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May 2002 Entries
Blogger has been up and down lately so who knows when I'll get updates done.
posted @ Friday, May 31, 2002 11:59 AM | Feedback (0)
MSNBC has an article up about the new tactics of anti-abortion activists. They take pictures of people getting abortions and post it on the web. They also post as much personal information as they can track down.
One woman is fighting back in court. She suffered a cervical tear while a patient at the Hope Clinic in Granite City, Ill., and needed to be rushed to a hospital. As clinic staffers wheeled her toward a waiting minivan, one of a group of antiabortion protesters outside, Daniel Michael of nearby Highland, Ill., saw what was happening and snapped a picture of her. Within days, her picture as well as her medical records-obtained through an unknown source-were on a Web site called Missionaries to the Unborn. It didn't name her but included her age, the name of her tiny hometown, the fact that she was married and the age and sex of her only child.
posted @ Tuesday, May 28, 2002 1:32 PM | Feedback (0)
Daniel Pipes has an article up titled Winning by Retreating. It's an interesting discussion of what happened when Israel withdrew from Lebanon.
"We thought that when the Israeli army withdrew, we'd finally get peace," lamented the mayor of a northern Israeli village recently. "I cannot understand what Hezbollah is doing."

Actually, it's easy to understand. Israel's retreat backfired because Jerusalem underestimated its enemy. Like the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah seeks not just to push Israeli soldiers out of some disputed land. It seeks nothing less than to destroy the state of Israel.

The episode illustrates three main points relevant to the West Bank and Gaza: * When Israel retreats before an enemy that seeks its destruction, it is perceived as weak. This in turn emboldens that enemy to step up its attacks. The lesson: Israel should consider pulling out of disputed territories only after having achieved true and permanent acceptance of its existence by its enemies.

Nothing in this article bodes well for Israel. I've always had in my head that they should just unilaterally withdraw from the the West Bank and build a big wall. Now I'm thinking that's not an option.

posted @ Friday, May 24, 2002 12:29 PM | Feedback (0)
On April 24, 2002, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick issued an open memorandum about Israel and the Middle East. These 20 facts will help serve as a primer for those trying to understand the historical context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Take a look at the 20 Facts yourself. Mostly stuff we've already covered but a good summary of what's going on.
posted @ Thursday, May 23, 2002 2:45 PM | Feedback (0)
Ha'aretz has an article on the diary that Shlomo Ben-Ami kept while negotiating with the Palestinians at Camp David.
Barak started to feel that he didn't have a partner. That he was going farther than any other Israeli prime minister and risking himself politically and losing his government, but despite that, Arafat would not budge. Arafat refused to get into the game.
The same theme is repeated from the other articles I've linked to: the Palestinian's failure to compromise on any of their demands. It wasn't so much a negotiation as a conference to see how much the Israelis would give up. Add this to the Farah article and you have to wonder whether Arrafat really wants a Palestinian state.
posted @ Thursday, May 23, 2002 2:17 PM | Feedback (0)
Joesph Farah has an interesting article on Yasser Arafat titled The day Arafat was offered power.
Aburish documents in detail the many steps Hussein took in trying to defuse the conflict between his regime and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had established a nation within a nation in Jordan. Even while members of Arafat's coalition were actively working on behalf of Hussein's overthrow, the king made the unprecedented and astonishing gesture of offering to form a government with Arafat - one in which the PLO leader would serve as prime minister.

"An amazed, almost speechless Arafat turned him down because he had no plan for Jordan, or for incorporating the PLO into a functioning nation state with or without Hussein," writes Aburish.

It's interesting to read the article and compare late-1960's Jordan to the present day West Bank and Gaza. Arafat's been kicked out of quite a few countries. He left Lebanon a shambles. The Palestinian-controlled areas are in much worse shape than they were in 1993. You can also check out Farah's article archive.

posted @ Tuesday, May 21, 2002 2:47 PM | Feedback (0)
Are you ready for a suicide bomber in America? The Director of the FBI describes it as "inevitable" in this CNN article.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Robert Mueller told a meeting of the National Association of District Attorneys in suburban Washington it was "inevitable" that the United States would one day see pedestrian suicide bombers like those who have struck frequently in Israel and elsewhere.
But what if their claims are just? What kind of country would America be if George Washington had used suicide bombers to drive the English out? If the North had used suicide bombers to end the Civil War? What legacy would Martin Luther King have if he'd used suicide bombers to fight for equal rights? Do two wrongs make a right? Ghandi's accomplishments were driven not by violence but by passive dissent. What kind of country will Palestine be if it gains it's independence by killing women and children?
posted @ Monday, May 20, 2002 3:54 PM | Feedback (2)
XBox Economics talks about the uphill battle that Microsoft faces with the XBox.
Look at the price of Microsoft's XBox and you'll probably chant the magical phrase: "give away the razors and sell the hell out of blades!" We all want to believe that the Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation 2, and Nintendo GameCube are $1,000 machines practically given away for $199. We are told that the hardware companies lose money on the hardware sales and make up the difference in software sales. In reality, Microsoft is the only one that has bought in to this "lose money on the hardware" idea.
posted @ Monday, May 20, 2002 2:18 PM | Feedback (0)
Ms. Magazine has a blurb on Zafran Bibi...
Zafran Bibi is on death row, sentenced to death by stoning for having sex outside marriage. She is in solitary confinement, visited only by her one-year old daughter, who was conceived, according to Zafran, not through a consensual extra-marital affair, but through rape. Islamic law in Pakistan, however, according to the New York Times, does not distinguish between consensual sex and rape when banning "adultery," so Zafran remains in prison, hoping to avoid execution. Zafran is not alone. Women's rights groups and human rights workers estimate that up to 50 percent of women who report rape in Pakistan are charged with adultery, and up to 80 percent of women in jail have been convicted with the crime. The men accused, however, are rarely charged, and under the law, four males must witness a man committing rape for him to be convicted.

MSNBC also has an article. I'm pretty sure I recall Pakistan being our ally. I guess it's important that we work with them since they have such great family values. HTML needs a sarcasm tag.

posted @ Sunday, May 19, 2002 10:21 PM | Feedback (0)
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created the first realistic videos of people saying things they never said - a scientific leap that raises unsettling questions about falsifying the moving image.

Yikes! I have enough trouble with what I actually say! It's from At MIT, they can put words in our mouths and it's an amazing technology.

posted @ Sunday, May 19, 2002 10:10 PM | Feedback (0)
On Yassar Arafat in Gangster Governance ...
Back in 1997, amid growing pressure for accountability, Arafat authorized an internal audit to assuage international donors. What the review found was remarkable: a whopping $326 million (more than 40 percent of the total PA budget for that year) could not be accounted for because of rampant corruption. Subsequently, much of the graft was traced back to Palestinian officials in key ministerial posts. Instead of instituting real reform, Arafat responded with a cabinet reshuffle that actually strengthened his grip on power -- adding ten new ministers, all from his Fatah branch of the PLO, to the government. Needless to say, subsequent reform efforts have been cosmetic at best.

These things don't even faze me any more.

posted @ Thursday, May 16, 2002 1:52 PM | Feedback (0)
The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity and later deported by Israel seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry.

They also guzzled beer, wine and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol.

And that's just the first two paragraphs of 'Greedy monsters' ruled church. It's an account what when on inside the Church of the Nativity. We've heard very little of the Christians speaking out against the Palestinians but details are starting to emerge. Keep in mind that these Churches are inside Palestinian-controlled areas so they don't have things like police or courts to protect them from the mobs. It also appears that all isn't well within the Christian community of the various churches.

"All the media concentrated on the Franciscan [Catholic] quarter, where little damage was done," the archbishop said. "Why? The Franciscans actually let the gunmen in, then guided the gunmen to our rooms."

Archbishop Ironius showed onlookers where the militants had broken in to the monks' quarters by smashing locked doors while, he said, the monks were praying downstairs.

"The Franciscans then blocked their own rooms' doors with iron bars," Archbishop Ironius said.

Nice. Let them into the other guys section of the Church and then bar the doors.
posted @ Wednesday, May 15, 2002 3:38 PM | Feedback (0)
The NY Times has a neat article about an Israeli special forces unit called the Palsars called An Impossible Occupation. It talks about the day to day life of a soldier during the Israeli military operations in the West Bank.
But the Palsars face an even more fundamental challenge here -- one typified by the discovery they made inside a primary school in Tulkarm.

Entering the Palestinian Authority school in the early days of the offensive, a group of Palsars found the classroom walls papered with posters of Palestinian suicide-bomber shahids, or ''martyrs,'' a pantheon of heroes for the 5- and 6-year-olds to look up to. Days later, they can't stop talking about it. I've heard about the primary school from at least a half-dozen platoon members, and always in tones of angry disbelief.

posted @ Tuesday, May 14, 2002 1:06 PM | Feedback (0)
If your curious you can see the pics I took in Washington, D.C.
posted @ Wednesday, May 08, 2002 10:34 PM | Feedback (0)
Daniel Pipes has a couple of new articles up. Arafat's Failure May Offer Seeds of Hope is an interesting look at the Palestinian strategy and how it may play out.
Although it certainly looked like Israel was sliding into defeat, a remarkable thing happened: a profound change in mood. Israelis came to realize that they were fighting for their survival. Lebanon was just a means to defend Israel and could be given up, but Israel itself had to be fought for.

A people who just months before had insisted on ending the conflict now accepted the need to fight on. A divided people became united. A dispirited population became mobilized. They overwhelmingly voted for a new and tougher government led by Ariel Sharon.

posted @ Monday, May 06, 2002 10:01 AM | Feedback (0)
Daniel Gordon in How the Times Distorted Jenin writes about the bias of CNN and LA Times reporters:
"What exactly happened in the Jenin camp has been cloaked in mystery, largely because Israel for days banned the entry of rescue workers, journalists and other independent eyes. Reporters who circumvented the restrictions, have pieced together the events of the camp..." Miller wrote in his April 21 article in the Times.

That is very dramatic prose. Unfortunately, where Miller is concerned, it is also untrue. Miller, far from circumventing the restrictions of the Israeli military, rode into the Jenin camp in an Israeli armored personnel carrier with me, courtesy of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

posted @ Monday, May 06, 2002 9:53 AM | Feedback (0)
A great article in the Jerusalem Post from last week. Burying the Truth, is about the events in Jenin ...
Despite the concern of UNWRA (United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestinian Refugees) and other aid organizations to begin to dig out the homes and start administering to the lives of their charges in the camp, the search and rescue work, says deputy director of UNWRA, Charles Capes, has been delayed by the large number of unexploded ordinances (UXOs) lying about the camp and a Palestinian interest in not rehabilitating the camp before the arrival of an international fact-finding commission.

... that the Palestinians continue to try and spin the "innocent civilian" lie ...

Hopping in and around the mess, Amr, a 23-year-old Palestinian man, begins to tell the German journalist that the two fighters were actually civilians, murdered in cold blood by the soldiers. Despite the clear evidence of the bullet holes, obviously fired from inside the room at the gaping hole in the wall, Amr insists that the men were unarmed.
posted @ Sunday, May 05, 2002 2:17 PM | Feedback (0)
This is odd. It seems that Atomz that provides the searching service is indexing all kinds of stuff in addition to my site. Most of it seems to come from Slate. Who knows what kind of random results search will return until this gets fixed.
posted @ Saturday, May 04, 2002 3:27 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's an interesting blurb about the Middle East. You'll have to scroll down to see it. He spends some time attacking the people that are comparing Sharon to Hitler. He also compares the Palestinian Authority to Israel.
When the citizens of Israel are told daily by their press and TV that the Arabs are subhumans who must be destroyed, then Sharon will be like Hitler. When Arabs must wear crescents on their shirts, Sharon will be Hitler. When stadiums full of Jews bay for the blood of the Arabs, and pour out in a torchlight parade to kick and beat and shave the beards of devout Muslims, Sharon will be Hitler. When the organizing principles of the Jewish state are war against neighbors, territorial conquest and the extirpation or subjugation of all non-Jewish peoples, the Sharon will be Hitler. When the mosques are burned and the minarets toppled and the babies thrown in the air and speared on bayonet point, Sharon will be Hitler.

As it stands, there is not an Arab member of the Knesset who even worries that the door to his office will have its locks changed overnight.

Yeah, there are Arab parliment members is Israel. Four of them belong to a political group called the Islamic Movement. Guess how many Jewish people there are in the Palestinian Authority. Ah, democracy. He shows a chilling picture of child and makes the following comment about it:

Who is the greater threat to this child pictured below? It's either the nation that withdrew from the Sinai, withdrew from Lebanon, admits Islamic Movement politicians to its deliberative body and would gladly make peace with any nation not sworn to destroy it - or it's the culture that hangs the grenade around the necks of its children.

posted @ Thursday, May 02, 2002 3:32 PM | Feedback (0)
The Palestinians finally admitted there wasn't a massacre in Jenin.
Palestinian officials yesterday put the death toll at 56 in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin, dropping claims of a massacre of 500 that had sparked demands for a U.N. investigation.

After weeks of spouting their claims of a massacre they finally admitted the truth. Of course they are still trying to influence public opinon.

The propaganda war continues, meanwhile, in the refugee camp itself. Families whose homes had been destroyed were ordered to sit and lie inside tents pitched near the destruction, to be available for interviews and filming with foreign reporters and photographers. At dusk, with the press opportunities concluded, they returned to houses offered to them in the undamaged city or in the rest of the refugee camp.

And how did the Israelis treat innocent civilians? Pretty well it seems:

Families living in houses directly opposite the destroyed area have told The Washington Times that Israeli soldiers, who temporarily occupied their houses just before the final battle began, treated them without violence and assured them: "You will not be harmed."

I just checked CNN to see if they convered this. Their only article didn't mention it. It did say:

When asked by CNN about the charge that Palestinians had exaggerated the death toll in Jenin, Hassan Abdel Rahman, the chief Palestinian representative to the United States, said, "It is not the numbers that count; it is the methods used by Israel in dealing with a civilian population."

Now it's not the numbers that count. Nice.

posted @ Wednesday, May 01, 2002 5:03 PM | Feedback (0)
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