PDavidHornik

Islamophobia strikes deep, into your life... (I already used this heading)

Robert Spencer and David Horowitz seek to inoculate you against this terrible scourge. Repeat after me: there's nothing to be afraid of! It's all in your mind!

Brass tacks from Dore Gold

Back from vacation, catching up on some reading...ah, here's one I like. My tastes have tended away from lofty thoughts and more toward plain facts, which are perhaps the most eloquent integers out there. Here Dore Gold considers the idea that, in some sort of ostensible peace deal, Israel should entrust the strategically vital Jordan Valley to foreign forces--as proposed by many, including previous prime minister Ehud Olmert.

To test that notion, Gold looks at UNIFIL's record in Lebanon since 2006. The ballyhooed UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which some viewed as a positive outcome of Israel's military campaign against Hizballah in Lebanon that summer, stipulated the largely European-manned UNIFIL keeping the territory south of the Litani River clean of Hizballah weaponry. The reality that has developed is somewhat different. No one who objectively looks at this reality could rationally recommend that Israel follow the same script in the Jordan Valley. Facts speak loudest.

This blog taking a vacation

For a week or so. Farewell till I return, dear readers. To those of you who are Jewish--Shana tova!

Some truth from Boogie Yaalon

I'd like to think he represents the PM and the DM but I'm afraid it's not that simple. The highly realistic former chief of staff and current deputy prime minister says

Israel will stop talking about land with the PA. "We did not receive 'territories for peace' but 'territories for rockets,'" he said. "We will not enter a discussion on territory because this is the subject where we give and we get nothing in return."

A little hard to square that with Netanyahu's--let alone Barak's, and of course so many others'--repeated ritual declarations of yearning to enter talks with the Pals. There is indeed nothing to talk with them about, an anti-Semitic, jihadist terror cult who are very lucky to have the degree of autonomy they have. Boogie for next PM! Would be interesting to see if he too--like all the others before him--starts talking jive. The jive might be diplomatically inevitable, but it's still jive.

Palestinians kick off statehood campaign with terror mom

If Israel doesn't make a big thing of this, we have only ourselves to blame. I know, Bibi's shtick is that he's willing to sit with Abbas anywhere anytime and talk about giving him "a state living in peace alongside Israel." Time to drop the pretense and start focusing on reality? I'd say now's the time. Details of the terror mom--selected by the Palestinian Authority to deliver the request for statehood to the UN secretary-general--and her seven sons are in the Palestinian Media Watch report linked-to above.

Kenneth Levin: The New York Times again soft on genocide toward Jews

Back in the 1940s, as the Times itself admitted more than half a century later, it didn't see anti-Jewish genocide as a "story." But not much has changed; the Times systematically omits Palestinian genocidal incitement, indoctrination, and behavior toward Jews and so keeps reiterating its editorial line that Israel is to blame for the "conflict"--an editorial line that now dominates the paper's "reporting," too. Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist-historian and particularly astute, discusses.

Eydar: Myth, not rationality, is in the driver's seat

Dror Eydar has profound reflections on how the "Palestinian" aggression against Israel is founded on national and religious myth, not rational aims as construed by liberals, and why Israel, in the upcoming UN contretemps, should emphasize "the rights of the Jewish people" in response.

The execrable Tzipi Livni

David M. Weinberg has a fine piece on the execrable Tzipi Livni, who, even at a time when Israel is under multipronged threats and attacks, cannot bring herself to behave as a responsible, patriotic opposition leader. Everything that goes wrong is Bibi's fault! Livni thus codifies her transformation into a card-carrying leftist: it's a great, harmonious world, on the brink of peace, but conservative Israeli (and U.S.) politicians wreck it.

As Weinberg sums up:

Imagine if Menachem Begin had blamed Levi Eshkol for the Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran, which led to the Six Day War. Begin, instead, offered to join a national unity government. With the Americans, Europeans, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians and Iranians closing in on Israel from all sides, you would think that Livni might consider doing the same. But no, she knows better. Netanyahu is at fault.

The Israeli electorate must dump Livni decisively whenever the next elections occur. Even some of her fellow Kadima MKs are sick of her and demanding that she quit.

Sickies at Columbia thrilled to dine with A-jad

And Mona Charen tries to understand why. She notes that the Iranian despot

represents everything that campus liberals profess to hate. In order of importance, those things would be: (1) persecuting homosexuals; (2) cruel and abusive treatment of women; (3) brutal treatment of minorities; (4) shooting opponents of the regime in the streets; (5) restricting free speech; (6) building nuclear weapons; and (7) sponsoring terror worldwide. Tehran provides material and moral support for Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, which has mowed down protesters by the thousands in the past few months. The Iranian regime is also guilty of fetid anti-Semitism, and has the blood of many American soldiers who served in Iraq on its hands — though it isn’t clear that the latter two offenses rate very highly with Columbia students.

Charen goes on:

Something is inoculating Ahmadinejad from the total contempt members of the university community would ordinarily feel toward someone with his views and his behavior.... My suspicion is that the harshly adversarial pose of the university toward American society and culture leads to a misplaced benefit of the doubt toward enemies of this country. It is Ahmadinejad’s very hatred of the U.S. that makes him intriguing to Columbia.

By George, I think she's got it.

I reacted to A-jad's earlier Columbia stint here in an article called "Notes on an Outrage."

 

Why "tax the rich" is the same demagoguery as always

Having lived first in the U.S. and now in Israel, I can attest that "tax the rich" is a cry heard in both countries, though probably more obsessively in the U.S. Thomas Sowell gives the most clear, concise explanation I've ever read as to why it was and will remain demagoguery. I also think it's immoral--if someone has honestly, legally, and legitimately made very large sums of money (that one can lie awake at night in envy over if one wishes), the government doesn't have a right to confiscate half or one-third of it.