Segacs’s World I Know

The UN nuclear agency has said it will be giving Saddam Hussein a grade of “B” on his co-operation with weapons inspections.

Gwozdecky said ElBaradei will tell the Security Council that Saddam’s government has provided good access to inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction.

“Access and co-operation are good,” he said. “We’ve been getting where and when we want to get, and we’ve been generally successful in getting what we need.”

But ElBaradei also will say that the Iraqis “need to help themselves by coming forward” with evidence rather than waiting for the inspectors to sniff it out.

He said the IAEA chief also would make a case for additional pressure on Baghdad to encourage Iraqi scientists to consent to private interviews with the UN inspectors. So far, the scientists have refused.

Of course they’re refusing. If they consent, and tell the inspection teams where the weapons are, it’s like signing their own death warrant.

I wonder how the grading scheme works? Do Iraq’s allies in the UN get to all vote A, and Iraq’s enemies get to vote F, and they compromise on B? Are there points awarded for smiling nicely? Yes, sure they’re co-operative . . . in leading inspectors to places where there are no weapons! Those idiots at the UN just don’t seem to get it.

Margaret Wente adds her voice to the number of people pointing out that the Iraqis are conspicuously absent from the anti-war movements. Why? Because they want nothing more than to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

There’s just one problem with all this lofty moral talk. So far as the Iraqi people are concerned, liberation can’t come soon enough. This is a dreadfully inconvenient fact for peace protesters. So they ignore it.

[ . . . ]

There are many reasons to oppose a war. But the best interests of the innocent Iraqi people are not among them. And the sight of sanctimonious Westerners pretending to speak for them, and demanding that they be kept enslaved by the most brutal dictator outside North Korea, is not an edifying one.

War is terrible. But there are worse things. Just ask the people of Iraq.

This is not exactly an original observation, but it’s one that tends to get lost in the shuffle.

Who’s the greatest fence-sitter?

I know it’s a tough question. Please, vote carefully.

Israel is going to the polls in 4 days, and the election has been fraught with scandals, mud-slinging, and all the dirty campaign tricks in the book . . . but guess what, it’s still an election! In other words, the citizens get to choose between different candidates, and their vote counts! Note that it’s the only country in the Middle East where this is at all possible.

Not an Israeli? Want to learn about Israeli democracy anyway? Register your mock vote at israelvotes2003.com.

The San Francisco Chronicle has released some disturbing poll results that show increasing antisemitic attitudes among Americans (via Sharkblog).

The poll results indicate, among other things, that:

• Nearly one third of Americans fear that a Jewish president may have divided loyalties when dealing with the state of Israel. (This apparently relates to the announcement by Senator Joseph Lieberman that he will seek the Democratic nomination for President in 2004).
• Nearly one in four Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that Jewish control of the media distorts the news.
• Twenty percent of Democrats and Independents tend to “view Jews as caring only about themselves,” compared to only 12 percent among Republicans.
• 34 percent of Americans agree that “Jews have too much influence on Wall Street.
• 37 percent believe that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus Christ.

The poll results were disturbing to Gary Tobin, President of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco:

Gary Tobin, the president of the institute, said the results appear to reverse a post-World War II and post-Holocaust trend of declining anti- Semitism in America.

The academic survey of 1,013 randomly selected adults was conducted from May 2-7, 2002. But Tobin suspects that the trend has only deepened since then because of the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the buildup toward a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“We’re not saying that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic,” Tobin said.

“But college campuses have become bastions of anti-Israelism. In places like Berkeley or Santa Cruz, the demonstrators’ signs say ‘Stop Israel’ and ‘Stop the Jews.’ That’s what we picked up in this survey.”

To me, it’s appalling that Tobin even had to include the disclaimer about not saying that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. That he had to say that at all indicates that Jews everywhere are on the defensive – about Israel, about our beliefs, our politics, and our identity.

This defensiveness is precisely what the existence of the State of Israel was supposed to eliminate. Zionism instilled a sense of pride in being Jewish, and all over the world, Jews no longer had to hide or be ashamed of their heritage. At least that was the theory.

The poll results are showing the opposite trend, though. And it’s scary as hell.

FOX is starting a new season of American Idol. Could the music industry sink any lower?

What ever happened to the days when fame was based on talent, rather than the other way around? When artists were expected to be able to sing, write music, and play instruments? When image was a consequence, not a cause, of fame? When music had depth?

For those unaware souls, packaged music is a pet peeve of mine. But, combined with another pet peeve (reality television), it’s all that much worse.

I know it sounds strange for me, as a marketing person, to complain about this. But come on, American Idol is nothing but a glorified karaoke contest. We’re already so close to the point where creativity and art stop mattering in music. The “day the music died” doesn’t seem so far off anymore, and it’s a really dismal prospect to think what music will sound like in another ten years.

This glossary of blog terms at Samizdata made me laugh.

The Canadian Jewish News has a story about how increasing numbers of American Jews are breaking the traditional alignment with the Democratic party and moving rightward.

We are now experiencing “a very explosive moment in Jewish politics,” one that is rocking the traditional Jewish affiliation with the Democratic party and creating an undercurrent of anti-Semitism, said Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic magazine.

[ . . . ]

For the left, the methods employed are of secondary importance to the otherwise justified anti-imperialist struggle, so the Palestinian use of suicide bombings are seen as no more than a “misguided tactic,” Beinart said.

Beinart described how traditionally liberal U.S. Jews have recoiled from that view and how they are moving away from their traditional liberal affiliations.

[ . . . ]

With the outbreak of the current intifadah, “this consensus started to crack. The liberal media have gone in one direction and the Jewish community has gone in another. The liberal media have gone left and the Jewish community has gone right.”

One of the reasons I find this so interesting is that I don’t think much has changed on the side of the Republican party. All the reasons that many Jews didn’t vote Republican before still exist. If anything, the party has become even more conservative. The party is still heavily mortgaged to interest groups such as the NRA and the far-right Christian lobby groups.

But now the same people who were wearing Gore-Lieberman kippot in shul on Rosh Hashanah 2000 are switching sides. And to me, what that indicates is not so much a shift in the population, but a shift in the issues.

Nobody agrees with a political party on every single issue. It’s impossible. So people tend to focus on the issues most important to them at the time, and vote for the party that is closest in position to their take on those issues. There’s no question that in the wake of September 11th, the outbreak of mideast violence, the escalating situation in Iraq, and the general shift in international politics, we’re living in a different world. So while four years ago, people might have chosen the party they felt most closely reflected their views on social and domestic issues (i.e. the Democrats), now suddenly foreign policy is the key issue and the Republicans seem to have the more sensible position on that score.

B’nai Brith Canada is sounding the alarm about the rise in antisemitism in Canada.

The time for silence and passive acceptance is over. Now is the time to speak out. And now is the time to take back our universities.

Agreed.