Reflecting on the current carnage between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza, and on the ongoing violence in the Tripoli Palestinian refugee camps, Ralph Peters has written an article in today’s NY Post claiming that the Palestinians have been victimized for … Continue reading →
Jimmy Carter, peacemaker extraordinaire, has called the wall Israel has built an “imprisonment wall.” A strange notion of imprisonment, indeed. How can a wall designed to keep murderers out of a single small country (Israel), and yet allowing them freedom … Continue reading →
What went wrong at Camp David? Read Pejman Yousefzadeh’s review of Dennis Ross’s exhaustive book The Missing Peace, a description of what led to the failure of the 2000 negotiations. It’s difficult to believe that it was only six short … Continue reading →
Here’s the joke: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a … Continue reading →
Richard Landes of Second Draft and Augean Stables has written what just might be the definitive answer to those who–like Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder–accuse Israel of heinous crimes and intents based (among other things) on the accusers’ complete misunderstanding of … Continue reading →
It’s been said before in parts of the Arab world, by Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and others: “We are going to win because [the Israelis] love life and we love death.” Loving death: what an amazing thing to brag about. It’s … Continue reading →
A piece by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi entitled “Israel’s Broken Heart,” in the current New Republic (subscription only), places the blame squarely on the Olmert administration for mishandling the opportunities of the last month. Israeli public opinion was united … Continue reading →
Below, we have Goya’s famous etching”The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” It came to mind while I was reading Melanie Phillips, who is presently writing some of the finest analysis of the British (and, by extrapolation, general Western European) reaction … Continue reading →
The casualties at Qana are horrific. The visuals are heartrending, and the details sorrowful–especially the predominance of women and children among the dead. We are biologically predisposed to want to protect children–to love them, to smile when we see them. … Continue reading →
If you look at the wide variety of opinions in the highlighted articles at Real Clear Politics as to how the current Mideast conflict is going to play out, you realize how much disagreement and confusion there is. In truth, … Continue reading →
There’s an old saying, rendered variously as: When elephants fight, it’s the mice who must tremble. When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. The applicability to the current situation in the Middle East? When Hezbollah goads Israel from its … Continue reading →
In line with the theme of some of my other posts today, we have this, about Hezbollah’s tactics in the current conflict in Lebanon: Hizbollah hid many of the rockets in private homes, and had teams that launched the rockets … Continue reading →