Long title, catchy idea. Check out this post on Nasrallah and his brilliant ideas, religiously quoted in this parrot dropping trap. He should worry more about attacks from British-bred killer badgers or snakes.
When Nasrallah speaks, the world listens, even if he speaks idiocy. “I believe Israel could have been behind [the two incidents in which Spanish and Columbian UN troops were killed].” No doubt that’s why his group is escorting UNIFIL soldiers so they’re not hit by Al-Queda IEDs.
There’s no thought to reality testing his claims, or refuting them (or even discussing them) in the article (look here). This is an example of the kind of idiot journalism that has come to symbolize this generation’s journalists. After all, if you talk back, question, or disagree with a Famous Name, at best you won’t be invited for any exclusive interviews! (At worst, it’s fatwa time!)
Yes, Israeli could have been behind the killings of the UN soldiers (no doubt it would be easier to accomplish when they take their R&R in Israel, which is where they go). Israel also could secretly be transmitting mind control signals to the Iranian President through its squirrel spies, or, equally probably, using nuclear space lasers to melt the ice caps so as to drown the Arab countries’ shoreline populations and oil terminals. Oh, please, would someone quote an unnamed former Israeli intelligence source as saying that?
We depend on journalists to report news. Idiotic babble does not rise to that level and should not be quoted. Maybe if public officials were only quoted when they made sense, they would speak more rationally (and sparingly!). On speak, but not be heard, which, all in all, isn’t a bad thing.
News and RL have a way of overwhelming a blog. So many issues, so little patience.
I’d lust like to draw your attention to Israel’s latest attempt to prove the hypothesis that repeating an experiment without changing any variables will not create different results. By this I mean that the release of prisoners to attempt to garner ‘favor’ with corrupt and weak regimes.
Israel’s agreement (yet again) to free terrorists to attempt to garner favor with the PLO (PA) pulls another brick out from under Israel’s already beleaguered judicial system. To put it in a perspective Americans might understand, it’s as if Bush pardoned and repatriated known Al Qeda affiliates caught in America in an attempt to shore up relations with Iran. (Yes, I know they’re Shi’ah and Saudi Arabia would be a better analogy, but our relations with Saudi Arabia are already too good.)
Freeing yet another batch of criminals back into their society puts into question the very legitimacy of the sentences originally meted out. What’s the point of having a strong judiciary if the “Executive” branch pulls the rug out from under it on a regular basis?
In the American business world time is money. In Iraq, time is blood. In Israel, time is, among other things, honor.
The sand is running out of the upper chamber, honor-wise. Unlike the primitive, craven tribal activities of Middle Eastern tribes’ idea of honor (which usually involves women being killed by stupid men), I’m speaking of the honor that gives Israeli statesman and stateswomen the ability to walk with their heads high while conducting State business.
Israeli taxpayer funds are used to shore up extremist religious schools. They’re being used to subsidize the kind of ‘pork’ American politicians would well understand. They’re being used for military idiocies instead of focusing on the things that will ensure that there is a next generation of Israelis: environment, education, medical care and investment in Israel’s brain trust.
This might be the generation cursed to see Israel’s water supply poisoned, it’s land corrupted by pollution to the point of no return, and its children’s education reduced to a shadow of its former self. Already the smart Israelis are making homes for themselves in Europe and the United States. Already the ‘dumb’ Israeli is the altruistic Israeli. Already the value of ‘giving as one can, and receiving as one needs’ has been diminished to almost zero.
This is the curse of Bal’am. Our economy is great: for the top 1%. Our military strength is great — for increasingly limited effectiveness, and increasingly not involving the former 1%. Our (former) president, our prime minister, our ministers, our members of parliament are coming under question, indictment and conviction. The taint of easy living, easy decisions and easy consequences is taking its toll, and the Jewish, the Israeli people, are beginning to live the consequences.
I hope my children, with their optimism, energy and the view imbued by their parents, can effect change against the inertia of corruption, pollution and institutional arrogance.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Here two need no words.
This first is credited to AP, and it’s either a posed photo, or someone in the journalism crew has figured that a neutered terrorist is a terrorist that at least won’t breed, and conned the guy into sitting still for the portrait. (Note the little idiot warning on the right side above the Einstein with the gun: no people.)
Ooh, scary terrorist. Coming out of the baggage check. The perfect poster for the US’ TSA. (3 oz. liquid in a 4 oz. bottle? Toss it, men!).
The Jerusalem post put these two photos together. Ehud Barak, easily our least effective prime minister until Ehud Olmert, has a shot at running the amy as defense minister after botching up his job as Chief of Staff. I’m sure he wasn’t sitting low in baggage claim with the picture was snapped, but if you just put a little ‘thought bubble’ around the cute terrorist, you’ll get the idea.
Life will get interesting in Hamastan and Fatahland. Each will consolidate their turf. Fatah has to make a stand in the West Bank, or it will fall to radical organizations like Hamas. Hamas, unlike Fatah, has figured out how to rally their people beyond the clan level. That’s dangerous, because the fundamental way of life for Fatah is the clan (and pitting clan against clan to achieve a higher goal).
This internecine squabbling is what helped Arafat look so incompetent at times; he could bring his boys to a battle, but couldn’t steer the peace because, effectively, the best he could do is try and co-opt the direction of the current most powerful clan at that time, for that issue.
The losers, predictably, will continue to be civilians. Sderot, Kiriat Shmona, (G)Aza and the “Palestinian street.” While attacking Gaza will now be easier (if the person has a weapon, kill them), the West Bank, which helped bring Hamas to power and therefore has a strong constituency, will be energized to repeat their victorious operations in Gaza. This means more bullets flying in marketplaces, more gunmen using human shields, and more tragedy and horror to mar the next generation of a people with little hope.
When the international community is ready and willing to take action again a terrorist force that they themselves have designated, and engage in a multinational action against a true evil threat to all democracies, then Israel might have a chance to come to the table, with its international allies, as part of a real solution to Gaza and the West Bank. Until then Israel will be the great distractor used by Wahabist controllers in one of Israel’s neighbors, and Shi’ite fanatics ruling another.
The Lebanese Cabinet seems to be giving the Lebanese Army carte blanche to get rid of the Islamic extremists. As someone whose government has been on the receiving end of these pronouncements, I suggest that Lebanese generals move cautiously.
Sure, the Fatah al-Islam folks are causing a problem for the Lebanese. But don’t expect that if the Lebanese army takes American ammo that they’ll do the cleanup the Americans expect. The relationship between the Palestinians in exile and “native” Lebanese is complex and frangible (to say nothing of malleable). The US helping Lebanon may bring as much excoriation as if the US was helping the Palestinian (Al Queda) forces. Or the corrupt Lebanese against the innocent Palestinians (despite Abbas’ stance).
The cancer of the “Pan Islamic Republic” has burst from the theoretical shell of the Wahhabi extremism to the blunt reality of the here and now. Pointing irrelevant fingers as Palestinian gripes about 60+ year old expulsions is as important in 2007 as the American Idol winner. A good photo opp, but functionally irrelevant.
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.
I’ll preface this by saying I’m looking for employment, and Microsoft is definitely one of the companies for which I’d like to work. At the same time, and at the risk of being deuced by them, the new Hotmail is another example of the wide gap between Web 2.0 and Microsoft. (Hint: if you hire me, I’ll help you out!).
I was really looking forward to checking out the new Hotmail. Having shown my spouse and friends the glory of gmail as opposed to clunky old Hotmail, I was really looking to see whether I should leapfrog back to Microsoft for my mail browser. After all, 2Gb does get eaten up eventually, and it would be nice to go to a web browser (the primordial
Alas and alack. The one thing I looked for wasn’t. A simple thing. A little feature that spells the difference between software as a service and service as addiction.
In other words, Microsoft has made the terrible mistake of thinking that a really nice GUI could be a softer, gentler set of handcuffs than MS Outlook for keeping users corralled in MS-space.
Don’t get me wrong, Google (hosts of this blog, for the purposes of full disclosure) does the same thing. But Google’s “handcuffs” are in the form form of great features that don’t hem the user in. I could host this blog on my Windows-based web site just as easily as on a Linux one. And connect it to RSS feeds or other throughputs without thinking about the corporate underpinnings. Forward my e-mails to Hotmail, or a personally-managed e-mail server. That I’m using Blogger (and Gmail, and Google pages, and Google documents, etc.) is a testament not to my enslavement to the mighty
This is unfortunately yet another example of the inner nervousness, the insecurity, that has scarred, not marked, Microsoft in this market. It’s a great enough company, with fantastic enough features, not to have to create artificial limits on its users. And each limitation, no matter how trivial it might seem, is viewed as yet another indicator that Microsoft can’t let go of it’s craving for domination long enough to let the market see the good, the wonder, and the benign nature, of its products’ feature sets.
