tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-157078092024-03-07T11:54:49.010+02:00You’ll come for the terrorism, you’ll stay for the taxes – welcome to the Middle East!Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-52648943609926431552008-09-21T20:21:00.001+03:002008-09-21T23:15:59.363+03:00The Sub-Prime Crisis: My response to a response to a response<div xmlns=''><p>A friend of mine—an enthusiastic supporter of John McCain, or at least an enthusiastic opponent of Barack Obama, but otherwise a nice guy—forwarded a rather cute PowerPoint presentation that provided a rather snarky interpretation of the recent fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. (I don't know if the PowerPoint is available online anyplace—if I can find it, I'll add a link to this post.) My friend added the following:</p><p style='margin-left: 0.49in'> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>BLAME THIS ON BUSH TOO! CONGRESS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS, CLINTON HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS... FANNY MAE $ FREDDY MAC HAD NOTHIG TO DO WITH THIS. RANGLE [sic] HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. IT WAS ALL CAUSED BY THAT GREEDY BUSH! NOW I HOPE ALL THE LIBERALS THAT VOTED FOR BUSH SEE THE RESULTS!!!</font></font> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>I responded to him—and everyone else on his distribution list, most of whom, I fully believe, had already written me off as some kind of communist, or at least something of a crank—as follows:</font></font> </p><p> <br/> <br/> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>Well, considering that Clinton ceased to be President almost 8 years ago, I'd say he's fairly thoroughly off the hook. (As far as I'm aware, the whole "subprime" mortgage boom started years after Clinton left office.) I don't know what Charlie Rangel (who used to be my Congressman in my Upper West Side days twenty-something years ago) has to do with anything; if you're talking about regulations that encouraged banks to lend money to borrowers in less expensive neighborhoods in their districts, then you're off target considering that (A) the mortgages now going into default were almost entirely *not* generated by banks and thus had nothing to do with these regulations; and (B) these regulations have been in existence for something like 20 years, and didn't cause any major problems in all that time. So I suspect Rangel is off the hook as well, although I do wish he'd use less hair gel. (Is his hair still so greasy? It used to look like an oil slick.)</font></font> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>Basically, the Bush administration has been in charge for almost eight years; for much of that time the administration had a Republican-controlled Congress (including John McCain, until the last few days a dedicated fan of financial deregulation), and even now the Republicans have enough strength in Congress that the Democrats can't break a filibuster or override a veto. Of course, this doesn't mean that Bush is responsible for everything that happens on Wall Street, or even in Midtown. But the fact is that (A) the regulatory infrastructure is part of the Executive Branch of government, which Bush controls; (B) many experts as well as ordinary people have been predicting for the last few years something very like what's been happening over the last weeks; and yet (C) the Bush administration did nothing about this brewing mess, through either direct executive action, promotion of legislation, or any other form of leadership. Considering that - unlike most politicians - Bush is from an old Wall Street family and has been in business for himself (mostly drilling dry holes, I'll admit), I think it would not have been out of line to expect him to have a better handle on these issues; after all, if the Republicans have anything to recommend them, it's supposed to be that they understand business and economics. I know Bush puts on a folksy image and appears clueless, but that was all supposed to be a put-on, wasn't it?</font></font> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>Bush, of course, is not up for re-election; and John McCain has never specialized in economics and financial matters. (He doesn't have the background for it, and I don't think he's ever pretended to be an expert on the subject. And given some of the crazy-assed derivatives of derivatives that are a large part of the current crisis, even the "experts" have a lot of trouble coping with what's going on nowadays. I've read that it's become almost impossible to come up with meaningful book values for a lot of the corporations dealing in the new financial instruments, because even the professionals can't figure out what some of these pieces of paper are worth.) For that matter, Obama isn't an accountant or a finance geek either, although he's probably got better financial chops than McCain. Neither candidate seems to be offering any magic answers, and frankly at this stage I think it's too late for magic answers; the time to prevent this crisis was four or eight years ago. (Old Arab proverb: The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time to plant a tree is today.)</font></font> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>Considering, however, that McCain has suggested privatizing Social Security, and that he very recently suggested deregulating healthcare in much the same way the financial markets had been deregulated, I think there are some legitimate grounds for worrying about his judgment in these matters. I certainly see nothing in his record to indicate that a McCain administration would be God's gift to American (or worldwide) financial markets or to the American healthcare system.</font></font> </p><p> <br/> <br/> </p><p> <font face='Arial'><font size='2'>As you may be aware, Israel for the last several weeks has been buying 100 million U.S. dollars per business day, in an effort to help prop up the U.S. dollar and keep our own currency from becoming so expensive that we can't export anything. (This seems a bit surreal given Israel's financial past, but it's true - times have changed! Our central bank's target is to increase its U.S. dollar holdings by $10 billion, which is a fair chunk of change for a nation of our small size.) We do like to do our part, of course, even if we can't support you Americans to the degree the Chinese can. And we understand that you're too busy in Iraq to do much about Iran, even though we still can't quite figure out why you went into Iraq in the first place. (You certainly didn't ask us if it was a good idea!) So we'll probably have to deal with Iran for you as well. But we are *not* prepared to solve the subprime mortgage crisis for you! Maybe the Chinese have an extra trillion dollars lying around?</font></font> </p><br clear='left'/></div>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-39740274681062743912007-01-07T19:32:00.001+02:002007-01-07T19:41:22.892+02:00Olmert triumphs in poll – humiliating What’s His Name the Minister for Something or Other<p>
In a <a href='http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467666214&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull'>recent poll of 345 Kadima voters</a>, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert triumphed over one of his fellow Cabinet members. Asked whom they would prefer to be Kadima’s next candidate for Prime Minister, the voters chose Olmert over the other minister by 8.7% to 5.8%. The only candidates the voters liked better than the current Prime Minister were Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (preferred by only 49.3% of the poll participants); Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz Who Used To Be Something Important In The Army (preferred by 14.5%); None of the Above (11.6%); and Undecided (10.1%).</p>
<span id="fullpost"><p>
“This is significant triumph for our Prime Minister over someone whose name, I seem to recall, sounds very much like something used to build interior walls,” said one of Olmert’s remaining unindicted spokesmen. “Who says that Ehud Olmert is the least popular leader in Israel’s history? The numbers show that this simply isn’t quite true.”
</p>
<p>
An Ehud Olmert political-strategy consultant (who refused to be identified because he was concerned about possible loss of clients) claimed that Olmert’s fifth-place finish was in fact a much better result than it seemed: “Remember that the people who chose ‘None of the Above’ were clearly referring to Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz, since they are the only ones who came out <em>above</em> ‘None of the Above’ in the poll. So these 11.6% of the Kadima electorate obviously prefer Ehud Olmert to Livni and Mofaz; they simply chose a more emphatic way of stating their revulsion to those two, rather than merely stating their obvious preference for Olmert.”
</p>
<p>
According to the same strategist, those who chose “Undecided” were also in the Olmert camp: “As Prime Minister, Olmert has seen first-hand the results of rash decision-making by earlier Prime Ministers, and has learned that putting off crucial decisions until later - or making Avigdor Lieberman make them and take the blame for them - is the essence of great leadership. Clearly, the Israeli people want an undecided Prime Minister, and Ehud Olmert is their choice for the job.”
</p>
<p>
Counting all the “Undecided” and “None of the Above” voters as members of the Ehud Olmert camp, the Prime Minister’s popularity among the Kadima electorate is clearly impressive: at over 30%, it is more than double Shaul Mofaz’s support, and well over half the support enjoyed by Tzipi Livni. “Ehud Olmert has shown that he has what the voters want, and momentum is on his side. If elections are held at some point in the future, there is a distinct possibility that he’ll be elected to something,” said Olmert’s spokesman.
</p>
<p>
Housing Minister Meir <strike><a href='http://www.usg.com/navigate.do?resource=/USG_Marketing_Content/usg.com/web_files/products/brand_overview/Sheetrock_Brand-BO.htm'>Sheetrock®</a></strike> Sheetrit could probably use some cheering up.
</p>
</span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-41411065752807163932007-01-04T15:48:00.001+02:002007-01-04T16:01:39.419+02:00Living in denial<p>
Perhaps things are just as bad in the rest of the world, but it seems to me that the Middle East is suffering from an epidemic of denial: denial of the Holocaust, of course, but also lots of less spectacular denials of generally accepted fact<sup><b>*</b></sup>. This phenomenon does not bode well for our happy little region.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
The recent Holocaust-denial conference in Teheran, along with British “historian” David Irving’s early release from an Austrian prison, has highlighted some spectacular instances of denial; however, most discussion of the subject has very little to say about <em>why</em> deniers feel the need to challenge the factuality of the Holocaust. After all, few of them seem all that horrified at the prospect that a future holocaust might occur - for example, the nuclear incineration of the State of Israel - so why is it so important to pretend that the Holocaust of the last century didn’t happen?
</p>
<p>
Our Palestinian neighbors also have their little denial issues. Prominent among them is the refusal of most Palestinian opinion-shapers to admit that today’s Jews have any authentic connection to “Palestine”; according to this narrative, we are merely a bunch of interlopers from Poland who somehow - <em>Invasion of the Tsuris Snatchers</em>? - took over the ideas and claims of the “true” People of Israel. (Of course, in some versions there is no such thing as the People of Israel even in the past; so not only are we fake Jews, we made up the whole Judaism thing in the first place, in order to experience the pleasure of living here and worrying where the next bomb will explode.)
</p>
<p>
On our own side, many Zionists refuse to accept the existence of the Palestinians as an authentic people. According to this reading of history and sociology, there was never a separate Palestinian-Arab language, culture, or politics (at least until recently - 1964 is a frequently-cited year for the first use of “Palestinian” as a term for a distinct Arab ethnic-national group); and therefore the Palestinians of today are merely a figment of their own imagination. The fact that millions of people <em>today</em> identify themselves as Palestinians, mourn the “calamity” (“<em>naqba</em>” in Arabic) of Israel’s creation, and share common aspirations for the future is irrelevant: Palestinians didn’t exist in the past, and thus it’s obvious that they don’t exist today.
</p>
<p>
And most recently, our distinguished Knesset Education Committee <a href='http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467638320&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull'>has rejected</a> Education Minister Yuli Tamir’s plan to include the Green Line - Israel’s pre-1967 <em>de facto</em> border - in maps included in Israeli geography textbooks. (I’ve written about this issue already - see <a href='http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/12/lines-and-inanity.html'>“Lines and Inanity”</a>.) Despite the fact that the Green Line figures in essentially every discussion of an eventual peace settlement with the (imaginary) Palestinians, nobody is supposed to know where the Green Line is; since “it died in 1967”, it’s somehow no longer relevant despite all indications to the contrary.
</p>
<p>
For the moment, I don’t want to get into the details of any of these denials of reality, or the many others floating around the Middle East. What I find depressing is not any single instance of denial, but rather the fact that denial is so widespread and pervasive. These flights from reality are not, after all, merely harmless fantasies.
</p>
<p>
All the denials I’ve mentioned are, at base, similar: they represent a refusal to face facts that do not fit in with our desires, and the willingness to ignore facts - or replace them with convenient fictions - in order to preserve our sense of how the world should be. So some of my fellow Zionists deny the existence of the Palestinians, because Israel can hardly be expected to adjust its borders to accommodate an imaginary people; while much of the Arab world denies the national existence of the Jews (at least as an indigenous Middle Eastern ethnic group), since they can hardly be expected to welcome us home (even grudgingly) if this was never our home in the first place.
</p>
<p>
Holocaust denial is a bit strange, even among flights of fancy. After all, what’s the point? The State of Israel was not created as a response to the Holocaust; the legal and political foundations for the Jewish State were set up between 1916 and 1923, when Adolph Hitler was a corporal in the Kaiser’s army and later a struggling painter in Vienna. (At most, one might say that the Holocaust nudged the process along a bit in the aftermath of World War II; but on the other hand, had the Holocaust not occurred, there would have been many more Jews alive to lobby for the creation of Israel and add to its population.) It would seem that Holocaust denial involves more than one fiction: first, that the Holocaust is the only justification for the existence of the State of Israel; and second, that it never happened or, at best, has been grossly exaggerated.
</p>
<p>
Reality, of course, is unimpressed by our denials:
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<div>
Whether the Palestinians existed a hundred years ago or not, they exist <em>today</em>, according to any reasonable reading of current events; and, sooner or later, Israel is going to have to reach some form of accommodation with them.
</div>
</li>
<li>The Jews are a genuine, if somewhat odd and annoying, religious/ethnic group; we have a genuine connection to the Land of Israel, which we have maintained faithfully for thousands of years. After all that time, we’re not all going to decide to go somewhere else.</li>
<li>The Holocaust happened, and in its course some six million Jews were murdered.</li>
<li>Even had the Holocaust <em>not</em> happened, the Jews would be entitled to a national home in Palestine/Israel; so said the League of Nations, which created the legal foundations not only for Israel but for most other countries in the Middle East and many in Eastern Europe.</li>
<li>The Green Line is a major fact of Israeli (and Palestinian) life and history; there is no point in hiding it from students as if it had never existed.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Refusing to face up to facts is not healthy - they do not, after all, go away when we turn our backs on them, and the more unpleasant ones have an annoying habit of biting us in the butt when we’re looking the other way. We don’t have to love them, but we do have to live with them. By retreating into fantasy we render ourselves incapable of coping successfully with the real world of today, and abandon all possibility of building a more hospitable future.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<br/><br/>
<p>
<sup><b>*</b></sup> <span style='font-size:85%'>“Generally accepted fact” is, of course, a bit of a complicated issue - since many true things have been widely disbelieved at times, and many falsities have been “generally accepted” as true. Further, “facts” - even when based upon accurate observation - always reflect some point of view, some limitations in perception. In the immortal words of Stuart Mayper, “<em>No fact is simple</em>.” Nonetheless, the “fact” remains that we can distinguish between “extensional” and “intentional” thinking: The former attempts to ground itself in observations of reality; while the latter begins with a framework of ideas and desires, filtering information based upon what fits comfortably into this framework. “Denial”, then, represents an extreme case of intentional thinking.
</span></p>
<p><span style='font-size:85%'>
If this seems a bit abstruse, remember that you didn’t <em>have</em> to read the footnote.
</p>
</span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-85875859399668625312006-12-26T22:09:00.001+02:002006-12-26T22:13:36.645+02:00A Hedgehog’s Hasbara<p>
Last
week I attended the second day of a conference on “<a href="http://www.theaugeanstables.com/herzilya-conference/program/">The Media
as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society</a>”.
(Unfortunately, I missed the first day, which actually covered a lot of the
stuff I was most interested in. My immune system and assorted pathogens
disagreed with my plans - and the less said about the details of the dispute,
the better.) In the aftermath of the conference (and, indeed, during the
conference itself), a number of my fellow blogger-attendees reacted rather
negatively to much of the conference’s tone and content.
</p>
<p>
I’ve
waited to set out my own thoughts on the subject, although I’ve written a bunch
of long comments on <a href="http://somethingsomething.blogspot.com/2006/12/stop-being-verbal-vegetarians.html">Something
Something</a> - Liza wrote a pretty scathing review of the conference there,
and some pointed debate (to put it mildly) followed between the liberal-blogger
set (of which I appear, somehow, to have become an honorary member) and the
rest. Foremost among the defenders of the conference is <a href="http://www.theaugeanstables.com/">Richard Landes</a>, who put the whole
thing together and, as far as I’m aware, was principally responsible for
selecting its panelists. Rather than repeat what Liza and Lisa and Yael wrote
about the conference itself, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s really going
on here: why is it that good and sincere people have such radical disagreements
about a topic that - at least at first glance - should be fairly simple?
</p><br/><span id="fullpost"><p align="center">
* * *
</p>
<p></p>
<p>
There
is one thing that all of us (or at least all of us involved in this debate) agree
on: Israel’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world is abysmal. Our
response has been to attempt more effective <em>hasbara</em> - literally,
“explanation” but more accurately translated as “public diplomacy”, “public
relations”, or (less delicately) “propaganda”. The problem is that Israeli
public diplomacy has been monumentally unsuccessful of late: the plucky little
underdog of yore is now seen as the big bad wolf, oppressing and occupying the Palestinians,
offending Hezbollah (by existing, basically), insulting Iran by accusing
President Ahmadinejad of all kinds of horrible things, and feeling offensively
sorry for itself every time a walking bomb blows up a bus or café.
</p>
<p>
We
seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding why we are perceived so
negatively. Are we not a thriving democracy? Do we not mean well? Okay, we’ve
had to do some rather unpalatable stuff at times, but hey, we live in a rough
neighborhood, and it’s not like we <em>enjoyed</em> knocking all those houses
down! And our adversaries include some genuinely evil people: guys who think
blowing innocent women and children to bits is a good thing, as long as it
happens to us and not them.
</p>
<p>
The
<em>hasbara</em> establishment - consisting of certain individuals and agencies
of the Israeli government, along with a bunch of concerned individuals and
private organizations - has responded to the failures of Israeli image-making
by circling the wagons, closing ranks, girding their loins, going for the
jugular, and keeping their powder dry: or, in other words and without the
tortured metaphors, they’ve opted to do pretty much what they’ve been doing all
along, but louder and more forcefully.
</p>
<p>
Others
of us believe that a more nuanced, diverse, and proactive approach is called
for. For example, rather than simply reacting to events on the ground by trying
to explain or justify them - the approach that is implicit in the use of the
Hebrew word for “explanation” to describe public diplomacy - we believe that
public-relations concerns need to be a major <em>input</em> into policy-making:
Just as politicians get advice from security experts before making decisions
with security implications, they should get advice from people who understand
international journalism and public opinion before making decisions that will
affect how Israel is perceived overseas.
</p>
<p>
While
we “<em>hasbara</em> rebels” don’t have an official set of beliefs - we aren’t a
cohesive, organized group, although someone recently accused us of being a
“sorority” and I’ve always wanted to sneak my way into a sorority - a lot of us
seem to believe that current, traditional Israeli <em>hasbara</em> is not only
too reactive, but also too strident, too self-righteous, and too focused on the
evils of our adversaries. I’m not going to repeat all our arguments (and the
counter-arguments) here; go to <a href="http://somethingsomething.blogspot.com/2006/12/stop-being-verbal-vegetarians.html">the
thread at Something Something</a> to see what I’m talking about. (At some point
I should collect everything I wrote there and edit the good parts into
something. Eventually.)
</p>
<p>
At
some point early in the debate, I began to realize that the people with whom I
was debating - while sincere, well-meaning, intelligent, and well informed -
nonetheless <em>didn’t get it</em>: No matter how my sorority sisters and I tried
to explain our position, they didn’t understand that we could be enthusiastic
Zionists, eager to see Israel positioned better in world opinion, cognizant of
the genuine problems out there (including some egregious bias in news
reporting, along with an awful lot of simple and not-so-simple cluelessness) -
and yet strongly disagree with their approach to <em>hasbara</em>.
</p>
<p>
I
don’t yet entirely understand why traditional <em>hasbara</em> practitioners have
such difficulty understanding the Sorority view - it’s not exactly rocket
science, after all. Since the debate began, I’ve had the refrain from a <a href="http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/t/thehedgehogssong.shtml">favorite
song of my youth</a> constantly running
through my brain:
</p>
<p>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes,</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>But you never quite learned the song.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em> </em>
</p>
<p>
<span style="font-size:xx-small;">(from “The Hedgehog’s Song”
by the Incredible String Band)</span>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
</p>
<p>
It’s
rather sad, and very frustrating; I wish I could find some way to convince
people who <em>know</em> that their approach isn’t working to think
constructively about <em>why</em> it isn’t working and how it might be made to
work better.
</p>
<p>
</p>
On the other hand, the debate has had one happy consequence: I’ve ordered
CD’s of the first three albums of the Incredible String Band - the second of
which includes the old favorite that I’ve had running through my head for the
last week. After almost forty years, it’ll be nice to hear that music again.
<div style="font-size: 88%;" id="wtmb_tags"><p><br/>Tags: <a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/Hasbara">Hasbara</a></p></div></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-6921068748094948982006-12-21T21:14:00.001+02:002006-12-21T21:31:03.821+02:00Blogging toy of the day: WriteToMyBlog!<p>
In the past, I've used Microsoft Word to write most of my blog posts; I like its spell-checking and formatting (as opposed to the primitive capabilities of Blogger.com's built-in editor), and I especially like the "smart quotes" feature, which automatically inserts “real” quotes (like the preceding) instead of the tacky "telegraph-style" quotes you get otherwise. It also puts in genuine apostrophes: I don't like the ones like the preceding, while I can’t help loving the real ones.
</p>
<p>
The problem, however, is this: how does one get what one has written from Word to one's blog?
</p>
<span id='fullpost'>
<br></br>
<p>
The new Word 2007 is supposed to have blog integration built in; nice thought, but it doesn't help those of us who don't have (and can't afford) Word 2007. I've been using a Word add-in (from Google, the owner of Blogger.com and much else of the universe) called Blogger for Word; this allowed me to manage blog posts and send new ones to my blogs, right from Word. Only two problems: First, it doesn't work on my office PC, where I do most of my writing; and second, it doesn't support the new version of Blogger, which I'm now (perforce, more or less) using. Good-bye, Blogger for Word.<br></br>
</p>
<p>
So what to do? After some frantic Googling, I've discovered a new tool that shows some promise: <a target='_blank' title='WriteToMyBlog' name='WriteToMyBlog' href='http://writetomyblog.com/'>WriteToMyBlog</a>. It's a free, Web-based editor that allows you to manage posts, write and post new ones, insert pictures (using a range of hosting options), and do all sorts of other cute stuff. So far, the only feature I don't see that I really want is the "smart quotes" (along with "smart apostrophe" and automatic N-dashes) - so you're probably seeing this with a bunch of non-smart quotes. Sorry sorry sorry. If it actually works, it looks like a pretty decent tool - and if you can read this, it worked!
</p>
<br></br>
<div style='font-size: 88%' id='wtmb_tags'>
<p>
Tags: <a rel='tag' href='http://technorati.com/tag/Blog'>Blog</a>, <a rel='tag' href='http://technorati.com/tag/Blogging'>Blogging</a>
</p>
</div>
</span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1166563376683591542006-12-19T23:22:00.000+02:002006-12-19T23:28:26.386+02:00Lines and Inanity*Among the many odd bits of education I’ve picked up here and there, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving some very useful training in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics">General Semantics</a> – a rather obscure discipline that is very difficult to define, but which can be described as a system for promoting accuracy of thought and feeling. (One of my principle teachers was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pula">Robert Pula</a>, who I just found out – thanks to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia’s</a> wonderfully rich cross-referencing system – died two years ago. Rest in peace, Bob.) A good bit of my rather annoying analytical style can probably be attributed to my exposure to General Semantics almost thirty years ago.<br/><br/>One of the fundamental concepts of General Semantics is that <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation">the map is not the territory; the word is not the thing</a></i> – meaning that our verbal and non-verbal representations of reality are, at best, just representations, and not reality itself.<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>If we want to think accurately, we need to be aware that it’s all too easy to use these representations in ways that radically distort our understanding of the world. For example, I frequently see some of my fellow Zionists saying and writing things like, “The Palestinians don’t want peace; they just want to destroy Israel.” The problem here is that there is no such “thing” as “the Palestinians”; several million people can be classified (more or less accurately) as Palestinians, and they lack even a means of expressing a majority opinion on this or any other subject. To talk about “the Palestinians” as if they were a unitary object with a single opinion on Israel – or, for that matter, on anything else – is non-sense. (I’ve written in this vein before; see the second paragraph of my response to A____ in <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/10/strategic-assets-and-white-elephants.html">“Strategic assets and white elephants”</a>.)<br/><br/>Since – with our limited and imperfect senses – we can never perceive reality entire, all we have is representations: words, maps, and other abstractions from the reality that is “out there” but which remains forever inaccessible to us. If we want to get along well with the universe, we should seek the most accurate representations we can get: Someone trying to understand the Middle East can no more afford to think in terms of what “the Palestinians” think than an American long-distance bus driver can afford to use a map that shows New Jersey next to Idaho. Successful navigation requires maps that fit the territory.<br/><br/><center>* * *<br/></center><br/>All of this brings me to one of this month’s existential crises in Israel: Yuli Tamir, our Minister of Education, has come under a <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1164881917186&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">barrage of criticism</a> from the Right for her decision to order the inclusion of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_%28Israel%29">“Green Line”</a> (Israel’s pre-1967 <em>de facto </em>border, which was in fact <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/09/israel-and-west-bank-is-it-occupation.html">an armistice line</a> recognized by neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors as a legal border) in maps to be included in new elementary-school geography textbooks. According to some (but by no means all) Israeli Rightists and their supporters overseas, including the Green Line in our children’s maps will somehow turn them all into raging members of <a href="http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/homepage.asp">Peace Now</a> and otherwise <a href="http://www.indelibleinc.com/kubrick/films/strangelove/">sap and impurify all of their precious bodily fluids</a>.<br/><br/>This controversy highlights one of the more surreal absurdities in a region that possesses over 60% of the world’s proven absurdity reserves: Although the Green Line is a significant factor in our lives, it is entirely absent from most of our maps. Since a November 1967 government decision decreed that Israeli maps should show only the post-Six-Day-War cease-fire lines and not the previous borders, the Green Line has achieved a kind of massive, intrusive invisibility.<br/><br/>This might make some kind of sense if the Green Line were in fact irrelevant; but it isn’t. Not only is it still a major part of Israel’s history and a constant point of reference in the debate about an eventual settlement of the Israeli/Arab conflict; it’s also a significant influence on the day-to-day lives of many Israelis:<br/><br/><ul><li>Until about six years ago, Israelis living across the Green Line received reductions in their income taxes. Many Israelis think we still do, and resent us for it.</li><br/><li>People living across the Green Line (myself included) have an easier time obtaining gun licenses than otherwise-similar people living inside “Israel proper”.</li><br/><li>Many banks will not give mortgage loans on houses across the Green Line, or else will finance a lower percentage of a home’s purchase price than they would inside pre-1967 Israel.</li><br/><li>People living across the Green Line know that they can be evicted from their homes by their government, as a result of an eventual agreement with our Arab neighbors or else as part of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. (When we bought our house, Vaguely Sinister Wife and I had to sign papers acknowledging this; in fact, according to what we signed the government can, at least in theory, evict us without compensation for the loss of our home.)</li><br/><li>As soon as you cross the Green Line from pre-1967 Israel, you come under military rather than civilian legal jurisdiction. This is easily forgotten, since Israelis living in the West Bank are normally dealt with by the Israeli legal system just as other Israelis are; but this is a privilege extended as a courtesy, and can be revoked at the government’s will. This means that if the government should decide to evict us from our homes, and should we decide to protest this decision, we could quickly find ourselves without the civil rights we normally take for granted; martial law is already in place, merely held in abeyance for us as long as it’s not needed.</li><br/><li>Stuff grown or manufactured by Jews across the Green Line is apt to be boycotted by members of the Enlightened Public overseas, and even by some Israelis.</li><br/><li>The Green Line features prominently in our social lives. Many people won’t visit me at home since I live on the “wrong” side of the Line by a couple of kilometers. (Others, of course, avoid me because they’re allergic to cat fluff, or simply because they don’t like me.)</li></ul><br/>In short, the Green Line is important – historically, politically, legally, economically, and socially. So where the hell is it? <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1164881893342&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">An awful lot of Israelis have no idea.</a><br/><br/>By eliminating the Green Line from Israeli maps, our government did not eliminate the Green Line; all it accomplished was to create a lot of inaccurate maps and ignorant Israelis. If we intend to navigate our future successfully, we need to know where the Green Line is and what the Green Line is. So let the maps be reprinted; let the Green Line show forth in all its wriggly and impractical glory! And when, eventually, it really does become merely a fact of history, let it enjoy an honorable, dignified – and visible – retirement.<br/><br/><br/>* <span style="font-size:85%;">This is a rather wretched play on the title of the seminal – and rather impenetrable – textbook of General Semantics, <i><a href="http://www.esgs.org/uk/art/sands.htm">Science and Sanity</a></i> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski">Alfred Korzybski</a>. I apologize abjectly – although I suspect that Korzybski would have approved of it.</span><br/><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1165778946502769272006-12-10T21:29:00.000+02:002006-12-10T21:29:06.520+02:00Watching a watchdog: HonestReporting veers off courseOn 8 December, media watchdog <a href="http://www.honestreporting.com/">HonestReporting</a> came out with a <a href="http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/reports/Special_Report_The_U.N._Human_Rights_Council.asp">special report</a> on the new – and already discredited – United Nations Human Rights Council. The report is worth a read, although there’s not much there to surprise anyone who follows the United Nations and its relationship with Israel.<br/><br/>As I dutifully read through the report, slightly bored and mildly depressed, if not astonished, by the hypocrisy of the U.N.’s supposed human-rights establishment, I came across the following sentence:<br/><br/><em>On November 15, 19 Palestinian civilians were killed when an Israeli artillery shell veered off course, missing its intended military target.</em><br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>Alarm bells began to ring. My boredom vanished. I suddenly felt that old familiar tingle in my typing fingers (all ten of them). Wasn’t HonestReporting going a bit beyond the facts here?<br/><br/>I very recently <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/11/bradley-burston-and-beit-hanoun.html">wrote about the Beit Hanoun tragedy</a>, although in writing that essay I didn’t investigate the details of how Israeli artillery managed to be off-target by several hundred meters. (I was more interested in the applicability of “international law” to the incident, rather than the technical aspect of what went wrong.) Still, I remembered enough about the incident to be suspicious: HonestReporting’s description didn’t ring quite true.<br/><br/>The first problem here was the word “veered”. (The immediate picture that came to my mind when reading that “an Israeli artillery shell veered off course” was an ancient cartoon sequence of some guy firing off a rocket, which then, predictably, did a loop-the-loop and hit him in the butt.) If the tragedy happened because a shell “veered off course”, we are meant to assume that it had been aimed correctly and somehow took a wrong turn in mid-flight. Now this might indeed happen with a primitive rocket, and it nearly always happens when I hit a golf ball; but it doesn’t generally happen with artillery shells.<br/><br/>And indeed, some very quick research revealed that it didn’t happen. <a href="http://www1.idf.il/DOVER/site/mainpage.asp?sl=EN&id=7&clr=1&docid=58693.EN">According to the IDF itself</a> as well as <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378365729&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">to other reports</a>, the shells flew straight enough, but were aimed inaccurately because of a malfunction in one circuit card of the artillery battery’s “Shilem” targeting system. The “Shilem” apparatus for this battery had been replaced five days before the Beit Hanoun tragedy; and according to <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785917.html">at least one report</a>, it had not been given a live-fire test before being used in the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The final report of the IDF investigation into the incident has not been released, so we don’t yet know why this particular device malfunctioned; the “Shilem” system has been in use for about 30 years and has an excellent record for reliability, which may have (perversely) contributed to the tragedy by allowing the system to be deployed with minimal post-installation testing before real-world use.<br/><br/>According to both the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, <em>seven </em>shells were fired off-target, not just one. So even though a hardware failure was responsible for the death of nineteen innocent civilians, the operational procedures in use that day failed to correct the problem in an appropriately timely manner. (Apparently, part of the problem was that the same system that had made the mistake in the first place was also in charge of tracking where the shells hit – and it thought it was doing just fine.)<br/><br/>So: It was seven shells, not one. The shells didn’t change their minds in midair; they were aimed wrong by a defective system, under circumstances that remain unclear. And what about the “intended military target” of the shelling?<br/><br/>Here I was on firmer ground, since I had already written about the targeting of the Beit Hanoun bombardment. The actual target of the shelling was an open area that had been used <em>on the previous day </em>for launching Kassam rockets at Israel. Without repeating <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/11/bradley-burston-and-beit-hanoun.html">a long discussion of the targeting issue</a>, I will only say that blithely referring to an open field as a “military target” is, at best, something of an exaggeration. The impression conveyed by the phrase “military target” is of something substantial – a weapons factory, a troop formation, or the like – rather than an open field that had been used for a military purpose on the previous day but might well be hosting a soccer game today. Even if the IDF had a more or less valid military <em>intention </em>in firing these shells at Beit Hanoun, the target was hardly an impressively military one.<br/><br/><center>* * *<br/></center><br/>All of this may seem like a lot of bother about one sentence in an otherwise unobjectionable report written by an organization of whose goals I approve. But I think that this sentence highlights an important problem with many of the individuals and organizations that support Israel in the public sphere: the tendency to be just a little bit too convinced of Israeli righteousness, to be too fast to gloss over our own side’s transgressions, and thus to lose the trust of a skeptical world.<br/><br/>Organizations like HonestReporting bill themselves as guardians of the truth – in HonestReporting’s own words, “<em>Promoting fairness. Ensuring accuracy. Effecting change.</em>” If these organizations want to achieve anything, they need to be seen as more than just pro-Israel propaganda mouthpieces. It’s fine to be pro-Israel – many people, myself included, are immediately suspicious of anyone who claims complete neutrality – but if you’re billing yourself as a guardian of accuracy and an opponent of media bias, you need to be scrupulously accurate yourself and try hard not to be swayed by your own biases.<br/><br/>On this occasion – and, I’m afraid, on many others – HonestReporting has let its sympathy for Israel overrule its professed dedication to accuracy, and thus has damaged its own effectiveness.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/palestine" rel="tag">Palestine</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/middle_east" rel="tag">Middle East</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/war_crimes" rel="tag">War Crimes</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1165232314237506392006-12-04T13:38:00.000+02:002006-12-04T13:48:59.183+02:00The Son Also RisesAccording to the Jerusalem Post, Ariel Katsav – son and <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3296057,00.html">purported alibi witness</a> of Israel’s embattled President Moshe Katsav, who has been <a href="http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/Katsav_Moshe.html">accused</a> of multiple counts of sexual harassment and rape – has now himself been <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1164881809877&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">accused of sexual harassment</a> by a fellow employee of Israel Railways, where the younger Katsav is Director of the Customer Service Department.<br/><br/>Presumably Ariel Katsav, wishing to carry on the family tradition of hands-on management, misunderstood the meaning of the word “service” in his job description.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/katsav" rel="tag">Katsav</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/sex" rel="tag">Sex</a>.<br/></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1165167998762312802006-12-03T19:46:00.000+02:002006-12-03T19:46:39.203+02:00Haveil Havalim #96 has arrived!<a href="http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/">Soccer Dad</a> has done it again – <a href="http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/archives/2006/12/03/haveil_havalim_96.html">another great edition of Haveil Havalim</a> (the Jewish/Israeli blog carnival) is off the virtual presses. This edition is extra-special, since it includes a post from You’ll Come for the Terrorism; of course, there’s lots of other great stuff to read, too. Enjoy!<br/>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1164739504955648342006-11-28T20:45:00.000+02:002006-11-28T21:27:42.746+02:00Bradley Burston and Beit HanounOf all the English-language columnists in the Israeli press, there is only one who consistently writes stuff that I wish I’d written myself: Haaretz’s Bradley Burston. I don’t always fully agree with him – he’s generally a bit to my left politically – but he’s always thoughtful, and, unlike many Haaretz writers, he’s never so doctrinaire as to render himself irrelevant.<br/><br/>Of course, there’s no point in writing a blog post simply to tell the world (OK, a very <em>very </em>small portion of the world) that you agree with something; to blog is to quibble, after all. So my lead paragraph is there simply to soften you up for what follows: a detailed <em>disagreement </em>with Bradley Burston.<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>In his recent column <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/792365.html">“We can’t be war criminals, we’re Palestinian”</a>, Burston quite correctly argues that Palestinian use of Kassam rockets against Israeli towns constitutes a war crime; and he brings in <a href="http://www.humanrightswatch.org/english/docs/2006/11/18/isrlpa14639.htm">Human Rights Watch</a> to back up his claim. So far, so good; but Burston also <a href="http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/11/10/isrlpa14550.htm">invokes HRW</a> to support his contention that Israel committed a war crime in its shelling of Beit Hanoun, which resulted in the tragic killing of nineteen noncombatant Palestinian civilians. I believe that it is unfair to “convict” Israel of war crimes in this manner, despite the fact that I do not have a great deal of confidence in our military and political leaders’ wisdom or motives; and I wrote Bradley Burston to explain why (correspondence is reproduced with Mr. Burston’s permission):<br/><br/><blockquote>Dear Mr. Burston:<br/> <br/>As happens annoyingly often, you’ve written a column that I wish I’d written myself. Thanks for the good writing and the astute analysis.<br/> <br/>I have one quibble with your argument regarding recent events in Beit Hanoun: You seem overly ready to convict the IDF of a war crime in the killing of 19 Palestinian noncombatants, considering that the law on the subject is highly ambiguous.<br/> <br/>International law indeed requires that military attacks be directed only at military targets. Human Rights Watch contends that the standards used by the IDF in aiming and timing its artillery attacks are such as to constitute a war crime; but I don’t think they successfully make that case. The problem is that while international law does require certain intentions in targeting, the relevant treaties do not establish any particular standard for “quality control” in executing attacks; that is, there is no well-defined boundary between “legitimate” unintentional killing of civilians and illegitimate attacks carried out with reckless disregard for civilian deaths.<br/> <br/>Lacking such a standard, there is no reliable way to judge the IDF’s shelling of Gaza on purely objective grounds.<br/> <br/>According to HRW, “the IDF confirmed that it had fired 12 artillery shells at the site, having missed its intended target 500 meters away.” It would seem to me that if the shells that killed the Athamna family fell 500 meters from their designated target, the <em>prima facie </em>interpretation of the incident is that it was a tragic but non-criminal error. Since the legality of an attack is based on its intention (that is, its target) the attack does not become a war crime simply because of an error in aiming weapons – <em>as long as a good-faith effort was made to procure accurate weapons and aim them properly</em>.<br/> <br/>HRW further claims that “the evidence suggests that Israel’s day-old information that homemade rockets had been launched from the area, with no specific information that rockets continued to be launched from the area, was an insufficient basis for considering the area attacked to be a legitimate military target.” This claim is problematic for two reasons: first, requiring “specific information” about Kassam firing in “real time” would make most forms of military interdiction of such firing virtually impossible, as Kassam crews arrive, set up their launcher, fire their rocket, and leave again within a very short span of time. The best that can possibly be done is to identify areas that are routinely used for firing Kassams and are not overly close to civilian dwellings or facilities, and then to try to time interdiction fire to achieve best results with minimum risk to the innocent. The second problem with HRW’s claim is that it is completely irrelevant: If the IDF artillery was off-target by 500 meters, <em>the timing of the shelling was not the primary cause of the tragedy</em>. Presumably, had the shells been aimed accurately, tragedy would have been averted even if nobody was firing Kassams from the target zone at the time.<br/> <br/>Ultimately, the determination of whether the IDF shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime can be made only on somewhat subjective grounds:<br/><br/><ul><li>Did the IDF procure and use weapons that are normally considered accurate and reliable? </li><br/><li>Did the IDF select targets taking proper account of the accuracy and precision of its weapons? </li><br/><li>Did the IDF properly train its artillery crews to avoid targeting errors? </li><br/><li>Did the IDF select targets based upon the best intelligence that could practicably be obtained? </li><br/><li>Did the IDF select what it believed to be the best available tactics for combating Kassam fire while minimizing danger to innocent Palestinians?</li></ul>And lastly - and perhaps most importantly:<br/><br/><ul><li>Did the IDF express and promote an attitude of proper care to avoid killing noncombatant civilians whenever possible?</li></ul>(This last question is really the key: If the IDF acted with the proper attitude and intentions, it is innocent of war crimes even if some soldiers botched an operation or equipment malfunctioned; but if the IDF exhibited reckless disregard for the lives of innocent civilians – or, indeed, <em>intended </em>that innocent civilians be killed – then Beit Hanoun was a war crime.)<br/><br/>I cannot confidently assert that the IDF is entirely innocent regarding the Beit Hanoun tragedy; I simply do not know the answers to the questions I’ve asked above. (I’m fairly sure that the IDF’s artillery is normally accurate and reliable; but as I have yet to see an explanation of why the shells were fired inaccurately, I’ll assume that even this question remains open for now.) But until and unless answers to these questions do become available, it is unfair to “convict” the IDF of a war crime in Beit Hanoun. There is, I believe, a reasonably high probability that the shells were fired off-target due to legitimate (i.e. non-reckless) human error; and if this is the case, no war crime took place even given the sad results of the shelling.<br/><br/>Best regards,<br/><br/>-Don Radlauer<br/></blockquote><br/><br/>Bradley Burston responded thus:<br/><br/><blockquote>Thanks very much, Don, for your thoughtful letter. I believe that the crime here was not that of the gun crew, nor of the spotters, but of [Israeli Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and senior officers in the Southern Command and the General Staff, who lobbied for and gave the green light to artillery shelling even though more accurate means were available, and even though they had been warned – both by precedent in Gaza and Lebanon, and by predecessors in senior posts – that something very much like Beit Hanun was a very likely possibility.<br/> <br/>Best regards,<br/> <br/>Bradley<br/></blockquote><br/><br/>To which I responded:<br/><blockquote>Dear Bradley -<br/> <br/>Thanks for your kind response.<br/> <br/>Indeed, if Peretz and the relevant IDF commanders believed that more precise means were available to combat Kassam launches, the decision to use artillery was problematic – and perhaps even criminal. That leaves us with two key questions:<br/> <br/><ol><li>What information did Peretz and the generals have regarding the likelihood of a Beit-Hanoun-style disaster based on extensive use of artillery, particularly in comparison to the risks involved in using alternative means? What information did they have regarding the effectiveness of the various means of attack, as well as the risk to our own forces (e.g. from in-person operations)? (It may also be relevant to consider that if the Beit Hanoun disaster occurred because of human error, other methods of attack might be equally prone to human error.)</li><br/><li>Assuming that the answer to (1) would lead a reasonable person (generally defined as someone closely resembling me) to choose something other than artillery, why did our military leaders choose artillery?</li></ol>I’m not sure that there really are measures available to the IDF that would effectively combat Kassams without endangering Palestinian civilians – particularly given that (as I see it) a large part of the motivation behind the Kassams is to provoke Israeli responses that would lead, sooner or later, to a Beit-Hanoun-style “massacre”. What method do you think would be both effective and safe?<br/> <br/>At the same time, I must admit that I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the decision-making abilities of our political or military leaders; too often they seem to be playing to the local audience (which, judged by Haaretz or JPost forum participants, is rather bloodthirsty) rather than understanding the implications of their decisions in a broader context. But lacking a detailed answer to the questions above, I’m still not convinced that Beit Hanoun was a war crime, as opposed to a sad and stupid – but non-criminal - fuck-up.<br/><br/>Best,<br/><br/>-Don<br/></blockquote><br/><br/>That is as far as our discussion progressed. I’ve done a little further research, just to clarify where the lines are drawn regarding what is a war crime and what is not. It seems that the subject is a rather complex one: the Hague and Geneva Conventions do not draw precise boundaries between legitimate warfare (which is never a clean business, rules or no) and war crime; and there is a substantial gulf between the strict interpretation of the various Conventions advocated by Human Rights Watch and other NGO’s active in the field, and the much looser interpretation reflected in the actual history of war-crime prosecutions.<br/><br/>As both Burston <a href="http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=479">and I</a> have pointed out, it’s quite common – and wrong – for parties perceived as the “underdog” to be given a pass regarding the rules of war. “Enlightened Public Opinion” is quick to condemn Western governments for any perceived violation of the rules (shooting at mosques, for example), but is strangely silent when Third World irregular forces commit flagrant violations of the same rules (like hiding combatants and arms in the aforementioned mosques, drawing Western forces’ fire). This inconsistency undermines the principles on which international law is based; if the rules of war are to have any meaning at all, they must apply to all combatants equally.<br/><br/>There is no real question, then, that Palestinian Kassam attacks and Hezbollah’s Katyushas fired at northern Israel are war crimes, <em>regardless of the legitimacy of Israel’s military tactics</em>. Weapons that cannot be aimed precisely enough to hit military targets are of use <em>only </em>to terrorize and kill civilians; and the use of such a weapon is thus a clear sign of the intent to attack civilian targets – precisely what the Conventions forbid.<br/><br/>But just as Israel’s military tactics, legitimate or not, do not justify our opponents’ violations of the rules of warfare, our opponents’ illegitimate tactics do not justify violations on our part.<br/><br/>If we are to use the strict “NGO interpretation” of the rules of war (which is the interpretation Bradley Burston and I were using in our exchange of letters), it’s possible that some Israeli actions against Palestinian or Lebanese targets might have been criminal; as mentioned above, it all hinges on what information and alternatives were available to commanders, and how they made the decisions they made. However, it is also important to note that in the real world, nobody has <em>ever </em>been prosecuted for war crimes based on this interpretation of the law. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes">An extensive Wikipedia list of prominent prosecuted and un-prosecuted war crimes</a> does not include a single case in which civilians were killed as a consequence of a botched – or even reckless – attack on a military target. Every one of the war crimes listed was a deliberate attack on civilians, with no military justification.<br/><br/>I try (albeit not hard enough) to be a person of principle, and I aspire to live in a nation governed by principle. I would be much happier with my government if I felt that its every decision took into account the rights of noncombatant civilians as well as Israel’s military and political needs – although I do feel that our record could be a lot worse than it is, considering the dangers we face. Like Bradley Burston, I feel very uncomfortable with incidents like the Beit Hanoun tragedy: even if the killing of innocent civilians was not intentional, it was predictable given the number of shells we were firing in close proximity to densely populated areas. But I still think Burston is wrong to classify Beit Hanoun as a war crime.<br/><br/>Words are powerful things. If Israel is accused of committing war crimes – by Israelis, no less! – we are being compared to the Nazis, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and the rest of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_criminals">the monsters</a>. To be classified as part of this group is to lose all legitimacy among right-thinking people worldwide; and Israel is desperately in need of all the legitimacy it can get. But while the Katyushas and Kassams fit comfortably into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes">the list of acknowledged war crimes</a>, Israel’s actions in Lebanon and Gaza do not.<br/><br/>The kind of even-handedness practiced by Human Rights Watch and Bradley Burston is certainly better than accusations made against Israel alone; but even this “fairness” seems terribly unfair considering that our adversaries have committed war crimes according to <em>all </em>legitimate definitions of the term, while Israel has committed war crimes – if at all – only according to an interpretation of the rules of war that exists only in the minds of human-rights NGO’s, and has never seen the inside of a court of law.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/palestine" rel="tag">Palestine</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/lebanon" rel="tag">Lebanon</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/middle_east" rel="tag">Middle East</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/hezbollah" rel="tag">Hezbollah</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/war_crimes" rel="tag">War Crimes</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1163268266889798612006-11-11T19:13:00.000+02:002006-11-11T20:55:04.536+02:00Electronic Weirdness Department: Don sells out to ReviewMe.comOver the last year-and-a-bit, my loyal readers have come to depend on me for... ummm... I’m not actually sure quite <i>what</i> my readers depend on me for, actually. Possibly a good night’s sleep? Proof that good grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t enough to make something worth reading?<br/><br/>But in any case, my <strike>many</strike> several readers have come to expect the utmost in integrity from <i>You’ll Come for the Terrorism</i>, The Blog That Couldn’t Be Bought.<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>In reality, of course, the reason that this blog couldn’t be bought was that I couldn’t figure out how to sell it. I’ve had the same problem with cars, cats, and lots of other stuff, which is why my closets are full, my bank account is empty, and I’ve got claw marks in all kinds of awkward places.<br/><br/>But now, <a href="http://feverishthoughts.com/2006/11/10/reviewme/">thanks to <strike>Satan</strike> Tricia</a> at <a href="http://www.feverishthoughts.com/">Tricia’s Musings</a>, I’ve <strike>sold my soul</strike> connected with an outstanding organization that promises to make me slightly less insolvent, without - I hope - compromising my precious ethical standards <font size=-2>more than a little</font>. The organization is called <a href="http://www.reviewme.com">ReviewMe</a>, and they offer opportunities for bloggers to review stuff in exchange for filthy lucre. (Actually, they pay via PayPal, so I think the lucre gets cleaned off somewhere in the process.) So far, so good, ethics-wise: In fully fifteen minutes since I signed up, they haven’t once asked me to say good things about shoddy products or websites. In fact, the only thing they’ve asked me to review so far is their own service.<br/><br/>Now, this is in fact a bit of a challenge. How exactly am I supposed to review their service if I haven’t actually done anything more than sign up and agree to write the review? It’s hard to come up with anything very substantive after such a brief acquaintanceship.<br/><br/>On the other hand, they’re paying me $20.00 for this review, so I’d better come up with something. (Blogs with higher ratings, based on Technorati rankings and the like, are paid more for reviews. While I wasn’t quite in the “beneath our notice” category, I’m one of their cheaper dates. ReviewMe takes 50% of the price paid by reviewees - so the review for which I receive $20.00 costs the reviewee twice that.)<br/><br/>Here, then, is My First Review: I signed up for ReviewMe. The “Create Account” screen worked flawlessly, although, annoyingly, the “Province” field is mandatory even for people who live in Israel, a country the whole of which would fit comfortably inside even a relatively modest province of someplace normal. The “Enter Your Blog” screen was similarly slick - or at least functional. The two automated emails I received (one congratulating me for having signed up, and the other reminding me that I’d agreed to review ReviewMe and that I had 48 hours to do so) were both brief, grammatical, and correctly spelled. The payment, I hope and expect, will be prompt.<br/><br/>The ReviewMe site’s visual esthetics are good; the fonts are all well-chosen, things are properly lined up, they used CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets) to good effect, and so on. Some of the background colors (notably the orange and green on the “Why ReviewMe?” page) were a bit jarring, but in general the website is well thought out. FAQ’s are brief but clear and informative, and navigation around the site’s pages is intuitive. (I hadn’t initially bothered to investigate most of this stuff - I raced straight into the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the service. Then I figured that for $20.00 I should actually look at more of the ReviewMe website, even though I tend to be more concerned with results than with esthetics.)<br/><br/>So - I’ve sold my soul for $20.00.<br/><br/>It feels great.<br/><br/><br><span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/reviews" rel="tag">Reviews</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1162921379083275602006-11-07T19:42:00.000+02:002006-11-09T18:29:26.590+02:00Required Urgently: Peepy ExtensionI finally got it up – and now it’s your turn to help me keep it up!<br/><br/>Get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers; it’s getting crowded here. I’m referring, of course, to my picture at <a href="http://www.25peeps.com/r/2269">25Peeps.com</a> – which has finally appeared after weeks on their waiting list, and will stay on their front page as long as hordes of rabid <em>You’ll Come for the Terrorism</em> readers go over there and click on my picture. (It’s the same pic as my Blogger profile – the one with an ugly me hugging my pretty horse.)<br/><br/>Pictures at 25Peeps stay there as long as they’re new or popular – and newness doesn't last long. Showing some nice cleavage helps – but all I’ve got is native talent, cool sunglasses, and a good hat collection. I’ll tell you a secret, though: Sapir the Horse happens to have a great pair of mammaries, and if you, my tasteful and loyal readers, keep me on 25Peeps for long enough, I may (with Sapir’s permission, of course) let you have a look at them.<br/><br/>I know it’s Election Day over in the States; but who’re you going to waste time on – me, or some stupid politicians? Go! <i>Click!</i> <b>Hurry!!!</b><br/><br/><br/><b>UPDATE/ADDENDUM: </b>24 hours later, I’m still hanging in there on 25Peeps, but I’m fading a bit. Keep clicking, folks - especially if you want to see those naughty pics of Sapir! (You’re allowed to click more than once, by the way.)<br/>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1162842479562658882006-11-06T21:47:00.000+02:002006-12-04T13:49:18.790+02:00More brevity: Pride and PresidentsFollowing the wild success of <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/11/brevity.html">yesterday’s post</a>, I’ve decided to continue writing six-word blog articles. Now that I’ve wallowed in the adulation of my fanatical fans, I want more – and if brevity is what it takes to make all three of them happy, then brief I shall be.<br/><br/>Here, then, is today’s miniature masterpiece:<br/><br/><center><strong>Katzav at home; not getting any.</strong></center><br/><br/>Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?<br/><br/>And yet…<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>In these troubled times, I think we need to draw encouragement from whatever sources are available, no matter how unpromising they may at first appear; and the situation of Israel’s President Moshe Katzav – <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1162378336674">accused of multiple sexual crimes</a> – is looking just about as unpromising as you can get. Such a depressing story can only be heartening to those of us with an appropriately contrarian spirit.<br/><br/>Israel, as you’ll no doubt be aware, is currently embroiled in a raging controversy: <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378324335&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">Will this Friday’s Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem be allowed to proceed?</a> If so, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378337869&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">will the Haredim (a.k.a. the “Ultra-Orthodox”) attack the marchers?</a> Seldom in the last several weeks of Israel’s history have tensions run so high. Earthquakes and tsunamis – real ones, not the metaphorical kind – have been threatened. Our nation cries out for moral leadership.<br/><br/>What a relief, then, to read that President Katzav – whose job consists largely of embodying the Israeli national consensus, whenever such a thing exists, which is mostly at funerals – has taken a firm position on issues of sexual preference. According to the Jerusalem Post article cited above, our President’s attitude is clear: “What is certain, however, is that if Katsav has to go down, it won't be without a fight.”<br/><br/>That’s the spirit, Mister President. It’s nice to know that whatever you’ve been accused of, you’re a man who stands up for his principles.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/katsav" rel="tag">Katsav</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blogging" rel="tag">Blogging</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/jerusalem" rel="tag">Jerusalem</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1162743520804729342006-11-05T18:10:00.000+02:002006-11-08T00:01:16.246+02:00Brevity<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway">Ernest Hemingway</a> once wrote what must be the world’s shortest short story:<br/><br/><center><em><b>For sale: baby shoes, never worn.</b></em></center><br/><br/>According to <a href="http://wired.com/">Wired Magazine</a>, he considered it his single best work. I’m not sure if it’s really Hemingway’s best story – certainly it wouldn’t work well as a summer vacation read, except perhaps for a <em>very </em>short visit to the beach – but one must admit that in six short words, Hemingway managed to imply a much longer story, with genuine emotional impact. (With its combination of pathos and brevity, it could, perhaps, serve as a bedtime story for <a href="http://hotcoffeegirl.squarespace.com/journal/2006/10/17/sleepy-head.html">constitutionally cheerful narcoleptics</a>; so even in purely practical terms, the story is a winner of sorts.)<br/><br/>There is a lesson here for writers – a lesson that Hemingway himself understood well, even though most of his work was more prolix than his six-word masterpiece: Don’t try to say everything.<br/><br/>Wired Magazine invited a bunch of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror writers to compose <a href="http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html">their own six-word stories</a>; here are some of my favorites:<br/><br/><span id="fullpost"><div class="post-nojustify"><font size=-1><table align=center width=90%><tr valign=top><td width=30%><strong>Margaret Atwood</strong></td><td>Longed for him. Got him. Shit.</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>David Brin<br/><br/></strong></td><td><br/>Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Orson Scott Card</strong></td><td><br/>The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Howard Chaykin</strong></td><td><br/>“I couldn’t believe she’d shoot me.”</td></tr><tr><td/><td><em>[This one resonates with me, considering that I’m an outgunned husband.]</em></td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Brian Herbert</strong></td><td><br/>Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Robert Jordan</strong></td><td><br/>Heaven falls. Details at eleven.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>James Patrick Kelly</strong></td><td><br/>We kissed. She melted. Mop please!<br/><br/></td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Steven Meretzky</strong></td><td><br/>He read his obituary with confusion.</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Time traveler's thought: “What's the password?”</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>I win lottery. Sun goes nova.</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Steve ignores editor’s word limit and</td></tr><tr><td/><td><br/>Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Richard K. Morgan</strong></td><td><br/>K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 - Closed Casket<br/><br/></td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Rockne S. O’Bannon</strong></td><td><br/>It’s behind you! Hurry before it<br/><br/></td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Richard Powers<br/><br/></strong></td><td><br/>Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Charles Stross<br/><br/></strong></td><td><br/>Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.</td></tr><tr/><tr/><tr/><tr valign=top><td><br/><strong>Vernor Vinge<br/><br/></strong></td><td><br/>Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.</td></tr></table></font></div><br/>Some of these are telegraphic plot summaries; others take the form of news headlines, epitaphs, and the like. Many of them made me laugh, and one – the one about a soldier killed in Iraq – approaches Hemingway’s masterpiece in its terse description of tragedy and bereavement (although I’m not sure if counting “K.I.A.” as one word constitutes cheating).<br/><br/>I am not a writer of fiction; I’ve tried, and I simply don’t have the knack. However, if Papa Hemingway and all these others can write six-word stories, I don’t see why I can’t try my hand at writing some six-word blog posts. Given my tendency to blather on, I’m sure the multitudes reading this blog (and while they are indeed very <i>small</i> multitudes, they are most definitely multitudinous) will appreciate my valiant effort to achieve brevity.<br/><br/>So without further ado, I present my first three attempts at writing The Great Six-Word Israeli blog post:<br/><br/><b><ul><li>Free Palestine! Limit one per customer.</li><br/><br/><li>Caroline Glick: <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1161811238155&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">All is lost!</a> Panic!</li><br/><br/><li>No Cabinet ministers indicted – slow day.</li></ul></b><br/>Elegant, no? And while the first may be more of a bumper sticker than a blog post (I may have more to say about potential bumper stickers, but that’s for later), the second and third seem to me to make rather good blog articles all by themselves.<br/><br/>And so, an invitation: Submit <i>your</i> six-word blog posts! This may<b><sup>*</sup></b> become a contest! There may be prizes! Stay tuned!<br/><br/><br/><b><sup>*</sup></b><span style="font-size:85%;"> (if enough of you submit entries)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blog" rel="tag">Blog</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blogging" rel="tag">Blogging</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/caroline_glick" rel="tag">Caroline Glick</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1162220472302551582006-10-30T17:01:00.000+02:002006-10-30T22:06:07.686+02:00Electronic Weirdness Department: Counting CommentsAs a software developer with over 25 years’ experience – and the grey hair to prove it – I have a strong aversion to computer programs that don’t work. The only thing more annoying than software that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do is broken software (or hardware, for that matter) that all of a sudden <em>starts working properly </em>for no discernable reason. Inconsistency sucks. It’s evil. If I wanted to deal with inconsistency, I’d have found a career dealing with people or animals instead of computers.<br/><br/>So, as a way of expressing myself without the nasty human-interface stuff, I took up blogging as a <strike>penance</strike> hobby. Beats talking to real people, right? I get to say what I want, nobody can interrupt me, and if nobody actually pays attention to what I’m saying, well, that’s just normal – they don’t pay attention in person either. No arguments, no talking back, I can delete comments I don’t like. In cyberspace, nobody can hear you scream – unless you’re <a href="http://midnighttherapy.typepad.com/my_weblog/">Crystal</a>, of course.<br/><br/>Great. I’ve got a hobby. Just me talking to a computer, not giving a flying copulation who’s reading what I write (which is why I check my visitor stats no more than once every half hour or so, usually). Everything is smooth and simple. No worries. No expenses to speak of: free blog platform and hosting courtesy of <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger.com</a>, free boring blog template provided by same, future more exciting template to be provided by Vaguely Sinister Wife (who, inexplicably, does things like this for me out of the goodness of her lethal little heart), free sidebar toys. No pressure, as long as I come up with a new post every few days. (Actually, that can add up to rather a lot of pressure.) No aggravations.<br/><br/>No aggravations…<br/><br/>No aggravations?<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>So tell me: <em>Why can’t Blogger decide how many comments there are on my last post?!? </em>On my <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/">main page</a>, Blogger tell me that “Ditching Israel: a false panacea” has four comments. But the <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006/10/ditching-israel-false-panacea.html">single-article version</a> and the <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_radlauer_archive.html">monthly archive page</a> say it has five comments. And the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=15707809&postID=116179510712962265">“post a comment”</a> page has <em>six </em>comments on it – including the last one I wrote, the absence of which on the single-article page tipped me off to the problem.<br/><br/>Now if Blogger simply wasn’t working for a while, I wouldn’t complain – after all, it’s a free service, and they hardly owe me perfect, 365-day-per-year interruption-free service for the money I’m not paying them. If the comment counter were showing zero, I could understand; after all, I’ve written a bug or two in my time, some of which were doozies. I could even contain my frustration if Blogger had lost a comment or two; shit happens, especially to me.<br/><br/>But how can Blogger come up with three completely different numbers for the same thing? If they have my last comment in their system, why does it show up only on the “post a comment” page and not elsewhere? Why am I seeing this problem only on my most recent post – a slightly boring, but harmless and well-intentioned little essay? <em>What kind of screwed-up logic from Hell could create such an annoying discrepancy? WHY DOES BLOGGER HATE ME?!?</em><br/><br/><center>* * *</center><br/>Sorry for shouting. While I take some deep breaths, please leave comments to console me and help me calm down. Maybe Blogger will even display them properly.<br/><br/>Stupid hobby.<br/><br/><br/><b>Addendum:</b> Now that I’ve posted this <strike>semi-coherent rant</strike> touching <i>cri de coeur</i>, the comment counter on my main page, as well as the archive page and the single-post page, is showing six comments for my previous post, as it should. I look like an idiot, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I hate computers.<br/><br/><br/><b>Appendix:</b> I have Blogger set up to email me every article that I post, along with every comment that someone posts. Interestingly enough (at least to me), just after I posted this piece, the last two comments that had been posted on my previous article – both of them more than 24 hours old by the time Blogger emailed them to me – suddenly turned up in my inbox. I was thrilled, of course: There really was a glitch at Blogger! I’m not necessarily an idiot! Then, of course, the Blogger server went down so I couldn't tell anyone about what happened.<br/><br/>Have I mentioned that I hate computers?<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blog" rel="tag">Blog</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blogging" rel="tag">Blogging</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/blogger" rel="tag">Blogger</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/rants" rel="tag">Rants</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1161795107129622652006-10-25T18:51:00.000+02:002006-10-25T18:54:36.736+02:00Ditching Israel: a false panaceaAmerican support for Israel has long been a loaded political issue. Whatever difficulty the United States faces, opponents of Israel find some way to claim that it’s all because of U.S. involvement with Israel. America’s bogged down in Iraq? Well, Bush and his guiding neocons sent the troops in just to protect Israel, right? America’s economy isn’t in great shape? Well, what can you expect when Israel soaks up untold billions in American aid? Oil shortages? Let’s not even get started. And since 9/11, everyone’s thinking about terrorism – and, as usual, it’s all Israel’s fault.<br/><br/>I wasn’t entirely surprised, then, to receive the following question:<br/><br/><em>If we (America) ditched Israel, wouldn’t that solve all our terrorism problems?</em><br/><br/>Here’s my response:<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/><em>The short answer</em>: No.<br/><br/><em>The medium-length answer</em>: No, it wouldn’t, for various reasons.<br/><br/>First, not all terrorism emanates from the Moslem world (although Islamist terrorism is definitely the flavor of the month nowadays). Anything that would be perceived as a major victory for Islamist terrorists would encourage not only further Islamist terrorism, but also non-Islamist terrorism. It’s a very bad idea to hand any terrorist, anywhere, a major victory, unless the compensating benefits are enormous. Appeasing terrorists does not reduce terrorism – it encourages terrorism.<br/><br/><br/>Second, not all Islamist terrorism has anything to do with Israel. In fact, most of the Islamist terror directed at targets outside Israel is organized, inspired, and sponsored by al-Qaeda (including its many offshoots) and Iran – and neither of these is primarily concerned with Israel. (Both, of course, dislike us, and Iran in particular does sponsor a great deal of anti-Israel terrorism; but both have agendas far beyond opposition to Israel. Al-Qaeda, in particular, is widely viewed in the Arab world as having publicly adopted opposition to Israel as an opportunistic attempt to cash in on the general anti-Israel sentiment in the region.)<br/><br/>Radical Islamic groups perceive themselves as being immersed in a global struggle against “infidels” – a “clash of civilizations”, to borrow a phrase. In this view, Israel is certainly one of the insults inflicted on the Islamic world by the West, but it is hardly the only one, or even the most important one. Were Israel magically to disappear tomorrow, the Islamic world would still be mostly poor, backward, ignorant, envious, and led by incompetent despots; and the West, with the United States as its largest, richest, most powerful, and most “decadent” member, would still be the enemy.<br/><br/>Terrorism, in my view, results from a combination of real – and, more importantly, perceived – grievances, and an ideology that focuses attention on these grievances, promotes violence as a “solution” to them, discourages societal introspection, and dehumanizes “the other”. Once a society has embraced terrorism as a strategy to cope with its self-perceived problems, I believe that a dynamic is established that is very difficult to eliminate; and in particular, I don’t believe that removing the ostensible external causes of grievance is likely to have a significant effect in reducing terrorism emanating from such societies. It’s simply too easy to find new grievances.<br/><br/><br/>Third, eliminating U.S. support for Israel would not eliminate Israel itself – and would cause a great deal of damage to the United States. Israel, while small, is relatively prosperous and technologically advanced, with a per-capita GDP (according to <a href="https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/is.html">the CIA estimate for 2005</a>) of almost $25,000 and a total GDP of well over $100 billion. This means that U.S. aid to Israel, at about $2 billion per year, represents less than 2 percent of our annual GDP; and in fact, this overstates the importance of this aid, since much of it consists of credits that we must use to purchase U.S.-manufactured military hardware that we would otherwise make – and export – ourselves. In effect, then, the bottom-line value to Israel of the aid it receives from the United States is far less than the official amount of that aid; and for the same reason, the real financial cost to the U.S. of this aid is much lower than it appears. So while losing this U.S. aid would be costly to Israel, it would hardly be fatal to us. (Further, U.S. weapons that are known to be used by Israel are considered to be especially attractive to other international buyers; thus, having Israel as a major export customer brings substantial financial rewards to the U.S. defense industry.)<br/><br/>Were the U.S. to “ditch” Israel, the political and military cost to America would be substantial. While losing U.S. diplomatic support would be painful and difficult for Israel, being perceived as having abandoned one of its closest allies would be terribly damaging to America’s reputation for loyalty and trustworthiness. It would also leave the U.S. without a single strong, stable, genuinely friendly, and reliable ally in the Middle East.<br/><br/><br/>In short, I don’t believe that abandoning support for Israel would in any way help to reduce terror attacks on the United States; in fact, I believe that such a move would only encourage terror organizations and their supporters to continue targeting the U.S. If America’s antagonists believe that America is weak and inconstant, they will redouble their efforts. Nothing is as encouraging as success.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/middle-east" rel="tag">Middle East</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/terrorism" rel="tag">Terrorism</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1161691029546692962006-10-24T13:57:00.000+02:002006-10-24T13:57:09.610+02:00Welcome to the world, Havel Havelim #90!The 90th edition of Havel Havelim (the Jewish/Israeli blog carnival) <a href="http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/archives/2006/10/24/haveil_havalim_90_the_real_thing.html">is here</a> – hosted by <a href="http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/">Soccer Dad</a>. There’s lots of great stuff to read, so click on over!<br/>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1161536988325546752006-10-22T19:09:00.000+02:002006-10-23T11:58:06.363+02:00“So what” Department: New review, new sidebar, new title – nu?This blog has been <a href="http://iwillfuckingtearyouapart.blogspot.com/2006/10/its-all-so-subjective.html">reviewed yet again</a> – this time by the good (if somewhat gothic in appearance) folks at <a href="http://iwillfuckingtearyouapart.blogspot.com/">Ask And Ye Shall Receive</a>. Strangely enough, they seemed to like it; probably their minds have gone from listening to the wrong sort of music. Happens to the best of us.<br/><br/>Having both reviews come out on the same day – particularly considering that both “Ask” and “I Talk Too Much” took several weeks to get around to my blog – was a bit of a surprise. The fact that the “Ask” reviewer was much more positive than the crew at <a href="http://www.italk2much.com">IT2M</a> wasn’t surprising, however; it just reinforces what seems to be the general verdict about this blog: it’s not for everyone. Most people who meet me say more or less the same thing – <em>I’m </em>not for everyone either. So apparently my faulty blog accurately conveys my faulty personality.<br/><br/>Everyone did seem to agree on a few things:<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/><ul><li>“Peekaboo posts” – <em>good</em>.</li><br/><li>“Peekaboo sidebar” – <em>good</em>.</li><br/><li>Still too much bric-a-brac on the sidebar – <em>bad</em>.</li><br/><li>Long, abstruse posts – probably okay if anyone had the patience to read them.</li><br/><li>My template – uninspiring at best.</li></ul><br/>…And while I didn’t get any particular criticism of the blog’s title, I was liking it less and less over time; it just didn’t seem accurately to convey what I was getting at. (I was also advised that it would be smart to get “Middle East” into the blog’s title rather than “Mideast”, to attract more search-engine users.)<br/><br/>So, after pondering the reviews and my own thoughts, I made a few changes:<br/><br/><ul><li>I ditched the “link-swap” ads on the sidebar.</li><br/><li>I reorganized the sidebar stuff into five categories, each with its own “peekaboo” menu.</li><br/><li>When I saw that multi-level “peekaboos” worked so splendidly, a mad gleam came into my eyes (or so I gathered from the reaction of the various cats, Wolfoid Dog, and Vaguely Sinister Wife – all of whom edged away from me and eyed the room’s exits). Why not create the ultimate uncluttered blog sidebar? Why not, indeed! So I did it. I’ve now got just about the world’s shortest sidebar, until you start clicking on it. (I’m reminded of a beloved Ephraim Kishon story, <a href="http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-4PKMbrwzfrSR8iUgDo4KVA2zSdXw?p=94">“The Silver Frenzy”</a> – evidently do-it-yourself projects make a lot of guys somewhat manic.)</li><br/><li>I gave my blog a new title. Goodbye, <em>“On the Contrary: Don’s Mideast Musings”</em>. Hello, <em>“You’ll come for the terrorism, you’ll stay for the taxes – welcome to the Middle East!”</em></li></ul><br/>So far, nobody seems to care about most of these changes; I ascribe this lackluster response to the masses’ usual inability to appreciate genius in its own time. Several readers have expressed mild approval of the change in title, although pretty much everyone seems to be concerned about how long it is. “How can we possibly ever link to one of your articles now?” they whine. “Just quoting your blog title will make our links two pages long!”<br/><br/>Hmph. Philistines. Art is art, and if my muse demands of me a fifteen-word blog title, I dare not argue. One dismisses muses at one’s peril – they have important friends.<br/><br/>But I suppose that I should show some mercy, to my own poor typing fingers if not to my readers. So now I have to come up with an official, approved shorter version of the new blog title. After deep reflection, I’ve narrowed it down to two choices:<br/><br/><ul><li><em>“Welcome to the Middle East!”</em> – functional, friendly, but perhaps a bit too white-bread perky for my taste;</li><br/><li><em>“You’ll Come for the Terrorism”</em> – darker, stranger, scarier. Kind of like me, except that most people don’t find me all that dark or scary.</li></ul><br/>So, Dear Readers: What do you think? Do we go for the bland, non-threatening “Welcome”, or shall we embrace “Terrorism”? Your opinions are cordially requested; who knows, I might even pay attention to them!<br/><br/>Or not.<br/></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1161332039085392552006-10-20T09:55:00.000+02:002006-10-20T23:03:04.556+02:00I’ve been slapped!Some time ago, I submitted this blog to the kind, gentle folks at <a href="http://www.italk2much.com/">italk2much.com</a> for one of their famous no-holds-barred, obscene-but-honest reviews. After sending them my information, I began to read what they had to say about other blogs whose owners had dared to request a review - and I began to be very, very frightened.<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>I quickly realized that my sidebar was far too long and sloppy; this alone was going to get me a right reaming. My frequently-long posts were also going to be problematic. So I scurried to find some technical solutions to these problems - without, G_d forbid, actually putting less stuff on my sidebar or learning to write short posts! I dare to say that I succeeded to a degree; and so when Sassie Sadie at italk2much got around to reviewing <span style="font-style:italic;">On the Contrary</span> last night, <a href="http://italk2much.com/index.php/weblog/my_head_hurts_my_feet_stink_and_i_dont_love_jesus/">she indeed didn’t find too much to complain about</a>.<br/><br/>That said, she didn't find all that much to praise, either:<br/><blockquote><br/><i>D’oh. I tried to read this blog. I’m sure that the person writes well and that they have a well-meaning message to send out. But it just seems so all over the place that I can’t follow it. He seems like a nice fellow though. The blog may be a bit too political for some.
The template is nothing to write home about. It’s simple. He has used the More/Less code in his sidebar. Thankfully, because there is a f_ckton of useless sh_t in there. [Vowels deleted to avoid offending the sensibilities of very sensitive readers with very limited imaginations. You’re welcome. -Don]
Sorry, not much to say on this one. It is what it is.<br/><br/></i></blockquote><br/>Well, it wasn’t quite the glowing endorsement I’d fantasized about receiving; but considering how the italk2much reviewers react to a solid majority of the blogs they review, it wasn’t half bad either. On the Contrary is definitely visually dull, and has no pretensions of being otherwise (although I'm thinking of adding a graphical banner). At least I’ve managed to avoid making the blog hard to read, for those few people interested in reading it.<br/><br/>So my blog “is what it is”? I guess I can live with that. Thanks, IT2M!<br/><br/><br/>P.S. I’m also thinking of giving the blog a new title; any suggestions? And no, I’ve already thought of “Yawn: the blog”!
</span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1161303252152270092006-10-20T01:42:00.000+02:002006-11-16T18:16:51.710+02:00Strategic assets and white elephantsI just answered an AllExperts.com question relating to to supposed inadvisability of Israeli territorial “concessions” to our Arab neighbors. The question is one that comes up rather often in discussions of Israeli policy and politics; so I think my answer may be worth sharing.
A____ gave a fairly thorough account of the historical enmity to Israel of the various Arab countries, then asked:<br/><br/><blockquote>
If the Arabs do not want a binational solution or any form of peace, then they will not stop until Israel is fully destroyed; so doesn’t giving them land just speed up the “wiping israel off the face of the earth” process?<br/><br/></blockquote><br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>Dear A____ -
Your description of Arab states’ hostility to Israel is factual enough, as far as it goes; but I can’t say whether it’s actually a useful answer to any particular question.
In response to your question, I’d like first to point out that there is a big difference between talking about “the Arab states” and talking about “the Arabs”, as you did. “The Arab states” refers to a relatively small group of countries (or, more accurately, governments) with known histories and policies, such that it’s possible to say definite and verifiable things about them. For example, I can say that among the Arab countries near Israel, only Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel and recognize its existence, and know that I’m saying something true. On the other hand, to say that “the Arabs do not want any form of peace with Israel” is to assume that all Arabs think exactly the same way - a gross over-generalization. There are many millions of Arabs, and among those millions of people there is a great deal of diversity of opinion. We should all get out of the habit of talking about “the Arabs” as if they were all alike, just as we should expect others to avoid making sweeping generalizations about “the Jews”.
Second, I believe you’re making one of the classic mistakes about Israeli policy regarding territorial withdrawal. You’re assuming that all land Israel holds is an asset, such that any time we “give” land to the Palestinians (or the Syrians, or the Lebanese, or whoever) we are strengthening them and weakening ourselves. If this were true, obviously it would be important to retain as much land as possible, and to make territorial concessions (if we made them at all) only in return for very substantial benefits.
Indeed, this assumption is true in certain cases. The Golan Heights, for example, has genuine strategic importance for Israel - both in regard to our water supply and in direct military terms. Giving up the Golan Heights and returning to the international border - or worse, the 4 June 1967 <i>de facto</i> border, which had some Israeli land under Syrian control - would genuinely weaken us, and thus it would make sense to make this concession only in return for full, reliable, and permanent peace with Syria and other local Arab states.
On the other hand, I see no reason to view Israel’s former settlements in the Gaza Strip as an asset to Israel: they were hugely costly to defend, and the only people who benefited from them were a few farmers who made substantial profits by using cheap Palestinian and Thai labor, and irrigated their crops with heavily-subsidized water. As far as I’m concerned, getting out of the Gaza Strip made Israel stronger and more viable, not less; and while the Palestinians certainly “spin” our withdrawal as a victory for them, I believe that in the long run the Disengagement was a victory for Israel. (All this has nothing to do with the issue of <a href="http://radlauer.blogspot.com/2005/10/disengagement-how-much-compensation-is.html">how much compensation should have been paid to our former Gaza Strip settlers</a> and how well or badly their resettlement has been handled; the fact that I believe the Disengagement was a good idea doesn’t mean I think the Disengagement was carried out perfectly.)
Similarly, I support retaining some parts of the West Bank, in order to strengthen Israel’s strategic position compared to the pre-1967 situation; but I see no reason that Israel should retain all the small settlements scattered through the entire West Bank, where a few thousand settlers live among two million Palestinians. Many of these small settlements are very costly to defend, and do not provide any compensating benefit to Israel. How is such a settlement an asset to Israel? Why does closing down such a settlement aid the process of “wiping Israel off the map”?
In short, I believe that certain pieces of land are genuine assets, while other pieces of land are “white elephants” in the technical sense: that is, supposed “assets” that in fact cost far more to maintain than they yield in benefits. (Remember that white elephants were given by the King of Thailand to his enemies: they were holy so they couldn't be used for work, they were a gift from the King so they couldn’t be discarded, and they cost a great deal to feed!)
It seems to me that the best way for Israel to survive is to focus less on how horrible “the Arabs” are, and instead focus on how we can strengthen ourselves. What can we do to improve our economy (which in turn supports our military and our educational system)? What can we do to increase our internal cohesiveness? How can we manage our affairs so that we can exist within some vaguely rational border as a democratic state with a solid Jewish majority? If Israel does a good job of strengthening itself - which mostly means strengthening its own population and institutions - nobody is going to be able to “wipe us off the face of the earth”, at least not without using nuclear weapons and presumably facing a massive retaliation in kind. But if we fixate on control of land as the sole criterion for security, we are going to neglect other factors which are in reality much more critical to our long-term survival.
Best regards,
-Don Radlauer<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/middle-east" rel="tag">Middle East</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/arabs" rel="tag">Arabs</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/disengagement" rel="tag">Disengagement</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/occupation" rel="tag">Occupation</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1160945952534298722006-10-15T22:49:00.000+02:002006-10-15T22:59:12.563+02:00Havel Havelim #89 is up!My friend and colleague Batya is the editor of <a href="http://me-ander.blogspot.com/2006/10/havel-havelim-succot-edition.html">the long-awaited après-Sukkoth edition</a> of the Havel Havelim Jewish/Israeli blog carnival, and, as usual, she’s done a great job of putting it together. Enjoy!Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1160847301641145982006-10-14T19:12:00.000+02:002006-10-14T19:40:41.843+02:00My contribution to humanity: Don’s aphorism of the dayAll my regular readers have come to rely on this blog for pithy aphorisms that guide them through their daily lives; this may explain why I have very few regular readers. However, today I’ve come up with a truly great aphorism, a paragon of pith, a phrase-o'-wisdom that will make our entire species and its pets smarter, nobler, and more spiritual:<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/><b><i>I pitied myself because I had no headlights, until I rear-ended a man who had no brake lights.</i></b><br><br/>Having taken these words into your heart, you are now an enlightened being - and don’t forget who enlightened you! If you meet Buddha on the road, tell him that he’s all washed up in this town - the guy may have been all right in his day, but where’s <i>his</i> blog?
<br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/aphorisms" rel="tag">Aphorisms</a>.</span></span><br/></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1160486641388778922006-10-10T14:09:00.000+02:002006-10-10T18:10:39.436+02:00Achieving mindlessness: A tale of fish and fuel injectorsSo - we made it to Eilat.<br/><br/>Mister Mechanic stayed in his shop under Vaguely Sinister Wife’s watchful eye (and concealed .45) late into the evening, reassembling Long-Suffering Renault’s engine, now including the correct (I hope!) timing belt, water pump, and their exciting collection of fashion accessories. As he labored, he frequently called his associate who had disassembled the thing, to ask what went where; since the guy specializes in four-by-fours rather than family cars, apparently he hadn’t done this particular job on this particular model before. Somehow he got the engine back together, with only a few probably-unimportant parts left over; V.S.W. drove home and life continued in its course.
More or less.
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The first time I drove the Renault, I noticed that it was idling a bit rough. Of course, I was concerned. Maybe one of those unimportant left-over parts actually was supposed to do something? But the car did seem to run decently once it had warmed up a bit, so I reassured myself that things must not be too bad. After all, the last time Long-Suffering Renault had a problem with the timing belt, the results were a rather catastrophic engine failure rather than just a little rough going; I assumed that if Mister Mechanic had made some drastic error, it would manifest in some equally spectacular fashion.
Before all this drama started, I had already been concerned that my car was showing some manifestations of A.A.S. (Automotive Angst Syndrome, that is - although as a French car, it probably prefers to be diagnosed with less-Germanic diseases of the soul). Mostly it ran fine; but once in a while it took a couple of attempts to start it, and a couple of times it stalled out on me at low speeds. The latter behavior was alarming; but as I do when Vaguely Sinister Wife fondles her chainsaw (a cherished birthday present from herself) and glances my way, I shrugged off the foreshadoings of possible doom. I'm a <i>very</i> good shrugger.
On Sunday morning, then, we set out for Eilat. All seemed copacetic. The luggage fit in the trunk, the Wolfoid was happily ensconced in the back of V.S.W.’s jeep, and none of the human passengers had more than superficial knife wounds. So generous was my mood that I decided to give Long-Suffering Renault a treat: when we gassed up at the northern fringes of the Negev Desert, I added a serving of fuel-injector cleaner to the car’s dinner. For such virtue one should receive only nice rewards, no?
No. As we proceeded into ever-deepening desert, my car began to seem distinctly anemic; while at 1.6 litres it’s never been exactly a muscle car, it was requiring much more gas-pedal action for much less impressive results than usual. And when it idled (and, for some reason, also at about 3000 R.P.M.) it vibrated alarmingly. Something was definitely amiss. I believe I managed to present a convincing image of <i>sangfroid</i> (I’d originally written “coolth”, but is is a French car, after all) and thus didn’t alarm my passengers overmuch, but <i>I</i> was certainly alarmed. Would we make it to Eilat? <i>“I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”</i> - seldom have I so sincerely meditated on that mantra. We managed to progress determinedly if not steadily southwards; and it was with a huge sense of relief that I finally greeted the hotels of Eilat as we laboriously topped a rise and they appeared in the middle distance.
We found the hotel - a fourth-rate Holiday Inn with the worst soundproofing I can recall in any hotel I’ve slept in that sponsors discotheques in its lobby every other evening - parked with only two or three stallouts, and proceeded with our vacation. (Wolfoid Dog is vacationing at a kennel here in Eilat, so we can visit him and see how he’s doing. I’m told he’s keeping company with a similarly wolfoid female, so I can only imagine him happy. In fact, I’m sometimes amazed that he doesn’t get tired just from smiling so much, the son of a bitch.)
<center>* * *</center>
Yesterday we spent the day at the beach, snorkeling and relaxing - except for Long-Suffering Renault, which doesn’t swim and thus hung out at the beach’s parking lot all day. The day was exactly the kind of day that makes for completely uninteresting blogging: nothing dramatic happened, and the big excitement was watching fish in every color of the rainbow (sometimes on the same fish!) swim about trying hard to ignore the stupid tourists. I worked hard on achieving a state of Zen Vacation Mindlessness; this state of mind (or of non-mind) is difficult for me to achieve, even with sun, fish, and light reading (a history of the Auschwitz <i>Sondercommando</i>) ready to hand. I state with pride that I managed it, pretty much, at least by my own medium-to-abysmal standards.
Today we took our car to a local mechanic, recommended by another mechanic who in turn had been recommended by a local friend of ours. He hooked a gizmo to our car’s internal computer, which promptly complained that one of its fuel injectors was unhappy. He informed us that a more detailed and reliable diagnosis would take a few hours, so we returned to Hotel Noisy; Vaguely Sinister Wife is out walking somewhere with Number One Daughter, and I’ve been left all alone in the hotel room with nothing but books, a bed, and the Internet. Poor me.
<center>* * *</center>
This is billed as a “serious” blog, meaning that I’m supposed to be drawing cosmic (or at least locally cosmic) conclusions from all the stuff that goes on around me. But I’m on vacation, fer chrissake! Can’t I just skip the conclusion this once?
No? Bastards.
OK, so I’ve got to come up with some lesson I’ve learned from my automotive travails. Here’s a first stab at it; and if you don’t like the moral, you can find me in the water tomorrow and complain about it. I’ll be the one with a snorkel sticking out above the surface.
<b>Today’s profound lesson:</b>
<i>Make lots of money, so you can...
Buy a new car every few years, so you can...
Throw it out (or flog it off on someone) before it starts needing serious repairs, so you can...
Buy another one. (Repeat as needed.)</i>
It’s not much of a lesson, is it? But I am, after all, on vacation.
<span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/rants" rel="tag">Rants</a>.</span></span>
</span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1160082159770789922006-10-05T22:31:00.000+02:002006-10-05T23:21:59.453+02:00Original Idea of the Day: A rant about a car mechanic!I try not to use blogging as a substitute for psychotherapy. Really I do. Partly because I don’t think it’s fair to expect unpaid strangers to slog through my neuroses, but mostly, I think, because I blog under my real name and I’m worried that y’all would send me bills for each 45 minutes you spent reading about my inner turmoil and conflicts over toilet training.
Today, though, I’m gonna rant. I’m gonna rave. I’m gonna kvetch, ’cause I’m pissed. At what, you ask? Oh, this one’s new. This one’s exciting and original. <i>I’m angry at my car mechanic!</i>
<span id="fullpost">
Still awake? Really? Maybe you <i>should</i> send me a bill.
OK – so here’s the story: Vaguely Sinister Wife’s stepmother arrived today for a visit, leaving her home somewhere in Yenemvelt (which is one of those untranslatable Yiddish words that in this case refers to the far-northern stretches of America’s Midwest) to stay for a week or so in our happy climes. We’ve planned to spend next week in Eilat, with hotel rooms booked starting Sunday. And, just to be responsible, we brought my car to the mechanic on Wednesday morning, to get the timing belt and the water pump replaced before the drive down south. Nothing was broken, mind you; the water pump had a slight leak and the timing belt should be good for another 40,000 kilometers, but we figured we’d be virtuous and make sure the car was not going to die on us in the middle of the trackless wastes of the Negev Desert.
The mechanic told us he should have the car ready for us at the end of the same day we brought it in – which was yesterday, as I write this. Yesterday evening came and went; no call from the mechanic. (Israelis are famous for calling when they have something they want to say, not when you expect them to call to keep you up to date; the idea of progress reports as a courtesy seems never to have reached our happy little country. Probably has something to do with the fact that telephones used to be an unreliable, scarce, and expensive luxury; but this mechanic came of age in an Israel with an excellent, modern phone system and more than one cell-phone per citizen.) Today we continued to hear nothing from the mechanic; finally, as evening approached, we called him to find out what was going on.
It turns out that the mechanic’s part supplier had (supposedly) sent the wrong parts – after the mechanic had already spent a good deal of time on fiddly disassembly of the relevant bits of my car’s engine. The mechanic sent the parts back. The supplier sent different – but still incorrect – parts. Now the mechanic is hoping to get the right parts. Tomorrow is Friday, which is normally a half day for businesses like repair shops. Tomorrow evening is the beginning of Succoth, a major holiday – and the Sabbath to boot. And Sunday morning is when we’re supposed to be off to Eilat. (And yes, we’d told the mechanic in advance what our situation was; now stop interrupting, I’m on a roll here.)
So: I don’t have a car. Vaguely Sinister Wife’s jeep (actually a little Suzuki Vitara) can hold four people and a couple of six-packs. (We were planning to take four people in my car, plus two people and Wolfoid Dog in the Vitara.) As of a couple hours ago, the mechanic has my car partly disassembled and doesn’t have the parts he needs to finish the job.
Now, the natural solution – assuming the correct parts do not miraculously appear in the very near future – would be for the mechanic to give up for now, put the car back together as it was, wish us good luck on our trip to and from Eilat, try to get his stupid parts supplier to compensate him for his lost time, hope that our repeat business would be worth his extra trouble, and maybe overcharge us a bit when we come back and he redoes the repair. Normal, no? Ahhh, but this is Israel! When we reminded the mechanic that we absolutely need the car by Sunday morning at the latest, and that if he can’t finish the job he’s got to at least get it back to the perfectly drivable state it was in yesterday morning, he informed us that we would still have to pay him something like 600 shekels – call it U.S. $140, but remember that salaries here are much lower than they are in the States – for his labor taking the engine apart and reassembling it with the same old parts he started with.
Now this, as we say in Hebrew, is not OK. So <i>his</i> parts supplier screwed up; why is this <i>our</i> problem? Mister Mechanic insists that the whole mess isn’t his fault, since he’s not the one who made the mistake. Very likely (since renting a car for a holiday week would cost a lot more than 600 shekels), we’ll indeed have to shell out the aforementioned sum for a car repair that didn’t happen; we’ll go away mad, and the mechanic already feels persecuted because we have unrealistic expectations having to do with not paying for services ineffectively rendered. And even if by some miracle he gets the right parts and fixes the car in time for our trip, we’ll never take either of our cars to him again: Screw-ups happen, and how could we ever feel comfortable doing business with a guy who expects <i>us</i> to pick up the bill when things go wrong in <i>his</i> operation?<br/><br/><center>* * *</center><br/>The problem, of course, is that Mister Mechanic is passing the buck: The person at fault is the parts supplier, so we’re told that we can’t hold the mechanic responsible. But life doesn’t work that way. From the customer’s standpoint, “the mechanic” is not just the guy with a wrench in his hand; it’s the facility he works in, his network of suppliers, and so on. We don’t pay him to tighten (or, in the current case, loosen) bolts, but to fix cars – and the difference between those two concepts is an important one. The mechanic isn’t selling us his labor; he’s selling results. Labor he wastes because he hasn’t developed the right network of parts suppliers is his lookout. But since Mister Mechanic doesn’t seem to understand this, he’s going to lose us as a customer – along with a lot more that 600 shekels in future business.
<center>* * *</center><br/>At the moment, both Israel and the Palestinian Autonomy seem to be having their own Car Mechanic Moments. Here in Israel, generals and politicians are scrambling to absolve themselves of all blame (and cast it on their colleagues, of course) for the less-than-satisfactory outcome of the recent unpleasantness in Lebanon. (I’m still not sure whether to call it a war; it certainly lasted longer than many of our wars, but during most of that time it consisted almost entirely of aerial bombardment and not ground conflict. But unpleasant it certainly was, except possibly for the pilots; so “unpleasantness” it is.) And the Palestinians are having a great deal of trouble deciding whose job it is to make the trains run on time, or indeed whose job it is to build railroads (and pay teachers, and so on) in the first place. Lacking clear answers to their problems of governance, many Palestinians appear to be taking rather drastic measures (i.e. shooting one another) as a means of expressing their discontents. Nobody – Israeli or Palestinian – seems to be ready to say, “It’s my fault; I screwed up; I’ll fix it.”
Why do I get the feeling that a lot of ordinary Israelis, along with a lot of ordinary Palestinians, would be happy to take their business elsewhere?
<span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/rants" rel="tag">Rants</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/israel" rel="tag">Israel</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/palestine" rel="tag">Palestine</a>.
</span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15707809.post-1159465061671465882006-09-28T20:37:00.000+03:002006-09-28T20:45:50.476+03:00Pipes and “provocation”<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/">Daniel Pipes</a> is one of the West’s most prominent experts on radical Islam and the various organizations promoting an Islamist agenda in the West. In addition to his columns in <em>FrontPageMag.com</em>, <em>The New York Sun</em>, and <em>The Jerusalem Post</em>, he produces <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog">his own blog</a>; he offers a weekly email version of the blog for those of us too lazy to take the initiative and go read it ourselves. (He also offers email distribution of his columns; sadly, he doesn’t deliver pizza, so I can’t survive on Pipes alone.)<br/><br/>Mr. Pipes has a lot of interesting things to say, a lot of good information to convey, and some strongly-held opinions and values – some of which I even agree with. However, <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/663">one of his recent blog pieces</a> raises some serious questions about his adherence to his own professed principles. His initial remarks, along with his reaction when I questioned them, lead me to conclude that Daniel Pipes, while a genuine expert on his own subject matter, is too much a partisan to be taken seriously as a commentator on terrorism.<br/><span id="fullpost"><br/>Mr. Pipes’ blog post refers to reports that a small group of British rightists have threatened to attack Moslems – even going so far as to brandish large knives and threaten to behead British Moslems who don’t “go home”. After a short introduction and a long quote from the original report (from an Australian newspaper rather than a British one, oddly enough), Pipes adds his own brief commentary:<br/><br/><blockquote><em>“It is nearly inevitable that Islamist barbarism provoke anti-Muslim barbarism... One can only hope the Islamists will call off their hordes before things get out of hand.”</em><br/></blockquote><br/>Pipes’ comment set off alarm bells in my mind (which, as you’ll know if you’ve experienced it, is a very annoying phenomenon – those things are <em>loud</em>!); so I sent the following comment to his blog:<br/><br/><blockquote>I was rather taken aback by the comment you made at the end of your “Behead Islamists?” post.<br/><br/>Aren’t you making the same mistake you accuse Islamic organizations of making? In “Islamists Threaten Civil War in Great Britain – A Good Idea?” and in many other places as well, you specifically (and correctly) castigate Moslem groups for threatening that Islamist terrorism will increase if Britain’s or America’s foreign policy isn’t changed, Moslems don’t get special privileges, or whatever. The point you make regarding Moslems – that terrorism is wrong and reprehensible regardless of its “root causes” – applies equally to anti-Moslem attacks, doesn't it?<br/><br/>By calling for Islamists to “call off their hordes before things get out of hand,” you appear to be blaming the victims (potential or actual) of anti-Moslem terrorism in a way you <em>don’t </em>do when the terrorism is perpetrated by Moslems against the West.<br/><br/>I’m sure that you didn’t mean to make this distinction; but the fact that even someone as careful and conscientious as you are can make this kind of mistake is an indication of how careful we all have to be to avoid hypocrisy and inconsistent standards. If terrorism is wrong, it’s wrong – period. That means that terrorism is just as wrong when it’s directed at people we don’t like as when it’s directed at our friends; and it means that our enemies are no more required to change their political beliefs and strategies as a response to threatened or actual terrorism than our friends are.<br/></blockquote><br/>To his credit, Mr. Pipes (who vets all user comments before they’re published on his blog) allowed my comment to appear. But he published it with the following reply:<br/><br/><blockquote><em>“It is wrong and I called it ‘anti-Muslim barbarism.’ Further, I am an analyst of this subject, not a spokesman for the British far-rightists, so I think your comparison between my analysis and the Islamist threats is a bit far-fetched.”</em><br/></blockquote><br/>Perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough when I commented on Mr. Pipes’ blog; but I hadn’t thought that someone as sophisticated as Daniel Pipes would need to be spoon-fed what is, after all, a fairly basic and standard bit of counter-terrorist reasoning. The point I was making was not that Mr. Pipes approves of anti-Moslem terrorism; his use of the term “barbarism” is clear enough even to a reader as obtuse as I. What <em>is </em>objectionable, though, is his call for British Moslems to soften their political rhetoric (assuming that this is what he means by “calling off their hordes before things get out of hand”) in response to terrorist threats against them, despite the fact that he consistently advises Western governments <em>not </em>to modify their policies and rhetoric in response to Moslem terrorist threats against the West. This kind of ideology-based inconsistency is terribly damaging to the fight against terrorism, and if Mr. Pipes has any aspirations to speak with authority on the subject, he needs to understand why.<br/><br/>Terrorism is politically-motivated violence against civilian targets. What is most important about this definition is that it does not distinguish between worthy and unworthy political goals: targeting civilians to further a political cause is terrorism (and is wrong) <em>no matter how just the cause in which it is carried out</em>. As soon as we begin to justify terrorism “in a good cause” (or relabel terror attacks as something more palatable like “resistance to occupation”) we’ve lost the battle against terror – since every cause is a good one in someone’s eyes. Instead of working to prevent civilians from being targeted by political violence, we’re stuck debating which political causes are worth killing for – and dying for.<br/><br/>If we intend to fight terrorism effectively, we need to banish from our thinking the notion of “provocation”. By writing that Islamist barbarism <em>inevitably provokes </em>anti-Moslem barbarism, Daniel Pipes in effect blames British Moslems (or at least their leaders) for any attacks carried out by British rightist “barbarians” against innocent British Moslems – and thus gives the rightists a license to kill. They aren’t committing acts of racist terrorism, after all – they’re simply <em>responding to provocation</em>.<br/><br/>The problem, of course, is that every terrorist on the planet justifies his actions this way. Nobody goes around killing noncombatant civilians just to relieve the boredom of modern life; terrorist movements are founded upon a sense of grievance, and <em>responding to provocation </em>sounds much more sympathetic than <em>murdering the innocent </em>or <em>attacking people you don’t like just for the hell of it</em>.<br/><br/>I don’t sympathize with the goals or tactics of Islamists, British or otherwise. But <em>even if British Moslems are themselves sympathetic to Islamist terrorism</em>, attacks against them are terror attacks, and should be condemned unreservedly. No discussion of “provocation” or “root causes” should be allowed to absolve terrorists of full responsibility for their deeds; terrorism is never “inevitable”, because there are always other ways of achieving political goals. No matter what the provocation, no matter what his grievance, the would-be terrorist must at some point decide that his political agenda is more important than the lives of his victims. It is precisely this dehumanization of the victim that enables terrorism to exist, and it is precisely this dehumanization of the victim that makes terrorism evil.<br/><br/>It’s very easy to condemn terrorism when the perpetrators are our enemies and the victims are our friends. But the true fight against terrorism requires us to oppose political violence against civilians even when the attacks are carried out by our dear friends against our sworn enemies; it requires us to defend our opponents’ right safely to hold and express opinions we find indefensible. This fight requires not only expertise, but also moral clarity and backbone. By falling into the trap of “provocation”, Daniel Pipes has shown that he’s not quite ready to be a true counter-terrorist.<br/><br/><span style="font-size:85%;">(This post can also be found at the <a href="http://gunsandbutter.blogspot.com/">Guns and Butter Blog</a>.)<br/><br/><span class="technoratitag">Categories: <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/terrorism" rel="tag">Terrorism</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/counter-terrorism" rel="tag">Counter-terrorism</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/donradlauer/pipes" rel="tag">Daniel Pipes</a>.<br/></span></span></span>Don Radlauerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06913661475277505087noreply@blogger.com8