Dreams Into Lightning 2

Kathy Griffin. Anderson Cooper. CNN.

New Year's Eve. What could go wrong?

Ramez Harb

Ramez Harb - Wikipedia:

Ramez Harb (? - 2012) was a Palestinian militant and commander. He served as a senior military officer in the resistance organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad's armed wing, al-Quds Brigades, until killed by Israeli forces during the ongoing Operation Pillar of Cloud.

Breitbart:

It is no surprise that the Los Angeles Times harbors an intense hatred for Israel; this is the same newspaper that to this day has suppressed the infamous video of Barack Obama honoring PLO leader Rashid Khalidi. But the lengths to which the Times will go to falsely indict and smear Israel reached another new level on November 20. The Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the Times, Edmund Sanders, wrongly identified Ramez Harb, an Islamic Jihad leader killed last week in an Israeli air strike, as a "Palestinian journalist." ...

CAMERA:

Following communication from CAMERA staff, the Los Angeles Times has clarified a Nov. 20 article by Jerusalem bureau chief Edmund Sanders which wrongly identified Ramez Harb, an Islamic Jihad leader killed last week in an Israeli air strike, as a "Palestinian journalist." The error and correction follow:

Error (Los Angeles Times, Edmund Sanders, 11/20/12): On Monday, Israel attacked the Sharouk communications building in Gaza City where it said four senior members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were meeting.

Among the dead was Ramez Harb, a Palestinian journalist. Israel said he was a legitimate target because he served in the information department of Islamic Jihad.

Correction (11/23/12): Gaza fighting: In the Nov. 20 Section A, an article about attacks by Israel and Hamas referred to Ramez Harb, who was killed in an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, as a journalist. Although initial reports said Harb worked for a Palestinian news agency, he was a member of the militant group Islamic Jihad. ...

NYT: Efraim Halevy on Republicans, Democrats, and Israel

Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy has an op-ed in the New York Times on American politics and Israel. I'm not going to try to discuss the article in depth, but I do want to make a few observations.

First, it is profoundly unsurprising that there are a plurality of opinions in the Israeli government, as there are in Washington. Undoubtedly there are factions in Jerusalem with sympathies toward one American party or the other. It's my impression that Shimon Peres does not get along well with Netanyahu, for example, and that Peres inclines more toward America's Democrats.

What's striking about this article, though, is its exclusive focus on the past. Virtually all of the leaders named - both Bushes, Baker, Shamir, Sharon, and of course Halevy himself - have left office, died, or become incapacitated. Notice too that the article is absolutely silent on Romney's policies, mentioning his name only once, and that in order to defend Obama from his accusations. In short, the article's main focus is on history, and in particular the history of the respective political parties.

I will not vote for James Baker for President. But he's not running. To me, this article reads like much of the New York Times and the mainstream media in general: Hey, you remember when the bad Republicans did this and that?

What some of us have figured out is that we are facing today's issues, not yesterday's, and our choices are the candidates and parties of today, not of twenty years ago.

And it's all very impressive that this was written by a former Head! Of! The! Mossad!, but I do not think this makes his opinion infallible. Again, there are going to be multiple opinions within any government or security organization, and you can find people with equally impressive credentials on different sides of many issues. (Witness the nuclear Iran issue today.) You know, Bush Sr. used to be the head of the CIA - does that mean that Bush was never wrong?

Morning Report: 2012-08-21

Ethiopia: PM Meles dies. 'Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has died, Ethiopian state television said on Tuesday. Meles had not been seen in several weeks. The government said in July that he was taking a break to recover from an unspecified condition. State television said Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn will be acting prime minister. ...'

Syria: FSA bans torture, prisoner killings. 'The Free Syrian Army issued new orders Aug. 20 forbidding the torture and killing of prisoners following criticism by U.N. investigators, Reuters reported. ...'

Russia / Israel: Gazprom eyes Leviathan. 'Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom is studying opportunities to participate in the development of Israel's Leviathan offshore natural gas field, Bloomberg reported Aug. 20 ...'

Turkey: Gaziantep bombing kills 8. CNN: 'Eight people were killed in a bombing in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, an official in the Interior Ministry said Monday. A spokesman for the Gaziantep governorship said 66 people were wounded in the blast. ...' Bianet - English: 'An explosion that took place near the Karşıyaka Police Station in the southeastern province of Gaziantep killed eight people and injured 61 at around 20:00 on Monday. The blast occured after someone detonated the explosives loaded inside a vehicle, Gaziantep Governor Erdal Ata told the broadcasting station NTV. The victims of the blast were passengers inside a nearby automobile and a minibus, according to reports. Two buses also caught fire in consequence of the explosion ...'

Gaziantep, previously and still informally called Antep; ʻayn tāb [ʕajn tæːb] is a city in southeast Turkey and amongst the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The city is located 185 kilometres (115 miles) northeast of Adana and 127 kilometres by road north of Aleppo, Syria. The city has two urban districts under its administration, Şahinbey and Şehitkamil. It is the sixth most populous city in Turkey.

USA / terrorism: Hezbollah funds seized. BBC: 'The US authorities say they have seized $150m (£95m) from a bank allegedly linked to a money-laundering scheme of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Last year, US officials accused the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) of helping the group launder profits from drug trafficking and other crimes. The funds were allegedly used to ship cars from the US to West Africa, with the proceeds smuggled back to Lebanon. ...'

Analysis: Benjamin Kerstein on Chomsky, NPR. Michael Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein on Noam Chomsky:

Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.

Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. ...

Go read the rest. Now via a Facebook friend here's Kerstein in 2010 on NPR:

Put simply, NPR is for coastal liberals what Rush Limbaugh is for heartland conservatives: a means of relating to the world from within the confines of a specific subculture. The difference, of course, is that Limbaugh’s admirers do not force others to pay for it.

Nor, I imagine, are Limbaugh’s listeners laboring under the same illusion as NPR’s. Most of them probably understand that Limbaugh is giving opinions based on his political point of view, which is, to say the least, well known to his listeners. NPR’s listeners, on the other hand, are quite convinced that they are receiving nothing less than the pure, unvarnished, objective truth from the network. They believe themselves to be smart and informed, and thus the network they love must also be, perhaps by definition, smart and informative. ...

Articles We Never Finished Reading

"Democracy is working just as it should in the EU's newest member state, argues the country's prime minister."

Extreme Will to Live

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors ...

So begins Anna Breslaw's piece "Breaking Bad Karma". It is quite a piece of work. No doubt Anna Breslaw is quite a piece of work; by her own account, her major grievance with her father is his stubborn refusal to give her permission to end his life.

Breslaw takes a richly deserved pounding in the comments. I'll refrain from joining in the piling-on, only because it's being done much more ably by others. Instead I'd like to focus on this one paragraph:

I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.

In this writer's mind, there is something fundamentally and inherently suspect in too strong a desire to live. (She says so herself in the very first sentence of the article.) Nothing in the article limits her generalization so some subset of survivors; she clearly states that "only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse" would live, and that her own grandparents "were not excluded from this suspicion". From there, the discussion flows naturally to Terri Schiavo and Breslaw's unreasonable family. (She must be quite a charmer, that one.)

Life Magazine vs. Jewish State, August 1946

Via Elder of Ziyon.

In a World unutterably wearied of seeing people pushed around, there is an understandable, though wishful, tendency to believe in some easy solution for the problem of Europe’s homeless Jews. The notion is being broadcast that the solution is merely to let 100,000 more Jews into Palestine where they can be cared for by their own people. Thus they would be lifted from the world conscience. lt is also suggested that in a true, independent Jewish state, not just a "Home,” the Children of Israel would continue to build out of arid wastes a land of hydroelectric milk and industrial honey so rich and so charming as to attract and provide for all unwanted Jews.

The Zionists are superb organizers; they are also religious idealists, with all the virtues - and_°someof the blind spots—-of zealots through-out history. ...

Read the rest of this gem at the link. And don't neglect this January 1939 classic from the Atlantic, I Married a Jew.

My husband's father and mother are Jews. My parents are both what Mr. Hitler would be pleased to call 'Aryan' Germans. I am an American-born girl, and the first to defend my Americanism in an argument; yet so strong are family ties, and the memory of a happy thirteen-month sojourn in the Vaterland a few years ago, that I frequently find myself trying to see things from the Nazis' point of view ...

"And so I did a lot of bad things, thinking they were good things."

Eric Allen Bell comes clean about the Murfreesboro mosque and the film "Not Welcome."

Veritas?

Sissy Willis:

We've been there forever, of course. As we wrote a few years back in "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open'":

Leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready. Enter the bloggers, stage right. ...

Steyn: Free the Preening Metrosexual Slug John Edwards

The only thing more disgusting than John Edwards is what's being done to him.

And that's before we get to the affair, and the denial, followed by the admission of adultery but only while his wife's cancer was in remission, and then the admission of non-remission adultery but certainly not leading to any love child, and finally the admission of a non-remission adulterous love child, and the realization that the sainted, stricken Elizabeth was less the victim than a co-strategist in the massive Edwardsian fraud that was his 2008 presidential campaign, and a full participating partner in an even creepier political marriage than the Clintons'.

Oh, and while we're at it, I loathe the American media, whose peculiarly contemptible combination of partisanship, snobbery, and self-neutering of any basic journalistic instinct might easily have led (were it not for the candidacy of Barack Obama) to this preening metrosexual slug's becoming president of the United States.

All that said, his trial is a disgrace.

It should be a national scandal, except that no one this side of the old Politburo is as ruthless as the Democrats at airbrushing former eminences out of the group shot. So, in a critical election season, the Edwards prosecution will be buried at the foot of page 43, and never make the network news.

What's wrong with it? First, there is no crime, if that term is to have any agreed meaning. In Malaysia, the longtime prime minister Dr. Mahathir spent much of the last 15 years battering his political rival, Anwar Ibrahim, with one sodomy trial after another. We're subtler about these things here. ...