Hamas and Fatah human rights abuses documented

The man I am sitting with in the photo below, taken in Jericho last Saturday, is Bassem Eid, the founder and manager of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Mr. Eid is a Muslim and a member of the largest Arab tribe in the West Bank.



Right to left: the author, Bassem Eid, Ruth Lautt.

Mr. Eid formerly helped monitor and investigate claims of human rights violations by the Israelis. After the founding of the Palestinian Authority by the Oslo agreements, Eid noticed that no one was paying attention to HR violations by the PA or Palestinian militias. So Eid founded the PHRMG in 1996.

PHRMG's latest revelations of human-rights violations by the PA and Hamas were released yesterday, entitled, "Fatah and Hamas Human Rights Violations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories from June 2007 to October 2007" (PDF online).

No one else is doing the work that Bassem Eid and his small number of assistants are doing. He was arrested by the PA in the 1990s, but was held only a day. The fact that his tribe is the largest in the West Bank - and therefore has the most muscle to retaliate against anyone who might harm him - is almost certainly the only reason he is still breathing.

I'll post a summary of our conversation with Mr. Eid soon.

Hamas rockets pushing Israel's patience

The news today is that Israel fired missiles into Gaza to kill Mubarak al-Hassanat, a top-ranking Hamas member directly involved with firing Hamas' homemade Kassan rockets into southern Israel. Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years. I went to Israel on Oct. 15 and returned just tonight. Two days ago I visited the town of Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) and nearby Ashkelon. Sederot is a little more than a kilometer from Gaza:



That's me standing on the southern edge of Sederot. Gaza is only a few hundred meters on the other side of the tree line behind me. Six rockets fell on Sederot a few hours before we arrived. Here are the remains of three of them.



There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside the town's police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.



These are purely anti-personnel rockets. They lack the explosive power to penetrate unreinforced buildings. The warhead section is loaded with pellets or small ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh, propelled by only a couple of pounds of high explosive. However, if they do hit an ordinary building (as a rocket did yesterday) they can damage it substantially:



Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimiter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.



The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. Whern a launch is detected, every speaker in the town - and there are a lot of warning speakers - announced "red dawn" over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter. The town continues to build shelters such as this one.



Here is a video of the extent of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched.

Two dawn shots from Galilee

Via email from OHC contributor Daniel Jackson

Galil Dawn"

After several days of very sandy (literally) days, the dawn's light over the Galilee for the last several days has been excellent. I have been getting up before dawn the last few days to climb the side of Mount Turan to photograph the dawn. It's been spectacular as the Galil Dawn image shows taken from the east ridge looking east over Tiberias towards Syria. My sailor's sense, however, reminds me that "red in the morning" is not always a good sign.

North Bound"

The other morning, when I was up on Mount Turan, I happened to turn to the north, over the crest of the ridge and thought that the stars with the pines made a nice shot. Suddenly, the International Space Station caught the light just under the constellation Cassiopeia. This was an image too good to miss. So, I took a 30 second exposure as the ISS sped northward to the North Star. I felt like a kid. There was a time when the fast steam locomotives would flash across the wide expanses carrying the mail and chopping seconds off records. As late as 1975, when I lived in Iowa for a while, kids would go down to the tracks to watch the Burlington Northern roar through the old station that was closed years before. So, here I am in the Galilee watching this marvel streak across the sky feeling like a kid again. I jumped up and down calling out; I even waved my hat. But, the conductor could not see me--he had to make tracks and a schedule to keep.

Click on image for full-size view showing the station's light track clearly.

Muslim scholars call for peace

One hundred thirty Muslim scholars have sent a letter to Pope Benedict and other Christian religious leaders calling for competition between Islam and Christianity " 'only in righteousness and good works.' "

"If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world's inhabitants," the scholars wrote. ...

Using quotations from the Bible and the Koran to support their message, the scholars told people who relished conflict and destruction that "our very eternal souls are" at stake "if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony."

So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works."

The letter was signed by Muslim scholars from around the world, including the Algerian religious affairs minister, Bouabdellah Ghlamallah, and the grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa.

These are very fine sentiments and the letter should be warmly received by the Pope and the other Christian leaders. Let me propose, however, that sentiments (by either faith) will not do the job. Both sides much adopt and teach true "think and let think" habits among their faithful. This will be much more difficult for Muslims than Christians. Freedom of personal conscience and personal religion will have to be adopted by Muslim societies before the sentiments expressed by the scholars can become reality.

Example: while the scholars were writing their letter, the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA), Dr. Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy, issued a fatwa declaring "that marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is forbidden and invalid, and that children born of such a union are illegitimate." The fatwa says, among other things,

"A person must have some buffer between him and [deeds] that will bring him to perdition. A person about to commit suicide may expect society to intervene in order to safeguard his right to live. This is why shari'a prohibits marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man - because it is the first step towards religious suicide, whether [it is the woman's] suicide or that of the children she will bear. This [form of] suicide is much worse than actual suicide, which also [involves] the murder of [unborn children]. The woman can expect Muslim society to stand between her and this fate, thereby safeguarding her faith and her salvation in the world to come."

Not that at least some Christians don't need to look in the mirror when it comes to intolerance:

Slash-and-burn columnist Ann Coulter shocked a cable TV talk-show audience Monday when she declared that Jews need to be "perfected" by becoming Christians, and that America would be better off if everyone were Christian.

Coulter made the remarkable statements during an often heated appearance to promote her new book on advertising guru Donny Deutsch's CNBC show "The Big Idea."

In response to a question from Deutsch asking Coulter if "it would be better if we were all Christian," the controversial columnist responded: "Yes."

"We should all be Christian?" Deutsch repeated.

"Yes," Coulter responded, asking Deutsch, who is Jewish, if he would like to "come to church with me."

Deutsch, pressing Coulter further, asked, "We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians?" She responded: "Yeah."

Coulter deflected Deutsch's assertion that her comments were anti-Semitic, matter-of-factly telling the show's obviously upset host, "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

A transcript of their conversation about Jews appears at the link. It must be read to believed. Ann Coulter is probably the most religiously uninformed public figure I have ever heard of. I do not consider myself a "perfected Jew" as a Christian, nor can I help but gagging at the idea Ann expressed (see transcript) that Christianity is the "Federal Express" way to heaven compared to Judaism. Before Ann or any other Christian starts talking about "perfecting Jews" they need to pay attention to perfecting Christians, for which there is very way long to go.

Foxnews.com has more about the scholars' letter.

An incovenient ruling

A few days ago the news was released that a High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, may not be shown to school students there unless preceded by court-mandated disclaimers:

... The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Sure it can!

James Joyner picks up on Mario Cuomo's piece in the NYT in which Mario says that Senators Jim Webb and Hillary Clinton are off track when they want Congress to enact law demanding that the president "go before Congress to ask for a 'declaration of war' before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation."

But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war.

Mario has more to say, of course, and James goes on to discuss how the warring powers of the executive and the Congress have been muddied since Thomas Jefferson's administration.

But here's the part of Mario's piece that caught my eye:

Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this mandate was neither erased nor modified by the actions or inactions of timid Congresses that allowed overeager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without making a declaration.

What??? "... the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion..."???

Sure it can, Mario, it happens all the time! The earliest example I can think of was Justice John Marshall's declaration in Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court could invalidate the actions of the other two branches of government. Yet the Constitution does not grant the Supreme Court any such authority. As Thomas Jefferson complained,

In denying the right [the Supreme Court usurps] of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than [others] do, if I understand rightly [this] quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that 'the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.' If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow . . . The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

—Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819. ME 15:212

So Mr. Cuomo might want to think again.

The fountains of the great deep …

The earth floats: “3-D model shows big body of water in Earth’s mantle.”

A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping - diminishing - deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.

One of the most dramatic features in the Wysession et. al global mantle shear-wave attenuation model is a very high-attenuation anomaly at the top of the lower mantle beneath eastern Asia. This anomaly is believed due to water that has been pumped into the lower mantle via the long history of the subduction of oceanic lithosphere — crust and upper mantle — in this region. The left figure is a slice through the earth, showing the attenuation anomalies within the mantle. The location of the slice — red line in the upper right figure — is a map of the seismic attenuation at a depth of roughly 620 miles. In both images, red shows unusually soft and weak rock, and blue shows unusually stiff rock (yellow and white show near-average values). The two figures in the lower right are resolution tests to see if the data have the resolution to retrieve Earth structure in these parts of the Earth. The sharper the black-white transitions are, the better the resolution is. Credit: Washington University in St. Louis.

This is very interesting stuff, but not surprising: any student of the Hebrew Scriptures knows that there are “fountains of the great deep.”

Pallywood

What happens behind the scenes of Palestinian "protests" that they don't want you to see. How Palestinian audiovisual productions are designed to deceive Western TV reporters.

Israel: a spasm, not a strategy?

Jerry Pournelle relates,

[I]n the first days of McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense, he invited the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to explain the US strategic war plan (known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan or SIOP). After the review, McNamara said in horror "General, that's not a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm."

I have been wondering since Tuesday or so, when I started collecting citations for this essay, whether the same might be fairly observed about Israel's response to Hezbollah's provocations.

I say that having already written why, from Israel's point of view, Hezbollah's July 12 cross-border raid indicated a new level of violence by Hezbollah that Israel could not accept nor even risk. The question it faced was not whether to respond, the question was how.

Despite the barrages of essays across media and blog sites about Israel's "disproportionate" response, Israel could not retaliate against Hezbollah with merely a tit-for-tat raid. That would have signaled to Hezbollah that Israel accepted the new terms of the long-going conflict that Hezbollah set with its cross-border raid.

In poker terms, Hezbollah raised Israel $100 and probably expected Israel to call. Instead, Israel raised Hezbollah $1,000. Hezbollah doesn't have it, not in military capital. But Israel may have miscalculated whether Hezbollah can call or even raise in political capital. Its stack of chips may be higher than anticipated.

Not that Hezbollah has been Albert Einstein Israel's Homer Simpson. For example, see Alon Ben-Meir's analysis that there were "Disastrous
Miscalculations" all around.

... it is hard not to conclude that every player involved directly or indirectly has badly miscalculated.

This conflict will not end by a restoration of the status quo ante. Israel will refuse to allow a replay of the last two weeks. This means that there must be a dramatic change in both Lebanon and the Palestinian territories that satisfies Israel’s security concerns and sends the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table in a permanently calm atmosphere. ...

Hezbollah has fared even worse than the Palestinians by badly miscalculating the Israeli reaction and counting on both the tacit and open support of Iran and Syria as well as the support of the Arab masses and governments to save the day.

... Seduced by his own rhetoric about how powerful and mighty Hezbollah is and eager to show solidarity with Hamas, Nasrallah overplayed his hand and now he is likely to pay a crippling price for his grandiosity. ...

But Syria and Iran underestimated the Israeli response. Somehow they were blinded to the fact that Hezbollah had crossed the line drawn in the sand by attacking urban areas inside Israel. To the Israelis this was totally and categorically unacceptable.

As far as the Arab governments' view of the war, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, chief editor of the Arab Times, says that they have swallowed a bitter pill:

Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of “these irregular phenomena” is what Israel is doing. The operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community.

It's highly doubtful that Hezbollah thought it would not get even rhetorical support from Arab governments. The Washington Post:

"What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity because of sensitive diplomacy. "Regional leaders want to find a way to navigate unease on their streets and deal with the strategic threats to take down Hezbollah and Hamas, to come out of the crisis where they are not as ascendant."

Hezbollah's cross-border raid that captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others has provided a "unique moment" with a "convergence of interests" among Israel, some Arab regimes and even those in Lebanon who want to rein in the country's last private army, the senior Israeli official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing conflict.

Israel and the United States would like to hold out until Hezbollah is crippled.

"It seems like we will go to the end now," said Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon. "We will not go part way and be held hostage again. We'll have to go for the kill -- Hezbollah neutralization."

But another point of view is found in Ralph Peters op-ed piece, "War in Middle East A Tragedy of Errors."

Hezbollah got this one wrong. Whoever green- lighted the raid on Israel didn't anticipate the ferocity or scale of the Israeli reaction. Then the Israelis began to miscalculate - reacting impulsively and emotionally themselves. Attacking Hezbollah was fully justified and necessary, but Israel's frustration with the Lebanese government's toleration of terrorists boiled over into folly. Israeli aircraft attacked Beirut's international airport and other targets around the city, doing both Israel and Lebanon's fragile democracy far more harm than good.

Israel hopes to pressure the Lebanese government into taking action against Hezbollah. But Lebanon's leaders can't do that. If they ordered their work-in-progress military to attack and disarm Hezbollah, some Lebanese Armed Forces units would mutiny, others would disintegrate - and any outfits that attempted to take on Hezbollah would be badly and swiftly defeated. And the action would reignite the country's dormant civil war.

After the Israeli strikes in Beirut, Hezbollah then raised the stakes again by raining rockets down on Israeli cities - making it impossible for Israel to limit its offensive.

Counterterrorism Blog analyzes thus about Syria and Hezbollah and the future of Lebanon:

Syria. Reports from military sources suggest that Bashar Assad would like to see Israel enter South Lebanon. For a long time, one of the key drivers of Syria's economy was its domination of Lebanon; after Syria was pushed out last year, its economy took a major hit. Reports suggest that the Lebanese government has essentially ceased being functional. If Israel enters South Lebanon, engages in major combat operations and then withdraws, it will likely leave a power vacuum that the Lebanese government cannot fill. That will pave the way for Syria's return.

Hizballah. Hizballah has already shown that it's capable of taking on the Israeli military. This fact alone will help increase its prestige. Moreover, Lebanon's infrastructure has already been so damaged that Hizballah's social services network is bound to expand -- thus bolstering the terrorist group's standing.

A third consideration is what is likely to happen next. There appears to be little chance of a long-term Israeli engagement in Lebanon. If Israel were interested in a long-term occupation, it would have had to call up far more reserves than it did.

The Lebanese government includes Hezbollah representatives; it's unlikely that any Lebanese will consder the kind of incursion being staged by Israel as I write this to be something other than invasion, no matter how Israel describes it. They risk fighting not only Hezbollah but large numbers of Lebanese soldiers who will desert to join Hezbollah's ranks - except that the Lebanese government might release them to do so in the first place.

Jonathan Steele, writing for The Guardian in Beirut, wonders, "How could both sides have blundered so badly?"

The key questions for Lebanon are whether Hizbullah will emerge from the crisis stronger or weaker, and whether the sectarian divisions that sparked its last civil war will re-emerge deeply enough to launch a new one. ... [A]s Israel continues to destroy the country's infrastructure, killing more than 300 civilians and putting half a million people to flight, anger has forged Lebanon-wide unity. ...

Strongly anti-Hizbullah Lebanese commentators such as the Daily Star's Michael Young fear that Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's leader, will emerge victorious.

"He doesn't need a military victory in order to secure his political resurrection. He needs only to survive with his militia intact and Israel sufficiently bloodied," he argued yesterday.

I personally think that Israel will be bloodied - Hezbollah has already shown it can fight skillfully and with determination. The question is whether Israel will pay the butcher's bill in its soldiers' blood to ensure Hezbollah's militia survives much less than intact.

I fear that Israel's leaders may have failed to remember what Richard Heddleson emailed me three years ago: "starting a war is like entering a dark room blindfolded." Even if Hezbollah's present ranks get badly depleted by Israel's arms, there will probably be no shortage of volunteers from Lebanon's population to reconstitute it. The enormous violence being done to the country and people of Lebanon, including Lebanese Hezbollahans, may propel Hezbollah, after open hostilities wind down, into a stronger domestic position than ever. It may wind up ruling the whole country.

I wrote near the beginning of Israel's operation that Israel was being forced to react to events rather than proactively shape them.

Despite being on the receiving end of Israel’s sword, it’s far from certain that either Hamas or Hezbollah think they are at disadvantage. In their minds, they may have Israel right where they want it, and they may be right in the long term. ...

All of which means that Israel was forced to react to circumstances rather than create them. Yet the real initiative is political, not military, and Hamas and Hezbollah (unjustly) hold the high ground there. I doubt that Israel’s military actions will reverse that.

For now the West, led by the United States, is giving Israel free rein; the Europeans are mouthing their usual "stop!" platitudes, but not very loudly nor earnestly. Even so, the day will come, and probably sooner than we think, when the West will insist on ceasefire, impelled not by military analysis but from the suffering of the Lebanese people. The calls have already started - actually they began almost the moment Israel sent its first F-16s into Lebanon.

Israel's grave risk is that Hezbollah will not be sufficiently degraded by the time the ceasefire negotiations are held. And, to paraphrase Will Rogers, Israel never lost a war or won a conference.

Now, I admit I could be underestimating the will of Europe, whose leaders may be awakened to the threat Iran poses via Hezbollah by proxy and who may actually understand the disastrous long-term consequences of letting Hezbollah survive. Certainly the "avert my eyes" reaction of the Arab countries is out of pattern for them, and that may make some backbone grow in the West.

As in so many things with such high stakes and countless variables, we shall see.

Fighting the wolves at the gate

The shepherd tends his flock at night as the wolves are ever present. He increases his control of the space around his pastures to establish a buffer for his sheep; to keep the wolves out of range. Finally he yields some of that space back to the wolves only to see the attacks against his sheep increase to the point that he begins to lose them to the wolves. What do we expect shepherds to do? We expect them to protect their sheep - to provide tranquility for their grazing and to defend them from the wolves.

The Catholic Church clearly states that peace is not simply the absence of war and that it is indeed a "tranquility of order" that is described as basic freedom. Well, Israel has experienced neither to the extent that we know it here in the US or in much of the western world today - and yet in relative terms it is an island of peace compared to the lives that Arabs live throughout the Middle East and Muslims live in Central Asia at the hands of their own regimes. In fact, until the War on Terror, Israel was the only nation in the region to grant Arabs a legitimate right to vote.

Aquinas teaches us from centuries ago that a "peace" can exist that is so brutal and corrupt that only war can establish or restore true human dignity and respect. Indeed Aquinas addresses war not as justice but as charity - that is, an act of love. Thus we have not only a right but a duty to achieve true peace and to provide legitimate defense for peace. Our common Christian tradition applies our scriptures to our world in a way that we have discerned four primary conditions for a Just War to do just that. They are 1) the threat must be lasting, grave and certain; 2) other means to counter the threat are ineffective; 3) there is a likelihood of success; 4) the actions taken must be proportionate to the threat.

So let us examine this current crisis in the Middle East in the context of Just War conditions.

Condition 1 – Lasting, grave, and certain

Israel has been fighting for its very survival since the day of its modern birth as a state. The threat of its total destruction has lasted its entire existence; and based on the words of its stated enemies that threat continues to exist (most starkly and alarmingly articulated by Iran in the last year; Iran who is the primary supporter of Hezbollah).

The Israelis have tolerated a level of violence for decades - a level that we would consider grave if it happened to us. They have had to live with it. But even their tolerance level knows its limits and when their survival is truly at stake. That day has arrived for them - again. According to STRATFOR.com (the best open source intelligence organization in the world in my opinion) the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers both by Hamas and Hezbollah demonstrated a new level of sophistication Israel has not seen before. In addition, the arms used by Hezbollah also are proving that they represent a far graver threat to Israel than they ever have before - now they can cause mass casualties within Israel itself. That is new and that is grave.

This threat has always existed and isn't going away. The militant threat to Israel is the very definition of "certain." There have been attacks from Gaza every day since the Israeli pullout a year ago and the Intifadah has never really abated. How many wars will Israel have to fight to prove to the UN and mainline Christian churches that the threat is certain? What is the level of violence we expect Israel to accept - while we are unwilling to accept anything close to what many in the West arrogantly expect Israel to "live" with? Chirac of France has already indicated he might use nukes if Muslim countries carried out or sponsored terrorist, WMD attacks in France - how many people and how much property do we think Israel should allow to be destroyed before they may defend themselves?

Hezbollah, Hamas and principal sponsor Iran have made it abundantly clear that they want to destroy Israel. Their desire and the real threat behind it are incontrovertibly lasting, grave, and certain.

Condition 2 - Other means ineffective

In an effort to give land for peace - both by withdrawing from Gaza and from southern Lebanon - Israel has received nothing but rocket attacks from those same areas every day. In 1998, at the Wye River negotiations, Ehud Barak offered almost everything Yasir Arafat had long demanded from Israel and yet he turned it down. (Dennis Ross, the US ambassador to the negotiations, has said that Barak agreed to “ninety-five percent” of Arafat’s long-stated demands.)

Fatah and Hamas continue not to be able to get their acts together to work for peaceful coexistence with Israel while Israel has reached out (peaceful coexistence has become a modern criteria of world harmony by the western world, including the Church). Hezbollah has received ever increasing training and aid from Syria and Iran while al Qaeda has worked diligently to make inroads in Palestinian refugee camps. Every action of the enemies of Israel points in only one direction - its destruction, not peaceful coexistence. They have only sought to buy time and the evidence today is that they believe their time has come or is close enough to provoke Israel. Diplomacy has consistently proved to be a failure. The fact is that the countless peace conferences over the decades have simply proven not that Israel’s interests and its enemies can be reconciled, but precisely that they cannot.

Condition 3 - Likelihood of success

Success is a word that we cannot often even imagine applying to the Middle East (though there have been some amazing successes there in the last five years such as the region has never known before). Yet there are examples of success that Israel has experienced with its neighbors in the past and that serve as a precedent that Israel should not be forced to exist under constant violence.

Israel’s former state enemies, Egypt and Jordan, are now at peace with Israel following past wars. They have diplomatic relations and serve as important intermediaries for one another. They are proof that peaceful coexistence is attainable. Also, the vast majority of Arab nations are not rushing to help Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel (except Syria and Iran who are real culprits and stand outside the current tide of history in that region). Indeed many are angered at these groups for creating a fight the region as a whole does not want.

Until now Syria had an under-the-table agreement with Israel to leave Israel alone while Israel left Lebanon alone and under tacit Syrian control - even with the withdrawal of Syrian forces last year. However, Syria has strengthened its surrogate Hezbollah while Syria in turn serves as a surrogate to Iran. What Syria needs is a change of sponsorship from Iran to someone else. Lebanon also benefits more from an Israeli victory; their problem is that they have been too weak to throw off the Syrian and Hezbollah yoke.

Can Syria and Lebanon come to experience the same peace with Israel that Egypt and Jordan enjoy? Yes, they can – but only if Hezbollah is neutralized. Israel is seeking to eliminate that problem for them. (Syria also would have to dissociate itself from Iran, a very tough problem even if it wanted to do so).

Condition 4 - Proportion

The differences here are compelling and stark. Israel targets military/infrastructure that is related to supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. There have been civilian losses but those are not the purpose of the strikes and are amazingly contained. Indeed Israel has sought to limit these casualties by leaflet drops in the civilian areas wherein Hezbollah and Hamas operate. This effort has come at the cost of operational surprise (that is, warning the enemy at the same time as warning the civilians) but it has saved countless lives.

On the other hand Hezbollah purposely targets Israeli civilians and makes no bones or apologies about it. The rockets fired from southern Lebanon over the last few years have been indiscriminately directed at Israeli towns and civilians. And the common practice of suicide-bomb attacks almost exclusively targets civilians. Again, how many sheep must Israel sacrifice? What level of violence must Israel accept that we would utterly reject for ourselves?

Hezbollah needs to be eliminated in Lebanon and Hamas needs to be encouraged to continue their transition to a political entity. Hezbollah has only been getting stronger under Iranian support and the time may soon be coming for Israel when taking action is too late. Hamas needs to know that its example is Jordan and Egypt not Hezbollah.

The implications of the crisis for the US are significant. We are learning the hard way this summer that our enemies do not fear us. North Korea sees the sweet deal we have offered Iran and wants some of the action. Iran sees how stretched our military is and only has to listen to Al Gore and Rep John Murtha to ascertain how weak we are (in their words anyway). Why shouldn't they exploit their opportunity now?

We need to change that perception - indeed we are morally obligated to do so for our own sense of peace and legitimate defense. We need to revive the idea of "peace through strength" and convince our enemies that we are not to be trifled with. Our paramount duty is drastically to increase the size of our military so that deterrence is once again given a chance to work. That is the most moral thing we can do over the next few years.

As for now, the most moral thing Israel can do is to protect its people and rid itself of the cancer of Hezbollah. Israel must act as a good shepherd acts by engaging the wolves that threaten its sheep.

Genocide of Christians in Sudan, persecution elsewhere

Here is a video summary of persecution of Christians around the world, focusing on Sudan. Another entry in the "religion of peace submission" watch.

British private awarded Victoria Cross

Via Amendment XIX I learned that British army Pvt. Johnson Beharry has been awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military award of the British armed forces. After reading his story, A. XIX's writer concludes,

One more thing, next time someone says that we went into Iraq "unilaterally" I am going to suggest they have a talk with Private Beharry.

Part of Beharry's citation reads,

As the lead vehicle of the platoon he was moving rapidly through the dark city streets towards the suspected firing point, when his vehicle was ambushed by the enemy from a series of rooftop positions.

During this initial heavy weight of enemy fire, a rocket-propelled grenade detonated on the vehicle's frontal armour, just six inches from Beharry's head, resulting in a serious head injury.

Beharry then lost consciousness as a result of his wounds

Other rockets struck the turret and sides of the vehicle, incapacitating his commander and injuring several of the crew.

With the blood from his head injury obscuring his vision, Beharry managed to continue to control his vehicle, and forcefully reversed the Warrior out of the ambush area. The vehicle continued to move until it struck the wall of a nearby building and came to rest. Beharry then lost consciousness as a result of his wounds.

The BBC's comprehensive story is here. He's an amazing man, still recovering from head wounds sustained in June 2004 during the second action for which he was cited.

Here's a link to an information site about the Victoria Cross itself, which links to this page, from which we learn,

Beharry is the first recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration for valour in the British and Commonwealth armed forces, since the posthumous awards to Lieutenant Colonel 'H' Jones and Sergeant Ian John McKay for service in the Falklands War in 1982. He is the first living recipient of the VC since Keith Payne and Rayene Stewart Simpson, both Australian, for actions in Vietnam in 1969, and the first living recipient of the VC in the British Army since Rambahadur Limbu, a Gurkha, in the Indonesian Confrontation in 1965. He joins only 13 other living recipients of the VC.

Beharry is a native of Grenada who emigrated to Britain in 1999.

This Canadian site has some interesting information about the medal as well, for example we learn that Canadians have been awarded more VCs, in proportion to recipient-countries' populations, than any other country. There was a street in Winnipeg on which three VC recipients resided, leading the city to change the street's name to Valour Road. There are only two living Canadian recipients, each of whom receive a $300 per year from the government for their service.

Each VC is made of bronze "from Chinese cannons captured from the Russians at the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War, large ingots of which are stored at an army depot near London."

Another piece of VC trivia I learned way back when - only one VC was awarded to a pilot for actions during the Battle of Britain. My research assistant, Mr. Google, confirms this. Jumped by German BF109 fighters, Flight Lieutenant James Nicolson faced a fearsome ordeal.

Four cannon shells hit Flight Lieutenant Nicolson's [Hurricane fighter] aircraft. One destroyed the perspex hood subsequently damaging his left eye and temporarily blinding him with blood. The reserve petrol tank was also struck along with his left leg. The Hurricane was now ablaze with the instrument panel melting, his hands blistering from the heat and his trousers on fire

Whilst preparing to bale out, a BF110 appeared in front of him. He slid back into his burning cockpit and continued flying the Hurricane after the enemy. Closing in, Nicolson opened fire and although the BF110 took evasive action to avoid the bullets, it was sent crashing into the sea

Finally baling out of his stricken aircraft, Nicolson had sustained severe burns to his hands, parts of his face, his eyelid was torn and his foot badly wounded. His ordeal however, was not quite over

While descending towards the ground some Local Defence Volunteers (LVD), under orders, opened fire with rifles at what they believed to be enemy parachutists. Pilot Officer King had his parachute badly damaged and plummeted to his death. Flight Lieutenant Nicolson, in great pain, landed alive with further wounds received from shotgun pellets

He was rushed to The Royal Southampton Hospital where he made a full recovery and returned to active duty during late 1941.

Amendment XIX points out that posters have been put up on the London Underground telling the stories of VC recipients.

The unique tribute is the idea of the descendant of Duncan George Boyes from Cheltenham who was awarded the Victoria Cross aged 17 in 1865.

His great great nephew Chas Bayfield said: "The stories are so inspirational I thought people should know them.

Would be a good idea to do around American cities, depicting Medal of Honor recipients.

If Monty Python ran the AP...

... they couldn't do better than this, reported by OpinionJournal:

The Associated Press plans to offer its member newspapers "two different leads for many of its news stories," reports Editor & Publisher, the news industry trade magazine:

"The concept is simple: On major spot stories--especially when events happen early in the day--we will provide you with two versions to choose between," the AP said in an advisory to members. "One will be the traditional 'straight lead' that leads with the main facts of what took place. The other will be the 'optional,' an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means."

The E&P piece concludes with these examples:

Traditional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP)--A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

Optional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP)--Yet again, almost as if scripted, a day of hope for a new, democratic Iraq turned into a day of tears as a bloody insurgent attack undercut a political step forward.

On Thursday, just as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad were telling reporters that they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government, a suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners in the northern city of Mosul.

I am imagining John Cleese or Eric Idle reading the "optional" section. As others have noted from time to time, the real news often sounds more and more like Scrappleface or The Onion.

Terri Schiavo's feeding tube has been removed

A Florida judge today cleared the last hurdle to removing the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who is unable to feed herself. Without the tube, Terri will slowly starve to death. ABC News says that CNN reports that Terri's sister says the tube has already been removed.

 

On a radio news report I heard today, Sen. Tom Delay said that Senate Republicans would work through the weekend to keep Terri alive. But that was before the tube had actually been removed, and once it's out (as it seems to be) then getting it back in will be more difficult than keeping it in would have been. Congressional Republicans even subpoenaed Terri in a bid to keep the tube in. Says ABC,

Congressional leaders issued the subpoenas after failing to enact legislation allowing federal courts to review the case. Through five years of hearings and appeals, the Florida courts have ruled in Michael Schiavo's favor and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused three times to intervene.

Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, said the U.S. Congress has no authority in the case.

"The state does not own Mrs. Schiavo's body and Congress cannot simply order her to remain alive contrary to her medical treatment wishes and court order," Felos said.

Well, Mr. Felos seems confused to me. I agree that the subpoena ploy was quite a stretch, but what the House's legislation would have done is permit Terri's parents to seek relief in federal court. Under the Constitution, the Congress has the authority to establish the jurisdiction of federal courts, so despite Mr. Felos's protestation, the Congress was not trying to assert "ownership" over Terri's body.

Second, Felos flat lied when he said that for Terri to remain alive is "contrary to her medical treatment wishes." Terri had no living will and there is not a scintilla of evidence that Terri herself ever indicated what she would want in such circumstances. That's precisely why this case has dragged on in Florida courts for seven years.

Chris Short is by-the-moment blogging this case in a single, updated post.

The most brazen scam I've seen yet

Just got this spammail:

Dear Paypal customer,
 
As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the
PayPal system. We recently noticed the following issue on your account:
A recent review of your account determined that we require some
additional information from you in order to provide you with secure service.

 

Case ID Number: PP-069-680-616

 

For your protection, we have limited access to your account until
additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any
inconvenience this may cause.
 
To restore your account access please send a fax to (347) 287-6958 with
following information:
 
1. Valid Photo ID.
2. First Name and Last Name from your credit card.
3. The scanned copy front and back of your credit card.
4. Credit Card Number.
5. Expiration Date.
6. Cid/Cvv2 (Last 3 digits located on the back of your credit card)
7. PIN (Your 4 digit number used in ATM transactions)
 
We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.
 
In accordance with PayPal's User Agreement, your account access will
remain limited until the issue has been resolved. Unfortunately, if
access to your account remains limited for an extended period of time,
it may result in further limitations or eventual account closure.
We encourage you send a fax to (347) 287-6958 as soon as possible to
help avoid this.
 
To review your account and some or all of the information that PayPal
used to make its decision to limit your account access, please visit the
Resolution Center. If, after reviewing your account information, you
seek further clarification regarding your account access, please contact
PayPal by visiting the Help Center and clicking "Contact Us".
We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please
understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you
and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.
 
Sincerely,
PayPal Account Review Department
 
PayPal Email ID PP522

We all get fraudulent emails like this, but this one really takes the cake. Note that the "valid photo ID" will contain either a driver's license number or a SSN and maybe both.The worst part is that come people invariably will fall for it. Then they will learn what "identity theft" is, the hard way, sadly.

Blogger starting to get some heat

Blogger has become the Mordor of the blogosphere
But the question is whether they will care. First stop: Bezahlt(dot)Org, who points out that Blogger's Status Page had a notice posted on March 11 (a week ago) that the service was aware of the "stability problems" with Blogger and was working to correct them (a week ago, I remind you).

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days.

As a Blogger user, I completely understand how unacceptable the performance has been in the past few days and it is the focus of the engineering team to fix these issues.

As bezahlt says, "Fix it, please, don't tell me how unacceptable it is to you."

Now Gerard Van der Leun weighs in:

[T]he endless server death spirals of the last few days are notable. ...

What accounts for this? The utter lawlessness that has infected Blogger combined with, according to Blogger's Blogger Buzz, a "shortage of electricity."

I'm sorry, but the last time I looked at Google, the owner of Blogger, the company's market cap was in the billions, and its rep for hiring only the brightest undimmed. So what accounts for Blogger? True, Blogger is free, but that's just part of Google's 'Engulf and Devour While Not Being Evil' business plan.

You get what you pay for, you say? True enough as far as it goes, but it seems to me that a "free service" that sucks in millions of people and is poised to suck in millions more, needs to take better care of its space lest it become seen as a kind of content Ponzi scheme.

And he shows how Blogger's own pages indicate that somehow, Spamblogs seem to be doing fine while the rest of us manage to post unreliably, if at all. (I have learned that I cannot count on any post I write actually appearing on my site, including this one. This morning I have experienced the publish page telling me that my post published 100% complete, only to find it does not appear on the site, nor on the "edit" page's index of posts.)

Yes, this service is free, so one might say I have no right to complain. I would reply that Blogger is now worth every cent I pay for it. I fact, though, my mere presence as a user, if not actually a "customer" in the traditional sense, is actually money to Google, for that is one way Google's market cap and stock price are determined. In a word, Blogger/Google needs me worse than I need it. And as I have said before, as soon as I can do so I will flee Blogger like Hobbits running from Mordor.

"Brigades of death" are AWOL

"Brigades of death" are AWOL
A year ago today I posted about how the Abu-Hafs al-Masri/al-Qaeda Brigades

delivered a letter to a London Arabic-language newspaper overnight, saying: "Learn your lesson, you lackeys of America, the brigades of death are at your gates . . . Our brigades are now preparing for a fresh strike. Will it be the turn of Japan, America, Italy, Britain, the al-Sauds, Australia . . .?"

I don't recall this ever happening. It occurs to me that reading al Qaeda's threats are like listening to high school boys talk about romantic entanglements - those who don't actually do anything brag the most.

test using html email

this is a test using html email with embedded links and blockquote. One year ago today on One Hand Clapping:

Ukraine's 19th Army Battalion anti-chemical weapons unit is readying for Persian Gulf deployment, where it would stand by to help neutralize the effects of a potential Iraqi offensive against neighboring countries. The 531-man volunteer unit has been training for four months, and is only awaiting parliamentary approval to go. Ukraine's government says it cannot fund the mission, which officials estimate could cost up to $1 million a month, and the United States is expected to help fund the force if parliament approves the project. Each soldier would receive a monthly salary of $600 to $1,000 if they don't participate in decontamination work and double that if they do. Asked where he preferred to deploy his force, deputy commander Lt. Gen. Valery Frolov replied, "Florida."

Actually, northern Florida tends to be chilly this time of year.

I've set up a backup site

Until Jan. 1, 2003, I did not have an off-Blogger host. My Blogspot site is
still there, but I changed its files' location months ago to my own server.
Its address is href="http://www.donaldsensing.com/blogspot/">http://www.donaldsensing.com/blogspot/.

Perhaps two years of posts have made it difficult, somehow, for Blogger to
publish to the root directory of www.donaldsensing.com. I don't put a lot of
stock in this hypothesis since a number of other Blogger users have
expressed the same difficulty as I.

Anyway, I have set up href="http://www.donaldsensing.com/blogspot/">http://www.donaldsensing.com/blogspot/
as a backup to this site and have added a link to the masthead at the top of
the page. Please do not change your Blogroll, donaldsensing.com remains the
main site, which I am working to transfer to another blogging package.

Why do we need legislatures?

Read Antonin Scalia's speech about Constitutional misuse by judges. It's all readworthy, but these excerpts are my target for now:

I am one of a small number of judges, small number of anybody: judges, professors, lawyers; who are known as originalists. Our manner of interpreting the Constitution is to begin with the text, and to give that text the meaning that it bore when it was adopted by the people. ... I do believe however, that you give the text the meaning it had when it was adopted. ...

Although it is a minority view now, the reality is that not very long ago, originalism was orthodoxy. Everybody, at least purported to be an originalists. If you go back and read the commentaries on the Constitution by Joseph Story, he didn’t think the Constitution evolved or changed. He said it means and will always mean what it meant when it was adopted. ...

[He spends some time exposing the fallacies of interpreting the Constitution as a "living" document, then -]

If you believe however, that the Constitution is not a legal text, like the texts involved when judges reconcile or decide which of two statutes prevail, if you think the Constitution is some exhortation to give effect to the most fundamental values of the society as those values change from year to year. If you think that it is meant to reflect, as some of the Supreme Court cases say, particularly those involving the Eighth Amendment, if you think it is simply meant to reflect the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society, if that is what you think it is, then why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers? What do I know about the evolving standards of decency of American society? I’m afraid to ask.

If that is what you think the Constitution is, the Marbury v. Madison is wrong. It shouldn’t be up to the judges, it should be up to the legislature. We should have a system like the English. Whatever the legislature thinks is constitutional is constitutional. They know the evolving standards of American society, I don’t. So in principle, it’s incompatible with the legal regime that America has established.

I addressed this topic in my post, "Alice in Wonderland" judges - also with quotes from Scalia. Alice in Wonderland is, of course, a much more mature work than generally given credit, rather than the simple children's story it's now recalled to be. As I put it then,

Treating the various [state or federal] constitutions as living documents rather than directive documents brings our legal system into its own Alice in Wonderland, where power, not justice, is the point:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more or less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master--that's all.'

If, as Scalia says is happening, judges can simply decide the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean, and overturn legislative acts or mandate new acts (as happened last year in Massachussetts), then why do we need legislatures at all? Lety us go all the way and submit ourselves to the fiat-rule of judges and be done with it.

See also commentary by James Joyner.