Rick Richman wrote at the end of last year that when he visited Israel, President Bush should be Following Kennedy’s Lead.

When he visits Israel next month, President Bush can immerse himself in the details of the “peace process,” perhaps resolving the issue of 300 new homes in Jerusalem, or discussing the release of more prisoners, or considering other steps to “strengthen” a Palestinian leader who does not control even his own “military wing” and cannot promise even eventual recognition of a Jewish state. 

Or he — or they — can go to Sderot.

The president can address the citizens there and say there are those who claim that peace is simply a matter of withdrawal from disputed land; or that one can satisfy those committed to one’s destruction with concessions; or that a people choosing life will eventually run from the threat of death.

And he can respond by saying: “Let them come to Sderot.”

Given that the withdrawal of Jews from Gaza directly led to the barrage of rockets aimed at Sderot and given that President Bush gave his full support to the withdrawal, it would have been an important gesture. (I didn’t think that such a trip was likely due to security considerations.)

President Bush didn’t make the trip to Sderot, but today France 24 reports that McCain takes pro-Israel stance in Sderot.

US Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Wednesday showed vigorous support for Israel, where he made a highly symbolic visit to a town hit by near-daily rocket fire from Gaza.

“No nation in the world can be attacked incessantly and have its population killed and intimidated without responding,” McCain said in the southern town of Sderot, where he visited a house hit by a rocket fired by Islamists in the Gaza Strip, just a few kilometres (miles) away.

The Arizona senator was in Israel on a fact-finding mission which has also taken him to Iraq and Jordan and has been widely seen as a bid to polish his credentials as a statesman.

“Seeing it first-hand, the situation here is one that is very compelling,” McCain told reporters in Sderot after touring the town with Defence Minister Ehud Barak.

“Nine hundred rocket attacks in the last three months; this puts an enormous strain on everyone here, especially the children.”

It’s an important point.

Israel has been remarkably restrained (despite what its critics say). McCain went further though:

McCain warned in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia threatened not only the Jewish state but also US and Western interests.

“If Hamas-Hezbollah succeed here, they are going to succeed everywhere.

“They are dedicated to the extinction of everything that the US, Israel and the West believe and stand for,” the Republican candidate added.

It was a little disconcerting though to read the following spin in an AP article about the visit.

While billed as routine congressional business, the visit appeared to be aimed at burnishing McCain’s leadership credentials and courting Jewish voters for next fall’s election. Jews make up large voting blocs in several key swing states, including Florida and Michigan, and could help influence the outcome of the election. 

Though McCain did not visit Palestinian areas, Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said the senator has always been accessible to the Palestinians and is “committed to peace.” But he suggested McCain’s visit was aimed more at attracting Jewish voters than promoting negotiations. “Maybe one day Palestinians will have money for your campaigns in the United States,” he said.

As McCain made clear the fight against Islamic extremism is an American, not a specifically Jewish, issue. Polls show that most Americans agree. And Erekat’s sly Walt-Mearsheimer evincing comment deflects that.

I wish that he were a little more skeptical towards Abbas, but when even the Israeli government doesn’t show that skepticism, it’s hard to fault McCain.

I expect that whoever is elected will not do everything I think he or she ought to regarding Israel. However this trip by McCain is more than I expected from any candidate.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A month ago JoshuaPundit questioned the wisdom of President Bush naming an envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference. After noting some previous antics of the OIC, JoshuaPundit writes:

This is the racist, anti-American group our president legitimized and is now sending an official US envoy `to listen and to learn’.

Daniel Pipes observes that the envoy, Sada Cumber, didn’t just “listen and learn” but also whitewashed:

as paraphrased by Agence France-Presse, he found “a new more moderate leadership in the Islamic world.” He will report to President Bush and Secretary of State Rice that the OIC is changing: “the way things are going on in this conference I can almost see the new leadership moving into moderation and that alone is very encouraging news.”

Roger Kimball also finds the cheek turning in the face of aggressive Islamism rather unsettling:

What makes this little pow-wow among “leaders of the world’s Muslim nations” significant is not what might follow from it in the way of positive legislation—though you never know—but rather what it betokens as a sign of the times. It is part of a large if still more or less amorphous mobilization of anti-Western sentiment on the part of people who detest Western mores but crave its wealth and Lebensraum. It is not at all clear that we have formulated any compelling response. Mostly what we find are anodyne bleatings like those of Sada Cumber, U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, who kept trying to burnish “America’s image” in Muslim countries and find what the AP called “common ground” with Muslim nations by championing “universal values the U.S. holds dear like religious tolerance and freedom of speech.” Gee whiz.

We see similar behavior regarding the Palestinians. Recently AFP ran a story Israeli-Palestinian peace talks renewed on sour note. What was the sour note? That Mahmoud Abbas had hysterically claimed that Israeli was ethnically cleansing Jerusalem and got the OIC to deem Israel guilty of war crimes? That he couldn’t unequivocally condemn the Merkaz Harav massacre? That he declared his pride in engaging in “armed struggle?” No. None of those:

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks resumed on a sour note on Monday with the Palestinian negotiator blasting Israel for vowing to continue settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

And how did the Americans react? Why Ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones said:

“Sometimes people do have to move to a different location. They cannot always stay close to their families.”

Elder of Ziyon commented:

He was clearly talking about Israel building new houses and apartments in Jerusalem.

Elder of Ziyon also links to a number of bloggers who objected to Ambassador Jones’ comments. The approach was generally that building around Jerusalem is an internal issue. But there’s a different problem with the Ambassador’s remarks. He essentially was validating the claims of the Palestinians. He was giving legitimacy to their “causus terrum.” (I just made that up.)

While Mr. Cumber simply said why can’t we all just get along, Mr. Jones essentially explained why the Palestinian ought not to get along. He confirmed their grievance. In the West we are facing a very real and possibly existential threat from radical Islam.

We are not going to win the war by sitting around the campfire and singing “Kumbaya” or by saying, “you know you just might be right.” Radical Islam in its various forms must be confronted and challenged.

Being silent or encouraging is not going to reduce their grievances with us. It will perpetuate the grievances.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald argued that

Underscoring that point rather vividly is the issue of negotiations with Hamas. Needless to say, isolating the democratically elected Hamas government and childishly pretending that they don’t exist is a central prong of the Bush administration’s policy, and few American politicians could ever get away with advocating that Israel attempt diplomatically to negotiate its conflicts with Hamas. Cascades of “anti-Israel,” “soft-on-Terrorists” and other related accusations would pour down on any person suggesting such a thing.But a new poll of actual Israelis — the people who have to live with the consequences of their choices as opposed to those who can beat their neoconservative, protected chests from a safe distance — reveals:

Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Less than one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks.

Leaving aside the hyperbole, which, in Greenwald’s case, is most of what he’s written, he’s arguing that since a majority of Israelis support negotiations with Hamas, the United States ought to consider the same thing. I had thought that the polling was specific to the issue of freeing Gilad Shalit, but apparently it may have been more general.

Still, Fugitive Peace points out in Hands up if you want to talk to Hamas that results of a poll are often dependent on what choices are presented to the interviewee.

In the poll cited by Greenwald no alternatives were presented by the pollster.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz’s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

Leaving aside the snark, it’s pretty clear that when Israelis are presented with the choice of actually fighting their enemies instead of talking with them, most Israelis would prefer to fight back.

Israeli, Israel Matzav find the polls results heartening..

A new poll of Palestinians finds that most of them support Hamas and terror.

A new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the attack this month on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight young men, most of them teenagers, an indication of the alarming level of Israeli-Palestinian tension in recent weeks.The survey also shows unprecedented support for the shooting of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip and for the end of the peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

The pollster, Khalil Shikaki, said he was shocked because the survey, taken last week, showed greater support for violence than any other he had conducted over the past 15 years in the Palestinian areas. Never before, he said, had a majority favored an end to negotiations or the shooting of rockets at Israel.

And what might the reasons for these results be?

“There is real reason to be concerned,” Mr. Shikaki said in an interview at his West Bank office. His Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which conducts a survey every three months, is widely viewed as among the few independent and reliable gauges of Palestinian public opinion.His explanation for the shift, one widely reflected in the Palestinian media, is that recent actions by Israel, especially attacks on Gaza that killed nearly 130 people, an undercover operation in Bethlehem that killed four militants and the announced expansion of several West Bank settlements, have led to despair and rage among average Palestinians who thirst for revenge.

Except as Mere Rhetoric points out, the poll results were already showing this before Israel started to defend itself.

Unlike the Israeli poll showing that Israel wants it government to fight back, this is a poll that supports blatant terror attacks, like the one at Merkaz Harav.

Elder of Ziyon adds:

The PCPSR is somewhat disingenuous as well. The last time that they even asked in a poll if the respondents supported attacks against Israeli civilians inside the Green Line was September, 2006, when 57% supported and 40% opposed. So while the number that supported this specific attack is higher, that could just as easily mean that while the people polled are against terror in the abstract but support it in reality. Either way, a convincing majority of Palestinian Arabs have consistently supported terror against civilians, over decades. For the pollster to say that he hasn’t seen such support for a specific terror attack before indicates more that he hasn’t asked.In 2001 and 2002, between 52% and 58% supported terror attacks against civilians inside the Green Line and over 90% supported terror attacks against civilians in the territories. Even before the intifada, 52% supported terror attacks versus 43% opposed.

These are the real facts, that the NYT is downplaying and the PCPRS is willingly ignoring: the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs want to see Jews killed, on both sides of the Green Line, and they have always felt that way.

What motivates the Palestinians is not a failure of the peace process to accomplish anything, but rather a hatred of Jews. The Palestinian leadership - even “moderate” Fatah reliably reflects this reality. Talking won’t work.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In honor of Women’s History Month at work, we were given a talk on women in computing. Part of the presentation was playing this YouTube video of the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman. It was extremely entertaining. Letterman seemed a bit unsure of the technical side of Adm. Hopper but he was a gracious host.

Admiral Hopper was known for many things including writing the programming language COBOL. She also found the first computer bug. (Go to the bottom of the page.)

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: “First actual case of bug being found”. They put out the word that they had “debugged” the machine, thus introducing the term “debugging a computer program”. In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In a sense. The kidney in question is not meant to save a life of a minister, rather the opposite - to croak the minister in question. In fact, you have got a choice of three targets: Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad Chief Meir Dagan orHead of Military Intelligence Amos Yaron.

The initiative comes from an NGO (so to speak) - an Iranian students organization calling itself Islamic Student Justice Seekers.

The Justice Seekers also called for volunteers to donate a kidney in order to offer the money acquired via the act to increase the financial prize.

Is the Iranian treasury so down on funds these days that they should resort to such amateurish methods?

But this post is not just about the Justice Seekers and their foray on the health domain. Look at this picture:

Aside of the call to invest your money or organs into the demise of the threesome pictured on the poster, it states quite clearly, and in the best Queen’s English what exactly should be done with Israel. I’m curious: what will Juan Cole and his ilk make of this statement? Blame the Iranian translators this time?

Another refreshing detail - the poster says “Israel” and not “Zionist entity” or some such. Interesting…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.