Category: Essay

The Knesset voted today to divert NIS 250 million (about $100M) of funds it doesnt have to help fund ‘private’ schools. That means Haredi ones. All the slippery politicians voted for it. It marks a victory for the morally bankrupt Shas party, whose hero has been indicted multiple times for diverting funds, and whose party has bargained for years for this agreement. You can bet that the private Druze schools up on the Golan Heights aren’t going to see an agora of that money. Nor any Muslim schools in Northern Israel.

Israel has many serious problems, each worthy of discussion, votes and funding. Spending time on propping up religious private schools — schools that it does not regulate, supervise or have any control over whatsoever — is a clear violation of the social contract the government is supposed to have with all its residents.

The American push for vouchers pales in its impropriety in the face of this egregious theft of public funds. Israel, a land that used to pride itself on high academic standards, has been steadily slipping. Funding these navel-gazing, self-interested schools does not further any of Israel’s national interests. For shame!

After Marshal Tito’s death, Yugoslavia ceased to exist, and the horrors involving Serbs, Croats, and Albanians befell the area. Geography (and a lack of extensive natural resources) conspired to eventually constrain the conflict, and today an uneasy, but existing, peace rules the region. Residents know they have much to lose, and little to gain, in continuing their ‘ethnic cleansing’ and mutual discriminations. They see, from up close, how their neighbors just a few hundred kilometers away can live, and prosper.

Iraq’s Tito was removed, and the tensions extant in that community, instead of merely unravelling, exploded like a firestorm. Unlike the Balkans, there is great wealth to be had by the ruling power, and consequently it’s not just about ethnic cleansing and clan independence, but instead about domination of the country. The virulence of the response has been infectious, and areas with the lowest immunity have been reacting in magnified ways as proof of an insurgency’s “success” continues.

This week has witnessed how potentially volatile the rest of the region is: Gaza squabbles have descended into clan/religious/party infightng with AK-47s firing level, instead of up in the air. Lebanon suffers from an almost identical mix of religious, political and clan conflicts, and they’ve flared up in Tripoli (once a PLO stronghold until Israel’s invasion, and their leaders’ exodus, in 1982). In both these cases there is an army (three, counting the IDF, in Gaza); in both these cases the army is not the solution.

In the past I’ve recommended partition for Iraq. That recommendation stands even more strongly now. The only caveat will be in how oil revenues are shared among the member states. And what each faction stands to gain by cutting its own nose off to spite its face. I suspect, from today’s point of view, that the “Arab street” is much more focused on the art of revenge than the labor of learning to live together.

A straight-A high school student was arrested for turning in a disturbing creative writing assignment, which included visions of mass killings with a pistol and necrophilia.

School: Danger! Virginia Tech! Alternative learning center, criminal charges, brou hah hah!
Student: Just being creative! Lookit the assignment! (Check out his hometown paper article on the subject and his comments on it.)

They’re both right, and the issue lies with the technical vs. temporally cultural definition of “free speech.” (I’m gonna get in trouble with this one: I’ve got a bro-in-law who’s a constitutional law professor).

I’d argue that if this student had written this in 1999, before Columbine1 and before VT, it would have come off as weird, sick, and perhaps resulted (if the teacher really cared) in a referral to the school shrink.

Now, after seeing what high capacity magazines and sick twisted minds can do, that same piece is a giant red flag for possibly aberrant behavior. And this kid should “suffer” the consequences of stupidity, the same as a person who yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

No, there’s no implied threat from the student. But there doesn’t need to be one for someone to see the writing as a warning sign that a person is capable of homicidal fury. After all, when a child is found to engage in animal cruelty, especially serial animal killings, it’s a sign this person may grow up to be a serial killer. It’s a known, established track. And if the writer happens to be a high school or college student, caveat emptor: find something equally creative but less disturbing to write about.

In each generation we learn more about the ‘tells‘ that indicate what a person might do. Twenty years ago was the animal thing. After Columbine, we learned that a young person’s writings had weight in terms of their future actions. That Virginia Tech outstripped Columbine in sheer numbers of martyred students was only due to some mistakes on the part of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre2.

At this point, we can’t take that chance with our youth. The Illinois student deserves not just reprobation, but punishment. And counseling, for in every fantasy there is the grain of truth.

Having said that, it would be great if Americans could see past their own borders to the magnitude of tragedy overseas. What I’m about to say has nothing to do with my opinion of the President’s Iraq policy. We read on a daily basis about the tragedies that befall the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been two incidents involving students in schools in the last month. The total murmur on this in the general media has been body count and then moving on. To the children maimed or traumatized by being bombed, to the parents of those children, these events will change their lives forever. Helping them overcome or heal from those wounds is every bit as important as helping the survivors of the Virginia Tech or Columbine shootings. For all the money we’re pouring into Iraq in terms of bribes, generator and food handouts, and other ‘calming actions,’ helping these kids and their families is a greater and more powerful way for us to minimize the chance that they, some day, do not turn into hatred-fueled perpetrators of massacres of their own.

1. I’m including Pearl River and all other school shootings throughout the world when I say “Columbine”
   




2. Kliebold and associate had over 40 bombs set up in lockers and in two cars, placed so they would cause maximum casualties to police and ambulance responders — but they didn’t realize the alarm clocks they’d used had plastic instead of metal minute hands, which meant the circuits (thankfully) did not connect. The bombs were found and diffused after the last bullets had been fired. More on that here.
   

Switzerland has started down the slippery slope of allowing people with death wishes to kill themselves. One of the countries that evaded the deNazification trials after WW II by claiming “neutrality.” Eugenics continue where not positively abated.

In a country where President Clinton went out of his way to apologize for the Tuskegee Airmen, where States abandoned their forced sterilization of “mental incompetents” in the 1980’s, reading about a first-world country moving towards helping sick people kill themselves is tragic.

Depression, bi-polar disorders and other mental illnesses can take a rational person and make them think suicide is a real option. They’re right — from a purely animal basis. But the damage they do to family really negates their selfish, tactical, short-sighted attempts to escape their pain. Medicine works. Therapy works. Suicide, as the MASH movie quote went, might be ‘painless,’ but the ‘changes’ it brings on affect the parents and families and co-workers (or fellow students) are far from that.

It’s easy to toss away those in society who waver. It takes a strong society, a just society to stick up for members who are not capable of sticking up for themselves.

Switzerland is showing it’s Nazi roots. The world should look at this, and then look at Darfur, the Gaza Strip and Iraq to see how it can avoid the curse of the blind eye in treating world citizens as they should be treated.

A small-time player claimed this week to have been involved in an Israeli-Syrian peace initiative. I say that because peace initiatives in the Middle East have involved “small time players” in the past, but most have foundered for one reason or another. Professor Suleiman, a Maryland resident, blamed, among other things, Olmert’s weakness as a reason for the talks failure.

He’s right. Katzav, Olmert, entire rafts of failed generals, and an atmosphere of corruption and failure of the government to uphold the public trust contravene any possible peace initiative.

That’s like saying “he didn’t win the Boston marathon because he had brain cancer.”

Israel’s continuing pandemic of morally and fiscally bankrupt leadership deprives the Israeli as well as Palestinian peoples of a partner in prosperity as well as a prospective partner for peace.

Don’t get me wrong: the hamas/PLO ‘love fest’ is a clear indicator that there’s no one home on the other side. But Israel in the past has at least had solid leaders with vision, power and the ethical standards necessary to at least stand at the altar of peace, even if stood up.

Now there’s no one, and the only benefactors are the extremists in Iran and the cunning in Syria. A sad state of affairs.

Here’s the link to an article about the 1914 Christmas Truce and its relevance today to the “war on terror.”

My daughter, to a school friend trying to convert her (named Christian, lest there be any doubt): “I know you’re trying to save me like, from the burning flames of hell, but… I’m okay.”

Check out The Pulse for the latest on this story.

Former President Carter is a naive fool, playing into the hands of both a cynical media and an equally cynical antisemitic Arab PR machine.

Jewish leaders protesting Carter’s use of apartheid are self-delusional at best, lying at worst.

Israel has generally treated not only the West Bank and Gaza residents (however they want to refer to themselves) as something a little better than cattle, and something definitely less than human for over thirty years. I’ve seen it, anyone who’s lived or worked in the agricultural, construction, or industrial sector has seen it, and anyone denying it is lying.

Israeli arab towns and cities get less economic, social, cultural, infrastructure, tourism, security and every other support available to their Jewish — and even mixed ethnicity — cities. Go drive up a street in Deir Al Assad, then take a spin in neighboring Karmiel. Check out the practice soccer pitches in Haifa, the drive up to Massadeh on the Golan Heights (officially annexed by Israel years ago).

That’s not to say that there aren’t great people, companies and relationships that transcend these terrible and institutional practices. But the norm is a form of apartheid. Carter’s blunder is to let the media equate the concept of apartheid with the level of apartheid. Israel, at its worst, was far better a master than the South Africans. Just writing that sentence makes me cringe, but it’s a true, qualitative statement.

And Carter using that statement turns a possible discussion about the non-revolutionary ways out of the quagmire that is the Middle East into a firestorm of fury about the players, guilty and innocent, that have to survive it.

President Carter should stick to building houses for the homeless, and American rabbis should stick to helping their constituents. Neither seems qualified to engage in this current discussion.