Activism: Israel Solidarity Rally in Los Angeles

I attended the Israel Solidarity Rally in Los Angeles today wearing a "Who is John Galt?" t-shirt and handed out Ayn Rand Center literature in the form of a still relevant Elan Journo article. This was my first rally in recent memory and certainly the first one I remember where I handed out literature. I had about 100 copies of the article to hand out and had 8 left when I departed. Most people were friendly and receptive to Ayn Rand. Many came up to me and said they had read her before and enjoyed it. Some were curious who John Galt was and, of course, I encouraged them to read the relevant book. One person said he had seen Ayn Rand speak many years ago during one of her last public appearances. I met PJTV personality Joe Hicks who also took a copy. I had one or two negative responses as well but nothing too drastic. I'm not sure how to estimate crowds but I guess it must have been in the hundreds, perhaps low thousands. Governor Schwarzenegger spoke, Jacob Dayan, the head of the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, as well as others, including Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, though the sound was bad and most speakers were difficult to hear.

Here are some pictures from the event.





A couple of signs I found interesting:



After I took somebody's picture, I asked them to take mine:

Robert Novak, the Late Terrorist Lover

Diana West seems to be among the few Conservatives willing to openly speak ill of the recently deceased Robert Novak. That's a shame because his support for Hamas and his claim that they are "freedom fighters" shows quite clearly where his sympathies lay and what the relevant evaluation should be. Perhaps with the passage of time some of us forget what Hamas actually stands for. Let's remind ourselves a bit. From a helpful link in early 2004 (there have been more atrocities since that time):

Since the beginning of the current wave of Palestinian violence, in September 2000, Hamas has perpetrated 425 terrorist attacks of various kinds, in which 377 Israelis were murdered and 2,076 civilians and soldiers were wounded.

Since the beginning of the current wave of Palestinian violence, in September 2000, Hamas has perpetrated 52 suicide attacks, in which 288 Israelis were murdered and 1,646 were wounded.

Among the more infamous Hamas suicide bombings and terrorist attacks were (the following is a representative, not exhaustive, list):

# The 1 June 2001 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, in which 21 people were murdered and 120 were wounded;
# The 9 August 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem restaurant, in which 15 people were murdered and 130 were wounded;
# The 1 December 2001 double suicide bombing on the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 188 were wounded;
# The 2 December 2001 suicide bombing of a #16 bus in Haifa, in which 15 people were murdered and 40 were wounded;
# The 9 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which 11 people were murdered and 54 were wounded;
# The 27 March 2002 suicide bombing of a Netanya hotel on the first night of Passover, in which 30 people were murdered and 140 were wounded;
# The 18 June 2002 suicide bombing of a #32A bus in Jerusalem, in which 19 people were murdered and 74 were wounded;
# The 4 August 2002 suicide bombing of #361 bus at Meron junction, in which nine people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 21 November 2002 suicide bombing of a #20 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 50 were wounded;
# The 5 March 2003 suicide bombing of a #37 bus in Haifa, in which 17 people were murdered and 53 were wounded;
# The 17 May 2003 suicide bombing in Hebron, in which two people were murdered;
# The 18 May 2003 suicide bombing of a #6 bus in Jerusalem, in which seven people were murdered and 20 wounded;
# The 11 June 2003 suicide bombing of #14A bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and over 100 were wounded;
# The 19 August 2003 suicide bombing of a #2 bus in Jerusalem, in which 23 people were murdered and over 130 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a hitchhiking post near the IDF base at Tzrifin, in which nine soldiers were murdered and 10 were wounded;
# The 9 September 2003 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem cafe, in which seven people were murdered and 70 were wounded;
# The 29 January 2004 suicide bombing of a #19 bus in Jerusalem, in which 11 people were murdered and 44 were wounded;
# The 14 March 2004 double suicide bombing at Ashdod port, in which 10 people were murdered and 16 were wounded.
# On Aug 31, 2004 16 people were killed and 100 wounded in two suicide bombings within minutes of each other on two Beersheba city buses, on route nos. 6 and 12.

[emphasis added, note the most of the attacks were on buses, malls, cafes, and other civilian targets]

Anyone who thinks that the instigators and perpetrators of these vile acts are freedom fighters has left the realm of rational discussion, condemned himself as morally evil, and would ideally be subject to social ostracism by all individuals with a shred of decency.

The Islamist Entanglement and Israel

Scott Powell's most recent Islamist Entanglement lecture, his ninth, focused on Israel. I have to admit that as far as the historical details Scott mentioned I didn't expect to be particularly surprised and I wasn't. This is no fault of Scott's but simply due to the fact that I happened to have a reasonably good knowledge of Israeli history, particularly early Zionist history before the founding of the state. I was, for example, already aware of the mixed role that Britain played in this history, first promising everyone everything, and second, and necessarily, reneging on the promises, particularly with regard to Jewish immigration to Palestine before and during World War II. Nevertheless, even I benefitted from this lecture since it now puts the Arab-Israeli conflict in the its proper context, namely, the several century old Islamist Entanglement of the West with the Islamic Middle East. As Scott points out at the beginning of the lecture, once one understands the full context and thus the basic reason for the conflict, the absurdity of the constant attempts at an isolated resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict via land-for-peace schemes becomes quite evident. With the next lecture, the tenth, Scott will conclude the Islamist Entanglement series and, I expect, tie everything together.

Saudi Arabia: The Arrogant Kingdom

Unlike some of the other countries that Scott Powell has lectured on in his Islamist Entanglement series, Saudi Arabia was never occupied by Western Powers. While it did face threats from the Ottoman empire, the West was content to let the Saudis rule in Arabia, as long as access to oil was provided. The Saudis had their own agenda. Born of an alliance between Wahabi Islamist elements and the leaders of the Saudi tribe based in the center of the Arabian peninsula (an area referred to as Nejd), the Saudis managed, after two unsuccessful attempts, to establish control over the remaining parts of the country. This success was subsequently guaranteed when, following the discovery of oil in Dhamman in 1938, then American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with the Saudi King Ibn Saud in 1945 and guaranteed the Kingdom's security. The effective result here was a kind of feudal arrangement between the United States and the Saudis, where the Saudis were supposed to play the role of feudal vassal to the US overlords. However, a problem here is that a few years years later the United States supported the creation of the State of Israel and recognized it upon its declaration of independence. As effective vassals one would expect the Saudis to join the US in supporting Israel. However, as Arabs and Muslims unwilling to accept a non-Arab, non-Muslim entity in the region, this was not possible to them. Inevitably this lead the Saudis to oppose the US whenever it supported Israel. and eventually in 1973 the Saudis joined the OPEC oil embargo after the US supplied Israel with the military means to defeat the Arab armies of Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur war.

Only two lectures remain in the Islamist Entanglement Series: One about Israel and one putting everything together entitled "The Middle East: Its Past and Its Prospects". It's still not too late to catch up!

The truth about Hamas and what to do about it

As usual, Caroline Glick puts it best:

The simple truths that the media, Jimmy Carter, the Bush administration, and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government are all unwilling to acknowledge are that Hamas is a genocidal terror group sworn to Israel's destruction and that it represents the will of the majority of Palestinians who elected it to office in 2006 and who continue to support it today.

This plain reality demonstrates that there is only one responsible policy for Israel to follow and for the international community to support if they are truly interested in peace between Israel and the Palestinians. That policy is for Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime. Only when they are forced to pay a real price for their support for terror and jihad - as opposed to being rewarded for it with further Israeli land giveaways - will the Palestinians be forced to reconsider that support. Only when they realize that terror will get them nowhere - as opposed to anywhere they wish - will the Palestinians be forced to accept Israel as an unchanging reality with which they must live in peace.

Why Ahmadinejad is smiling...

As usual, Caroline Glick has some of the best analysis of what to make of recent events in the Middle East. Here are a few exerpts:

And the fact is that the Sunni states are aligned with most of Iran's policies. They keep Iraq at arm's length and loudly criticize US operations in the country. They continue to back Hamas and ostracize Israel. And they have taken no substantive stands against Hizbullah's subversion of the Saniora government since the end of the Second Lebanon War.

The main reason that the Sunni Arab countries cannot contend with Iran is that their publics share Iran's jihadist ideology. And their publics share Iran's general jihadist ideology because the Sunni states have indoctrinated their publics to believe in jihad through their state-controlled media.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their Sunni Arab brothers are in no position to argue with Iran publicly or to confront Iran's Arab proxies because they can't explain to their own people why Iran's bid to destroy Israel and to dominate the world in the name of Islam is a bad thing.

However, to get the full context of how we got to this point, I recommend Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement lectures which are available both as a set and as individual lectures. Sign up now!

Egypt

The most recent lecture of Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement series focused on the history of Egypt. Despite the fact that Egypt had not been an independent country for many centuries, Egypt follows a path somewhat parallel to Turkey's. Its first (unsuccessful) period of westernization started while still under Ottoman rule early in the nineteenth century under the leadership of Muhammed Ali in reaction to the British and French interventions in 1798. A much-hated British occupation followed some disastrous financial decisions that the Egyptians made. Egypt has what Scott termed a somewhat hollow but nevertheless strong "sense of nationhood" that's tied to its ancient history. As a result, there was much anti-colonial sentiment in Egypt which resulted in clashes with the British and ultimately culminated in Gamal Abdel Nasser's takeover that kicked out the remaining British influences by 1954. Nasser's rule was ultimately a failure, having governed as socialist dictator at home and squandered his perceived grandeur during the Six-Day War with Israel, in which Egypt lost territory along with Syria and Jordan. Nasser was nationalism's last great champion in Egypt. The leaders that followed Nasser, including Sadat and Mubarack, merely tried to maintain the dictatorial system that Nasser established. Thus, nationalism as a motivating political ideology in Egypt is spent. In its wake, Islamism has begun step in, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood and can be expected to ultimately prevail, as has also been discussed elsewhere.

Israel, Gaza, and all that...

I haven't written about Gaza for some time. However, an interesting recent column was brought to my attention via Daniel Pipes's blog. In the column a liberal Israeli commentator, Yossi Klein Halevi, admits that he and others who supported the "disengagement" were wrong on the Gaza withdrawal. He writes:

...Israelis still felt so desperate to end the occupation that they withdrew their army and uprooted their settlements from Gaza in 2006. Had Gazans begun at this point to create a peaceful state from their new, self-governing territory, the Israeli public almost certainly would have endorsed substantive negotiations over a West Bank withdrawal. Instead, they elected a government led by Hamas, whose theology calls for the destruction of Israel and war against Jews around the world, and whose terror attacks are small pre-enactments of its genocidal ambitions. Palestinian rocket attacks that had previously been aimed at settlements were simply redirected toward towns and villages within Israel.a

Halevi thinks that "even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist." I wonder, it seems to me there are still plenty of "guilty" Israelis, as he puts it, that are perfectly willing to put the "plight" of the "Palestinians" above their own interests. But it's certainly difficult to tell given the chaotic political situation in Israel.

He also thinks that "[w]ithin the coming weeks, the Israeli army may re-invade the Gaza Strip in an attempt to stop the rocket attacks on Israeli towns and, perhaps, topple its Islamist Hamas government." I certainly hope so -- such an action would be overdue.

The Islamist Entanglement

The situation in the Middle East poses a substantial challenge to those who seek to understand what exactly our government has been doing there over the last few years. At times, the deeper significance of these actions seems a mystery. Let's take a look at a small sample of headlines from the BBC:

• Claim UK troops 'executed' Iraqis
• Hamas urges EU Israel pressure
• Israel to vanish, says Hezbollah
• Kuwait warns on Lebanon travel
• Iranians spar with Israel at UN
• US slaps sanctions on top Syrian
• W Bank building 'bias' condemned
• Ahmadinejad Imam row grows
• Palestinians 'may declare state'

etc., etc.

Clearly, the number of players local to the Middle East is quite large and, combined with the interaction of various Western countries such as the UK and US, there seems to be no lack of complexity to the situation. Add to that the fact that the region's issues did not arise yesterday but have a long history, it becomes a non-trivial problem to study and understand what exactly is going on there and why. I like to think I know more about the Middle East than many Americans, since I lived in Israel for a few years, and have read a good amount about the history of Israel and its neighbors. However, even I get overwhelmed by the number of facts, dates and the sheer complexity of it all.

Fortunately, there is now a new resource available to make sense of the region: Scott Powell's course on the Islamist Entanglement. Scott Powell, who also happens to be my daughter's history teacher, has, via a generous arrangement, allowed me to blog on each of the upcoming 10 lectures of the course. Registration is still open and all lectures will be digitally recorded and available, so feel free to join now. The Islamist Entanglement is part 3 of Scott's A First History for Adults and I have not taken the first two parts. However, based on having now listened to the first lecture, I think that Scott reviews enough relevant history so that I can enjoy part 3 without having to listen to the previous parts.

After an excellent orienting introduction, the first lecture in the course focused on the history of Britain's relationship with the Middle East. Britain was one of the first major European powers to get deeply involved in the Middle East and the effects of its influence are still evident. The pattern of Britain's involvement was guided substantially by its imperial interests, until those ended shortly after World War II. Scott discusses the origin of British involvement in the region, its sometimes conflicting motivations, and the reason for the decline of its involvement. The next lecture will focus on the history of the United States in the Middle East.

I was impressed with Scott's ability to create the sense of an overall story with specific causes leading to specific effects. Scott is quite properly ruthless in only allowing relevant facts to play a role in the story he tells. As a result, while there is still an abundance of dates and events, I never felt lost while listening to the lectures. The milestones that he outlined at the beginning served as anchors to strongly ground the overall story.

A key element of Scott's approach, the five key dates or milestones for the history of the Middle East vis-a-vis the West, are crucial signposts to the history's important trends. The first date is 1683. The date refers to the failure of the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks. This event marks the beginning of Western Ascendancy after a previous period of about a thousand years of increasing Islamic threat. The other dates also refer to pivotal events in the history of the interaction of the Middle East and the West. Scott presents the important concrete events that point to the overall trends that shape history. He intends to review the same historical periods from the perspective of different countries throughout the course, thus reinforcing the trends, as well as the concrete events and dates. This promises to allow one to build up one's knowledge about this important history with each lecture. I'm very much looking forward to the next lecture.

Update: Fixed date.

Alan Dershowitz on Torture

I have recently finished Alan Dershowitz's excellent The Case for Israel. The book will make you mad with the injustice that the Arabs (with frequent cooperation from much of the rest of the world) have perpetrated against Israel over the nearly 60 years of existence, and before. I highly recommend it.

In today's Wall Street Journal Dershowitz has an op-ed worth reading. Torture, much like war, is a terrible practice. Nevertheless, Dershowitz is one of the few liberal intellectuals out there who recognize that it is sometimes necessary:

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

I really respect Dershowitz for openly putting to rest some of the myths that people who, understandably perhaps, are opposed to torture continue to propagate:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

I am also strongly sympathetic to the legal framework that Dershowitz wants to impose here. If we agree that torture is sometimes necessary then let's specify, as much as possible the exact conditions for it and have appropriate legal responsibility so that it is not abused.

Just War Theory and Practice in Israel

A fascinating article on the current Israel-Lebanon conflict appears in today's Washington Post. The article focuses on the tenacity of Hezbollah and the difficulties the Israelis are having in defeating it. I really do believe that calling Hezbollah a terrorist group is a little bit misleading. Certainly Hezbollah is evil and has engaged in terrorist activity such as kidnappings. Nevertheless, it is really more of a guerilla fighting force and a fairly well trained and equipped one at that. As the Israeli soldiers describe it:

"What we face is an infantry division with state-of-the-art weaponry -- night-vision gear, advanced rifles, well-equipped -- deployed along our border," said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, who until last month was director of analysis for Israeli military intelligence. "They have some of the most advanced antitank missiles in the world."

A terrorist organization is usually a far more limited force and it is a military mistake to underestimate one's enemy's capabilities by assuming it is capable of no more than terroristic attacks. Hezbollah is clearly an enemy army, a branch of the Iranian and Syrian armies and should be treated as such.

The article is also quite revealing with respect to the restraints that Israel is placing on its soldiers. The soldiers are quite candid:

Several soldiers said they felt the army should be striking harder at Hezbollah but was being held back by concern for civilian casualties. Lt. Col. Svika Nezer, the commander of an artillery battery a few miles outside Kiryat Shemona, said his unit was operating at about 20 percent of its firepower.

"We could do much, much more. But the orders we get are limited," said Nezer, a reservist who is a lawyer in civilian life.

Among the main challenges facing Israeli soldiers, they say, is that Hezbollah chooses to fight in and among civilian centers, making it difficult to target its fighters without killing bystanders. Lebanese officials and human rights organizations have criticized Israel for what they term indiscriminate bombing, but commanders say that, if anything, they err on the side of caution when deciding whom to shoot.

"There have been many times when we let go someone whom we knew was a terrorist because we are not sure we could take them down safely," Adam said. "Meanwhile, they try to kill as many of our civilians as they can." [emphasis added]

The above brings to mind the excellent article on Just War Theory in the premier issue (Spring 2006) of The Objective Standard (Anyone who is interested in ideas and has not subscribed yet, should have their head examined). Dr. Brook and Mr. Epstein wrote about precisely such restraints and their source in "Just War Theory". They write:

"In implementing Just War Theory, the less a nation is concerned with the well-being of its own citizens, and the more it is concerned with that of others, the more it proves its “good intentions.”

Brook and Epstein also discuss the limits on the conduct of the war by nation that is subject to this doctrine:

Given that the purpose of war, according to Just War Theory, is the well-being of others (including those who are, in fact, one’s enemies), it is logical that Just War Theory also precludes a nation from waging war in a manner that will destroy its enemies. It is imperative, according to Just War Theory, that war be fought by unselfish, sacrificial means, in which great value is accorded to the citizens of enemy nations. This is the meaning of the requirements of “proportionality” and “discrimination.” Proportionality is the idea that the value gained by the ends a war seeks must be “proportional” to the damage incurred during the war. To advocate that ends and damage be “proportional” presupposes a standard of value by which these are to be weighed. What is the relative weight, for example, that the U.S. government should accord an American civilian and an Iraqi civilian? Since Just War Theory holds that a government’s intentions are “good” to the extent that it places value on other peoples, including enemies, by its standard of value a government of an innocent nation should place equal value on the lives of its citizens and those of enemy nations. On this view, in America’s “War on Terrorism,” we have to “balance” the lives of American soldiers and civilians with the lives of the enemy nation’s soldiers and civilians. According to Walzer, “In our judgments of the fighting, we abstract from all consideration of the justice of the cause. We do this because the moral status of individual soldiers on both sides is very much the same: they face one another as moral equals.”

Ironically, even though Israel is putting its soldiers and even civilian population at risk by fighting very much in a proportionate manner, it is being excoriated for supposed "disproportionality" -- apparently nothing but outright sacrifice of Israel to the Arabs will satisfy the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Israel's current effort seems less than sufficient to its self-defense needs and it is quite obvious that it could do better. Some soldiers remember the Lebanon war in the 80s:

Several soldiers said they were surprised by how long the operation has taken. When Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, they reached to within 10 miles of Beirut in two days. In the current conflict, after more than three weeks of fighting, the heaviest ground combat is still in a string of towns along the border.

Unfortunately, given its current political and intellectual leadership as well as its public, I think the future looks rather bleak for the State of Israel. Nevertheless, I hope she will rise to the challenge.

On Gaza

For those needing further authoritative evaluations of Israel's so-called "disengagement" from Gaza, look no further than former IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe Yaalon. As reported in the Israeli Daily Yediot Ahronot (hat-tip Israpundit) Yaalon, speaking to Haaretz said:

"The intellectual failure of the disengagement is this: the fact that there is no one to speak to on the other side doesn't mean that we can ignore the other side and the effects of his activities on us. The fact that even the Fatah leadership is not ready to recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state while it says it is committed to the road map peace plan doesn’t mean it is possible to ignore the fact that pulling out under fire is perceived as surrender and encourages terror," he said.

He added that "The disengagement was a strategic mistake of the first order. It brought about Hamas's victory. It emboldened terror groups. It has fueled the Palestinian struggle for years. It created a feeling among the Iranians, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda, that Israel can be beaten. That Israel is a society of spider webs as Nasrallah said or a rotten tree as Ahmadinejad said. And therefore the disengagement not only harmed us badly, but also harmed America's strategic war on terror in the region. It created a feeling among Muslim extremists that as it defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan it defeated us in Gaza and it will defeat us in Tel Aviv. As such, as they destabilized a super power, they will destabilize the west by defeating Israel."

Armchair strategists, such as Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson should take note.

Israel's Self Destruction

Louis Rene Beres has written an accurate, depressing assessement of what has been going on in Israel over the last few years. Here's an excerpt:

Israel, this pitiable human being in macrocosm, is now in a final process of becoming this "thing." Called upon repeatedly by our "civilized" world to negotiate with unrepentant terrorists, every prime minister from Yitzhak Rabin to Ariel Sharon has agreed to assorted policies of national defeat. Current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's idea for Middle East peace is simply more of the same. Fortified by an incontestable history of prime ministerial failure, his ironic plan is to arm Fatah against Hamas and to proceed with a new round of existential territorial concessions. Inevitably, of course, Israel will continue to disappear in shameless increments of auto-desecration now named "realignment."

Please read the whole article -- it is well worth it.

Media Bias in the US and Israel

Those among you bemoaning the state of the media in the United States should realize that it could be worse. Caroline Glick writes here latest column one at the Jerusalem Post:

In Israel, as the country's steady economic growth and high placement on just about every significant global economic index shows, the economic liberalization reforms enacted by former prime minister and finance minister Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu have been a complete success. The Israeli economy is the envy of a Europe that suffers from stagnation and decline.

Yet inside of Israel, the country's economic success is a well-kept secret. Most Israelis operate under the impression that the country is on the verge of economic ruin - that poor people are starving, that sick people are going without proper medical care. The reason that most Israelis believe that the country is teetering on the brink of an economic disaster is because the Israeli media have consistently reported an economic narrative that has absolutely no relationship with reality. So, while international investors line up to invest in the Israeli economy, Israeli citizens look to socialist politicians and pundits to save them from their capitalist nightmare of success.

A similar situation exists here in the U.S. where headlines read "Payroll Growth Stalls With 75,000 New Jobs" and "Jobs Report Signals Cooling Economy, " yet the articles state that "the nation's unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent, the lowest since the summer of 2001." The security situation is similarly distorted. In Israel

Palestinian terrorists Tuesday morning videotaped Israeli forces in the ruins of the Israeli community of Dugit attacking a Palestinian terror squad as it prepared to launch a Kassam rocket on Ashkelon. On Wednesday the IDF admitted that it has been deploying commandos in Gaza to prevent rocket and missile launches for the past two months. That deployment had been kept secret to prevent the public from learning just how ill-advised last year's retreat was. The need to deploy ground forces in Gaza today proves unequivocally that the only way to defend Ashkelon and the other communities bordering Gaza from attack is by deploying IDF boots on the ground in Gaza.

Just as they distorted their coverage of the Katyusha attacks on northern Israel on Sunday, to prevent the public from absorbing the significance of the IDF ground operations in Gaza, the media concentrated its coverage of the deployment of ground forces in Gaza on irrelevant side issues. All the media turned their attention to the terror propaganda film. That film regaled Israeli TV viewers with footage of poor terrorists dying of their wounds just before they had the opportunity to attack Ashkelon with their rockets.[emphasis added]

I almost pity those, like columnist Charles Krauthammer ("the Israeli abandonment of Gaza ... is both correct and necessary") and classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson ("Sharon's withdrawal policy from Gaza...can only help a militarily superior Israel"), who thought the Gaza withdrawal was a good strategy. But they should have known better. Just as in economics, regulations breed further regulations, so in foreign policy, a concession leads to further concessions. I was always skeptical of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon and doubly so of the Gaza "disengagement". Now Hezbollah sits on Israel's northern border and Hamas and Al Qaeda on Israel's southern. Sometimes I really wonder whether withdrawing from Sinai in return for "peace" from Egypt was such a good idea to begin with...

What's on the web today

Daniel Pipes writes the truth about Israel's Gaza withdrawal in his column entitled appropriately [The Gaza Withdrawal:] A Democracy Killing Itself. What Israel is doing here is quite sad and the repercussions will unfortunately be as bad or worse as the results of previous appeasements, whether by Israel or other countries.

Prager's first hour today was devoted to the increasing subjection of schoolchildren to what amounts to political indoctrination by school teachers. I have a personal experience with this sort of thing which I would like to briefly recount.

During my 10th grade year in 1985 at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, CA, I was enrolled in a Hebrew class. One day during the class a teacher introduced a guest speaker who proceeded to take over the class and gave a talk about how Israel should withdraw from the territories it originally conquered in the 1967 Six Day War and how that would result in peace for Israel with the Arab countries in the Middle East. I have to say that, being even then substantially opposed to such notions, I was not amused. Fortunately, few people in the class (except, of course, the teacher) agreed with the speaker and his attempt at indoctrination ended in failure.

Of course the main point here is that the incident recounted should not have happened at all. As Prager correctly pointed out on his show, regardless of the whether the political views presented are right or wrong, "left-wing" or "right-wing," this sort of thing simply has no place in school. The students at that age generally do not have the knowledge or intellectual means to properly understand the issues involved. Perhaps if students were properly taught logic and rhetoric, then as part of a debate class some analysis of political positions might be appropriate during the last years of High School. But the reports that I've read on the web and the calls on the Prager show indicate that these are not attempts at debate or logic at all and the target audience appears around the age of Middle School and younger. Apparently the situation in schools has only gotten worse over the last 18 years. Yet another reason why my wife and I will homeschool our child.

On to Jimmy Carter. While Prager addressed every argument in Carter's article, Prager's criticism seemed to refer mostly to the following passages:

As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.
...

The unanimous vote of approval in the Security Council to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction can still be honored, but our announced goals are now to achieve regime change and to establish a Pax Americana in the region, perhaps occupying the ethnically divided country for as long as a decade. For these objectives, we do not have international authority. Other members of the Security Council have so far resisted the enormous economic and political influence that is being exerted from Washington, and we are faced with the possibility of either a failure to get the necessary votes or else a veto from Russia, France and China.

Prager was very much upset that Carter seemed to claim his religious values are part of reasons for opposing a war against Iraq. Prager argued that there is no religion that decides the morality of a war based on the number of countries that support its prosecution. I think the broader point is also true: Moral principle (regardless whether its source is considered religious or not) is not decided by a popularity contest.
The idea that moral principles come from the majority seems to have ultimately come from Immanuel Kant (who made collective subjectivism a substitute for objectivity), via a long series of intermediate philosophers. More on that some other time.

Frankly, I don't want to spend too much time on Carter, the worst President in U.S. history, as Prager has accurately characterized him.

Let's get the shorter items out of the way. I heard only a little from the Minnesotans Against Terrorism. They seem to be a good group speaking out against the blatant media white-washing and inconsistency on terror.

This has been one of my frustrations with the news for some time. In the case of Israel, the media refuses to characterize anything violent that the Palestinians do as terror and instead always identifies the perpetrators as militants. Interestingly, the media and some intellectuals also do the reverse to some extent, occasionally characterizing some attacks on military targets as terrorism. This is undesirable and unneccessary. The words terrorism, terror, and terrorist should properly only be used when the civilian population is deliberately targeted in an attempt to terrorize it. When such is clearly the case, as with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like, to use an inappropriate term adds to the injury done to the victims.

I might also mention the morally unjustifiable habit that the media has of adding the death of the terrorist bombers to the total victim count. Proper coverage of such an event should always separate the deaths of the victims from the terrorists.