In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
More on the Rabbi Sacks fracas. If I were him, I'd be livid, and I'm not sure who I'd be angrier at: the left-wing press for twisting my words or the right-wing press for jumping to conclusions and engaging in outrageous attacks. This whole story is making me angrier and angrier the more I think about it.
posted by Noah at 8:17 AM

 
It's Thursday, which means I'm supposed to talk about the parshah of the week. But I just got back from a friend's son's bris (circumcision), and I haven't had a chance this week to do much studying. So I'm going to keep it short.

This week's parshah is a double: Nitzavim (parshiot are named for the first substantial word of the parshah; this week's first line is "Today all of you are standing before the Lord your G-d" - Nitzavim means "standing"), and Vayelech (which means, "and he went"). Nitzavim is Moses' summation of the essence of G-d's moral message; Vayelech relates the passing of his authority to Joshua, the establishment of the Masoret, the tradition, that stretches from Moses through Joshua down to the present day. If President George Bush has a favorite parshah, it's probably Nitzavim. Here are the key lines; you'll quickly see why:

For this commandment that I command you this day, it is not hidden from you, and it is not far away. It is not in the heavens that one might say, "who can ascend for us to the heavens and take it for us, that we may hear it, and do it." And it is not across the sea that one might say, "who can cross the sea for us and take it for us, that we may hear it, and do it." For this thing is very close to you, in your mouths and in your hearts, that you may do it. See, I have placed before you this day life and good, death and evil. . . I call heaven and earth to witness this day against you, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse - choose therefore life, that you may live, you and your descendants. [D'varim 30:11-15, 19]

This is the core of Judaism, it seems to me. There is good and there is evil. Good is life, and blessing; evil is a curse, and death. We have a choice between them. The choice is not always easy, but it is usually simple. And the choice we should make is clear.

I'm not going to tie little insights about these parshiot together in a pretty bundle (perhaps I think how to do it tomorrow, in which case I'll edit this). For now, I'm going to point to two midrashim that are meaningful to me:

(1) Why does Nitzavim begin with that first line - why does it begin with Moses telling the people that they are standing before G-d today? I mean, to begin with, the people are not in any particular sense standing before G-d on that day; they are no longer at Sinai, but now stand at the entrance to the Land of Israel. An Aggadic explanation cited by Rashi is: after the prior chapter's horrible curses, the people wondered, who could withstand these horrors? So Moses begins this discourse saying: you who rebelled so frequently in the desert and provoked G-d to anger, see, you are standing today before the Lord your G-d. Rashi goes on further to explain that the "day" referred to is not this particular day but the "day" that encompasses eternity - i.e. not only the daylight, but the 24-hour day that includes the night (the periods of suffering); in both periods, into eternity, you stand before the Lord your G-d.

(2) Before Moses hands authority to Joshua, he tells the people that he is going to his death, and not to enter the Land with them. And he takes Joshua with him into the tent where he received revelations from G-d during the time in the desert, and the pillar of cloud descends as usual. And there is a Midrash describing Moses' behavior when Joshua assumes authority that I have always found touching. In the Midrash, Moses is quite reluctant to die, and asks G-d to be able to continue, only subordinate to Joshua, the new leader. And G-d relents. So Joshua sits down to teach Torah, and Moses sits at his right hand and participates in the discussion. And then Joshua enters the tent to receive the divine revelation, and when he emerges Moses asks him what G-d told him. And Joshua replies: all through the desert, did I ever ask you what G-d told you in the tent? Then Moses says to G-d: let me die, for I would rather die than commit such a grievous sin as to be envious of Joshua's position.

It's a beautiful two parshiot; read 'em.
posted by Noah at 10:08 PM

 
Well here's come encouraging analysis about the prospects of an American invasion of Iraq. I'm encouraged.
posted by Noah at 3:36 PM

 
Well the Jerusalem Post seems to have a different view of Rabbi Sacks' comments. I maintain my view: that he did not say that Israel's policies are immoral or that Israel is doing anything other than defending itself, only that in the long-term a continuous state of warfare - particularly the sort of warfare currently ongoing - is morally corrupting. I don't see a problem with that statement. I think Rabbi Sacks' words have been manipulated by media like Ha'aretz in order to make him a supporter of the "peace camp" (better described as the "surrender camp") which I do not believe he is. And nothing in his statements as I have been able to obtain them has convinced me that he has become one.
posted by Noah at 12:00 PM

 
Hard to know how accurate any polls of the Palestinian population are this Survey is nonetheless revealing. Some key results:

ATTITUDES TOWARDS WAR:

* 92% support armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in the territories.
* 52% support armed attacks on Israeli civilians in pre-67 Israel and 53% would oppose any cease-fire that involved ending these attacks.
* 76% believe violent attacks will continue, regardless of whether there will be a return to negotiations by both parties.
* 71% say violence has achieved Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not.

ATTITUDES TOWARD PEACE:

* 57% say reconciliation between Israelis and Palestians will never be possible or will take generations.
* 71% believe peace is impossible or "definitely impossible."
* 63% would oppose an end to incitement against Israel and Israelis even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.
* 88% would oppose teaching children in school to recognize Israel even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.
* 62% would not invite an Israeli colleague to their homes and 64% would not visit an Israeli colleague's home even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.

How much more is there to say?

posted by Noah at 11:14 AM

 
People who think Israel can be defeated, read this interview with the current Chief of Staff. This supposed right-winger is a kibbutznik and a liberal, by his own admission. And I have rarely heard such clarity of vision from anyone - he gives Donald Rumsfeld a run for his money. Read it.
posted by Noah at 10:09 AM

 
There's been a lot of interesting stuff about Sudan from a guest-blogger on Joe Katzman's Winds of Change. I have to first of all give the guy credit for going to Sudan; Sudan is not exactly Martha's Vinyard. He comes back with extremely positive impressions of the Sudanese people, and very optimistic about the prospects for peace in that country. I'm still skeptical, but it's a perspective I hadn't heard before.

Sudan is a weird case in that the Islamic revolution there was imposed from the top down, by a military clique who took power in a coup d'etat. That's very different from Iran, where the revolution was popular, or Afghanistan, where the Islamists took power in after winning (mostly) a civil war, or Saudi Arabia, a religiously severe traditional monarchy that has been increasingly radicalized by the clergy on which it depends for legitimacy. It's probably most comparable to Pakistan in the Zia years. (Pakistan was founded on the notion of a secular Islamic identity, whatever that is, but under zia this took on an increasingly religious and Islamist cast, as the dictator threw his lot in with the Deobandi Islamists already popular in much of Pakistan and with the Saudi- and American-funded jihadists amassing to do battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan.) It is possible, therefore, that the regime itself could make a clean break with its prior ideology, and realign with the West. However, I don't see why this would necessarily bring peace to the South, which was brutalized by civil war from well before the advent of Islamist government in Sudan.
posted by Noah at 9:46 AM

 
Good interview with Daniel Pipes by John Hawkins. Instapundit points to it.
posted by Noah at 9:10 AM

 
Ha'aretz has an article about Mubarak's warnings to the U.S. not to attack Iraq. But note what's important about his statements: (1) U.S.-Egyptian relations are strong and good, and strategically critical, and will not be changed. (2) America is doing everything it can to try to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In other words, Mubarak thinks his position is strong and that the dominant ideas that have governed Egyptian thinking since Sadat kicked out the Soviets remain in place. This is in marked contrast to Saudi Arabia, where the leadership shows every sign that it views its own position as precarious, or Syria, which appears to be governed by either a moron or a lunatic or both.

I hate to constantly be saying nice things about Egypt, because it's a nasty, corrupt authoritarian country. But it is a fact that Egypt has acted forcefully to repress militant Islamist groups on its territory, which is not the case for other American allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is also a fact that Egypt's government has made no threats against Israel throughout the Oslo war. Indeed, Mubarak has repeatedly reiterated that Egypt has no intention of or interest in conflict with Israel. And while he has been forceful in criticizing the Israeli government and Sharon personally, he has been consistent in calling for both sides to stop fighting and return to the negotiating table. The Egyptian government's official posture has certainly not been pro-Israel, but is probably in par with, say, Canada's, and probably better than Sweden's or Belgium's, which is pretty good for an Arab state. And it is also a fact - too infrequently commented upon - that Egypt has one of the most legitimate regimes in the region, in that Nasser's coup was widely and deeply popular, and no one questions that the current government is Nasser's legitimate heir.

I've compared Egypt to Mexico in the past, and I still think the comparison is apt. Nasser's coup put Egypt in the vanguard of post-war anti-European and anti-colonial revolutionary states. Mexico's revolution did much the same for that country. Both states have strong national identities that stretch back for centuries; neither is a post-colonial patchwork. Both states have been one-party dictatorships since their respective revolutions, with endemic problems of corruption and state violence; both have been devastated by socialist and autarchic economic ideas; and both have become increasingly oriented towards and dependent on the United States. Mexico's economic and cultural interchange with the United States resulted in the emergence of a new, democratic, middle-class, pro-American force to rise within the country, politically embodied in the PAN, which captured power from the PRI for the first time since the Mexican Revolution in the last Presidential elections. Egypt has not undergone a similar change, both because of the failures of its leadership, the distance from America's cultural influence, and the over-emphasis on military might that is a regional malady. Nonetheless, Egypt remains the best - indeed, the only - hope for democratization in the Arab world. The United States was right to press for the release of Saa Eddin Ibrahim precisely because there is hope for that country, and the hope resides in men like him, patriots unafraid to seek freedom for their countrymen, not from foreign phantoms but from domestic tyranny.
posted by Noah at 6:34 PM

 
An interesting piece from First Things: Jihad and Just War. The point being: there is an Islamic theory of just and unjust wars, and the Islamists have obliterated it as they have obliterated all subtle distinctions in Islam. Kind of how Communists obliterated all ethical distinctions within Western philosophy, so that "human rights" could be the justification for mass-murder and a state of terror.

The core argument: there are two kinds of just war within traditional Islamic thought. The first is a war led by the legitimate leader of the House of Islam against the infidel in order to expand the House of Islam. This war has detailed ethical guidelines similar to Western notions of jus in bello or just conduct in war: no targeting of civilians, no conduct of war by irregulars, etc. In the case of Islam, this kind of war - aggressive but ethically limited war to expand Islam - is technically no longer possible because there is no legimate leader of the House of Islam since the end of the Turkish sultanate (and, arguably, since the Mongols trampled the last Kaliph of Baghdad to death; or, if you're a Shiite, since the early days of Islam when the true line of descent from Muhammad was usurped.) The point is, this kind of jihad could not be undertaken by individuals ever in the history of Islam, but only under proper authority, and even then it was subject to strict ethical controls.

The second kind of just war is a defensive war: where an enemy army has invaded and there is no time for the legitimate ruler to organize a proper defense, the entire community must undertake that defense. Since the invaders constitute an army, all of them are fair game; since an Islamic army is not available to fight them, civilians must conduct an irregular defense, acting as guerillas. This, also, has its parallels in Western history; the French resistance to the Nazis, the American Continental Army's resistance to the British, the Haganah of the pre-state yishuv in Israel, all engaged in irregular, guerilla warfare against an invading enemy army, and all are considered legitimate by most Westerners.

What the Islamists have done is take the norms of guerilla war originally designed for use against an invading army and apply them to any situation of conflict between a Muslim and non-Muslim power, whether or not that non-Muslim power is an invader, whether or not that power is an army. Moreover, it is not only every individual in the local community who has the responsibility for communal defense, but every Muslim around the world who can, on his own authority, take up arms to fight a lawless war against any infidel power he considers to be an "invader" - or any Muslim power he considers to be "in league" with the infidels. Thus, the Jewish State of Israel, the Indian control of Kashmir, the civil wars in Bosnia and Kossovo, the Egyptian peace with Israel, the presence of American soldiers in Arabia - all these are invasions of the House of Islam by infidels, which justify any Muslim using any amount of force against any individuals or groups associated with the infidels in order to repel the invaders.

Such a philosophy is clearly a logical deduction from the original idea of jihad. It is a logical deduction in the same way that Pol Pot's ideology was a logical deduction from the principles of the Enlightenment. After all, if human progress is possible, and if government is justified by the good it does for the citizenry, and if Marxism has persuasively critiqued existing society as oppressive and doomed, then it is perfectly justified to kill one out of every five members of society in order to totally remake that society along just lines. That's logic of a sort, the same logic that the Islamists use.

posted by Noah at 4:53 PM

 
Go James! You tell 'em.
posted by Noah at 3:56 PM

 
Here's an interesting news item, from the Jerusalem Post: 80,000 Palestinians emigrated from territories since beginning of year. Meanwhile, I note that, according to the Israeli Absorption Ministry that over 18,000 Jews have moved to Israel in 2002. That's way down from the average from 1992 through 2001 of about 70,000 per year, but (a) you'd expect the number to be down 'cause we're running out of Russian and Ukrainian Jews - immigration is up from Western Europe, North America and South America, and down dramatically only from the former Soviet states; (b) you'd expect the number to be down, because there's a war on; (c) 18,000 coming in is still a whole lot higher than 80,000 going out. It's also on-track to being a better year than 1989, and only down 25% from last year, which in turn was only down about 25% from the prior year - again, not bad considering there's a war on.

The demographic case for a strategic withdrawal from the territories is still compelling. There are 1 million Arabs in Gaza and 2 million in Judea and Samaria, and their birth rate is prodigious. But changes at the margins do matter. In that regard, observe the following projection for how Israel could bring in half a million additional Jews in the next decade:

FRANCE & WESTERN CONTINENTAL EUROPE: The situation in France is well-known. While the majority of French Jewry is strongly French-identified and secular, a growing minority has been radically alienated by the French government's unconcern about Arab violence against Jews in France and about growing Muslim unrest in France generally. There are about 600,000 Jews in France, 200,000 elsewhere in Western Europe (excluding Britain). About 1,000 Jews have emigrated to Israel from France this year through July, a year of particularly brutal war. Tripling that rate would mean bringing about 1% of French Jewry to Israel per year, or 60,000 over a decade; a somewhat lower rate for the rest of Western Europe would mean 75,000 Jews total for the region.

LATIN AMERICA: There are about 250,000 Jews in Argentina, 130,000 in Brazil, 40,000 in Mexico, 35,000 in Venezuela, 30,000 in Uruguay and 15,000 in Chile, for a total of about 500,000 across the region. Apart from Mexico and Chile, every country on this list is in severe economic and political crisis. Argentina specifically has also experienced a huge surge in anti-Semitism. Moreover, most of these communities have extremely high Zionist consciousness. This year through July, over 3,000 immigrants have come from Argentina, a greater than 1% immigration rate during a time of war. At 2% per year for the decade, and assuming a comparable rate of immigration from the rest of the region, that's 100,000 Jews over the decade.

FORMER SOVIET UNION AND EASTERN EUROPE: It's really hard to know how many Jews there are left in this region. The data I'm working with, from the Jewish Virtual Library are estimates from 1998, which should be accurate for most of the world but not for Israel or the former Soviet states, given the rapid rate of migration between the two. Numbers are particularly hard to come by for this region for several reasons. First, who counts as a Jew? Halachic Jews are thin on the ground at this point, but there are many people who have some Jewish ancestry, and there are strong economic incentives to recognize this ancestry and come to Israel. But will these people identify as Jews and assimilate once there? A good question. Currently, there are probably 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not halachically Jewish. However, the overwhelming majority would probably convert if this were easier to achieve. The Israeli rabbinate takes a very strict view of the criteria for conversion, which is the main reason that this population remains non-Jewish. Only a small minority actively refuses to assimilate to Judaism. Assuming I'm right about all this, and assuming - big assumption - that the Israeli rabbinate can muster the the political will to solve the conversion problem, we still have the question of how many potential immigrants there really are. In that regard, I'll note that not only the Jewish Agency, which has an incentive to find people even who aren't there, but also Chabad Lubavitch, the chassidic Orthodox group that has done the most to establish a Jewish religious presence in the former Soviet Union, continue to find people interested in reclaiming a Jewish heritage. Taking an optimistic view of the remaining Jewish population in the former Soviet Union, there are probably 1 million Jews of some sort left in the former Soviet states and in Eastern Europe, mostly in Russia and the Ukraine. (I'm discounting the totals I get from the 1998 figures by about 200,000, to account for immigration since that date and over-counting.) This year through July, 10,000 immigrants have come from the Former Soviet Union, down from 27,000 in a comparable period in 2000. Post-war, the annual total should rise, but it has to decline over time because of sheer lack of candidates, so let's assume the current war-depressed rate is a good average for the decade. That's 20,000 per year, or 200,000 over the decade.

THE ANGLOSPHERE, EX-US: There are about 300,000 Jews in Britain, 360,000 in Canada, 100,000 in South Africa and 100,000 in Australia, for a total of 860,000 Jews. Most of these Jews are happy and comfortable. Unlike in France, the Jews of Britain do not fear for their safety, in spite of Muslim restiveness in that country, for several reasons, including: the comparatively small size of the Muslim population there; the fact that Jews and Muslims do not live close to one another; the fact that British Jews have been resident in the country longer than most French Jews; and the fact that the British government has not been notably hostile to Jews and Israel in the way or to the degree that the French government has. Jews in Canada and Australia are securer still. However, in both Canada and Australia, and to a lesser extent in Britain, aliyah has been increasing from the growing traditionally religious portion of the Jewish community. Moreover, both the Canadian and Australian communities have very strong Zionist feelings. South Africa is a special case in the Anglosphere, where the likely fate of the Jewish community is tied to the prospects of the country generally. The Jewish community has largely stayed put through the recent difficulties faced by that country - indeed, South Africa has seen immigration from Israel, as Israelis are less unnerved by the security situation in South Africa and appreciate the physical freedom and the ethnic and geographic diversity of the country. All that said, if things deteriorate in South Africa there is a good chance of high immigration to Israel. Assuming 10% of the community is traditionally religious, and that 1% of that community immigrates per year, plus 0.1% of the remaining Jewish population, that's about 15,000 Jews over the next decade. Not a huge number, but every bit counts.

UNITED STATES: There are between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 Jews in the United States, depending on how strict you are about defining a Jew. Historically, aliyah from the United States has been negligible. As a proportion of the Jewish community in America compared with other countries, I think it's the lowest in the world. Nonetheless, the sheer number of Jews in America is so large that even a small move in numbers could have a significant impact on overall emigration. Through July of this year, about 1,000 Jews emigrated to Israel. At 2,000 per year, that's 20,000 over the decade. Current numbers are actually up rather than down because of the security situation in Israel, and there's a new trend in haredi world particularly of uprooting entire communities and moving them en masse to Israel. I think there are real prospects for a dramatic increase in emigration. Assuming there are about 500,000 traditionally observant Jews in the U.S.A., a 1% per year emigration rate would yield about 50,000 immigrants to Israel. Assuming a 0.02% immigration rate from the rest of the population, and taking the broadest view of who is a Jew (6,000,000 total numbers, in other words), that adds another 1,000 per year or 10,000 over the decade, for a total of 60,000 from the United States over 10 years.

WILD CARDS: Since 1989, nearly 50,000 Jews came to Israel from Ethiopia. Prior to 1989, there was no expectation of Ethiopian immigration; in fact, no one thought there were even substantial Jewish communities in Ethiopia. Could there be another such unexpected group of Jews coming home Israel's future? The Bnei Menashe of India who have formally adopted Judaism number only in the thousands, but the tribe of which they are apart - which is suffering intense persecution - numbers over a million. Who knows how many other descendents of Jews among that tribe will choose to reclaim their heritage once it is seen as a passport out of a war-torn region? In southern Africa, there are the Lemba, a tribe of about 50,000 souls with a likely genetic link to ancient Israel's priesthood. Most of the tribe is Christian, but many are reclaiming their Jewish heritage. Again, the economic pull of Israel as a developed country could have a profound impact on this group's desire to reclaim that heritage. Then there are the Pathans of Afghanistan and Pakistan, all 15 million of them. There's no established genetic link in this case, and to date no move has been made on their part to "return" to Judaism. But if the reported cultural evidence of a link is accurate, the persistence of such customs in a severe Muslim environment suggests that, in a climate of greater freedom, some number of these people will decide to claim a Jewish connection. Again, it is likely that if this occurs, the majority who so choose will seek to move to Israel. I wouldn't assign a high likelihood to any of these speculative lost-tribe situations resulting in a large return to Judaism and immigration to Israel. However, there are enough of them, and the numbers in each case are large enough, that it's not crazy to assume that over the next 10 years there will be another "wild card" immigration comparable to the Ethiopian immigration. That's another 50,000 over a decade.

Here's how it adds up:

FRANCE & WESTERN EUROPE: 75,000
LATIN AMERICA: 100,000
FORMER SOVIET & EASTERN EUROPE: 200,000
USA AND ANGLOSPHERE: 75,000
WILD CARD: 50,000
TOTAL: 500,000

Assuming no natural increase in the Jewish population, and assuming that the Arab population of Israel and the territories grows at its current rate, and with no net outmigration by the Arab population, this leaves the Jewish and Arab populations roughly at parity. But all these assumptions are too conservative. Assuming the Jewish population grows naturally at 1/2 the Arab rate of natural increase - which doesn't seem such a stretch, what with the increasing family size among religious Jews, the increasing proportion of the Israeli Jewish population that is religious, and the fact that historically the Israeli Jewish population has had a natural positive rate of increase - that adds another 750,000 Jews to the population of Israel. Assume further that Israel is able to dispose of the Gaza strip somehow; no one in Israel contemplates incorporating it permanently into Israel, so the only question is who can take charge there who will not wage continual warfare against Israel from there. That removes a projected 1.8 million Arabs (up from about 1.2 million today) from the demographic equation. We stillhave to reckon with about 1.3 million Israeli Arab citizens (up from about 1 million today) and about 3 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria (up from 2 million today). In this scenario, the Jewish majority between the river and the sea, excluding Gaza, would be about 60%. That's not good, but it's better than most of the projections I've read, and not very different from what the ratio is right now.

But this may also be too pessimistic, because the Palestinian territories are not capable of sustaining their current rate of population growth. It's not much remarked upon, but the economic growth rate in the territories when under Israeli rule rivalled that of the Asian tigers. The Palestinians under Israeli rule accumulated more wealth than Arabs anywhere in the world apart from the underpopulated oil sheikdoms. That economic growth, along with remittances by Palestinians working in the Gulf, underwrote the dramatic population explosion in the territories. But that's gone now. There are no Palestinians working in the Gulf states, and Islamist welfare will likely be significantly curtailed if Israel reasserts control of the Palestinian population centers. And even if Israel reasserts direct control over the territories, and the security situation improves dramatically, the Palestinian economy will never again be as integrated with Israel as it was in, say, the 1980s. With lots of people and a collapsing economy, the territories should be exporting people steadily over the next decade - perhaps not at the rate of 80,000 per year (a rate which, by the way, would reduce the growth rate of the Palestinian population in the territories by 2/3), but nonetheless significantly.

Of course, even if Palestinian population growth is slower than anticipated, and even if my optimistic projections about Jewish population growth are borne out, the ratio between the Jewish and Arab populations is unlikely to get much better than it is currently, absent a dramatic change. All I'm saying, really, is that time is not so against Israel as the Arabs - and many Jews - assume. Israel's Jewish population could well keep pace with the Arab population of Israel, Judea and Samaria. We have, after all, seen this movie before: since the signing of the Oslo accords, which were undertaken partly because of demographic fears, Israel's population has expanded by nearly 1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews. That being the case, Israel does not need to act out of pessimism, either by running away behind a wall or by agreeing to a "peace" under fire. The current prime minister has long said that time is on Israel's side. It's not as simple as that, but if Israel can restore a reasonable level of security, and crush the terrorist organizations, she should not feel that then she has to sign the first piece of paper someone puts in front of her. In the end, Israel wants an agreement - for moral reasons, but also for practical ones. Israel does not want to rule a large, non-citizen Arab population, and she does not want to risk losing the Jewish state from demographic change. But Israel may not be as close to the demographic zero hour as is commonly assumed.
posted by Noah at 5:09 PM

 
Another follow-up article from Ha'aretz on Israeli Arab involvement in terror. Sugar-coat it how you like, folks, it's bad. Real bad.
posted by Noah at 1:38 PM

 
Follow-up from Ha'aretz on Rabbi Sacks. I call attention to two things. First, as should be clear from the quotes at the bottom of the article, Rabbi Sacks is far from unclear about the nature of the enemy. Second, it's clear that specific phrases he used are being pushed further than their plain meaning in an effort to enlist him in the peace camp. Sacks says that the situation of Israeli rule in the territories is incompatible in the long run with core Jewish principles. I would agree with him here. But that's rather different from saying that Israeli policies are themselves un-Jewish or anti-Jewish. One of his rabbinic critics points out that Israel's actions are in self-defense, and hence are moral, not immoral. But Rabbi Sacks can grant this, and still argue that Israel has to be attuned to the moral fallout of even justified policies, of the way in which the war - even if it is a just war - is corrupting the morals of the country. That complicates the picture; it doesn't contradict the justification from self-defense.
posted by Noah at 1:35 PM

 
I've liked Rabbi Jonathan Sacks for a long time. The conventional rap on him is that he's a purveyor of plattitudes - that he won't take a position on anything that anyone can definitively disagree with. I don't necessarily reject this view of him. I just think that religious leaders are not politicians. A preeminent part of a religious leader's job is to safeguard the continuity of tradition, and it's not obvious to me that this job is best discharged by taking firm stands on controversial issues.

So I'm neither shocked nor appalled by the recent interview in the Guardian in which Rabbi Sacks says that Israel's rule over the Palestinians in the territories is "tragic" and "incompatible in the long run" with core Jewish principles. Indeed, I would agree with him in this. He does not, however, go further, and argue for a particular policy prescription, because he knows he is not a general. His job is to say the following.

One, keeping the land is not commanded; it can be traded for peace. This is mainstream Jewish opinion; most of the halachic authorities in Israel and the diaspora have ruled similarly. Only the most radical interpreters of Rav Kook's legacy - who are, admittedly, dominant in the religious Zionist camp and increasingly influential in non-haredi Orthodoxy generally - argue that such trades are impermissable.

Two, saving life is a paramount value, and therefore it is not only permissable but commanded to withdraw from territory if that will bring peace. This is also uncontroversial. The key question is in the if: if Rabbi Sacks' father is right, and the other side does not want peace, and withdrawal will cost lives, then it is impermissable to withdraw. The religious opinion hinges on a realistic evaluation of the facts. That's how it should be.

Three, rule by force over another people is unethical in Judaism. You'd think this was a no-brainer, but it isn't - not because Judaism would indeed countenance such a thing but because very few rabbis are willing to opine on what Jewish law says about the general conduct of the Jewish state. The haredi rabbis by and large take the position that the state is not really Jewish; a Jewish state will only exist in the Messianic age. What Israel is is a state that governs a lot of Jews. As such, they seek to bend the state to the interests of those Jews - specifically, the Jewish communities they represent, the ultra-Orthodox communities. In addition to trying to get more resources out of the state directed to their communities, they often seek to have various halachic rules enacted in law - not because they extract some set of principles from halacha for how a sovereign Jewish state should be run but because they govern their own communities by halachic rules and enacting those rules in law would make that governance easier and allow for the further extension of their communities and their norms. The failure of most Jewish authorities to grasp the nettle of sovereign Jewish self-government is a major failure of the rabbinate of this generation, and one whose persistence poses real risks for both Judaism and the Jewish state. Therefore, I take it as a very positive thing for an authority like Rabbi Sacks to opine in this way. I will note, however, that once again we are talking about a religious ruling against the behavior of the government of Israel. What Rabbi Sacks is saying, in effect, is that withdrawal from the territories would be good from a Jewish perspective even if it did not bring peace, because forcible rule over another people is ethically wrong. Who can disagree? But if withdrawal would cause war, and not peace, that would still trump in Rabbi Sacks' view, since the saving of life is paramount.

Rabbi Sacks does go on to say that, in his opinion, Israel will need to give up all or virtually all the territories to achieve peace. This is his opinion, not a religious ruling, but it is an opinion to be respected, given its source, even though I think he's dead wrong. I also think he is right to talk with fundamentalists on the other side who explicitly reject the existence of the state of Israel (with his important caveat that these not be individuals who kill their opponents, which rather narrows the field). After all, we need to convince some of these people and their followers if peace is ever to be possible. But I would add an additional qualifier: these interlocutors must be acting in good faith. There is no point in meeting with someone for whom religion is politics by other means, which in turn is war by other means. There are religious extremists who are sincere, but there are many for whom power is their god, and there is no point in talking to such people. I don't know the particular Ayatollah he met with, but the scale of corruption of the Iranian regime does make it important to know with whom one is dealing. It is one thing to talk to a Taheri, another to talk to a Khamenei.

The Guardian is going to make much of this interview, but I don't think it means much. I don't think it represents a change of view by Rabbi Sacks, and I don't think he's taking any different view from, say, Rabbi Michael Melchior, Chief Rabbi of Denmark and a member of the current Israeli government and a dove. Moreover, I don't think he's taking a different religious position on the territories than that taken by Rav Ovadiah Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel's Shas party, or most other non-Kook-ite halachic authorities.
posted by Noah at 11:07 AM

 
The news about the arrest of 7 Israeli Arabs involved in terror is terrible, absolutely terrible. It is ruining my day.

For those who are unaware, a little background on demographics. Israel has about 6 million citizens, of whom about 1.2 million are Arabs. This Arab population includes Muslims and Christians, but does not include Jews from Arab countries, who along with their descendents constitute more than half the Jewish population of the country. Israel's Arab citizens are able to fully participate in the political life of the country; the main way in which they are distinguished from other citizens is that they do not serve in the armed forces (though Druze, Circassians, Bedouin and other ethnic minorities do so serve).

In addition to these Arab citizens, there are approximately 1 million Arab residents of the Gaza Strip, which is largely under Palestinian Authority control, and 2 million Arab residents of Judea and Samaria, nearly all of whom live under Palestinian Authority control but in territory which is something of a patchwork, partly controlled by Israel and partly controlled by the P.A. Furthermore, there are about 250,000 Arab citizens of Jerusalem who, as legal residents of the city, are able to vote in municipal elections and participate fully in the life of the city, but they are not citizens of Israel and do not participate in national political life.

Prior to Oslo, Israel's Arab citizens, by their own testimony, suffered from something of a split personality. On the one hand, they considered themselves Israelis, voted in Israeli elections, took part in the economic and cultural life of the country, etc. On the other hand, they were Arabs, had relations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world, and had difficulty identifying with Israel as a Jewish state. I suspect that, if you had an honest conversation with your average Israeli Arab in 1985, he would have said that Israel should not be a Jewish state but a bi-national state, and that the occupation of the territories had to be ended, but that regardless he was a loyal citizen of the state and expected to be treated as such.

Since Oslo, this has changed, radically. During the "good" years, there was an increasing identification by Israeli Arabs with the Palestinian Authority. This was most pronounced in Jerusalem, where the Arab residents were not citizens of Israel, but it was a trend observed throughout Israel. The Arab population seemed to have internalized three facts.

First, that Israel had recognized the PLO and Palestinian nationalism. This meant that they, as Arabs of Palestine, were the most "legitimate" residents in Israel. Why, then, was Israel a Jewish state, and not an Arab state, or at the worst a bi-national state? Their historic critique of Israel was given a new edge by Oslo.

Second, that Israel was withdrawing from the territories in part because it was unwilling to contemplate absorbing such a large Arab population. If Israel was to remain a Jewish state, it would have to have a majority of Jews who controlled the national life. What did such a message mean for them, destined to be perennial minorities? If they were, it seemed, always going to be a distinct and separate minority in national life, perhaps they needed an outside power to look out for their interests - such as a Palestinian state?

Third, that Israel was withdrawing from the territories in part because it was weary of conflict. As in the P.A. territories, this suggested that Israel could be influenced by force. If such a strategy could be employed in the territories, why not in Israel proper?

So identification with the Palestinian Authority increased dramatically just when Oslo appeared to be working. Just as peace was supposedly dawning in the territories, Israel's Arab citizenry was becoming increasingly restive and unhappy with the modus vivendi within Israel. This resulted in a great deal of hand-wringing on the part of Israel's major political parties. Labor, Likud and even Shas (the major ultra-Orthodox party) tried to curry favor with Arab voters by promising more services, greater integration, and so forth, all with a view to buying that population's affection. These efforts failed miserably for three reasons. First, the promises were rarely, if ever, fulfilled. Second, they did not speak to the cause of alienation: the conviction that Israel's Jews intended to keep the Arab citizenry down, and that this plan could be altered by force. And third, because of a series of events that dramatically angered the Arab population of Israel.

During the "bad" years, several events happened to enrage Arab citizens of Israel. Most importantly, the forceful crackdown by the Barak government on mass Arab protests that resulted in the killing of several Arab protesters convinced much of the Arab population that Israel considered them, citizens though they may be, as no different from the Arabs of the territories. Another important event was the withdrawal from Lebanon, in which Israel disgracefully abandoned their South Lebanese Christian allies. This further convinced those Arabs most inclined towards Israel that, in the end, the Israeli government cared only about Jews, and would sell everyone else down the river. Meanwhile, of course, the P.A. was unrelenting in unleashing propaganda aimed at the Arab population of Israel, making the case that Oslo was a trick by Israel to carve up the Palestinian population into South-African-style homelands and actually increase Jewish settlement in the territories.

Which leaves us where we are today. Israel's Arab citizenry is still, I suspect, largely loyal in the sense that it would not actively collaborate with the enemies of Israel. But even this degree of loyalty is increasingly fragile. Israel's Islamic movement is growing; Nazareth is being actively Islamicized and the political support for radical Islamic groups is growing. Israeli Jews increasingly treat the Galilee as potentially hostile territory. The collapse of trust is going to have severe economic consequences for the Arab sector, far overwhelming any attempts by the government (if the government actually makes these attempts) to improve that sector's economic situation. Arab Israelis decreasingly participate in the political life of the country. The Arab parties are dedicated to the elimination of the Jewish state through legal means, and the Arab citizenry boycotted the last elections for Prime Minister (as Jerusalem's non-citizen Arabs overwhelmingly boycott the municipal elections in that city).

These trends will get much worse if proposals to withdraw unilaterally from most of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and retreat behind a wall are carried out. Israel's Arabs will have confirmation of the entire thesis outlined above: Israel doesn't want Arabs among them and, if the Arabs make enough of a fuss, Israel will flee from them. The logical response to their considerable grievances would be for Israel's Arabs to launch an intifadeh in the Galilee, demanding either the end of the Jewish character of the state or substantial regional autonomy - or, perhaps, demanding the right to vote to secede from Israel and join the P.A. on the other side of the wall.

Will they also get worse if Israel re-occupies the P.A.-administered territories on a permanent basis, and eliminates the P.A.? That depends. If the Israeli reconquest is absolutely forceful, things may die down for a time, but the problems will resurface with a vengeance not too long thereafter. Israel cannot, for any length of time, rule another people by force, and Israel's own Arabs will increasingly identify with their brothers in the territories so long as they are so ruled. The only thing Israel can do to mitigate this risk is to think seriously about post-reconquest political arrangements that could actually work long-term. As I have argued many times, the only such arrangements that are plausible involve a formal role for Jordan as the guarantor of the interests of the Palestinian population within Israel. Within that broad concept, there are two possible solutions: annex the territories to Israel and make the Arab residents citizens of Jordan, or give Jordan a formal role in the governance and security of the territories, parts of which will be autonomous Palestinian enclaves but not an independent state. Either solution would require a very close cooperation between Israel and Jordan, cooperation that would of course impinge on Israeli sovereignty and freedom of action. It would also require a degree of regional acceptance of Israel that has never been manifested, even in Jordan. I'm not saying such a solution is likely. I am saying that anything else could bring disaster - either civil war within the pre-67 borders of Israel or the forcible expulsion of much of the Arab population of the territories, and regional war.

Israel thought it could get rid of its Arab "problem" by giving up the territories. But the Arab "problem" is the problem of Palestinian nationalism, which is incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel, for both practical reasons (there is no room for two independent and viable states between the Jordan and the sea) and ideological ones (if Palestinian nationalism is legitimate, then Israel's founding was a usurpation of Palestinian rights). By withdrawing from the territories and legitimizing Palestinian nationalism, Israel has imported that nationalism into pre-67 Israel. Defeating that nationalism has therefore become all the more important.
posted by Noah at 6:51 PM

 
Bloggers could probably save themselves some time by installing a script that automatically blogs Mark Steyn's latest column wherever and whenever it appears.
posted by Noah at 12:08 PM

 
Paul Cella points my attention to a really good piece in Policy Review: Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris. To summarize the argument: most supporters of the current war on al Qaeda (e.g. Victor Davis Hanson) and most of the opponents (e.g. Noam Chomsky) share the assumption that the massacres of 9-11 were the opening salvo in a war. That is to say, they were operations undertaken to achieve concrete objectives. Harris argues that this may not be the case; that the terror attacks may have been ends in themselves, undertaken not to achieve concrete objectives but to make the perpetrators (and their surviving comrades) feel like victors. That the attacks were, fundamentally, theater rather than policy, the outgrowth of a psychological fantasy ideology rather than a logical ideology aimed at achieving power.

I'm going to quote the heart of his argument at length:

In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.

But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us — I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief — the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as “The Power of Positive Thinking,” or even the little engine that thought it could. To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at this conclusion. Rather, what is meant by this is that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.

The allusion to William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe” is not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the two thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in particular and fantasy ideology in general — Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. All three men begin with the same assumption: If human beings are limited to acting only on those beliefs that can be logically and scientifically demonstrated, they could not survive, simply because this degree of certainty is restricted only to mathematics and the hard sciences — which, by themselves, are not remotely sufficient to guide us through the world as it exists. Hence, human beings must have a large set of beliefs that cannot be demonstrated logically and scientifically — beliefs that are therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences.

Yet the fact that such beliefs cannot be justified by science does not mean that they may not be useful or beneficial to the individual or to the society that holds them. For James, this meant primarily the religious beliefs of individuals: Did a man’s religious beliefs improve the quality of his personal life? For Pareto, however, the same argument was extended to all beliefs: religious, cultural, and political.

Both James and Pareto viewed non-rational belief from the perspective of an outside observer: They took up the beliefs that they found already circulating in the societies in which they lived and examined them in light of whether they were beneficial or detrimental to the individuals and the societies that entertained them. As a botanist examines the flora of a particular region — he is not interested in creating new flowers, but simply in cataloguing those that already exist — so, too, James and Pareto were exclusively interested in already existing beliefs, and certainly not in producing new ones.

But this was not enough for Sorel. Combining Nietzsche with William James, Sorel discovered the secret of Nietzsche’s will to power in James’s will to believe. James, like Pareto, had shown that certain spontaneously occurring beliefs enabled those who held these beliefs to thrive and to prosper, both as individuals and societies. But if this were true of spontaneously occurring beliefs, could it not also be true of beliefs that were deliberately and consciously manufactured?

This was a radical innovation. For just as naturally existing beliefs could be judged properly only in terms of the benefits such beliefs brought about in the lives of those who believed in them, the same standard could now be applied to beliefs that were deliberately created in order to have a desired effect on those who came to believe in them. What would be important about such “artificially inseminated” beliefs — which Sorel calls myths — was the transformative effect such myths would have on those who placed their faith in them and the extent to which such ideological make-believe altered the character and conduct of those who held them — and certainly not whether they were true.

Sorel’s candidate for such a myth — the general strike — never quite caught on. But his underlying insight was taken up by Mussolini and Italian fascism, and with vastly greater sensitivity to what is involved in creating such galvanizing and transformative myths in the minds of large numbers of men and women. After all, it is obvious that not just any belief will do and that, furthermore, each particular group of people will have a disposition, based on history and character, to entertain one set of beliefs more readily than another. Mussolini assembled his Sorelian myth out of elements clearly designed to catch the imagination of his time and place — a strange blend of Imperial Roman themes and futurist images.

Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations — and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy — a fantasy with which the “audience” could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus twentieth century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father’s ghost.

Once again, it is a mistake to see in all of this merely a ploy — a cynical device to delude the masses. In all fantasy ideologies, there is a point at which the make-believe becomes an end in itself. This fact is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.

Any attempt to see this adventure in Clausewitzian terms is doomed to fail: There was no political or economic advantage whatsoever to be gained from the invasion of Ethiopia. Indeed, the diplomatic disadvantages to Italy in consequence of this action were tremendous, and they were in no way to be compensated for by anything that Italy could hope to gain from possessing Ethiopia as a colony.

Why invade, then? The answer is quite simple. Ethiopia was a prop — a prop in the fantasy pageant of the new Italian Empire — that and nothing else. And the war waged in order to win Ethiopia as a colony was not a war in the Clausewitzian sense — that is to say, it was not an instrument of political policy designed to induce concessions from Ethiopia, or to get Ethiopia to alter its policies, or even to get Ethiopia to surrender. Ethiopia had to be conquered not because it was worth conquering, but because the fascist fantasy ideology required Italy to conquer something — and Ethiopia fit the bill. The conquest was not the means to an end, as in Clausewitzian war; it was an end in itself. Or, more correctly, its true purpose was to bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome.

To be a prop in someone else’s fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you, but that was the position of Ethiopia in the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism. And it is the position Americans have been placed in by the quite different fantasy ideology of radical Islam.

As a major, major fan of William James (and Pareto is pretty great, too; I'm not familiar with Sorel), I find this analysis particularly persuasive. For Harris, the import of his anaylsis for our conduct of the war is simple. If al Qaeda is not a rational actor, but operating on the basis of fantasy, then it cannot be fought to the point merely of victory (ending the enemy's ability to do serious harm, or achieving the enemy's surrender) but must be fought to the point of extermination. That indeed follows logically from his argument. But I want to tease out a couple of distinctions that I think are important for the conduct of the war, and that somewhat qualify his conclusions.

First, I would agree that 9-11 was an act of theater, with al Qaeda as the director and actors in the drama, and America's symbols as the set and props. But who was the audience? There are three possibilities, not mutually exclusive: America, the Muslim world, and al Qaeda itself. Harris, while surely agreeing that all may be true in part, argues that the primary audience for 9-11 was al Qaeda itself. I don't think that is quite right; I think the primary audience was the Muslim world. I definitely agree that one purpose of the attacks was the self-glorification of the attackers and their comrades, an effort to convince themselves of their own power and importance. As such, they would be comparable to, say, the crimes of the Bader Meinhof gang or the Weathermen: violence that could not possibly be connected with political objectives, violence undertaken for the sake of violence itself, undertaken by a group of people utterly out of touch with reality. And its important to note that these terrorists did nothing to move their larger societies in their favor. But I think Hitler's beer-hall putsch, or the spectacular acts of terror perpetrated by the PLO through the 1970s and 1980s are better examples. These acts were not, in themselves, capable of catapulting the perpetrators into power. But they were part of a strategy intended ultimately to achieve just that, by means of infecting the larger society that the perpetrators sought to take over with the fantasy that already governed the perpetrators' behavior.

This has consequences for how we proscute the war. If al Qaeda is talking primarily to itself, then the overwhelming focus of the war should be on preventing that group from gaining additional military assets, surrounding and isolating it, and physically eliminating its members. If, on the other hand, al Qaeda is talking primarily to a much larger audience of Muslims, then a major part of the war should be devoted to innoculating the larger Muslim world from infection. That effort, in turn, must involve our own use of theater: to impress on the Muslim world the power and resilience of America, and the folly of al Qaeda. We would have to do this because if we didn't and al Qaeda's theatrical attacks had their intended effect, we'd see copy-cat organizations emerging throughout the Muslim world, a disease metastasizing too quickly for us to pursue a policy of cordon-and-eliminate.

Second, and more fundamentally, I would like to draw two distinctions that cut across the fantasist/rationalist division that Harris makes. They are: between radical and conservative powers, and between good and evil powers.

I've talked about the distinction between radical and conservative powers before, but I want to elaborate a bit here.

Possibly because I work with options, I tend to look at the whole world from the perspective of an options trader. (And I wind up sounding a lot like Malcolm Gladwell.) A holder of options stands to benefit enormously from a large positive move, but has a limited downside in the event of a large adverse move. Therefore, a holder of options wants the volatility of the underlying asset to increase; this increases the magnitude of potential positive events, but doesn't change the magnitude of loss if negative events transpire, and thus increases the holder's expected gain. Because of this, even events that decrease the expected value of the underlying asset (for example, events that make negative outcomes more likely) may be positive events for an options holder if they increase the volatility of the underlying asset sufficiently that the increase in potential value of upside events is great enough to overwhelm the greater likelihood of downside events. Finally, all options expire on a given date, so options holders need their hoped-for events to happen within a given span of time. The more time goes by, the less value their options have.

In options speak, the holder of options is "long gamma" and "short theta." (Gamma is the derivative of delta, which is in turn the amount that the value of an option changes with each incremental change in the value of the underlying asset. If you are long gamma, that means that your exposure to the underlying asset increases as the asset appreciates, and decreases as the asset depreciates. In other words, your gains accelerate as the asset goes up, and your losses decelerate as the asset goes down - in the case of a call option, in any event. Theta, meanwhile, is the rate of change of the value of the position with the incremental passage of time. If you are short theta, that means that your position value declines over time. Anyone who borrows money is short theta, because he is paying money every day until he pays off the loan; anyone who lends money is long theta.)

Radical powers are like holders of options, while conservative powers are like sellers of options. Radical powers have little to lose, but could benefit greatly from the right kind of change, if the change is sufficiently dramatic. Absent such a change, the radical power will decay and eventually collapse. In many cases, therefore, it makes sense for these powers to instigate change of almost any sort, even change that is objectively self-destructive, because by destabilizing the situation a radical power may create opportunities to dramatically increase its power, which is worth more than the objective loss of power caused by the action.

What I want to stress is that this is rational behavior on the part of the radical power. Thus, al Qaeda's leaders, behaving rationally, may have reasoned that it was very likely that they would lose their base in Afghanistan as a result of the attacks on America. But, they may have said, Afghanistan is of limited value; indeed, we've gotten about as much as we can possibly get out of it, having trained a generation of terror leaders and planted them abroad. We've run the country into the ground economically, and eventually we'll face resistance, either from within our own ranks or from the warlords or from ethnic minorities - memories of how we ended civil war will fade, and the reality of Afghanistan as it is will set in. So we need to radically increase our power. It's worth the likely loss of Afghanistan if a dramatic attack on America causes a revolution in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan - or if America's own invasion of Afghanistan achieves this. Even if the odds are that we'll reduce our own power and strengthen America's hand by these attacks, the attacks will unsettle the situation, and we'll be in a position to seize any opportunities that present themselves.

Similarly, Yasser Arafat heads a radical power that rationally reasoned that war - even a war they were more likely to lose than win - served their interests more than peace. Peace would mean confronting the degree to which the promises that the PLO made have fallen short of reality; peace would mean facing a destroyed economy, a rump mini-state utterly dependent on its neighbors, Israel and Jordan, and the utter loss of international significance. Far better to launch a war, and hope that instability will present opportunities to radically increase one's power - even if the likeliest outcome is the loss of what power one has.

That's the rational reasoning of radical powers. Conservative powers are in the opposite position. Rather than holders of options, they are like sellers of options, or holders of debt. Every day that goes by without dramatic change benefits them, because their assets are income-producing not wasting assets. Anything that radically upsets the international order has a good chance of hurting them - and even if it's more likely to help them than hurt, it's unlikely to help them overwhelmingly because of their already strong position, but it could do serious damage to valuable assets.

I want to stress that this divide between radical and conservative powers does not correspond to the difference between good and evil powers. Saudi Arabia, a nasty regime since its inception, has historically been a conservative power. Any change is dangerous to the regime, which has valuable, income-producing assets (oil fields, control of Mecca) and little to gain from disorder. The weaker Saudi Arabia becomes internally, however, due to population growth and productivity declines as well as the sheer boredom of its effectivelyimprisoned subjects, the more radical the regime must become, and therefore the more dangerous to itself as well as to others. On the flip side, from the beginnings of the yishuv to 1967, Israel was a radical power. Israel faced enormous odds against its success from the beginning, and there were strong forces in the international system arrayed against it. World War I resulted in the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate; World War II, however devastating it was for the Jewish people as a whole, ultimately benefitted Israel both by increasing its Jewish population and creating a unique political context in which the international community would bestow its blessing on the new state. After 1948, the state was acutely vulnerable to attacks from the outside, which could be conducted with minimal cost to the aggressor states. Israel therefore engaged in aggressive cross-border reprisals, and two dramatic wars (the Sinai Campaign and the 6-Day War) that were defensive in origin but aggresive in their conduct. But none of this means that Israel was an evil power; in fact, all through the period of the yishuv and down to the present, Israel has been extremely sensitive to the moral restraints on warfare, certainly in compared with its neighbors but also in comparison with many western powers (Algeria, anyone?) who have been apt to criticize Israel for its policies.

The participation in a fantasy ideology is orthogonal to both of these other considerations: both to the radicalism of the power and to its evil. I offer two examples as proof. First, Israel was, in addition to being a radical power, one dominated by a fantasy ideology. If the founders of the yishuv had ever considered the odds, Israel would never have come into being. Zionists came to Israel, settled the land and built the state as participants in a host of collective fantasies. Had the Zionists merely sought refuge from anti-Semitic Russia or, later, Germany, they would have been focused on trying to get to America - as many of their non-Zionist fellows were and did. Socialist, nationalist and religious fantasies - or, to use a less pejorative term, myths - powered the enterprise of Zionism from the beginning. And again, this does not make Zionism an evil enterprise by any means.

As a second example, I point to the British Empire. As David Cannadine argues persuasively in his book, Ornamentalism, a major factor both animating the British Empire and enabling its success was the theater and pageantry of it all. This was both consciously and unconsciously designed to make best use of the existing traditional authorities in the societies Britain sought indirectly to rule, but it was equally consciously and unconsciously designed as a project to occupy the Tory elements in British society with less and less obvious place in an increasingly bourgeois, mercantile society. The fantasy of a feudal order served the conservative cause of social stability in the midst of economic at home and stable, inexpensive rule abroad.

So fantasy ideologies can serve both evil and good powers, and both radical and conservative powers. As important as it is to recognize that we are up against an enemy whose political strategies are at least as much theatrical as Clauswitzean, and that the enemy may seek disordered change for its own sake rather than as part of a directed and controlled plan, it is more important for us to remember that the enemy is evil. Harris calls Bush's identification of the enemy as "evildoers" as a bit of fantasy ideology of our own - and he means that positively. And he's right about that. But it's also accurate. We will be tempted to decide that our war is being waged against some other force that caused this evil - religion, either in general or Islam specifically; or poverty and underdevelopment; or undemocratic regimes; or what have you. But we shouldn't lose sight of the basic value judgement: the people who perpetrated the massacres of 9-11 are evil. Those who help them are evil. And if we can't wipe evil off the planet, we should have no compunction about any actions we take to destroy it utterly when it threatens us.
posted by Noah at 12:02 PM

 
Smart article by Grover Norquist (I know, I know) about how President Bush's high approval ratings are useless to him.
posted by Noah at 3:15 PM

 
Some additional thoughts about Denise Majette's victory apropos of this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A lot of folks have been focused on how so much of the black "civil rights" leadership in this country came out for McKinney, and how her father made anti-Semitic charges after his daughter lost. But the story here isn't that there's a new problem in black-Jewish relations, or that Jewish money stole a black election, or that Arab money isn't reported in the press but Jewish money is, or anything like that.

Here's the story: McKinney lost her race in a district that is more black than it has ever been, and in a district with a bigger black middle class than ever. These voters were less interested in hearing about Jewish conspiracies and less interested in Jesse Jackson's opinion and more interested in voting out a woman they felt no longer represented them because her views were not theirs.

Majette's victory is a great victory for black Americans. The people ruled. It's a very optimistic turn of events. And we who thought McKinney was a disgrace, and who supported her opponent, should give credit for our side's victory where it is due: to the common sense and patriotism of the 4th District's voters, most of whom are black Democrats.
posted by Noah at 12:28 PM

 
There's a lively debate going on over whether there will be a Hashemite restoration in Iraq, and whether doing so would be a good idea or not. (See, for example, here for the case that it may be in the planning, here for case that it would be a good idea, and here for the case against.) I think it's worth stepping back a bit to examine the key questions, which get conflated in much of the discussion.

What is the purpose of a king? We in the United States, the world's longest-lived republic (Q: is that right? was Switzerland a republic before 1874?), have a natural aversion to monarchy. But monarchy is the most enduring form of governance on the planet, with a far more successful history than self-government. Stable republican government is harder to achieve for two reasons. First, in a republic, the people rule. For the people, a heterogeneous mass, to rule, they need to think of themselves as a collective. This is not so hard in a small territory like Athens or Venice, but much more difficult in a larger territory or with a population that divided into distinct ethnic, class or religious groups. The United States is virtually unique in having crafted such an effective unum out of our pluribus, and we have the genius of James Madison to thank for it more than anyone. In any event, for a country like Iraq to operate as a republic, the people must think of themselves collectively as Iraqis, and it is not obvious that this is the case; they may think of themselves as Arabs, Kurds or Turkmens - or Sunnis or Shiites - before they think of themselves as Iraqis. Second, a republic can only be maintained by a patriotic elite that has the people's allegiance - a natural aristocracy, in Jefferson's terms, to replace the hereditary aristocracy of monarchical regimes. Does such an elite exist in Iraq? It seems unlikely.

In the absence of these things - an authentic nationalism and a natural aristocracy recognized as such by the people - a republic is likely to flounder. When it flounders, one or another class or group will act to seize power - either to destroy or to protect the republic. The three most common variants of the above are: party dictatorship, military coup and ethnic civil war. (These are not mutually exclusive.) The brief Russian and Chinese republics were ended when Communist parties seized power; the Weimar Republic ended when the Nazis seized power; the broad-based Iranian revolution and the republic it inaugurated was very quickly transformed into a one-party clerical dictatorship. In Egypt, Iraq and Syria, one-party dictatorship was the outgrowth of a military coup. By contrast, in Turkey, the military has a defined constitutional role as protector of the republic; if regular democratic processes appear to threaten the longevity of that republic and its constitution, the military is supposed to step in. This is also how the military saw its role in the Chilean, Argentine and Uruguayan military dictatorships.

The monarch, as symbol of the nation, provides a prop to a less-than-robust sense of national identity. A people divided in many ways, unused to thinking of itself in collective terms, may nonetheless agree on a shared allegiance to a single man and his family. While a monarch may be capricious and corrupt, he is also less likely to operate completely without a check on his power than are the military or a single dictatorial party, because there are, in most cultures, old traditions that structure a monarch's power - and, moreover, a monarch rules by the power of deference and tradition, and therefore will perforce have to defer to some extent to other kinds of traditional authority, lest he undermine the basis of his own rule. This is not the case for the military, who typically rule in the name of national emergency, which would justify virtually any extremity, or a dictatorial party, which typically rules in the name of an absolutist ideology that happily uproots all other forms of authority before it.

For a monarch to function this way, however, these sources of authority - traditional deference and a natural relationship with other local traditional authorities - must also exist. Is this the case with the Hashemites in Iraq? Probably not. The Hashemites are revered by the Bedouin who are the dominant group in much of Jordan (though a minority of the total population, due to the large Palestinian Arab population in and around Amman). But they have no natural base of support in Iraq. Prince Hassan, if installed as king by a conquering American army, would be legitimate not because of his own claims but because of the power of that army.

But then, this would be the case for a republic as well, or for any other government installed in Iraq. Before we go in, we should get this through our heads: Iraq has no legitimacy as a nation, and therefore any state will be illegitimate. The current one-party dictatorship rules on the basis of terror. It has no legitimacy. The various military regimes that followed the fall of the Hashemite dynasty did the same. The Hashemites ruled by the blessing of Great Britain. Before that, Iraq was under the thumb of the Turkish Empire for centuries. For much of its history before that, Iraq has been under the thumb of various Persian empires. There's not a lot of history of Iraqi self-government, including indigenous monarchy, and little sign of national self-consciousness.

So I would have to argue that our supporter and our critic of the idea of monarchy for Iraq are over-stating the case. To the critic, it is anathema to get involved in "colonial" adventures choosing the government of other countries. But how, then, is war with an enemy like Iraq to be pursued? Take it as a given that Saddam Hussein's regime is a threat to America. How are we to address it? We will have no choice but to install a government in Iraq; we will be there, and our troops will be the power behind whatever government takes shape. I don't think that's colonialism; we're not interested in settling Iraq with Americans or stealing its resources. But it is a fairly extreme form of intervention in the internal affairs of another country, and I don't see an alternative to it. Our supporter of monarchy, meanwhile, vastly overstates the potential benefit of a Hashemite king. How great a force was Hussein of Jordan for a "liberal Islam" after all? And he, having the strong support of a major ethnic group in his country and having survived many challenges to his rule, was, by the end, far more legitimate than his brother, Hassan, could ever be as king of Iraq.

Iraq is going to be an enormous mess after we conquer it. We will be taking care of it for decades. It will be a much uglier job than the reconstruction of Germany or Japan. We have got to get used to this fact, and not expect a quick trip home for the boys right after the war. Iraq has a large middle class that is well-educated and largely unaffected by radical Islam. It has potential. But it is not a nation, and no one knows how to build a nation. More likely than not, we will know we have succeeded in our task when the Iraqis, without violence, vote to throw us out of their country some decades hence, as the Filipinos did in the 1990s.
posted by Noah at 12:11 PM

 
A really excellent opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the folly of the Mitzna boomlet. Which I suspect is already starting to fade.

Israel is still living this terrible paradox: its people are strong but its leadership is weak. I can count on one hand the Israeli political leaders I admire: Natan Sharansky, Beni Begin (who at this point isn't a political leader anymore), who else? I think Michael Melchior is a good guy, an important symbol, but he's got no influence at all. Sheetrit, Shalom, Meridor all seem like decent people, but not the sorts of people who could inspire one. I have considerable respect for Yossi Sarid of Meretz, even though I think he's wrong. For that matter, I had a lot of respect for Barak, even I think he drove the country straight off a cliff. But Ramon? Beilin? Yael Dayan? These people are supposed to be Labor's leaders; can anyone take these people seriously? And how much respect can one have for a Netanyahu or any of his old cronies, the Hanegbis and Libermans and the like.

Labor is now structurally a minority party. It has not adjusted; it hasn't figured out who it is. Mitzna, I've argued before, is a walking argument that Labor should become a Liberal party: pro-business, socially very liberal, and generally dovish but flexible - most important, a party not expected to embody the national consensus on anything but pushing the consensus in a particular direction, whether from within the government or without. That's a plausible future for the party. It's a future that, if the party is true to such a vision, and has any integrity (a real question) should put Shinui and Democratic Choice out of business, and could be a reliable junior partner to the majority party or, when that party stumbles, make a bid to form a government in coalition with a Social Democratic party to its left. Mitzna could help make that transition for Labor, but not if he runs as a "peace" candidate, as the Great White Hope who will make the situation disappear by virtue of being a good kibbutznik general, a guy from the right sort of background, "one of us" - the born to lead.

Israel's much bigger problem is that Likud has not yet grown up to become the majority party. Likud is, at its heart, a populist party, and populist parties have a hard time becoming majority parties. But Likud is - or will be, after the next election - the party of Israel's majority. Likud will probably run in an alignment with Yisrael B'Aliya (Sharansky's party) and with Gesher, and will take big bites out of Labor and Shas (and completely absorb the Center Party). And, unlike the elections of the 1990s, this big shift will be permanent. One of the things I heard on my visit to Israel, in a lecture by an Israeli professor of political science, was that Israeli voting patterns have historically been quite stable, and driven largely by demographics. Now, suddenly, there's a huge dislocation of voters who were sure in their political orientation, accompanied by a general shift to the right. I think it's pretty conservative to estimate that a Likud alignment gets 40 seats in the next Knesset (that's roughly 20 currently, plus 5 from Labor, 5 from Shas and 10 from Yisrael B'Aliyah, Gesher and Center together). 50 doesn't seem at all out of reach. A Labor alignment, meanwhile, could easily not break 20 seats. Likud is likely not only to win the next elections but establish itself as the predominant party in the country, the new establishment. But it has great difficulty placing itself in that position, psychologically, of being anything but the coalition of the outsiders, fighting the establishment.

Until the situation is resolved - not necessarily permanently, but into some kind of stable modus vivendi - Israel will effectively be not a two-party system but a one-party system. An opposition running on fantasy solutions to a difficult situation will be obliterated at the polls. To be a plausible opposition, Labor will either support Likud or will have to come up with coherent alternative policies on the security front, and it has shown no signs of doing the latter. To become a plausible partner for Likud means either becoming a "me, too" Likud-lite party or coming up with a plausible alternative identity, such as being a Liberal party. Or, Labor can join Meretz on the fringes, leaving the country to be governed by a coalition of Likud, the religious parties and the far-right. Those are the choices, really. Does Mitzna understand that? Does anyone in his party understand that?
posted by Noah at 5:27 PM

 
If it's Thursday, it must be time to study Torah - specifically, the parshah of the week. Second week in a row - I'm on a roll.

This week’s parshah opens with a description of the bikkurim, the offering of first fruits. In the days of the Temple, all the Jews of the Land would ascend to Jerusalem and bring the first fruits of their farms and orchards as an offering to G-d. During the joyous period from Shavuot to Sukkot – at the time of year in which we find ourselves right now – the people bringing the bikkurim offering would recite a few of the verses of this parshah beginning with verse 5: “Arami oved avi – A wandering Aramean was my father.

This phrase should be familiar to us from another place. The passage forms the central part of the Passover haggadah (where the phrase is translated as "An Aramean sought to destroy my father" - a reference to Laban and his dealings with Jacob). In the haggadah, these verses are expounded upon at length in a commentary that, to me, has often seemed to lack a clear thrust or purpose. Moreover, it is unclear why these verses were chosen, given that they are not about the Exodus or the Passover sacrifice but about the offering of first fruits, which occurs on Shavuot.

Rav Riskin has an explanation for the choice, which I will quote at length since links to the piece I'm quoting from seem to keep going cold.

Whereas the usual textual rendition at the conclusion of Maggid reads,''In every generation, it is incumbent upon the individual to see himself (lirot atzmo) as if he came out of Egypt,'' Maimonides' haggadah texts reads, “In every generation, it is incumbent upon the individual to show himself (leharot atzmo, play-act) as if he himself is now coming out of Egyptian bondage'' (Laws of Hametz and Matzah 7,6). Apparently for Maimonides history must not only be remembered but it must be internalized, a process which can only take place by every individual attempting to experience in his life-time now what his ancestors experienced then. By placing ourselves within the pages of the Bible, the pages of the Bible become an inextricable part of our beings; transference in deed becomes transference indeed!

Maimonides' reading has a further change that I believe is fraught with crucial implications. In our haggadot, the paragraph''In every generation it is incumbent upon the individual…'' concludes,''It was not our ancestors alone that the Holy One blessed be He redeemed, but He also redeemed us along with them, as it is written,''And He took us out with them in order to bring us and give us the land which He swore to our fathers' (Deuteronomy 6, 23).'' Maimonides reading adds:''And concerning this does the Holy One Blessed be He command in the Torah, ‘And you shall remember that you were a slave'; that is to say, as if you yourself were a slave, and you have come out into freedom and you have been redeemed.'' (Maimonides, ibid). In other words, for the seder night it is not sufficient that you re-experience the exodus from Egypt; you must also re-experience the goal of redemption, the entry into the Land of Israel.

Now we understand why the Mishna (Pesachim 10) insists that we explicate the Biblical paragraph Arami Oved Avi on the Seder night, a portion found in the Book of Deuteronomy (26), rather than the more to-be-expected verses from the Book of Exodus, the initial source for Egyptian servitude and freedom; the reason is evidently because Arami Oved Avi is recited by the individual bringing his first fruits to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Israel – and it therefore links the seder participant to true redemption as he stands at the Temples' altar. This is likewise why we connect Passover to Shavuot with the counting of the Omer; Shavuot is after all the Festival of the First Fruits, a ceremony pertaining exclusively to the Jerusalem Temple.

There is an important difference between the text in D'varim and the text in the haggadah, however. The text recited at the Temple on the occasion of the first fruits offering concludes with verses 9 and 10: “and He (G-d) brought us to this place, and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now, behold, I have brought the first fruits of the land, which thou, O Lord, hast given me.” These last two verses are omitted from the text in the haggadah. The haggadah ends with the Exodus.

This might, of course, seem appropriate, since that is the theme of Passover; why shouldn't the haggadah end there, then? But this highlights the question: why were these words chosen in the first place? Rav Soloveitchik has an explanation for this omission, which runs counter to Rav Riskin's interpretation above. He argues that the Exodus and the entry into the Land are two fundamentally different events – that the Exodus points toward Sinai rather than towards Eretz Yisrael.

The Bikkurim text of Arami oved avi extends over six verses, concluding with a refernce to Yishuv ha’aretz and the Bikkurim. In the Haggadah, however, the last two verses are omitted and the recitation concludes with “And the Lord brought us out with a mighty hand,” etc . . . [T]he omission of Yishuv ha’aretz is perplexing . . . The purpose of the Exodus was to create “a kingdom a priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). Pesach and the Revelation at Sinai are bound to each other because the full purpose of the Exodus was only realized at Mt. Sinai. Physical liberation without a spiritual identity would hardly be considered a fulfillment of God’s promise to the Patriarchs. Indeed, Moses’ assignment was to lead the Exodus and arrange for the Revelation, and nothing more. “And this shall be your sign that it was I who sent you. When you have freed the people from Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain” (Exod. 3:12). It was not his mission to bring them into the Land, as indeed he did not. Eretz Yisrael was their singularity as a people, and the verse pertaining to Yishuv ha’aretz was therefore omitted.

But why then does was this text, which seems to point up the connection between the Exodus and the Land, chosen as the center of the haggadah? We have a paradox: an explanation that satisfies as to why the bikkurim text was chosen for the haggadah is unsatisfying as an explanation of why the last verses are omitted; and an explanation that satisfies as to why the last verses are omitted is unsatisfying as an explanation of why the bikkurim text was chosen in the first place!

One answer may lie later in this parshah. In chapter 27 verses 2-3, we read: "On the day that you cross the Jordan to the land that God your Lord is giving you, you must erect large stones and plaster them with lime. When you then cross over, you shall write on them all the words of this Torah. In this manner you shall come to the land that God your Lord is giving you, the land flowing with milk and honey that God, Lord of your fathers, promised you." The bikkurim text glosses over the giving of the Torah, taking us directly from the Exodus to the settlement of the Land. But our parshah doubles back, and restores the Torah to its rightful place. For we are not to enter the Land in the spirit of the Exodus, but in the spirit of Sinai: our first act is to record the Torah on a public monument. Only later, when the Land is settled and we bring its fruits, do we look back to the Exodus and G-d's mighty hand in bringing us out, starting us on the journey to the Land, and we give thanks.

The bikkurim text is to be recited in full once we are actually in the Land, once the Temple is built and the first fruits are brought. But this will not happen until the installation of the Torah in the Land. If the haggadah included the complete bikkurim text, it would be operating from the perspective of the completion of this process, whereas in fact the Exodus is only the beginning. Moreover, it would suggest that the process is completed entirely by G-d's mighty right arm, as was the Exodus. But if the process of completion depends on the installation of the Torah, then it is partly dependent upon our actions, our merit, and not only on G-d's actions.

The narrative arc of our festival cycle goes: Pesach-Shavuot-Succoth. This can be paraphrased as: Freedom-Law-Redemption. First, we must be freed from slavery. This is not something that depends on our merit; this is our natural right as beings animated by the breath of G-d. Next, we must receive the Law. This is the purpose of our freedom: not that we should follow our own appetites rather than Pharaoh's, but that we should bind ourselves to G-d's purpose. (See my earlier thoughts on freedom and the law here.) Next, we enter the Land, which is both a literal event and a metaphor for the coming of the Messianic Age. This is the purpose of the Law: to bring about a world whose operations are in tune with the divine purpose. (There is a midrash to the effect that creation begins with the word b’reishit because “reishit” or first, is another way to refer to the bikkurim, or first fruits. By this reading, the purpose of the creation of the entire universe was the mitzvah of the bikkurim offering – and making this offering is the completion of purpose of creation!) Reciting the complete bikkurim text in the haggadah would collapse this narrative into simple dependency on G-d; by truncating the text, we are forced to hold our breath, waiting until today for the text to be completed.

At the end of our parshah, after uttering a long series of horrible curses, Moses makes the following famous and enigmatic statement: “You have seen all that G-d did in Egypt before your very eyes, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land. Your own eyes saw the great miracles, signs and wonders. But G-d did not give you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear, until this day.” What does this mean? At the Exodus, at Sinai, at the time of all these wonders the people could not understand, and yet today they do? What is special about today?

What is special about today is that today, in our text, we stand on the cusp of entry into the Land, the cusp of completion. But today, as we read our text, we are in the month of Elul, on the cusp of the Days of Awe, and this is also special. The narrative cycle of Freedom-Law-Redemption is interrupted in the Jewish calendar by the Days of Awe and the Day of Atonement. And this, too, is not an accident. During the Days of Awe we face the prospect of our mortal completion, and in response seek to make a complete repentance. This is the proper time for completing the bikkurim text, not at the Seder table. If we included the full text in the haggadah, perhaps we would think that G-d’s mighty hand and outstretched arm had achieved our complete redemption in the days of our ancestors. By chopping off the text, the haggadah highlights to us that there is more to come. The bulk of that “more”, the commandments of the law, is revealed at Sinai. But the completion of the task, the first fruits offering of joyful thanksgiving, is saved until the cusp of entry into the Land, and so our attention is held until we complete the verses today. In our day, we cannot offer first fruits at the Temple. But we can offer something far more valuable. My favorite prophet, Hosea, exhorts the people in a time when the sanctuary was debased to offer “parim s’fateinu” – literally the bulls of our lips – as offerings instead of bulls of flesh. The bulls of our lips are words of repentance. The most holy offering we can make is not the first fruits of trees but the first fruits of repentance. The use of the truncated bikkurim text in the haggadah connects the season of our liberation to the days of our repentance, when we truly can complete the work of creation.

posted by Noah at 12:34 PM

 
A belated thanks to Joe Katzman for the link, and to all his readers for following it here. Hope it hasn't been a disappointment!
posted by Noah at 6:10 PM

 
John Podhoretz has invented a new game: imagine movies other than Flashdance being remade into surfer flix like Blue Crush. He suggests Wuthering Heights and Stage Door for starters, but really, the possibilities are endless.

CITIZEN KANE: Charles Foster Kane devoted his life to building monuments to his own magnificence, only to find, at the end of the road, that none of it mattered. He had everything a man could possibly want, but what he wanted, what he could never have again, was that simple thing that gave him so much joy as a child, that simple surfboard . . .

CASABLANCA: Rick's been out of the game for years, ever since that rigged contest in Spain. Now he runs a parasailing outfit catering to tourists while his old girl and fellow surfing champ moons over that parapalegic (but still charismatic) ex-surfer Laszlo. But when the Columbian drug lords (what do you want, Nazis?) move in on the surf scene . . .

THE RED SHOES: Like virgins sacrificed to the volcano, aspiring surfer-girls are thrown into the firm but warm embrace of Boris, acknowledged master of the board. But can Victoria complete her training after falling for Boris's undisciplined but extremely blonde assistant surf-master . . .

E.T.: A space alien crash-lands in Hawaii and is adopted by a local human child, who teaches him to surf . . . wait a second: didn't Disney just do this one?

Other ideas?
posted by Noah at 3:24 PM

 
Stanley Kurtz, whom I always admire, has a strong rejoinder to the latest Weekly Standard cover story on the SAT. I have to say, I think they are both wrong, and I take that view because I have a more radical view of the whole college business than either of them. To whit: I think too many people go to college, too much of college is devoted to nonsense, and too much emphasis is placed on the importance of a college education specifically to success later in life.

People forget that the debate over testing is really about who gets into Yale versus who gets into UConn. It's not about measuring "worth" in some abstract sense. And any debate about this question cannot be divorced from the far more fundamental question: what is college education for anyhow?

There are, it seems to me, three major answers to this question, all true but with very different implications for what should be our admissions criteria.

(1) College is a fundamentally intellectual and cultural experience. It's where you go to pursue the fundamental truths, and learn how you as an individual approach them.
(2) College is a fundamentally social and political experience. It's where you go to meet people who, like you, have been pre-selected to be the managers and leaders of society.
(3) College is a fundamentally economic and professional experience. It's where you go to acquire advanced skills and credentials that enable you to enter into a profession or a career more lucrative and productive than would be available to you absent the college experience.

As I said: all three are true. How do all three inform how we should (or if we should) sort people for admission to college?

Let's start with (2). If college is a fundamentally social and political experience, the place where the future elite of the nation will meet each other and form a class identity, then the question of who gets into what college is really a question of who we want our elite to be. There is a strong argument to be made that we do not want our elite to be composed of people who are good at taking intelligence tests - which is what the old SAT was. I used to work at a firm who selected its employees almost entirely on the basis of their SAT scores and the schools they went to. We had a lot of very smart people, and we made some extraordinarily dumb mistakes, because intelligence isn't wisdom, isn't experience, isn't leadership, isn't strength of character, isn't all sorts of things we were relatively short of. Switching to an achievement test, or eliminating explicit entry criteria at all and selecting students according to the impressions, positive or negative, of the admissions staff, is a reversion to the old system of choosing an elite. Before the advent of the SAT, the nation's elite colleges were chosen from our nation's elite prep schools. The assumption was that these people were best-suited by cultural background to run the country and its major institutions. Even after the advent of the SAT, many colleges engaged in affirmative action on behalf of athletes and students from under-represented states; in each case, the goal was to select for qualities presumed to correlate with appropriateness for leadership (athletes are often considered natural leaders, and a diverse nation needs leaders from Missouri as well as from New York and Boston), not aptitude for academic achievement. Not incidentally, there was a strong desire to reduce the over-representation of Jews in the academy. Nowadays, exactly the same forces are in play, but on behalf of different groups - not white students from Missouri but black students from Los Angeles, and not with a desire to reduce the over-representation of Jews but to reduce the over-representation of Asians. If the purpose of an elite college is indeed to train the nation's elite, however, it is not obvious that these considerations are inappropriate. Indeed, it is easier to argue that a university that "looks like America" is appropriate if one is training the elite of the country than to argue that a university of students with high SAT scores is appropriate. The one will at least arguably make a contribution to social peace; the other, arguably, does no good at all, since it is manifestly unclear that good test-taking skills correlate with an aptitude for leadership.

Now let's go to answer (1). If college is fundamentally about cultivation of one's higher self - if it has no instrumental value, but is valuable for the thing itself - then admissions criteria should be radically different than for (2). But it is still not obvious that scoring well on an intelligence test is the right ticket in. More fundamentally, we must ask the question: how many students can be expected to benefit from such an education? A rigorous education along classical lines is likely to be beyond all but a tiny elite of students, and this elite is unlikely to have anything to do with the elite we would want running the country and its major institutions. If this is the student body we want for our elite colleges, then we should be testing not just academic achievement but talent. We probably need an admissions process something between the admissions process for schools of theology and that for schools of music; we'd be looking for both spiritual readiness and native talent. Neither is perfectly correlated to intelligence. If, on the other hand, we take a more democratic view of the importance of "higher learning" - if we take more of a 1950s attitude and less of a 1920s attitude - then it is unclear why colleges should be selective at all. Let's make an analogy: in the 1950s, when there was considerable passion for cultivating the entire citizenry, the public schools and the mass media were primary means of such cultivation. And, excluding the special cases of racial segregation and the handful of elite prep schools, what distinguished the high schools of that era was their uniformity one to the other. They were all pretty much teaching the same things in the same way to a diverse student body. If we aspire to such an ideal of cultural literacy, and if we are determined to use colleges rather than primary and secondary schools to achieve this, then I don't see a strong basis for having colleges be selective in admissions. Rather, the ideal would seem to be the open admissions system: come one, come all, and if you can do the work you pass, and if not you fail out.

But now we come to answer (3). This is overwhelmingly the focus of our discussion of higher education today. We don't believe in higher truth and we are uncomfortable talking about training an elite (even though we continue to do just that). Education, in the view of most of our pundits, is a purely economic good. You go to college so that you are qualified to go to law or medical school, or so that you can get a better job than you would likely get if you did not go to college. You want to teach the basics in college - writing, mathematics - because likely as not the student body hasn't learned these things in secondary school, and they are essential to the modern workplace. And you want to teach explicitly or implicitly pre-professional courses rather than courses in Shakespeare or, for that matter, the semiotics of hip-hop. If the purpose of college is to prepare one for future careers, then sorting students for college is no different than sorting through employees for hiring. You want to train people for what they'll be good at. You want to identify who will be good lawyers, and train them for the law; who will be good accountants and train them for accountancy; etc. You can have them all mingled together on one campus for social reasons, but the real sorting that needs to be done is for tracking to different professions. This tracking can be distorted in order to try to re-distribute economic goods among ethnic groups. But any such re-distribution is going to have significant economic costs. At some point, the piper must be paid, and either we will have a mal-distribution of people in the economy (lousier doctors and lawyers and accountants than we might have) or employers will have to spend more time and money sifting through the noise caused by affirmative action in order to identify real aptitude. Again, though, there's no reason to think that sorting the population by its performance on an intelligence test is a good way to slot people for pre-professional purposes. Indeed, if we're concerned about economic efficiency, then probably the best solution to the sorting problem is to have a diversity of solutions. The College Board monopoly is arguably itself the problem, not the SAT or the SAT II or any other particular test. Rather than having one system of sorting, we should have 3 or 4 systems of sorting people, such that colleges will compete to identify the students who will bring the most value to the school as alumni, and adjust their admissions criteria according to the results of different experiments.

Our current debates about the distribution of education are confused because we don't know what higher education is for. The resentment about affirmative action stems from the conviction - valid, after all, to some extent - that what college you get into is a strong predictor of your future earnings, and that therefore this good should be distributed accoring to merit. But even if this is true, what is merit? What are we trying to measure with the SAT, or achievement tests, or any test at all? Merit is not an abstract quality: it can only be discussed in relation to some objective. Productive people deserve to earn more; good leaders deserve positions of power; people of taste and discernment should set the cultural tone of the country. But what are "meritorious" people in the abstract?

Ironically, the class who benefits most from a system of selection through tests - and I should say at the outset, as an excellent test-taker I'm a traitor to that class - is, the very same class who benefits most from the distortion of that system through affirmative action and so forth. (This is a point that comes out very strongly in Nicholas Lehmann's excellent if obviously politically slanted book about the development of the SAT,
The Big Test.) This is the rising class of meritocrats, who believe that merit is academic achievement. They know that their claim to rule depends on a plausible case being made for their social solidarity with the larger citizenry; for that reason, they have an enormous stake in "looking like America." But there are other paths to wealth and power than by passing tests, and academic tests are a poor proxy for these. We should continue to debate how admissions are handled, but if we care about economic efficiency I would rather see more competition among tests than more debate about tests, and if we care about how our political or cultural elite is chosen then we should debate that topic explicitly, something we are currently very reluctant to do, and I doubt that intelligence tests will be brought much to bear on that discussion.
posted by Noah at 12:38 PM

 
The idiotarians are dropping like flies. First Alabama, now Georgia. Rock on, Denise. Now let's all pull for Norm Coleman in the general election.

Anyone want to take on Maxine Waters? These people aren't invincible, we now know.
posted by Noah at 8:59 AM

 
Returning to this morning's topic: the best domestic example I can think of the kind of anti-democratic dynamic practiced in the name of progressive values - regardless not only of the wishes of the majority but even the wishes of the minority supposedly being helped - is bi-lingual education. Ron Unz, tireless crusader for English, pulls no punches in his latest column.
posted by Noah at 6:07 PM

 
On the other hand, a small dissent from Joe's post on why Arab armies lose wars. My dissent takes the following form:

Of the 6 Arab-Israeli wars (Israeli Independence, Sinai Campaign, Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, Lebanon War, Oslo War), the Arabs arguably won two and are still engaged in a third. The Israelis won their first three wars, and DeAtkine's analysis of why they won dramatically in '48 and '67 is extremely on-point. The Arab armies were fighting wars of aggression with terrible command-and-control problems and demoralized and poorly-trained troops. Israel won in '48 against absurd odds and won in a rout in '67 against less absurd but still lopsided odds.

But the record since then is considerably more equivocal. The superior performance of Israeli troops is still manifest. They've got one of the best-trained, best-led, most highly-motivated armies in the world. But have these advantages resulted in victory? In 1973, Egypt and Syria successfully surprised Israel and won clear battlefield victories in the first hours of the war. Egypt's army in particular performed in a well-coordinated and efficient manner. They then lost the initiative due to political factors, and Israel was able to counter-attack decisively; the surrounded Arab armies were, then, saved by the same kind of political factors (Soviet intervention) that slowed their advance at the outset of the war. The lesson of 1973 was that Arab armies (or the Egyptian army specifically) were capable of success on the battlefield, but that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were not going to allow a decisive victory by either Egypt or Israel, and therefore Egyptian national interest dictated abandoning the overt war against Israel and siding with the United States. Which Sadat, a great Egyptian patriot, promptly did.

The Yom Kippur War was a very close thing, and people shouldn't forget that. They also shouldn't forget the lessons of Lebanon, a war that Hezbollah won. Let's not equivocate: they won, as surely as the North Vietnamese won their war against South Vietnam and America. The fact that Israel could have held out indefinitely is as irrelevant as the fact that America could have done so: the fact is, neither they nor we did. Hezbollah drove out the Israelis after an 18 year occupation of South Lebanon, and they are now the effective masters not only of Lebanon but, arguably, of Syria, given the "hypnotic" power Sheik Nasrallah holds over Bashar "the kid" Assad. What this proves is that, in a defensive, guerilla war, Arab forces can be quite effective.

The current Oslo war is being modeled very consciously on the Lebanon war, but the Israelis are (I believe) decisively winning the current war, where they lost in Lebanon. Why? Because in Lebanon Israel was fighting a war for purposes it no longer understood. The original objective - annihilation of the PLO - was not achieved, thanks to Soviet intervention, and Israel got bogged down with no end in sight. In the current war, however, Israel understands that it is fighting for its existence, and it has no intention of losing. (Unfortunately for Israel, that Palestinians also understand that they are fighting for their national existence, and while they are losing they show only equivocal signs of desire to surrender.)

Why do I run through all this? Because the key question with Iraq is not whether Arab armies perform well in the abstract but whether they will perform well when fighting to defend their country and its political independence. The answer is far from clear. I do not expect the Iraqi people to behave like Hezballah or Hamas, hunkered down for a long guerilla war against an occupying army. I do not expect this because (a) I think America will be less fastidious than Israel was, and obliterate much of the Republican Guard; (b) America will have internal allies, as in Afghanistan, who will command at least as much allegiance as Saddam Hussein; and (c) America is not fighting an existential battle with the Iraqi people but a battle to remove the Iraqi regime, and the people of Iraq understand this. But I do expect them to behave better than the Egyptian army in 1967, or the Iraqi army in 1991.

In the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein removed all of his best assets from the front lines, and left only the cannon fodder. He knew he was going to lose the battle, and was focused on winning the spin war afterward, and preserving as much of his strength for the internal battle to come. He played his cards very well and, arguably, won. This time, he knows we're playing for keeps, and we should expect his loyal troops to perform more effectively. Anyone who assumes that they will simply cut off his head and display it on the city walls as they open the gate to American troops is forgetting that much the same was expected of the Wehrmacht in 1944, and all plots against Hitler failed. All plots against Saddam have similarly failed, and we should expect them to continue to fail.

This is not in any way an argument against war with Iraq. Better now than later, better decisively than equivocally. We have every moral justification for war, and every reason of interest to want to pursue that war, and quickly. Moreover, I think it is certain that we can emerge victorious if we wish to. But it doesn't do us any good to engage in triumphalist thumping about the superiority of our culture. Let's assume, as Joe suggests, that the bad guys are as smart and well-organized as we could imagine, and let's make sure we can beat them if they are. Then, if it's a turkey shoot, we can all have a very happy Thanksgiving.
posted by Noah at 2:04 PM

 
His hand is getting better and Joe Katzman has a great collection of material on the upcoming (or already ongoing) war in Iraq. He promises additional installments every Tuesday and Thursday. The guy is a major public service.
posted by Noah at 1:28 PM

 
John Derbyshire is always worth a read, for his stylish writing but, more important, for the manifest honesty of his opinions. He's a rare bird with strong and passionate convictions but without the triumphalism or parochialism that usually accompanies them. He's always worth a read, but sometimes he hits a home run, as in his most recent column on Brent Scowcroft on National Review Online.

Kudos for that, and kudos as well for pointing us to this article by John Fonte at the Hudson Institute outlining the current and growing ideological conflict within the west, between what he calls Transnational Progressivism and liberal democracy. I think he's spot on in this analysis, and puts it better than I have. If I had to boil it down to a simple message, it's the following. The "new class" made much of in analyses of the old Eastern bloc - the intellectual-bureacratic class that ruled in the Communist world - still exists, and is fighting for control of the West and the world. As in the bad old days, their modus operandi is to articulate principles of justice and equity that only they are able to interpret and apply, and asserts that these represent "true" democracy as against the individualism and popular sovereignty that underlies liberal democratic systems. On the strength of this moral claim, and the claim of unique expertise to put their propositions into practice, they seize power. They are doing so gently today, through the institutions of the EU, the UN, the NGOs, etc. Their goal is the destruction of democracy as we understand it and its replacement by an international order which places themselves at the helm of power, unfettered by accountability to an electorate. They believe, most strongly, in meritocracy, in government by the best, so chosen primarily for their academic achievenements, as opposed to rule by the most popular (those who win elections), or those who have amassed the most wealth and power in the contest of the market.

Fonte's analysis is extremely persuasive to me, and I urge you to read it, and read many of our current conflicts - between the U.S. and Europe, between so-called conservatives and liberals at home, and even within our foreign policy establishment over the proper conduct of our current war - by its light.
posted by Noah at 10:17 AM

 
Mom, can I have one?
posted by Noah at 5:09 PM

 
I haven't visited Happy Fun Pundit in a while. My loss.
posted by Noah at 4:49 PM

 
Really good piece from Larry Miller:"It Gets Hard When They Cheer." Just read it; I'm not going to summarize.
posted by Noah at 4:00 PM

 
I'm probably not the first to suggest it, but the first I read it was in this week's Weekend Journal: the perfect inscription for the rebuilt Ground Zero, from E. B. White.

This race--this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man--it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demostration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything.

I can just picture it written in the sky at the top of Fred Turner's new twin towers.

And I do wish we'd get on with the battle against the evildoers, so we can rebuild without fear that all will be destroyed again, in an instant on another beautiful fall morning.
posted by Noah at 11:17 AM

 
Keep your eye on this space 'cause we're still hearing reports that Israel sees Barghouti as the most plausible successor to Yasser Arafat, the only leader among the Palestinians who is both credible to the "street" and willing to make "peace" with Israel. Very strange thinking at this late date. But we keep hearing it, coming purportedly from insiders of the same government that brought this indictment.
posted by Noah at 4:25 PM

 
Contrary to Jay Nordlinger (scroll down until you get there), I mostly agree with the latest Richard Cohen column on the subject of a museum of the African-American experience to be built on the Washington Mall.

I agree with two sentiments: first, that it is problematic that there is no museum of some sort relating to the unique black experience in America; second, that the Holocaust Museum does not belong there.

To take the latter first: the Holocaust belongs - and I do think that's the right word - to three peoples: the Jews, the Germans and the Poles. To the Jews because we were its principal victims; to the Germans because they were its principal perpetrators; and to the Poles because the crime was principally committed in their country. That's not to slight the gypsy victims or the mentally handicapped or homosexuals who were also targeted for murder, and it is not to ignore the contributions that other nations made to the perpetration of this historic crime, nor the contributions that all nations made to saving many of its intended victims. But there is a center and there is a periphery in anything, the Holocaust included. And by any estimation, America was a peripheral presence. America was not a great perpetrator nor a great savior, and the Holocaust has essentially nothing to do with the American experience. And that is what the Mall is for: it is our secular Acropolis, our shrine to the American experience and its symbols. If there is to be a major Holocaust museum in America, it should be in New York or Los Angeles.

There is a great American crime of course, and a great American story of reparation for that crime. The crime was race slavery and its aftermath in racial apartheid. And if there should be a museum on the Mall to memorialize a crime, it should be a Museum of Slavery and Anti-Slavery. Such a museum would, if done right, be a great contribution to education. Most Americans have not, I suspect, thought much about how the crime of slavery came to be; most have not thought seriously about what the Founding Fathers might have done to strangle the institution in its crib rather than let it grow as they did, until it became too large and dangerous to live with. Most Americans, I suspect, rest easy in their moral superiority to our ancestors, and are ashamed of them. And so we learn nothing about how to avoid committing such crimes in the future. Far better to study some other nation's crimes, crimes we did not commit.

A museum of slavery and anti-slavery would educate our population about the ancient roots of slavery, its justification by Aristotle, and its acceptance by the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Scriptures and the Quran. It would explore the development of slavery in West Africa and in pre-Columbian America, and how these institutions informed and were changed by the arrival of the European conquerors and settlers and the advent of a massive trans-Atlantic slave trade. It would expose us to the horror of slavery in the mines of Peru, on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and on the plantations of the American South - but also the extension of the peculiar institution in its domestic as well as its agricultural form as far north as New England. It would introduce us to the culture of the slaves, to their efforts to retain normal family and cultural life under conditions of unspeakable hardship, to the Christianity that they remade for themselves under that hardship, and how it was similar to and different from the Christianity of their masters, and the Christianity of the Northern whites. And it would focus attention on the debates of the Founding Fathers over slavery, how Franklin called for immediate emancipation and Washington saw slavery ending through gradual manumission and the integration of a free black population into the national life - and into the national gene pool - but how Madison and Jefferson, unable to accept the proposition of racial equality, evaded the problem, leaving it to a later generation to solve, or be destroyed by. It would trace the history of anti-slavery, from the colonial period through the Civil War and after, in both Britain and America, and among blacks and whites, how they contributed to ending a great evil, how they risked their lives for it, but also how their activities risked harm to their own cause. Similarly, it would trace the history of the slave civilization of the South, how it functioned, what were its professed and real virtues, how it justified itself and how the evil institution that it was based upon corrupted and destroyed it. We would be taught of the heroism of those among the slaves and former slaves who led their people to freedom, in flight and in fight, who took the greatest risks and shed the most blood to free the United States of America, not only themselves, from the Slave Power. And we would lament, of course, how their service was betrayed by the apartheid system known as Jim Crow.

Abraham Lincoln was notable for arguing at the same time that slavery was evil and that Northerners had no grounds for holding themselves morally superior to Southerners because, had they been born in the South, with the South's history and economic and environmental condition, they would have made the same decisions and perpetrated the same evil. This is not an easy posture to hold, but it is a necessary one for us to recapture, else we will not understand how evil institutions grow, or see them if they are growing in our midst. A major museum of slavery and anti-slavery could do that for us. But we could not build it. We are not, as a national culture, anywhere near secure enough in our own understanding of ourselves to attempt something like this, however important it may be.

And so I turn to Cohen's suggestion as a second-best. It is unfortunate that we must pay tribute to the African-American contribution to American civilization in this fashion, because to do so involves either hidden dishonesty or hidden defeat. Dishonesty, because as Cohen says, the African-American story is far more than the story of slavery and Jim Crow (as Ralph Ellison argued, it is in fact the story of America, the most American story there is), and yet but for slavery and Jim Crow what possible place would such a memorial have on the Mall? Shall there be a museum of the Jewish contribution to American civilization? Chinese? Mexican? Italian? If we're going to have museums of this sort, again, we should have them in New York, or Chicago, or somewhere else that stands for our diversity of origin, not in the place that stands for the unum that our pluribus has become. Or worse, defeat, because if this is the only group to have its contributions to American civilization singled out on the Mall, then this group is still separate, still not counted already as part of the national story, and is this a fact - if it is a fact - that we want to enshrine on our national Acropolis? In 1929, when Jim Crow still ruled, it may have made a great deal of sense to do so - indeed, the message of such a museum might have been a powerful rebuke to Jim Crow itself, a challenge to end the separation it represented in the name of the service that it recorded. But is this still the message of 2002?

Nonetheless, something should be built, and better a museum of the African-American experience than nothing - particularly when we already enshrine a memorial to someone else's crime in that spot. If we can all agree that something should be built, we could perhaps have an argument for the sake of heaven about precisely what before we actually break ground.
posted by Noah at 3:30 PM

 
Note: I've posted a couple of changes to yesterday's post, corrections for the sake of clarity and the addition of a bit of text at the end to provide better closure. In case anyone cares.
posted by Noah at 2:37 PM

 
Some thoughts on the internet bubble.

I object to the name. The pioneers of the internet did not cause the bubble, and their stocks were not those most inflated by the bubble. Rather, the bubble was caused by easy credit and the greed and fraud that flowed from jealousy on the part of other market participants towards the deserved gains reaped by the internet pioneers.

How can I say these things? Don't we know that the whole reason we are in our current pickle is that companies like Amazon.com were able to raise equity capital to finance gossamer dreams? Don't we know that the internet was one big scam and fraud?

Well, no. I took a look at the stock performance since IPO of some of the leading internet companies. And what I found is: if you bought these companies early, you would still have a pile of money - and a considerably bigger pile than you would have if you had invested in mainstream technology companies or in the market as a whole.

I focused on companies that, at and before their IPOs, generated considerable interest because of their innovative - even crazy - business models. These are the companies that invented the internet, not the companies that followed in their train. There is no question that at the time, and even before, their IPOs that these companies were viewed as the most interesting new businesses of their generation, the companies who were defined the new business models made possible by the internet.

I picked 4 companies, one from each year beginning in 1995 and ending in 1998, when the credit-fuelled stock bubble really began.

Here are the companies:

NETSCAPE: IPO in August of 1995. This company's IPO inaugurated the genre of the internet IPO. It was the first example of what would become an avalanche of companies launched with tiny revenues and tinier or negative earnings, companies that gave their products away, companies that went from concept to IPO to multi-billion-dollar market capitalization in a matter of a few years. Netscape is the company that put the internet on the map of the public imagination.

How would you have done buying the stock at its IPO? Netscape is actually the toughest of the list, because it was acquired by AOL in March of 1999. At its purchase price, it was worth seven times its split-adjusted IPO price. Since then, of course, AOL's share price surged and collapsed. It's now down over 80% since March of 1999. Even after that drop, however, an investor would have made about a 25% return on Netscape - a lousy return, certainly, compared with either the market in general or with tech stocks in particular, but probably not as bad as you would have thought.

The other names look substantially better.

YAHOO: IPO in April of 1996. Yahoo was a revolutionary company that upended everyone's expectations for how the internet was going to work. It didn't provide internet access, and it wasn't a piece of software. It was a truly new business model, a company that would make money by organizing the internet for people. It was widely recognized as a revolutionary business at the time, and has remained a leader in its business niche since its IPO.

How would you have done buying the stock at the beginning? Yahoo has declined 95% from its peak price in January of 2000. Nonetheless, had you invested in Yahoo at the IPO price, your investment would now be worth 11 times its original value. That's an extremely good return for any investment. By contrast, a basket of mainstream technology companies today would be a worth a bit less than 3 times its April 1996 value, and the S&P 500 is worth about 1.5 times its value in April, 1996.

AMAZON.COM: IPO in May of 1997. Amazon had been making headlines for some time before 1997. It had its worshippers and its vehement deniers; people either believed it would become the Wal-Mart of the internet or this it was going to lose vast sums following an insane business model, only to be crushed by Barnes & Noble or Wal-Mart itself. Again, this was a company that from the beginning was identified with the internet; you didn't need to have any inside knowledge to have heard of it or to know from the beginning that it was a leader, for better or worse.

How would you have done buying the stock at the beginning? Amazon.com has had its share of troubles. From its peak price, the shares have declined almost 90% - they were down more earlier this year, but have recovered somewhat. Moreover, Amazon.com is burdened with a heavy debt load acquired in the boom years, and has faced far higher negative cash flow than your average internet company. Nonetheless, if you had invested in Amazon.com at the IPO price, your investment would today be worth nearly 10 times its original value. That compares with 1.7 times for the basket of mainstream technology companies and 1.1 times for the S&P 500.

Last one:

EBAY: IPO in September of 1998. I remember making fun of this one, so naturally it has been the best-performing internet company in the history of the boom. eBay is that rare company that has made money from day one, and it is one of the few internet ventures that can truly say it invented an entirely new business. It has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, making money all the while. Had you invested in eBay at its IPO price, your investment would have appreciated to nearly 20 times its original value. That's against a 30% gain on the basket of technology stocks and a 13% loss on the S&P 500 since eBay's IPO date.

It may be objected that it was difficult to buy these companies at their IPO price, and that's true. But every one of them, after a startling jump on day one, declined over the next few weeks. While investors could not buy at the IPO price, they could often get close. If you bought all these stocks 2 weeks after their IPOs, your returns would still have well outstripped the market as a whole or the mainstream technology sector.

It may be objected that I'm cherry-picking, choosing only those companies that made it, ignoring the PSINets and Excites and Priceline.coms. But truly, it was not that hard to identify the best companies emerging on the internet, any more than it is hard to identify the best companies in the technology sector. What was hard was knowing whether they were a good buy, relative to other internet concerns or relative to non-internet investments. I'm using a very simple screen to pick these four stocks: these are the companies that most people would have heard of at the time, the companies that you would not have had to follow the market or the industry at all to have heard of, the companies whose products and services you were most likely to have used. Moreover, I'm comparing these four companies to a basket of technology stocks that were similarly famous at the time: Applied Materials, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments. If anything, you were more likely to have heard of Amazon.com than any of the mainstream tech companies, with the exceptions of IBM and Microsoft.

It may be objected that I'm cherry-picking my dates, choosing only names from far enough back in time that my results will inevitably show big gains for the portfolio. But first, I'm comparing returns to returns on the S&P and my tech-stock basket over the same period; second, I've picked four companies from four different years precisely to smooth out the effect of any one date; third, the lowest return among my four stocks is also the earliest IPO; and fourth, and most important, the dates are part of my argument.

That argument is: the bubble started in 1998 with the Russian debt crisis, accelerated due to the Year 2000 panic, and was caused by the combination of cheap credit and fraud. Cheap credit was twice pumped into the economy by the Fed in great big gouts, in late 1998 and late 1999, in the first case because of concerns about the stability of the financial system in the wake of Russia's default and in the second case because of fears about the Year 2000 bug. That excess liquidity found its way into the stock market and caused a massive inflation of financial assets. This effect was exacerbated by the fraud perpetrated by companies like Enron and Worldcom that we are now learning about. Not only did these companies raise their own stock prices through fraud, but they distorted economic decisionmaking across the economy as their competitors made uneconomic decisions in order to try to keep up with these companies' apparent success. That's why I haven't picked any companies to compare from 1999 or onward: by then we were in bubble-land. But the bubble wasn't caused by the internet except insofar as men like Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers committed the frauds they did out of greed and jealousy towards those who were legitimately making a great deal of money revolutionizing business on the internet.

Of course most internet companies were flops. As well they should have been. Many internet companies went belly-up all through the boom years from 1995 to 1998. Had it not been for the bubble, more would have been killed off sooner and fewer would have gotten over-funded in those days of free capital and riskless wealth. My point is not that the kind of "investing" we saw in 1999 and early 2000 was sensible, but that the kind of investing we saw in 1995 through 1998 was - including and especially investment in the internet.

The reason we have to remember all this is that all kinds of proposals are being tossed around now for how to "fix" our markets, and its likely that many of these improvements will actually make them worse. The markets were working well through 1998, a long way into the boom years. We don't want to "fix" things so we can't get back there for decades; we do want to fix things so that bubbles like 1999-2000 are less likely. The way to fix markets is to make sure that risk is being priced appropriately. To achieve that, monetary policy must be responsible and corporate accounting must be honest and fair. With that achieved, we should let 'er rip.
posted by Noah at 1:20 PM

 
New feature, hopefully to appear on most Thursdays: thoughts on the week's Torah portion. Every Saturday, in the synagogue, a portion of text of the 5 Books of Moses (and a portion from the Prophetic writings with some relationship to the Torah portion or to the particular day) is read aloud, such that over the course of the year the entire Torah cycle is completed. Sections from the portion to be read on Saturday morning are read earlier in the week on Saturday afternoon, on Monday, and on Thursday. I don't want to promise that I'll be writing something every week, but hopefully I'll have the time for at least a brief thought most weeks. (And hopefully it will be of some value.)

This week's parshah is Ki Tetze, an embarrassment of riches. The parshah includes laws for the soldier to avoid sin and impurity during wartime, laws governing marriage to a woman captured in war, the law of levirate marriage, the commandment concerning a wild and drunken son, and a host of other laws such as the command to set up a parapet one's roof - more laws, I believe, than any other parshah in the Torah. I would like to focus on two laws that form an informative contrast to one another. The first is from chapter 22 verses 6 to 7 of D'varim:

If, along the road, you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledgelings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledgelings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.

Three things jump right out about this mitzvah. First, it is a very rare command that includes within it a specific promise of reward. It is comparable in this way to the fifth commandment ("honor your father and your mother") which promises "that your days will be lengthened upon the land that the Lord, your G-d, gives you." Second, it is clearly a mitzvah that points to a larger moral message: the requirement to show compassion towards all creatures, even to small and simple ones like birds. It is related in this to another commandment, from Vayikra, prohibiting the slaughtering of an animal on the same day as its young are slaughtered. Indeed, absent such a moral message it is difficult to see what the point of the mitzvah is at all. And last, it is a command that can only be performed when circumstances present themselves: the Torah does not say, go and look for birds' nests and shoo away the mother bird before taking the eggs, but dictates a rule of conduct when one happens to come across such a nest.

Much of what appears obviously true about the mitzvah turns out to be problematic. Most problematic is the promise of reward. There is the famous story of Elisha ben Abuya, who observed a young man climb a ladder, as instructed by his father, in order to shoo away a mother bird and take her eggs. The young man falls off the ladder and dies. He dies while in the process of performing two mitzvot for which he is promised by the Torah text a reward of a long life: honoring his father and shooing away a mother bird before taking her eggs. Observing this occurrence, according to tradition, led Elisha ben Abuya into apostasy.

It is obviously problematic to associate a specific reward with performance of a specific mitzvah, and the story of Elisha ben Abuya is not the first canonical text to argue against that mechanistic view of mitzvot and their purpose; indeed, I would argue that the entire Book of Job, probably my favorite book of the Tanach, is a polemic against this view of mitzvot, against the notion that the reason to be righteous is the expectation of reward. But the sages go further than this, and appear to take issue with the second obvious aspect of the mitzvah, its moral message. Thus, in the Mishnah, in Berakhot, we read the following: "One who says, 'as far as the nest of a bird does Your mercy reach,' or 'for favors let Your Name be remembered,' or 'we give thanks, we give thanks,' must be silenced."

What is going on here? What could possibly be objectionable about these statements? They each are expressions operating within the mechanistic mitzvah-and-reward view of G-d's relation to his people: the speaker is first asking G-d to be merciful in His judgement on the speaker as He is on a bird; next the speaker promises to reward G-d for His favors done to the speaker by remembering His name; and finally the speaker attempts to win G-d's favor by being extra-effusive in his expressions of thanksgiving. There is the sense that the supplicant is not approaching G-d in a spirit of awe before the Almighty but with a sense that G-d can be manipulated - that the mitzvot can be arbitraged, if you will. Obviously, we recognize G-d's aspect of mercy, and we do in fact pray that this aspect be dominant when the time comes that we are judged. But we do not solicit that mercy with promise of praise, or with effusive thanks, or even with supplication and a reminder to the Almighty of this aspect of His judgement, but only with repentance.

Nonetheless, it would seem perverse to ignore the apparent moral lesson of the mitzvah. After all, even mitzvot that cannot and have never been observed - such as the execution of a wild and drunken son - are said to have been placed in the Torah for our moral edification. And so, presumably, we are indeed to learn from this mitzvah to be merciful even to birds, as the Almighty Himself was mindful of them when He decreed this mitzvah. And then, we get to the end of our parshah, and come upon a mitzvah with an apparently quite different moral message:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt - how, undeterred by fear of G-d, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your G-d grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your G-d is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (D'varim 25:17-19)

"Never forget" is a commandment that echoes powerfully in a post-Holocaust generation's ears, and the image of Amalek attacking the weak and weary among the camp, without pity or moral restraint, echoes powerfully today when our people in Israel are at war with terrorist organizations who behave in just such a fashion. As a technical matter, the commandment to wipe out Amalek is inoperative, just as the commandment concerning the execution of the wild and drunken son is inoperative; the Rabbis decreed that, since the Babylonian captivity, all the nations of ancient Cana'an have been intermingled, such that it is impossible to identify Amalek. A good friend, a very observant Jew, once expressed his profound relief that this was the case, since he would find it difficult to slaughter women and children as commanded by this law. Which just goes to highlight the fact that, while the rabbinic ruling may have removed the practical problem of how such a mitzvah could be performed, it did nothing to remove the moral problem of how to make sense of the mitzvah, which is still there to be studied.

The mitzvah to wipe out Amalek appears to be in precise contrast to the mitzvah to shoo away a mother bird before taking her eggs. With the mother bird, one only performs the mitzvah when circumstances permit; with Amalek, one is commanded positively to perform this mitzvah, and not to forget to do so! With the mother bird, the moral is one of mercy towards all creatures. With Amalek, we are commanded to show no mercy towards a people who has no mercy - not only on those who were guilty of the crime but on all their descendents, on the people as a corporate body. And with the mother bird, the disinterested act merits a reward of long life, however problematic that promise may be, whereas with Amalek there is no promised reward, and no suggested rationale other than just retribution or even the cold dish of revenge.

The moral message of this mitzvah is all the more surprising given that in this very parshah we read, in chapter 24 verse 16: "a person shall be put to death only for his own crime." How, then, do the commentators explain this difficult mitzvah?

Some commentators essentially argue that there is nothing to explain because mitzvot do not have explanations; they are to be obeyed, not understood. This line of argumentation I find to be totally unsatisfying on a number of levels, the simplest of which is that if they are not properly understood they cannot be properly obeyed. Indeed, it seems to be the favored style of argumentation of our current enemies who behave as Amalek, justifying murder with reference to divine revelation that purportedly interprets itself. Others argue that all the seed of Amalek are in fact guilty; the children may not yet have murdered the stragglers among the Jews, but they certainly intend to do so, and when one comes to kill you you should kill him first. This is, again, terribly close to the arguments of our enemies, who say that Jewish babies can be legitimately targeted because they will grow up to be soldiers of occupation.

Others have argued that the mitzvah is a good utilitarian calculation. While punishing those who are not individually guilty is generally reprehensible, it may be justified by great benefit. Thus, Maimonides argues that, in order to deter other tribes from complicity in the evil actions of murderers, the entire tribe must be punished. If only the individually guilty were punished, the tribe as a whole would see that there is no penalty for supporting and nurturing the emergence of such individuals, and their depradations would recur, from Amalek and from other tribes. If the whole tribe is punished, however, no other tribe will dare harbor people who behave as Amalek. The argument about such ethics is very current; the Israeli government is as we speak engaged in a debate, with itself and with the Supreme Court of the State of Israel, over the legitimacy of acts of collective punishment such as expelling the families of terrorists in order to deter other families from permitting a terrorist to rise from their ranks.

I will not argue that such reasoning is impermissable, because it is the kind of reasoning we engage in daily. The government of the United States for decades threatened to incinerate much of the planet in order to deter a similar attack on ourselves by a totalitarian enemy. These kinds of ethics are real, and it does no one any good to deny their existence, or to deny G-d's relevance to them, for if He is not here, where is He, when would we need Him more? I will argue, however, that the command to wipe out Amalek provides us with a useful parameter for determining whether we have legitimately entered the realm of such terrible ethics, or whether we are simply being cruel and murderous. When Saul is commanded to wipe out Amalek, he fails to complete his task, leaving King Agag alive along with much of his cattle and other valuable goods. For this, Saul is excoriated by Samuel and relieved of the kingship. But for what sin was he punished? For failing to kill Agag and destroy his cattle and goods? According to the same friend who expressed relief at not having to carry out such a mitzvah - and I wish I knew his source for this insight - this was not the sin that he was punished for, but rather the sin of murder. For the command was to utterly wipe out Amalek, and Saul failed to execute this command because he sought to derive benefit from Amalek: to take the king captive and ransom him, to take valuable goods and to perform sacrifices to G-d that would accrue to him G-d's favor (there's that mechanistic mitzvah-and-reward view again). And if he was not executing G-d's command, what was his justification for committing a massacre in Amalek? In the absence of G-d's command, the guilt of murdering innocent women, children and others fell squarely on Saul's head.

This, then, is a possible test for whether the nation is genuinely in a situation of these terrible utilitarian ethics: what is the benefit to be derived from the actions? If there is a benefit other than the great benefit to be derived from deterrence then this not only is a negative fact but it eliminates the moral justification for the extreme measures being employed in war, and leaves the nation with the guilt of those measures squarely on its head.

There is a midrash that I believe makes this point obliquely, though it is usually interpreted otherwise. In the midrash, Saul responds to the command to obliterate Amalek by thinking: if for shedding the blood of one man I must break the neck of a heifer, how many heifers' necks will I have to break for shedding the blood of a whole city, including innocent little ones? And in response, a divine voice enjoins him: don't be overly righteous. Elsewhere in his career, Saul orders the priestly city of Nob put entirely to the sword, and the divine voice rebukes him: do not be overly cruel.

This midrash is generally interpreted in one of two ways: either the message is not to be overly kind or overly cruel, but to hew to the median, or that there is a time and place for kindness and cruelty, and in confusing one you will also confuse the other, and be not only kind when one should be cruel but cruel when one should be kind. But I interpret it somewhat differently. Saul hesitates before destroying Amalek because of the cost of repentence: the number of heifers he will have to destroy. And what does he take from Amalek, contrary to Samuel's instruction? Their cattle, for sacrifices. Why does Saul obliterate Nob? Because of his mad jealousy of David, and his desire to preserve his kingdom - not to preserve the kingdom from harm, but to preserve his own position within it. What is common to both errors, the one overly kind, the other overly cruel, is that Saul decides how kind or how cruel to be based on his own interests, not G-d's command.

We have two passages in our parshah, one enjoining compassion, even on birds, and one enjoining cruelty, even on innocent children. In each case, it seems to me that the potential for error lies in bringing personal benefit into the equation. Our compassion must be disinterested, because relying on the promises of reward leads potentially to apostasy. And our cruelty, even more importantly, must be exercised only under G-d's command - that is, under the requirement of sovereign necessity, and not to further our particular interests. For if we are cruel not out of duty, but out of covetousness, or anger, or self-aggrandizement, then all our crimes will be on our heads, and we will, like Saul, lose our kingdoms.
posted by Noah at 11:58 PM

 
It's been a couple of weeks since Fred Turner first put out his concept for a new twin towers but I thought I'd belatedly put my own 2c in.

Per my earlier comments on the proposals from the re-development commission, I am obviously very happy to see a design with a distinctive skyline element, and moreover one that is doubled, and most important one that both harmonizes with other elements in the area and recalls the towers. From the git-go, I'm impressed.

However, I'm concerned about two things. First, I'm worried the whole design is too Corbusian in tone. The towers are huge, sculptural forms, way out of human scale. The old WTC was both economically and aesthetically a disaster, and for all that the internal arch is beautiful and for all that the high garden concept is magnificent, we're still talking about two huge towers, very like the old WTC.

Second, I don't like the top-heaviness of the towers. For one thing, if you stood under them (not inside the arch, but outside) it would look like the towers were toppling over onto you - not good! For another, they look like they are holding up something that isn't there: they kind of flatten out against an invisible ceiling. And in general, top-heavy buildings look ugly.

The best solution to the first problem, assuming we wanted to build tall towers, would be to pay close attention to both the immediate context and the sight-lines. Per the sight-lines, the towers should be located behind a ground-level memorial park that is the terminus of the memorial promenade from the best of the re-development corp's designs. They should not be in a plaza like the old WTC, but they do need some space to give the pedestrian room to see them in their glory. The general design of the Memorial Promenade plan could be retained, but it would probably be necessary to rotate it to put the two dominant buildings - now the towers that form the arch - at the north end of the park rather than the east end. This would also require re-orienting the park, which would in turn require re-thinking its relationship to the Wintergarden. Other than that, the important thing would be to have other skyscrapers surrounding the ground-level park that harmonized with the WFC and with the towers of the arch. I'd still be worried about the scale of the towers, but at least they'd have a supporting context to a pedestrian, and not just to someone on the Brooklyn Bridge.

With respect to the second concern, I think the design can be tweaked in two ways to make it less top-heavy and draw the eyes up higher than the "ceiling" of the garden. My proposal would be the following. First, the towers should not be square at the base; they should be rectangles, deeper than they are wide. Next, the towers should taper very gently as they rise, but only on the three outer faces; the face inside the arch should rise straight. By the 80th floor or so, the towers would have narrowed to a trapezoidal shape, with the long side on the inside of the arch. At this point each tower should flare out such that the roof of each is a square, touching at the center and forming a gothic arch, as in Prof Turner's design. The outer edges of the roof garden would be directly above the base of the towers, not extending out beyond the base; the inner edge, where the two towers join, would be the top of the arch. It's tough to describe in words, but I think this would achieve several important effects. By visually leaning the towers inward towards each other, and by keeping the garden over the footprint of the tower, you avoid the visual sensation that the towers are going to fall from being top-heavy. Indeed, they would probably look a bit as if they were nodding towards each other, a far more comfortable visual sensation. And it would look less like they were holding up something invisible and more like they were holding up the top stories, which the eye would visually connect even if they were not connected physically other than at the top. The towers would look something like a dolmen, or the temple of Dendur, but on a monumental scale and with a gothic arch at the heart.

Finally, I would add a skyline element at the top of the two towers that would link them and draw the eye further upward, and provide logical placement for a communiations tower that will have to be located on the top of the building (and which you wouldn't want in a memorial garden). My suggestion would be a St. Louis-style metallic arch - possibly of golden color, per the "golden door" - with a foot on each tower and a communications tower rising from its apex. At 20 stories high, this arch would be about the same size as the architectural arch formed by the two towers below it, and would draw the eye higher, away from what would otherwise be a still relatively top-heavy structure visually. And it would echo the metallic crown and spike of the Chrysler Building, everyone's favorite skyscraper and a key symbol of New York.

[Update: perhaps that is too tall, and will look funny. Perhaps there should be a smaller, 5- or 10-story arch, on only one of the towers. This would be less a skyline element than something for the people in the garden to look up to - a building, to make them feel that they are still in a landscape, even if 1000 feet up.]

Thanks, by the way, to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change for pointing me to Turner's design proposals. (And for the plug, of course.)
posted by Noah at 5:03 PM

 
Another very interesting bit from STRATFOR.com : Rumsfeld Pushes the Envelope With Forces Proposal. The gist is that the emerging Rumsfeld plan is to use Special Forces without host-country permission, a policy rather in the fashion of how the Israelis responded to the Munich Olympics massacre. The article then details how this is likely to cause tensions both between America and our allies and between Defense and the CIA and between the Special Operations Command and the theater warfighting commands. All very interesting.

A thought: could the Europeans be pissed off not so much because we support the Israelis as because we are becoming more and more like them?
posted by Noah at 12:54 PM

 
Daniel Pipes has a follow-up on his schtick about how Islam is not the enemy, Islamism is, and how our goal should be to modernize Islam. I really can't go along with this. For starters, Islam was more tolerant and intellectually flexible in the Middle Ages than it is today. Who says modernity means tolerance? Fundamentalism is a very modern phenomenon as much as secularism. Indeed, modernity and the reaction to it has a great deal to do with the violent fundamentalism that is currently raging through Islam.

But there's a deeper point. Pipes, and John Derbyshire, and others who have argued that militant Islam is somehow a deformed and false version of the religion - a defamation of Islam, in fact - ignore the fact that this particular defamation recurs in Islamic history. What is going on now is that a militant, primitive, fundamentalism variant of Islam is engaged in a civil war with an establishment that it considers decadent, weak and under the sway of foreigners. We have seen this movie before, in the Almoravid conquest of Spain, for example. A western source that mentions their invasion is the Poem of the Cid: the Christians are alarmed at the sound Berber drums in battle. The Almoravids practiced a severe, puritanical Islam, and were brought in by the ruling kings of Spain to help defend them against the marauding Spaniards, and the Almoravids wound up deposing these kings and taking over. This was the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Muslim Spain. The same story played out in Egypt, where Salah al-Din, a Kurd with a fairly primitive religious background, put an end to the waning Fatimid Caliphate, which had been one of the glories of the Muslim world. Salah al-Din is revered as the military leader who drove the infidels out of Jerusalem, but his conquest of Egypt nonetheless represented a setback in terms of the progress of the medieval Islamic Enlightenment. It's an old cliche that Islamic history is the history of culturally primitive charismatic military leaders riding out of the desert and conquering the decadent cities, purifying them of infidel ways and restoring "true" Islam, after which they establish new dynasties which themselves decay, to fall in a similar fashion to a new charismatic leader. It's an old cliche, but that doesn't make it false. Islam has a puritanical streak, and a history of political violence sacralized as necessary to purge society of immorality. That is far from the whole of Islam; the golden ages of Spain, Egypt and Baghdad are also Islam. But it is an authentic part of Islam, and it does no one any good to pretend that this is not the case.

Religions, as human institutions, are subject to human failings. As I put it in a letter to a friend: what might be the best way of thinking about it is not to say that one or another religion is evil but that religions have their blind spots. They may be good at correcting certain sins, but they will leave the believer vulnerable to other sins, and these sins become part of the characteristic "footprint" of the religion when viewed from the outside. From the inside, of course, a believer would argue that these sins are not at all part of the religion - and he may well be right, but it would be well for him, too, to be aware of patterns that manifest themselves, and be on his guard against them so that he does not defame the name of his religion by committing these characteristic sins.

There is clearly a temptation within Islamic history for Islamic leaders and would-be leaders to use violence to establish a kingdom consonant with the perfect law of God here and now. It's happened too many times to be a random accident. That doesn't mean that Islam is an evil religion by any means. There are characteristic evils associated with Christianity as well, and that doesn't make Christianity evil. For example, embedded deep within Christianity is millennial expectation - the belief that Christ will return imminently and rectify the world. any number of outbreaks of madness and violence since medieval days can be connected to this expectation. Christianity similarly has a complicated relationship with the Jews, one that has been characterized in the past by supercessionism (the doctrine that the Church replaces and abrogates the covenant with Abraham, a doctrine largely repudiated by the Vatican and by some Protestant sects in the second half of the 20th century) and that can clearly be connected with horrific anti-Jewish violence. Does that mean that Christianity is evil? No. But it does mean that Christians should be alert to these patterns, and particularly wary that they will be led down these particular paths.

As I have argued before, as both a sociological and a theological matter, the heavy lifting of changing Islam has to be done by Muslims. It is better for us to understand ourselves, and point out not how they must change but how we have changed. It is better for us to detail the history of the Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries, the reign of Oliver Cromwell and the era of the Spanish Inquisition, and explain - in terms comprehensible to a Muslim - how Christians came to change their view of the relation between religion, violence and the state as a result of these experiences. I don't know that it's useful to call this "modernization" - first, this is precisely what many Muslims - not only fundamentalists - are afraid of, and second, the Muslim world has a long history of chasing after one or another version of "modernity" - secularism, racialism, socialism, etc. - and catching only misery. Better than talking about the Muslim world as being backward perhaps is talking about them going the wrong way - a way that will help them neither materially nor religiously.
posted by Noah at 5:37 PM

 
Amen
posted by Noah at 12:20 PM

 
What explains the sudden enthusiasm for Amram Mitzna?

For who are not Israeli politics junkies, Avram Mitzna is the mayor of Haifa who has suddenly announced for the chairmanship of the Labor Party and who, instantly, took a commanding lead in the polls over the previous leading contenders, current leader and Defense Minister Binyamin "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer and perennial leader-aspirant Chaim Ramon. Being mayor of Haifa is roughly the equivalent of being mayor of San Francisco: it's a decent sized city with a diverse population, a highly liberal and left-wing politics, a large professional class, a high tech industry, beautiful coast and majestic mountains. It's a lovely place, really. Mitzna has a reputation of having been a good mayor, and is known for his ties to business, particularly high-tech. He's in many ways the perfect yuppie candidate. His views on "the situation" seem highly conventional for the moderate left: he wants a solution, he wants it now, he's willing to talk to anyone on the other side, including Arafat, and if no one on the other side will play ball then he wants to take his ball elsewhere by unilaterally drawing a border and withdrawing behind it. Chaim Ramon is an advocate of unilateral withdrawal, and Yossi Beillin is an advocate of unconditional negotiations, so it's not like Mitzna is bringing any new ideas to the table. So why is he suddenly popular in his party?

I think there are two reasons. The main reason is that he's a new face. Israelis are disgusted with their politicians in general and with the Labor Party in particular. They think that all these guys are spending their time jockeying for position and advancing their careers and that none of them care about the national interest. There was a poll a couple of months ago showing Sharon to be the most popular politician among Labor voters; that is due only in part Sharon's combination of stout resistance and relative restraint in dealing with the Palestinians; it also reflects the fact that, to some extent, Sharon has stood above petty politics, making real sacrifices of his preferred policy in order to hold together his national unity government. Mitzna is viewed as having made his decision to throw his hat in from genuine patriotic feeling, out of loyalty to the Israeli people and loyalty to the Labor party. Moreover, Mitzna has actually run something: he's been mayor of a major city. It's hard to recall, here in America, how rare that is in a parliamentary system where the executive is chosen from the legislature, and the only executive experience most Prime Ministers have when they come into office is in having run one or more ministries. In any event, So Mitzna had the right combination of experience (practical) and inexperience (absense from national politics). By contrast, most Labor politicians are viewed as naked opportunists, and they have been around the block too many times to be "reintroduced" to the Israeli public. Ramon in particular is despised for his transparent maneuvering, and Ben-Eliezer will always be tainted on the one hand by his ugly battle with Avraham Burg for the party leadership and on the other by his over-close relationship with Sharon, the sense that his only purpose is to be a plausible leader in a national unity government, and that he could not lead the party in opposition.

And this brings up the secondary reason. Mitzna is the only current candidate who embodies a vision of what the Labor Party is supposed to be. The Labor Party is, needless to say, no longer the party of labor. The working class is more likely to vote for Likud, which is Israel's dominant populist party. While security questions continue to dominate, there are other issues - religious, economic, social, etc. - that are deeply important to the Israeli electorate. Haifa is one vision for what Israel can be, and Mitzna embodies that vision: of a multi-cultural, relaxed, highly educated society with a vibrant economy and a strong social safety net. Mitzna would turn Labor into Israel's dominant liberal party: he would be more pro-business than pro-labor, would put a strong emphasis on bringing accountability and more money to education, and his unilateralism on the security front would similarly suit a liberal, pro-business line: the territories are a losing proposition, so cut your losses. This is a very plausible vision for the future of the Labor Party. It is less clear that it is a vision for Labor majority. Some 25% of the country is traditionally observant or ultra-Orthodox; 20% is Arab; and the proverbial Iraqi greengrocer will stand to gain little from Mitzna's program - most likely his taxes will go up to pay for better education for the children of professionals. But Labor's problem right now is that it has no identity at all, so even an overly narrow identity would be something of an improvement. Historically, Labor has represented the Establishment: the class and ethnic group that built the country and was born to rule it. Likud, the populist party, represented the outsiders. But all this has been scrambled, and Israeli voters are now showing less party loyalty than they ever have in their history. There is a faction within the Likud camp - men like Dan Meridor and Meir Sheetrit - who embody the center better, if anything, than their counterparts in Labor. And the utter failure of the Labor program vis-a-vis the Palestinians has left the public distrustful of the party in general.

Labor needs to establish a new identity for itself, a set of ideas and base receptive to them from which to expand and make a case for itself as the governing party. It can't do that with its current leadership. Hence the Mitzna boomlet. But in the short-term, it doesn't matter who leads Labor. In the next elections they are going to get massacred.
posted by Noah at 9:43 AM

 
I don't know how many people caught the original post the prompted this response - I thought it was rather too long and unoriginal - but this response from Xavier Basora posted at Winds of Change.NET on the subject of the so-called "Anglosphere" and whether it constitutes a unique civilization is well-worth reading, as a corrective to some of the overblown rubbish that has been extruded on the subject.

posted by Noah at 9:00 AM

 
Having returned yesterday from my visit to Israel, and having partly gotten over jetlag, I'm going to take a first stab at my impressions of the country.

First of all, I should mention that I spent most of the time with a UJA solidarity mission. That meant travelling on a chartered bus, with mostly older folks, with a security guy on the bus and another security guy scouting ahead of us. That extra security, plus the opportunity to hear from various officials and various organizations involved in responding to terror in various ways was the primary reason why I chose to travel this way. I've been to Israel five times before, and I've been with the UJA once before, and normally I'd rather travel around the country on my own and see things a little more off the beaten track. But given the situation, I felt safer travelling this way, and given the situation, I felt it was actually more valuable to show the flag in a visible group than to travel on my own and be less visible.

Our home base was in Jerusalem. From there, we took some day trips to other areas, but mostly we stayed in Jerusalem. The city is, unfortunately, empty. Tourism to the country has collapsed, and even Israelis are reluctant to go to Jerusalem. (It's funny: everyone has their own rules about where is safe to go. People outside of Israel are avoiding Israel. People in Tel Aviv and Haifa avoid going to Jerusalem. People in Jerusalem avoid going to Gilo, a southern neighborhood that has come under fire from nearby Bethlehem suburbs. And people in Gilo avoid the southernmost streets of their neighborhood. Meanwhile, bombs can still go off - and have - in Haifa and planes fly into buildings in New York. But we all have our rules for staying safe.) One night, we went out to Ben Yehuda street, which used to be a major commercial thoroughfare. The city has been organizing street fairs on Wednesday and Thursday nights, to try to get people out, and to provide security barricades are set up at every entrance to the street, manned with soldiers on both sides of the barricades. Inside, the scene was somewhat lackluster. Most of the shops were closed, many apparently permanently or semi-permanently. It was good to see people out and about, and interesting to hear "Sweet Home Alabama" rendered in Hebrew by a lousy local rock band, but there was something forced about it all, people trying to seem like they could still have fun but not really having their hearts in it.

The economic situation is more dire than I realized. Unemployment is reaching alarming levels, and you can sense the tension people feel as their budgets get stretched further and further. The situation imposes a whole host of taxes on the people, in terms of new government expenditures and in terms of business and individual expenditures. If you're afraid to take the bus, and take a taxi, that costs money - or you travel less, and that ultimately means missed opportunities for business. If you run a restaurant, or a movie theater, or a mall, you'll probably want to hire armed security. That costs money - money you have less of since tourism is down. If you run a retail outfit that caters to tourists, you probably need to get on the web and advertise abroad to get customers who won't be coming to your store. That costs money. I was surprised at the number of people I met who are commuting to the United States for work - including a friend of mine who just made aliyah (immigrated to Israel). We visited Shaare Tzedek hospital, the second biggest hospital in Jerusalem, and one of our group asked the hospital spokesperson if there was any shortage of doctors. She replied that they could use more hands, but that there were many unemployed or underemployed doctors in Israel; the problem wasn't people, but lack of money.

Our visit to Shaare Tzedek was eye-opening in a number of ways. We sat through a fairly harrowing presentation on the hospital's trauma center and how busy it has been, and heard a number of terrible stories from the attacks. We heard about a hospital orderly who, in the course of removing incoming patients from ambulances, pulled his daughter off of one of the ambulances returning from the Hebrew University bombing. We heard about a bombing in Jerusalem that took place several months ago that the presenting hospital spokesperson was present at. Before becoming a spokesperson, she had been a nurse, and she was also a police officer. When she heard the bomb went off, she hesitated, unsure whether to run towards the attack and do her job as a police officer or run to the hospital to do her job as a nurse. After a few seconds, she ran towards the hospital. A second bomb went off seconds later, timed to kill as many rescue workers as possible. But what was most affecting was not these stories, or the pictures of the maimed and wounded - though it is useful to be reminded of how many thousands have been grievously wounded in these attacks - but to see how the hospital was built from the beginning to handle urban warfare and mass-terror attacks. The hospital has a whole parkinglot outfitted with hoses to wash down victims of a chemical weapons attack. The hospital has three underground floors, so they can move the entire patient population of the hospital (in normal times - they are over-full just now) underground in case the city is being bombed. These are the kinds of precautions that Israel considers in normal times, because the hospital building was constructed years ago, before the start of the Oslo war. I knew all of this, but it's bracing to see it.

One of our day trips took us to Kfar Saba, a mid-sized city (about 80,000 people) north and east of Tel Aviv in the Sharon region, the narrowest area of pre-1967 Israel. Kfar Saba directly borders Qalqilyeh, an Arab town under Palestinian Authority administration of about 45,000 people. There have been two bombings in Kfar Saba since the Oslo War began. We met with the mayor of the city, a middle-aged gentleman who appears to have been in office forever, a classic Labor Party type. He told us that he personally had had excellent relations with the mayor of Qalqilyeh before 2000, and that the two towns had cooperated on a number of matters, sometimes publicly and sometimes quietly. But now it's all over. The media once came to visit him and ask him about this, and he told them that after a bombing several months ago he had waited for a condolence call from the Arab mayor, but one never came. When the reporters then travelled to Qalqilyeh to ask the mayor of that town about it, he said first that he'd been out of the country at the time and didn't get a chance to call, and then that he'd heard from his sources that the Mossad was responsible for the bombings. It's unlikely that this fellow believed any such thing, but how can one cooperate in any way with a man who, even from fear if not from conviction, could say such a thing? What is to be gained? We toured the area around the Green Line (the pre-1967 border between Israel and Jordan) near Qalqilyeh where a fence is being built to wall that town off from Kfar Saba. No one's expecting it to prevent all attacks, but the hope is that it will at least do some good. From the checkpoint on the Green Line, you can see other Arab and Jewish towns that abut one another, as Kfar Saba abuts Qalqilyeh, and the walls going up between them.

The enthusiasm for unilateralism, for separation, is obviously growing on the right and the left. We heard a presentation from a professor at Hebrew U. who self-identifies as a man of the "center-left" about the position of the left in Israeli politics. (He was added to the itinerary, actually, because a couple of members of our group felt that the previous speakers had been too uniformly right-wing.) And he began his presentation by saying: what left is left? Even Labor-ites like himself, he said, were increasingly uncomfortable identifying as in any way part of the same ideological group that includes Gush Shalom or even Meretz and Peace Now. In his own view, the only solution is unilateral separation. Israel should annex the defensible areas where the bulk of the settlers live, abandon the more difficult to defend settlements and evacuate their people, and build a big, high wall between Israel and everything else, and let the Palestinians fend for themselves on their side of the wall. In another generation, if they want to talk peace, we'll talk. And this is a man from the left talking. Meanwhile, on the right end of the spectrum, we met with a number of residents of Efrat, a settlement in Gush Etzion, which is just 10 minutes south of Jerusalem near Bethlehem, a settlement that has always been part of the "consensus" and that was slated to be annexed to Israel in all of the peace plans proposed at Camp David and Taba. Efrat had always been known as relatively moderate; they had excellent relations with their Arab neighbors, were involved in a number of development projects with them, and so forth. One can be skeptical of this kind of outreach, criticize it for being "colonial" in tenor, but I would argue that both the desire for good relations and the investment of time and personal energy in fostering them was genuine on the part of the Efratans. That's all gone now. The people we met with were as right-wing as they come; several openly supported the idea of "transfer" - forcible expulsion of the Arabs of the territories - and all felt that the army had been far too timid in its responses to terror. These people all knew people in their communities who had been gunned down; they made a regular practice of walking down to the main road to show their faces at funeral processions. When they sat down to lunch with us, they were all smiles, talking about how strong their community was, how happy they were to live their, how great their kids are, and so forth - they reminded me of the LDS-ers in Temple Square in Salt Lake, the kind of folks you have to out-friendly to hold your own. But it didn't take long for the fury to come through.

In general, I think people outside underestimate how angry Israelis are. They have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the United States, the only country that has stood by them at all. Towards Europe, there's nothing but contempt. I had a wonderful conversation with a young British volunteer at Magen David Adom, who was there on her summer break from college doing EMT work, and she was biting enough towards the British press, to say nothing of the Continent. But even towards America there is a kind of jealousy, a feeling that we can get away with things that they can't, that we can defend ourselves while they can't, that they are being asked to hold the line while America debates whether it can stomach putting its own soldiers in danger to defend itself. I wasn't there, obviously, but I expect the mood in Israel can be compared in some ways to that of Britain under the blitz. In 1940, it was manifestly unclear that Britain could possibly win the war she was engaged in, whatever Churchill might have said about "give us the tools and we'll finish the job." The citizenry was nonetheless committed and determined - to holding the line until the Americans got their act together and joined the fight in earnest. That's the feeling in Israel, too. Not that they are waiting for the Americans to win their war for them; they can handle the situation on their own. But they know they are fighting a war of attrition. I heard several times from people - especially family - that I must be crazy to come there and they must be crazy to live there. But they aren't planning to leave. The mood of one of the people who presented to us, Minister Dan Meridor, formerly of Likud and for the moment of the Center Party, and that of an IDF spokesperson who also presented to us, seemed most consonant with the mood of the country. Neither was optimistic. Neither felt that there was a purely military solution. Both understood that Israel was in a war of attrition, and that wars of attrition can go on for some time. But while they had nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears, they and their countrymen seemed eminently ready to spend it.

When the situation is over, as eventually it will be, even if it is only for a multi-year pause in the fighting and not for peace, I think that anger will be more openly expressed. I think Israelis in general will forgive their Arab neighbors more readily than they will forgive those of us in the West, Jews and non-Jews, who do not stand with them now. Even right-wing Israelis (mostly) know that the Arabs have a grievance. They feel (rightly) that their "legitimate aspirations" as they are called are rendered rather less legitimate by their enthusiasm for murdering innocent civilians in an effort to achieve those aspirations. But they know there is a real grievance, and they know that it is a dangerous thing to speak out against the murderers if you are a Palestinian Arab - or even an Israeli Arab. They are afraid of and troubled by their neighbors, and determined to fight them to defend their homeland, but they are less angry with them, I think, than with Westerners who equivocate or worse on the morality of murdering Jews.

The most affecting part of the trip, though, was not the visit to the hospital, or to my family, or hearing from terror victims or their families or going to the Green Line or to Gilo and seeing the walls going up and the sandbags piled against sniper fire - fire aimed, of course, at ordinary people, not soldiers. The most moving experience of the trip was being at the Kotel (the Western Wall) on Friday night to welcome the Sabbath. We were there the first Shabbat that the students at Yeshivat Ha-Kotel returned from vacation, and as is their practiced they emerged from their yeshivah as the sun went down and began to slowly dance and sing their way across the plaza towards the wall. To see hundreds of young, strong, Jews singing and dancing with joy at the Kotel on the eve of the Sabbath, to dance and sing and pray with them under the darkening sky - the words Am Yisrael Chai ("the People of Israel Lives") never felt so true to me before. And this was not a political rally, some ceremony of forced emotion; this was not a gathering to make a point; this is what Jews are supposed to do every Friday night, and to do it with such evident joy, in such numbers, in the most important place on earth for Jews to do it and at a time when Jews in numbers would normally be thinking little else but aren't we a big fat target standing here together like this - it took me completely out of myself.

I encourage anyone considering going to go. It's not the most relaxing vacation, but there are other rewards. I did not visit anywhere that made me feel unsafe; the presence of security personnel is obvious everywhere. I would recommend going in some organized fashion, whether as a volunteer through Volunteers for Israel or Magen David Adom, or whether on an organized mission or something. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable going and having to make my own way around. The one time I had a twinge of concern was in a taxi coming home from Kfar Saba; as we passed Mod'in the driver sped up and called the police to report a car with Israeli plates with five Arabs inside driving very fast towards Jerusalem. We followed that car all the way to Jerusalem, and never saw the police; presumably, they checked the plates and the car wasn't stolen, and that ended my little experience with racial profiling. But other than that, I never really felt concerned for my safety, even in south Gilo looking out over Beit Jalla and Bethlehem. I'm already trying to figure out how to get back for another visit.

I'll have more thoughts I expect over the next few days; that's all for now.
posted by Noah at 7:43 PM

 
I'm glad so many people have been visiting since Derb mentioned this site. Unfortunately for y'all, there's going to be a 1-week hiatus coming up, because I'm going to Israel on a solidarity mission. I'll be blogging my impressions and so forth when I return, so do come back the week after next. For now, a gut shabbos.
posted by Noah at 5:51 PM

 
Well, I think I need to see Tadpole. I liked Spank the Monkey (maybe "liked" isn't quite the right word: the movie was horrifying, but terribly true and very worth seeing), and I liked Rambling Rose (here "liked" is definitely the right word), and while I'm not a huge fan of The Graduate the reason is because I thought Dustin Hoffman's character was annoying, not because I thought Anne Bancroft's character wasn't fascinating.

I think Thomas Hibbs' take on Tadpole and the double-standard is right. And I think this is the answer to Andrew Sullivan and others who have accused right-wingers of being more concerned about abuse of children by gay men than by straights. It's not true: everyone is horrified by the abuse of children by men, whether the children are male of female. It's the abuse (or taking-advantage) of adolescent boys by women that is treated as different. And I don't think that's 100% wrong. That's not to say such situations are not exploitative; it's pretty clear to me that they are. But I do think the social and psychological impact on a teenage boy in the Tadpole scenario would be rather different than the impact on a teenage girl.

Anyhow, I'll let everyone know what I think after seeing the flick.
posted by Noah at 5:37 PM

 
Oh come on, Derb, lighten up. Things aren't nearly as bad as all that. Let's go point by point:

* Most of us will die in poverty. No, most of us will die working. What is anomalous is the current situation where people retire and live active, nonworking lives for 2 or 3 decades. That will end. People can work healthily and happily out to age 75 or 80 in a great many cases, and they will do so. And they will have plenty to eat and plenty of medicines. And they'll probably be less bored.

* Quality health care for all is not possible. Manifestly untrue: quality health-care for all is ludicrously cheap. Top quality health care for all is not possible. Let's face it: bottom-drawer insurance today pays for better health care than top-drawer insurance 50 years ago. Drugs and procedures get better, safer and cheaper every year. If we were not committed to egalitarianism in health care, providing excellent but not the best health care for everyone would be a snap. As for the quality of staff: this is hardly a structural problem of health-care; it's a structural problem of our education system, our legal system, and our public-sector unionism. These are things we can fix.

* Pop culture is filth. Okay, you got me there. I don't own a television myself, so I obviously agree.

* The environment is collapsing. This is really a question about whether the Third World can ever become comparably rich to the First World. That's an open question. We have several positive data points from East Asia: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. But perhaps their success can't be replicated; we'll see. The point is, London's air was once positively unbreatheable, and now it is pretty much clean. The same transition will undoubtedly happen to every country that pulls itself up to a high level of wealth and a low rate of population growth. The open question is how many countries can do this. But note again: the environment recovers. In 1850, about 25% of NY State was forested. Now it's more like 65%. Our air, water and land is getting cleaner every year. It can be done; we'll see if it can be done everywhere.

* Science has stopped. Really? I don't seem to recall any of the current information technology we take for granted being predicted in 1950 - or 1970, for that matter. Science is hard to predict, but it is hardly stopping.

* Not all groups are equally good at all things. Okay. So? And as for the corollary: this depends on whether all groups, while good at different things, cannot share power equally as citizens. We've confused two propositions: one, that there are statistical differences in people's abilities; two, that some groups are sufficiently better at all the important things that bring wealth, power and security that affirmative action is the only way to prevent a racial caste system with consequent social instability. It's the latter that I reject.

* Socialism is popular. True. So is capitalism. I'll grant you that from 1910 to 1965 or so, Socialism was winning most of the arguments. But can you really argue that they've been winning, on balance, since 1965? I don't see the evidence.

* Conservatism is dead. Well, it depends what you mean by conservatism. For true Tory conservatism to exist, you need to have something to protect and defend. Once that order is gone, perhaps you should call the folks on the right something other than conservative. That's the world we're in today. There's precious little of the medieval order left for a conservative to defend. There's the British monarchy. There's the concept of national sovereignty. I'm running out of other ideas. But the right, in contemporary terms, encompasses both the Tory and the Whiggish persuasions, because the leftist "new class" ideology is the enemy of both. And it is far from clear that Whiggish ideas are out of favor, whether we're talking about Evangelical Protestantism (on the wane? I think not) or entrepreneurial capitalism. This, it seems to me, is the main thing that is bothering Derb about American "conservatism" - it's overwhelmingly Whiggish rather than Tory, and therefore optimistic and future-oriented.

* Nothing will be done about immigration. Probably true, certainly a potential problem. But I remain bullish on our ability to assimilate the huge Mexican immigration, and the rest of the immigration wave is a drop in an ocean compared to the mid-19th and early-20th century deluges. We've got a pretty good history on this one.

* Only Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy. How do we know this? France has been, mostly, self-governing since 1789. That's only 1 century after the Glorious Revolution. I prefer the American model of self-government to either the British or the French versions, but that doesn't mean I deny that the French govern themselves. I think that Whiggish history is still quite persuasive: self-government is a good idea that has spread, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes with dramatic reverses, for 300 to 500 years (depending on where you start from) from it's roots in Britain. Again, that's a short time in historical terms. But the trend line is pretty clear.

* China will get stronger and richer, without moving one inch closer to constitutional government. Also, Taiwan will be re-united with the Motherland . . . by some combination of economic carrot and military stick. Sadly, I think he's right on this one, too. The trend line is pretty bad since 1989. We should all be studying British policy towards Germany from 1900 to 1914, and try to understand if and how it contributed to war. The greatest blame fell on the Kaiser, of course, but that was precious little comfort to the millions of widows, orphans and mothers who lost their husbands, fathers and sons in the Great War.

* Something inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East. I don't think you're going to get much argument from anyone on this one, Derb.

* The Four Horsemen of War, Famine, Pestilence and Microsoft. Yes, well, no argument on the last item. War is with us now. The trend lines since World War I on this one are: an vastly increasing percentage of war's casualties are civilians in poor countries. September 11th may mean a reversal of that trend-line; we'll see. As for famine: really? With the world awash in food and population growth rates dropping like a stone? I don't think so. Pestilence is your best bet, apart from Microsoft, but even there, the experience of the AIDS epidemic is: if you live in a rich country and don't expose yourself to ludicrous risk factors, you're in pretty good shape. I think the greatest risk of pestilence is tied to war, and that scenario is very hard to handicap.

* The U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism. Really? I seem to recall one John Derbyshire pointing out a column by a certain blonde conservative starlet that detailed all the simple, legal things that we could do to reduce the risks of terrorism dramatically without traducing the Constitution, things we have not done to date. Is the Constitution really a problem? Or our political/diplomatic paralysis? The Constitution survived the Civil War, and was strengthened by the post-war amendments. It'll survive this.

* Justice is dead. Again, look at a trend line. How many of the most liberal judges are geezers versus youngsters. Now how many of the most conservative. I don't think this is a tough call. And as for crime: are you talking about America, or France? Speaking for New Yorkers, we have absolutely no intention of letting real crime go up dramatically, and a politician who presides over a period when it does will be destroyed at the polls. Giuliani changed us; he showed us what could be done. We ain't goin' back.

* We are living in a golden age. I suspect people in Anglo-Saxon countries have been saying this since the coronation of James I. And, in some sense, it has been true every time they said it.
posted by Noah at 9:33 AM

 
This is important news: White House says Sept. 11 skyjacker had met Iraqi agent. Not that Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague; we've known that for a while, and the Czechs - who have no axe to grind here - have stuck by their story for months. The news is that a White House official endorses the story for the first time. Sounds like we're preparing the ground for an alternative justification for an invasion of Iraq, in case Saddam succeeds in getting some kind of neutered UN inspection regime restored. Remember: Tony Blair and I think Joschka Fischer as well said that Iraqi involvement in September 11th would justify war on Iraq, a war they would join, but that to-date evidence of such involvement was lacking. Stay tuned.
posted by Noah at 7:51 AM

 
Welcome to all the visitors brought here by John Derbyshire, to whom I owe a debt of thanks. If you're looking for stuff that is at least somewhat topical to what John directed you here for (stuff about the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on questions of nationalism and how it - or the lack of it in a mature form - plays into the current war against the West and the prospects for success - or even survival - of various countries in the region (long sentence, I know), here are a few items from the archives:

* On Egypt's foreign policy priorities.
* On the difference between Egypt and Syria.
* On not blaming Islam, and how it's not that simple.
* On healthy nationalism, its lack in much of the Middle East, and how this causes problems that can't be solved from the outside.
* A follow-up on the same topic.
* 10 rules for building successful nations in the Middle East.
* On various models of nationalism and their differences (and particularly on which is most appropriate for Israel).
* On the consequences of not supporting revolution in Iran, with reference to post-1989 China.

Stick around. I can't. Got to go back to work.
posted by Noah at 2:17 PM