I'm sure that you've heard the definition of Chutzpah being a person who kills both parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan. The UN, and special envoy Terje-Roed Larsen, is almost that bad.
On Wednesday Larsen issued a statement condemning the violence in the Middle East, in particular:
Terje Roed-Larsen issued a statement urging Israeli military authorities to “act in a manner that minimizes the risk to civilians and is in keeping with Israel's obligations under international law.”
Deputy PM Sharansky: Unfortunately, we have had very bad experience with any kind of involvement of the United Nations in the conflict. One of the last examples was, of course, the kidnapping of our soldiers by Hizbullah. The United Nations forces did not prevent it because, they said, they did not see it. But we found out from our Intelligence sources that they did see it. They watched the whole operation and taped it. When we demanded the tape, the United Nations denied for a year that they had the tape. Terje Larsen himself became very angry and shouted at our representatives: how dare we think that the United Nations has a tape. Only later, when they recognized that they do have the tape, they agreed to give it to us but only with the faces of the Hizbullah people masked in order not to take sides. So, between terrorists of Hizbullah and the members of the United Nations, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces and Terje Larsen himself prefers not to take sides.
Second, he mentioned the element of the smell of destruction. I've been in the camp - some of the people here were with me - one week following the fighting. During this time of four to five hours that we were there, nobody sensed any smell or any problem of such kind. There was no situation where somebody prevented burial of anybody. In five days of searching for bodies, we found possibly 25 bodies, and that is all. So talking about a massacre, this is again a terrible runaway from reality.
Minister Sneh: (Hebrew) I will give you my personal opinion. I don't think that we should deal with the legal, formalistic aspect. We must state clearly our view, that he himself, in his one-sided, blunt statements, disqualified himself from serving as a judge and as a neutral and balanced party. That is the message that we have to convey. I don't see any need for formal steps.
I finally received a response from the New York Times. I sent an e-mail recently to Executive Editor Bill Keller outlining my problem with the disappearing interview of President Bashar Assad. I received the following response from Allan Siegal, an assistant Managing Editor. Mr. Siegal allowed me to reprint his e-mail explaining what happened:
Dear Mr. Gerstman,Bill Keller is out of town, so I am replying to your latest
message, and in fact I have also been involved in researching the answer to
your earlier query. I should have given you an interim reply, though I have
to say that your presumption of deceit didn't fill me with zeal to put this
ahead of other tasks.The Times is not "suppressing" anything. The interview with
President Assad was arranged hastily, and granted on the premise that our
executive editor, Bill Keller, would attend. Mr. Keller flew hastily to
Syria and returned to New York immediately after the story was transmitted.
This all took place over a weekend, when our office was thinly staffed.The Times had no opportunity to arrange for its own recording,
translation and transcription. Therefore it confined its printed
presentation, beyond the article itself, to 700 words of "key passages,"
which Neil MacFarquhar, an Arabic-speaker, felt that he could authenticate.In the confusion after the article arrived, editors in New York
requested a copy of the full transcript to post on the Web, as is our usual
practice. It was supplied, I still don't know by whom, but evidently no one
in Damascus knew that it was intended for posting. When Messrs. Keller and
MacFarquhar learned that it had been posted, they asked to have it removed
from the site, on the ground that we could not vouch for the transcription
and translation. It was removed, after having been online for a day or two.And that's the whole story. Like many stories of human error, it
is less interesting and less dramatic than the conspiracy theories that
might arise around it.Sincerely,
Allan M. Siegal
Assistant Managing Editor/Standards
The New York Times
Dear Mr. Okrent,
Earlier I had e-mailed myself a copy of the Times interview with President
Assad of Syria. Later, when I went to check it online I discovered it was no
longer there. The link
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/01/international/middleeast/01FULL-TXT.html?pagewanted=all&position= doesn't take me to the archives, just to a notification that "Page Not Found," and no further explanation. Was it removed because President Assad's office had too much to do with its preparation? (As noted by the paper when it posted the interview.) Or was there another reason why the interview was removed. And why does there seem to have been no notification as to why the interview was removed?
The statement followed a meeting between Prince Abdullah
and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in Riyadh. It said a comprehensive peace "cannot be achieved except with Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab land, including the Syrian Golan." The statement also called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a matter critical to Lebanon, where many of them live.
(emphasis mine)
Viewpoints were identical regarding all discussed issues and ideas where assertion was that the just and comprehensive peace in the region as the strategic option could never be realized but through the Israeli full withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories including from the Syrian Golan Heights to the line of June4 1967, the liberation of the remaining occupied territories in South Lebanon, the establishment of an independent Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital clinging the the right of the refugees return in accordance with related UN resolutions.
Usually I have nothing but contempt for the way that the Baltimore Sun covers the Middle East. But this past week correspondent, Peter Herrmann wrote an excellent article about terror in Israel. He included items that often get overlooked elsewhere in the media. When writing about Wafa Idris, Herrman writes:
The first militant group to use a woman was the secular Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, which sent a woman medic into Israel using an ambulance as cover in 2002. Then, the Muslim Islamic Jihad followed suit.
Israeli intelligence officials said that the 21-year-old woman, a member of a wealthy Palestinian family that ran a battery factory and had business interests in Israel, had been caught in an extramarital affair. The reports said that her husband, a Hamas activist, forced her to carry out the attack as a form of honor killing.
Got to see to soccer games today. It appears that my 5 year old is starting to focus a little better on the game. I'd love to work with him more. Alas, the weather hasn't been cooperating.
My (nearly) 10 year old was a real relevation in his game. He goaltended perfectly for the whole time he was goalie. (His team lost anyway.) In one spectacular save he smothered a ball as two opponents were getting ready to kick it. That took guts.
After he hurt his hand he still had a good game doing other stuff. Once he fed a ball to a teammate. If the teammate had handled it, it would have been a goal. In general he was very good at stopping the forward progress of his opponents. Once he came out of nowhere and blocked a shot on goal. What a game.
Did anyone notice this?
Without doubt the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most important telescopes ever built. Its clear view of the cosmos, above the turbulent and distorting atmosphere, has changed our understanding of the Universe in which we live.
Its science is remarkable, its images iconic and it had much more to give. So why is it being abandoned?
The National Review and the Oregonian have brought some useful perspective to the conflict in the Middle East.
Writing in the former, Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post (the article may originally have appeared in the Jpost, I don't know) concludes:
The primary collateral damage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that it has given tyrants the world over a breather, and disenfranchised millions who look to the international community for survival and defense. By helping the ICJ to punt rather than decide against Israel, NGOs and governments have a rare chance to save one limb of the international body. Those who miss this opportunity are complicit not only in a campaign by tyrannies to delegitimize a besieged democracy, but also in an effort that, by gutting the international system, creates a convenient distraction for human-rights abusers the world over.
It's a strange kind of mother's love that abandons two young children. But, then, it's a strange kind of love of country that's founded on suicide attacks.
A few weeks ago I bought a (cheap) DVD/VCR combination player. To break it in I rented a couple of movies. The one I really liked was "Galaxy Quest."
"Galaxy Quest" is a hilarious "Star Trek" spoof. Featuring Tim Allen as a William Shatner clone and Alan Rickman as a Leonard Nimoy knockoff as well as Sigourney Weaver and Tony Shalhoub, the movie starts by showing our heroes as captives of their once glorious past. They starred on a now defunct space opera called "Galaxy Quest" and have become trapped in their roles for the past twenty years making regular appearances at conventions playing their parts for legions of fans, some of whom have a tenuous grasp on reality.
That all changes when the crew is recruited by a race of aliens who have intercepted the eternal reruns of the fictional TV show and interpreted it as a "historical record." The aliens are facing doom at the hands of a powerful enemy and are convinced that the actors are real space heroes. (The notion that these aliens are so sophisticated that they can create the make the fake technology of the TV show into real functioning technology, but be fooled into thinking that the TV show is real is absurd. But this isn't supposed to be deep. It's supposed to be fun.)
Since "Galaxy Quest" is a comedy you know that the good guys will win, summoning the moxie that their characters had in the show. It's a dead on spoof of "Star Trek," but it's a gentle, knowing spoof. It's not at all mean to its inspiration. There's a very happy ending and no one feels cheated.
The other thing I did was buy my first DVD. I went to half.com and bought my favorite Trek movie, "The Wrath of Khan." It is a story of revenge with literary pretensions. It's as good as Trek gets.
The outline of the plot is this: Khan, a villain from the first season episode of the original series, "Space Seed" was marooned on a planet. When the planet that Khan was exiled to falls out of orbit, leading to hardship and tragedy. Khan blames Kirk for his circumstances and the death of his wife., who exiled him for not checking up and making sure that everything was OK. He seeks to destroy Kirk in return. Of course he's not quite able to do it, but he gives it his best shot.
"The Wrath of Khan" may be the perfect Trek adventure. It's a straightforward story of revenge and redemption and tragedy. Watching the movie again (for the sixth or seventh time) I'm still amazed that the first attack on the Enterprise is still filled with suspense. I still think it's possible for the Enterprise to raise shields quickly enough and blunt the attack. Of course that never happens and Kirk must bear the guilt of being caught with his "britches down."
Then there's the famous ending in which a major character is killed off (for about 2 years.) "The Wrath of Khan" may not hold any surprises anymore, but it still entertains quite nicely. (The similarities between "The Wrath of Khan" and the latest Trek movie "Nemesis" are striking. "Nemesis" though is quite inferior.)
Today's IMRA carries a translation from Yedioth Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper. It seems that Reem Al-Reyashi wasn't necesarily a willing suicide bomber. It may just be that she didn't have a choice.
Yediot Ahronot reports this morning that 22-year-old Reem Al-Reyashi, the mother of two who blew herself up at the Erez Crossing from the Gaza Strip to Israel, murdering four Israelis and injuring ten on 14 January, was pressured by her husband to carry out the suicide attack after he caught her with her lover who is also a member of Hamas.In traditional society she faced execution by male family members for defaming the honor of her family.
The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.
Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.
I hope I remembered this correctly. When Tom Marr of WCBM was asked yesterday if men get 72 voluptuous virgins and rivers flowing with wine, what did yesterday's female bomber get?
Tom responded rhetorically, "Are there stud farms in Allah's heaven?"
Crude, but effective.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.
Here's an excellent essay from the Scotsman that concludes that Arafat is no Mandela. If one paragraph summarizes many of the problems with the Middle East it's this one:
How do we re-establish the conditions for fresh negotiations? Outside pressure might help but, regrettably, in Europe - where there has been a naïve tendency to turn the Palestinian terrorists into freedom fighters - the prevailing anti-Israeli bias has hardly helped persuade Arafat that he needs to respond. Indeed, the European Union supplies Arafat with ample amounts of your tax money both to fill his own Swiss bank accounts and to fund the appalling official Palestinian television service, with its constant diet of music videos extolling Palestinian youths to become suicide bombers.
The Gaza attack remains unsolved despite a $5 million reward for information and the common knowledge that in the close-knit communities of the Gaza Strip there are few secrets unknown to the all-seeing intelligence forces commanded by Arafat.In private, American officials express frustration bordering on anger with the slow progress of the investigation and the apparent inability of CIA- trained Palestinian intelligence agents to turn up any useful leads.
Daniel Pipes observes how various loony conspiracy theorists have combined forces.
The major new development, reports Mr. Barkun, a professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, is not just an erosion in the divisions between these two groups, but their joining forces with occultists, persons bored by rationalism. Occultists are drawn to what Mr. Barkun calls the "cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous" — such as spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative medicine, alchemy, and astrology.Thus, the author who worries about the Secret Service taking orders from the Illuminati is old school; the one who worries about a "joint Reptilian-Bavarian Illuminati" takeover is at the cutting edge of the new synthesis. These bizarre notions constitute what the late Michael Kelly termed "fusion paranoia," a promiscuous absorption of fears from any source whatsoever.
On December 1, 2003 the NY Times published an online interview with President Bashar Assad. I blogged about it. Shortly afterwards I noticed that clicking on the link brought up a "Page Not Found" notice. (Click the words "online interview" above.)
I was curious what happened to the link. Because there is a new office of the public editor at the NY Times, I thought maybe I'd be able to get some answers. I was wrong.
A little later Donald Luskin wrote on his blog that he thought that the public editor had made a difference. I e-mailed him and argued that the office of the public editor may listen to someone who is known like he is, but for someone like me the public editor wasn't responsive and told him of my experience.
Over the next few weeks, Luskin guided me through the process of establishing that the interview had been on the website and had been removed. He wanted me to be rigorous in my complaint, and I appreciate his guidance and patience.
I have received a number of responses from the office of the public editor but none have been satisfying or enlightening.
There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why the interview disappeared, but the Times has not provided it.
Luskin also graciously published my latest e-mail to the NY Times on his website here is his intro:
For several weeks reader David Gerstman has been keeping me apprised of his correspondence with the New York Times concerning the mysterious vanishment from the Times web site of a December 1, 2003, interview with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. It ran in the paper edition. It was posted on the web. And now it's gone with no explanation. And the office of the Times' "public editor" Daniel Okrent has done nothing but stonewall Gerstman's inquiries.Gerstman has satisfied me that the interview was indeed posted on the Times site on December 1, thanks to an email version of it that he retained at the time. And anyone can see by querying the archives that it is not there now. Gerstman has copied me on all his correspondence with Okrent's assistant Arthur Bovino. Here is Gerstman's latest email to Bovino, which nicely sums up the situation. I have made only minor grammatical and formatting edits.
Last week Madeline Albright expressed her horror in the Baltimore Sun that America was not popular in Europe. I took strong exception to her arguments. One of the reasons we suffered through 9/11 was because the Clinton Administration was a "Holiday from History" in the words of Charles Krauthammer.
Albright writes:
In October I spent three weeks in Europe, hoping to find passions cooling and anti-American sentiments receding. Instead I was told, even by normally pro-American officials, that European hostility had only grown deeper as the months passed with no weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq and without any sign of recognition by Bush that there had been any merit to Europe's prewar warnings.My European friends were not shy in telling me that Americans appeared to them simultaneously besotted with power and unnerved by terror, increasingly overbearing, jingoistic and rash.
Europeans appreciated the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks, I was told, but were baffled by the idea that an attack on Iraq should be the centerpiece of America's response. Saddam Hussein was a rotter, they conceded, but no imminent threat - and he was blameless for Sept. 11.
And I laughed aloud about Ms. Albright's unshy "European friends" -- hand-picked from the finest écoles and salons, I'm guessing -- complaining to her. I'm sure that they would make suitable dinner table companions to those American elites who champion "international institutions" over their own, as if the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were the obstacles to world peace, not terrorist insurgencies funded by totalitarian states.
In the eight years of the Clinton administration, America's security eroded as the threat to America changed to a more diffuse one. Despite some successes -- such as defeating the Slobodan Milosevic-run Serbia -- by retreating shamefully from Somalia, attacking al-Qaida with nothing more than a few missiles and honoring the world's most successful terrorist, Yasser Arafat, the Clinton administration emboldened America's new enemies, convincing them that America did not have the stuff to fight back.
Why is Friday my favorite day of the week? Maybe not my favorite day; but certainly my favorite media day. It's because it's the day of Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson. Today is a particularly good Friday.
Let's go alphabetically. Hanson often revisits the same themes: the perfidy of Europe, the hatred of the Arab world for the West and the dangers faced by Israel. This column is no different in that respect. But he writes so elegantly and brings new historical perspectives to his columns that each one still feels new.
Today he wrote "The Same Old Thing" I did not know that ...
Thirty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, most of the Europeans of the NATO alliance refused over-flight rights to the United States. We had only hours in which to aid Israel from a multifaceted surprise attack and were desperately ferrying tons of supplies to save it from literal extinction. In contrast, many of these same allies allowed the Soviet Union — the supposed common enemy from which thousands of Americans were based in Europe to protect Europeans — to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan.American "unilateralism" in those days meant acting alone not to let Israel perish. Had we gone "multilateral" and listened to our NATO allies — Germany, France, Greece, and Turkey all prohibited American planes from flying supplies in their space in transit to Tel-Aviv — there would be no Israel today at all. How odd that nations who asked for our protection from the Soviets would allow them to fly in supplies to the Syrian dictatorship, but not extend the same privilege of airspace to their protectors to save a democracy.
The Palestinians, who get their state and will see lots of settlers leave, hate the barrier not because it slices off some security slivers from the West Bank, but rather because it simply promises an end to their entire parasitic relationship with Israel. Suicide bombing was predicated on weakening Israeli will, ruining the economy, discouraging immigration to Israel, encouraging Jewish flight, tapping into latent anti-Semitism in Europe, and thus hoping that terror and demography would one day win what arms never could. In contrast, early indicators suggest the fence will make it very hard for suicide bombers to continue to traffic in death — apparently the sole bargaining chip left to a corrupt Palestinian Authority.
Saddam Hussein was one of them, and he is gone. Libya was another, and it has just retired from the field, suing for peace and giving up its weapons of mass destruction. (Gaddafi went so far as to go on television to urge Syria, Iran and North Korea to do the same.) Iran has also gone softer, agreeing to spot inspections, something it never did before it faced 130,000 American troops about 100 miles from its border.These gains are all a direct result of the Iraq war. A spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told the London Daily Telegraph in September that Gaddafi had telephoned Berlusconi and told him: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."
The simple fact is that Sept. 11 returned national security to the forefront of voter concerns. And President Bush upped the ante when, in a speech to the graduating class at West Point in 2002, he changed U.S. national security policy from one of containment and deterrence to one of "preemption," if need be.
Not only didn't Iran accept help from Israel during its recent earthquake, apparently it used the opportunity to help Hezbollah attack Israel.
Israel Radio reported this morning that Israeli security sources say Syria and Iran have recently stepped up the flow of weapons to Hezbollah via the cover of "humanitarian relief" planes bringing aid to the Iranian earthquake victims. The planes were loaded with weapons in Iran and flown back to Damascus where the weapons were transferred to Hezbollah. The United States has been informed of the situation.
I wonder if Secretary Powell finds this "helpful."
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.
Ze'ev Schiff boldly proclaims: "There's no partner for Syria"
Just as Israel has claimed many times that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is not a partner for peace, the Syrians can claim, and indeed are so doing, that the Israeli government is not a true partner for peace talks. Although there are glimmers of willingness to conduct negotiations, on the whole the Syrians are right.
Among other things, they ask why the radical foreign minister, Farouk Shara, was ousted and replaced by Information Minister Bouthaine Shaban.
On the relations with Lebanese Hizbullah party, the president underlined that Syria supports the Lebanese national resistance that fights within the Lebanese territories against occupation, and that the Shebaa Farms is small part of Lebanon and not Syrian as Israel claims.
"From a strategic and military standpoint, there is no way that we can leave the Golan Heights." So said today MK Yuval Shteinitz, Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He explained that it is "axiomatic" that northern Israel can simply not be defended without IDF control of the Golan Heights.
While Mofaz claims that "My task will be to ensure that my opinion will be completely unblemished, unbiased, purely professional and confined to the security issue," in the same breath he employs the assertion the Syrians are aware "that in a military clash with Israel, they will not be able to secure the same achievements they can get through a peace treaty because of the strength and might of Israel and the IDF" to reach the political conclusion to support withdrawal from the Golan.The military observation - that Syria can't push the IDF off the Golan with force and thus opts to push off the IDF with paper - in no way leads to a military conclusion that Syria wants peace with an Israel off the Golan.
I recently received a joke that had previously made its way around the internet about Jews on Mars. It starts:
In a stunning development, we have learned that there is life on Mars -- but not the kind that had been anticipated.The first indication, based on the current U.S. space mission, came when the small roving vehicle called Sojourner spotted a sign on the rocky terrain of Red Planet that read, "Welcome To Chabad House -- Bring Moshiach Now." The sign, in English, thrilled and confused NASA scientists back in Houston, who had no idea what it meant. Only after thorough research did they learn that it revealed the presence of a dedicated and particularly hearty group of Lubavitch chasidim, known for their tireless efforts to reach Jews in the most remote regions, urging them to perform mitzvot.
"We've been here for some time now doing our work," said a cheerful Rabbi Lou Steinwalker, captain of the spaceship "Mitzvah 613", in an exclusive phone interview. When asked how long he had been on Mars and how he got there, he said only, "where there's a will, there's a way."
He then excused himself, explaining that it was time for prayer and he was looking for a minyan. In a subsequent phone call, the Rabbi noted that in recent days another synagogue has been formed on Mars -- a reform congregation that he would not step foot in.
The unique image-compression algorithm was developed by Gadi Sarousi, HP Labs’ Director of its Information Theory Research group, as well as Guillermo Shapiro and Marcelo Weinberger. HP said that the compression technology enabled the sending of the high-quality photos from Mars in a short period. Weinberger and Sarousi, both graduates of the Technion, wrote their doctorates under Professors Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv, the developers of the Lempel-Ziv coding algorithm – which has become the international standard for compressed information transmission."Because of the great distance between Earth and Mars, the signals are very weak, thus data can be transferred very slowly. Thus the way to speed it up is to compress the data and translate it into another form with many fewer bits without harming the quality of the image," Ziv told the Jerusalem Post. "NASA adopted the algorithm originally developed by our graduates, who are the second generation of our original work."
Yesterday's Daily Pundit linked to the Washington Post article that "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper" Specifically:
The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
This endless, overwritten chunk of indigistible "investigative reporting" from the ... journalists at WaPo misses the point entirely. Of course, since that is what it is designed to do.The worry about WMD in Saddam's hands was not that he had huge stores of same, but that he had some, and that he might supply al-Qaeda or another terror organization with the means to wreak havoc in the US or elsewhere. Absolutely nothing in this rambling, badly sourced pile of slanted speculations does anything to shake the strong probability that Saddam did, indeed, retain such capability. We weren't worried about Saddam having ten tons of anthrax. We were worried about him giving one pound of anthrax to an al-Qaeda cell operating in New York City or Washington, D.C. We weren't worried about Saddam having ten thousand gallons of VX nerve gas. We were worried about him giving a gallon of VX to an al-Qaeda suicide cell operating in the NYC subway system.
Arutz-7 reports that a small subsidiary of IDT is employing many immigrants to Israel.
The Jerusalem company, Customer Service Management (CSM), is a daughter company of and a main telephone-information center for American-based IDT Corp. (NYSE: IDT, IDTC), the fourth largest telecommunications firm in America. IDT founder and chairman Howard Jonas, an observant Jew from Riverdale, New York, decided in July 2002 to "share the wealth" with Israel's struggling economy while providing employment for a small number of new immigrants as well. What began at the time as a small-scale 30-person project servicing IDT customers has now become a 24-hour-a-day business employing 400 workers at the Har HaHotzvim Industrial Park in northern Jerusalem.
The New York Times (and other news organizations) are concerned that "Israel Plans 25% Expansion of Its Settlements on Golan" and this poses a potential complication for peace. The first two paragraphs inform us:
Israel plans a major expansion of Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights, the government confirmed Wednesday. The announcement angered Syria, from which Israel seized the territory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.The plan, approved two weeks ago, comes just two months after the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, called for renewed peace talks between his country and Israel.
On the relations with Lebanese Hizbullah party, the president underlined that Syria supports the Lebanese national resistance that fights within the Lebanese territories against occupation, and that the Shebaa Farms is small part of Lebanon and not Syrian as Israel claims.
Syrian President Assad's visit next week to Turkey provides a unique opportunity remind the world that, when it sees fit, Syria can swallow its pride on such matters.Take a look at many Syrian maps of their country and you will find that they show the port city of Alexandretta inside Syrian territory. But it has been a part of Turkey since 1939.
Alexandretta holds a special place in the heart of President Assad and all his fellow Allawites. Before Turkey took over control of the area, Alexandretta was part of the Allawites autonomy inside Syria. And if this wasn't enough, when Alexandretta was transformed into Turkish Iskenderun, the Turks pressured non-Turks in the area who would not accept Turkish citizenship to leave.
Syrian policy to this day is that they will never concede Alexandretta.
And yet, despite what Syria sees as the ongoing Turkish occupation of sovereign Syrian territory, Syria and Turkey have full diplomatic relations. And as part of Syrian efforts to warm these relations, President Assad will soon be stepping off a plane on the first visit of a Syrian president to a country they consider an occupier of Syrian land.
Assad isn't doing this because he accepts the Turkish occupation of a port city in an area near and dear to his Allawite heart. He is doing this despite it.
Turks grew increasingly agitated as Syrians made promises they did not carry out. Finally, in mid-September 1998, Ankara got serious and made a series of specific demands of Damascus (drop claims to Turkish territory, close down PKK camps, and extradite the PKK leader) as top officials delivered a volley of portentous messages. "We are losing our patience and we retain the right to retaliate against Syria," the president announced. The prime minister accused Syria of being "the headquarters of terrorism in the Middle East" and warned Damascus that the Turkish army was "awaiting orders" to attack. The chief of staff described relations with Damascus as an "undeclared war." Every political party in parliament signed a statement calling on Syria to cut its support for the PKK or "bear the consequences." The media went into high gear, reporting every development in inflamed tones.Military exercises near the Syrian border began.
Then, suddenly, Assad caved, unconditionally expelling the PKK leader and ending Syrian aid to the PKK. More: this time he kept his word. Turkish officials say they are satisfied with Syria's actions and tensions have been diffused. There is now talk of increasing trade and visitors already are crossing the border in greater numbers.
I'm about 10 days late writing about this but Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics did a nice piece on Al Sharpton.
But for fringe candidates like Sharpton who don't have a prayer of winning and whose only concern is a personalized seat at the table of political power, national polls are a barometer by which they can measure - and leverage - their influence in the party. The bigger Sharpton's national numbers get the more he's seen as representing an important constituency, the more coveted his endorsement becomes, and the more the eventual nominee has to promise him in return for that endorsement.In that respect, nobody is benefiting more from John Kerry's demise than Sharpton. He's out-polled Kerry in three of the four latest national polls and is running, on average, 2-points ahead of John Edwards. The man who gave us the Tawana Brawley hoax and the riot at Freddy's Fashion Mart is, in the eyes of some Democratic voters, more qualified to be President than two sitting United States Senators. How's that for creating an image of legitimacy?
The Associated Press reports that Sharpton’s campaign is expecting a $100,000 check from public matching funds. This will be the first check sent to the campaign from the presidential public financing system.
I guess I'm not really surprised to find out that Willie Nelson has written (and sung) an anti-Iraq war song.
Country music icon Willie Nelson (news) has written a Christmas song with an edge -- a protest against the war in Iraq (news - web sites) that he hopes will stir passions in those who hear it.Nelson, 70, told Reuters on Wednesday he wrote "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth" after watching the news on Christmas Day and will play it in Austin, Texas on Saturday at a concert to benefit Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites).
Bush's next scheduled stop was the main stage of the "Concert for America's Youth," at Washington's MCI Arena. Country singer Lee Ann Womack and pop groups such as Destiny's Child entertained the crowd in between video biographies of President-elect Bush and his wife, Laura.
If Toby Keith's got some stallions in Oklahoma, they'll be stumbling drunk this week. That's because the country star tops the Billboard singles chart with "Beer for My Horses." Keith's duet partner, Willie Nelson, last reached No. 1 in 1989 with "Nothing I Can Do About It Now.""To have Willie back on modern young country radio with a No. 1 record and being a part of that experience has been gratifying," Keith says. "It was a dream of mine when I co-wrote the song to have Willie sing on it and for it to go No. 1. It was too perfect for it not to come true. It's a great thing to have Willie back on the radio."
Hey Uncle Sam
Put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty
Started shaking her fist
And the eagle will fly
And there's gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom
Start ringing her bell
And itll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Ahhh Brought to you Courtesy of the Red White and Blue
Last week two columnists discussed the interesting phenomenon of Bush hatred. For his part, Robert Samuelson debunks some of the assumptions of Bush hatred"Bush-Hatred: Fearful Loathing . . . ":
But just because lots of people feel passionately about Bush doesn't mean the country is split into Bush lovers and haters. Many Americans are ambivalent, as they often are. Some like Bush and not his policies -- or the reverse. Consider a Los Angeles Times survey in November (before Saddam Hussein's capture improved Bush's ratings): 40 percent liked the president and his policies; 6 percent liked his policies and disliked him; 28 percent liked him and disliked his policies; and 20 percent disliked him and his policies. Almost three-quarters liked the president or his policies. Interestingly, at the end of their presidencies, both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton enjoyed either personal or policy approval from about three-quarters of voters.
In the end, Bush hating says more about the haters than the hated -- and here, too, the parallels with Clinton are strong. This hatred embodies much fear and insecurity. The anti-Clinton fanatics hated him not simply because he occasionally lied, committed adultery or exhibited an air of intellectual superiority. What really infuriated them was that he kept succeeding -- he won reelection, his approval ratings stayed high -- and that diminished their standing. If Clinton was approved, they must be disapproved.
Here's how it works. An incumbent president tends to catalyze opposite reactions among the moderates and the extremists in the opposition party. Because he is adopting policies which help the nation and echo the demands of the broad center, he attracts moderates in the other party. But as he pursues the core policies of his own party, he generally triggers greater hostility from the true believers on the other side.Thus, President Bill Clinton's policies of reforming welfare and balancing the budget attracted moderates among Independents and Republicans. But his position on core Democratic issues like gun control and abortion drove the right-wing extremists crazy.
Similarly, President Bush's embrace of prescription-drug benefits for the elderly and his stalwart stand against terror lures the centrist Democrats and Independents. But his backing for the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act alienates the extreme left and whips them into a fine fury.
Because George W. Bush is attracting moderates with his forthright stand against terrorism, his willingness to go to war to defend our security, and his relatively compassionate social agenda, he is winning over Democrats and Independents who might once have voted against him. Those moderates who remain Democrats find themselves weakened by the defection of these moderates and become outvoted in the Democratic primaries.This phenomenon is precisely why Joseph Lieberman is losing to Howard Dean in the Democratic race for president. His constituency is voting for Bush and has left his party.
But Bush's strong Republican stands on the war in Iraq, defense spending, intrusive measures to fight domestic terrorism, support for conservative judges and opposition to powerful environmental measures leads the Democratic left to oppose him in ever stronger terms.
I was somewhat taken aback by reading Instapundit's recent comments about the Middle East.
THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.
It's just that his comments on the Middle East, while sympathetic to Israel, haven't betrayed this sort of vehemence in the past. But Reynolds is correct, the Palestinians are the enemies of civilization (certainly of Western civilization) and there's no polite way to say that. Reynolds takes them at their words and doesn't rationalize away the extremism that they promote.
Arafat's major accomplishment has been his successful misdirection by casting Palestinian nationalism as another liberation movement. Many in Israel and the rest of the West have bought into that. Either these people believe in the justice of the Palestinian cause but not its methods (or so they claim) or they believe in some inherent flaw in Zionism - the denial of rights to another nation - that must be corrected or both.
The first belief is contradicted by the 20th article of the Palestinian National Covenant:
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
I also don't write about it much because the Palestinians, fundamentally, are the cannon fodder of other people who don't like the United States, and the real way to resolve this problem is to deal with those other people. And so it's those other people who get the bulk of my attention.
Recognizing the critical role of Arab help has several implications for Middle East politics. First, it means that the PLO has very little of the political power so often ascribed to it. The PLO may appear to shape the policy of most Arab states, but in fact it reflects their wishes. It brings up the rear, echoing and rephrasing the weighted average of Arab sentiments. This suggests that it will moderate only when its Arab patrons want it to; so long as the Arab consensus needs it to reject Israel, the PLO must do so. Aspiring peacemakers in the Middle East must therefore not make settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute contingent on PLO concurrence, for this is to give a veto to the organization least prone to compromise.Second, while Arab rulers make the PLO rich and prominent, they also prevent it from becoming a representative body, an effective one, or a decent one. So long as it exists, the PLO will continue to ill-serve Palestinians by subordinating their interests to those of Qadhdhafi, Fahd, Asad, and Saddam Husayn. Do the Palestinians have an alternative to the PLO? Can they develop their own institutions, independent of the Arab states, which would cast off the PLO's illusory ambitions, discard its autocratic structure, accommodate Israel's existence, and promote practical interests? The "New Palestinian Movement" reportedly organized last fall in South Lebanon, the attempt of Palestinians living in the West to organize politically, or the efforts of West Bank mayors are moves in this direction. But their hopes of success must be slim, for no fledgling refugee organization has much chance against the weight of Arab consensus, which is still vested in the PLO.
