Category ►►► Palestinian Perils and Pratfalls

June 29, 2008

Olmert On a Nutshell: Yesterday's Dead Outweigh Tomorrow's Victims

In a "prisoner" swap stunning in its pointlessness and inhumanity, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet have agreed to release several live terrorists -- including a notorious Lebanese killer of Jews, whose crimes include one of the most horrific murders of the long Palestinian war against Israel -- in exchange for the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers:

Israel’s government voted on Sunday to trade one of the most notorious convicts in its prisons, a Lebanese murderer, for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers whose cross-border capture led to and partly motivated its month-long war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

After a wrenching national debate which served to drive hesitant officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, into accepting the deal, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to trade the prisoner, Samir Kuntar, along with four other Lebanese, for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers....

Mr. Kuntar was part of a cell that in 1979 raided the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, shooting dead Danny Haran while his daughter Einat, 4, watched, then smashing the girl’s head, killing her as well. Mr. Haran’s wife, Smadar, hid with their 2-year-old daughter and accidentally suffocated her to death in an effort to stop her from crying out.

Thus, Olmert signals that he is willing to sacrifice future generations of Israeli Jews in order to comfort the families of the dead.

While I understand the anguish that must enshroud those families, as much as can a person who has not personally experienced such tragedy, I have enough clarity of mind to realize that, as important as it is to retrieve the remains for proper burial, it's far more important to protect future innocent lives.

Goldwasser and Regev were captured alive; the terrorists bestially butchered them, even while they continued negotiating with Israel for their "release." The negotiation by Hezbollah was a farce of utter mendacity, and Olmert now insures that this pattern will happen again and again: Terrorists now have a green light to kill their cake and sell it, too.

This deal is a perscription for disaster; make no mistake, by releasing Kuntar and the other Palestinian terrorists, Olmert has made the world a more dangerous place:

• Olmert and his coalition have condemned an indeterminate number of innocent Israelis to death; Kuntar and his fellow butchers will see their release as a reward from Allah, and they will instantly dive into yet another murderous plot, and another and another.
• The Olmert government has prolonged the war with Iran and its proxies; the release will embolden Hamas and Hezbollah, and through them Iran, giving them heart to redouble their efforts to "cancel" the "Zionist project."
• The deal has handed a huge propaganda and morale coup to Hamas and Hezbollah, while endangering America and the West; the rest of the Moslem world will once again start to see radical Islamic terrorism as the "strong horse;" Israel will be weakened in the eyes of the world; it will be so much harder for the West to sustain the fight, knowing that we no longer have a reliable ally in Israel.
• And Olmert and his cabinet have declared open season on capturing or kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians, even making bodysnatching into a viable Palestinian military strategy: The more dead Israelis Iran's puppets hold, the more of their most brutal and effective terrorist serial killers the Israelis will release. Hamas now understand that they can kill their own prisoner, Gilad Shalit, knowing his death will not diminish his value in trade.

Even the Israeli government seems to realize that this deal is a dreadful mistake that they will never be able to justify to Israelis:

“Despite all hesitations, after weighing the pros and the cons, I support the agreement,” Mr. Olmert was quoted by his spokesman as telling his cabinet at the start of the meeting. “Our initial theory was that the soldiers were alive... Now we know with certainty there is no chance that that is the case.” He added, “There will be much sadness in Israel, much humiliation considering the celebrations that will be held on the other side.”

So why did he accept it? Very simply, he hadn't even enough spine to stand up to the families of Goldwasser and Regev.

Olmert hadn't enough courage to look the families in the eye and say, "I feel your loss, as I feel the losses of all the men who died during the war in 2006. But we cannot jeopardize everything that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev fought and died for. Of all people in the world, those two brave heroes would not have asked what you are asking, and they would never have accepted such a trade. I'm sorry."

The celebrations will be boisterous and sustained in Gaza City... and in Ramallah, Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. Palestinians and Israelis alike will see this as capitulation by Israel. More attacks will follow, more rockets and greater destruction will rain down upon Sderot and other cities.

It's hard to imagine a stupider and more self-destructive strategy; if Iran threatens to desecrate and cremate the bodies of Israeli soldiers, will Olmert agree not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities? Is that all it takes to ensure a nuclear-armed Iran? If he has insufficient courage to say No to the Goldwasser and Regev families, has he even a prayer of standing up to Hassan Nasrallah, Mahmoud Zahar, Bashar Assad, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Perhaps Ehud Olmert can make things better by proclaiming that by trading a half-dozen live terrorist murderers, hands still dripping blood, for two dead Israeli soldiers, he has secured "peace in our time." Though I doubt this peace will last as long as did the Munich Agreement of 1938.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 29, 2008, at the time of 4:54 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 25, 2008

Hamas Invades Egypt; Israel Blamed

For what I believe is the third time in as many days, Hamas militants breached the wall separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip, this time using bulldozers in full view of the Egyptian national police:

There were small clashes throughout the day, with short episodes of rock-throwing. Egyptians fired guns into the air and aimed water cannons above the heads of the those in the crowd to keep them back. The new breaches in the wall were large enough for cars and trucks to drive through, and some Egyptian guards then retreated.

But why is this peculiar thing happening at this moment in time? Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has the explanation:

Egypt is under pressure from Israel and the United States to restore the international border and regulate it, but does not want to use excessive force against the Gazans, whom the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, has insisted are starving under the pressure of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel.

Darn those Jews! For no reason at all -- other than a few thousand rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli cities -- the wicked Zionist Entity has ceased donating food, fuel, and medical supplies to the utterly helpless and impoverished Palestinian people who are currently attacking Israeli cities.

Therefore, Hamas has no choice but to bomb, tear down, or drive bulldozers through the border wall... so that the helpless, starving, impoverished Palestinians, with not a pair of shekels to rub together, can race through the gap by the hundreds of thousands... to bazaars in Egypt, where they buy millions of dollars worth of necessities, comforts, and luxuries.

If somebody can offer a better explanation to me than the obvious one -- that Gaza, led by its Hamas government, has noisily invaded Egypt, while the corrupt Egyptian police stood by and did nothing (and Mubarak blamed the Jews) -- I should like to see it.

But such a non-response on Egypt's part is likewise fraught with peril; as the Times asks, at what point does Mubarak worry that...

• Inviting Hamas to visit is altogether a different thing than inviting them to leave;
• Palestinians, around whom human sacrifice flows like water around a fish, are not exactly the most stable group to grant permanent right of access;
• And at what point, by simple custom and propinquity, does the "responsibility" for feeding, fueling, and treating millions of Palestinians -- who cannot ever seem to feed, fuel, or treat themselves -- devolve from Israeli shoulders to Egyptian?

Of course, Israel is no happier about these repeated breachings of the wall than are the Egyptians:

Hamas is trying to push Egypt into an agreement to regulate the border without having it sealed, as it had been from the time Hamas took over Gaza in early June. A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, said, “The gaps shouldn’t be closed because they provide urgent assistance to the Palestinians.”

Israeli officials have expressed increasing concern to the Egyptian and United States governments that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups are using the border breach to import military supplies and to send out fighters for training or terrorism.

Israel has raised its security alert for the Sinai and warned its citizens not to travel to the region’s popular beaches, fearing attacks there, and is saying it has credible reports of new efforts to smuggle gunmen and suicide bombers through the Sinai into Israel. The last suicide bombing in Israel, in the southern resort town of Eilat a year ago, was carried out by a militant who had traveled there through the Sinai.

There is, of course, no wall along the border between Egypt and Israel; the two countries have been at peace since the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords, the only treaty ever signed between Israel and an Arab state that has actually worked... oddly enough, pushed through by President Jimmy Carter, the worst American president of the twentieth century. Thus, if Hamas terrorists can freely travel into Egypt, they can bypass the walls between "Hamastan" (Gaza) and Israel to carry out murderous bombings.

The precarious Israeli government led by Ehud Olmert of the Kadima Party is widely believed to be already fallen in all but name; an election today would very likely bring Likud to power, possibly even in the first majority government in Israel's history. And one major reason for this is the government's relentlessly ham-fisted policy towards the Palestinians; at the moment, for the latest outrageous example, Olmert is toying the with idea of handing over control of the crossings between Israel and Gaza itself -- to Hamas:

Mr. Olmert is expected to discuss the Gaza crisis along with peace talks in his Sunday meeting with Mr. Abbas. Israel is considering the possibility of granting the request of Mr. Abbas and the prime minister based in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad, to let the Palestinian Authority [Hamas] control the crossings between Israel and Gaza, allowing them to reopen. [I suspect that we should read "Olmert and his Kadima-led coalition is considering," not all of Israel.]

Israel had previously rejected the idea, because it would loosen the economic squeeze on Hamas, which intensified last week when Israel decided to cut off shipments into Gaza, including fuel for the local power plant, in response to rocket attacks from Gaza. That move produced international protests and the Hamas decision to breach the border with Egypt.

When Israel says "let the Palestinian Authority" control the crossings, that means Hamas; Fatah has no toehold left in the Gaza government, so any PA soldiers would actually be Hamas militants.

It may be worth noting that Hamas was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who led the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood... the parent organization of many other terrorist groups, including not only Hamas but Egyptian Islamic Jihad (whence came Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda number two), al-Qaeda, and many others. It's difficult to determine whether the MB is itself a terrorist organization on the same scale as Hamas or EIJ, or whether it simply serves as a "gateway drug," a way station through which prototerrorists pass en route to forming their own, much more violent terrorist organizations.

However, the spiritual and political center of the Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt... which is yet another reason to be worried at the recent chumminess between that country and Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2008, at the time of 6:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2007

JoshuaPundit Sounds the Horn...

Wall fails to tumble; film at 11:00.

I can understand JoshuaPundit devoting an entire, long blogpost to arguing with a recent Big Lizards post; the only wonder is that more bloggers don't do it! After all, if our actual impact on the 'sphere matched our colossal ego, why, the whole wide web would be bristling with pro- and con-lizardly bloguations.

What's a bit puzzling is that he would choose to nominate that particular post for the Watcher's Council award. I think it a bit odd, considering how many of his points against us are not simply wrong but so easily proven wrong by past posting. Seems like such a waste.

After all, regardless of my irritation whenever he goes on a tear after George W. Bush and American foreign policy for being insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab, in fact, I am perfectly capable of voting for JoshuaPundit's posts in first place... even when I'm the only one to do so.

Back to the blog-bate. Let's start with JP's basic, flawed premise... that I think Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is morally wrong, and that's why they should give them up. Says he:

If the Arabs made the choice to attack and lost some territory as a result, it's hardly an injustice or an `occupation'.

But I've never said there was anything wrong with Israel occuping those territories. It's perfectly fine with me. "Occupation" is descriptive, not disparaging.

True, Israeli Jews have no "claim on history" for those territories... but neither do Arab Moslems. I don't support the very idea of historical land claims; I believe land ownership is decided by possession, defense, and development.

Israel possesses those territories now; it has successfully defended them from all comers; and it developed them far beyond what the Arabs ever did (which was, as JP points out, virtually nothing). Ergo, those territories belong, morally and politically, to Israel, to do with as they please.

I suggest they let them go -- not because the world, the Arabs, the Arab-Palestinians, or U.N. Secretary General Nanki-Poo have any say in the matter, but because it's in Israel's best interest to rid themselves of such pestiferous hellholes.

In the same piece in which I recommended pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank (this is more than two years ago, back when I was a guest blogger on Captain's Quarters), I also recommended treating any further aggression from either place -- under Arab rule -- as one would treat similar military attack from Syria, Egypt, Iran, or any other country: With overwhelming retaliation.

In fact, I predicted that's what Israel would do after Hamas took over and launched an attack. I was right on 2/3rds of that prediction: Hamas took over; they, in concert with Hezbollah, launched an attack; but Israel fought a lousy, half-hearted war and -- while they didn't lose, exactly, they certainly didn't win, exactly, either. (In my defense, I had no idea Ariel Sharon would go and have a stroke, leaving a buffoon like Ehud Olmert in charge.)

I can only quote Larry Niven again: "Not responsible for advice not taken."

Somehow, this doesn't seem to jibe with JoshuaPundit's analysis of my psyche:

The main premise of people like Big Lizards is that appeasement of the Arabs and enfranchising the Palestinians will lead to peace in the region. The sad reality is that the Arabs are mainly concerned with weakening Israel so as to speed its demise...and what's more, they've never made a secret of it.

I blink and wonder if we have a deranged, blogospheric identity-thief slithering around using the name Bum Gizzards or somesuch.

But no; the most likely explanation is that, like many who take an extreme position, JoshuaPundit simply cannot imagine a person disagreeing with him -- unless that person is a mendacious villain or the dupe of mendacious villains. It never occurs to him that I may have a unique position on the Israeli-"Palestinian" situation, one that doesn't fit into the standard range somewhere between that of Mier Kahane and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Had Israel chosen to formally annex Gaza and the West Bank, then ethnically cleanse all the Arabs out and encourage Israeli Jews to flood the lands... I would have had no problem with that. That, at least, would have been a workable solution. But given the fecklessness of what they have done (or rather, failed to do), it's completely unworkable to maintain an occupation of a hostile population with access to outside agencies who can arm them... as the Brits discovered to their chagrin in India and elsewhere. Since there is now no option of annexation and repopulation, best let them go -- but defend the bloody borders a hell of lot better than we've seen so far.

Another major faux pas was committed by "Freedom Fighter" (aside from his studied refusal to use my name, Dafydd ab Hugh, despite the fact that it's easily discoverable from (a) reading the top and bottom byline on every post, and (b) clicking the "Who are these 'Big Lizards' guys anyway?" link found in the right sidebar of every page on Big Lizards). Steadily, and throughout, FF mistakenly assumes that I also want Israel to give up East Jerusalem:

This blogger [he means us] goes on and makes the point that Israel never annexed Judea, Samaria or East Jerusalem and therefore has no claim. He's incorrect when it comes to East Jerusalem....

Well, that blogger is incorrect when he claims I said Israel has no claim on East Jerusalem. The full annexation of East Jerusalem would not only be the most easily justifiable annexation Israel could make, I actually think it would be a good idea. It would make it clear to the world that Jerusalem would never be divided, nor would ever become the capital of a second Palestinian state.

But he keeps throwing East Jerusalem into the mix, perhaps to make us look like Israel-haters or even worse... Mearsheimerites; e.g.:

He then further states that Jews were never a majority of the population in Judea, Samaria or East Jerusalem and that these areas always had a majority Arab population....

As we never said a word about East Jerusalem (or West, South, or North Jerusalem; read our post), this seems a bit thick. I have no idea where he got such a notion; I certainly never said any such a thing; nor do I believe it. And not only do I think Israel should annex East Jerusalem, I also totally opposed the withdrawal from the Lebanon security zone north of the border... and I still think it was a bad idea. And Israel should hang onto the Golan Heights until the cows come home to roost.

(That grinding noise you hear is the sound of Freedom Fighter's head spinning around like Linda Blair's in the Exorcist, as he tries to squeeze the Lizardly white paper on Israel into the narrow confines of his imaginative suitcase.)

Of course, none of JoshuaPundit's claims about my ignorance of Israel's history are accurate; but that's just my assertion... I can't prove it. Though I'm sure I've made references here and there through the years that would demonstrate at least a grasp of the main points -- for example, that Jews had purchased a lot of land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prior to the establishment of the modern nation of Israel... which Freedom Fighter seems to believe is news to me.

Then there are some claims of his that are simply tedious in their attempt to divert the debate from what we actually wrote to a cockamamie caricature of what we wrote. For one example (among many), we published the following:

As you may have guessed by now, "Freedom Fighter" at JP is one of those Israel boosters (I don't know where he posts from, here or there) who is so wrought up in the battle that he considers George W. Bush -- the most pro-Israeli president America has ever had -- to be Israel's enemy.

JP seizes upon one line there and twists it to make us sound like Borat-style "throw the Jew down the well" antisemites:

Big Lizards starts out by referring to me as `one of those Israel boosters' and wonders whether I'm posting `from here ( meaning the US) or there'(meaning Israel). I hate to disillusion anyone, but this site does not originate from Mossad headquarters, and there's no `dual loyalty' or question of my patriotism involved here.

Freedom Fighter... just as a frolic, perhaps you could try -- taking me literally? Dude, there is nothing on your blog indicating your nationality or where you post from. Perhaps if I read every post assiduously, I would spot something... but for all I know, you could be the heir to the principality of Monaco and posting from your winter castle in the island of Fernando Póo (now called Bioko Equatorial Guinea). You have a Blogger blog; you don't seem to list your real name anywhere (or perhaps I just haven't found it); I don't recall you mentioning identifying information in any of the posts of yours I've read.

The only clue I see is that your main banner includes an American bald eagle nibbling on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ear... but that might just be political commentary -- a Swiftian "modest proposal" for simultaneously ridding the world of its number-one terrorist and also providing a meal for an endangered species.

Regardless of one's position on the disposition of the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip -- or as Freedom Fighter would say, Judea, Samaria, and, ah, the Gaza Strip, I guess -- the central analogy of the JoshuaPundit post, that Gaza and the West Bank are to Israel as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are to the United States, is inappropriate and silly. The distinctions far overwhelm any superficial similarities.

The most basic one is easy to spot: The United States does not rule over any hostile populace. No seething, terrorist populations that hate us with a passion. No territories held by force, when the majority living there would rather die to kill an American than live with the thought that we live as well.

In reality, the Palestinian-flavored Arabs hate Jews and love death more than they love life, even the lives of their children. And that's not my prejudice talking... they proudly announce it themselves.

Americans are sensitive plants. The moment there is any hint of disharmony among even 30% of the population of some territory we frequent, we immediately saddle the campfire, pee on the horses, and up stakes for warmer climes. We know when we're not wanted! The only exceptions I can think of are Afghanistan, Iraq, and of course, the Civil War... though the first two are short-term fights that we'll soon win, ending with far less than the magic 30% figure; and in the last, there was a moral principle involved: abolishing slavery.

One cannot find 30% of the population in the four American border states demanding to be returned to Mexico. One cannot fine 3%. One cannot even find 0.03%. In fact, not even 0.03% of the Hispanic population of those states. The entire membership of MeCHA that really wants those states to be swallowed up by Mexico as the state of "Aztlan" would probably fit into the Whiskey A-Go-Go nightclub.

While in the Israeli-occupied territories, the percent of the population that wants to be free of Israel and judenrein is, oh, about 100%. That's a pretty significant distinction between the analogy and the analogized!

That was the point of our earlier post; I have no idea what was the point of Freedom Fighter's post, other than a cri de cœur arising from generalized angst. But what the heck; read what we wrote, then read the JoshuaPundit post, and form your own opinion which of us is more convincing.

I'm all eyes...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2007, at the time of 4:04 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

November 7, 2007

David Samuels Speaks Out

David Samuels has done us the kindness of responding with a comment to our most recent post on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and what she did or did not say to someone who raced to pass it along to Aluf Benn for condemnation. Our two recent posts on this topic were:

• Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?
• Some Respect for the Lady

Given Mr. Samuels' respected position in the journalistic community -- and the relatively obscure state of things here at Big Lizards -- we are of course rather flattered. Despite my rather colossal ego and preening narcissism, I attribute his response to a desire to set the record straight, as he sees it, about what he said, rather than concluding that he is a regular Big Lizards reader.

But surely his dogged defense of his column deserves an equally thoughtful response; and it's a good excuse for another post, anyway. As Samuels offered his response as a public comment (under the handle "DS"), I feel free to quote big chunks of it in this post, for ready reference. (Throughout, I accept that this is the authentic David Samuels, which I believe because of diverse tests.)

Ergo:

His first point is one that I thought I myself made in the previous post; but Samuels would like to stress it:

In the space alloted me in the article that was republished in FrontPage, I am careful to distinguish between two distinct possibilities:

A. Condoleezza Rice has said things -- either directly to Aluf Benn or to a political source he trusts -- that cite her own personal experience as a black girl in the South as a proof of her empathy for Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and Gaza.

B. Condoleezza Rice means what she says, in a heartfelt, deeply personal way.

I strongly believe that A is true, while I think that B is nonsense. I think the reasons are quite clear from the text of my article, which was intended as a commentary on Rice rather than a close reading of Aluf Benn's column in Haaretz.

I certainly understood that point; Samuels' article is well and clearly written. That is what I sought to convey by dividing my own response into two phases:

1. Phase 1, in which I praised Samuels for his rejection of point (B) above, and especially for his rejection of the standard conservative theme that Rice is freelancing, and that she has somehow bullied or bamboozled President Bush into going along against his better judgment.
2. Phase 2, in which I noted that he nevertheless unreservedly accepts part (A), that she said what Benn claims she said -- comparing PA President Mahmoud Abbas to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. -- despite the fact that neither Benn nor anybody else has presented the least bit of evidence that she did -- other than hearsay evidence from an anonymous source.

I will make one caveat: Unlike David Samuels, I am agnostic about whether she actually said it; but having a scientific frame of mind, I am unwilling to accept claims that have no evidence behind them, requiring me to believe a person I don't know, who says he correctly heard what another person that none of us knows (and who goes nameless, to boot), about what the second chap thinks he heard from Condoleezza Rice.

I can state with some assurance that I have never heard Dr. Rice say what Benn says she said (to someone else, not him); and that it doesn't seem likely that she would say it (she's not an ass). Benn himself says she never says such things in public... so why should we believe she says them in private?

But let us sail on...

1. Aluf Benn is a very reputable Israeli journalist who operates at a very high level in his profession, has interviewed Rice a number of times and has never been accused of fabricating a story before.

Nor has he been now; and I'm perfectly willing to accept that Aluf Benn is very reputable.

But so too was Dan Rather... and yet he broadcast an obvious fabrication. Nevertheless, I don't accuse Rather of fabricating the story: I am utterly certain he believed the "Killian memos" were authentic when he broadcast them. I suggest rather that Rather was fooled by his own biases into believing something silly... and that he dug in his heels when confronted with evidence of his own wild error. And that is also what I suggest may be the case with Aluf Benn (the first part; I have no idea whether he would double down if somehow confronted with evidence that his claim was wrong).

Again, I thought I was fairly clear that I was not claiming that Benn made the whole thing up, as Samuels seems to think I said. (Samuels writes, "From your post, you appear to believe in an entirely different possibility -- Possibility C -- namely, that Aluf Benn made up his entire column and the sources behind it as part of a left-wing plot to make Condoleezza Rice look bad.") In fact, I took no position on that, merely noting the possibilities (in the earlier post, the first one linked above, not the most recent):

Finally, we have convincing evidence that either somebody, God knows who, told Mr. Benn that Rice in private says Abbas is like Dr. King; or else that Benn himself made it up. We certainly have no evidence whatsoever that she actually did say such a thing... and by now, you'd think we would have, wouldn't you?

Again, I did not say he fabricated it; I said that either he fabricated it, or else someone told him that she said that (the latter being Benn's claim). I expressed no opinion on which was the case -- not knowing Aluf from Adam -- but those really are the only two options, aren't they? But in neither case do we have even the remotest evidence of accuracy.

Let's assume that Benn did not fabricate the story:

• His source could have misheard or misunderstood what Rice said (is Benn's source a careful listener?)
• Benn himself could have misheard or misunderstood what his source said (do we know whether his anonymous source is a careful speaker?)

• Condoleezza Rice could have been tired and said something she doesn't believe and didn't mean to say (do we know -- well, yes, we do know she is a human being, for all that).

  My grandmother use to do it all the time. She was the first among her set to buy a couch with a hide-away bed (this was in the 1940s, I think); she brought her club over to see it... and then proudly informed them, "And the nicest thing about this couch is that if you pull off the cushions and tug on this strap, it opens up into a full-course dinner!" Needless to repeat, that was not what Grandma meant to say.

Any one of these three strong possibilities utterly undercuts the claim that she intentionally said what Benn claims she said, and what Samuels ends by accepting uncritically -- after first treating it skeptically.

I think Samuels also shoots a bit wide with this point:

It is not at all clear to me that causing a fuss about Rice among fervent right-wingers would in any way further Benn's own political agenda. I am inclined to believe that the opposite is true. Benn's story is confirmed by the right-wing journalist David Bedein -- which argues against the idea that this story was fabricated to serve a left-wing agenda. Undermining Rice at this moment seems like the agenda of the hard right.

First, it should be fairly clear that "undermining the Bush administration" is rather high on the agenda of all left-wingers, no matter what country they inhabit; they hope it will lead to President Hillary.

That it also happens to play into the hands of the Israeli Right (they malign Bush and especially Rice with great frequency) is unsurprising... because we see that same pseudo-alliance here in America, where the internationalist Left joins with the isolationist Right to attack Bush's foreign policy -- usually dumping on the black chick in the process.

Again, Samuels barks up the wrong tree by believing I'm trying to prove Benn made it all up; I think it far more likely that Benn believed what he was told precisely because it fit his preexisting bias against Condoleezza Rice, and indeed against many "right wingers".

I have noticed that a lot of Israeli lefties still think that conservatives hate Jews and side with the Arabs every chance they get. Thus it would be unsurprising for an Israeli leftist to readily believe it when a source tells him that the "hard right" Condoleezza Rice is an antisemite who sees Israeli Jews as Jim-Crow Klansmen oppressing the innocent-as-a-lamb Palestinian minority.

In the same way, Dan Rather was poised to readily believe it when Mary Mapes told him that light Col. Jerry Killian said he was being "pressured" to give Lt. George Bush better marks than he had earned and to pretend Bush had been present when he was AWOL. Rather didn't set out to lie; he simply accepted a fraudulent set of documents because nothing in them raised alarm bells... they perfectly fit what Rather already believed about Bush.

That is my best guess about Aluf Benn: His source told him something he already believed... and now he had the "proof" of what he'd known all along! So he ran with it.

And even you admit he is reckless -- which rather conflicts with your near-simultaneous claim that he "operates at a very high level in his profession;" I assume you mean more than that Benn is successful... you mean that he's a good and careful reporter, right? Yet you yourself write:

2. Benn himself clearly distinguishes the nugget of reporting that he presents as fact (Rice made a comparison between Palestine and the American South), and his further "guesses" about Rice's "personal feelings" -- which I label as "incendiary," and which are probably unsupported by anything besides Benn's imagination (although its always possible that Rice said those things, too).

While I hate to judge before all the facts are in, I tend to think that a careful reporter operating at a very high level -- one whose very word we should accept, even when his only source is anonymous -- shouldn't be making "incendiary" claims that are "probably unsupported by anything besides [his own] imagination." Call it a quirk of mine.

3. I have interviewed Rice several times and she made a point of discussing the subject of race or the experience of her girlhood in Alabama each time, without my prompting her.

Yes, I've heard her do that, too... but that's not the point, is it? The point is whether she compared Israeli Jews to the Bull Connorses and Sheriff Clarks of her youth... and compared Mahmoud Abbas to Martin Luther King.

And Mr. Samuels still has not responded to my basic point, which I supported with four examples from his FrontPage piece. I quote myself, as I am wont to do at the drop of a hatpin:

This is an old bugaboo of mine: The interlocutor begins with "it mighta happened," soon talks himself into "it prob'ly happened," and ends by working himself into a veritable frenzy of "it rilly did happen!" -- while never presenting a scrap of evidence beyond the sonorous sounds of his own sweet soliloquy.

I still want to know how Samuels gets from noting that Benn "never cited any source" to Samuels' virtual certainly that Benn correctly understood what his source was saying, that Benn's anonymous source was accurate, and that Rice really did say what Benn claimed she said -- that Abbas was like King. Was Samuels truly impressed, as a journalist himself (which I am not), by "I cannot name my sources.... But I rely on firm ground?"

After all, Samuels wrote in his comment:

While I am confident that Rice did say something similar to what Benn suggests that she said [i.e., that Abbas is like Dr. King], I also see no reason to believe that ANYTHING Rice says as Secretary of State... has any necessary relation to how Condoleezza Rice actually feels inside.

All right, I understand he believes she was lying when she "said" that. But again, what makes him think she even said that? Do we even know that Aluf Benn's source wasn't Emily Litella?

I would encourage you to read more carefully in the future, to avoid logic-chopping, and to be more judicious in your citations of other people's work.

If I may speak directly to Mr. Samuels... thank you; I do always strive to rise to the level of the elite media, even if I sometimes fall short. But never for lack of trying! I hope to always read carefully; I would be ashamed of my math background if I caught myself "logic-chopping" (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds pretty bad); and I try to exercise judgment whenever I cite other people's work.

I very much appreciate your comment... and I hope you will respond once more to answer the burning question above: What, besides Aluf Benn's say-so, causes you to believe that Condoleezza Rice compared Mahmoud Abbas to the Rev. Martin Luther King, jr.? Have you ever heard her specifically make such a comparison?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2007, at the time of 3:57 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 6, 2007

Some Respect for the Lady

This David Samuels article from FrontPage Magazine takes a couple of small steps forward to rein in the hysterical Condi-bashing by so many conservatives; but it takes one giant leap backwards by perpetuating the most irritating part of the media charade: Accepting as uncontested fact an anti-Condi whispering campaign orchestrated by a "respected left-wing [Israeli] journalist" with a class interest in portraying Condoleezza Rice as biased towards Palestinians.

(Hat tip to Soccer Dad, who e-mailed me the link after reading our last foray into this realm: Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?)

Here is the part that is reasonable and perceptive:

At the same time, it is also important to remember that Condoleezza Rice is not a talk show host but the U.S. secretary of state -- which is not a job that leaves very much room for personal moments. Her private rhetoric (if “off the record” conversations with foreign politicians and journalists can even remotely be considered private) is simply rhetoric -- that is to say, words intended for a purpose. Every word she speaks embodies the political will of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet – a nation currently having a bit of trouble in the Middle East.

Rice is a skilled political tactician who is fantastically loyal to President Bush, who has repeatedly declared his intention to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza before he leaves office.

This echoes the point we ourselves made three days earlier:

Honestly, we don't know what Condoleezza Rice thinks about, e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian "roadmap" nonsense, except that clearly it doesn't bother her enough to cause her to resign from the administration. It's possible she's 113% in synch with President George W. Bush's enthusiasm about a Palestinian state living "side by side" with Israel and at peace. But it's likewise possible that she thinks it's doomed to failure... but since that's the foreign policy the president wants, she may believe strongly enough in the unitary executive that she's willing to push hard even for something she opposes.

To put this as bluntly as I can, this is not Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's personal foreign policy. She is not a latter-day Svengali, mesmerizing George Bush (playing Trilby O'Ferrall?) with her eyes; she's not a zuvembie, casting a voodoo spell to suborn the president's will to her own, turning him into the walking dead.

She is ably and honestly representing the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, which is precisely the duty of every cabinet member; if a secretary can no longer represent and further the president's policies, because he (or she) disagrees so strongly on a moral or political level -- then he has the duty to resign.

Those are the only two choices... be the mouthpiece of the president, or go find another job. The only thing we know about Dr. Rice's personal position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is that she doesn't disagree with Bush so strongly that she feels compelled to resign. Nothing more. As we also said, sometime after January 20th, 2009, we will likely find out her own position on a whole host of issues -- when she runs for office, writes a book, and/or gives post-administration interviews.

But here, illustrated better by this David Samuels article in FrontPage than I've ever before seen, is the essentially absurd dichotomy of all this speculation. How does the vague and unsourced Benn accusation here:

Though Benn never cited any source for his description of Rice’s deep personal identification with the Palestinian national cause, he has interviewed Secretary Rice before and obviously felt his source was good enough for print. He went on to "guess" that Rice’s feelings were based on the similarity between the separation fence and checkpoints in the West Bank and the Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from exercising their most basic civil rights. For good measure Benn also threw in the suggestion that Rice often confuses Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with Martin Luther King...

...And here:

Benn’s off-the-record/on-the-record “hint” that Rice might be personally sympathetic to Palestinians has naturally excited Jewish right-wingers, who fear a sell-out at the upcoming peace conference in Annapolis, just as it pains left-wingers, who worry that she might think that they, too, are racists, the worst sin in the liberal “Al Cheyt...

...Abruptly transmaugrify, without visible evidentiary means of support, into the utter certainty of this:

While the intent of Aluf Benn’s “guesses” about Rice’s innermost feelings about the Palestinian cause is clearly incendiary, I have little doubt the secretary and her aides have whispered sweet nothings into the ears of Israeli and Palestinian politicians and even to Aluf Benn himself, suggesting that she can empathize with the Palestinian sufferings under Israeli occupation by virtue of having been born black in Alabama...

...And this?

At the same time, it seems highly unlikely that Secretary Rice’s sudden empathy for the Palestinian cause is anything more than a tactical maneuver....

The paradox of Rice’s conduct...

Yet there is still something disturbing about the remarks Rice is reported to have made, however direct or vague they might have been, and however tactically clever they might seem to their author. Offhand analogies between Palestinians and Southern blacks or Israelis and Southern whites make a mockery of real pain and suffering by ignoring the specificity of actual historical experience. Comparisons of Palestinian “freedom fighters” with the American civil rights movement would merely seem ridiculous (imagine the membership of Hamas and Fatah joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome”) if they were not also part of a bullying assault on historical specificity that has come to characterize much recent political discourse in America....

Condoleezza Rice, the political science professor and provost of Stanford University, would likely judge such bullying and divisive rhetoric harshly, as the product of a second-rate mind afraid to engage in reasoned discussion and debate. When she returns to private life, she will feel ashamed of herself.

This is an old bugaboo of mine: The interlocutor begins with "it mighta happened," soon talks himself into "it prob'ly happened," and ends by working himself into a veritable frenzy of "it rilly did happen!" -- while never presenting a scrap of evidence beyond the sonorous sounds of his own sweet soliloquy.

And then to cap off this eye-popping extravaganza of phantasmapalooza, the Samuels piece thuds back to earth with this final and self-referential awakening from the dream:

That said, I don’t see the slightest bit of evidence that the secretary of state actually believes Mahmoud Abbas is Martin Luther King in disguise, or that she has flashbacks to her childhood in Birmingham every time she sees the Separation Fence on her way to Ramallah. But a whisper or two can’t hurt, right?

No, Mr. S., it can't; nor is there any way that a put-upon Secretary of State -- "an accomplished black woman with a Ph.D. in political science, who plays the piano, who grew up as a little girl in the South and lost a friend when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the churches in Birmingham" -- can respond to such churlish insolence and impudence, such an attack on her basic honor, integrity, and decency, without seeming the fool for getting into a literal "he said, she said" back and forth with some lefty reporter about who knows better what is really in Condoleezza Rice's heart.

Good Lord, everyone; get a grip: We do not have any believable evidence that Dr. Rice ever said any such a thing. So let's stop the show trial and confine ourselves to complaining about what we do know... which is that the president's policy (not Condi Rice's policy) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shifted from demanding that the Palestinian-Arabs live up to their earlier agreements -- an essential component of Bush's own "Roadmap to Peace" -- to now offering them inducements and enticements, compromises and concessions merely to blight Annapolis with their presence.

But that is Bush's fall from grace, not Condoleezza Rice's.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2007, at the time of 7:27 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 2, 2007

Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?

My favorite blog, Power Line, has spent the last few years firing rockets and mortars at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seemingly blaming her for every State Department initiative they dislike -- and by and large dismissing the possibility that Rice might not be a Col. Kurtz-like rogue agent but actually representing the foreign policy of the president. I have said several times that I think they're theorizing beyond the evidence, which Sherlock Holmes dubbed a cardinal sin.

Honestly, we don't know what Condoleezza Rice thinks about, e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian "roadmap" nonsense, except that clearly it doesn't bother her enough to cause her to resign from the administration. It's possible she's 113% in synch with President George W. Bush's enthusiasm about a Palestinian state living "side by side" with Israel and at peace. But it's likewise possible that she thinks it's doomed to failure... but since that's the foreign policy the president wants, she may believe strongly enough in the unitary executive that she's willing to push hard even for something she opposes.

(Such selfless advocacy is hardly unprecedented, even in Foggy Bottom; Colin Powell pushed very hard to bring our allies along for the Iraq ride, even though he personally abhored the policy.)

My point is this: We won't know what Condi Rice thinks until, like John Alden, she can speak for herself. In 2009 and later, when the Bush administration has run its course, Rice may run for public office (perhaps governor of California when Arnold Schwarzenegger's term expires in 2010). Even if she doesn't, she would be a fool not to write a book and cash in on her (relatively) low-paid years in government service and at Stanford (low-paid compared to what she could have earned in private industry).

At that point, we'll finally learn what she really thinks about this; I can't imagine a campaign or memoir that didn't address what has occupied much of the time she has been at State and before that as National Security Advisor. But until then... well, what we have is a lot of rumor and inuendo by people who have a class interest in shiving her, such as the folks at Haaretz and self-proclaimed Zionists such as Boker tov, Boulder! (the clock on the blog shows Jerusalem time, though the blog presumably emanates from Colorado).

Sadly, the lads at Power Line often seize hold of such iffy, flakey "evidence" as more ammunition for their artillery barrage -- as today:

The latest round of diplomatic buffoonery includes a recurrence of Seceretary Rice's characterization of the Palestinian cause as a civil rights issue in the image of the one she grew up with in Birmingham, Alabama. As Joel Fishman recently reported:

Last week in Jerusalem, U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, articulated some of her personal views which ultimately found their way into the press. For Dr. Rice the struggle of the Palestinians is analogous to that of the Afro-Americans for civil rights and she identifies with the Palestinians. She recalled what it meant to travel in segregated buses as a little girl in Alabama. She also compared the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to Reverend Martin Luther King, because, in her mind, both were committed to peace. According to reporter Aluf Benn, Rice views Abbas as committed to the struggle for Palestinian independence and, like Martin Luther King, opposed to terror and violence (Haaretz, October 16, 2007). Independently, David Bedein reported Rice's statements in The Bulletin (Philadelphia, October 17, 2007).

At the end of the post, Scott Johnson notes finally received a link to the Haaretz piece itself from a reader, and he links to it. Let's turn to the original to see what evidence "respected left-wing Israeli reporter" Aluf Benn actually cites:

When Condoleezza Rice talks about the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, she sees in her mind's eye the struggle of African Americans for equal rights, which culminated in the period of her Alabama childhood.

Rice is very aware of political sensitivity, and avoids making such comparisons in public speeches and interviews, where she keeps to the official list of talking points. But in private, she talks about the

[Sic; the paragraph actually ends hanging with this sentence fragment]....

Now, Rice is comparing Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayad, to Martin Luther King. Abbas is committed to the struggle for Palestinian independence, and like Abbas he is opposed to terror and violence. Just as Tony Blair, the Quartet envoy and former British prime minister, compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tothe conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, so does Rice recall the struggle for civil rights in the United States when she speaks about the Palestinian boy who needs new hope instead of aspiring to commit a suicide attack. Rice's current visit to the Middle East is one of the most important in her term as secretary of state, perhaps the most important.

Please pardon my bluntness, but what the hell kind of evidence is this? Benn simply asserts, without even hinting at his sources, that Rice equates Abbas with Martin Luther King and the Palestinian conflict with "the struggle for civil rights in the United States" -- and Scott accepts the assertion uncritically. Why? I believe because it fits his preconceived storyline on Condoleezza Rice.

I cannot help but suspect that if Aluf Benn published a piece where he asserted, equally unsourced, that Rice had forcefully demanded that the Palestinians live up to their previous agreements before she would offer a new one, Scott Johnson would be very skeptical and demand to see something more substantive; he is convinced of the opposite. Thus doth conviction make convicts of us all.

At least one anti-Rice blogger, Boker tov, Boulder!, who is favorably linked by the Power Line post, thought the sourcing was thin enough that he (or she) e-mailed Benn to inquire what he actually had. BtB appears to find the following response very reassuring:

UPDATE: I wrote to Aluf Benn and asked for any substantiation of his comments on Secretary Rice. He very kindly responded immediately:

I cannot name my sources, and as I have written, Rice did not speak in public about these matters. But I rely on firm ground.

Well! Who could argue with that? "Firm ground," indeed.

But come now; if a leftist reporter at, say, the New Republic offered his reliance on firm ground as sole authority for the flat claim that Bush told friends "in private" that he wanted to launch a ground invasion of Pakistan -- would Power Line accept it? Would any of us?

Scott uses a rhetorical trick to try to further discredit the Secretary of State:

These themes have become a motif in Secretary Rice's discussion of Palestinian statehood. She articulated them most egregiously last year in an astonishing speech before an American-Palestinian group. In that speech Rice likened the Palestinian struggle to the American struggle for independence and to the American civil rights movement. Rice said:

I know that sometimes a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel must seem like a very distant dream. But I know too, as a student of international history, that there are so many things that once seemed impossible that, after they happened, simply seemed inevitable. I've read over the last summer the biographies of America's Founding Fathers. By all rights, America, the United States of America, should never have come into being. We should never have survived our civil war. I should never have grown up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama to become the Secretary of State of the United States of America.

But what "themes" does Scott mean? The theme in the previous attack was that Rice thinks Mahmoud Abbas is like Martin Luther King; but this theme is that she still has hope that rationality can prevail and a peaceful Palestinian state could eventually emerge.

First, I don't know about you guys, but those seem awfully different "themes" to me. But second, what of Scott's characterization that the passage "likened the Palestinian struggle to the American struggle for independence and to the American civil rights movement"? There is no question she compares them; but "compare" needn't mean "equate." I can compare elections in Iran to elections in the United States without likening them or saying they're the same.

In the sense that, if such a peaceful Palestinian state comes into being, it might be seen as something that "seemed impossible" right up until it "seemed inevitable," such a circumstance would be very much like the United States; but that's a far cry from saying Yassir Arafat was like George Washington or that Mahmoud Abbas is like Martin Luther King. I can say that many people thought it would have been impossible for the United States to lose a war (or a peace) to primitive North Vietnam; but by the time it happened, it sure seemed inevitable to me. Yet surely this doesn't mean I equate Ho Chi Minh to George Washington or even Martin Luther King, jr.

Like Anne Frank in her last days, Condoleezza Rice still has hope in the future and in people. What is Scott Johnson's hope? Does he not hope that the Palestinians can eventually come to their senses?

What are the alternatives? I see only two: that Israel runs the entire Arab population out of Gaza and the West Bank and annexes them as "Judea and Samaria," or that Hamas eventually expunges Israel. I think the first would so enrage the Arab world -- heck, the entire Moslem world -- that the war on global hirabah would become vastly more dangerous to us.

And of course the last is unthinkable. So honestly, I have great sympathy for Dr. Rice's hope that the Palestinians return to the land of sanity sometime, because it's really the only solution.

And for heavens sake, Rice was speaking "at the American Task Force on Palestine Inaugural Gala." She was talking to an audience of Palestinian-Americans! She called upon them to help in the task of liberating the PA from terrorist violence and the "humiliation" of being just a territory or "authority," not quite a state. What is she supposed to do -- tell that audience that Israel should annex the territories and expel all the Arabs?

So which of Power Line's claims have convincing evidence behind them?

• That Condoleezza Rice hopes for Palestinians to reject violence and create a peaceful state;
• That she considers Mahmoud Abbas a "moderate leader" -- which, since moderate is a comparative, means "moderate compared to his rivals in Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (which appears to despise Abbas, despite being part of Fatah, Abbas's party), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda;"
• And that she wants to persuade Palestinian-Americans to join in the effort to nudge the PA in a more democratic and peaceful direction.

Finally, we have convincing evidence that either somebody, God knows who, told Mr. Benn that Rice in private says Abbas is like Dr. King; or else that Benn himself made it up. We certainly have no evidence whatsoever that she actually did say such a thing... and by now, you'd think we would have, wouldn't you?

That gruel of truth seems a bit thin to make the big buffet breakfast of Condoleezza bashing Power Line serves us.

They're still my favorite blog, of course; I will always aspire to their pinnacle of posting (near) perfection. But decades ago, I became pathologically obsessed with truth; and in this case, I must point out a few "inconvenient truths" about the animus that so many conservatives have against Condoleezza Rice.

Besides, she is a true lady (and a hottie), and I must therefore rise in defense of her honor.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2007, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 24, 2007

Cindy Sheehan's Day of Out-of-Tunement Manifesto

I rarely do this, as you know: I rarely link to some piece and say simply "read this." (I'm too in love with the sound of my own fingers typing on a keyboard.)

But here's an exception. Read Cindy Sheehan's Yom Kippur "sermon," delivered at Michael Lerner's Beyt Tikkun "synogogue;" you will be -- if not exactly glad, then at least agape. (Rabbi Lerner is Hillary Clinton's mentor, author of the Politics of Meaning and other works of Socialist agit-prop masquerading as theology.)

My response (I love this) is entirely contained in the list of categories I had to attach to this post.

(Well, one more thing. It has always been my understanding that Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is a day for each person to atone for what he, personally, has done wrong -- not "atone" for his enemies failing to live up to his own lofty standards, apologize for all the times America hasn't followed his lead, or wallow in self-righteous indignation that nobody listens to him. 'Nuff said; read the list of categories above.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2007, at the time of 2:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 19, 2007

Israel Finally Listening to Big Lizards' Advice

A long time ago (in blog years -- June 2005), I wrote a piece on Patterico's Pontifications called "Words of Wall," which I later reposted here on Big Lizards. As I wrote in the introduction to the repost:

This is the post where I first laid out the Lizard Doctrine: Israel should withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, not because it will pacify the Palestinians (which I correctly predicted it would not), but because it would allow Israel at last to "give war a chance."

The Doctrine requires two steps; without both steps being undertaken, it is not the Lizard Doctrine, and I disclaim all accountability for problems that result from implementing only one or the other step: "Not responsible for advice not taken," as Larry Niven likes to say at the drop of a space helmet. The stages are:

1. That Israel fully withdraw all soldiers and settlers from Gaza and the West Bank;
2. That Israel subsequently treat Gaza and the West Bank as if they were separate, independent countries -- and respond accordingly to any future military aggression.

Step 2 is just as important as step 1, and it boils down to this: If Syria fired missiles from Syrian territory at Israel, or even if it allowed Hezbollah or Hamas to shoot missiles from Syrian territory, how would Israel respond? I think it would brush aside any considerations of how thoroughly Bashar Assad controls the Syrian frontier... and it would simply bomb the Baathist state in retaliation. And the bombing would cause far more damage to Syria than Syria had caused to Israel, as a deterrant (which may or may not deter).

Thus, under the Lizard Doctrine step 2, when the government of Gaza or the West Bank fires rockets or missiles or launches any other attack against Israel, or allows any other group to do so, from Gazan or West Bankian territory, Israel must respond by bombing them or taking some equivalently harsh military action against them: tit for tat, with the response being much more severe than the provocation.

Alas, this is the part where Israel, in the person of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cronies, has fallen asleep at the switch: The only military action they launched in response to literally hundreds of rockets and missiles fired into Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Fatah-controlled al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and from Palestinian-controlled territory (without the least attempt by the Palestinian Authority to punish the attackers, thus proving complicity), was a feckless and ultimately stalemated invasion that destroyed a lot of the terrorist groups' weaponry -- but ultimately did nothing to punish the PA itself for giving the terrorists safe haven.

And of course, ever since the last elections in the PA, the government itself has been controlled by a known terrorist organization, Hamas. Again, as the rocketry continued during and after the war, Israel has made no move to punish the PA as it would Syria, Egypt, or Jordan, were the shoe on that hand.

Rather, Israel has carried out "airstrike assassinations" only against specific individuals. While I think they're a great idea -- keep it up! -- this, too, fails to punish Gaza and the West Bank as if they were enemy states, which is what the Lizard Doctrine requires.

But today, for the first time, I have hope that Israel is finally getting around to implementing step 2:

Israel declared the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip an "enemy entity" on Wednesday and said it would cut utilities to the territory, complicating the U.S. plan to relaunch peace talks aimed at establishing a separate Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel made the provocative decision hours before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived for talks setting up what President Bush hopes will be a pivotal international Mideast peace conference this fall. Rice neither endorsed nor criticized Israel's move.

First of all, it's outrageous that evidently, all this time, Israel has been supplying electricity, water, and other utilities to a geographic entity that has been at open war with Israel. What imbecile made that decision? For that matter, even were the PA at peace with Israel, why would it be Israel's duty to give them free electricity and water, build roads for them, give them cash money, or perform any other infrastructure improvements? Do we give free electrical power and drinking water to Mexico and Canada?

But it's absurdity on a bagel that they continue doing so while Gaza busily gnaws away at the hand that's feeding it. It's no wonder that the Olmert government polls about as low as the Democrat-controlled Congress in America!

Still, better late than not at all; and I welcome Israel's sudden awakening to its own idiocy... "light dawns on marblehead," and all that. Thank goodness Ehud Olmert is finally listening to the Lizard's advice:

The Israeli designation covers all of Gaza, not just Hamas militants who took control of the territory in June. The United States and Israel regard Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuse to deal with it.

[Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi] Livni said Israel was not obliged to deliver anything to Gaza beyond humanitarian aid.

"When it comes to the humanitarian needs, we have our own responsibilities," Livni said. "All the needs which are more than humanitarian needs will not be supplied by Israel to Gaza Strip."

Perhaps I'm a bit cold-hearted and harsh; I've been called that plenty of times before. But I dispute that Israel has even the most minimal humanitarian obligations to a country or other geopolitical entity with which it is at war. This changes if Israel, or any other nation, occupies a territory; when you take over, you assume certain duties... and this was the major reason the Lizard Doctrine called for Israel to divest itself of the occupied territories: so that any such moral obligation would cease, and the PA could be let alone to sink or swim as it will.

I'm irked and distressed that even this minimal bit of common sense eludes the Israeli leadership. Israel no longer occupies Gaza by even the most expansive definition; and even the West Bank is by and large independent; why was Israel still paying money to keep either entity afloat? Surely that is the responsibility of the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

And until they are forced, life or death, to shoulder those responsibilities, they will remain in the infantile stage that allows them to consider the cessation of welfare a violation of their human rights:

Israel did not announce a date for cutoff of services. The decision is likely to reinforce perceptions among Palestinians and their Arab backers that Israel will do as it sees fit regardless of the cost to civilians, and that the U.S. will not block Israel's hand....

Livni said the decision is legal, but international aid groups called it unacceptable to blame civilians for the actions of rogue militants.

Gisha, a human rights group that works for greater freedom of movement in Gaza, called the action "immoral and illegal, constituting prohibited collective punishment of civilians."

Sorry, Gisha; "punishment," as used in the legal phrase "collective punishment," means violent assault or the seizure of property; it does not include the decision not to continue giving gifts to the enemy. See, for example, this vigorously anti-Israel article in Counterpunch, objecting to last year's invasion of Gaza:

Attacks on a civilian population as a form of collective punishment violate article 50 of the Hague Regulations, which provides: "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible."

The Fourth Geneva Convention also prohibits collective punishment. Article 33 says: "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed." The Convention requires all states party to it to search for and ensure the prosecution of perpetrators of the war crime of "causing extensive destruction ... not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Amnesty International called the deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure war crimes.

Collective punishment is likewise forbidden by Article 75 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. As four US Supreme Court justices agreed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last week, Article 75 is "indisputably part of the customary international law."

Protocol I (which Israel, the United States, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have never ratified), Article 75 does not explicitly define "collective punishments;" but the examples it cites of prohibited actions are all obvious violent assaults or the theft of property.

Again, "prohibited collective punishment of civilians" has never, in all of human history, been defined so expansively as to include the refusal to give humanitarian aid to an enemy entity that is attacking you.

My hopes are still low for the current administration, and I hope that some parliamentary maneuver can be carried out to force elections soon. Such elections would certainly spell the doom of the Kadima Party of Olmert and, most likely, the election of Likud (possibly even a pure Likud majority), making Binyamin Netanyahu the prime minister once more.

But until then, at least Ehud Olmert is shaking himself partially awake and beginning, just beginning, to assume the most basic responsibility of any government leader: to preserve, protect, and defend from violent attack the very country he leads, whether from other countries or even external quasi-governmental entities.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 19, 2007, at the time of 2:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 16, 2007

...By Definition, Also Still "Lesser"

It goes without saying (but I will anyway) that Fatah -- the political party of Palestinian "president" Mahmoud Abbas -- is a terrorist organization. The dead giveaway is when a political party boasts a "military wing" (in this case, the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade) that commits terrorist acts with the sanction of the party leadership.

So why on earth does President George W. Bush treat Abbas and Fatah as if they were serious partners in the "Roadmap to Peace?" Why does he babble about today being "a moment of clarity for all Palestinians?" And what does he mean by saying "and now comes a moment of choice?"

Believe it or not, there is a realistic and rational reason why that sort of fancification may be a very good policy for the United States to follow. Let me explain...

I said before that we know Fatah is a terrorist organization because it has a military wing, al-Aqsa, that commits acts of terrorism sanctioned by Fatah.

But this brings up an intriguing comparison to another conflict: Both the two major Shiite political parties in Iraq also have (or used to have) military wings: The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- recently renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), the largest political party in Iraq -- certainly used to operate the Badr Brigades, which were pro-Iranian terrorists during the Iran-Iraq war; while the Islamic Dawa Party has a historical connection to the Mahdi Militia and its onetime leader, Muqtada Sadr.

And thereby hangs our tale: When the SCIRI changed to the SIIC, that signalled a significant change in their attitude. They have made serious efforts to rein in the Badr Brigades/Organization, successfully enough that it's been a long time since we've even heard from them.

Similarly, Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, once a close ally of Sadr, has by and large severed ties with Sadr and the militia he once headed (I consider his leadership dead since his failed attempt to return to Iraq and subsequent flight back to Iran).

Not completely; and Maliki still tries, now and again, to prevent Coalition soldiers from aggressively searching the Shiite slums of Baghdad. But in many very visible ways, Maliki has surrendered to the American demands that we be allowed to go anywhere, anytime, without warning -- and in concert with Iraqi army units (including those from Sunni areas) -- and that is why Sadr has fled Iraq: He knows he can no longer rely on his one-time ally.

This is why I added the caveat above that both parties "have (or used to have) military wings." Though both once did, and both once functioned as official terrorist parties (particularly in assassinating thousands of Sunnis suspected of collaborating with al-Qaeda), today they are clearly disassociating themselves from the militants: Badr is more or less defunct, while the Mahdi Militia has lost its Iraqi partonage and relies more and more on Iran. The separation is not perfect, it's not complete -- but it's unquestionably underway.

Similarly, as we saw in Anbar, Diyala, and Baghdad provinces, some Sunni terrorist-supporting tribes have likewise turned on their erstwhile allies, to the extent of actually going to war against them.

So what does all this have to do with Fatah? Simply this: The central point upon which the Bush administration hangs their policy of engagement with Fatah is that they are the lesser of two evils. As many sententiously point out, the lesser of two evils is still evil; but on the other hand, by definition, it's also still lesser.

Why does the president believe Fatah is the LOTE? Because the mere fact that they pay lip service to moderation indicates they understand the rest of the world does not support the idea of nakedly announcing the imminent destruction of Israel and driving the Jews into the sea. And even though Fatah's actions often belie their words, that still puts them one better than Hamas, which flatly and openly advocates the final solution to the Jewish problem.

If you like dueling aphorisms, here's one: Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. In the present instance, the mere recognition of the importance of international opinion as a check on overt aggression more than makes up for the clandestine nature of Fatah's continued attacks -- especially since everyone knows what they're really doing; they're not fooling anyone.

Another analogy: A man who commits murder by stealth at least acknowledges that what he is doing is evil by the rule of society, and he acknowledges that those rules are important enough for him to hide his activies.

But a man who simply walks up and brazenly murders his enemy without the least concern for society's reaction thereby tells us that he believes he is beyond good and evil as enunciated by society. He tells us that he doesn't give a fig what anybody thinks; he's just going to do whatever the hell he wants. That man is both more evil and more dangerous in my opinion, because he recognizes no behavioral limit whatsoever. Think of bin Laden boasting to the world about 9/11.

And our experience with Iraqi terrorist supporters indicates that when people recognize that something they are doing is shameful enough that they must hide it... then there is always the possibility that at some point, when concealment becomes impossible, they will stop doing it altogether.

Of course, there are several factors that make it much less likely that Fatah will ever reform the way the parties in Iraq have done (thus much less likely that the Bush "Roadmap to Peace" will actually work):

1. First and foremost, we're talking about Palestinians. Palestinian culture is uniquely violent, irrational, and fanatical; no other culture even comes close in terms of the perpetual war of all against all. (Some other countries have brief spasms of staggering chaos; but the Palestinian Authority's entire existence is one long, violent spasm.)
2. The Iraqis required a seminal event to wise up to their self-inflicted terrorist wounds: The invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. There has been no such seminal event in Arafatistan.
3. The current terrorism in Iraq is now widely see among Iraqis as being the result of two outside forces: Iran and al-Qaeda. Thus, opposition to terrorism joins synergetically with nationalism. Palestinian terrorism, though financed by various outside sources, is quite locally driven by groups such as Hamas, al-Aqsa, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and so forth.
4. Iraq has existed as an independent and sovereign state since the early 1930s; they have experience with running a country: first a monarchy, then a republic, then a one-party dictatorship, and now a parliamentary republic again. By contrast, the Palestinians have never had to face the reality of running a country; like Blanche Dubois, they have always depended upon the kindness (or protection money) of strangers. Thus, like teenagers who have never had to work for a living, they make absurdist demands and enunciate grandiose schemes that they will implement as soon as they think they have the power.

These are all serious problems... but except for the first, each is surmountable and could change, and change rapidly, under the right circumstances:

2. A "seminal event" could occur if a new Israeli government actually fights back seriously against Hamas and al-Aqsa, inflicting such a devastating defeat on them that their worldview is shattered. While picking up the broken pieces, they may decide to leave some lying on the floor, including governance by terrorism.
3. Iran could begin to "cash in" its investment in the Palestinian terrorist groups by trying too overtly to seize control of Gaza and the West Bank. This could cause a huge reaction by more nationalistic Palestinians.

4. Countries giving aid to the Palestinian government(s) could follow the American lead and make that aid conditional upon behavioral change. While one can argue (as I do) that we don't go far enough along those lines, we certainly go farther than does, e.g., Saudi Arabia or even the EU; if countries start witholding funds from the PA, and if the latter turns to Iran or Syria for the missing funds, this could accelerate (3) above.

   It's also unlikely that the Iranian pockets are infinitely deep; they have their own economic and political troubles. Eventually, the squeeze will force the PA either to start accepting their own responsibilities for running a sovereign nation... or they will collapse. Either would be an improvement over today.

Not much one can do about (1), but it's not clear whether this quality is implicate in Palestinian culture (in the David Bohm-ian sense of "enfolded") or grew from political necessity, given the circumstances.

In any event, Fatah seems much further along the "nation-building" curve than Hamas; and it makes a lot of sense to support the former at the expense of the latter. Too, even if it doesn't work, supporting one party and not the other in a dispute will inevitably fuel the civil war between the two of them, weakening both. Even though this may be a serendipitous side effect, rather than one of the prime reasons for the policy, I would still find it hard to believe that nobody on the Bush team has thought of it.

The alternative would be to label all Palestinian parties as terrorists and refuse to differentiate between them, thus ensuring their continued existence in perpetuity... or until the Millennium comes, and they are all somehow magically "wiped out" or ethnically cleansed from the region (by whom?). As I find that possibility even more remote than the chance that Fatah will moderate its behavior to more or less match it's public (non-Arabic) discourse, I think the Bush approach can be a useful, if rather minor, adjunct of a rational American foreign policy.

(Yes, Virginia: Sometimes lying is a better foreign policy than telling the strict truth at all times. That's why we have diplomats in the first place.)

I do agree the president seems to attach all too much importance to it; and there is little evidence that he has the realistic viewpoint I enunciate above. Still, whether through clever statecraft well-hidden behind Bush's poker face, or though inadvertently stumbling on the right policy for the wrong reason, I emphatically believe the Bush approach will work better, over the long term, both for us and for the Israelis, than would the approach advocated by many conservatives: adamant, angry confrontation with all Palestinian parties, without exception, all the time.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 16, 2007, at the time of 6:07 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

June 12, 2007

Palestinian Civil War in Gaza; UN Declares It's Bush's Fault

I never was able to get the software working to allow readers to vote on Dhimmi of the Month, but I thought this might be a propitious time to dust off the concept (if not execution) for this incredible story.

Here is the sequence of steps:

1. Israel decides to evacuate from Gaza.
2. Israel sends troops into Gaza, not to attack Palestinians, but to herd several thousand Jewish settlers into buses and trucks and ship them back into Israel. No Jews left in Gaza (no live ones, anyway).
3. Palestinian voters decide to thank Israel by electing Hamas.
4. The European Union, the United States, and many other countries decide to boycott the Palestinian Authority, now officially run by a mob of thugs on everybody's list of terrorist groups.
5. Fatah gets angry at losing power.
6. Hamas and Fatah begin to fight.
7. Fighting escalates.
8. Fighting escalates.
9. Fighting escalates; recall this war is between rival Palestinian terrorist groups fighting each other over the "spoils" of the Gaza Strip (which seems to me like fighting a duel over a hooker, but you know).
10. Fighting escalates.
11. United Nations Middle East Envoy Alvaro de Soto writes a secret report to U.N. Secretary General Nanki-Poo; declares that George W. Bush is to blame!

I rib you not; here is the Guardian story.

You just can't make this stuff up. Evidently, it's America's fault for urging civilized nations to boycott Hamas, which every national and international body agrees is a gang of terrorists. If only we had embraced Hamas, worked with them to exterminate the Jews, and not riled them up, then surely all this wouldn't be happening now. Oh, a few Juden might be killed here and there, Israel might be obliterated... but we wouldn't have the dreadful spectacle of Arabs killing Arabs.

So... it's Bush's fault. Remember that for next time.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 12, 2007, at the time of 11:40 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

January 2, 2007

The First Victim of the "Big Lie"

Paul at Power Line has an interesting post up about the persistence of blindness by the drive-by media to the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel Jr. and his chargé d'affaires Curtis Moore back in 1973... a hit that appears to me to have been personally ordered by Yasser Arafat. (Paul links to a post last June by Scott Johnson, in which he goes into more detail about crime and evidence.) Please read these first before continuing...

All right, this is the line Paul wrote that caught my eye:

[W]hy has our MSM which prides itself on exposing government cover-ups ignored almost totally the cable...?

The answer... is that Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world and is, therefore, information that it would prefer the public not know.

I think Paul may be overestimating the role played by mendacity and underestimating the will to deny on the part of the elite media -- and indeed all of humanity: I don't think journalists consciously keep this information from the public; I believe they're unconsciously keeping it from themselves.

I can't believe my eyes

In my early youth, I used to dabble in magic (prestidigitation, not sorcery; sorcery was in my middle youth). I was never very good -- no patience -- but I was a magic junkie who watched every live and broadcast magic show I could find... scores of them by the time I was fifteen, perhaps a hundred individual acts or more. After a while, I caught onto the big secret of magic: the "gimmick," the actual working of the trick, typically takes place in plain view.

So why doesn't the audience see it? Because the magician tells them not to. He doesn't come out and say, "see here now, close your eyes for this bit." Instead, he misdirects their attention to this side, when the gimmick is taking place on that side.

The great magicians (Herrmann, Thurston, Kellar) were sheer artists at misdirection. It was said of Harry Kellar that when he was performing, a brass band could march across the stage behind him, followed by a half-dozen elephants, and the audience would later swear he was alone.

This demonstrates what I call "the will to disbelieve." Your eyes may see, but your brain does all the observing... or in this case, the unobserving.

Everyone who goes to a magic show wants to be fooled. Haven't you noticed that most people, if you tell them how a trick is really done, are not satisfied but instead rather disappointed? That's because, even though they asked, they really didn't want to know.

The hard-headed skeptics are especially desperate to be fooled; they're always the easiest to misdirect. (The hardest to fool are children: they haven't yet learned the knack of willful blindness. By nature, they tend to look in exactly the right place, which is exactly the wrong place for a magician!)

It may twist and turn, but this post has not careered out of control; I'm actually going somewhere with it.

Magic is a universal indicator. It's a synecdoche, which can mean many things: in this case, a small part that stands in for the whole. We all want to be fooled; the world is awash in pandemic credulity.

Song of myself

Every one of us has a "story," the story of himself. This narrative takes all the myriad observations, expectations, and subtle indications our brains receive and arranges them into a more or less coherent plot. In reality, we can say only that A precedes B. It takes a narrative to say that A causes B.

The narrative includes both "facts" and inferences. I use quotation marks around "facts" because, pace John Adams, facts are actually squirmy, gelatinous things that we only experience second-hand, by observing the effect of the fact upon us -- for example, we don't see a Ford Mustang; we observe the light reflected from the Mustang, and our brain draws the inference that a Mustang exists at that spot. But the inferences are the interesting things, because they control or modulate everything we sense... everything we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is really an inference we have drawn from a stimulus to some part of our brains.

In mathematics -- therefore in everything else -- inferences imply rules of inference: we must have internal rules that tell us when we can take A and B and conclude C. For example, you see a Mustang speed past you and tear around a corner. Seconds later, you hear a terrible crash. Do you draw the conclusion that the Mustang you just saw has wrecked?

Probably; I would. My rules of inference tell me that it's unlikely that a completely unrelated car just happened to have an accident at that second. But of course, I'll be wrong sometimes -- such coincidences do, in fact, happen.

The best is enemy of the workable; as Mason said to Dixon, you gotta draw the line somewhere. (This whole subject is part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, by the way: "how we know what we know.") Everybody's rules of inference are probability based: it's pretty likely that the speeding Mustang wrecked and was responsible for the accident... so that's what we tell the cops.

Believing is seeing

But the weird part of the internal narrative, the story of ourselves, is the way that the brain constantly edits the file of sensory inputs to match the eventual conclusion drawn: in our little thought experiment of the speeding Mustang, the most likely outcome is that, when the actual civil trial occurs and you're called as a witness (or even earlier, when you talk to the cops), you will say that you saw the speeding Mustang crash into the Volvo!

And you know what? You won't be lying... you will actually remember it that way. As Isaac Asimov put it in one or another of his autobiographies, we remember things the way they should have happened, not necessarily the way they actually did... which, in the absolute sense, is unknowable anyway.

Out of mind, out of sight

Which brings us back, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to the Human Consciousness Editor.

Let me quote a man I've never read (I can't get past page 5 of anything Friedrich Nietzsche wrote!): "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Actually, I have no idea if he actually said it. Or wrote it. But it's always arrtibuted to him. And anyway, the idea is the important thing, no matter who said it... what are you, a wisenheimer?)

Memory is not like a movie film; it's more like a writable DVD that is constantly being edited by the brain, to bring memory into congruence with the story of ourselves. This applies to everybody -- not just liberals. Quite literally, if an observation simply cannot exist within the central narrative of the brain... then the brain erases it from existence. "if out of sight, then out of mind" is a trivial observation; the deeper version is "if out of mind, then out of sight." In a vivid, real, and literal sense, you cannot see what you cannot believe.

We can't handle the truth

Which brings us back to journalism, the elite media, and Arafat's hit on Noel and Moore (actually, this more or less explains absolutely everything, if you think hard enough about it): Paul was wrong; it's simply not plausible that --

Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world and is, therefore, information that it would prefer the public not know.

The far more likely explanation is that Arafat's role in killing American diplomats runs counter to the MSM's narrative about our world, and therefore the journalists' brains erase such "knowledge" from their memory banks. It's not that they know and they're concealing it from the rest of us; it's that we look at A, B, and C and conclude that Arafat ordered the hits -- while the MSM look at A, B, and C and conclude that Arafat didn't know a thing about it and was distressed when he found out.

We cannot even say we're right and they're wrong; scientifically, about the best we can do is that our reading requires much less editing of verifiable sources than theirs!

They literally don't see it. When liberals say that there is a "100% chance" that Gore actually won the vote in Florida and that Bush stole the election, they're not lying... they really believe it. Just as most Americans actually believe there is an invisible man with a long, white beard who knows when they are sleeping, who knows when they're awake, who knows if they've been bad or good -- and who sends the bad ones to Hell (I'll bet you were expecting someone else).

Tom Tancredo probably looks at a Mexican family crossing our border and literally sees enemy soldiers invading our country; judging from some of the comments when I talk about immigration, I reckon quite a few of you see the same reality Tom does. I see a bunch of potential entrepeneurs and consumers, but that "reality" is as much a product of my own internal narrative as your "reality" is of yours. "We are all greater artists than we realize."

That is the real dilemma of speaking to the enemy: it's not that he hasn't seen all the facts, and as soon as we enlighten him, he'll come round to our point of view. Rather, we don't even agree on what "facts" are on the table: we see one set of facts (while another batch remain stubbornly invisible); and he sees several of our invisible fnords while being unable even to detect some of our critical facts. Neither party will likely be convinced, because each draws rational conclusions from self-cooked data.

Members of the MSM literally sees no connection between Arafat and the murders, just as liberals literally see no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda; and every "fact" that "comes to light" (every observation their brain-modulator allows them to see) simply confirms those non-connections. Conservatives stubbornly refuse to see any connection between liberty and sexual deviance; libertarians refuse even to notice any connection between duty and survival; the religious see a rigid cause-effect relationship between faith and morals, while the irreligious see absolutely no connection whatsoever, unless it's an inverse relationship.

Can't we all just get a loan?

So how can we communicate?

• The first step is to recognize that each of us lives in his own reality net, his own bubble of "fact" and inference, held together in a coherent shape by the web of narrative spun by our own brains. It's counterproductive to say "I'm right and you're wrong;" it's much more effective to demonstrate that my model typically predicts future events with great success, while yours typically fails.
• Recognize that some gaps cannot be bridged; concentrate on those that can.
• Start your voyage of discussion from islands that exist both in your disputant's reality sea and your own: find overlapping subsets of reality and try to expand outward from there; that makes it harder for him to dismiss you out of hand.
• Learn to argue from within the other person's reality net: it works much better. Tell a conservative that holding a job builds character; tell a liberal that holding a job connects one to the community.
• Learn to laugh. It's the best defense mechanism against screaming.
• Remember that you're not alone in being all alone; you're part of a vast community of people who share being all alone together.
• Finally, in a more practical vein, if you want your own reality net to prevail (as who doesn't?), then make it more interesting, joyful, and hope-filled than the reality next door: people who are bored or frightened by one reality net will simply change the channel... and yes, it is that easy. Keep their attention, and they'll keep watching!

That last is the biggest problem the Democrats have: their reality net is one of defeatism and fatalism, two very unpleasant modulators. That's why, even when the Democrats win, they lose: they won the 2006 election, but nobody really thinks they can solve any of our problems. (And to be blunt, they're not even trying... they're simply campaigning for 2008.)

That's the secret weapon of Republicans, whether libertarian-Republican, conservative, neoconservative, or Giuliani-Republican: hope and pride. That is what, in the end, will reel 'em back in. Fill yourself with hope and pride and always aggressively follow your bliss -- not your decadence, your bliss. That way, even if you go down, you'll die a hero's death... and hey, that's something, isn't it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 2, 2007, at the time of 5:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 29, 2006

Rice-A-Ruiny

I Processional

I think we're beginning to see a new phenomenon among conservatives: CDS, or Condi Derangement Syndrome. Like its near namesake BDS, it's diagnosed by several recognizable symptoms:

• Reflexively gainsaying anything Condoleezza Rice says, disparaging everything she does;
• Reading every statement of hers in the worst possible light (preferably one that fulfills the descriptor "treasonous");
• Toadstool-picking statements to prove the above;
• Imputing astonishing conspiracies to her malignant influence;
• Caricaturing Ms. Rice as (a) a liberal, (b) a Socialist, or (c) feeble-minded.

Some of the kindest, most intelligent, and otherwise fairest people have fallen into the Carvillesque trap of CDS... including, sadly so, my friends over at Power Line. The latest example: in an interview, which Scott Johnson quotes and dismisses as "tripe," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the following:

[Cal] Thomas [for Jewish World Review] asks Secretary Rice what evidence she has that the denizens of such an independent state would give up the dream that actually seems to drive them -- the dream of eliminating Israel:

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you can look at any opinion poll in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent of the people will say they're perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace. And when it comes right down to it, yeah, there are plenty of extremists in the Palestinian territories who are not going to be easily dealt with. They have to be dealt with -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories -- they're terrorists and they have to be dealt with as terrorists.

But the great majority of Palestinian people -- this is -- I've been with these people. The great majority of people, they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don't believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that's what people are going to do.

QUESTION: Do you think this or do you know this?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think I know it.

QUESTION: You think you know it?

SECRETARY RICE: I think I know it.

II Minuet

(Look, I may be hysterically overstating things; but it is Sunday morning, after all... the very time for histrionics and overstatement.)

Scott Johnson derides Dr. Rice's answers. But why? What exactly is wrong with what she said? One can (if one chooses) interpret them as ludicrously suggesting that all it takes is another peace-process agreement, and all will be well. But that's not the only, or even the most plausible, way to take her position -- especially considering later parts of the same interview that Scott did not quote.

Let's turn it around. Suppose Scott is right, and Rice's answers to Cal Thomas are completely, ludicrously wrong. What, then, must we conclude?

• That Palestinians are unique among all the people of the world in their irrationality;
• That while others, from Rwanda-Burundi to the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, eventually come to their senses, act rationally for their own enlightened interest, and stop killing one another -- Palestinians are incapable of doing so;
• That their incapacity cannot be cured; nothing can be done; hence, it must be a genetic mental deficiency that prevents them from thinking rationally, even if reality were to be clearly separated from the decades of propaganda and privation that have warped and twisted their thinking.

This is, to say the least, a rather odd way of looking at the problem. The last point -- that it's genetic -- is implicit in the idea that nothing can be done to awaken the Palestinians to the reality of their situation... so why bother trying? This belief is the inversion of Condoleezza Rice's faith:

[T]hat kind of ideology of hatred and hopelessness does not have a chance against an ideology of hope and a better future. We just have to realize that because of the way that the politics of the Middle East has developed for the last 60 years, that ideology of hope and a better future has not been there.<