Category: Networks

— This boy, credited with the Dumbest Article on Blogging Ever, has an inflated sense of his own importance (wrongwaygoback : wetlog : keep the bastards honest)

As someone else put it, there truly is a disconnect between long-time bloggers and warbloggers. I don’t get blogging? Having blogged for over two years now, I’ve written several articles about weblogging – articles written badly enough to be included in the book, We’ve Got Blog .

Hot shit – two whole years, and still he can’t size his fonts correctly. When I invented the blog back in ’94, I knew there would be idiots like this one, but I pressed ahead because I also knew there would be people like those on the right-hand side of my home page.

— Many commentors are using the word “desperate” in connection with the situation facing Israel. In a story on fundraising in California, a donor notes:

People here feel anguish and a lot of deep, deep concern that something about this crisis is clearly different,” Fishel said. “Many of us believe that what we’re looking at is the survival of the Jewish state.

In the TNR editorial that Megan links:

Are either of these options attractive? No; they’re both hideous. But unlike the status quo–which prevents Arafat from stopping terrorism and prevents Israel from stopping it as well–each at least offers a vision for how Israel can once again be made safe. Why should Israeli and American leaders gamble on plans with so high a likelihood of failure? Because that is how desperate things have become.

Sobering, isn’t it? All it took to bring the situation to the brink was a few suicide bombings by Ayat al-Akhras and others, and Sharon’s temper.

— There’s nothing like a historical perspective. While the pressures of Palestinian suicide bombing and Palestinian population growth foretell a grim future for Israel, it’s useful to understand that Israel is more like an ancestral summer home than a homeland for the Jews. They’ve already been kicked out of that region five or six times before (Facts About Israel: History) and they always return. Their persistence goes way beyond the ability of any of those who’ve evicted them – famine, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Arabs, and the Turks – to deal with for long. Taking the long, long, view, the Palestinian Arabs are going to lose.

— There hasn’t been a suicide bombing in a few days, and there are two theories going around to explain this: 1) the incursion has wrecked the suicide bomber infrastructure, so nobody can supply the necessary hardware; and 2) the whole point of the suicide bombing campaign was to provoke Sharon into a military action that would create sympathy for the Palestinian side by its disproportionate nature. He’s gone nuts, so the Palestinians can step back and go: “see what he’s doing to us, poor, innocent little Arabs without a tank to our name!”

I don’t know which is right, but it doesn’t appear to me that it’s all that hard to make a suicide-bomber backpack, which lends support to theory number two.

— A couple of weeks ago, Ken Layne broke this story, which had previously been reported only by one obscure Aussie reporter:

KEN . LAYNE . DOT . CON –Saddam Hussein has increased money for the relatives of suicide bombers from $10,000 to $25,000, drawing sharp criticism from Washington.

Yesterday, Tim Russert used it on Week the Press. This is why we need warblogs, boys and girls.

— In the post below, “Israel is going to lose“, I commented on the Jewish diaspora, noting that very few Jews lived in the Middle East prior to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. A reader comments that there must have been some. This takes us to the modern history of the Zionist movement. Zionism was born in the late 19th century, following the Russian pogroms of 1881-82. In the early days, waves of Jewish migration to Israel were called “aliyas,” numbered first through fifth:

Aliya and Absorption —
By 1940, nearly 250,000 Jews had arrived during the Fifth Aliya (20,000 of them left later) and the yishuv’s population reached 450,000. From this time on, the practice of “numbering” the waves of immigration was discontinued – which is not to say that aliya had exhausted itself.

During the aliya period, Jews living in the area we now call Israel lived under Turkish or British rule, and many left within a few years of arriving.

The British government, after taking over Palestine, was the first government in the area to recognize and support the national aspirations of the Zionist movement, in the Balfour Declaration, which said:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

It’s that bit about the civil rights of non-Jews in the area that has our Arab brethren so upset today.

— Amidst the hostility toward President Bush for either being too hard on the Israelis for their incursion into the occupied territories (or too easy, depending on who you believe), the debate over Arafat’s exceptionalism among Palestinian leaders, and the general horror incited by suicide bombers, it’s easy to lose focus on Israel’s long-term prospects, which aren’t good. Israel is, after all, a small country, with only six million people living shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of millions of hostile neighbors. While Israel is technically advanced, the suicide bomb is a weapon of mass destruction against which it’s completely powerless. If present trends continue, suicide bombing alone will lead to the end of the state of Israel in a few short years.

It’s the recognition of this that lead Sharon to make such a disproportionate response, trashing houses, killing innocent civilians, cutting Palestinians off from hospital visits, surrounding Arafat, and the rest of it. He’s desperate because he knows it’s only a matter of time until the suicide bombing makes life in Israel so unbearable that Israelis emigrate en masse to more peaceful climes. And it’s all happened before, in the first diaspora that left Palestine without a Jewish population in 1948 when the modern state of Israel was created:

The Jewish Diaspora and Israel: After the Jewish revolts against the Roman occupation (66-135 CE), Jews are banned from living in Jerusalem and Judea. Under Byzantine rule (324-640 CE), Christianity is introduced in Israel and many anti-Jewish laws are enacted. By the 6th century, Jews have become a minority in their own land. After the Arab conquest, the Jewish population declines further. At the time of the first crusades (11th century), only a few thousand Jews remain in Israel.

This is the scenario that those of us who support Israel don’t want to acknowledge. It makes us uncomfortable for the same reasons that suicide cults like the People’s Temple and Heaven’s Gate and military suicides like the Kamikaze make us uncomfortable. We’re individualists, and we mistakenly assume that everybody else in the world is too, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Not that we’re all that sincere in our individualism, which generally manifests in our young people in forms of rebellion narrowly selected from MTV and the Ralph Lauren catalog; our deepest desire is to belong to a group, and while we act on that impulse while speaking the rhetoric of the self, the rest of the world isn’t at all conflicted about sacrificing the self for the sake of the community. The supply of potential suicide bombers in the Arab world alone is practically boundless; it certainly wouldn’t take more than a few thousand to bring about the end of Israel as we know it.

Perhaps the situation in the Middle East isn’t completely hopeless (I certainly hope it’s not, for America’s sake if for no other reason,) but unless there’s a major shift in attitudes on both sides of the River Jordan, Israel has no future. Do the math.

— Stockton Record reports:
“San Joaquin Delta asparagus growers, at what should be the peak of the harvest season, razed many of their fields in recent days because [of] a sudden collapse in prices.”

— Our junior senator is really, really mad about the suicide bombers in Israel. Well, OK, not about all of them, just the women, and she’s got her colleagues in the Senate to go along with a meaningless act of stereotyping suggesting that suicide bombing only be done by men:

Boxer rails at ‘tragic development’ of female suicide bombers / But so far Senate resolutions, letters to U.N. get few results — “I am trying to wake people up to what it means when women start blowing themselves up. It’s a tragic development that has not gotten enough outrage around the world,” she said yesterday.

Before leaving for its spring recess, the Senate passed a resolution condemning women’s involvement in suicide attacks. “The involvement of women in carrying out suicide bombings is contrary to the important role women must play in conflict prevention and resolution,” the resolution said.

And here I thought female suicide bombers were the True Feminists of the Islamic world.

— The Chomskian Left is fast making itself irrelevant by irrationally opposing the war, which will make the project of hard-core religious conservatives like John Ashcroft so much easier in the future. Sharp self-criticism by Michael Berube, Nation and Narration, in Context.

So, faced with an enemy as incomprehensible and as implacable as bin Laden, much of the left checked the man’s policy positions on women, homosexuality, secularism, and facial hair, and slowly backed out of the room. They didn’t move right, as so many Chomskian leftists have charged; they simply decided that the September 11 attacks were the work of religious fanatics who had no conceivable point of contact with anything identifiable as a left project save for a human-rights complaint about the sanctions against Iraq. As Marx himself observed, there are a number of social systems more oppressive than that of capitalism. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are good cases in point.

Those leftists who support the war are just a little too gleefully going after their rivals, it seems.