Archive for category Politics
Greenberg on Terrorism
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Politics on June 4, 2009
What’s the answer to terrorism? What’s the question?
The Lost Light
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Politics on May 14, 2009
Paul Greenberg offers this heart-twisting eulogy for a great man and the lost opportunity he symbolizes. It’s a poignant reflection on the decline of good character and good judgment.
Are you listening, Mr. Hope and Change?
Aww, who am I kidding?
Jeff Jacoby on Justice
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Politics on May 14, 2009
Is the current administration poised to abandon both Torah and constitutional justice in favor of empathy and political correctness?
Krauthammer on the “Two-State Solution”
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Israel, Politics on May 8, 2009
It’s politics as usual. Why is the fallacy of peace with terrorists so difficult for so many to understand?
Krauthammer on Torture
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Politics on May 1, 2009
Those who insist on looking at the world in black and white are destinied to come down on the wrong side of almost every issue — even life or death.
Hat tip: Dave Weinbaum
Email of the Week: A Story of Socialism
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Politics on April 2, 2009
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.
That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Could not be any simpler than that.
Hat tip: Dave Weinbaum
A Short History of Justice
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Israel, Politics on February 22, 2009
“Upon three things the world endures,” says the Talmud. “Upon justice, upon truth, and upon peace.” Maybe that’s why my world has often felt as if it’s on the brink of collapse.
Where is justice? Is justice in American foreign policy, which has consistently pressured Israel to make concessions while overlooking Arab violations of Oslo and Wye? Is justice in the UN condemnation of Israel, tacitly endorsed by the United States, after former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak risked his political career by offering once unthinkable concessions? Or is justice in the return of the Jewish patriarch Joseph’s tomb, revered by Jews for three thousand years and now desecrated by the same Palestinians who promise to protect Jewish holy sites given over to their control?
Where is truth? Is truth in the American press, which has continually accused Israel of provoking Arab violence, even as Arab parents send out their children to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and martyr themselves on international television? Is truth in the vilification of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, after he received false assurances from Palestinian security — before his visit to the Temple Mount — that there would be no violence, and despite the full day that passed before the “eruption” of “spontaneous” Arab violence? Or is truth in the squalor of Palestinian refugee camps in nations throughout the Arab world, whose governments have brokered violence for half a century rather than welcoming their own dislocated people as citizens?
Where is peace? Is peace in the concrete blocks hurled down by Arabs onto the heads of Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall, or is it in the beating and stabbing of American yeshiva students pulled from their taxi by an Arab mob? Is peace in the insistence that Judaism’s holiest site on earth should be placed entirely under Palestinian authority? Or is peace in the river of hate pouring out of Palestinian press releases and into the minds of Palestinian school children?
There is yet no justice. There may not be peace any time soon. But allow me to offer this grain of truth:
I was there, in Israel, during the first intifada, when bomb squads regularly cordoned off metropolitan boulevards upon the discovery of unattended handbags or backpacks, where Jews were murdered in their own apartment buildings by Arab knives and on their own street corners by Arab suicide bombers. I was there during the Gulf War, stuffing my one-year-old daughter into a plastic tent to protect her from threatened Iraqi gas attacks, shuddering beside my wife in the middle of the night as American Patriot missiles exploded in the skies over Jerusalem and Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles devastated the streets of Tel Aviv. I was on buses that were pelted by Arab stones and whose windows were shattered by Arab cinder blocks.
And now I am here, watching in disbelief as journalists around the world paint Israelis as war criminals and Arabs as freedom fighters. And, even more astonishing, is the perpetuation of this macabre fantasy by Jews in the media, by the New York Times and National Public Radio and others. To paraphrase one American student writing from Israel: often Jews have been victims of blood libels, but never before have Jews believed those libels themselves.
American Jews have believed for decades that America would become their haven from the terrors of thirty centuries of anti-Semitism. But those hopes vaporize before the unreasoned biases of the “objective” media, whose slanted reporting discredits both them and the First Amendment they invoke whenever their integrity is called into question.
American Jews must be both Americans and Jews. We must speak out in defense of what’s right and what’s fair for all peoples, but we must also speak out to defend ourselves. We owe it to the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by Inquisitors in Spain and Cossacks in Poland, to the millions massacred by the Romans in 2nd century Israel and the Nazis in 20th century Europe. We owe it to the Jews who suffered in uncountable numbers under the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks and the Syrians, under Almohads and Crusaders and Bolsheviks and in the Reformation, from thousands of years before any modern nation existed until our own generation. We owe it to all of them.
The rest of the world owes it to them, too.
Originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 2000
The Road to Compromise is a Two-Way Street
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Israel, Politics on February 17, 2009
Henry Clay earned his reputation as “the great compromiser” when he forestalled the outbreak of the Civil War by ten years. Even so, one has to wonder whether even Mr. Clay’s genius for mediation could save the Mideast peace process from becoming a towering embarrassment to US foreign policy.
Compromise, according to Webster’s, is “a method of reaching agreement in a dispute, by which each side surrenders something that it wants.” This shouldn’t be hard to comprehend for anyone with a background in high school civics. What does remain incomprehensible is how otherwise reasonable people might seriously apply the term “compromise” to past peace proposals, and why anyone thinks it will be different the next time around.
Definitions notwithstanding, immediately after the Camp David negotiations in the summer of 2000 the New York Times observed that Yasir Arafat’s “willingness for more talks suggests room for compromise.”
The Times deserved credit for optimism and imagination, but won few points for objective editorial insight. Indeed, only a month earlier (on July 11 of that year), the Times reported that, “The Palestinians want a settlement based on United Nations Resolution 242,” implying that if not for Israeli intransigence, there would have been peace in the region long before.
Let’s see. Resolution 242 mandates 1) the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and 2) the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
For its part, Israel returned more than 90% of the Sinai to Egypt in 1981, and offered to give more than 90% of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Pretty good, for a compromise.
From the Palestinian side, however, it’s been hard to detect even a whiff of compliance. Rather, these are the ways the Palestinian Authority has terminated its claims and belligerency: all government and schoolbook maps, as well as children’s television programs, identify the whole of Israel as “Palestine;” teenagers at Palestinian “summer camps” train with automatic weapons to fight Israelis; Arafat has named squares and streets after Hamas suicide bombers; Israeli security has caught PA officials smuggling numerous weapons, including anti-tank weapons, into Israel. The list could easily fill this column.
Ehud Barak had been prepared to overlook all that. But then the Camp David talks broke down anyway, largely because of Palestinian insistence of absolute sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Yet Jerusalem has been the heart and soul of Israel for over 3000 years, the holiest site on earth according to Jewish tradition and the Old Testament. The Arab’s spiritual capital is Mecca, whereas Jerusalem is merely a religious and historical footnote, not mentioned by name even once in the Quran. What’s more, from 1948 to 1967, when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, not one Arab ruler visited the city, except Jordon’s own King Hussein. Electricity and water services were neglected, and no government offices or cultural centers were set up there.
So what does the Palestinian Authority want? What it has always wanted: everything. The very concept of compromise appears utterly foreign to the thinking of Palestinian leaders, and is entirely absent from their behavior. It’s hard to see what the PA has ever thought it’s bringing to the negotiating table, except for the vague promise of controlling terrorism and the hazy commitment of conceding Israel’s right to exist, a right already granted by the United Nations over half a century ago.
In hindsight, it’s also hard to see what Ehud Barak hoped to accomplish by bargaining away so much for so little. According to Mideast analyst David Makovsky, Mr. Barak’s objective was “peace without illusions.” Peace between governments, the former Prime Minister believed, is the only possible goal presently within grasp; peace between peoples is generations away.
Mr. Barak assumed that once a treaty is signed, all of Israel’s Arab neighbors will abide by its conditions, gradually leading to normalization and the eventual cessation of the hateful rhetoric that foments Arab violence.
The trouble is, there’s no evidence it would work. Whatever the terms, any deal that produces even the coldest peace must rest on the foundation of compromise, a foundation that doesn’t exist. The indoctrination of children with hatred of Israel continues, even in Egypt, nearly three decades after it grudgingly traded political recognition for the return of its land.
Other Arab nations have refused to offer even this little olive branch; they have never demonstrated the slightest willingness to compromise. Neither Israel nor the United States should take another step forward until they do. Let us hope that the new U. S. president will learn from the errors of his failed namesake and not put his hope in false promises that have already led nowhere.
Adapted from an article originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 August 2002
Shine the light of history upon the Middle East
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Israel, Politics on February 16, 2009
How can anyone not sympathize with the Palestinian people? They’re second class citizens in Israel. They’re denied even a rudimentary infrastructure in the land on the West Bank of the Jordan that has been promised them, and they languish in refugee camps in Arab states from one side of the Middle East to the other. They’re deprived of basic amenities, political self-determination, and basic human dignity, so that one cannot look upon their plight without sharing their indignation. According to Jimmy Carter, they’re victims of Apartheid.
In today’s culture of feelings, most people look for nothing more before rendering judgment. The Palestinian people are clearly victims, and we love nothing so much as we love a victim. So much, in fact, that it often matters little whether we point the finger in the right direction so long as we can point it in some direction. The fallacy, of course, is that in doing so we ourselves become part of the problem, adding to the sum total of injustice in the world while doing nothing to alleviate the plight of the victims whose condition has ignited our wrath.
Before all else we should look to history. And so, before condemning the Israeli people and government as oppressors, will you not make the effort to know and understand the road both peoples have traveled to reach this point? Incline your ear, and listen to the instructive lessons of history.
Do you know that in 1937 the British Peel Commission devised the first plan for the partition of Palestine? Although its terms would have granted Israel much less than its 1948 borders, the Jews accepted its terms. Arabs leaders rejected it out of hand.
Do you know that in 1939 the British White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 15,000 per year and that, after 5 years, granted absolute autonomy over the region to Arab authority? The Jews, albeit under protest, accepted its terms. Arab leaders rejected it out of hand.
Do you know that in 1947, when the United Nations recognized the formation of the modern State of Israel, the Jews begged their Arab neighbors to remain in the country and live along side them as friends? The Mufti of Jerusalem, who had allied himself closely with Hitler during the Second World War, urged all Israeli Arabs to flee the country so that the Arab countries would be unhindered in their campaign to drive the Jews into the sea. More than two-thirds of Arab “refugees” fled Israel without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
Do you know that those same displaced Arabs, and their children and grandchildren, continue to live as refugees scattered among the Arab nations, the only displaced people ever to be denied repatriation by countries of their own ethnicity? In 1960, King Hussein of Jordan remarked that “Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner…. they have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.”
Do you know how many Arab leaders have never renounced their objective to destroy the Jewish nation? That the PLO formed in 1964, when Jordan still controlled the entire West Bank, as a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel? That before 1947 Arabs threw garbage down upon the heads of Jews praying at the Western Wall? That between 1947 and 1967 the Jordanians refused Jews access to their most holy site?
Do you know that Arab textbooks contain no reference at all to the State of Israel? That they deny that the Holocaust ever happened? That they repeat the blood libels dating back to the Crusades, claiming that Jews murder gentile children and use their blood to make matzah and wine?
Do you know that billions of dollars sent from around the world to Yasser Arafat to develop infrastructure in the Palestinian Authority never made it past the pockets of Arafat and his lieutenants, who have fattened their private bank accounts abroad while their people live in squalor? Do you remember when Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer to return of 97% of the occupied territories and recognize a Palestinian state?
And do you know that, while debate continues to rage in Israel between the hawks who demand open warfare and doves who promote unilateral contrition, every voice of peace and every suggestion of compromise among the Arabs is silenced by Arab assassins?
It may be true that Israel has not always been guiltless in its dealings with the Palestinian people, but how many options does Israel have in dealing with an enemy who refuses peace in any form, who has no desire except the annihilation of its neighbor? What hope for peace is there with a people who send out the own children to massacre innocents?
History should be our teacher in this, as in all things. Repeated acts of appeasement emboldened Hitler, as they emboldened Arafat, as they embolden Hamas today. It remains difficult to comprehend how the world’s indifference once allowed the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. It is with uncomprehending eyes that today’s Jews witness the world’s moral equivalency and wonder if the same thing could happen again.
Adapted from an article that originally appeared in the St. Louis Jewish Light in May 2002.
Beware of “Brilliance”
Posted by Yonason Goldson in Culture, Politics on February 5, 2009
What do Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Woodrow Wilson have in common? They were exceptionally intelligent men who were largely ineffective presidents.
Jonathan Rosenblum makes a pointed case for how the new administration is making the same mistake — confusing intellect with wisdom — and the possible consequences for US policy toward Israel.
Torah Ideals 
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