Does This Look Familiar?

This picture pretty much says everything one needs to know about the Palestinian "freedom fighters".

Now They Check?

It seems that Iran has finally acceded to requests by the toothless IAEA to inspect the Parchin military complex. This is the complex that had been identified by an Iranian resistance group as another area where Iran is developing its nuclear weapons. Of course, the only reason that the IAEA is now being allowed in is that the Iranians have already moved and hidden all the proscribed equipment. This is the same game that Iraq had played with weapons inspectors for years. Unfortunately, we don;t have that much time to play these games with Iran.

A Peace Plan

Amir Taheri has some good advice for President Bush (and others) regarding attempts at peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians: don't.

THE first step toward any peacemaking (which is bound to be a very long-term process) is to deflate the issue to its real dimensions.

Any would-be mediator must begin by asserting that this is a Palestinian and Israeli problem that can only have a Palestinian and Israeli solution. The idea that Bush or anyone else can devise and impose a solution is both fanciful and dangerous.

Every peace agreement between Israel and Arabs has come without outside help. Going back to the Camp David Accords with Egypt, the two sides first met in secret, and only after coming to an agreement did they take the agreement to the US which then acted as the facilitator. All "peace processes" that have gone through other countries have all ended in failure. Until the Palestinians make a strategic decision to accept Israel and forego all violence, there will not be peace. Abbas is demonstrating by his pandering to the terrorist groups that the Palestinians have not yet reached this point. And because of the brainwashing of the current generation by Arafat, probably will not reach his point for at least another generation.

Something Going On?

Maybe theBush Administration does actually have plans to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

Iran has reported flights by U.S. military aircraft over nuclear facilities near the borders with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iran's state-controlled media said the overflights by U.S. aircraft were spotted near a range of nuclear facilities, including the Bushehr nuclear reactor constructed by Russia.

More on Stinginess

As rescue and recovery efforts continue in Indonesia and the other countries affected by the tsunami, the UN has tried to assert its relevance. And it seems the harder it tries, the more it is obvious that they are worthless. While the US, Australia, New Zealand, and others send supplies, the UN, in the words of Diplomad

The UN continues to send its best product, bureaucrats.

All this, of course, after charging the US and other Western countries of stinginess in their help. But while the UN talks and sends bureaucrats to further asses the situation, others are actually doing something about it. Mark Steyn describes the situation.

By the weekend, the Australians had managed not just to restore the water supply in Aceh, but to improve it. Even before the tsunami, most residents of the city boiled their water. But 10 army engineers from Darwin have managed to crack open the main lines and hook them up to a mobile filtration unit. This is nothing to do with Egeland and his office or how big a cheque the Norwegians sent.

Indeed, the effectiveness of these efforts seems to be what Miss Short finds so objectionable. Washington's announcement that it would be co-ordinating its disaster relief with Australia, India and Japan smacked too much of another "coalition of the willing". "I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN," she told the BBC. "Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority."

I didn't catch the interview, but I'm assuming that the Oil-for-Fraud programme and the Child-Sex-for-Food programme notwithstanding, Miss Short managed to utter that last sentence with a straight face. But, if you're a homeless Sri Lankan, what matters is not who has the moral authority, but who has the water tankers and medical helicopters. President Bush didn't even bother mentioning the UN in his statement. Kofi Annan, by contrast, has decided that the Aussie-American "coalition of the willing" is, in fact, a UN operation. "The core group will support the UN effort," he said. "That group will be in support of the efforts that the UN is leading."

True Colors

For the second day in a row, future Palestinian leader Abbas has allowed his true feelings to slip out: Palestinian Leader Assails 'Zionist Enemy'. It is becoming more and more clear with every day that Abbas is not a "moderate", as the press has taken to describing him. He is simply a less colorful version of Arafat. He continues to allow terrorists free rein, continues to make promises to the Palestinian people that he knows he can not keep, and continues to talk about reconciliation with Israel if any Westerners are within earshot. He is the last chance for the Palestinians to achieve any kind of progress towards statehood, their alleged desire. Yet all his actions so far show that he is not the person to bring them anything more than Arafat brought them. The Palestinians seem poised to once again confirm Abba Eban's line about never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

and there was much rejoicing?

Drudge is posting a report of the arrest of Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi. The source is not overly reliable so I won’t get too excited just yet. Nonetheless, if it turns out to be true, this would be a wonderful development in the lead up to the Iraqi elections.

The Left's Betrayal

Naseer Flayih Hasan, an Iraqi poet, has seen the "peace activists" of the Left in Iraq and describes how they have betrayed the US, Iraq, and their own "progressive" principles.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the general attitude of peace activists I met was tension and anger. They were impossible to reason with. This was because, on one hand, the sometimes considerable risks they took to oppose the war made them unable to accept the fact that their cause was not as noble as they believed. Then, too, their dogmatic anti-American attitudes naturally drew them to guides, translators, drivers and Iraqi acquaintances who were themselves supporters of the regime. These Iraqis, in turn, affected the peace activists until they came to share almost the same judgments and opinions as the terrorists and defenders of Saddam.

This was very disappointing for someone like me, who thought for decades that the Left was generally the progressive power in the world. You can imagine how aghast I was when my French reporter friend told me that the Communist Party in his country actually considers the “insurgents” to be the equivalent of the French Gaullists!

Dealing With the French

John Miller, author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, argues that we shouldn't get angry at France. After all, they are acting the way they have always acted. The proper way to deal with them is to simply ignore them.

Moreover, making an example of the French is precisely the wrong approach because it elevates France in the eyes of the world's anti-Americans, who will always be with us. The one thing France and the neo-Gaullists can't possibly abide is being ignored. Perhaps that's punishment enough.

Palestinian Elections

With less than a week left until the "elections" for a new Palestinian leader, it is interesting to take a look at what is going on. At this point it is fairly clear that these are not the type of elections envisaged by the people who want true reform. Abu Mazen was, in effect, chosen to be the successor to Arafat. Having persuaded his main rival Marwan Barghouti not to run, most likely with promises to not crack down on the armed gangs or other such enticements, he is realistically unopposed. This is not at all dissimilar from the "election" of 1996 which confirmed Arafat as the President of the PA. Undoubtedly, Jimmy Carter and his election monitors will declare that the election was run fairly and legitimately and the world will have to accept this "election" as the Palestinians abiding by the demand for political reform.

In the meantime, Abu Mazen is clearly stating that he will protect the Palestinian gunmen, i.e. terrorists, and will not crack down on Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of the other terror groups. It is possible that this merely an election ploy; that it would not be possible for Abu Mazen to win without kowtowing to the terrorist elements (though Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad head believes that Abu Mazen is telling the truth in this). But what then does this say about the Palestinians? Isn't this the clearest indication that they do not want and are not ready for peace?

Despite all the optimism of a new opportunity presented by the death of Arafat, one is left to wonder what has really been achieved. It seems that we are once again going back to the formula of the Oslo years - the Palestinians pretending to abide by the agreements they make, with the world accepting these pretenses and pressuring Israel to make real and irreversible concessions. Hopefully the Bush Administration will see through this and not allow it to happen again.

UPDATE: And now, Abbas is promising that all the "refugees" will return to their "original homes" in Israel. If Halevy is right, and this is what Abbas really believes, as opposed to just saying this for the election, what is the point of negotiating with him?

Happy New Year!!

A very happy and healthy New Year to all!

Year ending top 5 list

So yeah... maybe just an ill-disguised effort to induce a little reader participation but here goes. It is the end of the year and there have been plenty of great interviews, debates and exchanges. Without really thinking about it too much, here are my top 5.

#5. Teresa Heinz Kerry to Colin McNickle...

"You said something I didnt say. Now Shove it!"

#4. Sean Hannity to Ted Rall...

"You are thoughtless, mean and hateful."

#3. Joe Nameth's Drunken exchange with Suzy Kolber...

"I want to kiss you."

#2. O'Reilly vs. Paul Krugman on Russert...

O’Reilly: You are in with the most vile form of defamation in this country. You are pandering to it. And I resent it, sir.

Krugman: We resent you, too.

O’Reilly: Yeah, I know you do. And you know what you’ll do about the
resentment? You’ll lie about me and attack me personally. That’s what you’ll do.

#1. Pat Buchanan on Da Ali G show... Just too good to even quote from. If you have never seen it, you missed out. At one point he has Buchanan saying BLT instead of WMD. If you have Comcast on demand it is episode #8 or 9. A must see... trust me.

Ok... so this is the part where you chime in with your list.

Back to Old Ideas

For some reason - maybe its the end of the year and newspapers can't get anything better to publish on their op-ed pages - there are two pieces today about what the US must do regarding the "peace process". And given the writers, we once again get the old discredited ideas that brought us the Oslo War.

David Matz, the director of Graduate Program in Dispute Resolution at University of Massachusetts, brings up the Geneva Accords, and alleges that "Geneva Accords have the support of substantial majorities of Israelis and Palestinians". Its not clear where he gets this data, but the fact is that he is simply wrong in this statement. The only Israelis and Palestinians who support the Geneva Accords are the ones who came up with it. He then goes on to suggest a coalition to "bring the pressure of world opinion to bear on the parties". Of course, what this really means is to pressure Israel to make concessions while the Palestinians continue to do nothing.

The other article is by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher (none of this would be happening if Warren Christopher were alive). His brilliant, groundbreaking idea is more "active hands-on involvement of the United States", and "[t]he second, preferable, option would be the appointment by the president of a high-ranking United States emissary to the Middle East". OF course, the only thing that the past five high-level emissaries have produced are worthless plans and more casualties from suicide bombings.

What neither of these writers mentions, and what is the only hope for peace, is the wholesale remaking of Palestinian society into a pluralistic, democratic one from one based on a cult of death. Until this happens there is no chance for peace, with or without Arafat. To create a Palestinian state now, without achieving any democratization, would be a disaster for everyone. It would almost surely lead to a larger possibly regional war.

Liberal Hate Speech

At the end of every year Jeff Jacoby compiles a list of liberal hate speech over the past year. This being an election year there was more material than usual.

So began another year in which liberals engaged in, and mostly got away with, grotesque slanders and slurs about conservatives -- the kind of poisonous rhetoric that should be beyond the pale in a decent society. Once again, too many on the left -- not crackpots from the fringe, but mainstream players and pundits -- chose to demonize conservatives as monsters rather than debate their ideas on the merits.

As in years past, Republicans were almost routinely associated with Nazi Germany. Former Vice President Al Gore referred to GOP activists as "brown shirts." Newsday columnist Hugh Pearson likened the Republican National Convention to the "Nazi rallies held in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler." Linda Ronstadt said that the Republican victory on Election Day meant "we've got a new bunch of Hitlers." Chuck Turner, a Boston city councilor, smeared National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as "a tool of white leaders," like "a Jewish person working for Hitler."

Undoubtedly there have also been outrageous statements from the Right, and Jacoby acknowledges it. But the point is that inevitably the Left is never taken to task for its asinine and malicious statements.

Dinosaurs

While the world has changed over the last 40 years, only one side of the political spectrum has adjusted to it. As Victor Hanson shows, the Left continues to plod along with their '60s agenda and rhetoric, not realizing that they are being left behind.

What has happened? Sometime around the 1980s, the Right saw the demise of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to evolve beyond realpolitik to promote not just anti-Communism but grassroots democracy, coupled with free-market globalism from Eastern Europe to Latin America and Asia. In contrast, the hard Left stayed in its knee-jerk suspicion of the West and continued to give a pass to authoritarians from Cuba to Iran who professed socialism, thinking that the world was a static zero-sum game in which somebody's gain spelled another's loss — oblivious that real wealth could be created by a change of mentality and technology and not mere exploitation.

Gun Control

John Lott has been arguing for quite a while that gun control does not work. In an number of books and articles, he has gone through the crime data compiled by the FBI and found that more guns equals less crime, the exact opposite of what gun control advocates have long contended. Now the National Academy of Sciences has issued a report on gun control.

The big news is that the academy's panel couldn't identify any benefits of decades-long effort to reduce crime and injury by restricting gun ownership. The only conclusion it could draw was: Let's study the question some more (presumably, until we find the results we want).

The academy, however, should believe its own findings. Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey that covered 80 different gun-control measures and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun-control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

From the assault-weapons ban to the Brady Act to one-gun-a-month restrictions to gun locks, nothing worked.

Of course actually saying that gun control is counterproductive (see the example of England which recently banned all guns and has seen an upsurge in crime) is not politically correct. So the NAS has in effect tried to hide the results. So much for scientific rigor.

Sontag

I haven't read much of Susan Sontag's work, so its hard for me to judge her overall oeuvre. But from what I have read, it seems to me that she was a fairly standard 1960's "literary artist". Her politics were very clearly on display in her piece in the New Yorker after the attacks of 9/11.

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing America bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

Roger Kimball pens an obituary in the New Criterion blog Armavirumque, looking at her work.

There can be no doubt that Susan Sontag, the doyenne of (to use Tom Wolfe's apposite coinage) radical chic, commanded rare celebrity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, her influence in those decades and beyond was great. The question is, was it a beneficent or a baneful influence? Sontag has been celebrated as a towering intellectual. In fact, though, what she offered were not so much arguments or insights as the simulacra of arguments and the mood or emotion of insights.

Most offensive, although perfectly in-line with leftist artistic opinions, were her statements regarding Cuba and Vietnam.

[A]fter ten years, she writes, "the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization"; even better perhaps, is this passing remark delivered in parentheses: "No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published."
...
Sontag concocted a similar fairy tale when she went to Vietnam in 1968 courtesy of the North Vietnamese government. Her long essay "Trip to Hanoi" (1968) is another classic in the literature of political mendacity. Connoisseurs of the genre will especially savor Sontag's observation that the real problem for the North Vietnamese is that they "aren't good enough haters." Their fondness for Americans, she explains, keeps getting in the way of the war effort.

Nudnikette adds:
To be fair, Kimball goes a little too far. Sontag did draw heavily on French ideas, but so did the entire intellectual establishment of the past 50 years. She did mold herself in that 'public intellectual' fashion of the French, most notably Barthes and Derrida (whom Kimball eulogized just as devastatingly and again more than somewhat unfairly). But she wasn't a trivial presence. Although I agree that her literary style was poor, her observations were often acute. Sontag's essays on photography - the first book not the 2nd - are illuminating. It is her politics that are truly the issue, contemptible and morally skewed. She wasn't the first auteur to side with odious ideologies - it is a sin too popular by far - and she will not be the last. So maybe there is a point in divorcing her better production from her politics, to save a few insightful thoughts?

Stingy

Yesterday Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian aid chief, was quoted as calling Western nations "stingy" in their response to the devastation caused by the tsunamis. So to whom was he referring? The US has at this point pledged $35 million. A FoxNews graphic showed the contributions of a few other nations; Japan pledged $30 million, Australia $7.6 million, a few other European nations pledged in the $2 to $5 million range. France, that beacon of morality and humanitarianism, pledged $135,000. Yes, that is correct - $135 thousand. I guess the people of South Asia simply haven't killed enough Jews for the French to care about them. For comparison, as of 8:25 pm those dullwitted, warmongering, unilateral Americans - the people, not the government - have donated close to $500,000 to the Red Cross just through Amazon.

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Added thoughts from “Elder of Zion #6”

Now that Sri Lanka has publicly rejected assistance from the evil Israeli military, I figure the French money should start to roll in.

The Nobel Missiles

I wonder how many Nobel Peace Prize recipients have a missile named after them?

GAZA CITY - The ruling Fatah movement has displayed what it calls its latest and greatest surface-to-surface missile.

The missile has been named "Yasser Arafat," after the late leader of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and the 1994 co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Global Warming and Evolution

After a bit of an absence, Mark Steyn is back. This article, from a couple of weeks ago, examines Europe's concern with the possible extinction of an Antarctic krill species, yet complete unconcern about their own imminent demise.

What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history.

Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli . . . If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with. But try and rouse the progressive mind to a "Save the Italians" campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he too is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed.