Author: Andrew Sullivan

It seems to me that questions about how the law deals with sexual orientation have nothing to do with Israel's policies concerning Gaza … or with much else in foreign policy for that matter. But if gay pride parades are to take a position on Israel, they should surely note that Israel is the safest place anywhere in the Middle East for the gays and the BLT community. Barring an Israeli float in Madrid's gay pride parade seems perverse, exclusive and pernicious. They think they could have a pride parade in Gaza?

Steinglass proffers a unified theory for twenty-first century catastrophes:

Leonhardt concentrates on the unfortunate human tendency to discount the highly unlikely. This is certainly a factor, but as advice, it’s only partially useful. If the lesson of the catastrophes of the noughties is to pay attention to tail-end risk, then we should all be running around building nuclear fallout shelters and working out deflection strategies for massive asteroid strikes. And that’s not going to happen. (Though in the case of climate change, one of Leonhardt’s examples, it is useful: we should be paying more attention to the risk that global temperature rise by 2100 will be near the catastrophic 6-degree-celsius high-end estimate, not the merely awful 2-degree median estimate.) But I don’t think that is the main lesson. The main lesson is simpler and more concrete: government regulations need to be more restrictive, regulators need to be more aggressive, better-paid, and more powerful, and they need to stop people and corporations more often from doing things that may be profitable but pose unacceptable risks to the public. We had this theory for a while that economic self-interest would prove sufficient disincentive to foolish risk-taking. But now the Gulf of Mexico is on fire, so I’m afraid we need to go back to the old-fashioned system with the rules and the monitors carrying sticks. Sorry.

This sounds good, but what do you do when regulators have sufficiently large sticks but remain unwilling to swing them?

TNC on this spectacle:

By the logic of the press corps, these White House social events have no real effect on the news narrative. I find that interesting. There are some very smart people in the the White House. It would seem that by now they would know their soirée press strategy has been a miserable failure. And yet they press on. I wonder why?

Walter Russell Mead writes that "the strong reaction in Turkey to the Israeli interception of a convoy organized by Turkish groups with aid for Gaza underlines the possibility that Turkey is moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States." Er: why is Israel the same as the US? It is only if one assumes that the US supports everything and anything Israel does that you can make this kind of leap. And the Obama promise – which Netanyahu has done his damnedest to destroy – was precisely to re-establish the US as some kind of honest broker in the Mideast.

But there is also a more logical inference which seems to have escaped professor Mead:

Why has there been a “strong reaction” to the raid on the aid flotilla? It isn’t because Turkey is “moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States,” and it isn’t even because the AKP government is bent on undermining the relationship with Israel. There has been a strong reaction because eight Turkish citizens were killed on a Turkish-flagged civilian ship in international waters by the armed forces of its ostensible ally while on a basically peaceful aid mission. Name me a government that would not have a strong reaction to such an episode. For that matter, the aid mission was an effort to breach an inhumane blockade that probably cannot be legally justified. If partnering with the U.S. means ignoring gross, violent provocations against its citizens, no democratic government in the world would be able to maintain such a partnership for very long.

Actually, I can name a government that is largely indifferent to another government's murder of one of its teenage citizens: the U.S.

(Photo: A demonstrator burns an Israeli flag behind a Turkish flag during a protest against Israel on June 5, 2010 at Caglayan Square in Istanbul. Nine people — eight Turks and a US national of Turkish origin were killed in May 31's pre-dawn raid by Israeli forces on the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the aid flotilla aiming to break the crippling blockade of Gaza. By Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty.)

Steve Jobs' iPhone presentation FAIL. And yes, this was the keynote.

The Israeli government has walked back a statement connecting the activists on board the Mavi Marmara to al Qaeda. Bret Stephens reiterates it:

So a bunch of “peace” activists teams up with a Turkish group of virulently anti-Semitic bent and with links both to Hamas and al Qaeda …

IHH denies this; Washington says it has no evidence; the IDF conceded that:

“We don’t have any evidence. The press release was based on information from the [Israeli] National Security Council.” (The Israeli National Security Council is Netanyahu’s kitchen cabinet of advisors).

The source for Stephens’ assertion, however, is this Danish Institute study (PDF) that does indeed persuasively show links between IHH and al Qaeda in the 1990s:

An examination of IHH’s phone records in Istanbul showed repeated telephone calls in 1996 to an Al-Qaida guesthouse in Milan and various Algerian terrorist operatives active elsewhere in Europe – including the notorious Abu el-Ma`ali, who has been subsequently termed by U.S. officials as a “junior Osama Bin Laden.”

During the later Seattle trial of would-be Al-Qaida Millenium bomber Ahmed Ressam, federal prosecutors called French magistrate Bruguiere to the stand as an expert witness. Bruguieretestified that IHH had played “[a]n important role” in the Al-Qaida Millenium bomb plot targeting LAX. Under repeated questioning, Bruguiere insisted that “[t]here’s a rather close relation”:

The IHH is an NGO, but it was kind of a type of cover-up… in order to obtain forged documents and also to obtain different forms of infiltration for Mujahi- deen in combat. And also to go and gather[recruit] these Mujahideens. And finally, one of the last responsibilities that they had was also to be implicated or involved in weapons trafficking.

It’s important to note the Islamist ties of IHH, and its past relationship with al Qaeda. What we cannot say is if any al Qaeda members were on board the ship, the Mavi Marmara. In fact, we simply have no evidence to back that up at all. One might have thought that taking the word of Cheney’s Netanyahu’s kitchen cabinet  about al Qaeda links might be a little radioactive after the Iraq war. But no. We’re back where we were.

A reader writes:

Oddly enough I thought of your blog the other day when I was petting a friend’s cat. It is rare for me ever to dislike an animal. But it’s just as rare for an animal to form an immediate bond with me. Upon first meeting my friend’s cat, it immediately took to me. Over the last few weeks it has become evident that this cat and I understand each other on an intuitive level. She acts as though she’s my cat and we’ve know each other forever. And I understand her feline mood swings better than any other cat I’ve been around. There is something deeply intuitive about our relationship.

The only thing I can compare it to is the love I feel for my best friends and for my childhood dog: there is absolutely no effort to the relationship, all love and immediate compassion.  And it made me think of Montaigne, and then your blog. I imagine this is where you see the divine, trumpets blaring. And if there were anything that I were to consider divine, it would be this special, rare connection. 

Divinity aside, what appears most important to me is that many (all/most/few?) of us have had this feeling of a deep friendship; a feeling that is not privy to any one one faith. Whatever the reasons for this connection – and we must all surely have an explanation – I am just thankful that I have felt it and that it exists even without me.

Friedersdorf tweaks Chris Beam's formula:

[E]ven today BP’s leadership lacks adequate gender diversity, its board of directors being made up of fourteen persons, only one of them who self-identifies as a female, and all of whom earn significantly more than the median income in Louisiana, Alabama, and even the relatively privileged residents of coastal Florida.

Chait approves, this time:

I foresee a progressively less-amusing internet trope. By the time this devolves into "What if biologists wrote the news?," we're all going to want to kill ourselves. In the meantime, Friedersdorf's piece is pretty darn good.

Meh.

"So far, at least, the US public seems to be demonstrating more patience and maturity than their op-ed writers," – Clive Crook.