Busy working when I wasn’t recovering from a stomach bug. But I found this on Hot Air:

Effing hilarious, even if you haven’t seen the movie.

Both Sens. McCain and Obama passed their all important interviews with entertainment weekly. (via memeorandum)

I have to admit that Sen. Obama’s choices were not pretentious as I had expected. I should have given him more credit. In fact Marc Ambinder focuses on certain choices and observes:

In some ways, Obama has the tastes of a 72 year old man; McCain has the tastes of a 47 year old whippersnapper. Who knew?

However for their choice of on-screen Presidents McCain prefers Dennis Haybert’s David Palmer:

“He’s fabulous,” McCain says. “He’s a guy who makes tough decisions, he takes charge, he’s ready to sacrifice his interest on behalf of the interest of the country.”

Sen. Obama prefers the president played by Jeff Bridges in the Contender:

“He was charming and essentially an honorable person, but there was a rogue about him,” Obama says. “The way he would order sandwiches – he was good at that.”

So one admires a President who puts the country first; the other admires the way a President orders sandwiches. (Someone else, I can’t remember who, noted this disparity too.)

Both like the not so superheroes, with McCain favoring Bat Man and Obama preferring both Bat Man and Spiderman.

The choices are contrasted at Political Punch.

I don’t know how much to read into their choices, but I’m sure it says something about both their characters. (It is a little worrying that McCain likes Dexter a series about a likable serial killer.) I just don’t know what.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Barry Rubin writes about the failure of the Arab/Muslim world to modernize.

This struggle between the old and new societies characterized much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the trend was steady. Perhaps fascism (arguably Communism) and World War Two were, respectively, the final reactionary movements and last struggle. Yet victory required 500 years of rethinking and education.

There’s no such history in the Middle East and several additional problems block change toward moderation and democracy here. Whatever one thinks of specific Islamic doctrine as generally interpreted the big problem is that it remains so powerful and hegemonic. Arab nationalism is anti-democratic, repressive, and statist. Islamists seek a somewhat revised version of the eighth century, albeit with rockets and mass communication.

It is also worse because Middle East regimes and revolutionaries know Western history. They are aware of the fact that while pious Western philosophers and scientists sincerely believed open inquiry and democracy didn’t threaten traditional religion and the status quo they were wrong. Openness led to revolution and to modern secular-dominated society, a West with all the ills decried by those in religious, ideological and political power in the Middle East. They know what happened to Soviet bloc dictatorships that experimented with more freedom, too. And they know that accepting Western ideas makes people want to change their own societies.

Left unmentioned but also relevant is the degree to which the failure to modernize is tolerated and justified by the West by excusing the the anti-Israel stances of these countries as reasonable reactions to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict.

And yet every once in a while there are glimmers of hope.

Deja Vu re-published the thoughts of A Syrian Dreams of a day in Haifa

No doubt, it would be tempting to land in Haifa. Perhaps I would run into one of the 1948 Arabs [i.e. Israeli Arabs] - not in order to ask him whether he would prefer to live in the West Bank or Gaza rather than in the state of the artificial ‘entity,’ but to ask him whether he would prefer living in Mecca or Qom to living in Haifa…

Israel Matzav quotes from a Kuwaiti writer:

Hizbullah and Kuntar’s family should thank their maker for making Israel their neighbors rather than Hussein’s Iraq. Otherwise, Kuntar would not have come back to his homeland on his feet, at a healthy weight of 90 kg, but rather in a little plastic bag containing a few bones, as our Kuwaiti prisoners returned to us.

Elder of Ziyon highlights another Kuwaiti writer who reflects on the extremism he sees in clips from MEMRI and concludes:

When we place our very own miseries in the hands of others, we are externalizing our problems that we are not able to solve, not because we cannot with some will and desire do so. Rather, we put our problems in the hand of foreigners because as such we can allow ourselves to do nothing about it for whatever reason we wish to ascribe to such act.

And Israelly Cool! quotes from the Daily Star of Beirut:

Over the past few days the two Palestinian factions seem to be close to repeated the same disastrous mistakes. We have seen Palestinians denigrating the legitimacy of other Palestinians, Palestinians making war on other Palestinians, and Palestinians arresting other Palestinians, while the Jewish state has come to the rescue of those Palestinians who fear for their lives. Israel has never looked so good.

These essays that show a self-awareness absent from much if the thought we in the West read in articles coming from the Arab world. Are they a sign of a new openness? A sign that the governments of the Arab world may start taking responsibility for their own citizenry rather than blaming their failures on Israel?

It’s possible but even Barry Rubin expresses some skepticism.

In comparison, while there are courageous individual liberals, there’s no real liberal party anywhere in the Middle East, no liberal-controlled media or liberal proselytizing university. In Egypt the liberal organization has been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.

And Daniel Pipes, reflecting on recent titles that appeared in a Cairo book fair, writes:

While risible to the foreign eye, these books and their covers must be taken seriously, for they define the mental world of monolingual Egyptians.

While there may be some indiviiduals who see the need for the Arab world to progress, there is no sustained movement with that as its goal right now. Modernization, it seems, must wait.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Back when the news of Israeli negotiations with Hamas were starting to make the news, Col. Jonathan D. Halevi wrote what Hamas was looking for:

The tahdiya agreement for a lull is an important achievement for Hamas. Hamas will gain the recognition it wants as the legitimate ruler of the Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that the Israeli government has defined Hamas-ruled Gaza as a hostile entity, Israel agreed to the continuation of trade with it, and even recognized the hostile entity’s authority to operate the Rafah crossing. Hamas regards that as immensely important and wants to exploit it as a lever to open the door to official relations with Europe, and to have itself removed from the various lists of terrorist organizations.

Another important objective for Hamas is winning the Palestinian presidential election, which will be held when Mahmoud Abbas finishes his term of office in December. Hamas wants to present itself in the contest as a legitimate ruling body worthy of inheriting the presidency. High-ranking Hamas figures have already stated that the organization will not recognize Abbas’ authority as president after December 2008.(5)

As Elder of Ziyon noted, though, Hamas didn’t just have political goals in mind, it also had military objectives too.

Everything that goes into Gaza, either from Egyptian tunnels or from Israel, gets taken by Hamas. Hamas takes everything it needs first and then places the rest on the market, heavily taxing it to ensure that the “international boycott” against that terror organization is meaningless.

Cement is a major item that Hamas covets. As the Shin Bet’s Yuval Diskin testified yesterday, Hamas is using the cement it is receiving to build fortified bunkers and tunnels to transport and store weapons.

This is not just Israeli propaganda. Even last January, when Hamas breached the wall to Egypt, it was reported that Hamas was taking delivery of hundreds of bags of cement to build bunkers and tunnels.

A few days later, Elder of Ziyon noticed the degree to which Hamas had been emboldened by the tahdiya. And earlier this week the threat became somewhat more explicit.

The strength of Hamas reflected in its new brazenness was noticed by others. Noah Pollak noticed that King Abdullah of Jordan is now starting to talk with Hamas.

Abdullah has his finger in the breeze, gauging the exact extent to which lines of communication should be opened with Hamas, to correspond with the group’s improving prospects. King Abdullah understands that the recipients of his phone calls might soon have to be Ismail Haniyah and Khaled Meshal — not Abu Mazen.

So having achieved a number of advantages over these past few weeks a group in Gaza (likely speaking on behalf of Hamas) declared that the truce is almost over;

Gaza’s Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) militant group on Thursday warned Israel that a truce between Israel and Hamas which went into effect on June 19 was in danger of collapse, saying it could end in three weeks.

Abu Mujahed, one of the group’s leaders, told dozens of fighters undergoing military training that Hamas, the PRC and other factions were disappointed at Israel’s slow action on opening Gaza’s border crossings and prisoner release talks.

“(Israel) has until the end of the tenth week (since the declaration of the ceasefire) and if they do not abide by the obligations of calm, politicians will stop talking and military men will act,” Abu Mujahed said.

So Hamas has been using the respite to strengthen its fortifications in Gaza, project its expanded political reach and openly train its forces in anticipation of further conflict with Israel.

In other words, as Col. Halevi predicted, Hamas observed the ceasefire as long as it suited its needs.

Israel’s attempt to boost Abbas’s standing by freeing prisoners is likely to fail miserably, especially after handing Hamas an undisputed victory that cost Hamas nothing.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad