Heretics' almanac

Anything you want, dubbya

Dahlia Lithwick - another literary crush of mine - (does Michael Kinsley have a knack for finding them, or what?) - listens in when the Supreme Court listens to oral arguments. This time it's about Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, who are detained indefinitely at Camp X-Ray by the US department of defense.

Apparently, Congress in its patriotic fervor right after September 11th passed into law something that gave him the right to:

...use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.

The administration's attorneys are arguing in front of the Supreme Court that this right exists without limitation; that "necessary and appropriate" is his call to make; that what "he determines" goes. If this is true, president Bush can - until and unless Congress revokes this authorization - use all necessary and appropriate force against anyone anywhere for any reason, as long as he determines it has something to do with terrorism.

Der Norwegian Broadcasting Stürmer

In the category of "lame but disturbingly effective ways to malign Israel and Jews in general," the state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation recently aired a documentary about the pro-Israel activists in Norway, concluding - or rather precluding that it's not unlike a conspiracy of fundamentalist, end-of-day Christians run by devious, shadowy Jews at the Israeli embassy in Oslo.

I am one of the "pro-Israel" (though I rather think that peace should be of some passing interest to Palestinians as well) Norwegians, and I am not Christian nor particularly fundamentalist, and the Israeli embassy in Oslo won't respond to my e-mails even when I ask questions.

Remember Newsradio? That much admired but too little viewed TV show with Phil Hartman? Remember when he bumped into Jerry Seinfeld and interviewed him, only to edit the responses so as to distort not only what Seinfeld meant but what he actually said?

Arabist losers write letters to Blair

52 "former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials" apparently formulated and signed a letter to prime minister Blair complaining about the British government's "doomed" policy in the Middle East, especially vis a vis Israel and Iraq.

So, here we go again.

The British press refers to the ringleaders of this gang as the Camel Corps, a bunch of Arabists who have gone native, feeling more at home as expats in Beirut (when it's not raining artillery shells), Amman, Cairo, Damascus, etc., than among their fellow citizens. They are the heirs to T.E. Lawrence, a somewhat dubious distinction. Many of them have their education at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS) and are known for their "pro-Arab" views.

Freudian slips and Bush's secrecy

Laura Kipnis, who I think I have some kind of literary crush on (or is it: on whom I may have a literary crush?) writes about Condi Rice's Freudian slip in referring to the president as her husband. (The president's national security advisor isn't married.)

Although I'm not a psychologist, I am an introspective guy, and when I misspeak I try to find out why I did. What was it in my brain that caused one word to slip out of my mouth when I really wanted to use another one? Sometimes, I don't know or don't want to know - confusing my wife for my mother evokes a grimace, for example. But usually it's because my brain is free-associating a little too fast, leaving my mouth to finish the business my mind should stay with for just a little longer.

My tendency is therefore not to overanalyze Freudian slips too much. But Laura's point is that reporters embedded with the Bush administration are acting like spectators of a trapeze show or car race: they're there to see if some horrible mistake happens. Because when a mistake occurs, the truth may come out.

The Oslo war/process and PRIO's fallacies

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned a study from the International Peace Research Institute to learn more about the Norwegian government's role in the so-called Oslo agreement.

Per A. Christiansen at Aftenposten, Norway's leading daily, presents a (Norwegian) preview of the findings, with the headlines "Norway and Israel misled the US about the Oslo channel." This is one of several points Christiansen cites as evidence that Norway favored Israel over the PLO in the negotiations. The pivotal point is that Israel as the "strongest party," was in a position to demand more than the Palestinians, who were - according to the study - most anxious to get a peace process going.

This appears to be a widespread opinion among many Norwegians, that the peace process failed because Israel had the upper hand, being so enabled by parties that should have acted as honest brokers. It remains to be seen whether the report accepts this as a premise. If pundit consensus in Norway is any guide, this would only be one of many possible fallacies that might render the whole analysis useless at best, counterproductive at worst.

There is clear evidence that PRIO fell victim to this fallacy. To quote from the introduction to the report:

Accounting for Yom Hatzma'ut

The day before Israel's independence day, Israelis take time to commemorate those who died defending the Jewish state. According to Debka.com, it's been 21,196 men and women since November 19th, 1947. (That's the day the UN General Assembly voted in favor of the partition plan that was to create a Jewish and Arab state on the remnant of the British Mandate in Palestine.) The number would have been much larger - by one or two orders of magnitude - if Israel hadn't done what everyone seems to hate her so much for: defend herself.

Nobody knows how many Arabs died trying to throw the Jews into the ocean. Probably a much larger number. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs. Add to that the cost of maintaining military forces on both sides, and the anxiety of being in a constant state of war, and it adds up, no matter how you measure it.

So I've gotten to thinking about all this talk of making reparations to the Palestinians.

What to do with a problem like Arafat...

You can't help but compare Sharon with Patton, for better or worse. When he says that he wants to kill the entire Hamas leadership, he's not just whistling Dixie. And when he tells the world that Arafat's "immunity" is up, the entire world press is envisioning a helicopter attack on the presidential compound (the "Muqata") at some future time.

Of course, "attacking" isn't the same as "killing," so when Reuters writes of "death threats" they are committing journalistic fraud. A number of options are available to Sharon besides killing Arafat, and some are probably better.

Anita Bryant's Bruce and Adam want to tie the knot

Unless your premise is that homosexuality should be criminalized, you'd be hard pressed to find a convincing argument against same-sex marriage. I know, because I've been looking for one. It's not that I want to be against it, but it's one of those issues where I can see merit to only one side of the argument, and that always makes me suspicious.

But there are people in favor of gay rights who nevertheless believes that the U.S. isn't ready for same-sex marriage. Bruce Carroll (via Volokh) in the Washington Blade worries about a backlash that will result in widespread constitutional bans at the state level. Jeffrey Rosen makes a similar argument in The New Republic.

In effect, they are saying: don't push the issue. Americans aren't ready to do the right thing yet.

The legality of killing Yassin and Rantisi

It seems that the international community has decided that Israel violated international law by committing an "extrajudicial killing" of Rantisi. I'm glad that they, for once, were specific about their allegations. So let's see if there's anything to this allegation.

Today is the 13th day of the Omer

I have a photograph that my wife's grandmother lent me. It's a picture of my wife's great-great-uncle with his family. His name was Chasnela Agashov, possibly spelled Ogeshov or some such variety. When his two sisters left Kiev for the United States, he stayed. We don't know what his wife or son's name is, but we know his father's name was David, and his mother's name was Frumma.

Chasnela and his family were most likely murdered by the Nazis. We don't know for sure, though. I wrote to Yad Vashem to find out, but they had no record of anyone with that name.