were displaced from Arab countries after 1948 than were Arabs from Israel but they (and their descendants) are not counted because they were assimilated into Israal. However, they were forcibly expelled without their property and should be included in any plan for "reparations." What this candid admission reveals, however, is that the Palestinian Arab position is intransigent and intractable and that further concessions are useless and counterproductive. Peace will only come three generations after they have decided to make peace and cease fomenting irredentism among their children. So far, they have not started to stop doing so.****
Bringing Bibi Downby Caroline Glick 12/17/2010
...Last Friday, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief peace negotiator with Israel published an op-ed in Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he declared eternal war on the Jewish state. This he did by asserting that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that does not permit the immigration of some 7 million foreign Arabs to Israel will be "completely untenable."
So as far as the supposedly moderate chief Palestinian negotiator is concerned, a peace deal in which Israel cedes Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians as the Israeli Left desires will not be sufficient for the Palestinians. Unless Israel also agrees to commit national suicide by accepting 7 million foreign Arabs as citizens, the Palestinians will continue to wage their war. With or without a Palestinian state, as long as Israel exists, the Palestinians will continue to seek its destruction...
***Incredibly, the Left everywhere, even in Israel, ignores this statement ( indeed, it is because they could be expected to ignore it that Erekat could afford to be so candid )and blithely proceeds as if this admission and the actual position behind it don't exist. It's not just the Left ( e.g. the NY Times et al ) but the U.S. State Department as well. (Of course, this includes Barack Obama whose antipathy to Israel transcends even his Leftist nature. )We have already seen from the WikiLeaks information that other Arab governments care much less about the Palestinians than they do about the threat from Iran. Privately, they probably find the Israelis easier to deal with than the always-obstreperous Palestinians. The only cultural feature to distinguish Palestinians from other Arabs is not language, religion, literature or other usual characteristic: it's that they have historically always been a pain in the ass to everyone.It's no accident that "Black September" refers to Jordan's reaction to them and that other Arab countries have been singularly unwilling to assimilate Palestinians into their societies (or even to expel hundreds of thousands of "guest workers" after the Palestinian leadership endorsed Saddam's invasion of Kuwait). ****
http://tinyurl.com/28guqlx
Erekat Pulls Wool Over 'Guardian' Readers' Eyes by Gil Ronen
...What Erekat failed to note was that the Arab world bluntly rejected Bernadotte's plan for peace between Jews and Arabs and opted for war against the nascent state of Israel instead...The Arabs refused to accept even this plan, however, and the Jews rejected the plan after the Arabs did.
Bernadotte noted in his journal that the "Palestinian" Arabs had little desire for independence."The Palestinian Arabs had at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak. It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan."
...it was the Arab side that was first to reject Bernadotte's generous***i.e.generous to the Arabs*** plan. The Arabs then launched a genocidal war against Israel - and lost it. The result included many more refugees, whom the Arabs now wish to put back into Israeli territory, along with their descendants. ***Erekat refers to the Palestinians as the oldest and largest refugee group but, by uniquely including descendants, he makes the two points tautological.(If you identify two rabbits, the more time passes the more rabbits you have.) Actually, more Jews were displaced from Arab countries after 1948 than were Arabs from Israel but they (and their descendants) are not counted because they were assimilated into Israal. However, they were forcibly expelled without their property and should be included in any plan for "reparations." What this candid admission reveals, however, is that the Palestinian Arab position is intransigent and intractable and that further concessions are useless and counterproductive. Peace will only come three generations after they have decided to make peace and cease fomenting irredentism among their children. So far, they have not started to stop doing so.****
Friday, December 17, 2010
Not every problem has a solution even if you increasingly pressure someone to make concessions.
Can Israel Turn Enemies into Peacemakers? - David Suissa
The State of Israel was built not by whiners but by Jews for whom no miracle was impossible - whether that meant defending against an Arab invasion or turning a desert into lush fields of agriculture. This can-do attitude has been the life force behind Israel's military success as well as its economic and cultural renaissance. There is one area, however, where Israel's can-do attitude has been a big failure, and that is in making peace with the Palestinians.
With making peace, it's far from clear whether Israel has a product the Palestinians want to buy. Israel has been under enormous pressure over the years, internally and externally, to "do something" to bring peace. Israel has been too embarrassed to admit that "we can't solve this one," that the parties are too far apart, that peace, no matter how desirable, is simply not in the cards at the moment. What if there is nothing Israel can offer the Palestinians to get them to accept and deliver a durable peace with a Jewish state? What if the truth is that Israel can evacuate 300,000 Jews from the West Bank tomorrow and give up half of Jerusalem and that this would still not bring peace - and might even bring more war?
The Palestinian demand for a "right of return" is a deal-killer. So is a return to nondefensible borders, and so is the presence of a terrorist state in Gaza. The fact that peace is immensely desirable has nothing to do with the reality that it is immensely unobtainable. If anything, the more Israel has shown its desire, the more the price has gone up. The Palestinians have said "no" to every peace offer Israel has ever put on the table. The status quo may be untenable, but a fake peace process makes it even worse. Israel should fess up that it doesn't have the power to turn enemies into peacemakers. (Los Angeles Jewish Journal)
****The issues have been misrepresented over the years: the emphasis now often seems to be on the creation of a "Palestinian state." In fact, this is not at all the issue. The Palestinians ( Arabs living in the area defined by the British Mandate of Palestine, whether they lived there before the Mandate or moved there after --and then had progeny, since the originals are long-since gone ) could have had a state on many occasions and long before the present time. When Churchill spun out Trans-Jordan from the Mandate (all of which was intended by the Balfour Declaration and international agreement after the poat-War splitup of the Ottoman Empire), many Arabs were living there and all could have moved there. There could have been a Palestinian state before the 1948 War at the time of the UN partition. Likewise, between 1948 and 1967 there was no impediment to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, ostensibly the present goal of the Palestinians, when the former was controlled by Arab Egypt and the latter by Arab Jordan. In fact, there was no effort to do so. The Palestinian Arabs have been, until energized by the nationalism created out of whole cloth by Yasser Arafat, satisfied to be Arabs living in an Arab state. (Although they identified as Syrians more than anything else and the first mention of "Naqba", or "catastrophe", referred to the 1920s devolution of Palestine to the British Mandate rather than to the French one that included Syria.) The Palestinians are, in fact, indistinguishable from other Arabs albeit with a possible bias to, and affinity for, Syria: they have no separate language, culture and, indeed, their history is not unique in the way that is Syria's or Iraq's or Eqypt's or Saudi Arabia's. There are pitiful attempts to create a history of affinity with the land of Israel (historical Palestine, renamed such by the Romans after crushing the last Jewish revolt ) but these are manufactured and phony.
The real issue is that Palestinian Arabs, and Arabs in general, (perhaps all Muslims!) don't want a Jewish state or even the presence of any Jews in Arab lands. It is not even clear that they would allow dhimmi status for Jews since 900,000 dhmmi Jews were expelled from Arab lands after the 1948 War ( of course, without their property and after pogroms ). It is strange that it is unremarked that discussions of a Palestinian state ASSUME it would be completely Judenrein. Since the existence of Jews anywhere ( except perhaps in Madegascar or Alaska, as was historically suggested by Arab sources after the Holocaust failed to be total despite Arab endorsement and participation ) is anathema, national suicide is the only option offered to Israel. The "right of return" is a phony joke for several reasons. Land and population swaps have been the world norm for millennia. Not ever before has the status of "refugee" been granted to the third or later generation of people who have actually left a place. How really can one return to a place if she was never there and never personally had a family member who was? It strains credulity and derives only from the fact that other Arab nations had no wish to absorb Palestinian Arabs into their societies both to maintain the issue as a festering sore ( deriving, in all likelihood, from the Islamic animus against Jews mentioned in the chronologically later parts of the Koran ) and because they had no wish to have the Palestinians in their midst since they have the reputation even among Arabs of being pains in the ass. (Note Black September refers to Jordan's need to suppress a Palestinian Arab insurgency and the Gulf state expelled 400,000 Palestinian workers after Arafat endorsed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.)
It has been truly said that, If the Palestinians lay down their weapons there will be peace, and no more war and terror in Palestine; if the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be no more Israeli Jews.****
The State of Israel was built not by whiners but by Jews for whom no miracle was impossible - whether that meant defending against an Arab invasion or turning a desert into lush fields of agriculture. This can-do attitude has been the life force behind Israel's military success as well as its economic and cultural renaissance. There is one area, however, where Israel's can-do attitude has been a big failure, and that is in making peace with the Palestinians.
With making peace, it's far from clear whether Israel has a product the Palestinians want to buy. Israel has been under enormous pressure over the years, internally and externally, to "do something" to bring peace. Israel has been too embarrassed to admit that "we can't solve this one," that the parties are too far apart, that peace, no matter how desirable, is simply not in the cards at the moment. What if there is nothing Israel can offer the Palestinians to get them to accept and deliver a durable peace with a Jewish state? What if the truth is that Israel can evacuate 300,000 Jews from the West Bank tomorrow and give up half of Jerusalem and that this would still not bring peace - and might even bring more war?
The Palestinian demand for a "right of return" is a deal-killer. So is a return to nondefensible borders, and so is the presence of a terrorist state in Gaza. The fact that peace is immensely desirable has nothing to do with the reality that it is immensely unobtainable. If anything, the more Israel has shown its desire, the more the price has gone up. The Palestinians have said "no" to every peace offer Israel has ever put on the table. The status quo may be untenable, but a fake peace process makes it even worse. Israel should fess up that it doesn't have the power to turn enemies into peacemakers. (Los Angeles Jewish Journal)
****The issues have been misrepresented over the years: the emphasis now often seems to be on the creation of a "Palestinian state." In fact, this is not at all the issue. The Palestinians ( Arabs living in the area defined by the British Mandate of Palestine, whether they lived there before the Mandate or moved there after --and then had progeny, since the originals are long-since gone ) could have had a state on many occasions and long before the present time. When Churchill spun out Trans-Jordan from the Mandate (all of which was intended by the Balfour Declaration and international agreement after the poat-War splitup of the Ottoman Empire), many Arabs were living there and all could have moved there. There could have been a Palestinian state before the 1948 War at the time of the UN partition. Likewise, between 1948 and 1967 there was no impediment to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, ostensibly the present goal of the Palestinians, when the former was controlled by Arab Egypt and the latter by Arab Jordan. In fact, there was no effort to do so. The Palestinian Arabs have been, until energized by the nationalism created out of whole cloth by Yasser Arafat, satisfied to be Arabs living in an Arab state. (Although they identified as Syrians more than anything else and the first mention of "Naqba", or "catastrophe", referred to the 1920s devolution of Palestine to the British Mandate rather than to the French one that included Syria.) The Palestinians are, in fact, indistinguishable from other Arabs albeit with a possible bias to, and affinity for, Syria: they have no separate language, culture and, indeed, their history is not unique in the way that is Syria's or Iraq's or Eqypt's or Saudi Arabia's. There are pitiful attempts to create a history of affinity with the land of Israel (historical Palestine, renamed such by the Romans after crushing the last Jewish revolt ) but these are manufactured and phony.
The real issue is that Palestinian Arabs, and Arabs in general, (perhaps all Muslims!) don't want a Jewish state or even the presence of any Jews in Arab lands. It is not even clear that they would allow dhimmi status for Jews since 900,000 dhmmi Jews were expelled from Arab lands after the 1948 War ( of course, without their property and after pogroms ). It is strange that it is unremarked that discussions of a Palestinian state ASSUME it would be completely Judenrein. Since the existence of Jews anywhere ( except perhaps in Madegascar or Alaska, as was historically suggested by Arab sources after the Holocaust failed to be total despite Arab endorsement and participation ) is anathema, national suicide is the only option offered to Israel. The "right of return" is a phony joke for several reasons. Land and population swaps have been the world norm for millennia. Not ever before has the status of "refugee" been granted to the third or later generation of people who have actually left a place. How really can one return to a place if she was never there and never personally had a family member who was? It strains credulity and derives only from the fact that other Arab nations had no wish to absorb Palestinian Arabs into their societies both to maintain the issue as a festering sore ( deriving, in all likelihood, from the Islamic animus against Jews mentioned in the chronologically later parts of the Koran ) and because they had no wish to have the Palestinians in their midst since they have the reputation even among Arabs of being pains in the ass. (Note Black September refers to Jordan's need to suppress a Palestinian Arab insurgency and the Gulf state expelled 400,000 Palestinian workers after Arafat endorsed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.)
It has been truly said that, If the Palestinians lay down their weapons there will be peace, and no more war and terror in Palestine; if the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be no more Israeli Jews.****
Monday, December 13, 2010
It is a fiction that the post-1967 border is the barrier to peace in Israel
Or even that a Palestinian state is.The antipathy of Arabs to Jews in Palestine ( N.B. Palestine used to refer to Jewish land e.g. Daniel Barenboim as a youth was referred to a "Palestinian prodigy.")antedates even 1948. The Grand Mufti even before he got the title was a prime instigator ( and he was related to Yasser Arafat, Arafat being an alias. )
http://masada2000.org/Arafat-Husseini.html
U.S. Report: German Nazis Paid "a Fortune" to Jerusalem Mufti - Sam Roberts (New York Times)
A report published Friday by the U.S. National Archives reveals the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.
The report says the Muslim leader was paid "an absolute fortune" of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year).
It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party's elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated the Jews there.
The report details how Husseini was allowed to flee after the war to Syria - he was in the custody of the French - and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israel Arab leaders and "were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism."
In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine's Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attache in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and "cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can't do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that."
http://masada2000.org/Arafat-Husseini.html
U.S. Report: German Nazis Paid "a Fortune" to Jerusalem Mufti - Sam Roberts (New York Times)
A report published Friday by the U.S. National Archives reveals the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.
The report says the Muslim leader was paid "an absolute fortune" of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year).
It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party's elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated the Jews there.
The report details how Husseini was allowed to flee after the war to Syria - he was in the custody of the French - and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israel Arab leaders and "were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism."
In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine's Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attache in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and "cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can't do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that."
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Jihadi imams infest the military's chaplain corps.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/01/exclusive-concerns-military-chaplain-vetting-policy/
http://tinyurl.com/26xrskw
EXCLUSIVE: Former Defense IG Raises Concerns About Military Chaplain Vetting
By Jana Winter
Former Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz is calling for an investigation of the vetting process for Muslim clerics who serve as U.S. military chaplains.
In a letter sent earlier this month to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Inspector General Joseph Schmitz outlined what he believes is the potential risk to national security posed by the military’s current chaplain vetting system...
http://tinyurl.com/26xrskw
EXCLUSIVE: Former Defense IG Raises Concerns About Military Chaplain Vetting
By Jana Winter
Former Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz is calling for an investigation of the vetting process for Muslim clerics who serve as U.S. military chaplains.
In a letter sent earlier this month to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Inspector General Joseph Schmitz outlined what he believes is the potential risk to national security posed by the military’s current chaplain vetting system...
The American Narcissus
The world's foremost experts on psychiatry have decided to eliminate narcissistic personality disorder from the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
When asked by reporters why they decided not to include the disorder any longer, members of the panel cited the existence of two case studies of extreme narcissism with which the Manual could never compete. So they gave up. One is Dreams of My Father. The other is The Audacity of Hope.
When asked by reporters why they decided not to include the disorder any longer, members of the panel cited the existence of two case studies of extreme narcissism with which the Manual could never compete. So they gave up. One is Dreams of My Father. The other is The Audacity of Hope.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Political correctness makes all the difference for the NYTimes
New York Times editors, as cited in James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column at WSJ.com, Nov. 29:
"The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."—New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009.
"The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."—New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010.
"The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."—New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009.
"The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."—New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010.
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