Obama and the UN vote on Israel: Part I, backlash

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote on Saturday, Obama’s decision that the US should abstain in the UN and allow a vote against Israel on measures very similar (and even worse) than those he had vetoed in the past was possible—and to him, desirable—because he no longer has to answer to the American voter. All their voting is done, as far as he’s concerned: his own election and re-election as president, and then the defeat of his designated successor, Hillary Clinton, who will not be carrying on his legacy.

So he’s free now to gum up the works as much as he wants.

And free now to stick it to Donald Trump, his actual rather than his preferred successor. But that hardly would seem to be his primary motivation; he’s also interested in punishing Israel and Netanyahu. This action does it all.

And Obama probably has a few more tricks up his sleeve before January 20, although some of them may involve topics other than Israel. Something about Guantanamo, perhaps, one of the pieces of unfinished business of his presidency?

But Obama may discover something about the law of unintended consequences. There has been a backlash of outrage to his move, and some of it has come from a group of Republicans and Democrats who don’t often agree on all that much. Among the Republicans, this backlash has taken a particular form that is somewhat more extreme than usual: the desire to withdraw US financial support of the UN, which is crucial to its activities.

I doubt Obama intended that result, and I’d wager he didn’t expect that unified a reaction either. He is used to a more powerless GOP in Congress, either because Republicans didn’t control the Senate (they only regained it in 2015, and even then there was the filibuster), or because Obama and the GOP knew he’d be vetoing anything the Republicans tried to pass that he didn’t like.

Now things are about to be different in terms of who holds power in Washington. And people as disparate as Lindsay Graham, John McCain, and Ted Cruz are all supporting a move to cut funds to the UN. No Democrats have joined that call yet (and I doubt any will actually go that far). But many of them certainly don’t seem happy about what Obama did in the UN:

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said it was “extremely frustrating, disappointing and confounding” that the Obama administration failed to veto the UN’s vote.

Schumer called out the UN as a “fervently” anti-Israel body…

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, called the US’s abstention from the vote “unconscionable.”

“A two-state solution must be negotiated directly between the Israelis and Palestinians”…

He also said support for Israel must remain “bipartisan,”…

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said that he was “deeply disappointed” that the Obama administration allowed such a “one-sided” resolution to pass…

And Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia said “one-sided resolutions” at the UN are counterproductive to the peace process and “achieving a two-state solution.”

Rep. Eliot L. Engel, a Democrat from New York and the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was “very disappointed” by the US’s “acquiescence to a one-sided, biased resolution at the United Nations Security Council.”

Lindsay Graham also is quoted in that article as saying he’s going to work to make the move to stop or greatly reduce UN funding bipartisan. It will be very interesting to see where that may go.

So, what about this UN resolution are they all riled up about? Charles Krauthammer explains what was different about this UN vote:

To give you an idea of how appalling this resolution is, it declares that any Jew who lives in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, the Jewish quarter, inhabited for 1,000 years, is illegal, breaking international law, essentially an outlaw, can be hauled into the international criminal court and international courts in Europe, which is one of the consequences. The Jewish quarter has been populated by Jews for 1,000 years. In the war of Independence in 1948, the Arabs invaded Israel to wipe it out. They did not succeed, but the Arab Legion succeeded in conquering the Jewish quarter. They expelled all the Jews. They destroyed all the synagogues and all the homes. For 19 years, no Jew could go there. The Israelis got it back in the Six-Day War. Now it’s declared that this is not Jewish territory.

You can’t quite call the following a backlash to the UN vote, because it preceded it. But Donald Trump is on record as saying that he plans to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. Here are some of the reactions from opponents:

Those who’ve worked on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations say that moving the embassy would effectively kill the peace process.

“It would essentially validate the view that all of Jerusalem now belongs to Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, a former peace negotiator and scholar at the Wilson Center.

But here’s my question for Miller: what peace process?

There is no peace process. It was revealed to be a farce when Arafat walked out of it in 2000 after being offered just about everything, and the Second Intifada was begun. The “peace process” was once the hope of Israelis, but by now even many of the leftists in Israel who used to support it have reluctantly concluded that they have no “partner” for peace.

The idea of the embassy move to Jerusalem is not a new one, either; for example, George W. Bush promised as much during his campaign. But something intervened:

After 9/11, the Bush administration’s concern was that moving the embassy would antagonize Arab countries whose support it needed in the War on Terror.”

I wonder whether it still matters to them. It seems to me that the main reason some countries in that area still support US efforts in the War on Terror (which is no longer called that) is that such support is in their own self-interest, since they are internally threatened by terrorists, too. Therefore, they might continue to support our efforts, under the table, even after a US embassy move to Jerusalem.

As for Obama:

Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Obama never promised to move the embassy.

“It was not something that was seriously considered in the context of what the Obama administration was trying to do,” said James Cunningham, the ambassador to Israel from 2008 to 2011.

Now we know even more about what the Obama administration has been trying to do.

Here’s another opinion on the effect of the proposed move (from the man who was ambassador to Israel under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton):

“Such a move would fuel the radical jihadists. It would give them a new cause to gain adherents,” Djerejian said.

Ah, but what doesn’t “fuel the radical jihadists”? Concessions fuel them, defiance fuels them—it seems as though everything fuels them.

Another opinion here:

“Given how important the issue of Jerusalem is for Muslims around the world, and especially at a time when Islamist terrorist groups systematically exploit the Palestine issue, this will also constitute a potentially explosive provocation,” said Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute.

Did you hear a faint bell ringing in the background when you read the name “Rashid Khalidi”? You should have, because Khalidi was the subject of the famous but never-revealed 2003 video of Obama at a function honoring him, a video that the LA Times had possession of but refused to release.

And Khalidi and Obama will be the subject of Part II, coming soon.

[ADDENDUM: Also see this, by Charles Hill [emphasis mine]:

The first thing Obama did when entering office was to derail all hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by declaring all settlements to be illegal. Now the last thing (if only”¦) he’s done is to enshrine that anti-Israel position into international law in language that can be followed up with sanctions to delegitimize Israel’s existence itself. From anti-settlement to anti-Zionism to anti-Israel to anti-Semitic is the logic chain at work here.

That’s the significance of the resolution—it can be used as a springboard around which to rally the international community to further boycott and punish Israel.

And Alan Dershowitz weighs in here.]

Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah!

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not just being PC. Today is that rare occasion when both Christmas Day and the first day of Chanukah occur at the same time. So I get the opportunity to wish everyone a happy holiday at once.

I’m giving myself the gift of light blogging today–but not light eating. And the gift of various festivals of lights, of course. But I wanted to give a gift to all of you, and so I decided to share an old family recipe once again.

It was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe for the cookie of the same name, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 9X9 cake pans. Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

‘Twas the Blogger’s Night Before Christmas

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This small poetic effort of mine has become somewhat of a holiday tradition at neo-neocon. So here it comes again—just like the holiday itself. Merry Christmas Eve to you all!]

‘TWAS THE BLOGGER’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ”˜sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their laptops were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.

Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.

But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be a mere token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.

For instance, there might be found under the tree
A sleek Mac; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It cries to be tried out, one just can’t delay.

Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and possibly leading to glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.

And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore)””

So it seems about time it was newly updated
And here’s my attempt””aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
In writing, I set a new record for speed.

I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, I’ll write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!

Here’s a video of the original, with some 50s-type nostalgia for those who remember. There are a few odd anomalies (“safe in their beds” instead of “snug in their beds”). But it brought back memories of pincurls, and the days when parents were assumed to sleep in twin beds (even though I don’t recall that most people did).

I think I had the book on which this is based. The illustrations look very familiar:

I can’t believe I found it: “Intermezzo”

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was taking a walk, listening on my iPod to some ballet music, and I suddenly wondered—for no particular reason—whether the Eliot Feld ballet “Intermezzo” might have made its way to YouTube.

During the 70s I had seen the ballet many many times, with the original cast. Certain passages from it are among the most beautiful choreography I’ve ever experienced, casting an overwhelmingly romantic spell. The Brahms music was no small part of it, but it was the choreography in particular that created the emotional effect of a bygone era of grace and lush romance. Three couples dance in a series of vignettes, sometimes together and sometimes just spotlighting one of them. Their movements are marked by dramatic and inventive lifts that are never circus-y despite their breathtaking daring, still managing to express the mood of an old-fashioned ballroom where couples court and smoldering feelings are kept in check by decorum.

I didn’t really think the ballet would be on YouTube—but when I checked, lo and behold, there it was, the whole thing (including a few parts that are comic, although they are overshadowed by the serious sections). The picture is blurry and small, and the dancers are not the original dancers (this version was recorded in 1985).

But there it was, after all these years without it. And even though it’s somewhat like watching a gossamer, translucent, slightly diminished ghost of the past, it’s still a beautiful ghost that stirs up beautiful memories, all the more precious because I didn’t think I would ever see it again in any form.

I will reproduce the full-length ballet here (in two parts) at the end of this post. But first please indulge me, and let me talk a bit more about my memories. Central to those memories is the extraordinary Christine Sarry from the original cast. Sarry didn’t look like any other dancer I’d ever seen, before or since. She was so small as to be almost midget-like, with a childish body and legs that were also short for a dancer. And she even had short hair, which is highly unusual for a ballet dancer even today and most assuredly was back in those days.

But oh, what amazing attack she had, what speed and calm, what a way of timing her movements and giving them just the right emphasis, breath, and shape without ever being schmaltzy or overdone. Words cannot describe her—well, they don’t have to describe her, because I found a very small clip of her in a portion of a rehearsal, and then a tiny bit of a performance in the ballet. She is not in costume—no puffy romantic skirts to give the requisite light and cloudlike feel—but instead is garbed in leotards in a private rendition for potential backers in 1969, when the ballet was newly choreographed and hot off the press.

It’s easy to spot Sarry—she’s the tiny one with the short hair. She’s not dancing full-out, so this is not as lovely as a real performance by her. It’s just a tiny and diminished taste of what her dancing was like. And it doesn’t feature any of the speed for which she was known, and which was fully showcased in other sections of “Intermezzo.” But I still think it conveys some of the special quality of her movement, which Feld exploited by inserting many quick changes of direction where the dancer’s impetus leads one way and then suddenly (and gracefully rather than jarringly) reverses and goes the other way. I’ve cued it up to show a brief part of the rehearsal, and then there’s a small part of the performance:

Today, Sarry is still affiliated with Feld, although she once called him, “The most difficult person I’ve ever worked with.” She teaches at Feld’s school in New York, and I’ve cued up just of few moments of her talking:

Time. It passes, doesn’t it?

And here is the full-length ballet, in costume, with the 1985 cast. The fast parts were Sarry’s, and as I watch this I can see her in my mind’s eye—with her lightening speed, special emphasis, and exquisite phrasing. But these dancers are pretty darn good, so enjoy:

Obama’s parting shot at Israel and at Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

According to this report, President Obama “personally directed Friday that the U.S. abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity, seeing the escalation of settlement building as an increasing threat to the viability of a two-state solution to the region’s problems.” Obama managed to take time out from his Hawaiian vacation to let Donald Trump know—as deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes put it—that, “There’s one president at a time.”

Indeed.

But that president has less than a month to go in the office, although Obama is eager to make the very most of that month:

Trump transition-team members report how Obama officials are providing them with skewed or incomplete information, as well as lectures about their duties on climate change. (No wonder Mr. Trump is bypassing those “official” intelligence briefings.) The Energy Department is refusing to provide the transition team with the names of career officials who led key programs, like those who attended U.N. climate talks.

But perhaps nothing has more underlined the Obama arrogance than his final flurry of midnight regulations…

Please read the whole thing.

But back to Obama’s actions in ordering the abstention on Israel at the UN. Obama claims this is just business as usual:

The decision to allow the resolution to pass, rather than cast a veto to block it “is consistent with long-standing, bipartisan U.S. policy” opposing Israeli settlement activity, Rhodes said.

But most people—even some of those who often support Obama—disagree. Let’s see [emphasis mine]:

In an unprecedented diplomatic rebuke of Israel, the United States abstained Friday on a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements, allowing the highly charged measure to pass…

The American Jewish Congress also expressed dismay with the move.

“In the strongest terms possible, the American Jewish Congress is deeply disappointed with the Obama administration for shamefully abstaining on today’s anti-Israel UN Security Council resolution,” the group said in a statement. “By the U.S. abstaining, President Obama abandoned long standing American foreign policy of vetoing one-sided resolutions against Israel at the United Nations, and in doing so, he steps away from his presidency, turning his back on the unbreakable bond with our great ally Israel.”

And:

The Obama administration had been weighing whether to support the UN measure or abstain from voting, which would have been a break from the US’s traditional practice of shielding Israel at the UN and other international organizations.

Lindsay Graham, not ordinarily a hothead, has reacted by announcing a plan to sponsor a bill defunding the UN:

Sen. Lindsey Graham will propose a measure to pull US funding for the United Nations unless the UN Security Council repeals the resolution it passed condemning Israeli settlements.

“It’s that important to me,” he told CNN. “This is a road we haven’t gone down before. If you can’t show the American people that international organizations can be more responsible, there is going to be a break. And I am going to lead that break.”

Some say this UN resolution has merely symbolic meaning rather than any actual force. After all, the UN has been reprimanding Israel for decades now; it’s one of the UN’s favorite pastimes. But this one may be different; as Elliot Abrams writes in the Weekly Standard:

Does the resolution matter? It does. The text declares that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” This may turn both settlers””even those in major blocs like Maale Adumim, that everyone knows Israel will keep in any peace deal””and Israeli officials into criminals in some countries, subject to prosecution there or in the International Criminal Court. The text demands “that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” Now add this wording to the previous line and it means that even construction in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is “a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution also “calls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” This is a call to boycott products of the Golan, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

Obama knows this, or he certainly should. And he also knows it is likely that Trump is going to pursue a very different foreign policy and a very different stance on Israel. So, why did Obama do it? Because he could. It was a twofer of sorts: a spit in the eye of Trump and of Israel.

[NOTE: This article goes into some of the history of UN resolutions on Israel and American votes on them (towards the end of the article). The US has not always blocked UN resolutions against Israel, but most of the unblocked resolutions have been far more specific, such as the one that condemned Israel for bombing Iran’s nuclear facility. In addition, a great deal of the history on this occurred back when it was still reasonable to think that negotiation could work and lead to a two-state solution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. This hope effectively died in 2000.

The article also points out that until now the Obama administration has been consistently blocking “one-sided” resolutions at the UN condemning Israel. So this is very much a reversal of Obama’s own previous actions:

Under Obama, the US in 2011 used its veto power to block a similar measure to the one adopted Friday.

Back in 2011, however, Obama still had an election ahead of him. Now he doesn’t have to answer to anything or anybody.]

[ADDENDUM: The WaPo editors are uncharacteristically critical of Obama in this editorial.

See also this from Andrew C. McCarthy.]

The Christmas market terrorist and Europe’s border policy

The New Neo Posted on by

Europe has a dream—the dream of Schengen. Schengen represents a borderless unity, with European states united to the economic and social benefit of all of them, in peace and harmony:

What makes the allegiance to Schengen so strong among Europeans? We found that in 13 countries, protecting the principle of free movement is the most important issue regarding how member states feel about the future of Schengen…

..[T]he idea that terrorism is a European threat which is best tackled together”¦underlines the sense that although border controls have been reinstalled over the past few months, there is a fundamental belief that these are temporary, not permanent changes, even if the route back to the old Schengen is difficult to see at the moment.

Those quotes were taken from an article last May; they refer to a tightening of border control that had been implemented after the Paris terror attacks. However, it seems that those border control changes were indeed temporary, as the border-crossing movements of Amri the Christmas market terrorist have made clear. This was a man whose identity and appearance was known, and yet no attempt seems to have been made to make border control more strict again even in the wake of the Christmas attack in Berlin.

There have been differing reports on whether the two Italian policemen who stopped Amri and asked to check his ID suspected that he was the killer. Apparently, however, they did not; it was a routine stop of some sort to check the documents of a man who was roaming around at around 3 AM:

The truck killer is reported to have told them: ‘I don’t have documents, I am Calabrian.’

But after being challenged, he pulled out a gun and shot at the two officers.

Milan police chief Antonio de Iesu said: ‘They had no perception that it could be him, otherwise they’d have been more careful.’

And yet in Europe they can’t check people for ID at the border. Crazy.

Tory MEP David Campbell-Bannerman said: ”˜Schengen is a terrorist’s dream as we saw with the Paris, Brussels and now Berlin attacks.”…

French far-Right leader Marine Le Pen said the hunt for Amri was ”˜symptomatic of the total security disaster represented by the Schengen area’.

By the time the European arrest warrant for him was issued on Wednesday, Amri, who had used at least six different aliases with three nationalities, had vanished.

Despite being Europe’s most wanted man, he was able to cross the German border into France and make his way to Chambéry, before crossing another national border by travelling on a high speed train to Turin in northern Italy.

From there, he apparently caught a regional train to Milan, arriving at 1am yesterday, before then taking another service to Sesto San Giovanni station in the suburbs…

Under the Schengen rules he had no need to show travel documents at national frontiers, which have been had checkpoints removed.

Milan police said Amri was carrying a few personal belongings and several hundred euros ”“ but no mobile phone and no travel documents.

”˜He was a ghost, he didn’t leave a trace,’ said Milan police chief Antonio De Lesu.

The mastermind of the Paris terror massacres had bragged of travelling across Europe at will.

Is it not time to suspend Schengen indefinitely, in addition to stopping the influx of “migrants” from troubled Muslim countries?

Schengen isn’t the only terrorist-facilitating situation Europe faces. Getting weapons is apparently no problem whatsoever for the terrorists of Europe. It’s far more of a problem for law-abiding people, of course:

Anis Amri murdered a Polish truck driver and shot an Italian policeman with a handgun freely available on the black market in Europe for just 150 euros.

The ISIS terrorist’s 22 caliber pistol was photographed next to his body where he was shot dead after a shoot out in Milan at 3am today.

It raises questions about how Amri was able to secure the weapon despite being under surveillance by the German authorities and being arrested by police at least three times this year.

Terrorists are finding it easier than ever to get guns because of the flow of illegal weapons flowing from the Balkans into the heart of western Europe.

Experts from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey estimate there are between 3million and 6million guns left over from wars during the 1990s. Up to 1.5million of them are said to be in Serbia – a legacy of the break-up of Yugoslavia.

A simple hand gun is no more than 150 euros and more expensive weapons like AK-47s will cost as little as 700 euros and are delivered to you by criminal gangs.

Speaking in 2015, an arms dealer known as ‘the German’ described how guns are being sold to terrorists all the time…

And yet, a certain German judicial official was apparently ultra-cautious in protecting the privacy of a man wanted for the Christmas market attack, and that official is now being asked to resign:

It has been alleged that Steffen, who is head of the judicial authority in Hamburg, prevented the pictures [of Amri] being circulated because he feared sharing images of Islamist terror suspects will incite racial hatred.

Newspaper Bild reported that police were able to give a description of the killer, but not show the public what he looked like because of privacy concerns.

Insiders claim he was worried the pictures of terror suspects incite racial hatred…

It quotes Hamburg CDU politician Richard Seelmaecker, who said: ‘Anis Amri has allegedly murdered twelve people, but instead of using all means to search for him, Hamburg’s green lawmaker is more concerned about comments on Facebook.’

As I’ve said before, articles in the European (particularly British) papers often have a wealth of information about what’s going on in Europe in terms of terror attacks and the efforts of European countries to thwart them. So far they seem to demonstrate that, although in this country we have our own arguments about what we need to do and how far we need to go to combat terrorism, in Europe they seem to be even further behind.

Meanwhile…

The New Neo Posted on by

…with so much big news going on today, we have some news about bigness from Politico.

I kid you not. And they’re apparently serious, too.

What new revelations about size are forthcoming? I shudder to think.

The Christmas market terrorist is killed (plus: terrorism and enclaves)

The New Neo Posted on by

Berlin Christmas market terrorist Anis Amri has been shot and killed by police in northern Italy.

It’s not that the police managed to trace his movements, but it seems that “a tip” (more about that later) led police in Italy to think he might have arrived there, and regular police work (stopping a suspicious man and asking for papers) led to the shootout that left one officer wounded and Amri dead.

You might think it would have been even better to have captured him alive, in order to take advantage of what he knows. However—knowing the way Europeans law works these days—he probably wouldn’t have talked, and he probably would have been let out in a year or two, or perhaps even while awaiting trial.

Yes, that last comment is sarcastic (I doubt at this point he would actually have been released). But my bitterness and cynicism comes from the fact that this man had a rap sheet that should have already precluded his being free and roaming around Berlin to wreak the havoc he was so obviously planning.

At any rate, we can be grateful for the two Italian policemen who stopped him:

ISIS news outlet Amaq today confirmed Amri’s death – and that he carried out the market massacre in Germany.

Security chiefs believe Amri, who used at least six different aliases with three nationalities, was trying to flee to southern Italy where he had entered Europe illegally in 2011.

Police, who had received a tip-off Europe’s most wanted man may have been in the city, approached Amri because they were suspicious that anyone was at the station at 3am.

The terminal had earlier been closed for the night and officials are trying to work out whether he may in fact have arrived in the suburb, north of the city, by bus.

When the patrol approached him, he said he had no ID papers, no phone and just a small pocket knife. But he then pulled a 22 calibre pistol from his backpack and shot one of the two police officers, Christian Movio, 36, in the shoulder.

Amri ran for cover and cowered behind a car in a piazza near the station before being shot dead by trainee officer Luca Scata, 29, who had only been in the job for nine months.

On Amri’s body police found a train ticket that helped reconstruct the attacker’s movements in Berlin, revealing how he took a train from Chambery in France and then from Turin to Milan. But it is not clear whether he had driven from Berlin to Chambery or taken a 1,000-mile train trip all the way to Milan via Frankfurt – the normal rail route to the south of France.

So we have a situation in which the authorities were on high alert for this man, and yet he was able to travel across Europe’s porous and almost-nonexistent borders in the wake of the attack. What’s wrong with this picture? Nearly everything.

Amri also made the obligatory selfie video declaring his allegiance to ISIS, which has been released now that he’s dead. Obviously there is a network of people in Europe (and probably elsewhere) who knew about him and his plans, and assisted him. Here’s a little possible clue about that; it’s easy to miss if the article is read quickly:

[The shootout with Amri] comes hours after two men were arrested at a mosque in Berlin where Amri is believed to have been seen both before and after his murderous rampage.

Are these two men the source of the tip that led police to suspect where Amri might be? We may never know.

This issue of networks of help for jihadis throughout Europe and this country was the subject of the draft of a post I had readied yesterday evening, before Amri was found and killed. Here it is, and you’ll see that it’s relevant to the story that later emerged.

Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

…Gatestone Institute’s superb analyst Soeren Kern recently published a jaw-dropping report, “Inside Germany’s No-Go Zones,” part one of which focuses on North Rhine”“Westphalia. It is Germany’s most populous state, and it just happens to be where Anis Amri lived ”” in housing set aside for asylum seekers.

Kern observes that the German press has identified more than 40 “problem areas” across the country…

How do these communities operate in practice? Kern relates:

The president of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, told Spiegel Online years ago: “In Berlin or in the north of Duisburg there are neighborhoods where colleagues hardly dare to stop a car ”” because they know that they’ll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men.” These attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to the authority of the state ”” attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing their contempt for our society.”

If we are lucky, Anis Amri will be apprehended before long, and before he can strike again. It is entirely possible, though, that he will remain on the lam for some time. Like Salah Abdeslam and other jihadists, he is not without places to go.

These are areas where the rule of German law is non-existent. And they are growing in area, and not just in Germany.

What is the solution (and will the countries of the Western world implement it, if they even could identify it)? Is there a solution? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but the West seems stymied and almost paralyzed by its own dedication to tolerance, fairness, and respect for other cultures. But lawlessness and murder are not a culture to respect, and letting known jihadis go free is not a solution.

The violations of law are not limited to terrorism, not by a longshot. There is more ordinary criminality as well. The following is from the Kern article:

Police say they are alarmed by the brutality and aggression of the clans, who are said to view crime as leisure activity. If police dare to intervene, hundreds of clan members are mobilized to confront the police.

A 17-page report prepared for the NRW State Parliament revealed how Lebanese clans in Duisburg divide up certain neighborhoods in order to pursue their criminal activities, such as robbery, drug dealing and extortion.

“Further data collection is not legally permissible. Both internally and externally, any classification that could be used to depreciate human beings must be avoided. In this respect, the use of the term ‘family clan’ is forbidden from the police point of view.” ”” Ralf Jé¤ger, Interior Minister, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Please read the whole thing.

The Kern article is terrifying in its implications. And neither Kern nor McCarthy even suggest an approach for dealing with the situation as it now is. Obviously, calling a halt to further immigration from terrorist-laden Muslim countries would help, but it is not going to change what’s going on right now. The governments of Europe are never going to clear these people out and deport them, which would have to be an almost military action.

In addition, not all the perpetrators are recent arrivals by any means. Some are full-fledged citizens, many born in the European countries (or the US), or are even converts.

It’s no wonder, though, that both in this country and in Europe, the population is ready to throw out the parties that helped to create this situation and the conundrums it presents.

[ADDENDUM: Here are a few more facts I’d like to highlight from Amri’s checkered past:

In 2011 [Amri] dodged prison in his native Tunisia after fleeing following a violent robbery. He was jailed for five years in absentia.

He arrived in Italy in 2011, arriving on the small island of Lampedusa amongst thousands of people fleeing the Arab Spring uprisings. He pretended to be a child migrant – even though he was 19 – but then rioted inside his detention centre, which was set on fire. He was then jailed for four years, serving it in two prisons on Sicily.

After his release Italy failed to deport him twice because Tunisia refused to take him back and he fled Italy via the Alps for Germany, meaning he probably went via Milan.

Amri’s story highlights so many things. One of them, of course, is that eventual terrorist murderers are ordinarily not strangers to the authorities, often in several European nations. And yet they slip away. Their ability to travel within Europe from country to country, to evade deportation even when they clearly merit it, and to get the help of like-minded jihadis and jihadi sympathizers all across Europe is an outrage. And we are supposed to trust that the authorities have the immigration situation under control, and are effectively screening and monitoring the arrivals? Even when the person comes in waving multiple red flags and shrieking “I am a jihadi!,” it doesn’t seem to matter much.]

Nuclear weapons, Trump, Russia, and the arms race

The New Neo Posted on by

Despite that very-important-sounding title, I’m not going to do a full analysis of Trump’s recent comments about our nuclear arsenal—and the varied reactions to it and interpretations of it—because I think his remarks (mostly in the form of tweets) resemble one of those TAT tests where the meaning is in the eye of the beholder:

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test. Proponents of the technique assert that subjects’ responses, in the narratives they make up about ambiguous pictures of people, reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world. Historically, the test has been among the most widely researched, taught, and used of such techniques.

You can find a discussion of some of the varied interpretations of Trump’s position here. Or you can just start plowing through the articles on that Memeorandum page to which I already linked.

What do I think? It’s my opinion that these sorts of ambiguous and shifting comments—and the stirring up of a hornet’s nest of speculation—are Trump’s specialty. We are very familiar with them (on a host of subjects) from his campaign. He does this intentionally, IMHO, and watches the entire world spin around him.

It certainly garners publicity, but is it a good thing? I think a little goes a long way, and he needs to be careful. It’s not a bad thing for the world to find a president somewhat unpredictable, as well as willing to project US strength and ability to defend itself. But too much unpredictability and too much aggressiveness can backfire and cause an equal reaction on the part of those who feel threatened.

As I’ve said before: we’ll see.

[NOTE: Interesting how one moment Trump is labeled too friendly to Russia, and the next moment too belligerent.]

Rollers and dryers and hair

The New Neo Posted on by

This post by Ann Althouse made me remember the hairdryers and roller settings of yesteryear that were replaced many decades ago by blow drying and those wand thingees that press the hair into a bone-straight (and in my opinion unflattering to most people, even the young and beautiful) sleekness.

I grew up in the era of the roller and the hairdryer, and I could really identify with this reminiscence about hours spent under a hood hairdryer, reading a magazine or just staring off into space.

Like many things that are supposed to be easier and better and more convenient, blow-drying really isn’t—although I suppose it depends on the kind of hair you’ve got. For my curly hair, blow drying makes it wild if I don’t use a diffuser and tons of glop. And blow drying makes it bushy if there’s an attempt to blow it straight, even in a salon (plus, I don’t like the way my hair looks straight). Even some professionals have agreed that the product of their attempts at blow drying with me are less than lovely, with the hair becoming more straight and yet bushy and even less shiny (and curly hair isn’t shiny to begin with).

I end up just a bit like this:

roseanna

Even for the person without my special situation, the heat from blow drying is damaging to the hair, and it also takes a great deal of technique and dexterity to do well. Plus two hands are busy all the time—no way to read, unless you have absolutely mad skills.

I never mastered it. And I know a lot of people who never did, either, and who go every week to the hairdresser for a professional blowout, much as my mother did to have her hair washed and then set in rollers.

I was inspired to buy a package of rollers a few months ago, after watching the Makeover Guy (those videos I love and sometimes post here), who sometimes sets the crown of women’s hair on rollers. I hadn’t seen or thought of rollers since around 1967. But I noticed that those rollers gave women’s hair more body and a nicely controlled wave/curl, and I thought “Ah, I remember that.” My hair has become frizzier over the years, as with many women, and it turns out that a few rollers on top really do the trick. And I don’t need a hood hairdryer at all; I just waft the blow dryer over it for a while and that works pretty well.

Setting hair on rollers is like riding a bicycle; you never forget. I had mastered the skill as a teenager, when I used to set my hair every single night and slept like a baby on those hard rollers. But I don’t have to do that now. I find that just a few rollers on top for just a few minutes keep the curls more controlled and smoother until the next washing, which for me (with dry, curly hair that almost never gets dirty) comes maybe once a week.

I did a Google search to look up current information on setting hair with rollers and discovered to my surprise that nearly every single site I saw was geared to black women. Well, many of the products I use on my hair are also marketed mainly for black women, as it turns out. But I see no reason why rollers should only be pitched to that particular group. Rollers certainly were a universal phenomenon when I was growing up. I had one of those home hairdryers, too, both a soft bonnet one and a hard hood one. The soft bonnet one was easily portable, and the hard hood one was for home use but it folded up in a nifty way, too, for storage. The latter hairdryer was a gift from my clients (yes, my clients) for my sixteenth birthday, because I used to cut the hair of many of my friends, just for fun.

As a pre-pubescent and in early puberty, I wanted to be a hairdresser, actually. My parents talked me out of it.

Here’s a modern version of the type of hairdryer they gave me, for those of you who haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. I’m astounded that they still sell these things:

dryer

Hey, you can even order it through Amazon. Will wonders never cease?

[NOTE: By the way, the title of this post, “Rollers and dryers and hair,” is meant to be modeled after the famous line in the movie “The Wizard of Oz”: “lions and tigers and bears.”]

The latest target chosen by the left: the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

Eliminating the Electoral College is the next goal of the left in its never-ending quest for political domination, although at the moment it’s still reeling from the shock of losing the presidency and just about everything else. Attacking the Electoral College seems to make perfect sense for the left. However, as with the use of the nuclear option in the Senate, it could end up backfiring on them.

The NY Times is leading the way in the fight (as it often does) with Monday’s editorial entitled, “Time to End the Electoral College”:

By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office ”” to the person who gets the most votes.

The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

That’s not a new position for the Times, but it’s the current party line the left is pushing, and I’ve read it over and over again recently in other articles too. That narrative purposely leaves just about everything out—but hey, what’s a few distorted facts or omissions among friends?

The Electoral College is actually a reflection of the reality—a reality known to the Times editors but perhaps not to so very many of its readers (the Times editors hope, anyway)—that the US is a republic and not a democracy. The reason for its design as a republic was not race—race, the original sin that leftists use to explain nearly everything—but a distrust of democracies and their possible (even probable) excesses and vulnerabilities to tyranny.

So the Constitution set up an each-state-is-equal Senate that is even less democratic (small “d”) than the House. And it used to be so very undemocratic that its members weren’t even elected, although I doubt the majority of people are even aware of that history any more:

The framers of the Constitution created the United States Senate to protect the rights of individual states and safeguard minority opinion in a system of government designed to give greater power to the national government. They modeled the Senate on governors’ councils of the colonial era and on the state senates that had evolved since independence. The framers intended the Senate to be an independent body of responsible citizens who would share power with the president and the House of Representatives. James Madison, paraphrasing Edmund Randolph, explained in his notes that the Senate’s role was “first to protect the people against their rulers [and] secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led.”

To balance power between the large and small states, the Constitution’s framers agreed that states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House. Further preserving the authority of individual states, they provided that state legislatures would elect senators. To guarantee senators’ independence from short-term political pressures, the framers designed a six-year Senate term, three times as long as that of popularly elected members of the House of Representatives. Madison reasoned that longer terms would provide stability. “If it not be a firm body,” he concluded, “the other branch being more numerous, and coming immediately from the people, will overwhelm it.” Responding to fears that a six-year Senate term would produce an unreachable aristocracy in the Senate, the framers specified that one-third of the members’ terms would expire every two years, leaving two-thirds of the members in office. This combined the principles of continuity and rotation in office.

Both the Times and all the other articles I’ve read from the left calling for the end of the Electoral College (and I’ve read many) say that the EC is a legacy of slavery and the 3/5 compromise. But that compromise at the original drawing up of the Constitution was about representation in Congress, and it was a way to reduce the power of slave states (and minimize their population advantage) rather than increase it:

The Convention had unanimously accepted the principle that representation in the House of Representatives would be in proportion to the relative state populations. However, since slaves could not vote, white leaders in slave states would thus have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College. Delegates opposed to slavery proposed that only free inhabitants of each state be counted for apportionment purposes, while delegates supportive of slavery, on the other hand, opposed the proposal, wanting slaves to count in their actual numbers. The compromise that was finally agreed upon””of counting “all other persons” as only three-fifths of their actual numbers””reduced the representation of the slave states relative to the original proposals, but improved it over the Northern position.

The history of the Electoral College is long and complex and had little to do with slavery. It involves an evolution from a situation in which electors were autonomous, although elected by voters to represent them, to electors being more of less bound by the popular vote on a state-by-state basis. If the Democrats wish to go back to the original structure of the Electoral College, they would be moving further and further away from the democracy they profess to champion, and towards a system in which a small number of elite representatives would hold all the power to choose a president.

But that’s not what Democrats want. What they want is for the extremely blue states of California and New York to decide the election, because that’s the way it would probably be if the Electoral College were to be eliminated. Before the 2016 election, you didn’t hear all that many calls from Democrats for the end of the EC, in part because the EC arrangement was seen to favor Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Remember all the cries that Trump had no Electoral College “path” to victory? I certainly do.

But since Trump somehow managed to blaze such a path, much to their intense astonishment (and somewhat to mine, I must say), they want the Electoral College gone. And because there is little chance of a constitutional amendment to that purpose passing (probably not enough states would support it), they’ve found a way around that little impediment:

There is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact, would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national popular-vote winner would become president.

I guess “elegant” is in the eye of the beholder.

However, I think the Times editors should be careful what they wish for; you know, unintended consequences and all that. If the Electoral College were to be eliminated, candidates will adjust by campaigning differently—concentrating all their resources on a couple of very populous states—and these are states the Democrats already almost totally dominate. I wonder if it has ever occurred to the left that perhaps the Democrats won’t dominate those areas so much any more when the Republicans start focusing on them, because in those states the Republicans pretty much have nowhere to go but up?

But there’s always cheating. If the popular vote becomes the only game in town, the Democrats—who control the apparatus in cities like New York—will have even more motivation to cheat than they did before. National recounts will become commonplace, extremely complex, and bitter. But the left probably figures that would be a small price to pay for the Democratic hegemony they believe will result.

[NOTE: See also this, on the same subject.]