Tag: Premium

Massive Selloff

by Bill McKibben

Well, sort of. News overnight that Australia’s prestigious Sydney University has announced its endowment will stop making any new investments in coal, and start reviewing its existing holdings. It comes after an intensive campaign from Greenpeace Australia, and my friends at 350.org, and is only one of many victories for the divestment campaign in recent weeks: the Unitarian Universalist Association, the World Council of Churches, Pitzer College, and the University of Dayton (a big Catholic research university in that green stronghold of Ohio) have joined Anglican dioceses, Stanford University, the United Church of Christ, and a great many others in what an Oxford paper described as the fastest growing movement of its kind ever.

The divestment camp has made two basic arguments. One, we’ve said, it’s simply wrong to invest in companies whose business plans involve finding, digging up, and burning far more carbon than the world’s scientists say is safe: if that’s your plan, than you’re not a normal company, you’re a rogue. You may not be breaking the laws of the state, but you are committed to violating the laws of physics.

Two, even if you don’t care about the future of the, you know, earth, it’s also an unwise gamble to keep doubling down on fossil fuel, because your investment only makes sense if the world takes no action to rein in carbon emissions. If the planet’s leaders ever get their act together, then many of the reserves that undergird company valuations will be “stranded,” much like the condo developments abandoned in the Nevada desert during the last housing crash. That argument has been more persuasive than I would have guessed when we launched this drive.

Not everyone is convinced, of course:

NSW Minerals Council chief executive Stephen Galilee said it was “a shame that Sydney University has caved in to the bullying of environmental activists masquerading as financial advisers”.

“The divestment campaign is environmental activism dressed up as investment advice and anyone choosing to take investment advice from environmental activists do so at their own financial risk,” Mr Galilee said, adding a recent report commissioned by the council had found the fossil fuel divestment case was based “on false premises and unsubstantiated claims, and may breach Australian law”.

But in fact, coal stocks have been a drug on the market. New York State’s pension fund alone has managed to lose $100 million over the last few years investing in black rocks. In this case, one might be better off taking investment advice–or advice period–from Desmond Tutu, who helped lead the last great divestment drive (from apartheid South Africa) and now is a key voice for fossil fuel divestment:

The taste of “success” in our world gone mad is measured in dollars and francs and rupees and yen. Our desire to consume any and everything of perceivable value – to extract every precious stone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhinoceros in the bush – knows no bounds. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth.

Gluten, Free At Last

by Sue Halpern

Sometime before my toddlerhood I became a failure to thrive baby. Food was going right through me; I wasn’t gaining weight. And so my parents took me to the doctor, and tests were done, and I was diagnosed with celiac disease. Certain foods were eliminated from my diet. Others were offered up almost non-stop. If there was ever a good case for sibling jealousy, it was watching my older brother eat apple pie while I got mashed bananas. Again.

Celiac doesn’t go away, but there came a time when I stopped abiding by the rules. What’s a little (or a lot of ) stomach distress when a buttered, toasted bagel is in the offing. Or blueberry pie. Or waffles. It was the celiac’s equivalent of Amish youth’s Rumspringa, and it was great! But having gotten sick once too often, I went back to my old ways, and when I did, I found that the sense memories of what I’d eaten stayed intact. Even now, years later, I can conjure up the taste of that bagel, or pie, or waffles. And because I have been able to do that, I’ve hardly felt deprived.

For the longest time, being wheat-free or gluten-free was an anomaly. But in the past five years or so, as you no doubt know–how could you not?–it has become a thing. Everyone is doing it! Celebrities. Athletes. Regular folk. The word on the street has been that eliminating wheat, or gluten, gives you more energy. That it makes you lose weight. That humans didn’t evolve to eat this stuff, so we can’t fully digest it. And the more it has become a thing, the more products are showing up on the supermarket shelf with the “gluten-free” label, even foods like Cheddar cheese and popcorn and, probably, steak. Which is to say nothing about the specialty products– the gluten-free oatmeals and almond flours and beers.

While none of these appeal to me–I’d rather have my sense-memory of  Toll House cookies not be distorted by some weak imitation–I completely understand why it might seem like a godsend to others, especially parents with celiac children. But to be honest, I’ve felt a little silly recently saying that I can’t eat that pasta or pizza, like I’m part of a cult I never meant to join.

But now begins the backlash. And not from people who are ready to go back to sourdough and cupcakes, but from science. As Luisa Dillner reports in The Guardian, for the past two years, gastroenterologists have been diagnosing people with something called non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), whose symptoms include “bloatedness and diarrhoea but also fatigue, ‘foggy brain’ and pain and numbness in the arms and legs.” But, she writes,

The research on NCGS is inconclusive and the most recent studies show that carbohydrates called Fodmaps, rather than gluten, may be the cause of symptoms. Fodmaps are fermentable oligo-, di- and mono-saccharides, and polyols – and one of them, fructan, is increasingly implicated in irritating the gut, causing flatulence, diarrhoea and bloatedness. Wheat has Fodmaps but so do other foods such as garlic, artichokes, yoghurt and fruit.

And an editorial in the academic journal Gastroenterology suggests that NCGS may not even exist.

Potentially phantom illnesses aside (and let’s hear it for the placebo effect in any case!), a warning issued by a Kansas State University food safety specialist brings a more serious worry: a popular gluten substitute, lupin “has the same protein that causes allergic reactions to peanuts and soybeans.” Because, until now, lupin has not been used much here in the States, the fear is that people with nut allergies will be unsuspecting consumers, with disastrous results.

But do not expect the recently gluten-free to break out the Mint Milanos any time soon. According to an article in The New York Times:

The portion of households reporting purchases of gluten-free food products to Nielsen hit 11 percent last year, rising from 5 percent in 2010. In dollars and cents, sales of gluten-free products were expected to total $10.5 billion last year, according to Mintel, a market research company, which estimates the category will produce more than $15 billion in annual sales in 2016.

Prenatal Complexity

by Dish Staff

Ananda Rose presents real-life examples of the two opposite ends of the abortion debate. First, she tells the story of a woman, whom she calls Julie Smith (name changed), who carried a fetus with severe abnormalities:

Her first choice, she says, was to give birth at a hospital but not to offer medical interventions such as feeding tubes, ventilators, or resuscitative measures, and to let nature take its course; without such intervention, Alice would likely die shortly after birth, if she was not stillborn, which was also a possibility. But, as Smith explains, the law requires feeding tubes for non-responsive infants, which would have kept Alice alive, but in a way that seemed “wreckless and cruel.” She could not imagine watching her daughter suffer in that way. The only other option that she and her husband considered “was going off the grid,” because, Smith says, even with a home birth state workers would most likely have intervened. But Smith feared that if they “just disappeared” to have the baby somewhere in peace and quiet, and if Alice died as predicted, they could be charged with homicide.

Given these realities, Smith chose what she believed was the most compassionate option: to terminate the pregnancy. “I am a mother, and I would do anything in my power to save my child,” she wrote on her blog. “That’s how the most difficult situation I’ve ever faced, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, was also the clearest choice.”

Rose then turns to evangelical Christian Maria Lancaster, and to the world of embryo adoption, “which is when unused embryos from a couple’s fertility treatments are donated to another couple”:

After four years of being frozen at -200 degrees, the two embryos, which Lancaster marveled at through a microscope, were implanted into her uterus. While one of the embryos did not make it, the other grew into what Lancaster calls her “child of destiny.”  … Lancaster also co-founded her own embryo adoption agency along with Dr. Joseph Fuiten, senior pastor of Cedar Park Church in Issaquah. For several years now she has been connecting families who have remaining embryos after fertility treatments with those unable to conceive. Lancaster says that she “prays over the files” that come to her, trying to create the best match. She pairs couples in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity, “like God does it,” so that the child “will feel a real part of the pack,” adding that her efforts have only confirmed her belief that “rescuing these unseen lives from the freezer” is her moral duty.

Will The ISIS War Come To A Vote?

by Dish Staff

If Obama wants to secure the public’s backing for the fight against ISIS, Jack Goldsmith recommends that he bring it to Congress for a vote:

The President must eventually educate the nation about why the United States is going to be deploying significant treasure and possibly some blood in Iraq and probably Syria to defeat IS.  As noted above, the case in theory is not hard to make.  But a mere speech from the Oval Office will not do the trick if the President wants the nation to understand the stakes and risks, and wants to get the American People truly behind the effort.  Only an extended and informed and serious national debate can do that, and such a debate can only occur if the President asks for Congress’s support.

Will Inboden also believes it’s time for a new, ISIS-specific Congressional authorization for the use of force:

Even before the Islamic State’s resurgence, some national security legal scholars were arguing that the Obama administration ‘s campaign against al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises was skating on increasingly thin legal ice. … Substantively, a new AUMF, especially focused on IS and its affiliates, could take into account the evolution and adaptation of militant jihadist groups in the 13 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the shifts and drawdowns of American ground force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic State’s nihilistic wickedness may be generating the headlines now, but over time even more danger may be posed by its magnetism towards other al Qaeda franchises and its potential leadership of militant jihadist groups spanning the broader Middle East and points beyond in Africa and South Asia.

Ashley Deeks, meanwhile, explores the various ways in which the administration might kosherize an intervention in Syria under international law:

A UN Security Council Resolution would provide the clearest basis for action. This option was a dead letter back in July 2012, when Russia and China refused even to approve economic sanctions against Assad, let alone the use of military force. One question would be whether the politics on this have changed: there might be some reason to think that Assad is coming under pressure from his own supporters to take on ISIS. It seems unlikely that Assad would affirmatively embrace a UNSCR authorizing a coalition of the willing to target ISIS in Syria, but if Russia senses that Assad might tolerate such action, the Security Council dynamics could change. Then again, the U.S.-Russia relationship is so toxic right now that this option seems remote. …

Second, Assad could secretly give consent to foreign governments (including the United States) to use force against ISIS in Syria. This, too, seems improbable, given the longstanding animosities between Assad and various Western governments. But having one government give secret and reluctant consent to another to conduct strikes in its territory is not without precedent.

A Sand Wedge Issue

by Jonah Shepp

Obama has come in for a lot of criticism for remaining on “vacation” in Martha’s Vineyard and proceeding with his regularly scheduled golf outings despite mounting crises in Iraq, Ukraine, and Missouri. Ezra Klein identifies what’s right and wrong about that critique:

This is politics at its dumbest. The country is not well served by a burnt-out president. If there’s a problem with presidential vacations it’s that they’re not restful enough. The way to do this right would be for the vice president to take over for a week or two — and for the president to get a call if something really goes wrong. Instead, the president takes working vacations, and the White House brags about how much work he gets done when he’s supposed to be resting.

But so long as the president is still the president when he’s on vacation, he still carries the symbolic weight of the role. He can’t go directly from leading the nation in grieving to hitting a drive. … Obama, of course, would say that this isn’t his problem. The get-caught-trying thing is Washington’s problem. The idea that politician should go around pretending to get things done even when they’re not getting anything done is exactly why the American people hate Washington, and exactly why they elected to Barack Obama to change it. And he is, in many ways, right about that. But there are days when it’s bad to get caught not trying.

First of all, let’s dispense with the notion that Obama is “on vacation”. President is a job you can do from pretty much anywhere these days, and in August, I suspect I’d rather be doing it from Martha’s Vineyard than from Washington, DC, where it’s typically a breezy 86° in the shade, not counting the hot air emanating from Capitol Hill. And that’s exactly what the president is doing: his job, from somewhere other than his usual office. It’s not like he’s really unplugging and unwinding out there on the links—and as Klein points out, he’d probably be handling this hellscape of world affairs a bit better if he actually got to do so once in a while. This criticism also strikes me as somewhat hypocritical, when the same people who accuse the president of failing to think out his strategic choices clearly and act on them decisively also insist that he operate under conditions of maximum stress.

Should he have postponed those 18 holes he put in after the Foley speech? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s how he clears his head after delivering a grim address. It might not look especially sensitive, but then, those who are making political hay out of that can always be counted on to find their hay somewhere. And after all these years, Paul Waldman figures the president is past caring about “the optics”:

Obama could try to “win the morning” and be consumed with every up and down of the news cycle. But he plainly no longer cares. Playing golf might not make him look good, but he’s probably decided that it’s an important way for him to stay sane (as the Times article says, he has “perhaps the most stressful job on the planet”), and he’s willing to tolerate some bad press.

Back when he first ran for president, Obama and his team prided themselves on their ability to see beyond the fury of that day’s news cycle, avoid the distraction of whatever was in Politico that morning, and keep their focus on their long-term goals. That was a central part of the “No Drama Obama” ethos. What’s happening now is in some ways an extension of that perspective. It may be that Obama has decided that it’s no longer possible to affect how most Americans think about him — after nearly six years in office, there’s no clever press strategy that will revive his approval ratings. The only thing that will make a difference is results.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy’s defense of what he dubs Obama’s “golf addiction” is so snobbishly golf-happy it reads more like a brief for the prosecution. I came away from it much angrier at Obama—and anyone else who makes $250k+ a year—than I was going in. Read it only if you either love golf and want to feel like you have something in common with the president, or hold deep class-based resentments against the sport and enjoy getting angry about it.

Foley’s Impossible Ransom, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Bucking the pundit consensus, Leonid Bershidsky argues that the US should not dismiss out of hand the option of paying terrorist groups ransoms for civilian captives like James Foley and Steven Sotloff:

Not leaving the ransom option open fits the logic of war. Either the U.S. Marines will drop out of the sky and destroy the hostage takers — in the case of photojournalist James Foley that didn’t work out — or the terrorists will kill their infidel victim and distribute the fortifying video to their supporters. Yet this approach may not be smart for detective work. Keeping the ransom option open may create opportunities to track down kidnappers and free hostages — and a growing number of successful hostage liberations would be as powerful a deterrent to terrorists as declarations that no money will be paid out. So a policy of refusing to pay isn’t so obviously superior, after all. One thing is for sure, though: More deaths like Foley’s will just raise the savages’ morale.

Michael J. Totten wonders if there isn’t a middle way:

Washington can’t pay ransoms, but it could and probably should offer a large cash reward for intelligence that leads to a successful rescue. Kidnappers might try to collect the reward money themselves, which would make it a ransom by other means, but there’s an easy way around that—kill all the kidnappers. Do not arrest them and send them to Guantanamo. Kill them.

I have no doubt Washington is looking for Sotloff and the others right now. They’ll send men if they think they know where he is. They’ve already tried at least once. We can only hope they’ll succeed before it’s too late. In the meantime, to all of my colleagues: for God’s sake, stay the hell out of Syria.

And Sandy Levinson brings up the uncomfortable truth that a human life isn’t really as “priceless” as we like to think it is:

We know, when we decide to build skyscrapers or major bridges, etc., that people are going to die.  Ditto, incidentally, with regard to raising speed limits on automobiles or continuing to allow the sale of alcohol in bars, etc., etc.  To be sure, we don’t know exactly who is going to die, and that makes all the difference, just as Barack Obama doesn’t know exactly whom he is sentencing to death when deploying troops or allowing the use of drones that will generate “collateral damage.”  For many, that non-specificity makes all the difference. … There is absolutely no excuse for what was done to Mr. Foley, but perhaps we have to treat war journalilsts the way we treat soldiers:  i.e., they voluntarily enlisted in a very dangerous occupation, for a mixture of reasons, including patriotism and devotion to the public weal, but part of the deal is that their lives will be on the line, to be protected only at “acceptable” cost.

Even if it is true that most of us consider our own lives “priceless,” no society has ever operated on that basis, and none ever will.

Libya Just Keeps Getting Worse

by Dish Staff

Meanwhile, in Libya, the The NYT reports that Egypt and the UAE have secretly launched airstrikes on Islamist militias battling for control of Tripoli:

Since the military ouster of the Islamist president in Egypt one year ago, the new Egyptian government, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have formed a bloc exerting influence in countries around the region to rollback what they see as a competing threat from Islamists. Arrayed against them are the Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by friendly governments in Turkey and Qatar, that sprang forward amid the Arab spring revolts. Libya is the latest, and hottest, battleground.

Several officials said that United States diplomats were fuming about the airstrikes, believing they could further inflame the Libyan conflict at a time when the United Nations and Western powers are seeking a peaceful resolution. “We don’t see this as constructive at all,” said one senior American official. … The strikes have also proved counterproductive so-far: the Islamist militias fighting for control of Tripoli successfully seized its airport the night after they were hit with the second round of strikes.

As the above image shows, the capital’s airport has been almost completely destroyed in fighting between the Misratan and Zintani militias. Ishaan Tharoor flags the recently released footage of a “public execution” by an Islamist militia, which further illustrates how the already tenuous security situation is deteriorating:

In the footage, which is available on YouTube, masked gunmen waving black flags bring a blindfolded Egyptian man identified as Mohammad Ahmad Mohammad onto the field in a pick-up truck. He is eventually shot in the head by a person dressed in civilian clothes, believed to be the brother of a man Mohammad is said to have killed. The murder is one of the starkest instances yet of Islamist groups enacting sharia law in the country. (Since Gaddafi’s fall, Salafists have also set about attacking the shrines of Sufi saints.) “This unlawful killing realizes the greatest fears of ordinary Libyans, who in parts of the country find themselves caught between ruthless armed groups and a failed state,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, the organization’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, in Amnesty’s press release.

Siddhartha Mahanta warned last week that the country was rapidly falling apart:

[F]ighting has only grown more intense over the summer, raising questions about whether Libya is on the fast track to civil war — or already in one. On Monday, planes of initially unknown origin conducted airstrikes on Islamist targets in Tripoli. Then, in the early hours of Tuesday, unidentified militants shelled an affluent section of Tripoli with Grad rockets, killing three. And, yes, that’s the same kind of artillery Russia has been accused of firing across the Ukrainian border. Who fired the Grad rockets remains a mystery, but eventually Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a onetime Qaddafi loyalist turned revolutionary and now a hardened anti-Islamist fighter, took credit for the airstrikes. Haftar said it’s part of his broader campaign for control of the city and airport, though there’s still some question as to whether Libyan planes could have been in any shape to conduct the strikes.

Not for the first time, Larison attributes this chaos to our “successful” intervention there in 2011:

While it is possible that Libya would still be suffering from internal conflicts in the absence of outside intervention in 2011, it is far more likely that aiding in the destruction of the old regime condemned Libya and its neighbors to the destabilizing and destructive effects of armed conflict for an even longer period of time. It was not an accident that Libya’s immediate neighbors were among the least supportive of the U.S.-led war, since they were always going to be the ones to experience the war’s harmful effects. Unfortunately for the civilian population in Libya, they will be living with the dangerous consequences of that “humanitarian” intervention for years and perhaps even decades to come. Considering that the war was justified entirely in the name of protecting civilians from violence, it has to be judged one of the most conspicuous failures and blunders of U.S. policy in the last decade. The desire to “help” Libyans with military action has directly contributed to the wrecking of their country. The lesson from all this that the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t be forcibly overthrowing foreign governments is an obvious one, and one that I am confident that all relevant policymakers in Washington will be sure to ignore.

Parental Whoa-vershare

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So the most egregious example of parental overshare that I’ve yet encountered has just appeared. Depressingly, it’s in the same publication as my own first published piece on the topic. It’s from a father who caught his 9-year-old son looking at porn:

His eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for an escape hatch inside his own head.  He was formulating a plan, something to get out of this situation, and then he stopped. His brow furrowed.

“Wait,” he said, sitting back upright. And then he followed up with possibly the sweetest thing he ever asked me, given the context. “What’s porn?”

I couldn’t help but smile. His defense hadn’t been self-preservation so much as it was genuine confusion. “It’s videos and pictures of people having sex,” I told him. He slumped back into embarrassment. “Oh. Then, yes. I looked at porn.”

Totes adorbs! Oh, and the author’s writing under what we can assume is his real name, and provides his son’s name and nickname. In case this wasn’t traumatizing enough for the kid, we also get specifics of his surfing habits:

My brain registered the title of a web page in the middle of the history list before my eyes really focused on anything.

8:41 PM    http://www.bimbos.com    Free XXX Vids: Sheila, The Queen of Ana…

I expanded the Page Title column to see the whole thing and was dismayed, but not surprised, to find that Sheila was not the Queen of Analogies. There were several more pages visited in rapid succession, all featuring women giving jobs that had nothing to do with our nation’s unemployment rates. Finally, the browser history showed, a Google search for “sex videos” had led to brief visits in the Internet’s nether regions before he’d apparently seen enough. I called his mother the next day.

What’s so jarring to me is now normal this sort of essay has become. No one bats an eye! Everyone’s happy to discuss their thoughts on this father’s approach to childrearing, happy to have the ‘so how does one address porn with young kids?’ conversation, and somehow missing that the most private moments of a specific child’s life are not fodder for an article in a much-shared publication. And the worst of it is, the father here totally got that this wasn’t a public moment. Recounting the talk, he writes, “‘So, I have to talk to you,’ I told him, once we were inside the car and away from other ears.” Other ears? Does the Atlantic‘s readership not count?

Inspired by this article, a parental-overshare checklist, to go through before pitching a story about your kid:

  • How would you feel if such an article existed about you? As in, from your childhood, by one of your parents? How would you have felt if you’d discovered such an article at 14, 17, 22?
  • Is what you’re sharing something you’d feel you had the authority to share, on that scale, about your best friend or partner?
  • Is there a way to address this issue without talking about your kid? Who is identifiable even if you’re a woman with a different last name from said kid? Who, even if reasonably unidentifiable (i.e. no first or last name given) will still read the article and know exactly whom “my daughter” refers to?

Fighting Disease Pays Dividends

by Dish Staff

Charles Kenny makes the economic case for eradicating Ebola:

There are straightforwardly selfish reasons for rich countries to work with poor countries to eradicate infectious diseases. While Ebola in its current form is an unlikely candidate as a serious health threat to Americans or Europeans, other diseases, from AIDS to West Nile virus, are reminders that infections that start or survive in the developing world can become considerable threats to the health of people in wealthier societies. Reducing the risk of such diseases has a global benefit.

The fight against smallpox is a case in point. Annual expenditure on the global smallpox eradication campaign from 1967 to 1979 was $23 million. Since eradication in 1980, the U.S. has recouped nearly 500-fold the value of its contribution to that effort in saved vaccination and treatment costs. And although smallpox remains the only scourge to have been intentionally wiped off the face of the earth (minus a few refrigerators), global progress against other infections has been dramatic enough to save considerable medical costs the world over. The U.S. doesn’t regularly vaccinate against tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, or cholera because rates are low enough at home and in nearby countries that the the threat they pose is minimal.

Meanwhile, Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne rip to shreds Newsweek’s fear-mongering Ebola cover story:

The Newsweek story implies increased vulnerability to Ebola in the United States, which psychology research shows will likely amplify negative reactions to people heuristically associated with the disease — in this case, the many African migrants living in the Bronx (and potentially elsewhere in the United States) accused by Newsweek of liking bushmeat (never mind that Newsweek’s investigative reporters were never able to locate any for sale). The negative reactions to increased vulnerability include having more xenophobic attitudes. …

Fear-mongering narratives about Ebola circulating in the popular media can also have a serious effect on knowledge and attitudes about Ebola. Though there are no cases of person-to-person infection in the United States, a recent poll conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health reports 39 percent of Americans think there will be a large Ebola outbreak in the United States and more than a quarter of Americans are concerned that they or someone in their immediate family may get sick with Ebola in the next year.

Israel Gets Into The Demolition Business

by Dish Staff

One of Israel’s air strikes in Gaza this weekend leveled an entire apartment building:

The Israeli military said that it destroyed the building because it contained a Hamas command center, though spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner “could not immediately specify which floor, or floors, of the building were the targets in the attack, or whether the intention had been to destroy the whole tower,” according to the Times. Residents denied that Hamas had been working out of the building. Residents said they received an alert from Israel 20 to 30 minutes before a drone dropped a “warning” rocket on their home. A warplane filled with non-warning weapons arrived shortly after. Text messages, voice mails, and leaflets distributed by Israel also warned that it would target anything “from which terror activities against Israel originate.”

Israel hit several other targets in Gaza over the weekend, including two homes and a commercial center. Ten Palestinians were reportedly killed in those attacks.

Netanyahu is now preparing his public for a war that continues into next month. A new ceasefire proposal may be in the offing, though that won’t be much comfort to the 106 Palestinians or the four-year-old Israeli child killed in the exchange of fire since the previous truce broke down last Tuesday:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday Israel would not be worn down by persistent rocket fire, warning it would hit any place from which militants were firing, including homes. His remarks came as the air force stepped up its campaign against rocket fire, bombarding a 12-storey residential block. But by early Monday, there was increasing talk about a possible new ceasefire agreement which would see the delegations return to Cairo to resume discussions on an Egyptian proposal to broker a more permanent end to the violence.

“There is an idea for a temporary ceasefire that opens the crossings, allows aid and reconstruction material, and the disputed points will be discussed in a month,” a senior Palestinian official said in Cairo. “We would be willing to accept this, but are waiting for the Israeli response to this proposal,” he said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Another Palestinian official said Egypt might invite Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams to return to Cairo within 48 hours.

Meanwhile, a new poll of Gazans has come out that illuminates the attitudes of the people who, in Israel’s view, abdicated their status as noncombatants when they voted for Hamas:

More than 90 percent of Gazans surveyed thought that resistance was either “well prepared” or “somewhat prepared” for the Israeli assault, and more than 93 percent opposed the disarmament of Palestinian militant groups, which Israel has said is a condition of any long-term truce. At the same time, despite an Israeli assault that has killed more than 2,100 Palestinians — overwhelmingly civilians — in the last six weeks, nearly 88 percent of those surveyed also supported a long-term truce, and another 10 percent supported an unspecified “medium-term” truce. …

The poll also surveyed opinions in Gaza regarding the Syria-based Wahhabi militant group Islamic State, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which Israeli leaders have repeatedly referenced in their offensive against Hamas. More than 85 percent of Gazans surveyed, however, said they oppose the group.

That last finding is particularly salient in light of the new propaganda meme Netanyahu has been pushing:

Max Fisher takes down that facile comparison:

The two groups are totally distinct. It’s not just that there is no known connection, operational or otherwise, between Hamas and ISIS, although there isn’t. They ultimately follow very different ideologies: Hamas will talk about Islamist extremism, but it is ultimately a Palestinian nationalist group first and foremost, one that is fighting to establish its vision of a Palestinian state. One of Hamas’s most important supporters historically has been the government of Iran, which is actively fighting against ISIS in Syria, where it has been sending arms, money, and men. If Hamas and ISIS were really the same thing, then presumably Iran would not fund one half of the group and then send Iranians to die fighting the other half. And Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal publicly rejected any Hamas-ISIS comparison.

ISIS, on the other hand, comes from the same ideological strain as al-Qaeda, a jihadist movement called Salafism, which rejects the idea of nationalism and seeks a pan-Islamic caliphate. Even within Gaza, the Palestinian territory that Hamas rules, there is sometimes-violent tension between Hamas and the local Salafist groups that follow something more akin to the ISIS worldview.