A few people gave me money for my bat mitzvah, and I’ve decided to apply the money towards something I’ve wanted for six years: Real desks for my students. I’ve got about $500 in the fund, since I decided that family money stays in the family, but all other funds go towards the desks.

If anyone wants to add a little bit to the Bat Mitzvah Desk Fund, I’ve got Amazon and Paypal tipjars on the left sidebar. Amazon allows anonymous donations. (Email me if you’d rather have an address to send a check.)

I’m also donating some of my own money. It really is nice to be able to start contributing more to the school. Today was a rough day—the kids were nearly unmanageable—but I still went home smiling after spending two hours with my students. And with individual desks, I’ll be able to solve about half the discipline problems. We currently sit around two long tables put together, which is not the best learning environment. The kids need their own space. And I need them sitting up and attentive like they’re at school—which they are. But they call public school “regular school” and don’t think of Hebrew school as such. Desks will do a lot to change that way of thinking. Oh, I could be a lot stricter on the kids, and that would get them to sit up straight, sit in their chairs, and stop bouncing around and grabbing the other students things and doing half the things that nine-year-olds do—but it would also get them to resent coming to religious school, and make it that much harder to teach. Right now, my students hate to miss one of my classes. And that’s the way I like it.

I should scan in some of the hand-made bat mitzvah notes they gave me. Very, very cute.

I’m listening to Phillip Glass’ “Metamorphosis” right now, thanks to reader John M.

Can’t wait to hear the Galactica soundtrack CD. I’ll have just enough time to listen to both before I have to teach today.

Thanks, John. Two early (and unexpected!) birthday presents. What a way to balance out the bills and summons for jury duty in today’s mail.

Eh. Jury duty will be fine. It’s the first time I’ve been called since I moved to Richmond. No, that’s not true. I got called by Essex County my first year. Didn’t have to serve, though. They accepted my “I’ve moved” excuse.

By the way, does anyone know when they’re releasing Season Three? I don’t have Sci-Fi Channel and I never saw them. I got the DVDs of 1 and 2.

I’m almost ready to buy the episodes on iTunes and watch them on my computer.

via memeorandum

This is not news, but there’s another academic concluding that terror is not a function of poverty. In this case it is Alan Krueger who explains What makes a terrorist.

Claude Berrebi, now of the RAND Corporation’s Institute for Civil Justice, wrote his dissertation at Princeton on the characteristics of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were involved in terrorist activities. For example, he compared suicide bombers to the whole male pop­ulation aged 16 to 50 and found that the suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line. In addi­tion, almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school education, compared with less than 15 percent of the general population. Jitka Malecková and I performed a similar study of militant members of Hezbollah, a multifaceted organization in Lebanon that has been labeled a ter­rorist organization by the U.S. State Department. We were able to obtain information on the biogra­phies of 129 deceased shahids (martyrs) who had been honored in the group’s newsletter, “Al-Ahd.” We turned translations by Eli Hurvitz at Tel Aviv University into a data­set and then combined it with information on the Lebanese popu­lation from the 1996 Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs Housing Survey of 120,000 peo­ple aged 15 to 38. These deceased mem­bers of Hezbollah had a lower poverty rate than the Lebanese population: 28 percent versus 33 percent. And Hezbollah members were better educated: 47 percent had a secondary or higher education ver­sus 38 percent of adult Lebanese. This is also the case, apparently, with al-Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer, has written a book titled Understanding Terror Networks. He found that a high proportion of mem­bers of al-Qaeda were college educated (close to 35 percent) and drawn from skilled professions (almost 45 percent). Research on members of the Israeli extremist group, Gush Emunim, that Malecková and I conducted, also pointed in the same direc­tion. Perhaps most definitively, the Library of Congress produced a summary report for an advi­sory group to the CIA titled, “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” which also reached this conclusion—two years before 9/11.

(I don’t know why Gush Emunim is thrown in. It is not a terror group.) Another observer, Scott Atran, came to a similar conclusion a few years ago, however his policy prescription leaves much to be desired.

Shows of military strength don’t seem to dissuade terrorists: witness the failure of Israel’s coercive efforts to end the string of Palestinian suicide bombings. Rather, we need to show the Muslim world the side of our culture that they most respect. Our engagement needs to involve interfaith initiatives, not ethnic profiling. America must address grievances, such as the conflict in the Palestinian territories, whose daily images of violence engender global Muslim resentment.

But as Noah Pollak showed, Israel’s “show of military strength” has likely eroded the Palestinian capacity for conducting a terror campaign in the manner of the “Aqsa intdifada” of 2001 - 2003.

Israel’s victory involved several key elements: the killing and imprisonment of large numbers of the Palestinian corps of jihadists, especially the terror leaders; the construction of a security wall that today makes Palestinian penetration of Israel immeasurably more difficult; and a revolution in Israel’s intelligence-gathering and military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. By way of everything from checkpoints and electronic surveillance to the cultivation of networks of informants and the deployment of undercover operatives, the Shabak (the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service and counterintelligence agency) and IDF dramatically have curtailed the ability of Palestinian terror groups to organize themselves and attack Israel. You wouldn’t know much of this living in the U.S., where the daily heroics of the Israeli security services largely go unnoticed. A lot of people—such as Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl—apparently believe that the suicide bombings of the “second intifada” no longer occur because the Palestinians gave up the tactic, or decided to halt their offensive, or no longer wish to use terrorism to kill Jews. Diehl and his ilk seem to think that such attacks can be resumed at any moment. But they are badly misguided. Anyone who doubts this should read the Israeli press on a daily basis, where stories of suicide bombings thwarted in the West Bank—as opposed to stories of suicide bombers detonating themselves in Tel Aviv—are regular occurrences.

Atran, and those like him look solely at motive, not, as I argued earlier, on means and opportunity. Krueger, is correct when he writes,

To under­stand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extrem­ist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

It’s an observation that matches that of Daniel Pipes from a few years ago.

Islamic Jihad, which along with Hamas trains the suicide killers, explains: “We do not take depressed people. If there were a one-in-a-thousand chance that a person was suicidal, we would not allow him to martyr himself. In order to be a martyr bomber, you have to want to live.” The same strange logic applies for Hamas, which rejects anyone “who commits suicide because he hates the world.” Convincing healthy individuals to blow themselves up is obviously not easy, but requires ideas and institutions. The process begins with the Palestinian Authority (PA) inculcating two things into its population, starting with the children: a hatred of Jews and a love of death. School curricula, camp activities, TV programming and religious indoctrination all portray Israelis in a Nazi-style way, as sub-human being worthy of killing; and then deprecate the instinct for self-preservation, telling impressionable young people that sacrificing their lives is the most noble of all goals.

Unfortunately Krueger didn’t look at indoctrination and concluded that a lack of freedom plays a significant role in terrorism. He may have a point. But I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that this is probably one factor in explaining the increase in Palestinian terror against Israel since the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians were freer when occupied by Israel than when ruled by Arafat. (Atran elsewhere has argued that occupation is the root of all terror.) The indoctrination served to direct the terror against Israel.

I still think that the indoctrination is more important. Palestinian terror has worked because it’s been successful. It’s made otherwise rational people say, “I may differ with their methods, but they have a legitimate grievance.” Political support for a state of Palestine grew out of such sentiments that became pervasive in the diplomatic world. Unfortunately a view that “If these are their methods they undermine even a legitimate grievance” never took hold. If it had, it may have created enough disincentive for the Palestinian to engage in terror. Even now there’s still a view that Israel must accommodate Hamas even though it has shown no reciprocal interest and even though it has never moderated its actions (or words) towards Israel.

Regardless of what causes terrorism, what stops it is clearly force. (Even if it doesn’t work immediately.) Wishing for change that is not there only serves to promote more terror, rather than appease its practitioners.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Hamas killed seven and wounded 85 in a rally for Yasser Arafat yesterday. Today, they’re making mass arrests. Yeah, that freedom that they promised the Palestinians? Not seeing it yet.

Hamas security forces moved swiftly against their Fatah rivals in the aftermath of a mass Fatah rally that ended with seven people dead, rounding up 400 people in an overnight crackdown, Fatah officials said Tuesday.

The detainees included dozens of the rally’s organizers, Fatah spokesman Hazem Abu Shanab said. Hamas officials were not immediately available for comment.

Monday’s rally, a memorial service for the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, drew 250,000 people, making it Fatah’s biggest show of force in Gaza since Hamas took control of the coastal territory in June. It ended in the worst violence Gaza has seen since the Hamas takeover, with seven civilians killed and 85 wounded as Hamas men opened fire on protesters.

And the terrorists did what terrorists often do at the funeral: Shot each other some more.

Four of the victims were buried Tuesday without incident. On Monday, a funeral for one 19-year-old killed at the rally turned violent when mourners clashed with Hamas men, leaving three people wounded.

And once again, Israeli Double Standard Time is in effect. This next part of the story lies buried eight paragraphs down in the AP wire story, where it will never make the three-to-five paragraph World News section of most local newspapers.

In one confrontation, hundreds of young Fatah activists, some wrapped in their movement’s yellow flag, faced off against Hamas police in black or blue-camouflage uniforms across an intersection.

The Fatah supporters pelted Hamas troops with stones, surging forward even as they were met by heavy bursts of gunfire. One Hamas policeman dropped to one knee for better aim. At one point, a young stone thrower collapsed and was carried off by others.

And of course, the AP and Reuters never use the words “Hamas Kills” in their headlines. Typical headlines used different terminology, like “Rally for Arafat turns deadly in Gaza“. CNN, on the other hand, calls a murderer a murderer: Seven killed in Hamas-Fatah fighting at Arafat rally. (Good for CNN.)

In the Reuters story, it was gunfire that killed the Palestinians, not Hamas: Gunfire kills seven at Fatah rally in Gaza. And in an amazing example of managing to not give us the facts, our old pal Nidal al-Mughrabi writes an entire lede—and it is approved by the Reuters editors—without once saying that Hamas gunmen did the shooting.

GAZA (Reuters) - Gunfire killed at least seven people and wounded 80 on Monday at a Fatah memorial rally for Yasser Arafat attended by more than 200,000 supporters of the defeated faction in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

A sea of yellow Fatah flags had filled a Gaza square for the biggest gathering held by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular faction in the territory since Hamas Islamists routed its fighters there in June.

The rare Fatah rally broke up in chaos after gunfire rang out and grew into what Hamas described as battles with the rival group’s fighters, forcing even members of the crowd who had initially stood their ground to bolt for cover.

Dr Muawiyah Hassanein, head of Gaza’s emergency medical services, said seven people, all civilians, were killed. He said 80 people, including several Hamas security men, were wounded.

Fatah officials accused Hamas forces of opening fire from the nearby Islamic University. Hamas said its men had come under attack from Fatah gunmen and returned fire.

Note how even to the last, Reuters refuses to blame Hamas for firing on civilians. They give the Hamas excuses as fact.

The BBC manages to blame the crowd for causing their own deaths.

The violence occurred when Fatah supporters began taunting Hamas police and throwing stones, witnesses said.

The Hamas security forces reportedly responded by firing towards the crowd.

Those sound like Hamas witnesses to me. CNN managed to tell the truth.

It is unclear how the incident began; each side blamed the other for firing first.

Why couldn’t the BBC and Reuters? Let’s think… hm… what is it that BBC and Reuters don’t like? Wait, it’ll come to me, starts with an I, ends with an srael… oh, right. Because Israel didn’t do the killing, therefore, nobody did. People just “died” at a rally in Gaza. Passively. As a result of gunshot wounds.

What time is it, folks? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time, and the soft bigotry of lowered expectations—even for terrorists.

Earlier I critiqued Jackson Diehl’s column, “If this peace process fails.” Now, (via Daled Amos) I see that Noah Pollak has critiqued the column from a different perspective.

The 2000-2005 terror war was not an outpouring of political or social frustration, but rather an attempt at so thoroughly terrorizing and intimidating the Israeli public that the Israeli government would concede almost anything to make the suicide bombings stop. For its success the terror war required political, military, and religious leadership and organization, arms supplies (remember the Karine A?), and funding—and it also required an enemy that was caught off-guard by the suddenness and depravity of the attacks. None of these factors exists today, primarily due to the total defeat of Arafat’s terror offensive. Israel’s victory involved several key elements: the killing and imprisonment of large numbers of the Palestinian corps of jihadists, especially the terror leaders; the construction of a security wall that today makes Palestinian penetration of Israel immeasurably more difficult; and a revolution in Israel’s intelligence-gathering and military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. By way of everything from checkpoints and electronic surveillance to the cultivation of networks of informants and the deployment of undercover operatives, the Shabak (the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service and counterintelligence agency) and IDF dramatically have curtailed the ability of Palestinian terror groups to organize themselves and attack Israel.

In the past I’ve written that the MSM is usually obsessed with the motives for Arab terror rather than the means or opportunity. Here Pollak is arguing that a violent response from the Palestinians is unlikely because Israel has greatly reduced their means and opportunities for carrying out terror. That is true and something I hadn’t considered.

I still expect some terror attempts in the wake of a failure at Annapolis. The Palestinians will need to put up a good front that the failure has caused them despair and that the despair has led to increased terror attempts.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Barry Rubin writes about what is being done and why it needs to be done regarding the Iranian nuclear threat. (or here) What’s being attempted.

…it is the last moment for three other things:

* If international terms, if diplomatic and economic pressure is going to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons it has to be intensified right now or it will be too late to generate the needed non-military threat to Tehran.

* In technological terms, Iran is right on the verge of being able to build nuclear weapons all by itself without any more foreign help or equipment.

* In political terms, if Iranian leaders and people aren’t worried about the country’s isolation and the nuclear program’s high costs, they will more likely keep in power the regime’s most extreme faction—and the ones most likely to use nuclear weapons in the future. So in several real ways it is truly a moment of now or never, not because of an imminent attack but due to the fact that this era gives the last chance to avoid one.

President Bush isn’t war mongering when he talks about the possibility of World War III, he’s warning what could be if Iran isn’t stopped. But Prof Rubin goes on to argue, that nuclear weapons in the hand of Iran may be more effective as a looming threat than as actual means to attack enemies.

# Appeasement: Frightened by Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons and uncertain of Western protection, Arabic-speaking states will rush to meet Iran’s demands.

# This means they will be afraid to cooperate with U.S. policy or provide facilities for Western efforts to contain Iran. And that development will make them even less able to protect themselves against Tehran, further reinforcing the effect.

# Given Iran’s rejectionist stance, no Arab state or the Palestinian Authority would dare move toward peace with Israel. Even if you believe such a thing is possible now, forget about it for 20 or 30 years.

# Since Iran always favors higher oil prices (with Saudi Arabia, which already has lots of money, holding them down), the combination of Iranian pressure and heightened regional insecurity will send the cost of petroleum sky-high, far above anything hitherto dreamed.

# Intoxicated with a belief that Islamism is on the march to victory, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands will join radical Islamist groups, either clients of Iran or independent ones.

He lists more possible consequences but these five are scary enough. And yet there are countries that are undermining even the American diplomatic efforts aimed at stopping the development of the Iranian nuclear bomb. Are they already being cowed by Iran? Or do they figure that they’ll be spared Iran’s wrath if they betray the United States now? Or have they simply not thought about the future?

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Thats’ quoting Al-Jazeera:

“If peace comes and the occupation comes to an end, Israel will live in a sea of peace,” he said on Tuesday after meeting his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, in the Turkish capital of Ankara.

I hope it is not the Mediterranean sea that he has in mind…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Tagged near the end of an article in the Jerusalem Post detailing Saab Erekat’s insistence that the Palestinians will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state is this interesting poll data:

Also according to the poll, 52.9% believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved if Jerusalem becomes a Muslim city while 26% believe east Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine and west Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Ten percent said they thought the city should be the joint capital of both nations and 7.4% said the capital should be under international control.

More than half the Palestinians are in effect insisting that if Israel surrenders utterly to the Palestinians, there will be peace. Otherwise, expect eternal war.

It’s interesting how there was no need for a Palestinian state, or a capital of such state in Jerusalem, for the entire time the Palestinians lived under a British mandate. There was no need for it when Jordan controlled the eastern half—with most of the religious shrines, from which they forbade Jews—from 1948 to 1967. And of course, Jerusalem is not mentioned at all in the koran, but it has been the capital of world Jewry for over three millennia, whether Jews were in Israel, or in exile.

But all we have to do is make it a Muslim city, and there will be peace, you see. Submit to the will of Allah, I suppose they’d say.

Shyeah.

Never. Gonna. Happen.

Whether or not the Palestinians officially recognize Israel as the Jewish state that it is doesn’t matter. Olmert doesn’t have the political capital to give up Jerusalem.

I think the only good thing about the Annapolis conferences is that ultimately, it’s going to fail. I’m not worried that Jerusalem will be split. I’m not worried that the Palestinians will have the control over the West Bank they’re asking for. And I’m not worried about a third intifada. Ehud Barak is preparing to take back the Philadelphi corridor and rid Gaza of much of its weaponry, explosives, and terrorists.

Whether Saab Erekat and his buddies admit it or not, Israel is the Jewish State. And Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish State, now and forever. The Palestinians don’t get to determine that fact. It’s been determined by history, by archeology, by facts on the ground, and most especially, by Someone whose name is most emphatically not Allah.

Get over it, Erekat. The Jews are never leaving Israel, or Jerusalem, ever again.