So does this make me more or less of a geek that I took my guest list out of Microsoft Word, where it was in a table (I love making tables in Word), changed each “L” and “D” to “1″ to signify the number attending the lunch or dinner, and then, of course, totaled the columns. So now I don’t have to count anymore. All I have to do is add a 0 or 1 to the spreadsheet, and it tells me how many people need to be fed. I’m going to equivocate Friday night with Saturday lunch in numbers. I think I won’t go wrong there.

And by the way, if anyone out there has an odd hour throughout the day that they’re not doing anything, and they know haftarah, I’d love to have even more people out there to bounce my practices off.

I should have started a month before I did. It’s crunch time. I’m getting better with the trope, but I’m not there yet. And there’s still the Torah to learn, which my rabbi probably doesn’t think I can do, though he hid it well today.

Sorry, but failure is not an option.

Yesterday, I wondered how many of the three winners of the Nobel prize in economics were Jewish.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to Leonid Hurwicz, 90 years old, a retired professor at the University of Minnesota, who told reporters he thought his chances at the honor had faded; Eric S. Maskin, 56, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.; and Roger B. Myerson, 56, of the University of Chicago.

The answer: All of them. I’m not quite sure why Wikipedia finds it important to point out in the first sentence of a biography whether you were “born to a Jewish family.” (I have yet to find a reference to someone being “born to a Christian family” or “born to a Muslim family,” but hey, perhaps it’s not nearly as important to know if someone was a Christian or a Muslim than it is to know they are Jewish.) Digressions aside, all three of our boys are Jews. In fact, they’re all three American Jews.

That makes 155 Jewish Nobel prize winners in total, most of them American Jews. And of the ones who were born in other countries, well, a large percentage of them wound up here, too. Europe has been giving itself a lobotomy, as they say, for many, many years.

Hurwicz was born in 1917 to a Jewish family from Poland, World War I refugees from the Congress Kingdom displaced to Moscow, a few months before the October Revolution. Shortly thereafter, the family returned to Warsaw. In 1938 he received his LL.M. degree from Warsaw University. In 1939 he studied at the London School of Economics, then went to Geneva and studied at the Graduate Institute of International Studies.[5] After World War II began, he was forced to move to Portugal, and finally in 1940 to the United States.[6] He continued his studies at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.[7] His parents and brother fled Warsaw, only to be arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps.

People talk about the brain drain of various nations’ top scientists and doctors coming to the U.S. because here’s where the action is. But let’s not forget the incredible addition of talent America has received due to the persecution of European Jewry for the last few centuries. The waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe brought America a lot more than the Hollywood studio system. It brought us top scientists, thinkers, doctors, technologists, and authors.

This is what I like to call an in-your-face moment for the David Dukes of the world. The convicted felon, whose only contribution to the world is the spread of hatred and bigotry, goes to Iran to be feted by his fellow bigots at the Holocaust denial conference, while back in America, the Jews that Duke hates so much are working hard at their respective crafts, and being recognized by the rest of the world for the valuable contributions they make. The fact that envy makes up a great part of the world’s Jew-hatred simply cannot be denied.

But there’s one country that has never expelled her Jews. And while there has been (and continues to be) anti-Semitism in America, there have never been pogroms, and Jews are safer, more protected, and more a part of society in America than they have ever been in Europe.

So let’s hear it for America, the nation where Jews have carved out one of our greatest successes since Biblical times. Let’s celebrate the nation of true diversity, not the faux diversity that is the European Union.

And while we’re on the subject of America: Two more Americans won the Nobel prize in medicine. Add five more Americans to the tally, one who was born in Italy, and the other in Great Britain. Our nation of immigrants just keeps on truckin’.

Welcome, Instapundit readers. An update to the post: There’s one in every crowd, of course, and when it comes to Jews, far more than one. From a comment that was not approved:

Maybe Jews are just better at self promotion

Hype , hype ,hype hype,, It’s the Jews creed

Say, thanks for illustrating my point about envy, anonymous schmuck. And may I point out to you that hype doesn’t get you a Nobel prize for economics.

American efforts to bridge the gaps between Israel and the Palestinians to culminate in a summit at the end of November are being met by skepticism in the Arab and Muslim worlds according to Jeffrey Fleishman of the LA Times.

Posturing and recrimination often characterize such negotiations, but Arab nations, including Washington’s closest allies, are criticizing the November conference as a miscalculated photo op by a Bush administration desperate to repair its image in the Middle East.

“This is not an effort to save the Palestinians, it’s an attempt to prop up the administration’s very low standing in the Arab world,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “Saudi Arabia and other Washington allies will lose a lot of credibility if this is just to take part in an American show.”Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice plans a visit to the region this week aimed at persuading Arab countries to send at least ministry-level officials to the meeting in Annapolis, Md. But analysts and media in the Middle East complain that the U.S. has not done the diplomatic legwork needed to advance peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Preliminary talks between the two sides are at an impasse.

The article emphasizes the Arab weakness and parrots the line that the failure of the summit would only “embolden the extremists.” (It seems that every “successful” Israeli peace effort - such as withdrawing from Lebanon or from Gaza, or allowing Fatah into Gaza and Jericho - has “emboldened the extremists” too, so how failure would differ from success is unclear.)

The New York Times reports

With time running out on his tenure, President Bush has called for an international conference to be held in the United States this fall as part of a renewed push to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, trying to leave a legacy that has enticed and eluded his predecessors.In Ramallah, Ms. Rice, on her seventh trip to the region this year, described Mr. Bush’s initiative as “the most serious effort to end this conflict in many, many years.” In some of her strongest language yet, she said, “Frankly, it’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The Times also includes this gratuitous bit:

Appearing with Ms. Rice at the Palestinian Authority compound in Ramallah — which Israeli forces battered in 2002 as his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, was holed up inside, and which has been partly rebuilt — Mr. Abbas reiterated that even the initial document must address the most contentious issues.

Israel did not simply batter the “muqata.” It was fighting a war that was instigated by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

The Washington Post reports

Rice arrived this week facing deep skepticism among Arabs and Israelis about such lofty statements, especially given what many here regard as the administration’s past disengagement from the issue — a position Rice flatly rejected today. With great interest by both sides in her visit, Rice and senior American officials are trying to tamp down expectations about what can be accomplished in the near term, nervous that a conspicuous failure to pull off the peace conference could spark new violence in the Palestinian territories or have other unforeseen consequences.

The fear that a summit’s failure would spark violence, again, is indicative of what’s wrong with all these “peace efforts.” If these “peace efforts” were to be successful, violence would not be a problem in the event of failure, as, officially, the Palestinians have abjured violence and committed themselves to the political process. Of course that never happened. While it’s certainly not unreasonable to fear Hamas now, it was Arafat of the “moderate” PA who decided to keep violence as an option despite his signed commitment to the contrary.

The other reason that “peace efforts” fail, is that they’re not synonymous with coming to an acceptable resolution between the two parties, but with America pressuring Israel into concessions. The Palestinians (and the Arab and Muslim worlds supporting them) want to avoid negotiation. They will claim that they are too weak for concessions and demand that Israel accede to all their demands. In fact, they (and especially the Palestinians) are too weak for anything, as Deja Vu notes:

Worried Israelis listening to their hapless prime minister announce that Jerusalem is on the table cannot but join Barry Rubin in asking: And what do we get? “After all,” as he points out, “Israel is negotiating with people who have no control over much of the territory or people on whose behalf they speak.” So how can it give Israel what it wants, security, i.e., peace? It cannot even if it wanted and it is doubtful it wants.

And that’s because the “peace process” is never about Israel. It’s defined solely by the creation of a Palestinian according Palestinian specifications. So why doesn’t the State Department take a step and ask what the United States gains from a Palestinian state that is handed to the PA on a silver platter? Why are Palestinian demands sacrosanct and Israeli concerns dismissed? Why is nothing of substance required of the Palestinians?

Four years ago 3 State Department employees were killed in Gaza. To date nothing has been done to bring their murderers to justice. Wouldn’t this be a good time for the American government to insist on justice?

The American government missed the opportunity to threaten the closure of the PLO office for not fighting terror. But the American government ought to use the failure of the PLO (the “moderates”) to hold the murderers accountable as leverage.

The government can argue that a Palestinian state is in American interests. But that rings hollow when American aid workers are killed by Palestinians with impunity. It can argue that a Palestinian state will lead to peace. But that argument doesn’t withstand the fact that the Palestinians allow immunity to terrorists. And it can argue that a Palestinian state is good for the Palestinians. But that also doesn’t stand up if the Palestinian can’t govern themselves.

Making the satisfactory resolution of this case a basis for any further diplomatic recognition of the PA would be a necessary step in the right direction. More than anything else it would show that the American government is serious about peace and a Palestinian state. It would add the element of Palestinian responsibility to the list of requirement necessary for mid-East peace.

Unfortunately, it looks like the American government is more interested in pacifying the Arab palaces than in creating the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

So while Abbas and Qurei and various other Palestinian leaders drone on about final status issues, Jerusalem, insisting on moving back to the 1949 Armistice lines (a.k.a. “pre-1967 borders”), UN resolutions, yadda yadda, blah blah blah, ad nauseum, the Palestinians, well, they just keep on killin’. Or trying to. And they don’t care how many of their own get caught in the crossfire.

IDF soldiers on Tuesday morning killed the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades commander in the old city of Nablus, Bassam Abu-Seria, also known as Gaddafi, Palestinian sources reported.

The sources added that a Palestinian civilian in his seventies was shot to death as he left his home and that three other group members were injured.

[...] According to the source, Shakher al-Wazir, a Palestinian civilian in his seventies, was killed in the exchanges of fire after being shot near his house. The Palestinians claimed that he was forced to leave his home due to the clashes and was caught in the exchanges of fire between the soldiers and the gunmen hiding in the building.

You got that? The terrorists forced the civilians out of their homes into the middle of a gun battle. Why? Propaganda value if they were killed, protection for the terrorists in any case. And there’s the lack of respect for the lives of their own people. Just the other day, Palestinian “police”murdered a five-year-old boy, and nobody noticed.

Palestinian Authority security forces shot dead two Palestinians on Saturday, including a five-year-old boy, in the West Bank city of Qalqilyah.

According to local resident, security forces opened fire after a 22-year-old man refused to stop at a PA roadblock in the city. The 22-year-old man was killed, as was five-year-old Yazid Obid.

Funny, when American soldiers kill two women at a checkpoint in Iraq, it makes the headlines worldwide. When an errant Israeli shell kills civilians in Gaza, the world comes down on Israel in loud, angry condemnation, often involving the UN. When the Palestinians kill their own children—no one cares. It’s simply not newsworthy.

Because the IDF didn’t do it.

Yet another example of the anti-Israel media bias and Israel Derangement Syndrome.

An Aspen public-access TV station has decided not to air a Holocaust-denial video that was being pushed by a 9/11 “truther”:

The GrassRoots TV board of directors voted Monday to ban a controversial Holocaust-denial film.

Steve Campbell, founder of Citizens for 9/11 Truth, asked the station to air “Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II” on Oct. 1.

But after prescreening the film, which questions conventional wisdom about the Holocaust, GrassRoots TV board members stopped the airing, pending further debate.

The board held an open forum on the matter Oct. 11 to gauge community reaction.

“The GrassRoots Television board has decided not to air the film ‘Judea declares War on Germany,’” GrassRoots TV board chairman Alan Feldman said in a statement after the board meeting Monday.

“After careful consideration and community input, the board concluded that this film is obscene, repugnant to the generally accepted notion of what is appropriate in our community. GrassRoots TV will not allow the station to be used as a vehicle to incite hatred against any group. GrassRoots Television will issue a more detailed statement to our community in coming days.”

Feldman promised a board policy in the future: “Our community spoke, and we have given it a lot of rational thinking,” Feldman said. “We have the ability to refuse to air something if we believe it’s obscene.”

Campbell called it a “poor decision.”

“Unfortunately, it shows basically what I and others have tried to say about this whole issue,” Campbell said. “There are those who don’t want you to see this information, and they’ll do anything they can to stop you from watching it. And that’s just what they’re doing.”

Campbell has shown other controversial films on GrassRoots, as well as on Rifle’s public access station, he said.

He called the debate over “Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II” a matter of “conscious-raising.”

“I just think that it’s a travesty what’s going on,” Campbell said.

Campbell said he is not planning any legal action against GrassRoots but added, “By censoring this film, it’s only going to make people watch it more.”

Campbell said that while he is being censored now, “The truth will come out. It’s just like the grass that grows between the cracks in the sidewalk.”

He said he might try and air the film in another venue, but he was disappointed that the large audience in Aspen wouldn’t see it.

“This is part of the beginning of the loss of our freedoms of expression and speech and the dissemination of information just so certain people can maintain their status quo,” Campbell said.

As I discussed last week, the Aspen Times newspaper editorialized that the film be shown.

Notice how they cover this story above: giving far more space to the illiterate anti-semite (”conscious-raising”?) than to the people who made the decision. Not to mention the oh-so-politically correct way of referring to one of the purest forms of hate speech as simply “controversial” and as “question(ing the) conventional wisdom about the Holocaust.”

The “censored” video is available at Amazon (one reviewer, 4 stars) and can be seen on-line if you care to look for it.

The name of the production company, believe it or not, is Amalek Productions.

(cross-posted to Elder of Ziyon) 

Last week Hugh Hewitt wrote about An Astonishing And Sickening Breach Of Trust. A private firm that tracks terrorist movements got a hold of the Osama bin Laden video last month, before its release.

It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

This week the NY Times broke the story of a North Carolina based blogger who spread the glad tidings of Jihad.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.”Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

This is an example of some excellent reporting. Except …
Except that Dr. Rusty Shackleford of the Jawa Report complained

Thanks a lot to Michael Moss and the New York Times for blowing an ongoing investigation into a known al Qaeda sympathizer who lives here in the United States. I’ve known about this piece for a few weeks and wrote the NY Times to ask Moss not to run it. No reply from the Times.While we appreciate Moss’s commitment to spreading the word about the Internet Jihad, we really wish he would have consulted with us on the matter. He has a right to out Inshallahshaheed as Samir Khan, but doing so has jeopardized an ongoing investigation into a terror ring which begins in the US and ends in Somalia.

But that’s just like the NY Times, isn’t it? In Moss’s defense, he seems to have asked the FBI if there was an investigation into Khan, and they declined to comment.

While I can understand Shackleford’s frustration, the fact that the reporter couldn’t get information on the case from the government seems to be the major complaint. If the government had told the Times’s reporter not to publicize its story, the Times might have listened. But like the Osama video case it appears that the media, like the government has limited respect for private investigators of the jihadists.

A few years ago, the New Yorker profiled the SITE intelligence group’s founder, Rita Katz. Katz, who started out working for Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project, but later founded her own group.

Taking two staff members from the Investigative Project, Katz set up her own office. She got by on small government contracts. Some of that work, done for the Treasury Department, involved identifying Islamic groups that might be sending money to terrorist organizations. She also had a contract with the Swiss government and with a group of relatives of 9/11 victims who were suing Saudi Arabian officials, businesses, and charities. Still, during the first two years, Katz said, she couldn’t always pay salaries.But Katz’s organization had embedded itself in the Internet, and when a part-time P.R. consultant whom Katz brought in suggested that she start a subscription service, Katz sent out an e-mail to people and groups she had worked with. In a few weeks, SITE had a few dozen subscribers, each paying twenty-five hundred dollars annually. (SITE is a nonprofit organization, and also raises money from private donors.)

According the article, the number of “open-source counterterrorism operations” is small. And yet they can trace the crumbs that jihadists leave over the internet. And clearly there is some good they do.

For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as “wills,” the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going. Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days, the staffer told Katz that one of the site’s members, a young Muslim man in a European country, had just posted a will. “It was obvious that he was planning to become a martyr very soon,” Katz said.Katz called officials in Washington, and was met with institutional resistance: “They said, ‘Oh, Rita, I’m not sure you should even be communicating with them—you might be providing material support!’ And they wanted to get approval from the Department of Justice to look at the e-mails. I said, ‘Look, we have to do something.’ ” Katz then called an American counterterrorism official stationed in the young man’s country, and he, in turn, sent the jihadi’s e-mails to local investigators. Within twenty-four hours, they had him under surveillance, and a week later they arrested him. “In my opinion, they probably wouldn’t have had a clue if it hadn’t been for Rita,” the official told me. This, Katz said, is what she always hopes to achieve: “It’s one case where everything just worked so well.”

SITE has had some failures too (that are mentioned in the article) and these, naturally, lead to critics.

It’s possible that her immersion in the world of terrorism has removed whatever skepticism or doubts she may have had. “Much as Al Jazeera underplays terrorist threats, the SITE Institute at times overhypes them,” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit, said.

(I’m no fan of Scheuer’s who wrote “Imperial Hubris,” while still at the C.I.A.) Yet despite the nay-sayers it appears that SITE accomplishes quite a bit of good. (The reporter, despite the negatives, comes across as impressed with Katz and her work.)

And yet, it appears, these two incidents show that private anti-terror groups may not get the respect they deserve from officialdom. (Be it the government or the media.) Hopefully, the damage from such dismissals will be minimal.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I thought I had Mary Katherine Ham on my blogroll, but I didn’t. Now I do.

I like her. I love watching her on the cable news shows as their resident conservative internet expert. She was on CNN yesterday talking about Ann Coulter. We aren’t very far apart on what we think of the issue, and she made Dana Goldstein of TAPPED look practically incoherent. Here’s a tip, Dana: Lose the middle school girl vocal style. When you end every sentence with an upswing like a question, you sound childish, unsure, and unintelligent. That’s fine when you’re ten. But you’re a grownup now, and you need to learn to talk like a grownup. (She was actually pleased with her first TV appearance. Sad.)

Mary Katherine, on the other hand, has been professional from the get-go. And there’s something about her that makes me feel like we could be friends. Well, maybe next time I’m in New York, I’ll look her up. Of course, I’m going to feel really old meeting her, but hey—I tried going backwards. It doesn’t work.