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June 2002 Entries
It's even spilled over into sports. ESPN has an article up about a doubles team composed of an Israeli and Pakistani. And guess who's upset? Pakistan Sports Board director Brigadier Saulat Abbas.
"Although he is playing in his private capacity, we officially condemn his playing with an Israeli player and an explanation has been sought from him," Pakistan Sports Board director Brigadier Saulat Abbas told the BBC. "Since Pakistan has no links with Israel, Qureshi may face a ban."
posted @ Saturday, June 29, 2002 12:01 PM | Feedback (1)
Also don't miss Why does the left support the Palestinians?
The left speaks about its passion for democracy ("power to the people"). Yet it is Israel that is a fully functioning democracy, as opposed to all of its Arab and Muslim enemies. Yasser Arafat is precisely the self-aggrandizing, corrupt dictator-type that the left claims to hold in contempt.

The left claims to have particular concern for women's rights. Yet it is Israel that has as highly developed a feminist movement as that of any Western country. It is Israel that conscripted women into its armed forces before almost any Western country. At the same time, the state of women's rights among Israel's Muslim enemies is perhaps the lowest in the world.

And he's got a pretty darn good answer.
posted @ Friday, June 28, 2002 9:53 AM | Feedback (0)
Orson Scott Card writing a weekly column on world politics? Who knew? Card wrote Enders Game, one of my favorite books. Many of his other books also feature political intrigue so I guess I shouldn't be suprised that he follows politics. He also takes an active interest in the Middle East and write a column called War Watch. His latest article, You Can't Have Peace When the Enemy Wants War, talks about how the current terrorist actions by Palestinians are aiding Iraq.
If Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, or even Turkey (where Islamism has only a slim foothold) were seen to be supporting us in a war against a terrorist state, they could have survived the crisis and it would, in the end, strengthen their position and make their world safer.

But if those same nations were seen to be supporting us in a war against a Muslim state, they would be in grave danger of being destroyed in a popular revolution driven by Islamist imams who would harangue their congregations into pouring out into the streets.

The Palestinian War, in other words, changed the meaning of our invasion of Iraq and made it impossible to hold the coalition together.

It's a very well written and well thought-out article. My respect for Card has just gone up a notch. Also, don't miss Live with Yasser and Geraldo about Geraldo's interview with Arafat. It's funny in the beginning and scary at the end.
There is no moral equivalency between Israel and Palestine in this current war.

There might have been. The U.N. resolution that created Israel also created a Palestinian state. The territory that was historically both Israel and Palestine was supposed to be divided between them.

But the state of Palestine never came into existence.

Why not? Because the Arab countries surrounding Israel immediately invaded. They expected to destroy all Israeli resistance and drive the Jews out of Palestine.

But Israel didn't read the script. Israel won.

When that first war ended, Israel controlled a strip of land along the Mediterranean, a swath of desert reaching down through the Negeb to Elath so they had access to the Red Sea, a finger of land that reached Jerusalem, where the Israelis controlled half the city, and another stretch of land reaching east to the Sea of Galilee.

However, the Muslims still controlled a sizable portion of the land the U.N. had set aside as a Palestinian state -- the regions now called the West Bank and Gaza.

For eighteen years, from 1949 to 1967, those areas were completely under the control of Muslim Arabs. At any time, they could have established a Palestinian state in either or both of those territories.

Instead, Egypt ruled in Gaza, and Jordan ruled on the West Bank. The people who lived there were never called "Palestinians." The Palestinians in refugee camps were never allowed to go to "Palestine" and settle there and build their own nation.

During all those years, the only Palestinians who got to vote in free multi-party elections were the ones who stayed in Israel.

People talk about a Palestinian state as if it would represent the will of the Palestinian people. As if it would have free elections and political parties and a free press where people could say what they wanted. You know, the moral equivalent of Israel, only run by Arabs.

But that is not one of the choices on the table.

Yasser Arafat is a thug. He makes Castro look nice. If you're a Palestinian and you think Yasser Arafat is wrong about anything, keep that opinion to yourself. Because if you say it out loud, somebody will come and shoot you in the knees. Or the head.

The site also has some forums so you can discuss the articles. I haven't read all the posts but they seem pretty reasonable, even when people disagree.
posted @ Friday, June 28, 2002 9:51 AM | Feedback (0)
There's an interesting story in the Jerusalem Post about CNN media bias where Israel is concerned.
Watchdog groups have long charged that CNN is actually biased against Israel. They have logged countless examples of reporters who allow Palestinian representatives to get away with abject lies, such as the PLO representative to the US, Hassan Abdel Rahman, who said on Crossfire on April 2 that there were "very few" armed people hiding in the Church of the Nativity; reporters who talk repeatedly of violence "flaring up" and "erupting" in the passive tense, helping to disguise Palestinian responsibility for the violence; and reporters who distort facts, for example, on February 16 reporting that "a Palestinian died when a car exploded," without mentioning he was in the process of attempting a suicide bombing.
posted @ Thursday, June 27, 2002 2:11 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's something I don't read every day. Parameters describes itself as the "The United States Army's Senior Professional Journal." In early 1998 they published an article by Ralph Peters titled Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States.
When you leave the classroom or office and go into the world, you see at first its richness and confusions, the variety and tumult. Then, if you keep moving and do not quit looking, commonalties begin to emerge. National success is eccentric. But national failure is programmed and predictable. Spotting the future losers among the world's states becomes so easy it loses its entertainment value.

In this world of multiple and simultaneous revolutions--in technology, information, social organization, biology, economics, and convenience--the rules of international competition have changed. There is a global marketplace and, increasingly, a global economy. While there is no global culture yet, American popular culture is increasingly available and wickedly appealing--and there are no international competitors in the field, only struggling local systems. Where the United States does not make the rules of international play, it shapes them by its absence.

The invisible hand of the market has become an informal but uncompromising lawgiver. Globalization demands conformity to the practices of the global leaders, especially to those of the United States. If you do not conform--or innovate--you lose. If you try to quit the game, you lose even more profoundly. The rules of international competition, whether in the economic, cultural, or conventional military fields, grow ever more homogeneous. No government can afford practices that retard development. Yet such practices are often so deeply embedded in tradition, custom, and belief that the state cannot jettison them. That which provides the greatest psychological comfort to members of foreign cultures is often that which renders them noncompetitive against America's explosive creativity--our self-reinforcing dynamism fostered by law, efficiency, openness, flexibility, market discipline, and social mobility.

Traditional indicators of noncompetitive performance still apply: corruption (the most seductive activity humans can consummate while clothed); the absence of sound, equitably enforced laws; civil strife; or government attempts to overmanage a national economy. As change has internationalized and accelerated, however, new predictive tools have emerged. They are as simple as they are fundamental, and they are rooted in culture. The greater the degree to which a state--or an entire civilization--succumbs to these "seven deadly sins" of collective behavior, the more likely that entity is to fail to progress or even to maintain its position in the struggle for a share of the world's wealth and power. Whether analyzing military capabilities, cultural viability, or economic potential, these seven factors offer a quick study of the likely performance of a state, region, or population group in the coming century.

The Seven Factors

These key "failure factors" are:

  • Restrictions on the free flow of information.
  • The subjugation of women.
  • Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
  • The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
  • Domination by a restrictive religion.
  • A low valuation of education.
  • Low prestige assigned to work.
Mr. Peters follows with an in-depth discussion of each of the seven factors. This was written in 1998 so there wasn't the focus on the Middle East that there is today. It's interesting to apply these factors to various countries in the news today and see how they stack up.
posted @ Thursday, June 27, 2002 6:53 AM | Feedback (0)
This is priceless! It's titled Psychological Warfare by John R. Bradley of ArabNews.com. Yeah, I'm sure they have a correspondent named John R. Bradley. They have three other articles written by him that I could find on three random topics (soccer, Al-Jezeera and foreign nationals) and none of the articles had a similar writing style to this one. I swear I could never make up an article this funny.
JEDDAH, 25 June - A number of Western cells are presently operating in Saudi Arabia, both overtly and covertly, and have launched periodic assaults on the youth of the Kingdom in the months since the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

It is time that this matter was addressed with the sense of urgency and outrage it warrants.

The Westerners who make up these cells are experts in psychological terrorism.

Although there is reportedly intense rivalry among them, they are nevertheless bound together by their lack of ethics and blind loyalty to the lost cause of breathing life into a profession dying a quiet death in their home countries: serious, objective journalism.

These Western journalists are apparently motivated by their collective misconception that because 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis, normal life does not exist in what they so love to refer to as the "oil-rich" Kingdom.

The Western journalists typically enter the Kingdom under cover of pretending that they want to learn more about what goes on here, for the benefit of international relations and intercultural harmony.

However, once they arrive they immediately shed their flimsy masks.

High on having got in, they set about doing what they really came here to do: launch psychological assaults on the local Saudi population.

Our "journalists" are conducting psychological warfare against them! That's priceless! Is a little free press really that scary?
posted @ Tuesday, June 25, 2002 5:27 PM | Feedback (0)
President Bush called for a democracy in Palestinian-controlled areas and asked other Arab Middle East powers to help. Except that none of them are democracies. The Washington Post has an article on the democratic status of the major Arab countries. Call me simple or an American Imperialist but I think democracies are better than dictatorships.
posted @ Tuesday, June 25, 2002 12:28 PM | Feedback (0)
And here's the article on CNN giving airtime to terrorists families: CNN chief: No more airtime to bombers' families
posted @ Monday, June 24, 2002 6:52 PM | Feedback (0)
CNN has a special section up on the victims of terrorism. They'd been under quite a bit of pressure lately to provide more balanced coverage. They also have an article on Gal Eisenman, the 5 year old Israeli girl murdered by a suicide bomber.

The article also has an interesting statistic about the death toll in Israel. Since January 2002 Israel has had 225 people killed by terrorists or one of every 26,392 citizens. Applying that same ratio to America would yield 10,888 deaths. We invaded a country and deposed the leaders because we lost one-third that many. And people ask Israel to negotiate with the people that kill them. Hell, Israel offered to give them the West Bank, Gaza and half of Jerusalem for their troubles. The Palestinians didn't complain when Jordan ruled the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip. Heck, maybe if the American Indians start blowing themselves up in Washington, D.C. we'll give them back Oklahoma.

Maybe this article will be the turning point in the public opinion war against Yasser Arafat. Right now he's at the top of my list of barriers to peace in the Middle East.

posted @ Monday, June 24, 2002 3:21 PM | Feedback (0)
James Lileks has a great satirical piece up comparing Islam to the West. Apparently they did a poll among college students and found out some interesting things:
American students intensely and overwhelmingly disagree with the statement that Western culture is superior to Arab culture. Only 16% believe Western culture is superior to Arab culture but 79% do not.

A. Essay question. Two choices: life as an gay atheist in Fargo North Dakota, or life as a Christian gay in Riyadh. Write 1,000 words describing how each faces equal hardship. If your essay contains less than 1000 words, you will either be docked one grade or have your left hand removed with an ornately engraved scimitar, depending on which morally-equal culture the teaching assitant wishes to consult.

And it only gets better!

posted @ Friday, June 21, 2002 3:26 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's a scary scenario for what might unfold if Hamas or Hizbollah ever managed to get ahold of chemical weapons.
Israel would not strike back at Hamas in Gaza or Lebanon with nuclear or chemical weapons, because the collateral damage could hit them, too. Artillery barrages that turn Gaza into Beirut and drive every Palestinian from Israel are a possibility, but even that won't protect Israel. What was done once, could be done again... and Israel's Arab citizens would be thoroughly radicalized if the Palestinians were deported en masse by force. Infiltration is also possible across borders, and Hamas has been building and firing rockets into Israel for a while now. The problem must therefore be removed at its root, or not at all.

Hamas' very existence is made possible by (in order) Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The logic is therefore clear: unless those sponsors are punished in a manner so horrific that they will force their proxies never to do such a thing again, the long-term result could well threaten Israel's existence. Not to mention the emotional resonance that would be at play in Israel, a country set up so that Jews would never again be gassed for being Jewish.

posted @ Wednesday, June 19, 2002 1:27 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's a great article on the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat. One of the better ones I've read for understanding what he's doing to the Palestinian people.
The story of how this came to pass is the subject of this essay. In it, I will document-in large part using original source material not previously published in the West-the rise of a regime characterized by a massive police force whose specialty was intimidation of political opponents; an executive branch in which Arafat alone made all major decisions and in which the civil service was reduced to a corrupt patronage machine; the institutionalized absence of the rule of law, and a judiciary that lacked any independence; and the intimidation of the media and human rights organizations, to the point that it became virtually impossible to transmit any message other than one personally approved by Arafat.

This last point is particularly chilling, because the West Bank and Gaza boasted no small number of independent newspapers and human rights groups when Arafat replaced the Israeli government as the ruler of these areas. In describing what happened to them, I will rely heavily on material my staff and I collected when I was the head of Peace Watch, an independent monitoring organization that was the only Israeli group officially accredited by the Palestinian Authority as an observer of its January 1996 elections. This position permitted me to see firsthand how these once-democratic institutions-which represented the best hope for creating true pluralism within Palestinian society-were beaten into submission. It also permitted me to witness certain rare cases of true heroism, in which these institutions and the individuals committed to them attempted to swim against the rising tide of dictatorship.

This is another one of those articles where I want to quote the whole thing. And another quote on the West Bank under Israeli rule.

To make matters more difficult, the Palestinians in the territories had, over more than a generation of Israeli rule, become intimately familiar with the workings of Israeli democracy and had benefited from an occupation that was more liberal in many respects than any Arab government. They enjoyed the freest press in the Arab world, based in eastern Jerusalem, and they sported a host of human rights organizations, scattered throughout Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, which had become internationally known for reporting on the practices of Israeli troops. Moreover, exposure to the chaotic workings of Israel's Knesset and to the trial and appeal processes in Israel's courts led Palestinian residents in the territories to develop views on power-sharing, pluralism, and the rule of law that were sharply at odds with those that Arafat and his colleagues were perfecting in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunis.

Do you want to go on trial in the Palestinian Authority?

Since the point of the courts was to hand down appropriate verdicts quickly, normal safeguards were dispensed with: The trials were held in the middle of the night, with little warning, and without the presence of family members or journalists. Defendants were represented by court-appointed lawyers, little evidence was offered, and decisions were generally returned in fifteen minutes or less.76 When one of the officer-justices resigned in protest over the lack of proper procedures, Arafat ordered him to be arrested and interrogated

These are the people that want control of a country. If the U.S. gives Arafat a country we'll have created another dictatorship. Then we'll sit back and be suprised why the Palestinian people hate us so much because we helped make their lives miserable. At some point America has to stand for freedom and democracy and basic human rights. It's really amazing to read how much of a dictator Arafat is. Is this man a partner for peace? It's a long article but a good read. At least read the first few paragraphs of each of the main sections if you don't read the whole thing. And the bottom half is all footnotes to document his statements.

posted @ Monday, June 17, 2002 8:58 PM | Feedback (0)
Please, please don't go see Windtalkers. That movie is horrible. It might be the worst movie I've ever seen on an opening weekend. It has horrible acting and a plot written by a dysfunctional third-grader. Calling the characters cardboard is an insult to packing material everywhere. It's just a really bad war movie with some Navajo "code talker" stuff thrown in. Some of the plot lines are so formulaic: redneck Texas racist's life saved by Navajo and he finally comes to respect him. Pu-lease!

There is nothing about why their code was never broken. Nothing about how they really protected the code. Nothing about how they discovered they could user Navajo. And once again the Navajo probably got the worst of this. There's nothing about why their language is so amazing. John Woo screwed this one up royally. I hope someone gets fired for this. I'm still trying to figure out why I didn't leave in the middle. There were a few others that did. I should have at least asked for my money back. Maybe we can get some crazed Muslim cleric to issue a fatwah against this movie. Then we'd have some common ground.

posted @ Saturday, June 15, 2002 7:33 PM | Feedback (0)
Daniel Pipes has written quite a few articles. His latest, A New Round of Anger and Humiliation: Islam after 9/11, is a very interesting summary of the history of Islam and the roots of it's conflict with the West.
This anger has deep roots. From the Islamic religion's origins in the seventh century and for roughly the next millennium, the career of Muslims was one of consistent worldly success. By whatever standard one judged - power, wealth, health, or education - Muslims stood at the pinnacle of global achievement. This connection between accepting the Islamic message and apparent reward by God endured in so many aspects of life in so many places for such a long time that Muslims readily came to assume that mundane well-being was their due as a sign of God's favor. To be Muslim meant to be on the winning team.

But then, starting about 1800, things went awry. Power, wealth, health, and education moved elsewhere, and specifically to Europe, a place long scorned as backward. For two long centuries, Muslims have watched as other peoples, especially Christians, surged ahead. Not only did France, England, and the United States do so on the grandest scale, but more recently East Asia has outpaced the Muslim world. As a result, a sense of failure has suffused Muslim life. If Islam brings God's grace, many Muslims have asked themselves, why then do Muslims fare so poorly? This traumatic history of things going all wrong is the key to understanding modern Islam.

And what does this lead to?
These days, the strongest vehicle for such emotions is militant Islam (also known as Islamism), a political movement that takes the religion of Islam and turns it into the basis of a totalitarian ideology that shares much with prior versions, namely fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Like them, for example, it seeks to replace capitalism and liberalism as the reigning world system. The appeal of militant Islam goes far to account for the anti-Western hatred coming from Muslims in many places around the world, including Muslims resident in the West itself.
Wow! I posted the above quotes before I fully read the article. All I can say is "Wow". Those quotes barely skim the surface of the the depths of the discussion in the article. Mr. Pipes lays out a very logical framework for dealing with militant Islam. This is definitely an article worth reading.
posted @ Wednesday, June 12, 2002 3:34 PM | Feedback (0)
An Israeli victim of a Palestinian terrorist attack sued the European Union after his wife was killed by Palestinian policemen in August 2001. He's asking for $100 million shekels. (Shekels is such a cool word to say. Shekels.). I think that's about $30 million American dollars. Apparently the Europeans have discovered that the Palestinian Authority is funding terrorsim with their money and suspended the payments. Shocking!
Until this week, the European Union had been donating $10 million to the Palestinians each month. A total of $1.5 billion has been contributed by member states since 1994. The money is meant to pay the salaries of the PA's municipal workers, including teachers, health officials and police officers. Documents captured by Israel in its recent incursion into Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, however, evidence that the funds were being passed along to terrorist groups such as the Fatah Tanzim. European states donate the foreign aid to the PA in order to maintain political influence and goodwill in amongst Arab states.

There's nothing like buying Arab goodwill by funding terrorism. So if the EU has an extra $10 million floating around they could buy my goodwill. I'd have lots of goodwill toward them for only . . . say . . . $6 million a month. Of course that's negotiable depending on exactly how much goodwill they want.

posted @ Monday, June 10, 2002 2:32 PM | Feedback (0)
Israel's Prime Minister published an editorial in the NY Times this weekend titled The Way Forward in the Middle East. Pretty interesting reading.
Israel entered the West Bank only after its cities and airports had come under heavy fire. Israeli actions were legal - resulting from a clear-cut war of self-defense. For that reason, the United Nations Security Council determined in a historic decision, Resolution 242, that Israel was entitled to "secure and recognized boundaries" and was not expected to withdraw from all the territories that its forces had entered - and from which it was attacked - in the Six Day War. In effect, the resolution established that these were disputed territories where Israel had legitimate rights to defensible borders, besides the claims of the Arab parties to the conflict.

Under Resolution 242, which became the cornerstone of peacemaking, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in accordance with the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. It was under the principles of Resolution 242 that Israel attended the 1991 Madrid peace conference where President George H. W. Bush spoke about a "territorial compromise" between the parties. And again in line with Resolution 242, Israel, operating under the 1993 Oslo agreement, withdrew its military government over the Palestinian population so that by 1999, 98 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were under Palestinian rule.

It's interesting to read the assumptions he makes about a Palestinian state in the West Bank. It's also interesting to recall that conditions weren't that bad in Gaza and the West Bank in 1993. They had a functioning economy and rule of law. After the PLO took over things went downhill. Just like Lebanon. And don't forget the civil war they started in Jordan. And Tunisia kicked them out also. Great bunch of folks.

Remember that Israel offered Arafat a Palestinian state in the West Bank in September of 2000 and he rejected it.

posted @ Sunday, June 09, 2002 11:23 PM | Feedback (0)
It seems at least one journalist is picking up on who all these terrorists are:
Lou Dobbs, host of the nightly CNN business show "Moneyline," said on the air Wednesday that he is abandoning the phrase "war on terror" in favor of the more specific "war on Islamists."

He said the enemy is not terror, but radical Islamists who argue that non-believers should be killed.

"This is not a war against Muslims or Islam or Islamics," Dobbs said. "It is a war against Islamists and all who support them, and if ever there were a time for clarity, it is now. We hope this new policy is a step in the right direction."

Yahoo has the story.
posted @ Friday, June 07, 2002 10:40 AM | Feedback (0)
Blogger sort of seems to be working so we'll see how this works out. A Mercedes-Benz fuel cell car just completed a trip across the country. You can also view their offical site. One small stop on the road to clean energy in cars.
posted @ Thursday, June 06, 2002 9:17 AM | Feedback (0)
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