Month: May 2011

A reader writes:

And for those Americans stuck in the 1960's, the West Bank settlers are the cowboys in the white hats struggling in an inhospitable frontier and the Palestinians are the heathen Indians. Sometimes, understanding American grassroots politics is all about the movies.

Another writes:

At the end of this post, you sounded more than a little fatalistic. For those of us who love Israel, want to support it, and yet see what is happening, these may seem like dark times, but the thing to remember, always, is that Israel is truly a democracy. 

Which means two things (1) the democratic process will often end with a result that angers the hell out of us; and (2) it is also self-correcting.  These are things we accept in America but sometimes have a hard time recognizing in other countries.  Bibi is a political hack whose survival in office depends on fanning the flames of hostility.  He won't last.  (He didn't before.)  The left looks dead in the water in Israel right now, but it will climb back; it always does everywhere.   Who could have imagined Blair in the age of Thatcher or Obama in the age of Bush?

It wasn't that long ago that an Israeli politician offered a peace deal that was very close to what Obama spoke of and it was rejected by Arafat. 

A few years before that, the country was led by Rabin, who was truly committed to peace.  A few year before that, Begin made peace with Sadat, the strangest couple of all, and settlements were destroyed to make that peace.  Everyone knows the deal; it's going to take the democratic process in Israel more time than we would like to get to that place where it becomes inevitable. 

The issue for American Jews is how to speed that up without giving up or overstepping our bounds.  (I say overstepping because, truth is, we're not the ones sending our kids to war or huddling in bomb shelters when the rockets fly, and so we have to be careful about how much we try to dictate.) If you believe in democracy, you have to accept the byzantine path it creates.

Know hope.

(Photo: Children of Jewish settlers look out of their window during the inauguration ceremony of new settler homes on May 25, 2011 in the Jewish enclave of Maaleh Zeitim in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud in east Jerusalem, Israel. Maaleh Zeitim was financed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz who has bankrolled other settlement projects in the occupied West Bank, and east Jerusalem. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

Waterlemon Cay, U.S. Virgin Islands, 9.25 am

Eric Voeten links to the abstract of a new study that tested whether civics class increased students' commitment to civil liberties:

More than 1000 students in 59 high school classrooms were randomly assigned to an enhanced civics curriculum designed to promote awareness and understanding of constitutional rights and civil liberties. The results show that students in the enhanced curriculum classes displayed significantly more knowledge in this domain than students in conventional civics classes. However, we find no corresponding change in the treatment group’s support for civil liberties, a finding that calls into question the hypothesis that knowledge and attitudes are causally connected.

Or maybe some core elements of authoritarianism and fear are deeply embedded in pre-rational feelings.

Too Big To Fail In 80 seconds:

"While the drugs screwed me up in a lot of ways, they improved me in certain others. I’ve never been good with numbers, but when I was on crack I could do math really, really well. I became a fucking whiz at calculus. But I also became kind of psychotic, unfortunately," – Courtney Love.

A reader writes:

I know you're busy yelling at Netanyahu and Palin supporters (who aren't listening to you anyway), but I'm surprised that you haven't said a word about Serbia's having finally captured Mladic. This is a big deal for Serbia and Europe. And it might make us think differently about the Arab Spring, given that so many hold out the metaphor of 1989 with one hand, then retract it with the other: Europe was different, was wealthier, was more stable.

Yes and no, and Mladic's capture allows us to reflect more fully on the reality of 1989 and its aftermath.

Yugoslavia started boiling in '89 (Tudjman renaming streets in Croatia after Ustasa murderers from WWII, Milosevic's vicious nationalism,_inter alia_), exploded in 1991, and didn't stop murdering until 1998. Nagorno-Karabakh, and tension and warfare in the Caucasus which continues to this day. The Czech-Slovak "Velvet Divorce," and the subsequent election in Slovakia of Vladimir Meciar, former boxer and corrupt thug. The elderly throughout the region scrabbling through garbage cans for recyclables to sell as subsidies for utilities and cheap rents disappeared. The enormity of East Germany slowly dawning on the prosperous West German population, and the brain drain and internal conflicts which resulted. Aleksandr Lukashenko still in power, not to mention Vladimir Putin. The EU's fear of Poland, now reaimed at Turkey.

But it's not surprising, is it? Never before had an interlocked set of socialist economies been forced to leap forward 20 years (or, in some cases, 50 or 60 – that's how far behind the rest of the world these economies were) and capitalism created from scratch. And half of Europe had to confront fifty years of bloody history, from their collaboration with Nazism to the actions of their Communist secret police, and then find a way forward together.

Mladic's capture helps us keep these messy details in mind. Europe's post-'89 transition is not complete, despite the US tendency to think of Europe as a "finished" continent and despite Europe's many undeniable advantages over the Middle East. If Europe needs more than two decades to sort out this kind of historic shift, and lapsed into genocide along the way, it shouldn't surprise us when the Middle East encounters bumps and snags along its own path.

Another:

I'd like to point out the difference between the way Europe and the US go after bad guys. The US invades countries, blows them to pieces, then goes into another country, blows that to pieces, only to find out that the guy they're looking for is hiding in yet another country. One they thought was a friend. But regardless of the friendship, the US goes in without telling their friend and executes their bad guy.

Here's how Europe does it. It holds a big carrot over the place where the bad guy is hiding: membership of the EU union. It creates an international court system, in this case the Yugoslavia court. And it waits. And slowly the bad guys get discovered by the locals. First Milosovic. Then Karadzic. Now Mladic.

No guns, no execution, no torture, just the patient power of the law. Just look at the dry headline on The International Criminal Tribunal's website: "Tribunal Welcomes the Arrest of Ratko Mladi?". These thugs have to stand trial. No glorious, scandalous trial. No politicians fearing death and destruction. Just the slow-grinding, boring mill of justice. Milosovic died under the pressure. Karadzic is fading away. And now Mladic faces the same prospect in a very decent cell in Scheveningen.

America is a fantastic country to live in. But boy am I proud to be European on days like this.

(Photo: A Serbian Radical party supporter holds photos of war crimes suspects Radovan Karadzic (L), Ratko Mladic (C) and Vojislav Seselj (R) at a rally in Belgrade February 24, 2006. A Serbian ultranationalist party on Thursday urged fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic not to surrender to the UN warcrimes court, despite mounting pressure on Belgrade to hand over one of the most wanted suspects of the Balkan wars in 1990s. By Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

By fear, threats and stigmatization. A memoir of how it has worked in the past, with a cameo by the late fanatic, Bill Safire.

“The threshold question, not usually asked, but it’s in everyone’s mind in a presidential election. ‘Should we give this person nuclear weapons?’ And the answer [in Palin's case], answers itself,” – George Will.

Coburn ups the ante on raising the debt ceiling.

The rest of her sanctioned pics are here. Shushannah Walshe reports on the meaning of Palin's bus tour:

According to a source with knowledge of Palin’s operation and thinking, keep a careful eye on how long the tour lasts, because it is intended as a way to test the presidential waters. If the road trip ends abruptly, it’s a sign she didn’t get the enthusiastic responses she believes she needs to launch a campaign. If the tour heads to regions outside of the Northeast like Iowa and South Carolina that, the source says, is a “big indicator” that Palin will pull the trigger.

I'm sorry, but all I could really think of was the strange parallels between loud, obnoxious attention-seeking bikers and, well, you know who: