Turkey's foreign policy

The latest go around between Turkey and Israel has Turkey calling for an apology from Israel for the May 31 raid on the Turkish-flagged vessel, pay compensation, agree to a U.N. inquiry into the incident and lift the blockade of 1.6 million Palestinians living in Gaza Strip. In return for all of this Turkey offers not to “cut ties”.

The amount of compensation is unclear, the make-up of a U.N. inquiry is unclear, the nature of the ties to be cut is unclear and the wholesale lifting of the blockade will ensure an “armed to the teeth” Gazan militia.

In an earlier time, Turkey’s actions in all of this would likely constitute an act of war.

Fortunately, Turkey is dealing with a nuclear-armed state that shows remarkable constraint in the face of provocations. The U.S. asked Israel to stay out of the Gulf War and despite the rocket bombardment of Israel by Saddam Hussein, it complied with the request. One wonders if the charlatan in the White House who appears determined to set Israel adrift to appease the Muslim world would have the same success with Israel in a similar circumstance.

Anyway, it ought to be Turkey apologizing to Israel and having to explain why it permitted a ship load of Islamic radicals, bent on martyrdom to leave port for the sole purpose of provoking a military response from Israel. The only conclusion one can come to is that Turkey has long planned its break from Israel and the flotilla raid is the fig leaf it needed for legitimacy.

Turkey’s foreign policy should not be surprising to any student of the history of that country. It is best summarized by this: “Who is winning, go with them.”

At the outbreak of the First World War, Turkey wanted to sit on the sidelines in glorious neutrality until it figured out who was going to win and then it would join that side in the hope of sharing in the spoils. However, German diplomacy, in the face of British perfidy, indifference and arrogance caused the Turks to join the German and Austro-Hungarian Axis.

Had Turkey stayed out of the conflict there never would have been a disastrous Gallipoli campaign, Churchill would not have had to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lawrence of Arabia would have been an obscure Arabist, Saudi Arabia would never have been born, and Britain and France may never have ended up with the League of Nations mandate over Syria, Iraq and Palestine.

What a difference all of that might have made for the Near and Middle East.

Turkey learned from its experience and managed to stay out of the Second World War, despite pressure from Germany, until the closing months when it joined the Allied side.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey embarked on a modernization program, reforming its governmental institutions and its cultural norms to make it more “Europeanized”. It saw modern, industrial Europe and the United States as the models of the winning side and it endeavoured to be one with them.

Now Turkey has slid away from that Western embrace and is courting the Islamic world it once dominated. Having taken the measure of the results of the 40 years of Arab-Euro dialogue on the fate of Europe and Israel, having seen the United States squander its political and economic capital on mostly fruitless wars in Islamic countries, having taken the measure of Muslim-leaning Barack Hussein Obama, Turkey has decided that the winning side is an Islamic world and it wants to join it, for the spoils.

Bat Ye'or and the Arab-Euro Axis

It may seem strange, given some of the posts I have published, that I am only now getting around to reading Bat Ye'or's seminal work, Eurabia,the Euro-Arab Axis. It comes about because I had an occasion recently in Toronto to hear her speak, along with Sam Solomon (a former Muslim)about the issue of Israel. This was within a week of the incident of the Israeli military forces confronting Islamists on the Gaza flotilla.

She shocked me at this event by declaring that this was the first time she was ever invited to speak at a synagogue.

I am not a Jew, but I say shame on you Jews.

If you are to be protected by anyone and preserved as a people it is because of warriors like Bat Ye'or.

Anyway, I have not yet been able to work my way through her book, which details the pact made between the Arab states and their Muslim sympathizers to write the foreign policy of Western Europe regarding Israel through the threat to oil imports.

Speaking as a Canadian, in full light of the nonsense propagated by Barack Hussein Obama, I would put an end to NAFTA and keep our tar sands oil strictly for ourselves, and tell the Muslim world and the Americans to go to hell.

Despite the fact I am not yet finished the book, I found these paragraphs quite telling. They appear on page 87 of the paperback edition. To this point she has shown the close Arab/European dialogue, promoted mainly be France, under De Gaulle, to counter American influence. By 1980 she asserts:

Srong ties were forged between the OIC, the Arab and European states, as well as between various factions of the Left, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches. They led, under Arab threats, to Israel's demonization at all levels of European society as well as in international bodies. In fact, this Euro-Arab collusion appears mainly in Arab texts; in European sources, it is carefully disguised as a humanitarian concern for "the suffering of Palestinians abandoned by the world." Anglican Canon Kenneth Craig described this identification with the Palestinians as "to be on behalf of the people in voicing despair, so that evil is not silenced,dismissed disregarded - which is the way of untruth - but held, pilloried, taken for the evil it is." Israel's metaphysical identification with evil had to be constantly exposed by shedding light on the sufferings of those who worked for its destruction (emphasis mine).

The creation and dissemination of the image of the victimized and abandoned Palestinian was therefore of pivotal importance. The coalition of churches, mosques, of European and Islamic states, was cemented in a joint attack against four million Jews living on less than half of their historical land -- survivors of the tyranny of both (emphasis mine).

It is just a blatant attempt to sap world anger

Boy, they don't even bother trying to hide it.

In response to Israel's announcement that it is easing the blockade of goods moving into Gaza and making the list of banned goods public, Hamas had this to say:

"Hamas rejects this decision. This is an attempt to sap international anger over the blockade on the Gaza Strip,” Hamas official Ismail Radwan told Reuters by phone from Gaza.

The important delegitimizing of Israel will be derailed if Hamas cannot continue to stir the global hatred pot against the little Jewish state, and, of course, that is the most important thing of all.

The Forgotten Rachels

Israeli commandos fought it out with Islamists on board a vessel called the Rachel Corrie a week ago. It is named after an American pro-Palestinian activist who died while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a structure believed to have been hiding a smuggling tunnel in Gaza.

A Spectator journalist, Tom Gross penned a piece called The Forgotten Rachels about all the women named Rachel who have been murdered by Palestinians and whose names are not celebrated on the stage in London, or painted on the sides of ships.

Here is a link to the article.

Thanks to Mark Steyn for bringing it to my attention.

Correction:The Rachel Corrie was not the vessel involved in the shootout, it was one of the vessels in the flotilla that docked at the Israeli port. The battle occurred on the Mavi Marmara.

Random thoughts on God and religion

Whilst walking my Labrador Retriever this morning I found myself ruminating on the arguments for God. I wondered if my dog is cognizant of God. I think not.

As I walked through the forest I considered the old question of whether a tree that falls in the forest when nobody is present makes a sound. The correct answer is no. Sound requires something to propagate waves in the air and something to receive those waves and interpret them. Both things are essential for the existence of a sound.

So, here is the thing.

If no humans existed, ever, would there still be an argument to be made for the existence of God? If yes, then who would make it? Does the existence of God depend entirely on the existence of humans?

The Abrahamic religions tell us that God created humans to worship and obey him.

We know that the Universe is about 10 billion years old. We know the Earth is about 4 billion years old. We know that modern humans first appeared about 100,000 years ago. We believe on the best available evidence that the modern human brain functionally capable of contemplating God first came into being about 50,000 years ago.

So, here is the thing.

What caused God to create a creature capable of knowing of his existence 50,000 year ago? Why not 100,000 years ago? Why not 100 million years ago? Pick any time frame. What was the burning need in God to have a creature capable of contemplating him and worshipping him and why did this need arise only 50,000 years ago?

Questions. Always with the questions.

And here is another one.

We know that Islam discourages the graven images of humans, and that Muslims get very angry at depictions of Mohammed. Yet I have never heard of Muslims creating a ruckus over depictions of Allah, of which there are many in the history of art in Western civilization.

Why is that? How is that Mohammed takes precedence over God? Why does he get to have urban riots in his name because of pictorial representations, but not God? I was in the Sistine Chapel a couple of months ago and noticed a few Muslims gazing up at Michaelangelo’s painting of the Almighty. It did not seem to ruffle them.

And yet another one.

This one I have to attribute to Melanie Phillips in The Spectator.

Why all the fuss over the Jewish settlements in the lands claimed by the Palestinians? Just take the necessary steps to inaugurate the state of Palestine and let the Jews who live there become citizens of the Palestinian state. After all, the Jewish state has a significant number of Arab citizens. If the settlers don’t like that prospect, and I am confident they would not, then they can move to Israel and free up the settlements for Arabs.

In short, it is a self-correcting problem and making into the kind of deal-breaking condition precedent to peace is a red herring.

What's this war for?

In a recent column by Tarek Fatah in The National Post, he says we have lost the war in Afghanistan, we should acknowledge defeat and we should bring home our troops now before any more of them are killed.

I don’t agree with him.

I normally have a lot of time for Fatah. He is one of a handful of Muslims who calls for the reform of the religion. For his efforts, he and his family have been threatened with death by other Muslims.

Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, a book that has been reasonably well-received by the public and was a runner-up in the 2009 Donner Prize for the best books on Canadian public policy. The book discredits the notion of a world-wide Caliphate from an historical perspective.

However, this column is the most defeatist I have ever read. If he had written this kind of thing in 1942 about the war with the Axis Powers, he probably would have been locked up for sedition.

Fatah says:

We have lost the war. The Islamist jihadis have won it. We must acknowledge defeat and bring our troops home.

In a war between those who desire death and those who treasure their RRSPs and IRAs, the outcome is predictable. Canadian soldiers are professional, but mission-less armies have never fared well on the battlefield. American soldiers, who enlist primarily with the objective of obtaining a college degree, will never be able to defeat their counterparts, who view their freshman year as starting in paradise on the banks of rivers of milk and honey surrounded by 72 virgins.

This is hyperbole, of course, because there are many Americans who did not enlist for a free ride into college, but to avenge 9/11 and to do what the American military exists to do; i.e., keep the country secure.

We are told that we are involved in an “asymmetrical” war and that different strategies and tactics need to be employed if we are to “win” it. Asymmetrical is just a fancy name for guerrilla warfare and guerilla wars have been won; the British in South Africa, Kenya and Malaya, as examples. The more recent one is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka.

However, those conflicts were carried out in confined geographical territories, where the combatants on the other side did not have easy access to outside material support, or had little room to maneuver, and where the victorious party could effectively bottle them up in less and less defendable territory.

The problem with the war against radical Islam is that it recruits its “soldiers” from everywhere, including our own country, and it can supply them from a bottomless armory of small arms and explosives, available mainly through the helpful manufacturing and distribution by the very governments who send their armies to fight these zealots.

So, just as the military needs to think differently about how it combats non-state agents of a death cult, we, the people, need to consider redefining what we mean by defeat and victory. Sometimes a victory is merely keeping somebody at bay.

Did we experience a victory over the Soviet Union like we did over Germany and Japan? Clearly not. But we defeated it just the same. We contained its expansion and it eventually imploded.

That is how we need to think about victory with respect to radical Islam. Keep it off balance, bottle it up, interdict it wherever it appears, and discredit it at all times. As long as Islam lives, the death cult will never go away, but it can be contained and its harmful effects minimized.

I agree with Fatah that we should bring home the troops, but only when our commitment to Afghanistan ends in 2011. The Islamists will crow about it, but we accomplished what we set out to do which was to disrupt al Qaeda and chase away the Taliban government.

In the future, we should not set ourselves lofty goals of bringing democracy to these backwater Islamic states. We should just interfere enough to derail any emerging threats and then let them sort out their own messes. The strategy is containment and successful containment is a victory. Had we identified this goal early on, we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan long ago and not found ourselves in the current quagmire of endless warfare.

Israel employs such a strategy with its neighbours. It fights them when necessary, inflicts a military beating, without complete conquest, and then goes back to the status quo. It is instructive that Lebanon’s belligerent Nasrallah declared war on Israel in 2006 in support of Hamas’s dustup with the Jewish state and got such a bloody nose from that encounter that he stayed well away from its re-run in 2008.

Although I disagree with Fatah about claiming a defeat and running home now, I do agree with this sentiment.

In the U. S., a bumbling President who knows the threat of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology very well still bends over backwards and welcomes the bearers of this doctrine into his inner circle.

Imagine fighting the U. S. S. R. without confronting the ideology of Stalinism. Could we have won? Not a chance. Today we are fighting Islamist jihad-ism, yet neither Obama nor the British PM nor Harper or Ignatieff dare utter one word against the ideology that attacked us all on 9/11. So what is this war for?

We have to have a clearer idea of the enemy we are fighting and who our real friends and allies are in the Islamic world.

Prisoner number 88794 - languishing for a whole week in an immigration detention centre. The horror!

The following letter is reproduced from The Free Gaza Movement” website, and now appears to be in circulation on the Internet -- it first came to my attention that way. My comments will appear below the italicized text.

Letter from an Israeli Jail, by Cynthia McKinney

Saturday, 04 July 2009 13:47 Last Updated on Sunday, 05 July 2009 15:30 Written by Free Gaza Team

This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel's Operation ‘Cast Lead' [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water ... It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream ... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better ... The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap. Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I'm lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?

Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

Cynthia McKinney is controversial politician who is not shy about thumbing her nose at authority. She pushed her way past a security guard on Capitol Hill and allegedly assaulted him. She later apologized for her actions. Her father, who was also a politician, was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Georgia and was reported to have made anti-Semitic remarks, to the effect, that the “Jews buy everybody”. I get the feeling she is a black Mel Gibson.

It is clear that long before she went to the Middle East she had her mind made up with respect to who is right and who is wrong in this conflict, and her mind has not been unduly influenced in that respect by a short stint in Israel’s immigration detention centre.

She is a great lover of conspiracy theories and was one of the early ones to jump on the “9/11 was an inside job” bandwagon. She later accused the authorities, in the wake of Katrina, of summarily executing 5,000 prisoners and secretly burying the bodies.

She wrote with approval to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after New York Mayor Guilani gave him back his $10 million donation when the Prince proceeded to lecture on U.S. foreign policy. McKinney focussed on the accusations of human rights breaches by Israel. Imagine, sympathizing with a leading Saudi on human rights violations. Perhaps Ms. McKinney should go to Arabia and rent a car and do a driving tour of the country. Then she will be able to compare the inside of a Saudi jail with that of Israel’s.

I am not to sure what to make of her comments about Ethiopian cellmates. Apparently, they are black. Who knew? They also are stateless, hence their housing and three squares a day courtesy of the Israeli taxpayers. Ethiopians are Christians, and apparently they are under some delusion (which McKinney quaintly calls dreams) that Israel is the homeland for Christians. Nope. It is the homeland for Jews.

It strikes me that the energetic Ms. McKinney has a lot to offer the United States in terms of working hard to find a solution to America’s illegal immigration policies and perhaps would be more effective at that than lecturing a foreign state on its immigration policies. But, then, that is what American politicians do best, telling other people how to live their lives.

There is an internationally approved naval blockade (also approved by the Palestinian Authority), managed by Israel, to prevent arms flow into Gaza. Twice Ms. McKinney’s vessel tried to run the blockade. On the second journey, the captain provided false information to the Cyprus port authorities as to the vessel’s destination (claiming Egypt), which secured port clearance for the departure, something that would have been denied if Gaza had been listed as the destination.

This is a woman who doesn’t like Jews, doesn’t like Zionists, doesn’t like Israel, and doesn’t respect authority as a matter of course. It is clear that the whole thing was staged as a publicity event. She wasn’t detained for carrying crayons to children; she was detained for blockade running. Until the Israeli navy apprehended the vessel and searched it, they could not be sure it was not carrying weapons. There was nothing done by Israel that was illegal. The same cannot be said for her.

She has been released by the Israelis and they have offered to deliver her humanitarian aid by land. Other than being temporarily detained, she has not been harmed in any way, and has the right to avail herself of the Israeli legal system to defend her (yes Virginia, unlike Hamas-run Gaza, Israel has a fully functioning legal system that even the Palestinians appreciate).

What I would recommend for Ms. McKinney’s next big adventure is delivering boxes of crayons to deprived black children in Darfur who are being systematically slaughtered by Arabs. I wonder how she will enjoy her experience being detained by the Jajanweed. They are not quite as punctilious about human rights as the Israelis, nor even the Saudis.

Geert Wilders: "Europe is at the crossroads once again. We either choose the road to darkness or the road to freedom."

Our good friend, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian with the 1950's hairstyle and the retinue of bodyguards, has been in the news again lately. The recent elections to the European Union saw a sharp turn away from the multi-cult, politically correct, socialists to the more European-centred, nationalist parties.

Wilders and his party did exceptionally well and he was recently celebrating it in a speech in Denmark. Go to this site for the full text.

Here are some highlights that caught my attention:

Why is it good news that the socialists lost by such a margin?

Let me answer this myself. It’s good news because socialists are the most inveterate cultural relativists in Europe. They regard the Islamic culture of backwardness and violence as equal to our Western culture of freedom, democracy and human rights. In fact, it is the socialists who are responsible for mass immigration, Islamization and general decay of our cities and societies. It is the socialists who are responsible for the fact that cities such as Rotterdam, Marseille and Malmö seem to be situated in Eurabia rather than in Europe.

And they are even proud of it.

Our Western elite, whether they are politicians, journalists or judges, have lost their way completely. All sense of reality has vanished. All common sense has been thrown to the wind. They take all efforts to deny the things that take place in front of our eyes, and deny everything that is so obviously seen by everyone else.
They won’t stand firm on any issue.

Their cultural relativism affects absolutely everything up to the point where they no longer see the difference between good and evil, or between nonsense and logical common sense. Everything is pushed into a grey area, a foggy marsh without beginning or end. The only moral standard they still seem to apply is the question whether or not it is approved by Muslims. Everything Muslims disapprove, they disapprove too.

On the matter of the cost to the treasury of mass migration, Wilders threw out these figures:

According to the Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, mass immigration has to date cost the Dutch taxpayer more than one hundred billion Euros. According to the Danish national bank, every Danish Muslim immigrant costs the Danish state more than 300,000 Euros. A Swedish economist has calculated that mass immigration costs the Swedish taxpayer twenty-seven billion dollars annually. In Norway a warning has been issued to the effect that the proceeds from North Sea oil will have to be spent entirely on mass immigration, while in France official figures have been published suggesting that mass immigration is reducing growth in the French economy by two-thirds. In other words, mass immigration, demographic developments and Islamization are certainly partly causes of Europe’s steadily increasing impoverishment and decay.

Of course Wilders doesn’t believe it is possible for the Muslim population of Europe to truly integrate with Europeans and he pointed out that this is not a new discovery by citing this 1959 statement of Charles de Gaulle:

“Those who recommend integration must be considered pea-brained even if they are scholars and scientists. Just try mixing oil and vinegar. Then shake the bottle. After a moment the two substances will separate again. Do you really believe French society could absorb ten million Muslims, who would be twenty million tomorrow and forty million the day after? In fact, my own village would no longer be Colombey-les-deux-Églises but would rather come to be known as Colombey-les-deux-mosques.”

I also have come to the same conclusion as his depiction of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict having less to do with a squabble over some crappy desert lands, but a war rooted in religion and race.

Islam forces Israel to fight. The so called ‘Middle East conflict’ is not at all a conflict about land. It is not about some inches of land in Gaza, Judea or Samaria. It is a conflict about ideologies, it is a battle between freedom and Islam, a battle between good and evil, to Islam the whole of Israel is occupied territory. To Islam Tel Aviv and Haifa are settlements too.

Israel is the only democracy in the entire Middle-East. Israel is an oasis of enlightment, whereas the rest of the Middle-East is covered by the black veil of the night.

A child's new year's wish

This is a picture from a pro-Hamas "peace" rally in Melbourne, Australia, on January 18. Sweet little thing. Probably doesn't have a clue what the sign means, but, give her 15 more years and her burqua-clad mother's guidance, she'll get it.

And yet another look at proportionality

One of Canada's best columnists has some historical insight into proportionality.

Proportional response

Here is a perfect example of what I was musing about in my last post. The writer of this piece is Michael Byers, a far left, and in my opinion, a hair short of being classified as a wingnut, university professor from lotusland (B.C.). Maybe it's something in the water on the west coast.

He writes often on the subject of war and what I have gleaned from reading him is that his operational bias (we all have one) is that war itself is a crime. He sent a letter to the International Court in the Hague asking that Canada be investigated for war crimes in Afghanistan.

Now war is a terrible thing and ought not to be initiated lightly. As one famous American General put it, "It is a good thing war is so terrible, else we may become overly fond of it." But the action is not itself a crime.

We find Byers waxing on about "proportionality" and how Israel is not practicing that because: the IDF is shelling and bombing in densely populated districts; the IDF is using white phosphorus shells; the IDF has hit deliberately U.N. assets; the IDF does not consider the possibility of civilian casulties when it strikes. He also dismisses the years of rocketing of Israel, contenting himself with only the attacks that have occurred since the end of the ceasefire.

If Byers wrote the rules of war in accordance with foregoing, Israel would have no defence.

What Byers doesn't say is that there is no evidence that white phosphorus has been used on human targets -- believe me, if it had, we would certainly have heard about it by now. Israel says it uses it to illuminate targets. One would think that a guy who is passionate about proportionality would endorse such a use rather than decry it, since accurate targeting would clearly reduce the possibility of civilian casulties.

Byers does not consider the new, smart weaponry used by Israel, that can look through walls of buildings and that can take out a building without seriously damaging the nearby structures. He sucks and blows at the same time: the IDF is so good at targeting that it can murder U.N. personnel; and, at the same time they are so careless with their bombing and shelling that they kill civilians indiscriminately. Well, which is it?

Byers might be surprised to learn that soldiers die from something called "friendly fire", an accident of war in which your own troops are killed by you. The fact is that once a war is launched people who ought not to get killed will. Some factors simply cannot be controlled to the precision that Byers advocates -- war is not a video game.

George Jonas says proportionality means what it takes to stop the rockets and mortars falling on Israel. In short, the right to self-defence means the right to stop the enemy from attacking you and if that proves to be bloody rather than neat and precise, then so be it.

Anything less is not a right of self-defence.

Given the population density of Gaza, it is remarkable that the death toll for Gazas after more then 3 weeks of sustained fighting is only about 1,000. By comparison, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 and the campaign took 19 days. In that period, 9,200 combatants were killed and 7,300 civilians lost their lives.

I don't believe Israel is going over the top here and if the U.N. doesn't want to risk its personnel, it should get the hell out of Gaza until the shooting stops. It does that in other hotspots in the world.

A few thoughts relative to Israel and Hamas and why Israeli tactics work

Israel hinted this morning that its military action against Hamas may soon be winding down. So, before it fades from the headlines, I thought I would venture a few thoughts and questions.

Smuggling tunnels

These seem to be as much a focus of Israeli military action as rocket sites and individual Hamas leaders. Since the only other country bordering Gaza is Egypt one must assume these tunnels go under the wall that Egypt built to keep out the Palestinians. The treaty between Israel and Egypt requires Egypt to patrol and keep that border secure, specifically to prevent weapons from entering Gaza. Clearly, either Egyptian officials are incompetent, or are being bribed to look the other way, or they are actively complicit in aiding the Palestinians in acquiring rockets and other munitions. Why does no one ever point a finger at Egypt and its responsibiities?

Proportional response

This hoary proposition raised its head during the Hezbollah battle in 2006 and we have heard it occasionally in this one. The allegation is that Israel is over the top in responding to Hamas's repeated rocket barrages. These have been going on for years and I have heard various figures, 5,500 or 6,500 such attacks. I wish someone making this accusation would actually follow it up with examples of what would be considered a proportional response: an equal number of killings, an equal number of rocket attacks (with appropriate pro rata adjustments for the accuracy of the Israeli rockets), or what. People should be banned from using this expression until they can explain clearly what it means in reference to Israel's wars.

Collective punishment

We are repeatedly assured that Israel is guilty of collectively punishing the Palestinians for the sins of Hamas. Without getting into the obvious issues of an enemy that hides itself amongst the non-combatants and the problem posed by considering the election results that brought Hamas to power (80% voted for Hamas), one wonders why no reflection is ever made of the impact of terrorist activity perpetrated by organizations like Hamas, aided and abetted by those who support them, but are not of them.

When suicide bombers blow themselves up on buses, subways, aircraft, and in buildings, shopping areas, restaurants, night clubs, etc., they are inflicting collective punishment on the larger society that is victimized by such activity. Airline travel is a horror show today mainly because of Palestinian collective punishment (highjackings) in the 1970s. The cost of the Olympic games is about double because of the requirement to keep Israeli atheletes safe so that there are no repeats of the collective punishment dished out by Palestinians at the 1972 games in Munich. When the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress decrees that every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 is a legitimate target for murder by Palestinians he is talking about collective punishment.

Hezbollah's so-called victory

The conventional wisdom is that Hezbollah came out the winner in the 33 day war with Israel in 2006. It won only in the sense that it was not destroyed. Israel lost only because it set unwinnable goals for itself at the beginning and had to change course part way through. The fact is that Hezbollah was handed a terrible beating by Israel. It lost about one-third of its trained fighters.

What military organization in the world could effectively carry on a war with losses of 33% of its soldiers in the first 30 days? That would would be the equivalent of the United States losing 500,000 soldiers in its invasion of Iraq (it only committed 150,000 to that venture). Total U.S. losses in three and one-half years of combat in WWII amounted to 400,000.

This is why we have only seen a couple feeble attempts by perhaps rogue elements in Hezbollah to attack Israel this time out. Hezbollah certainly has the fire power, but it doesn't have the will.

Some of my friends like to argue with me that Israel's tactic don't work. Well, they worked to forge peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and they have now caused Hezbollah to have second thoughts about taking on the Jewish state.

Within the limiting context of what peace is achievable in the Middle East, I would say they work.

I guess I just got my answer

In my December 29 posting I raised the question of how long it would be until Hezbollah began to mix it up with Israel. It took them just 10 days from when I asked. The Toronto Star story reports that the Lebanese government is looking to see who did this -- like it doesn't know!

The comfortable pulpit of a public service union leader

Can there be any better evidence of the fat and complacency that infects a union leadership than the example set by Sid Ryan, the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Ontario? He is fed, housed and clothed on the backs of the membership dues paid by more than 200,000 public service employees, who might, if given the choice -- which, by Ontario law, they are not -- find a better use for some of the dues they pay to that union.

Mr. Ryan is back in the news declaring CUPE’s opposition to the state of Israel. He is initiating a resolution with the union executive that would call upon post-secondary academic institutions in Ontario to shun Israeli academics unless those Israelis are on record as condemning the war being waged by their country against Hamas. This is not his first outing into the politics of the Middle East. When Israel was battling Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ryan got CUPE to pass a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli goods and services.

The remarkable thing this time, however, is that this comes during the worst worldwide recession this country has faced since the Dirty Thirties. Everywhere, businesses are laying-off workers, union or otherwise, but especially union. Elsewhere, there are dark hints that unions might have to roll back gains they have made in the past few years.

You would think that a union leader should be sticking to his knitting at a time ofgreat economic and employment peril and would be issuing statements that would give comfort to his membership. The last thing you would expect is to find the media full of stories and interviews with a union leader who is occupying his time fretting about an intractable political dilemma thousands of miles away that has little direct impact on Canada and no impact on the individual dues-paying members of the union.

Now, we all understand that unions do more than just ensuring job security, benefits and wages for their members. They get involved in social policies and politics. For the most part, this is not unreasonable. Union support for universal health, universal education, and universal pension plans, minimum wages and minimum severances are all things that have legitimacy because they also enhance the living standards of the union membership. But how do banning goods and services and academics from Israel provide advantage to CUPE union members?

Why would Ryan feel so comfortable in stepping out in this fashion from his proper role of looking after his union membership?

Part of the answer I have already given. His standard of living is ensured by a law requiring the compulsory payment of union dues. Secondly, only a small number of union members ever involve themselves in the politics of the union. Union leaders tend to be big frogs in small ponds. Thirdly, this is a public service union – meaning it represents civil servants. The last time Ontario suffered a debilitating recession, nobody in the Ontario public service got laid off, although they did have to take some unpaid days, so Ryan’s membership is pretty well secured without his involvement.

Perhaps the next time CUPE elections role around, union members will ask some searching questions about what Ryan’s Israel hobby horse has to do with the members’ welfare. Perhaps the members should be asking for a reduction in dues comparable to the time/money wasted by Ryan and his associates dabbling in Middle Eastern wars.

The significance of honour codes

Every time Israel and its enemies go at it, out come the cheerleaders for the combatants.

Generally, I find those that support the Palestinian side are left-leaning liberal types, many of whom are infected with a utopian world-view that posits that all deadly conflicts can be resolved by reasonable people sitting around a table and discussing their differences with a view to honestly trying to resolve them.

Not in their universe are notions of the overweening power of emotions, history, tribalism, clan claims, or religion. Since these people eschew power relationships, it does not register with them that many people in the world view well-meaning attempts at amelioration, negotiation and compromise as weakness – weakness that is not to be rewarded by concessions but by ruthless exploitation.

One of the more interesting books I have read this Christmas holiday is The Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. He reviews the popular concept of people succeeding in life by dint of simply working hard and being smart. He demonstrates that there are many external factors that will determine the chances for success that are not controllable and have little to do with individual effort.

In one chapter he discusses the famous family feuds that left a bloody history in the Appalachian mountain region of the United States throughout most of the 19th century and well into the early 20th. He attributes these to the region of the world from which the immigrants who settled Appalachia derived. For the most part they were Scotch-Irish and they came from a culture that for centuries lived by clan codes of honour. Personal insults to these people required acts of revenge, including murder.

He says that modern psychological studies carried out in universities confirm the idea that honour codes are nearly genetic for such people, even today. The point of this chapter was to show how legacy codes, at buried emotional levels, can still impact our behaviours. And this is amongst the rational, reasonable people of North America.

When I read this I reflected on my own life. Like anybody else, I have been subjected to my share of insults from other people. Generally, I am a pretty level-headed sort of fellow. I have been accused of being naïve or of advancing stupid ideas, and a host of other unpleasant things, even being called a racist. But the only one that I was never able to simply laugh off was an insult that impugned my integrity – like one that stated or implied I am a liar, or less than an honourable person. Such an accusation causes me to immediately feel enormous waves of anger. I nearly lost a job because of this reaction.

One of my sons was getting into a lot of fights with other students during his high school years. He would go off the school grounds at lunchtime and square off with somebody, while his classmates egged him on. He won all these fights. I became concerned when I learned about it and had discussions with him to try to persuade him to desist. What I found was perceived honour code violations led him to combat. Worse, he would challenge people who impugned the integrity of his friends.

Gladwell’s stuff made sense to me, because on my father’s side, I am of Scotch-Irish ancestry. My grandfather immigrated to Canada from Belfast.

How does this relate to Israel versus the Arabs?

The Jews are normally considered to be a rational and reasonable people. Much of our modern western culture is derived from Jewish precepts, both moral and legal.

So when Israelis go to war, a certain part of our society thinks that they are acting immorally, that they are betraying the liberal ethos. The reality is that the Israelis are facing enemies comprised of tribal people who live by honour codes and for whom anything insulting requires retaliation. When you add in the notion that power is respected and conciliation is not, and top that off with the religious ideas that the land belongs to the people of one religion and not the other, one can easily see that the conditions for reasonable negotiation of differences simply do not exist.

Israel understands their enemies even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

One wonders how long it will be before Hezbollah starts mixing it up with Israel. The last dustup with Hamas brought the Lebanon-based “Party of God” into the war within a week. Since the last fight, Hezbollah has been re-building its rocket potential.

Iran pulls the strings for both Hamas and Hezbollah and there is a political power struggle underway in that country. I cannot see it being to the political advantage of the current Iranian president not to unleash Hezbollah on Israel. Iranian clerics have already declared acts of violence against Israel by Muslims to be martyrdom for those who die in the service of Allah.

I always find it interesting how the people in the streets of cities far from the conflict react. Despite the ongoing intentional provocation of Israel by those who would see the Jewish state destroyed, there are never any street protests. It is only when Israel fights back that we see such moral outrage demonstrated by street marches.

The Paradox

Now here is a statement that puzzles me. In my January post regarding Israel and other Muslims states, I received a comment from Tossing Pebbles in the Stream to the effect that Israel should be held to a higher moral standard because it purports to be a secular, liberal democracy. I have heard this kind of utterance before, but what is interesting to me is that the blogger in this instance is an ordained minister in the Christian faith.

If I understand people who believe in the existence of a sky-god, they also believe that this god made mankind and that this god's laws are superior to any laws made by mere mortal man. It would stand to reason that a state that governed itself in accordance with god's laws should be held to higher moral standard than a mere liberal democracy. However, if you examine the human rights record of some states that govern themselves in accordance with god's laws (e.g. Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia) you would be forced to conclude that a liberal democracy is far superior.

Israel and Genocide

חדשות NRG - A Homemade Genocide: "There are those that claim that Arab and Muslim states are immune from criticism, because they are not democratic, but Israel is more worthy of criticism because it has democratic pretences. Claims like this are Orientalism at its worst. The covert assumption is that the Arabs and the Muslims are the retarded child of the world. They are allowed. It is not only Orientalism. It is racism.

The Arabs and the Muslims are not children and they are not retarded. Many Arabs and Muslims know this and write about it. They know that only an end to the self-deception and a taking of responsibility will lead to change. They know that as long as the west treats them as unequal and irresponsible it is lending a hand not only to a racist attitude, but also, and mainly, to a continuation of their mass murder.

The genocide that Israel is not committing, that is completely libelous, hides the real genocide, the silenced genocide that Arabs and Muslims are committing mainly against themselves. The libel has to stop so as to look at reality. It is in the interest of the Arabs and the Muslims. Israel pays in image. They pay in blood. If there is any morality left in the world, this should be in the interest of whoever has a remaining drop of it in him. And should it happen, it will be small news for Israel, and great news, far greater news, for Arabs and Muslims."

This is the epilogue from a long piece by an Israeli journalist, Ben Dror Yemini, published on the Internet at this website.

It expresses a viewpoint that I have held for some time: the liberal-leftists who condemn Israel and praise the Palestinians, who condemn the Americans but ignore the Arab responsibility in the Muslim versus Muslim civil war raging in Iraq, think the Arabs and Muslims are childlike. I believe that they do not understand that such a view of Muslims and Arabs is racist.

With respect to the rest of Mr. Yemini's article, he has assembled, from a number of public sources, a catalogue of war deaths in the past 60 years. He invites us to compare the record over the same period of time, particularly the Muslim record and that of European powers, with Israel's, and asks us why Israel should be saddled with accusations of genocide when one looks at the "proportionate" picture. Leftist-liberals love that word proportion -- if only they would actually undertake the exercise instead of predertiming the outcome.

I will give you a summary of his statistics, but first a word about them. He gives ranges because obviously it is very difficult to determine exact numbers of deaths under war condition and the public sources differ (for a recent example, the U.N. now claims 36,000 Iraqis died last year as a result of the civil war, but the government of Iraq only claims 22,000). I have used the higher end of the scale because I believe there are always more victims of war than the official counts.

Israel: over its 60 years of life, the state has fought several wars with neighbours and suffered two insurgencies called Intafadas. The total number of Muslims killed by Israelis in this period is 60,000.

Algeria: France killed around 1,000,000 Muslims. Muslims killing other Muslims since independence amounts to another 100,000.

Sudan: Muslims have killed about 3,000,000 other Muslims, Christians and animists. The killing continues unabated.

Afghanistan: Russians killed 1,500,000 Muslims, and civil wars (Muslims versus Muslims) since have claimed another 1,000,000. The war continues.

Somalia: Muslims have killed 500,000 other Muslims. The war continues.

Bangladesh: Muslims from Pakistan killed 2,000,000 Muslims in this country.

Indonesia: Muslims killed 400,000 alleged communists and another 200,000 East Timorese.

Iraq: During Saddam's reign, including the war with Iran and Kuwait, 2,000,000 Iraqis died, and nearly 1,000,000 Iranians died. After Saddam about 200,000 Iraqis have died, including around 40,000 resulting from the American led invasion. The Muslim versus muslim killing continues as an ever increasing pace.

Lebanon: 130,000 people died in two civil wars between Muslims and Christians, including 18,000 killed by Israelis.

Yemen: Muslims killed muslims to the tune of 150,000 during civil wars and thousands have since died in riots.

Jordan: Former King Hussein killed 25,000 Palestinians.

Chad: With a population 50% Muslim, so far 30,000 have died in civil war.

Kosovo: 10,000 Muslims killed in ethnic cleansing.

Tajikistan: Civil war claimed 50,000.

Syria: Hafez Assad killed 20,000 Muslims in one city.

Iran: Thousands died in the revolution, about 10,000 of whom were Kurds.

Turkey: 20,000 Kurds killed.

Uganda: Idi Amin claimed to be Muslim and 300,000 Ugandans died.

So the next time you hear somebody going on about how Israel is the most dangerous nation and engages in genocide, or you see, hear or read one of those Muslim happy face stories (i.e., Islam is a religion of love and peace, the Koran forbids Muslims to kill each other, etc.) keep these stats in mind and do the "proportional math."