Segacs’s World I Know

So I’ve decided, now that I’ve been back at work for one day, that I need another vacation.

A user comment on the Link directed me to this article at ArabicNews.com:

Two Palestinians yesterday carried out two operations near a coach station in the downtown of Tel Aviv that resulted in killing 23 Israeli settlers and wounding other 80, seven of them in a critical health condition.

Note the use of the word “settlers” to describe the Israelis killed in Tel Aviv. Yet more evidence of what the Palestinians truly mean by “end the occupation” – they don’t mean Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip; they mean all of “Historic Palestine” (read: they want to destroy Israel). To them, any Jews living in the Mideast are “settlers” or “occupiers”.

When will the world catch on?

Lynn B. deconstructs an article by Ari Shavit from Friday’s Ha’aretz. I suggest checking out her extensive commentary, but one thing in particular about the article struck me:

We visited Sheikh Raad Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement (he received us with eyes beaming and talked about the abandoned mosques in the ruined villages throughout the country and about the danger looming to the Al-Aqsa mosque, and about how the Jews had no right to Al-Aqsa. You know, he said, even according to the Israeli historians, even according to Ha’aretz Magazine, the Jews have no right to Al-Aqsa: The whole story of the Temple Mount never happened).

Upon reading this, I thought to myself, there it is! Right there, in black and white. The Palestinians believe their religious claims are valid and those of the Jews aren’t – why? Because there are more secular Israelis than secular Palestinians!

It seems so obvious. While there are many Christian Palestinians, and Muslim Palestinians are among the most secular Muslims in the mideast, they’re still overwhelmingly more religious and inclined to believe their holy texts than are Israelis. Israel is sharply divided between religious and secular, with religious communities battling for more control but with a huge secular population ready to throw out all claims attached to Jewish history or biblical ties.

As a secular Jew myself, I guess this affected me even more than it might affect someone religious. Do I believe in the bible as literal truth? No. Do I respect the right of others to believe in it? Absolutely! This is, after all, what freedom of religion is all about.

I support the right of religious Jews to believe in the Torah, of religious Christians to believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, of religious Muslims to believe in the Koran and in the words of Mohammed, and of the Raelians to believe we all came from aliens if that’s what they friggin’ want!

But what the Shavit article exposes is what we’ve always known: that religious intolerance is behind much of what is being falsely portrayed as a secular movement for Palestinian rights. Salah’s rantings come from the perception that Islam is right and Judaism is wrong, and, as with most matters of faith, to him this is an unshakeable belief – as unshakeable as my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow.

It’s much easier to delegitimatize your enemies if you believe yours is the only true religion. And it’s easy to claim rights over land if you believe your holy text is right and theirs is wrong. To us, it seems like a double-standard but to them there’s no contradiction at work here; it’s simple truth.

That, right there, is what Israel is fighting. Not reason. Not a willingness to compromise. Not openness to logic or even centuries of hatred. Israel is fighting an enemy engaged in what it perceives to be a holy war. And people who beleive they are backed by the heavens aren’t going to compromise or see the other side anytime soon. It’s a zero-sum game to them.

Noah Shachtman in Wired.com writes about how bloggers are often breaking stories and bringing them to national attention, when otherwise they would be ignored by the mainstream press. He specifically discusses Concordia as an example:

Congruent events occurred at Montreal’s Concordia University. In September, Palestinian supporters clashed with riot police before a planned speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, in December, the Concordia Hillel had its funding cut by the Concordia Student Union — allegedly for displaying a pamphlet for the Mahal 2000 program, which helps diaspora Jews volunteer for the Israeli army.

Bloggers were the only ones to pay attention to these events in the United States. Despite hundreds of articles on anti-Semitic incidents in France, the confrontations at Concordia received scant press coverage.

Bloggers like [Glenn] Reynolds and California Web designer Charles Johnson focused the attention of readers on the issue.

Now, Noah Joseph, a Concordia Hillel student leader, feels he’s got an international network of support.

“Were getting an absolute influx of e-mail — 400 to my personal account, thousands more to a general mailbox,” Joseph said. “It’s uplifting to know you’re not alone in all of this.”

I guess I could feel slighted that nobody mentioned me as the person who sent the story to Instapundit and LGF in the first place . . . but that would just be narcissistic. The point is, the Concordia story got more coverage thanks to them, and that’s all that matters.

Speaking of Noah Shachtman, he’s got a new blog, Defense Tech about technology and defense and the relationship between the two.

Jackie Mason and Raul Fender explain the fallacy of rewarding Palestinian terror in a JWR column entitled “Kill Jews, get your own country”:

It is no accident that the Arabs are not concerned with public opinion while killing our people, but we are terrified of public opinion before we dismiss them from our country. Somehow, we have become intimidated into believing that we are obligated to give them a place to live, and we have no right to throw them out just because they are killing our people.

It is about time we realize that public opinion is nothing but publicly expressed anti-Semitism and appeasing public opinion makes as much sense as Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler. Jews dying in Israel disturbs them as much as watching your neighbor killing a cockroach, even if it doesn’t fill you with pleasure you certainly don’t feel remorse about it. That is why when suicide bombers kill hundreds of Jews not a word of protest is ever heard, but when we try to defend ourselves by retaliating against our killers the U.N. immediately is called in an emergency session to protect our assassins.

We are brain-dead if we accept the idea that we have to guess which Arab is our next killer. We are not obligated to victimize ourselves by letting the Arabs play Russian roulette with Jewish lives. Israelis are constantly asked the same obnoxious question ” How can you throw the Arabs out, where would they go?” The answer is if they don’t care whom they kill, why are we obligated to care where they go?

If a gang of killers lived across the street, would you allow them to keep throwing bombs through your window until you can find them another apartment? Are we morally obligated to become a real estate agent for every Arab suicide bomber? We are not obligated to accept a new, slower Holocaust as the inevitable fate of our people. Jordan did not take a poll of world opinion and neither did Kuwait before they routed the Palestinians out of their countries.

America did not wait for public opinion to take whatever action was necessary to protect their country, and there is no reason why we should be afraid to do what is necessary to protect the state of Israel.

Agree or disagree, it’s worth a read.

As part of its response to yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government has ordered the shutdown of three Palestinian universities, including Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, on charges that the campuses are breeding grounds for terrorism. Based on what we know about Palestinian education, I’d say this charge isn’t so far out in left field.

The tensions in North Korea continue to heat up, with the war of words becoming reminiscent of the Cold War era.

But reclusive North Korea remained defiant, denouncing Washington’s missile defense system and threatening the United States with destruction if it launched a nuclear attack over its suspected atomic weapons program.

North Korea said it had “increased its self-defensive military capability” to cope with the “U.S. intensified policy to invade and stifle it with nukes.”

“If the U.S. unleashes a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, it will not escape its destruction,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

That’s of course of little comfort to South Korea, which is hoping to avert a crisis through diplomacy. While appeasement of hostile nuclear threats is of course extremely dangerous, it makes sense that South Korea is scared, given the fact that it’s the most likely to suffer if North Korea launches an attack.

With the escalation in North Korea, inevitable comparisons to Iraq are being made on a daily basis. Jonah Goldberg in the Washington Times explains why the two must be treated differently.

Um, yeah. That’s because North Korea has the fifth-largest standing army in the world, huge supplies of weapons of mass-destruction, probably including nukes, and the ability to inflict staggering casualties on South Korea, Japan and our own troops.

[. . .]

Of course, Iraq wants to be treated like North Korea. That’s why Iraq is pursuing weapons of mass destruction. And that’s why the Bush administration wants to keep that from happening. The whole rationale for stopping Saddam now is that the price might be too high to stop him later, like it already is with North Korea.

A heavy dose of reality is needed here. Some oppose all war on principle, not recognizing that you can’t stand in the middle of a battlefield holding up a white ribbon when you’re being shot at, and that the our enemies’ bombs can’t distinguish between activists and pacifists when they fall. Others say that we can’t right one wrong if we’re not going to right all the others at the same time. To them, I say that we’re doing the best we can, one situation at a time, and that if they really wanted to change the world, they should start backing those efforts.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw adds another comment to a long list of European apologies for Palestinian terror, by expressing his “regret” that Israel won’t allow PA leadership to travel to London for a conference.

Straw deplored Sunday’s double suicide bombing which left 22 dead in Tel Aviv, but he appeared to suggest that such violence was understandable, even justifiable, in the absence of movement toward a political settlement.

“The 6 million people who live in Israel and the 3.5 million people who live in Palestine, in the occupied territories, can only live in peace if they are going to have a future,” he told the BBC on Monday.

Straw seemed particularly displeased that he had not been told in advance of Israel s decision to prevent the Palestinians from traveling to London, noting that he had only learnt of the decision on a BBC news program.

Just more of the same moral blindness. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

In the “stupidest reasoning to oppose the gun registry” category, this letter by Gerry Gamble in yesterday’s Gazette tops the list:

In addition, the vast majority of car accidents and deaths are caused by registered vehicles driven by licensed drivers. Obviously, licensing and registration has been unable to stop motor-vehicle mishaps. So will how registration have an impact on the use of dangerous firearms? The fact is, it won’t.

What Mr. Gamble obviously ignores is the reason behind registering motor vehicles. We don’t register them to prevent accidents; we register them to better be able to deal with accidents when they happen. Like guns, cars can be lethal weapons in the wrong hands. The idea is to keep track of whose hands they are, so that a vehicle involved in a crash – like a gun involved in a shooting – can be traced to its owner, and the owner punished.

I’m in favour of gun control laws, but I understand many of the arguments opposing the registry. Unfortunately, this one is just absurd.