Month: September 2010

This interview with Muslim-baiter Frank Gaffney is priceless.

Bob Wright – surveying the grim present and ominous future in Israel/Palestine – proffers this one-state-to-two-states idea to get moderate Israelis less indifferent to the need for a breakthrough before catastrophe arrives:

If Palestinians want to strike fear into the hearts of Israelis they should (a) give up on violence as a tool of persuasion; (b) give up on the current round of negotiations; and (c) start holding demonstrations in which they ask for only one thing: the right to vote. Their argument would be simple: They live under Israeli rule, and Israel is a democracy, so why aren’t they part of it?

A truly peaceful movement with such elemental aspirations — think of Martin Luther King or Gandhi — would gain immediate international support. In Europe and the United States, leftists would agitate in growing numbers for economic and political pressure on Israel.

In 2002, some Harvard students urged the university to purge investments in Israel from its portfolio, and the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, suggested that the disinvestment movement was anti-Semitic. This time there would be a lot more students, and no university president would call them anti-Semitic. All they’d be saying is that if Israel isn’t going to give up the occupied territories — and, let’s face it, the current government isn’t exactly in headlong pursuit of that goal — it should give Arabs living there the same rights it gives Jews living there.

As momentum grew — more Palestinians marching, more international support for them, thus more Palestinians marching, and so on — the complacent Israeli center would get way less complacent. Suddenly facing a choice between a one-state solution and international ostracism, reasonable Israelis would develop a burning attraction to a two-state solution — and a sudden intolerance for religious zealots who stood in the way of it. Before long Israel would be pondering two-state deals more generous than anything that’s been seriously discussed to date.

Well, it's one way to break past the Israeli refusal to stop building settlements. But I'm afraid the far right in Israel (which controls the current government and would cripple any other with violence) is so wedded to permanent occupation of the West Bank as a religious duty this kind of international pressure would backfire. You can also be sure that AIPAC would describe such a campaign for enfranchisement of West Bank Palestinians as an attack on Israel as a Jewish state and ipso facto anti-Semitic. But Bob, unlike the allegedly pro-Israel lobby, is right to see that the current stalemate cannot last:

Given the ongoing damage done to America’s national security by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s in America’s interest for Israelis to feel intensely eager for a two-state deal. And some do.

As for the others: if they really grasped their predicament, they’d be intensely eager as well. The menu of futures for Israel features only three items: (1) two-state solution; (2) one-state solution; (3) something really, really horrible. There’s just no way that the situation will simmer indefinitely without boiling over, whether via nuclear bomb (purchased by terrorists from cash-hungry North Korea, say), or via a tit-for-tat exchange with Hamas or Hezbollah that spins out of control, bringing a devastating regional war, or via some other path to catastrophe.

Sooner or later, something will alert Israel’s unfortunately silent majority to the high price of leaving the Palestinian issue unresolved. The only question is whether by then the price will have already been paid.

(Photo: Israeli settlers walk along al-Shuhada street, past two of dozens of shuttered Palestinian owned shops daubed with the Jewish Star of David, on September 28, 2010, in the West Bank town of Hebron, after Palestinians were forced years ago to move out of the old quarter by the Israeli army to allow for the Jewish settlers to move securely in the area. A few hundred hardline Jewish settlers live under heavy Israeli military protection in the heart of the town of 160,000 mostly Muslim Palestinians. By Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty.) 

Pew found that Jews, Mormons, atheists, and agnostics are better informed about religion. Jamelle Bouie's thoughts:

To me, it’s no surprise that the highest scorers — after controlling for everything — were religious minorities: atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons. As a matter of simple survival, minorities tend to know more about the dominant group than vice versa.

E.D. Kain largely agrees. Kevin Drum remarks that most "us just don't know very much about anything." Larison's adds his two cents. And Douthat labels atheists converts:

The very act of declaring yourself an “atheist,” after all, suggests a particularly high level of interest in religious detail and debate — higher than many self-described Methodists or cradle Catholics who have a vague belief in God and show up at church on holidays, and also higher than the many nonbelievers who are merely indifferent to religion. Another way of putting it is that self-described atheists are the religious converts of the irreligious world. Like someone who leaps from Lutheranism to Catholicism, or Christianity to Islam, they’ve made an intellectual decision about their faith — or the lack thereof, that is. And so it isn’t surprising that they’d be more knowledgeable about the subject than the much larger populations of part-time churchgoers and “nothing in particular” nonpractitioners alike.

Claire Berlinski discusses Britain's post World War II decline and its resurgence under Margaret Thatcher.

Daniel Larison articulates a deeper criticism of Rush Limbaugh:

One of the things I find grimly amusing about Limbaugh’s invocation of a “distinctive American culture” is that he is an enthusiast for the global reach of both American power and American popular culture and commerce. All of these have contributed to the steady erosion of differences between American culture and cultures elsewhere, and they have hastened the homogenization of distinctive American regional and local cultures into a mass culture that is remarkable mostly for how little it stands out from the mass cultures of other countries.

When Limbaugh talks about a “distinctive American culture,” all that he is really referring to is America’s superpower status and a certain brash, arrogant disdain for other nations. A random Spanish-language ad raises the alarm because it hints at a failure to show the proper disdain and an unwillingness to assert American preeminence. My guess is that Limbaugh’s reaction to the ad has almost nothing to do with questions of assimilation, immigration or culture, and has almost everything to do with a certain mindless sort of American self-congratulation that Limbaugh would applaud no matter what language was used to express it.

Yglesias acknowledges the limits of fact checking:

The genius and the horror of something like D’Souza’s argument is that it’s perfectly possible to put together something utterly loopy that makes no factual errors whatsoever. Indeed, in some ways punctiliousness about the facts is the signature of the conspiracy theorist. Glenn Beck’s TV show is, in its way, the most fact-filled program on cable. It’s just that you can string together a lot of data points in a nutty way if you want to.

Paul Waldman accepts bigger government as an inevitability. I don't. But then I grew up under Thatcher, a real fiscal conservative who had both the willpower and the brain-power to save Britain from being drowned by too much government. And I look at today's Britain and see another generation of Tories determined to do the right thing again, after more than a decade of Bush-style profligacy by Blair and Brown.

Reihan thinks Jim DeMint “comes closest to filling the Palin vacuum” if she doesn’t run. Bernstein runs through candidates for the Republican nomination. He too wants to know more about DeMint’s chances:

[I]t sure seems to me that Jim DeMint is the current leader of the hard-core conservative faction of the Republican Party.  He’s far more consistent with his endorsements than any other conservative leader, and unlike Palin he can claim that he’s actually been doing something effective for the cause.  For the conservative/Tea Party faction, presumably the trick is to be as far to the right as possible without actually sounding crazy to those outside the faction (and thus perhaps drawing vetoes from more pragmatic conservatives, and possibly some GOP-aligned interest groups).  At least as I read the reporting, DeMint seems to be pretty good at keeping to that line, and he certainly must be more reliable both for that crowd and for more pragmatic types than Palin.

A reader writes:

I find it interesting that the same behaviors we call "bullying" for young people can result in criminal and civil charges for adults.  Even similar verbal assault in a work environment would likely fall under sexual harrassment laws binding to the employer.  But for kids, it's simply the more benign word "bullying".  I'm not suggesting kids be prosecuted as adults, but I wonder how much it normalizes the behavior and lets adult authorities off the hook.

From what I recall of of the few peer-reviewed journal articles out there, sexual orientation victimization (SOV) is visited on GLBT and non-GLBT young people alike. 

It's defined as physical and verbal assault based on perceived homosexuality or gender nonconformity.   Most victims have yet to identify as GLBT, particularly in middle school, where it is reportedly most intense.  Randomized-controlled trials found that the health outcomes (depression, suicide ideation, substance abuse, school performance) to be significantly more pronounced for those who eventually identified as GLBT.  Perhaps this is due to the greater likelihood of the gay young person internalizing the abuse.  It may also be that perpetrators may eventually identify as GLBT themselves, thus calling into question what intervention is happening with perpetrators even if the abuse is reported to an authority. 

It would seem a given that all victims would benefit, however targeted messages such as the one from Dan Savage would seem most beneficial and needed for those young people who eventually grow up gay.