Overcoming mistrust

Posted on 02/13/2008 by Soccerdad

Following up on yesterday’s attempt to evade responsibility for terrorism, Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad continues his PR blitz with the willing participation of the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler complaining that since Annapolis Israel hasn’t done enough.Kessler, like any good PR flack makes sure that we all know Mr. Fayyad’s qualifications.

Fayyad, a former economist with the International Monetary Fund, enjoys good relations with U.S. officials. He is visiting Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush — and to promote a new public-private partnership to create educational and economic opportunities for Palestinian youth, such as refurbishing West Bank youth centers in Nablus, in Hebron and in Ramallah.

.Fayyad has his say:

Fayyad, in comments during an appearance at the Aspen Institute and in a separate interview, said Israeli officials often shower him with praise, then take no concrete steps on dismantling security roadblocks or restraining the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “You see no change in the way that Israel operates,” he said.”Atmospheres are much better, [but] checkpoints have increased, not decreased. We have good meetings, friendly meetings. A lot of promises of ‘We will think about this, this makes sense,’ ” he said. “I am happy when somebody tells you you are making sense. I would be a damn lot happier when I see things begin to happen.”

In the interview, Fayyad insisted that his comments were “not meant to be pejorative. This is the reality. I am just trying to state it as it is.”

At least Kessler quotes an Israeli source who disputes this:

A number of Israel officials, including Ambassador Sallai Meridor, were in the audience when Fayyad spoke at Aspen. An Israel official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want a public spat, strongly disagreed with Fayyad’s assessment. He said Israel has released Palestinian prisoners, transferred Palestinian tax revenue, signed agreements on industrial zones and handed over security responsibility of some Palestinian areas.”Israel’s made a strategic decision to help strengthen the Palestinian Authority in an effort to cooperate in fighting terrorism and reaching a historic compromise of two states for two peoples,” the official said. “Unfortunately, Palestinian terror continues against Israeli citizens, including by elements affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.”

Three recent terrorism attacks against Israelis were committed by members of the Palestinian security services, the official charged.

“the official charged?” Come on. They were committed by members of the PA’s security services. No qualification necessary.

Fayyad gets a last word in.

“You have to overcome years of mistrust,” Fayyad acknowledged. “I am trying to tell them is this is a new period. If something bad happens, I feel bad, but it is not policy. This is a big difference.”

Well when your security forces are still engaged in terror and your propaganda still calls for the destruction of Israel, it doesn’t really help to overcome the mistrust does it?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Overcoming mistrust

Off the marc

Posted on 02/13/2008 by Soccerdad

The Washington Post today features a fawning profile of HRW activist Marc Garlasco, The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate

Garlasco is uniquely suited to understand both sides of the air war debate: He knows what the bombs can do, and he knows the price of errant attacks. In the five years since he moved from targeter to human rights advocate, he has lobbied for greater deliberation in the military’s use of air power. He has made it his mission to prevent the use of cluster munitions and has argued for smaller bombs that have less impact on surrounding areas — like the bombs that the Air Force now uses in Iraq.

and

“The objective is not to end war, it’s to change the way militaries wage war,” Malinowski said. “In order to do that, we need people who can speak with credibility to military leaders. Marc is effective because he speaks the language of the community he seeks to influence, he comes from that culture. . . . They tend to see him as a constructive critic rather than the enemy.”

Hard to argue with that.
Or maybe not so hard.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores article 28 of the Geneva conventions.

The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.

(h/t Seraphic Secret) What Garlasco is doing is pushing for democracies and respecters of human rights to reduce the lethality of their military attacks in order to absolve terrorists and rogue states from their responsibilities according to international law. The pressure HRW brings to bear is only on the side of those who respect human rights. Their efforts will have no effect on the rogue elements of the world who don’t give two hoots.Going to Page 2 of the profile we learn:

Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., the service’s deputy judge advocate general and an advocate of air power, said Garlasco’s background has helped him build relationships in the military.”I think that Marc is the prototype of what many nongovernmental organizations are seeking — that is people with real expertise,” Dunlap said. “I have not always agreed with Marc, but I have never found him to be driven by an ideological agenda.”

And here is where I disagree completely. I didn’t just find this article at random. I saw the name Garlasco and I remembered something about him. Nearly two years ago a Palestinian family at the beach on Gaza was hit by an explosion killing 8. Garlasco immediately blamed Israel for the blast using his credential as a military expert for HRW. The problem is that his expertise was in targeting, not damage assessment. But that military credential shielded him from questions that ought to have been asked.

Worse, a timeline established by NGO Monitor show how Garlasco reversed himself, seemingly to remain true to HRW’s (anti-Israel) agenda rather than acting independently. HonestReporting also scores Garlasco for contributing to a report faulting Israel for destroying houses that hid smuggling tunnels. (Israelly Cool! points out that smuggling tunnels are still a big problem and aren’t always so easy to spot.)

I’d probably have questioned Garlasco’s sincerity regardless. However knowing of his past I’m not just guessing. Given the article’s failure to mention Garlasco’s fiasco from Gaza, it really is a fluff piece more suited for the Style section than the A section.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time, Media Bias | Comments Off on Off the marc

Europe finds a spine

Posted on 02/13/2008 by Meryl Yourish

Wow.

I’ve been saying that you can’t count out the European self-preservation instinct. I don’t believe that the nations that have millennia-old history of war and bloodshed will just lie down and die when their way of life is threatened. And here’s proof I’m not wrong:

Denmark’s five major daily newspapers republished on Wednesday one of the 12 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad which angered Muslims around the world, as a protest against a plot to murder one of the cartoonists.

A Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians were arrested on Tuesday in western Denmark for planning to murder 73-year-old Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist at Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the drawings in September 2005.

The five newspapers—Jyllands-Posten, Politiken, Berlingske Tidende, BT and Ekstra Bladet—on Wednesday republished Westergaard’s cartoon, which depicts the founder of Islam with a bomb in his turban.

Apparently, even the left recognizes existential threats. And their response has none of the xenophobia and bigotry of the far-right anti-Muslim parties like Vlaams Belang.

“Regardless of whether Jyllands-Posten at the time used freedom of speech unwisely and with damaging consequences, the paper deserves unconditional solidarity when it is threatened with terror,” It said.

This is exactly the reaction that Muslim organizations don’t want. The West, it seems, is not going to kowtow to the bullying and threats of the radical Islamists. Not counting, of course, morons like the Archibishop of Canterbury.

There is no inherent right not to be offended. Time to let the professional victimologists know that.

Posted in Religion, World | 2 Comments

The last refuge of the Palestinian Authority

Posted on 02/12/2008 by Soccerdad

The Palestinian Authority is making an effort to avoid paying damages it incurred for fostering terror. The State Department is considering helping. Glenn Kessler reports in Palestinians Ask U.S. To Intervene in Suits Over Terrorist Attacks.

The State Department is considering supporting the Palestinian Authority in its quest to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments won by American victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel, according to Palestinian officials and defense lawyers involved in the cases.U.S. officials insist that no decision has been made regarding the complex litigation, which could force the Bush administration to choose between supporting compensation for victims of terrorism and bolstering the Palestinian government as the United States presses for a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The outrage here is that the PA continued to receive foreign aid despite the fact that its leaders were still tainted with terrorism. Now the PA is crying for relief for its own failure. (Actually “complicity” might be a better word.)

One thing is pretty clear, is that this is a last ditch effort by the PA to evade responsibility. The (pdf) original ruling against the PA dealt with the issue of “sovereign immunity.” The court decided that since the PA was not a state, it did not enjoy sovereign immunity. Later its non-status actually saved it when a judge ruled that funds belonging to the Palestine Monetary Authority could not be frozen on account that it was not the same entity as the defendant the Palestine National Authority. My guess is that now all the legal maneuvering has reached an end, so now the one protection left to the PA is the State Department.

In the past, the State Department has defended Iran against the lawsuit of Steven Flatow. So we can expect the State Department now to take the side of the terrorists rather than that of the victims.

The third paragraph is mistaken on a number of counts:

Testimony in Israeli courts has connected senior Palestinian leaders — such as the late Yasser Arafat — to specific terrorist attacks involved in the lawsuits. But Palestinian officials have argued that it makes no sense for the United States to be providing millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority while U.S. courts are threatening to bankrupt it.

The testimony was not in Israeli courts but as the document shows was offered in an American court. While the testimony did indeed tie Arafat to the terror, he was dropped as a plaintiff. That’s a shame because if his pilfered millions could be attached, there would be no need for the State Department to intervene. (But then those are located in France.) But the problem is that the foreign aid was given on the premise of changed behavior on the part of Arafat and his henchman. Since they didn’t change, it was given under false premises. It’s hard to have much sympathy.

Secretary of State Rice’s initial response to the pleas of the Palestinian Authority were originally admirable.

After the Ungar case, about $200,000 in two of the PLO mission’s bank accounts were frozen in 2005, a situation that Safieh called a “nightmare.” On June 18, 2005, then finance minister (and now prime minister) Salaam Fayyad wrote to Rice, urging State to intervene, saying that the Ungar lawsuit was a “serious obstacle” to effective Palestinian participation in peace talks and was inconsistent with U.S. foreign policy.Abbas also wrote to Rice in November 2006, after another court froze more than $100 million in retirement funds for Palestinian workers that were being managed in the United States.

Rice responded with a neutral letter. She noted that the Ungar case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to review it, so “the judgment is final and enforceable in United States courts.” She suggested that the Palestinian Authority explore “out of court solutions so as to avoid enforcement actions.”

I find it incredible that at every turn the Palestinian Authority asks for independence and at every turn it seeks to be excused for its failure to exercise its basic responsibilities. I hope that the State Department will be strong, but past experience shows that it will likely aid the terrorists.

It’s also interesting how terrorists and their supporters use law – that they flout when it suits them – to evade responsibilities of past actions but even to block investigation of their current activities.

UPDATE: I wished I’d thought of this when I first posted. There’s a famous definition of chutzpah: A man who kills both parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

The PA’s plea that the United States bolster it and prospects for a “breakthrough” in peace talks by reversing the courts and ignoring its past support of terror, is nothing if not audacious.

In None Dare Call it Murder, blogging friend JoshuaPundit fills in a number of details, including a point I glossed over – the PA isn’t hurting for cash, no matter how much they claim they are.

PrariePundit has thoughts similar to mine (h/t larwyn):

The Palestinians are masters of avoiding responsibility for the acts of the terrorist they support and nurture. They set up several different groups to attack Israel while acting as if they are powerless to stop them. What they are asking the State Department to do is award this sham. In fact the State Department should be supporting these law suits which penetrate the maze put up by the Palestinians. To do otherwise is to support terrorism.

Surprisingly Andrew McCarthy (via memeorandum) agrees with the Palestinian Authority.

Exactly right! It makes absolutely no sense for the United States to be providing aid to a non-state entity dominated by parties pledged to the destruction of Israel, which represents a people who breed, support and even vote for terrorists when given the chance.

OK he agrees that it makes no sense to both aid the PA and punish them for terror. Somehow I don’t expect that the PA would agree with his conclusion though.

The problem here is not the judgments; it’s the aid.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel, Terrorism | 7 Comments

It’s been a week of a weekend

Posted on 02/11/2008 by Meryl Yourish

My weekend seems to have lasted a week.

The windstorms knocked out power to my apartment from about 2:30 yesterday afternoon to 3:30 this morning. I cooked and ate by candlelight.

I needed to get up early to drive to northern VA to work today. Problem is, I caught something from one of my students, and got very little sleep. Made it to work, but my head is fuzzy and I couldn’t remember that p comes before r, thus making it very difficult to find the pur directory on the network, among other things. I kept looking for it after the r sites.

Chicken soup and OTC cold meds haven’t quite done it. Gracie waking me up at 2:30 a.m. didn’t help. That’s probably why I was awake when the power came back on at 3:30. But I couldn’t sleep much between then and time to get up for work.

If this post makes no sense, it’s because my head is made out of cotton right now, I think. Very fuzzy. I’m going to let Janet drive my Jeep to her house. I’m staying overnight in NorVA. I will be sleeping much tonight, if I can.

I suppose all of this is explanation for not posting yesterday or today. I didn’t get my part of the podcast done, either. Or the laundry. Having no electricity really is a pain in the ass.

Well, at least my food didn’t get spoiled. I’d have to say the only positive thing about the event was not having to worry about Tig’s welfare during the power outage. Gracie wanted to know what the candle on the table was. She sniffed the glass container, determined it was hot, and ran like hell away from it.

My house smelled like vanilla during the blackout. It’s my favorite candle scent. Not “vanilla ice cream” or “vanilla cake” or those other weird scents you can get these days. Just vanilla.

Anyway. Break is over. I’ll try to get a post up tonight, but you may have to wait until tomorrow. Colds make me stupid.

Posted in Life | 5 Comments

Of Israel, the Palestinians and the United States

Posted on 02/11/2008 by Soccerdad

Roger Cohen in today’s New York Times argues that Jews ought to embrace the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama in “No Manchurian Candidate. ” Like the NJDC he sets up lots of straw men in his defense of Sen. Obama. (Of course he dismisses such inconveniences such as Sen. Obama’s embrace of Rev. Wright or the appearance of Zbigniew Brzezinski among his advisers. To Cohen, those are just questions that Jews ask. Well those questions are substantive and they haven’t been answer satisfactorily.)
Why does Cohen think that Sen. Obama will be good for Israel?

Foreign policy will roar back once this is a straight Republican-Democrat fight. A Democrat who’s going to win has be strong on core American defense principles, which include Israel’s security.Obama feels Israel in his kishkas, all right. Equally, he feels dialogue, which has been his way of getting things done since he became a Chicago community organizer in the 1980s. There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. “He’d be actively involved from day one,” said Axelrod.

Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if such U.S. backing provides carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.

It’s funny, because President Clinton followed the exact course that Cohen advocates and his term ended with the foreign official who was honored with the most trips to the White House, Yasser Arafat, launching a terror war against Israel after he refused a peace deal. (A point working against Sen. Obama, is that the one American involved in those peace talks who feel that the failure wasn’t Arafat’s is Robert Malley, now another one of Sen. Obama’s advisers.)

Of course that last sentence is a way of dismissing any who dare disagree with Cohen’s mistaken view of what will bring peace in the Middle East. (And he talks about “right wing bullying!) The concerns about Sen. Obama are real and only a partisan of the Senator would dismiss them instead of addressing them.

As I noted, the idea that anyone who disagrees with someone like Roger Cohen is not necessarily advocating the Israeli “subjugation of another people.” Barry Rubin boils down the current prevailing view in Israel in Pay Now Nothing Later.

The central theme of Israeli thinking today is readiness to accept a two-state solution and to give up almost all the territory captured in 1967 for real peace, coupled with the view that there is no prospect of the other side making and implementing this desired outcome.In effect, the policy is to demonstrate Israeli willingness for negotiation and compromise–showing how good a deal could be–but making it equally clear that nothing material will be given unless something very real and specific is provided in exchange.

Nor does this mean that nothing has changed. Much of the Arab world–notably the governments of Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Gulf states, would like the conflict to go away. But they are not prepared to do much themselves, nor can they deliver the Palestinians and Syria, those without whom there can be no agreement, not to mention an increasingly important Iran. Thus, while shifts in the Arab world are a positive development–the fact that a war between Israel and Arab states is unlikely is a huge advance over the past–at the same time formal peace remains closer in theory but not so much in practice.

The question isn’t as Cohen presents that Israel must do something, but how will the Arab world change to accept what Israel will offer? That’s what frightens me about all of the remaining candidates for President (including my choice, Sen McCain).

How much will the next President adopt the prevailing view, that peace can only come as the result of some measure of American pressure on Israel is a problem. Cohen who believes that, also dismisses whatever President Bush has done over the last eight years. Frankly, by staying on the sidelines as much as he did, he probably helped matters. He also tried to reformulate how we should view the Arab/Israeli conflict. That he didn’t stick by his principles is unfortunate as Natan Sharansky and Bassam Eid write in today’s Wall Street Journal. (h/t Bald Headed Geek.)

The real breakthrough of Mr. Bush’s vision five-and-a-half years ago was not his call for a two-state solution or even the call for Palestinians to “choose leaders not compromised by terror.” Rather, the breakthrough was in making peace conditional on a fundamental transformation of Palestinian society: “I call upon [Palestinians] to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. . . . A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.”Many critics argued at the time that linking the peace process to a transformation of Palestinian society was a radical departure in peacemaking. It was. And it was long overdue.

The prevailing view in media, academic and diplomatic circles has failed to achieve peace time and again. It has strengthened the Palestinian terror organizations by absolving them any responsibility. As the Annapolis conference has marked a return to paying the Palesitnians to behave, I wonder if the next President will reverse this backward destructive trend.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time, Politics | 1 Comment

Israel won!

Posted on 02/11/2008 by Soccerdad

In today’s New York Times, Daniel Gavron writes of “Israel’s Secret Success.”

The Palestinian Hamas, which rules Gaza, refuses to recognize Israel, but even that movement seeks a long-term truce, which is tantamount to de facto recognition.

Tantamount? To what? Today’s New York Times reports:

Rocket fire from Gaza has killed 13 Israelis in the past seven years, many of them in Sderot. The attack on Saturday caused an uproar in part because of the youth of the wounded brothers. The rocket caught them in the street, and they had not had time to take shelter after the municipal alarm sounded.Part of one of the younger brother’s legs was amputated, doctors said, but the condition of both brothers had stabilized by Sunday. About 40 rockets were launched on Friday and Saturday, army officials said.

Elder of Ziyon concluded from a report at YNet that

1. Palestinian Arab terrorists remain depraved as ever, celebrating the pain of innocent civilians.
2. Islamic Jihad’s morale must be amazingly low, as they continue to lower the bar of what they consider “victory” just so they can have something to celebrate and not feel like total losers.
3. Mosques in Gaza are used, today, to promote terrorism.


Israel Matzav added that

Underground Kassam launching pads big enough to hold katyusha rockets were discoverd by IDF forces operating in northern Gaza early Thursday. Taking advantage of the breach in the Rafah border wall, Hamas has wasted no time in using the recent weeks to boost its weapons and explosives supplies, as well as receive training and instructions from foreign operatives who slipped into Gaza from Egypt after the Rafah border wall was blown up.

From these items we see that the Palestinians in Gaza have
1) stepped up their attacks on Israel.
2) celebrates the injury of civilians
3) have prepared more advanced weaponry.

Perhaps I’m missing something in the subtlety of international relations, but I would conclude that such behavior is tantamount to declaring war or to a commitment to continue fighting, not de facto recognition.

Gavron writes later:

Problems remain, of course. We Israelis have made a shambles of our Zionist enterprise by establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories we have occupied since 1967. Either we must disentangle ourselves from the Palestinians, or else create a structure for sharing the land with them. Many of the flagship Jewish settlements are so deep in Palestinian territory that no matter how the borders were to be redrawn, the settlements would be left inside Palestine.And the current talk of swapping “settlement blocs” in the West Bank for equivalent amounts of land in Israel near the border is unrealistic. For any “two-state solution” to work, we would need to conduct a complete withdrawal from the West Bank. Even so, the success of the Zionist enterprise would be astounding.

The problem isn’t, of course, the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel. No, it’s “settlements.” Maybe then Gavron could explain why in the one area where Israel evacuated all “settlements” – Gaza – the terror has persisted. Not suicide bombers, for the most part, the wall around Gaza has kept them out, but Qassams. Clearly the Kool-Aid he’s drinking has been spiked with lotus.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome | 4 Comments

Haveil Havalim #153 is UP!

Posted on 02/11/2008 by Soccerdad

Jack continues to make his mark on Haveil Havalim as he has recruited a new hostess I’ll Call Baila who hosts Haveil Havalim #153. If you’re interested in Jewish blogging, check it out! To submit for the next edition click here.

Posted in Israel, Linkfests | Comments Off on Haveil Havalim #153 is UP!

More on Tig

Posted on 02/10/2008 by Meryl Yourish

The wind storms we’re having in Richmond have knocked out the power to my apartment. Thanks all for your kind words about Tig. The apartment feels really empty today, even though he was only a shadow of himself. But I sure liked having even half-Tig around.

I’ll tell you about it later. Suffice to say that he did purr more than once on his last day, and that picture below was taken less than an hour before he died.

I spent most of yesterday out. I couldn’t bear to be here. I may leave again this afternoon. There’s no electricity, and no Tig. One or the other is bad enough. Without both, this apartment kinda sucks.

Thanks for all the kind words.

I miss my boy. He was one-of-a-kind. But I kept my contract with him. He had a happy life, and he went easily.

There will be more pictures. I have a stock of many hundreds that you haven’t seen. Digital images don’t cost a dime ’til you print them.

Posted in Cats | 11 Comments

Yiddishe nachas *

Posted on 02/10/2008 by Soccerdad

Not.

And amid all this hype, Winehouse’s representatives said late Friday that she won’t attend tonight’s Grammys in Los Angeles. Although she resolved her visa issues with the U.S. Embassy, she’ll still appear via satellite from London. Winehouse apparently decided not to stray too far from the very place she sang about never entering: rehab.

The New York Times tells the story of
a new principal at a troubled high school. (h/t Shalom USA.)

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up.

Who is he?

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.. . . “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

Not surprisingly, not everyone has accepted him, though it seems that most of the critics are no longer with the school, so it might just be that they have an ax to grind.

When an etiquette expert, Lyudmila Bloch, first approached principals about training sessions she runs at a Manhattan restaurant, most declined to send students. Mr. Waronker, who happened to be reading her book, “The Golden Rules of Etiquette at the Plaza,” to his own children (he has six), has since dispatched most of the school for training at a cost of $40 a head.Flipper Bautista, 10, loved the trip, saying, “It’s this place where you go and eat, and they teach you how to be first-class.”

In a school where many children lack basic reading and math skills, though, such programs are not universally applauded. When Mr. Waronker spent $8,000 in school money to give students a copy of “The Code: The 5 Secrets of Teen Success” and to invite the writer to give a motivational speech, it outraged Marietta Synodis, a teacher who has since left.

“My kids could much better benefit from math workbooks,” Ms. Synodis said.

Mr. Waronker counters that key elements of his leadership are dreaming big and offering children a taste of worlds beyond their own. “Those experiences can be life-transforming,” he said.

One of the themes in the report is that Mr. Waronker has a personal touch. For example:

So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.

My guess is that despite the problems, Mr. Waronker is having some success. And it comes from his seeming religious commitment to the school.

Back in Crown Heights, Mr. Waronker says he occasionally finds himself on the other side of a quizzical look, with his Hasidic neighbors wondering why he is devoting himself to a Bronx public school instead of a Brooklyn yeshiva.“We’re all connected,” he responds.

Gesturing in his school at a class full of students, he said, “I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time.”

* Yiddishe Nachas could be translated as “Jewish Pride.” It’s something I get when I read of someone like Shimon Waronker, but not a spoiled, self-destructive pop-singer.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Jews, Miscellaneous, Pop Culture, Teaching | 1 Comment

Sharia for Britain

Posted on 02/10/2008 by Soccerdad

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Shari’a to be adopted in England. Martin Fletcher added his two cents:

As one who has been hauled in front of a Sharia court I would like to risk having my hand — or head — chopped off a second time by suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury just might have a point.

Fletcher thinks he’s being funny. He is actually saying that he considers those who disagree with him as extremists. But the main part of the story really is infuriating:

We waited in the yard of an old police station. An alleged drug dealer lay on the ground on his stomach, his hands and legs bound together behind his back. Several wretched faces stared out from the dark interiors of cells with barred windows. A bunch of women engaged in some sort of domestic dispute arrived and waited patiently behind us.Finally the drivers, still arguing furiously, were each told to make their case to a couple of religious elders. They had barely begun before the court adjourned to a nearby carpet for sunset prayers.

When it resumed, and both drivers had had their say, the court pronounced. The two men were ordered to apologise to each other and we were all dismissed.

The court performed its duty with admirable dispatch and minimal fuss and everyone went away happy. It was quicker, cheaper and just as effective as a British magistrates’ court.

After describing the “wretched faces,” he tells how his own encounter ended and “everyone went away happy.” Well not everyone. Not the “wretched faces” he saw when he arrived.

LGF was absolutely correct to highlight those lines. Fletcher’s self-centeredness is very much on display. What if the court had decided differently, would he still be so smug? Is he so certain that the episode couldn’t have ended worse for him and his entourage? Or even the other party?

The Belmont Club notes that Sharia law doesn’t always produce good (or consistent) outcomes in a post delightfully entitled “My sentence was reduced to beheading.” It’s the story of Sandy Mitchell, who was working in the desert kingdom.

He was held in prison for three years and tortured until he eventually signed a confession, which he later had to read out on Saudi television. A sharia court sentenced him to having his head partially severed, followed by public crucifixion.The sentence was later reduced to beheading, before the Saudi authorities finally conceded that al-Qa’eda terrorists had planted the bomb and let Mr Mitchell return home to Halifax, West Yorks. …

His torturers told him his wife and son were “involved” in the plot, even though his son was only a year old, and Mr Mitchell finally cracked when the jailers told him: “We will torture them. When you hear their screams, you will know they are suffering because you haven’t told us the truth.”

Judeopundit saw an article that casts even more doubts on the wisdom of Sharia courts

Commander Steve Allen, head of ACPO’s honour-based violence unit, says the true toll of people falling victim to brutal ancient customs is “massively unreported” and far worse than is traditionally accepted. “We work on a figure which suggests it is about 500 cases shared between us and the Forced Marriage Unit per year,” he said: “If the generally accepted statistic is that a victim will suffer 35 experiences of domestic violence before they report, then I suspect if you multiplied our reporting by 35 times you may be somewhere near where people’s experience is at.” His disturbing assessment, made to a committee of MPs last week, comes amid a series of gruesome murders and attacks on British women at the hands of their relatives. […]

Think about that for a moment. If these practices are so prevalent now, what would happen if Sharia would become official? Couldn’t you expect that these practices would be perpetrated with even greater frequency once Sharia became official?

(via memeorandum)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in World | Comments Off on Sharia for Britain

The teacher and the terrorists

Posted on 02/10/2008 by Soccerdad

(An open letter to Deborah Howell, ombudsman of the Washington Post.)Over the past two years, you defended the decision to publish op-eds by representatives of Hamas, a terrorist organization. It is a decision that cannot be justified. Still, you defended your position. In defense of your 2006 decision to publish Ismail Haniyeh’s op-ed you wrote:

Good editorial pages and commentators enlighten and provoke readers to broaden their thinking.

Except that, as James David Besser later reported, Ismail Haniyeh didn’t write the op-ed. It was written by American supporters of Hamas. So instead of publishing the undiluted views of the leader of Hamas, you published a slickly produced piece of propaganda.

The only possible justification for publishing the op-ed then, is that was the opinion page. It’s a very weak justification. Still, I suppose, it’s better than publishing propaganda for Hamas in your news pages. That is exactly what you did last week.

In her article “Israel to Intensify Strikes If Rocket Fire Continues, Ellen Knickmeyer reported:

Also, a 42-year-old Palestinian high school chemistry teacher was killed when a shell hit a school just before classes started in the morning, said Jamil Suleiman, director of the hospital in the Gaza village of Beit Hanoun. Three 16-year-old Palestinian boys, all students, were wounded, Suleiman said.Israel denied targeting the school, saying it was firing at rocket teams that use the border village as a base for attacks on Israel. On Thursday, fighters fired at least seven rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, wounding one person, the Israeli military said.

The problem is that Israel didn’t just deny targeting the school. What happened is not a matter of dispute. Ms. Knickmeyer found a nice quote from the Egyptian foreign minister dismissing the significance of the Qassam attacks because they gave Israel an excuse to attack Gaza, but somehow she missed the AP report that it had actually photographed rocket launchers near the school.

(It’s possible that one of the AP reports available on the Washington Post website included this bit of information. However, according to my search of your website, Ms. Knickmeyer’s report was the most recent. Since it carried the byline of you reporter and it’s the one that appeared in your print edition it’s the most significant.)

There is no excuse for failing to report the presence of the rocket launchers near the school. As blogger Elder of Ziyon noted, placing armaments in close proximity to civilian institutions is a war crime.

Instead of presenting a “conflicting viewpoints” version of the news, your reporter had an obligation to present the evidence that the Israeli version was accurate. Failing to do that in the original news story, there should have been a followup with the relevant information omitted from the original story.

The New York Times mentioned the AP report, so the information was available to be reported.

In this case the Post failed in its obligation to provide undistorted news. You owe your readers a correction.
ps I am posting this on my blog in anticipation of a response, which I will publish (if I receive it) uncommented on afterwards.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on The teacher and the terrorists

Tigger

Posted on 02/09/2008 by Meryl Yourish

Saying goodbye to Tig

March 15, 1997-February 9, 2008

Posted in Cats | 55 Comments

Terrorists to southern Israel: Evacuate or die

Posted on 02/08/2008 by Meryl Yourish

Terrorists are now bold enough to publicly warn Israelis to leave southern Israel. Why is that? Because Olmert has not done anything to stop the rockets from flying.

The Popular Resistance Committees called on the residents of Israel’s south to evacuate their families from the line of fire on Friday afternoon. In all more than 20 Qassam rockets have been launched towards Israel from northern Gaza on Friday. Abu Mujihad, a spokesman for the Salah al-Din Brigades (the military wing of the PRC) claimed responsibility for the barrages and told Ynet the attacks were in retaliation for the killing of one of the organization’s senior commanders, Abu al-Sa’ad.

A senior PRC official, Abu Abir, warned the attacks would only increase and urged the evacuation of Sderot and its neighboring communities. “What was up until now is nothing compared to what will be. We call on them (the Israelis) to evacuate for their safety and the safety of their children,” he said.

Yeah, the safety of the children. That’s why the terrorists launch their rockets specifically during the times when Israeli children are walking to and from school. If you were truly interested in the safety of the children, Abu shithead, you wouldn’t be launching rockets filled with ball bearings at them.

Two of the rockets launched on Friday landed in Netiv Haasara and damaged several greenhouses. Another rocket landed in Ashkelon’s industrial zone. The rest landed in open areas in the western Negev and north of Sderot. No injuries were reported in any of the attacks.

Meantime, Hamas is digging in for some major attacks.

The defense establishment is dealing with an increasing number of warnings regarding Hamas plans to carry out a major attack in the Gaza Strip area, security sources say. In meetings held this week the emerging picture was that in light of ongoing IDF military operations in the region against Hamas targets, the organization seeks to boast an achievement via terrorism.

[…] Dozens of Hamas members have been killed in recent weeks in clashes with IDF troops in the Gaza Strip. In addition, the Air force attacked several Hamas targets in response to ongoing Qassam fire. Officials in Israel who have been analyzing the situation believe that the Islamic group is not at its peak at this time.

At the same time, security officials say that Hamas continues to boost its military strength and group members are constantly working to prepare themselves for a possible large-scale IDF ground operation.

“We can see Hamas’ progress every time they come into contact with IDF soldiers in the Strip,” the defense official said. “We can see that they are more highly skilled people who are better equipped than before and they operate like an army.”

That would be because they are an army. They are Iran’s proxies against Israel, and have trained in Iran with the Revolutionary Guards. The next battle will not be easy. It will be a full-on battle with rockets landing in Israeli towns and cities, as well as terrorists trying to launch suicide attacks throughout Israel. It will be a battle joined by Hezbullah and Syria, with Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, aided by the other terrorist organizations and by Fatah as well. Palestinian “police,” who are being trained by the CIA, will turn their weapons on Israeli soldiers. Oh, and the world media will be screaming about Israeli “war crimes” while ignoring Hamas war crimes, just as they did during the Second Lebanon War.

This summer may be the hottest summer in Israel since 1967.

Posted in Hamas, Israel, Terrorism | 7 Comments

I musta got lost

Posted on 02/08/2008 by Soccerdad

An Israeli professor solved a problem that has been bothering mathematicians for nearly 40 years.
Trakhtman solved the “Road Coloring Problem,” which was raised by Israeli mathematics Prof. Binyamin Weiss and others in 1970. There are many forms but the most popular one among experts goes like this:

A man reaches a town he has never visited before and drives around trying to find the home of his friend even though there are no street names. The friend says not to worry and that he will provide instructions (left, right, left…) on how to get there.This is called synchronizing instruction. The problem is whether by using such instructions, the driver could reach his destination no matter where he was lost, said Prof. Stuart Margolis, a colleague and mentor of Trakhtman who made aliya from the US and joined Bar-Ilan the same year as the Russian mathematician.

“He is brilliant with a high IQ,” Margolis told The Jerusalem Post. “It’s God-given gray matter in his brain. He is shy, reserved and very modest. He intentionally offered his paper to an Israeli journal even though any mathematics journal in the world would be overjoyed to get it. Now he’s working on a real algorithm to implement his solution.”

What’s the most remarkable part of the story?

A 63-year-old mathematics professor at Bar-Ilan University, who worked as a guard for about five years after his aliya from the former Soviet Union in 1990, has solved an abstract math problem that has befuddled experts for the last 38 years.

He started over again in the middle of his life and now has achieved fame in his field.

I’m guessing that something like this would apply to Rubik’s cube.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | 2 Comments