Beating Ebola

The story of the missionary doctor who contracted Ebola, was administered a new drug that hadn't yet been approved by the FDA, and has made an amazing recovery is rapidly getting to be old news but it's fascinating nonetheless. CNN has a report on it:

This is the lede from the CNN story (linked to above) which should be read in its entirety since it has a lot of interesting details about the serum and the sequence of events that led to its being administered to the two Americans.

It's a story that could have come from a cinematic medical thriller: Two American missionary workers contract Ebola. Their situation is dire. Three vials containing a highly experimental drug are flown into Liberia in a last-ditch effort to save them. And the drug flown in last week appears to have worked, according to a source familiar with details of the treatment.

Dr. Kent Brantly's and Nancy Writebol's conditions significantly improved after receiving the medication, sources say. Brantly was able to walk into Emory University Hospital in Atlanta after being evacuated to the United States last week, and Writebol is expected to arrive in Atlanta on Tuesday.

On July 22, Brantly woke up feeling feverish. Fearing the worst, Brantly immediately isolated himself. Writebol's symptoms started three days later. A rapid field blood test confirmed the infection in both of them after they had become ill with fever, vomiting and diarrhea.

It's believed Brantly and Writebol, who worked with the aid organization Samaritan's Purse, contracted Ebola from another health care worker at their hospital in Liberia, although the official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention case investigation has yet to be released.

As the Americans' conditions worsened, Samaritan's Purse reached out to a National Institutes of Health scientist who was on the ground in West Africa, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"The scientist was able to informally answer some questions and referred them to appropriate company contacts to pursue their interest in obtaining the experimental product," NIAID said.

The experimental drug, known as ZMapp, was developed by the biotech firm Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., which is based in San Diego. The patients were told that the treatment had never been tried before in a human being but had shown promise in small experiments with monkeys.

Here's a question for liberals to ponder: Why is it that drugs like this always seem to be created and produced in free market countries and never, to my knowledge, in socialist countries? It's something for fans of government-controlled health care to contemplate.

Here's another question related to plague-like diseases: How long will it be before the President's lassitude concerning our southern border results in something like Ebola making its way across said border and into our major cities undetected? Maybe it won't happen, but why is Mr. Obama making it easier for it to happen?

I also heard today that the active ingredient in the drug is nicotine. I don't know if that's true, but if it is tobacco farmers will be dancing a jig.

Ripping the Campus Apologists

Chloe Valdary tears into the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine for seeking to conflate the Palestinian struggle with the American civil rights campaign. She writes a blistering open letter to the group chastising them for what she sees as a deeply flawed and tendentious analogy. Here's how she starts:

SJP is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

• If you seek to promulgate the legacy of early Islamic colonialists who raped and pillaged the Middle East, subjugated the indigenous peoples living in the region, and foisted upon them a life of persecution and degradation—you do not get to claim the title of “Freedom Fighter.”
• If you support a racist doctrine of Arab supremacism and wish (as a corollary of that doctrine) to destroy the Jewish state, you do not get to claim that the prejudices you peddle are forms of legitimate “resistance.”
• If your heroes are clerics who sit in Gaza plotting the genocide of a people; who place their children on rooftops in the hopes they will get blown to bits; who heap praises upon their fellow gang members when they succeed in murdering Jewish school boys and bombing places of activity where Jews congregate—you do not get to claim that you are some Apollonian advocate of human virtue. You are not.
• If your activities include grieving over the woefully incompetent performance by Hamas rocketeers and the subsequent millions of Jewish souls who are still alive—whose children were not murdered by their rockets; whose limbs were not torn from them; and whose disembowelment did not come into fruition—you do not get to claim that you stand for justice. You profess to be irreproachable. You are categorically not.
• If your idea of a righteous cause entails targeting and intimidating Jewish students on campus, arrogating their history of exile-and-return and fashioning it in your own likeness you do not get to claim that you do so in the name of civil liberty and freedom of expression.
• You do not get to champion regimes that murder, torture, and persecute their own people, deliberately keep them impoverished, and embezzle billions of dollar from them—and claim you are “pro-Arab.” You are not.
• You do not get to champion a system wherein Jews are barred from purchasing land, traveling in certain areas, and living out such an existence merely because they are Jews—and claim that you are promoting equality for all. You do not get to enable that system by pushing a boycott of Jewish owned businesses, shops, and entities—and then claim that you are “against apartheid.” That is evil.

There's much more to her letter. Particularly potent is her listing of black leaders who she claims were Zionists, including Martin Luther King.

I read a piece last evening about the massive groundswell of opposition to the Israelis in Europe, even in England. Roger Cohen, a British ex-patriot, writes in a New York Times op-ed:

To cross the Atlantic to America, as I did recently from London, is to move from one moral universe to its opposite in relation to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Fury over Palestinian civilian casualties has risen to a fever pitch in Europe, moving beyond anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism (often a flimsy distinction). Attacks on Jews and synagogues are the work of a rabid fringe, but anger toward an Israel portrayed as indiscriminate in its brutality is widespread. For a growing number of Europeans, not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience. The deaths of hundreds of children in any war, as one editorial in The Guardian put it, is “a special kind of obscenity.”

This is interesting because far more children died in Germany at the hands of British bomber pilots during WWII than have died at the hands of the Israelis since 1948. Moreover, the German children were deliberately targeted by the RAF as they carpet bombed German cities. Americans did the same thing in Germany and, of course, Japan. Children killed by the Israelis are killed either accidentally or because Hamas is deliberately launching rockets at Israel from schools and hospitals so that any Israeli retaliation will kill civilians whose deaths can then be used in the propaganda war to outrage gullible Westerners.

If the editors of The Guardian wish to say that when the Israelis kill children inadvertently it's a "special kind of obscenity," what do they say about the British bombing campaign against German civilians? What's the difference?

The deaths of children and other innocents is always tragic, but just as the deaths in WWII should be laid at the feet of the German and Japanese governments, so too, should the far fewer deaths of children in Gaza be laid at the feet of Hamas. And just as it would've been foolish to declare a cease-fire with Hitler because civilians were dying in the war, it would also be foolish to allow Hamas to survive to terrorize Israel again a year or two from now.

Speaking of tragedies, why is it that the Obama administration consistently refuses to comment on any of its many scandals on the grounds that investigations are still ongoing and we need to wait until all the facts are in before we draw conclusions, but every time a Palestinian school or hospital is hit by rockets the State Dept. issues a statement implicitly condemning the Israelis and the media reflexively leaps to the conclusion that Israel is targeting innocent civilians?

I'll close with another question, a rhetorical question the answer to which is pretty much a no-brainer for everyone except maybe the folks at SJP: Numerous Arabs are citizens of Israel with full rights of citizenship. What rights would be given to Jews who sought to live in Gaza or any Arab country, for that matter?

Taking Back the Culture

A friend of mine gave me a photocopy over lunch the other day of an article by Adam Bellow at National Review Online. As he passed it across the table he said with tongue-in-cheek, "You may not know it, but you're a counter-cultural hero." I was intrigued. I've long thought of myself as counter-cultural, resisting, however futiley, the cultural tide threatening to inundate us in our own sewage, but heroic is not an adjective I ever thought appertained to anything I did. Having read the piece, I understand what my friend was referring to, although humility, and reality, constrain me to reluctantly decline the encomium.

In his article Bellow issues marching orders and instructions for conservatives who wish to take back the culture. He argues, rightly, I think, that the market for non-fiction books laying out the whys and wherefores of conservatism as well as the plenitude of flaws in liberalism is maxed out:

Recently I was asked to comment on the state of conservative publishing for an article in BuzzFeed. My major focus was the difficulty of publishing the sort of serious, intellectually demanding books that used to be the staple of the movement. I ticked off relevant factors such as the rise of conservative mass media, the proliferation of publishing imprints, the decline of book reviewing, and the bifurcation of political media into spheres of left and right, leading to the disappearance of serious controversy.

What I didn’t say is this: The real problem isn’t the practical challenge of turning serious books into bestsellers. The real problem is that we may have reached the limit of what facts and reasoned arguments can do. The real problem is that the whole conservative nonfiction enterprise has peaked and reached its limit of effectiveness. [E]ven as we appear to be winning the political argument, for the moment anyway, we are losing on the cultural front. For proof, you need look no farther than the recent successful attacks on conservative spokesmen.

Conservatives do seem to understand that this is a battle that must be engaged. But they don’t seem to know how to fight it. What they urgently need to realize is that this is not a battle that can be fought in the realm of ideas and politics. We can win every election for the next 50 years and it won’t matter, if conservatives are not allowed to speak. Nor can we debate and argue this incipient totalitarian movement out of existence. We can publish all the polemics and blog posts we want. But if that is all we’ve got, we are still going to lose the larger war.

So, to paraphrase the Marxists, what is to be done? Bellow writes this:

Fear not, however — this is no doom-and-gloom scenario. I actually come bearing good news. A second front is opening in the oddly misnamed culture war (which has nothing to do with culture). The tools of our salvation are at hand. There’s a new posse in town. We just need to wake up and support them.

The late Andrew Breitbart understood the importance of popular culture and was determined not to neglect it. “Politics is downstream from culture,” he famously said, and he continually called upon conservatives to quit griping about liberal media bias and do something constructive instead. Write your own books, he exhorted. Record your own music. Make your own movies. Everyone agreed that this would be a great idea. But no one knew how to go about making it happen.

Andrew was right. The conservative counterrevolution is coming. Indeed it is already here. It’s just that most conservatives haven’t noticed it yet. It came to my attention only because of the position I occupy in the New York publishing world. As a nonfiction editor throughout my career I never missed publishing fiction. It just seemed a little bit beside the point. I figured we would win the battle of ideas first, and then the imbalance in the culture would correct itself. But that didn’t seem to be happening. If anything, liberal dominance of popular culture seemed more entrenched than ever.

Meanwhile, more and more, I started hearing from conservative authors asking if I would look at their novels. I read quite a few of these, and while some of them were awful, many others were entertaining and well done. But they didn’t rise to the level of proficiency required for mass-market publication, and no sectarian market existed for conservative-themed fiction. So I suggested they self-publish, making use of the new digital-distribution technologies.

At first I thought of this as an isolated phenomenon. But the queries continued and after a while I began to see it as a trend. I started poking around the Kindle store to see what was up and found dozens of self-published books by conservative authors bravely putting forth their work and hoping to be discovered. I already knew that science fiction had attracted many libertarians. But this phenomenon was clearly more extensive. Conservatives were writing books in every genre — thriller, mystery, historical, military, western, gothic, supernatural, romance, and young adult, not to mention numerous hybrids. Similar searches at iTunes and YouTube turned up dozens of conservative and libertarian pop songs and videos.

Andrew didn’t live to see it, but conservatives are making their own culture. They are writing and publishing their own books, recording their own music, and making their own videos and films. It is Breitbart’s Revolt.

This outpouring of creativity on the right doesn’t just represent the emergence of a new genre or market — though it is both in my opinion. Taken together, it amounts to nothing less than the rise of a new counterculture. Only this time it is coming from the right, and not, as in the Sixties, from the left.

My friend's jest was a reference to my novel, In the Absence of God,which, though it's not political or ideological, is an attempt to fire a few shots in the culture war through the medium of fiction. Like Bellow, I just don't find that very many people, especially young people, read non-fiction, and they especially don't read non-fiction that argues for a point of view contrary to their own. There are tons of books out there on all sorts of topics relating to politics, religion, etc. that just gather dust on bookshelves. People are, however, may be inclined to read stories and to to be swayed by messages that are conveyed by stories. That's why most best-sellers are novels and even non-fiction works that become best-sellers are biographies or other works, like histories, that tell stories.

Movies and television have been such powerful propaganda weapons for the left because they tell stories. Popular music plays a similar role and conservatives could certainly do more in this field as well.

In between the excerpts I cite here Bellow packs a lot of argument for his thesis, and it would repay reading the whole thing. He finishes with this.

I know what Andrew Breitbart would say if he were here: Stop giving money to Karl Rove to spend on useless political ads. Instead, you should support the conservative literary wing, which has been producing great stuff against tremendous odds and urgently needs your help.

The question is, What are you personally going to do about it? Every conservative has a responsibility to support the rising counterculture. Buy their books and records. Share their videos with your friends. Join the crew at Liberty Island and support our authors with tip-jar contributions and donations to our crowd-funding efforts. Or become a creator yourself — write a story, record a song, make a video.

What good will it do to write a novel? May as well ask what good it did to show the revolutionary flag at Bunker Hill (a battle we lost, by the way). We need to hoist our flag and show the strength of our resolve in order to build morale and win recruits. Remember, this is still a fight that can be lost. Will we as a society reject the new regime of liberal thought control or will we let it impose a politically correct orthodoxy on us that we will all have to live with for the rest of our lives? Win or lose... defiance is both a moral and a practical necessity.

As a friend of mine once put it: Resist! Surrender is futile.

Is the Left Anti-Semitic?

Brendan O'Neill at the Telegraph asks the question: "Is the left anti-semitic?" The question seems to me rather like the question whether the Pope's a Catholic, but perhaps O'Neill isn't asking quite the right question. Maybe a better way to frame it is to ask why it is that most people who are outspokenly anti-semitic today are people on the left, but that's a minor quibble.

O'Neill answers his question by averring that there are troubling signs that the left is indeed trending toward anti-semitism, not because of their opposition to Israeli policies in the Middle East but because of the language and the hatred that bubbles up on the left whenever Jews are involved in controversy.

He documents his case well, but one thing he doesn't say much about, perhaps because he's writing in Britain, is the virulent and disgusting screeds that have appeared in the United States. Protestors of the Gazan incursion can regularly be seen and heard calling for Jews to be sent back to Auschwitz or to be otherwise destroyed.

The Jerusalem Post has an interesting piece on anti-semitism in Europe in which, after discussing the surge in anti-semitic incidents during the 2009 incursion called Cast Lead, they write that "such incidents, given their severity and scope, 'testified to pre-planned mobilization among radicals from the left and among Muslim immigrant communities, resulting in a well-coordinated onslaught which employed clear anti-Semitic motifs...' "

There is, to be sure, hateful rhetoric to be found in the comboxes of conservative web sites, but the locus of hate, bigotry, and intolerance in the modern era, particularly for Jews and also for Christians, is on the left. The irony is that so many Jews are leftists. I wonder how long that will last.

Atheists, Israel, and ID

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views has a fine column praising, of all people, militant Darwinian atheist Sam Harris. Harris has written an essay titled "Why I Don't Condemn Israel," a column he felt constrained to write because so many of his fellow materialist atheists are criticizing him for supporting Israel's campaign to defeat Hamas.

Setting aside Harris' hostility to orthodox religious beliefs his column is an excellent read for those who find themselves ambivalent on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Klinghoffer interestingly ties Harris' column to the theme to which ENV is committed which is Intelligent Design. Both posts are very much worth reading.

In the course of his ENV piece Klinghoffer makes an interesting and important point:

If Israel today put down its arms, the country's Palestinian Muslim neighbors who support Hamas would immediately seek to commit genocide against Israel's Jewish citizens. So says the Hamas charter. If the Palestinians put down their arms, Israel would immediately seek to do business with them, forming a relationship like America has with Canada and Mexico.

Turn your neighbors into corpses or turn them into trading partners. That's the yawning moral difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the ultimate hopes of Israel.

The interesting thing about this is that almost everyone knows it to be true and yet some still seek to convince us that there's some moral equivalence between the two sides.

In further discussing the hostility of atheists like Harris to Christianity and the hostility of a number of atheistic biologists toward Israel Klinghoffer poses a thought experiment:

You're transported back in time to Poland seventy years ago where you are a Jew on the run from the Nazis. In a Warsaw street, two doors lie ahead of you. You have just enough time to knock on one, seeking aid, as the scuff of pursuing boots draws closer. One door belongs to a Catholic priest or nun. The other to a biologist -- better yet, an atheist evolutionary biologist. On whose door do you knock?

You've got 5 seconds to decide. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Go.

After noting the bizarre indecision among Darwinian atheist bloggers like P.Z. Myers who seem to be confused as to whether they should sympathize with a Muslim terrorist movement devoted to murdering every man, woman and child in Israel, he restates the experiment:

Say you're a Jew today in a European city, on the run from an anti-Semitic mob that is marching to support Hamas. Two doors lie ahead of you. Seeking safety, you can knock on one and only one. One belongs to a biologist inclined to doubt Darwinism in favor of intelligent design. The other to a New Atheist acolyte and Darwin supremacist.

Which door do you choose? You have 5 seconds to decide. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Go.

Read the whole thing, but if you can only read one, read Harris'. His antipathy for Christianity is off-putting, but his defense of Israel in the current conflict is very compelling.

Beg Your Pardon?

This blurb at Breitbart caught my eye:

On Sunday, President Obama and First Lady Michelle released a statement thanking Muslim Americans for their many “achievements and contributions… to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.”

The comments were made to mark the celebration of Eid-al-Fitr, a time of spiritual renewal for Muslims which comes at the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan. The Obamas said in their statement that Eid “celebrates the common values that unite us in our humanity” and “welcomed their commitment to giving back to their communities.”

Actually, Muslims have done nothing to build the fabric of our society. Our society was constructed on the principles of human equality, free speech, religious liberty, and toleration of differences, all of which derive from our Judeo-Christian heritage. Muslims adhere to none of these principles. They are perhaps the most anti-democratic demographic in the country. To thank them for their contribution to building our society's fabric is ludicrous.

I once asked a Muslim cleric what would happen to the Bill of Rights if Muslims ever gained political control of our country. He told me unequivocally that the Bill of Rights was incompatible with Islam and left me to supply the implied inference.

I understand the Obamas' desire to offer Muslims their best wishes as they celebrate their holiday, but I think they should get the facts right. There's nothing to be gained by pretending that what's false is really true.

What to Do About the Children

George Will is getting beaten up on conservative talk radio for his remark Sunday as to how we should respond to the flood of illegal immigrant children on our southern border. Will said this:

“We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school and get a job and become Americans.’”

“We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county,” he added. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.”

Will also added that the waves of immigrants America took in and assimilated in the 19th Century vastly outnumbered the present influx.

He said that the greatest counter to illegal immigration ever passed by the United States was NAFTA, “which put the Mexican economy on the road to prosperity.” Will advocated for a similar free trade agreement with Central American countries and a plan to reduce America’s illegal drug consumption in order to arrest the flow of immigrants from unstable countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

I have to say that I largely agree with Will, with qualifiers. I just don't think sending these kids back to their home countries is either necessary, practical, or right, but I would suggest that absorbing them into the United States should be done only if some other measures are sincerely committed to first.

The first measure, the one upon which the others are contingent, is that our government needs to commit itself to stopping the flow of illegal immigration. If this means finishing the border fence then we should finish it, but to do anything else before we stop the flood is like painting the living room while the roof is leaking.

George Bush was reluctant to build the fence and Barack Obama has been adamant in refusing to build it, or to do much else to control illegal immigration across our border. Nevertheless, we simply cannot ask the American people to do what no other country in the world does which is to allow in all who can make it across our border, and, if Mr. Obama has his way, even those who can't make it across. The president, for example, has proposed sending planes to Central America to bring back those who can't make it here on their own.

As with illegals who have been here since before the recent wave, no policy is worth considering if it's not predicated on a secure border. The reason no immigration reform will be passed as long as Mr. Obama is president is that no one trusts him to enforce any law he doesn't like, much less one requiring strong border enforcement.

Once there is a good faith commitment to securing our border we should inform the recent illegal immigrants that only those unaccompanied children under (say) sixteen can stay. All adults must return from whence they came. If the adults brought children with them they must take the children back with them since separating families is not good policy.

Those who stay will not be eligible for citizenship unless and until they complete high school or serve in the military. Nor will they be eligible for any taxpayer-provided benefits other than schooling. What benefits they receive should be administered by churches and other charitable organizations.

As Will says we can assimilate the children and the young ones are not here through any fault of their own. It would be a failure of compassion, I think, to hold the kids responsible for the decisions made by adults who sent them here. Nevertheless, it would be a failure of fairness to allow law-breakers to leap-frog ahead of those seeking to immigrate legally and it would also be a failure of fairness to require the American taxpayer to bear the burden of compensating for the dysfunctionalities that exist in their countries of origin.

Americans should take the children in, many of them are essentially orphans, but doing so should be largely an act of private charity not an act in which Americans are coerced by our government to undertake and accept.

The War in Gaza

For those interested in the situation in Gaza there's an interesting piece in the Jerusalem Post about the Maglan unit, an Israeli commando force which operates behind the lines:

Operating behind enemy lines in Gaza during the conflict with Hamas, the elite Maglan unit has attacked dozens of terrorist cells that fired on the IDF, destroyed areas used to launch rockets and killed and injured 40 terrorists in the last few days.

A senior source from the unit revealed that its members targeted Hamas gunmen waiting in ambush for the IDF’s ground forces, striking the threats before the soldiers passed by the would-be attackers.

The Maglan unit has detected and destroyed forward Hamas posts and rocket launchers. It detected a cross-border underground attack tunnel leading into Israel from Gaza, and found 20 bomb-laden, booby-trapped Gazan homes. The unit also uncovered a large quantity of weapons in raids.

The source said the company is operating in a heavily built up area, characterized by residential buildings, orchards surrounded by buildings, and tunnels. Hamas planted its military assets deep inside the very fabric of Gazan civilian life, he said.

“Hamas operatives and area commanders, as well as their rocket cell members, keep one part of their home for normal family life. A second part of the home is the command center, or the start of a tunnel. Daily life and military infrastructure are totally interwoven,” the source said.

“This is the source of the complexity we face in our combat. We must overcome the challenge of differentiating between Hamas and the civilian population,” he added. The Maglan unit has met the challenge, having detected a series of Hamas assets, he said.

The spokesperson also noted that the Hamas fighters seem to have lost their appetite for fighting Israeli soldiers:

The source added that in recent days, a recognizable wave of demoralization has washed over Hamas’s combat battalions. “They simply escape, leaving behind weapons and suicide bomb vests that were laid out for battle. This morning we stormed a position, and they just weren’t there. I don’t see a determined enemy. We have encountered stronger pockets of fighting in the past. But now, I would not give them a high grade for fighting spirit.”

I came across a report elsewhere that claimed that Hamas fighters are often abandoned by their officers and left to face the Israelis alone. In any case, one of the objectives of the Maglan unit is to identify and destroy the tunnels:

Hamas built a network of tunnels that begin a few kilometers away from the Israeli border, and pass under the frontier, the source said, in a bid to enable dozens of terrorists to infiltrate the country. In response, the IDF has used a wide array of firepower and ground units to tackle the challenge, employing a rapid maneuver to “shatter the enemy and deny it freedom of operation in closed areas, where it is based,” he said.

“We move in as quickly as possible, engage in close combat, and prevent the enemy from using its tunnels to enter our territory,” the source said.

He recalled seizing large numbers of weapons, suicide bomb belts, and projectile launchers in recent raids.

“Hamas has turned tunneling into a national profession. They lean on highly skilled engineers to do this. We’re dealing with all of these threats through close-range combat,” the source added.

Hamas has built “defensive layers around the tunnels. They have attack positions in mosques, in the homes of operatives, and tunnels that allow terrorists to approach our forces,” he said.

As for the attempts to avoid civilian casualties these are complicated by the use of civilians and their homes as shields and weapons repositories.

“I have not entered one civilian home that did not have weapons, suicide belts, or booby traps in it,” the source said. Any home found to be containing women and children leads to an immediate halt of the raid, he said.

“We hold our fire, there’s no question. We don’t take chances with children and women. We allow them to leave, and then continue the raid. That’s who we are, and this is the source of our strength,” he said.

Israelis try as hard as they can to avoid harming civilians while Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups are trying as hard as they can to ensure that the Israelis inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians. They're also trying as hard as they can to kill Israeli civilians. How much outrage did the world express about Hamas' use of human shields and the rockets they and their associates launched against Israeli cities? Very little.

When the Israelis kill a Palestinian civilian who has been forced to remain in a house from which rockets are being fired, the western media is in high dudgeon. When the Palestinians force that same civilian to remain in a targeted building or shoot two thousand rockets at Israeli children, the world yawns.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine that instead of Russian backed Ukrainian terrorists accidentally shooting down the Malaysian airliner and killing almost 300 people suppose Israelis had accidentally shot it down. What would the world's reaction have been? Why is the United Nations not demanding that Russia stop meddling in the Ukraine and cease supplying the terrorists there with weapons with the same fervor with which they call upon Israel to stand down? Why are there no riots in the major cities of the world against this horrible deed?

Why, on the other hand, when several dozen people are killed in an accidental strike on a Gazan hospital (which may have been due to a failed Palestinian rocket) do anti-Israel and anti-semitic protests break out all across the globe? Why do people tisk when airliners are shot down but demand the deaths of Israelis when a hospital is accidentally bombed? Why is there not universal outrage at Hamas for building tunnels directly under Israeli kindergartens? Why is the world not outraged at threats to Israeli civilians by high-ranking officers in the Iranian military

This is a pretty good illustration of a reprehensible double standard if not of arrant moral bankruptcy on the part of those who condemn Israel for the war in Gaza.

Is Matter All There Is?

Science writer George Johnson summarizes in a piece in the New York Times the perplexity many thinkers feel when they look at the cosmos through the eyes of materialism. The perplexity results from a sense that materialism is leaving something out. Johnson is evidently a naturalist, i.e. he believes that nature is all there is, there's nothing that transcends nature, but he wonders if nature might include mind as well as matter. Materialism, the naturalistic belief that everything that exists reduces to a single substance, matter (and energy), seems inadequate to account for what science is learning about the cosmos.

Here are some excerpts from Johnson's essay:

[I]t is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.

Since it was published in 2012, “Mind and Cosmos,” by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, is the book that has caused the most consternation. With his taunting subtitle — “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” — Dr. Nagel was rejecting the idea that there was nothing more to the universe than matter and physical forces. He also doubted that the laws of evolution, as currently conceived, could have produced something as remarkable as sentient life. That idea borders on anathema, and the book quickly met with a blistering counterattack.

What makes “Mind and Cosmos” worth reading is that Dr. Nagel is an atheist, who rejects the creationist idea of an intelligent designer. The answers, he believes, may still be found through science, but only by expanding it further than it may be willing to go.

Dr. Nagel finds it astonishing that the human brain — this biological organ that evolved on the third rock from the sun — has developed a science and a mathematics so in tune with the cosmos that it can predict and explain so many things.

Neuroscientists assume that these mental powers somehow emerge from the electrical signaling of neurons — the circuitry of the brain. But no one has come close to explaining how that occurs.

That, Dr. Nagel proposes, might require another revolution: showing that mind, along with matter and energy, is “a fundamental principle of nature” — and that we live in a universe primed “to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” Rather than being a blind series of random mutations and adaptations, evolution would have a direction, maybe even a purpose.

Indeed. In their book Quantum Enigma physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner make a compelling case that so far from the materialist belief that mind, whatever it is, arises as an epiphenomenon from matter (much as light is an epiphenomenon of fire), it's coming to look as though matter arises as an epiphenomenon of mind. In other words, mind, not matter, is the fundamental substance which makes up reality.

“Above all,” Nagel wrote, “I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.”

Although Nagel's book made materialists apoplectic (Neuroscientist Steven Pinker dismissed it as the "shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker") he's certainly not alone in suspecting that materialism is an obsolete metaphysical hypothesis.

While rejecting anything mystical, the biologist Stuart Kauffman has suggested that Darwinian theory must somehow be expanded to explain the emergence of complex, intelligent creatures. And David J. Chalmers, a philosopher, has called on scientists to seriously consider “panpsychism” — the idea that some kind of consciousness, however rudimentary, pervades the stuff of the universe.

Heading off in another direction, a new book by the physicist Max Tegmark suggests that a different ingredient — mathematics — needs to be admitted into science as one of nature’s irreducible parts. In fact, he believes, it may be the most fundamental of all.

In a well-known 1960 essay, the physicist Eugene Wigner marveled at “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in explaining the world. It is “something bordering on the mysterious,” he wrote, for which “there is no rational explanation.” The best he could offer was that mathematics is “a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

Dr. Tegmark, in his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” turns the idea on its head: The reason mathematics serves as such a forceful tool is that the universe is a mathematical structure. Going beyond Pythagoras and Plato, he sets out to show how matter, energy, space and time might emerge from numbers. But is mathematics, for all its power, really the root of reality? Or is it a product of the human mind?

If numbers are the root of reality where do numbers come from? Do they exist in some Platonic realm transcending space and time or do they exist in some transcendent mind? And why, when so much that we are learning, points to the universe as the product of a mind, is this idea so viscerally opposed? What are the implications of this view that so many thinkers find so repugnant and unacceptable, and why are they so repulsed by those implications?

The Left's Moral Blindness

In any conflict between peoples or nations the Left seems to assume that the stronger party is ipso facto villainous and the weaker party is noble. This simplistic assumption is nowhere more pellucid than in the current Israeli/Palestinian war. In order to maintain this assumption, though, the Left has to deny or suppress a host of facts. It also has to hold the stronger side of the battle to a standard that it's not willing to impose on the weaker side nor, for that matter, would it be willing to impose it on itself. This is either unintelligent or dishonest, or both.

Consider a recent editorial in the LA Times which is so estranged from reality as to justify the inference that it was written by representatives of Hamas. Breitbart gives us a summary:

The Los Angeles Times leads Thursday with a story entitled: "Gaza's dilemma: Deadly war or suffocating Israeli embargo." According to the story, Palestinians in Gaza are left with no choice but to wage war, because if they do not fire rockets at Israeli civilians, they must accept an Israeli [sic] "embargo." The article omits the obvious point that if Hamas would stop trying to kill Israelis, neither the embargo nor the war itself would be necessary.

The authors, Alexandra Zavis and Bathseva Sobelman, accept that Hamas started the war--and even suggest that most Palestinians in Gaza support it, though there is nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to prove that claim. They also describe Hamas's smuggling tunnels to Egypt--which have been used to import deadly weapons--in positive terms, lamenting their supposed closure: "Residents are left to struggle just to get by."

Nowhere--not once--in the entire article do Zavis or Sobelman note the terror tunnels that Hamas has spent the past several years building to attack Israel, diverting humanitarian aid and building materials for that purpose. Nowhere do they mention the fact that Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields, or that Israel has offered many ceasefires, or that the rockets fired from Gaza are intended to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible.

The article presents "war" or "embargo" as a false choice for Palestinians, utterly ignoring the fact that Gazans could choose peace instead of either of those options.

The Washington Post offers a condign rejoinder to the nonsense purveyed by the LA Times:

The distinguishing feature of the latest war between Israel and Hamas is “offensive tunnels,” as the Israeli army calls them. As of early Wednesday, 28 had been uncovered in Gaza, and nearly half extend into Israel, according to Israeli officials. The tunnels are the reason that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu decided last weekend to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, and they explain why that operation has strong support from Israelis in spite of the relatively heavy casualties it has inflicted.

Most significantly, the tunnels show why it has been difficult to reach a cease-fire and why any accord must forge a new political and security order in Gaza. Hamas’s offensive tunnels should not be confused with the burrows it has dug under Gaza’s border with Egypt to smuggle money, consumer goods and military equipment. The newly discovered structures have only one conceivable purpose: to launch attacks inside Israel. Three times in recent days, Hamas fighters emerged from the tunnels in the vicinity of Israeli civilian communities, which they clearly aimed to attack.

The ­concrete-lined structures are stocked with materials, such as handcuffs and tranquilizers, that could be used on hostages. Other tunnels in northern Gaza are designed for the storage and firing of missiles at Israeli cities.

The resources devoted by Hamas to this project are staggering, particularly in view of Gaza’s extreme poverty. By one Israeli account, the typical tunnel cost $1 million to build over the course of several years, using tons of concrete desperately needed for civilian housing.

By design, many of the tunnels have entrances in the heavily populated Shijaiyah district, where the Israeli offensive has been concentrated. One was found underneath al-Wafa hospital, where Hamas also located a command post and stored weapons, according to Israeli officials.

The depravity of Hamas’s strategy seems lost on much of the outside world, which — following the terrorists’ script — blames Israel for the civilian casualties it inflicts while attempting to destroy the tunnels. While children die in strikes against the military infrastructure that Hamas’s leaders deliberately placed in and among homes, those leaders remain safe in their own tunnels. There they continue to reject cease-fire proposals, instead outlining a long list of unacceptable demands.

Thanks to Hot Air for the links. I was watching MSNBC's Morning Joe yesterday morning when one of the panelists asked a retired El Al Israeli security chief one of the most boneheaded questions I think I've heard since this new war began. He asked the Israeli why, if Iron Dome is so successful in deflecting Palestinian missiles, do the Israelis feel they need to invade Gaza to defend themselves. After all, Hamas has tried without success to kill Israeli civilians by futilely firing thousands of missiles into Israel so why not just sit back and let them keep doing it?

The question was breathtakingly otiose - not just because the rockets aren't the primary reason for the invasion, the tunnels are, but because even if they were the primary reason, they're reason enough. The questioner, whose name I missed, apparently thinks that a policeman shot numerous times by a thug but saved each time by his kevlar vest, should refrain from using deadly force against his assailant by returning fire because he really hadn't suffered any harm.

The MSNBC panelist's question simply shows the lengths to which some will go, even to the point of self-embarrassment, in order to try to pin blame on the tragic Palestinian casualties on Israel rather than on Hamas where it belongs.

Kristallnacht All Over Again

A Parisian suburb known for its multiculturalism exploded in antisemitic hatred the other day.

It's interesting that news reports emphasize that the suburb was a multicultural oasis. Multiculturalism is just a feel-good euphemism for tribalism. Wherever disparate cultures are thrown together they either assimilate or they eventually wind up at each others' throats. The concept of a mosaic of cultures living together in harmony is a liberal fantasy rooted more in an unfounded belief in the inherent goodness of human beings than in empirical historical precedent.

People will only tolerate each other if they share a common core culture - particularly language and values. The more differences there are between people the more they are seen as "other" and the more friction there'll be between them. If there's a history of conflict and bloodshed between them in the countries of origin then the hope that they will get along in their adopted multicultural environment is almost certain to be dashed. This is why celebrations of differences among cultures living together is ill-conceived. What we should celebrate are the things that make us alike. We only encourage resentment and conflict by celebrating our differences and treating others as outsiders. Nations with large minority populations should strive to be cultural melting pots, not mosaics.

Lest we think that an apparent reprise of 1938 in Paris is limited to Europe and the effete French, the same sort of hatred for Jews is simmering in American cities. Boston saw a series of protests in recent days not just against Israel, but against Jews. Antisemitic insults were hurled and police had to extract several Jewish demonstrators from a crowd of pro-Palestinian leftist demonstrators who shouted for Jews to be killed and/or sent back to extermination camps.

The last time the Jews were targeted for murder it was by extremist socialists like the Nazis. This time it's socialists simpliciter. The Left and other Palestinian sympathizers, frustrated by their inability to harm Jews living in Israel, threaten to take out their hatreds on Jews living in supposedly enlightened Europe. Of course, "enlightenment" means little when it comes to tribal hatreds. Germany in 1938 was the most enlightened place in the world. Europeans, just like all human beings, have the heart of a beast covered by a thin patina of civilization. It doesn't take much to dissolve the patina away. Antisemitism seems to be an acid that dissolves that patina more quickly than just about anything else.

Michael Ruse's Ethics

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting recently interviewed atheist philosopher Michael Ruse for his series of interviews at the New York Times Opinionator blog. At one point in the exchange Gutting asked Ruse about his views on the relationship between religion and morality.

Gutting asked, "Is one of religion’s merits that it provides a foundation (intellectual and practical) for morality through the idea of God as divine lawgiver?" To which Ruse replied,

I am on record as an “evolutionary skeptic.” I don’t deny substantive morality — you ought to return your library books on time — but I do deny objective foundations. I think morality is a collective illusion, genetic in origin, that makes us good cooperators. And I would add that being good cooperators makes each one of us individually better off in the struggle for existence. If we are nice to other people, they are much more likely to be nice to us in return.

However, as the philosopher J.L. Mackie used to argue, I think we “objectify” substantive ethics — we think it objectively the case that we ought return library books on time. But we do this (or rather our genes make us do this) because if we didn’t we would all start to cheat and substantive ethics would collapse to the ground. So I don’t buy the moral argument for the existence of God. I think you can have all of the morality you need without God.

Ruse's response raises several questions. If morality is merely a set of "substantive" rules that we ought to follow if we want other people to treat us well, what if I can get along perfectly well in the "struggle for existence" without following these rules? Would it be wrong for me to ignore them? What if it actually promotes my chances for evolutionary success to flout the rules, would it be wrong to flout them? What if I don't give a fig for my evolutionary success, why should I follow those rules?

Consider a concrete example. I choose to ignore, let us say, the suffering of children in some other part of the world. I'm in a position to help them, I even present myself to others as one who is helping them, but in fact am not. Am I doing anything wrong by ignoring them? What obligates me to help them? Why is it wrong to pose as their benefactor when in fact I am not? On Ruse's view why is it wrong to refuse to help others who will never be in a position to ever return the favor?

Or consider a very powerful ruler who has life and death authority over his subjects. If no harm can come to him for anything he does, what's wrong, on Ruse's view, with such a man treating his political opponents cruelly? Imagine further that this man is able to deceive his people into thinking that he is in fact a kind and benevolent ruler when in fact behind the scenes he's a terribly cruel tyrant. Would Ruse think that would be wrong? It's hard to see how.

Ruse's position leads inevitably to egoism, the view that my good is the only good I need be concerned about. When he says that morality is an illusion that our genes create to get us to cooperate with each other he undercuts any ground for taking morality seriously. Why should we take an illusion seriously? Why should we think that a random, impersonal process like genetic evolution could ever impose a duty on us to behave one way rather than another?

Unless there is an objective moral law established by a transcendent moral authority able to enforce the law and hold us accountable to it there simply is no right or wrong behavior. There are only actions that some of us like and others dislike.

In other words, one can hold that it's wrong to be cruel or one can hold that there is no God (setting aside the matter of how we should properly conceptualize God), but what one cannot do is hold both of these propositions simultaneously. If one is true the other is false.

Atheist philosopher Richard Rorty saw this clearly. He famously observed that "For the secular man there's no answer to the question 'Why not be cruel?' "

On atheism, morality is nothing more than a set of subjective preferences and tastes, of no more significance than a person's preference of one flavor of ice cream over another. That being the case, when an atheist says anything more about another person's behavior than that they like it or don't like it, they're acting as if God exists while simultaneously denying that he does, and that's irrational.

Angry Atheist

A year ago a video appeared on YouTube that ultimately went viral. Perhaps you saw it but, as often happens with pop cultural phenomena, I missed it completely. Happily, it was resurrected by Hot Air's resident atheist Allahpundit who pondered whether the tirade of the man on the video was staged or genuine.

I tend to think for reasons stated by the man who filmed it that it was genuine, but that the man who is the subject of the video needs help and compassion. He seems to be suffering a psychotic episode, but may, on the other hand, not be mentally deranged at all but just be releasing a lot of pent-up anger.

In any case, one wonders how representative of contemporary atheism this man is, not in terms of his behavior so much, but in terms of his convictions. How many people out there are as angry and hate-filled as he? How many atheists are laboring under as many misconceptions about Christianity as this fellow is? For that matter, how many Christians come across to non-Christians as angry and irrational as this man comes across?

The video is both funny and sad - sad because if it's genuine this man has evidently experienced a lot of pain in his life, and funny because, well, you'll have to watch it for yourself.

The incident takes place at Sproul Plaza on Berkeley's campus and viewers are cautioned that there's a lot of obscenity. I was reluctant to post it for that reason, but I chose to do so because I believe the man gives us an important look, though he's an extreme example, at how many people view Christians and Christianity.

You might wish to read also the commentary by atheists Allahpundit and Hement Mehta at the links above.

How the Israelis Know Where to Look

I returned Saturday from a vacation in Italy having spent a week admiring that country's vast treasures of art, history, and architecture. I had been pretty much out of touch with the news while abroad but had heard bits and pieces of the attack on the Malaysian jet by Russian-supported separatists in Ukraine, the ground invasion of Gaza, and the continuing crisis on our southern border.

The globe seems to be overwhelmed with unmanageable crises and yet the President's press secretary, Josh Ernest, assures us that his boss' policies have "made the world more tranquil." Either the world looks very different to people in Washington than it does to us living in the hinterlands or Mr. Ernest has been spending too much time in Colorado availing himself of opportunities afforded by Colorado's new pot laws.

Anyway, I came across a piece at Debkafile on how Israel knows where to look to find targets for their air and ground forces. Here's an excerpt:

IDF (Israeli Defense Force) obtains its eyes on the ground either voluntarily, inadvertently or by interrogating prisoners.

The spies on the ground of the Shin Bet, IDF combat intelligence-gathering and AMAN field units, trained in clandestine operations in an Arab environment, may pick up data bonanzas from ordinary people in war zones, who are willing to talk out of various motives:

Financial: Ordinary Gazan Palestinians, in contrast to their ruling elite, are in dire financial distress. They may be persuaded to part with valuable information for a cash reward or a permit to cross into Israel.

Revenge: They are deeply fragmented by factional and personal rivalries. Certain elements may offer information to settle scores with their opponents.

Safe Guarantee: A Palestinian in Gaza may be willing to sell valuable secrets to buy an IDF guarantee of safety from attack for himself, his family and his property for the duration of the Israeli-Hamas military conflict.

Buying long-term collaborators with financial or medical rewards is one of the key HUMINT operations which are performed under cover of the IDF ground incursion.

How likely is it, do you suppose, that the Palestinians have cultivated the same sorts of sources among Israelis?

Of course, different measures are employed against captured combatants but even with these the Israelis prefer subtlety to force:

Contrary to conventional assumptions, Israeli interrogators have not found violence to be the most productive method of extracting secrets from unwilling subjects. They obtain their best results by tricks and subterfuge and, dovetailing the information obtained with the data incoming from other sources, human and other.

They also act on the premise that their subjects may be utterly faithful to their national and religious ideals, but some may also be human beings with personal ambitions, wives, aging parents or sick children in need of medical or other assistance. Therefore, a detailed rundown on the subject’s CV obtained in advance will give the investigator the advantage of knowing where to apply pressure to extract information.

This sort of pressure is apt to produce a gold mine, the key piece of information for unlocking such secrets as the locations of terrorist tunnel openings – the first of which Israel ground forces in fact found Friday night in schools, private homes and greenhouses.

It may also yield from prisoners such valuable data as the whereabouts of the booby traps Hamas rigged for invaders, the identities of contact men, the Hamas chain of command, its combat systems, its technological resources and its command and control centers.

One of the things Israeli interrogators have learned is that Hamas has built its command and control center in the basement of a hospital to protect it from Israeli air attack. They've placed their rocket launchers in schools and homes for the same reason. That is a very illuminating fact for two reasons: It's an acknowledgement that Israel tries hard to avoid civilian casualties, a fact which Hamas exploits, and it offers a stark contrast with Hamas which would not be deterred at all from bombing an Israeli hospital whether or not there were military targets therein.

As Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day, Israel uses missiles (Iron Dome) to protect it's people. Hamas uses people to protect it's missiles. Indeed, Hamas is reported to be telling people in Gaza not to flee their homes because they know that if the people flee the Israelis will be less reluctant to assault urban areas, and they also know that if the people stay and some are killed this works to Hamas' advantage in the court of world opinion.

It could in fact be argued that Hamas cares less about the welfare of the Palestinian people who are useful merely as human shields than do the Israelis. If Hamas did care about their people they would've spent a far larger percentage of the millions of dollars in aid they've received from the global community, including the U.S., on mitigating the rough edges of the poverty in which Gaza is mired and less on weaponry and tunnel building.

All of which illustrates the difference between a civilized people and barbarians.

Vacations, Mine and Yours

I'll be away until next week so Viewpoint will be on hiatus. Please feel free to browse the archives in my absence.

Speaking of absence, if you're looking for a good summer time read please consider In the Absence of God.

With as much humility as I can muster, let me say that it'd be a great book to take to the beach, or anywhere you're vacationing this summer. Thanks for considering it.

An Important Difference

The difference between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs could not have been more starkly on display than it was in the wake of the recent murders of three Israeli teens and, in retaliation, a Palestinian boys.

When the young Israelis were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas the Palestinian people celebrated. Palestinian websites praised the crimes and the perpetrators. No attempt was made by Palestinian authorities to apprehend the murderers. When the Palestinian boy was killed in retaliation the Palestinians rioted.

Nevertheless, the Israelis hunted down the killers of the Palestinian teen and arrested six Israeli suspects, some of whom have confessed and now face prosecution.

Israel acted like a civilized nation, the Palestinians acted like barbarians, and much of the Western media acted like blockheads, prominently featuring the murder of the Palestinian boy, the awful but relatively minor beating of another Arab boy who happened to be an American, and the rage of the Palestinian people, while scarcely mentioning the three murdered Israeli youngsters. In our leftist media Israeli lives seem somehow not so important.

A Sermon for Our Times

Andrew Klavan packs an excellent message into these few paragraphs:

I am a skilled hiker, but a week or so ago, I made a perilous error. Carelessly neglecting my clear and accurate guide, I mistook a side path for the main trail down the mountain. As I descended along the narrow track, the way became steeper and steeper until, abruptly, it ended at a sheer cliff above a long fall. Short on water, out of breath, weakened by the blistering heat, I looked up and saw my only other option was a dauntingly vertical climb back to the main trail above. My heart misgave me.

Then three words came into my mind unbidden: Don’t be afraid.

I know who speaks those words to me. I said a quick prayer to him for courage and felt myself promptly flooded with the stuff. I began the climb, and though the way was very difficult, and even dangerous once or twice, I was surprised how quickly I found myself back on the main trail, the way home.

Our country has made a similar error, and equally perilous. We have carelessly neglected our clear and accurate guide to the governance of a free people. We have gone by another way into a steeper and steeper decline. Soon, we will reach a point where the only choice is between a catastrophic fall and a long, hard, upward journey. Our hearts may tell us the climb is impossible.
Don’t be afraid.

A Rising Conservative Majority?

David Leonhardt at The Upshot, a New York Times blog, writes a column in which he speculates that today's teens may be growing increasingly conservative. Here are a few excerpts:

There was a time not so long ago when the young seemed destined to be liberal forever. Americans in their teens and 20s were to the left of their elders on social issues. They worried more about poverty. They voted strongly Democratic....

In the simplest terms, the Democrats control the White House (and, for now, the Senate) at a time when the country is struggling. Economic growth has been disappointing for almost 15 years now. Most Americans think this country is on the wrong track. Our foreign policy often seems messy and complex, at best....

To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.

“We’re in a period in which the federal government is simply not performing,” says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, the author of a recent book on generational politics, “and that can’t be good for the Democrats.”

Academic research has found that generations do indeed have ideological identities. People are particularly shaped by events as they first become aware of the world, starting as young as 10 years old, as a new analysis by the political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman notes.

In other words, young people who come of age during the Obama years, Leonhardt fears, are going to be unimpressed with liberalism and its promises of a smoothly running governmental machine and candy for everybody.

As much as I'd like for Leonhardt to be right, I'm not sure he is. The allure of government handouts and the chimeric benefits of cradle to grave security resonates with those who never stop to think about things like who'll pay for it and how it will be paid for. Nor do they give much thought to what government dependency does to the moral fiber of a society. A lot of people just want the goodies and couldn't care less where they come from. That's why conservatives, being more thoughtful, rational, and prudent, will probably always be a minority in this country.

Perpetual War

Ever since its founding in 1948 the Israelis have been fighting a defensive war against their neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Their neighbors attack and Israel responds until the attack is repulsed and their enemies lack the ability to continue. Then the world prevails upon Israel to relent, to show restraint, and retreat from the field which, of course, allows the enemy to recover, regroup, resupply, and at some future date restart the whole cycle all over again.

It seems like an exercise in futility, but this is the status quo in the Middle East and it will continue until Israel's foes, who have sworn its destruction, ultimately wear it down and destroy it. It often seems that this would not bother the West overmuch, which perversely views the stronger more civilized side in a dispute to be ipso facto the evil aggressor and oppressor. Nevertheless, the prospect of their ultimate destruction should bother Israel, one would think, unless, like the rest of the West, they've succumbed to the notion, promoted by the left for the last eighty years or so, that the civilized nations of the West just don't deserve to survive.

Perhaps it's time for Israel to create a new status quo. Perhaps it's time to eliminate Hamas in Gaza. Roger Simon at PJ Media puts it this way:

A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle. As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand. The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just...winning?

What many Israelis realize but many other Westerners seemingly don't is that radical Islam is in a state of permanent war with the world. It's been going on since the 7th century and will continue until Islam is the only religion in the world (actually it will continue beyond that as Muslims will be killing each other to decide which sect of Islam will be the only sect in the world). We will never be safe from this threat. To think that it's at an end, or that we have somehow made peace with the Islamists, is to confuse their temporary tactic of hudna with a genuine desire for peace.

The world shouts "peace, peace" but there is no peace. The Islamists don't want peace, they want total victory. That's why there's really no solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no prospect of compromise.

Talk of Impeachment Is Premature

Sarah Palin said the other day, quite rightly, I think, that if this president doesn't deserve impeachment then no president does. True, true. Mr. Obama has, inter very many alia, failed to uphold the laws he took an oath to uphold, but nevertheless I think impeachment efforts at this point would be a mistake. Pat Buchanan is correct, in my opinion, when he writes this:

Any Republican attempt at impeachment would go up against a stacked deck. And the GOP would be throwing away a winning hand for a losing one.

For while the American people have shown no interest in impeaching Obama, they are coming to believe they elected an incompetent executive and compulsive speechmaker who does not know what the presidency requires and who equates talk with action.

With the economy shrinking 3 percent in the first quarter, with Obama sinking in public approval, and with the IRS, NSA and VA scandals bubbling, why would Republicans change the subject to impeachment?

The effect would be to enrage and energize the Democratic base, bring out the African-American vote in force and cause the major media to charge the GOP with a racist scheme to discredit and destroy our first black president.

Does the GOP really want a fight on that turf, when they currently hold the high ground? If you are winning an argument, why change the subject?

If the nation is led to believe Republicans seek to gain the Senate so they can remove Barack Obama from office after a GOP-led impeachment, then Republicans are not likely to win the Senate.

It's a tough call because Republicans shouldn't be putting the nation at risk by allowing a man wholly unsuited for the office to continue to dig us into an ever deepening hole just to make it more likely that the GOP will prevail in 2016. Even so, it seems more prudent to me to view the task at hand as continuing to educate the public as to the destructive nature of Mr. Obama's policies and those of his allies in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Impeachment may come, but it should come when the overwhelming number of Americans have indicated that they want the President out, and as far as I can tell we haven't yet reached that point.

Mr. Obama is not popular, but his unpopularity shouldn't be confused with a willingness to see the first black president thrown out of office. As Buchanan points out, that's something which at this juncture, neither the media, nor the African-American community, nor the majority of Democrats would abide. Even so, there are signs that the nation might be moving in that direction. The November election results should give us some inkling of what's in the offing.