Monsters in the Middle East

When you consider the Arab-Israeli conflict, consider also who it is that the Israelis are having to deal with. If you are heartened by democracy spreading in Arab countries (if in fact that happens), consider who it is will be voting for governments in those countries.

Glen Beck describes the murder of Israeli settler family Uri and Ruth and their three children Yoav (11), Elad (4), and Hadas (3 months) (thankfully three children escaped) by a Palestinian terrorist.



Here is an interview with the Vogels a year ago.



Here is the Fogel family playing in their home.



Here are the surviving children with their grandmother, if your heart can stand it.



My column today, "Middle East Murder," addresses an aspect of this. I should have titled it "Middle East Massacre."

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal has a fine column on the subject, "Are Israeli Settlers Human?" (You may have to Google the title to get at the column.)

A few years ago, British poet and Oxford don Tom Paulin offered a view on what should be done to certain Jewish settlers. "[They] should be shot dead," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." As for Israel itself, it was, he said, "an historical obscenity."

Last Friday, apparently one or more members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the terrorist wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's "moderate" Fatah party, broke into the West Bank home of Udi and Ruth Fogel. The Jewish couple were stabbed to death along with their 11-year-old son Yoav, their 4-year-old son Elad and their 3-month-old daughter Hadas. Photographs taken after the murders and posted online show a literal bloodbath. Is Mr. Paulin satisfied now?

Unquestionably pleased are residents of the Palestinian town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, who "hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack" and "handed out candy and sweets," according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper quoted one Rafah resident saying the massacre was "a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank." Just what kind of society thinks it's "natural" to slit the throats of children in their beds?

The answer: The same society that has named summer camps, soccer tournaments and a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman who in March 1978 killed an American photographer and hijacked a pair of Israeli buses, leading to the slaughter of 37 Israeli civilians, 13 children among them. ...

The mystery of iniquity.

The Iranian Nuclear Game Plan

We had no indication that there was any difference between the candidates in the recent Iranian Presidential race on that country's nuclear program, but now that Ahmad I'm-A-Dinner-Jacket has secured the office for another term (which in The Islamic Republic is not the same as winning the election, apparently), dealing with Iranian nuclear ambitions becomes a matter of all the more serious foreign policy planning.

John Bolton in last week's Wall Street Journal thought through various scenarios ("What If Israel Strikes Iran?").

Whatever the outcome of Iran's presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon -- if ever -- put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran's determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow....Consider the most-often mentioned Iranian responses to a possible Israeli strike:

1) Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. "Iran would be risking U.S. attacks on its land-based military."

2) Iran cuts its o wn oil exports to raise world prices. "An Iranian embargo of its own oil exports would complete the ruin of Iran's domestic economy by depriving the country of hard currency."

3) Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. "[D]oing so would risk direct U.S. retaliation against Iran"

4) Iran increases support for global terrorism. "If Washington uncovered evidence of direct or indirect Iranian terrorist activities in America...even the Obama administration would have to consider direct retaliation inside Iran."

5) Iran launches missile attacks on Israel. This would "provoke an even broader Israeli counterstrike, which at some point might well involve Israel's own nuclear capability."

6) Iran unleashes Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. This would "argue for simultaneous, pre-emptive attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas in conjunction with a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities."

This seems like a no win situation for Iran, yet the Islamic Republic will proceed with its nuclear program, Israel will eventually destroy it, and then Iran will do little in response, and Arab states will (privately) cheer.

The State and the Stateless

The anonymous psychoanalyst blogger at http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/ puts forward this analogy by Robert J. Lewis to illuminate the Palestinian/Israeli relation:

Let us hypothesize a small man, weighing 150 pounds, who is unarmed. Facing him is an Arnold Schwarzenegger type, 250 pounds of sinew and muscle, who also has a machine gun slung over his broad shoulders. Since the two don’t like each other, you would expect the smaller man, as an act of self-preservation, to act in such a way so as not to rile the bigger man. But instead, throwing caution and IQ to the wind, the little man begins throwing rocks -- some of which are sharp enough to lacerate -- at the bigger man. He repeats the rock throwing the next day and then the next, seemingly intent on making a rite of a wrong. A neutral observer would conclude that only someone intellectually deficient would expect his bigger and more heavily armed adversary, now bleeding, to do nothing indefinitely, that at some point the big man is going to say enough is enough and pick up the little guy and hurt him bad, which is what he is doing now, in Gaza – without apology.

Though his commentary following (which I highly recommend, by the way) is insightful and bears accurately on the genocidal fantasy of Jewish extermination incited in all Arab cultures, it leaves out of account something Hannah Arendt developed in her post-war reflections on the twentieth century disasters of Stalinism and Nazism.

These totalitarian regimes hit on a technique reminiscent of a good chess move--i.e., one that accomplishes both an offensive and a defensive objective. The bi-focal and multi-functional move made by the Russians and the Germans in the 1930's was to create a class of "stateless peoples", undesirables, who were made culpable for the suffering of the true volk (and whatever the Russian equivalent was)--Jews primarily, but also Gypsies and Slavs. These people were driven out, propertyless and without rights, and most importantly, without citizenship. They were essentially made non-persons, since a human being before the awful edifice of the modern fascist state is nothing more than his legal status, as defined by the state. Thus, the home country was rid of "useless mouths" and putative troublemakers, and at the same time made to be the enemy's problem by their sheer numbers. Thousands--even millions--of such stateless people wandered across the borders of eastern and western Europe during the '30's, causing hardship and suffering at both the individual scale as well as the national and political scales of the countries, nominally Christian, forced to deal with unwanted refugees. The doubling of the effect was diabolical, emotionally and psychologically crushing these unwanted people while at the same time inflaming the local populations to acts of hatred and violence against the hapless intruders.

And it is this technique--if it were a chess move it would gloriously bear someone's name-which has been learned to great effect by the Islamists across the Middle East, who, following the example of their fascist teachers, have made of the Palestinians stateless people. If there were truly a Pan-Arabism afoot, or anything like an Arab brotherhood, wouldn't you think their Palestinian brothers--who are full-fledged Arabs after all--would find a home in Jordon, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Syria, or...name the Arab country without either excessive oil wealth or exceedingly generous Western (read American) subsidy. Why has not a single Arab nation come to the rescue of the Palestinians, to help build an actual nation--the sine qua non for the chimerical "two state solution"? No, what has been going on, and what continues under the tutelage and tyranny of Hamas and Iran, is the stateless persons move perfected in the 1930's.

And the inarguable logic in it is this: when something is working for you, you stick with it.

Cuddly Little Pirates

The Christian school that my children attend starts off each semester with a week of theme days on which they kids get to come in dressed as Bible characters or with clashing clothes and so on. Today is "pirate day." It is interesting the way pirates have been rehabilitated over the last 200 years. They have become something between humorous and romantic. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Will Turner can protest that Jack Sparrow is not only a pirate, but also "a good man," and no one even raises an eyebrow. Have I missed something?

We do have a little costume set that we purchased at Target, but I thought I'd send them to school with a speed boat and a shoulder launched missile to make them look more up to date, more authentic.

I wonder if schools and birthday parties 200 years from now will have terrorist themes. Darling children will show up with explosives strapped to their little bodies. Oh, hold on. They do that in the Middle East today.

Iraqi Gives Bush the Boot

Watch here as an Iraqi reporter surprises President Bush by throwing both his shoes at him at a press conference during his "Goodbye, it's been great" final visit to Iraq. After almost eight years in office, an American President becomes good at ducking, as you will see.



The shoe toss is puzzling to Americans primarily because it is so impractical. How can you make a getaway without your shoes? Even if you expect to get hauled off, why add the indignity of leaving in your stocking feet? And as much as you dislike the President, is getting a whack at him really worth a pair of Florsheims? Perhaps Payless reduces the cost of this stunt.

So what is it with the shoes? We saw the same thing when Saddam fell from power. People would take off a shoe and hit Saddam's face on a poster with it. It is symbolic of having the person under your foot in conquest. It's a disgrace. You see this expressed in the Bible. The Apostle Paul says of Jesus, "he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet" (I Cor. 15:25, alluding to Psalm 110:1). When John says he is not worthy to untie the Lord's sandals, which would involve lowering himself to the level of Jesus' feet, he is abasing himself. It is quite a statement. Then to top it all off, when Jesus takes the role of a household slave and lowers himself to bath the disciples' feet, it is an infinitely greater humiliation because, as the Lord of glory, he has further to descend.