Who Stands for the Jews?

Everybody loved the Jews when they were helpless victims slaughtered in the Holocaust. And everyone loved them as plucky underdogs against the Arabs in 1948 and 1956 and 1973. But the left has no room in its heart for people who aren’t progressive or who aren’t victims. And so the left of Europe has slowly moved towards an open support of the Palestinians. They must be right because they are victims.

That’s how you get to demanding “proportionate” response to Hezbollah border attacks and rocket attacks. But as Suzanne Fields points out:

Restraint is what you show in disputes with rational people who are willing to compromise, who will give up something in return for something. But restraint can buy time for your uncompromising enemies to enable them to plot the ambush to kill you later.

Hezbollah and its master in Tehran do not believe in compromise. They believe in the elimination of Israel.

Throughout history, the biggest problem the Jews have had is trying to figure out who their friends were—at least for the moment.

The question in the United States is: how much longer can American Jews afford to vote for a party whose leading presidential candidate once embraced the wife of a terrorist. And how much longer can American Jews keep voting for a party that is about to kick out a Jewish United States Senator because he is insufficiently opposed to the War on Terror.

The clock is ticking and the hour is getting late.

Because the question is: How soon with the left turn from its veiled opposition to Israel to frank and open anti-Semitism?

Public Opinion on Lebanon

After the shock of the new Mideast War we are beginning to see public opinion forming in the pronouncements of the opinion makers. In Europe, of course, the watchword is “disproportionate” as in Israel’s response to border violations and rocket attacks on its citizens.

But in the US there is a different dynamic developing. There is the “arc of Shia radicalism” argument, suggested by Walid Phares, in which the Iranians are building an arc of Shia radicalism from Tehran to Beirut with Hezbollah holding down the right flank.

Then there is Michael Barone observing that the rules have changed in this Mideast War because there is now, after the withdrawal from South Lebanon and Gaza, no excuse for the “land for peace” argument. Israel’s two enemies want to destroy it. Period.

A lot of people are panicking about the strength of Iran and Hezbollah. But Peter Brookes wonders if it is Syria that is panicking. “Syria,” he writes, ”will not be invited to attend this Wednesday's Rome conference on Lebanon.”

Damascus is, in actuality, desperate. It is becomes increasingly marginalized in this Middle East crisis by both the United States and other Arab nations, and may have little to no say in resolving the current Lebanese conflict. This would be a serious blow to Damascus' interests-and more painfully, its ego.

Imagine that. Condi going to the Middle East with cards to play against Syria and Iran.

Suppose that Israel succeeded in defanging Hezbollah, and suppose Syria actually offered substantial concessions to get into the game.

Well, you never know. Justs because CNN and Al-Jazeera are showing mayhem and disaster 24/7 doesn’t mean that, behind the scenes, there really is mayhem and disaster. It just means that they are filling the TV screen with ruined buildings and frightened, wounded children. Because that is what they do.

Anyone for "Mongolian Ping Pong?"

I have seldom been so delighted by a movie as “Mongolian Ping Pong.” It’s a delightful story of a Mongolian boy whose father sends him down from the yurt to dip a bucket of water in the river. And what does he spy in the river, but a round white thing floating along. What is it? Grandma thinks that it is the treasure of the water spirits.

This Mongol seven-year-old, descendant of the Great Khan no doubt, is already a fine horseman, and he and his two friends get into a lot of adventure and trouble with their parents as the movie unfolds—as any decent kids with a spark of spirit should do.

There are spectacular shots of the steppe and its endless grasslands, and they are long shots with people riding into them or walking off as the mood takes them.

The grassy steppe, remember, goes right across Asia from Hungary to the Pacific Ocean. That’s why Genghis Khan and his merry men were able to conquer the whole of Asia. So long as they kept to the steppe their horses had grass to eat, and as long as the horses were fed they could keep invading. That is a big deal for an army because horses eat about ten pounds of grass a day while a soldier needs only one pound of food each day.

But what is most poignant about the movie is that these Mongol kids seem to have the whole steppe to ride around in and get up to mischief. What American kid has such freedom?

Of course, all good things must come to an end. At seven the kid has to go off to boarding school in the city.

Two Views of Hezbollah

Which is it? Is Hezbollah a homegrown political movement that has organized the downtrodden Shia of Lebanon into a political force, as Bronwen Maddox and others propose? Or is it a overweening satrapy of Iran and Syria, a force of disorder in a weak and suffering land of Lebanon, as Fouad Ajami writes?

What is clear is the Hezbollah has had a ton of money from Iran. You don’t build all that military infrastructure on the benevolence of strangers. And now Hezbollah is in a full-out war with Israel.

Write Maddox et al,

Has Sheikh Nasrallah miscalculated? Many assume that in seizing Israeli soldiers he hoped to win the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, as Hezbollah had done before.

...

But Israel may have also have made a misjudgment. It does not want to withdraw without success, but more fighting will kill more civilians, radicalise more Lebanese and test Israelis’ nerves and the patience of its allies.

In the opinion of Ajami,

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin.

Right now the Europeans are singing the song of Israeli “disproportion.” After another week President Bush may find it hard to allow Israel to clean up its northern border and give its people the right to live free of rockets from Lebanon courtesy of Sheikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah.

The 100 mpg Car That Isn't

Our liberal media friends are getting all excited about the birth of the 100 miles per gallon car. There are even people driving around with stickers advertising their triple digit gas sippers. Here’s a characteristic gushy article on the topic from MSNBC.

But wait a minute. These gas sipping miracles aren’t really getting 100 mpg. If their owners were corporate advertisers they would be getting sued for false advertising.

This phoney-baloney way to get to 100 mpg relies on buying an expensive conversion kit, including more of those expensive metal-hydride batteries, and plugging your car into the electric outlet. You don’t really get 100 mpg from the total energy input into the car. You get 100 mpg on the gasoline you buy, augmented by “free” power from your home electric outlet. Only you get to see the cost of the free power on your electric bill.

You could say that you are saving because you are charging the car using off-peak power during the night. But if you are a liberal environmentalist you do not believe in market prices, you just look at the difference in overall energy use.

Let us look at that. The key is to think about losses.

If you are charging your hybrid at home then you start with coal. There are losses at the generating plant, say 30 percent. Then there are losses in electrical transmission, say 15 percent. Then there are losses in charging your battery, say 20 percent. Of course, you are saving because you are not paying road fuel taxes.

If you are running a hybrid then you are saving from the smaller gasoline engine (if you have a Prius; Camry and Highlander hybrid owners forget it) and from the energy saved by recapturing energy in regenerative braking, about 50 percent. But you have the energy losses in charging the battery, which are substantial.

And of course if you have converted your hybrid into a plug-in hybrid it has cost you something north of $10,000. Try amortizing that over the life of the car.

OK. Now let us do the math, with our handy-dandy energy price calculator.

(Calculator omitted)

If you put “3.00” into the gasoline price field you will see that it is equivalent in energy to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. How many of you folks out there are paying more than 8 cents per kilowatt hour to your electric utility?

Just checking. Because you see, if the price of gasoline goes back down to, oh, $2.00 per gallon, then the 100 mpg car isn’t going to look too good, is it?

The Black Divide

This week President Bush finally spoke at the NAACP convention and received, according to reports, a polite reception. The delegates especially liked it when he announced his support for extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Did the president go out of politeness or out of political calculation? According to Harry Jackson there is an emerging split in black America, one that puts African Americans in play politically for the first time in forty years.

The split was made public on June 27 before the national media. As a result, writes Jackson, the pastor of New Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Maryland, the occasion

marked a watershed moment for the black religious community in America. The Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery and about 100 others decided to attack the motives and moral integrity of the nation's most successful black mega-churches.

They made the usual criticism from the left that the mega-churches have abandoned “Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.”

No doubt “poverty reduction, education reform, improved health care, judicial fairness and prison after care” are important, Harry Jackson says, but there are plenty of blacks who are also concerned about “black genocide” in abortion and “family disintegration.” And they need a voice for their concerns.

Harry Jackson is concerned about black unity, but he is backing the wrong horse. It is not disastrous but good that blacks are splitting and beginning to emerge from the safety of racial unity.

It’s happened before in America, and it will happen again. When an immigrant group starts to get its feet on the ground it moves away from ethnic solidarity towards the great American way of purpose and self-help. And the great vehicle of this social transformation has been, for two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christian church.

People cannot live on bread alone. As Harry Jackson quoted Senator Barack Obama: People “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”

Welcome to America.

How About Some Liberal Villains on TV

The Business and Media Institute has done a study on the treatment of businesspeople on TV and they don’t like what they see. In Bad Company they report that if you watch TV shows you would see that:

• TV Is Overwhelmingly Negative toward Business
  
• Businessmen Are Villains, Not Heroes
  
• Businessmen Are a Greater Threat to Society than Terrorists or Gangs
  
• Businessmen Are Almost as Likely to Commit a Serious Felony as Career Criminals
  

and so on. On “Law & Order” 50 percent of the crooks are businessmen. On “Desperate Housewives” the office is represented as little more than a dating service.

Tough, writes columnist Clarence Page.

How many people would have watched "Dallas" if J.R. Ewing were an "average businessman"? A nice, ethical, self-sacrificing father who volunteers in his spare time to work with the Boy Scouts is hardly the stuff of gripping crime dramas.

And anyway there are plenty of bad apples in the business world like “Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff or Jeffrey Skilling.” So get used to it.

Look. If TV wants to do lots of stories about corrupt murdering businessmen it’s OK by me. But the point is that the world is swimming with skunks and scoundrels that never get a mention. How about:

• Liberal professors full of hate and rage towards George W. Bush who fake their resumes and plagiarize other peoples’ scholarly work.
  
• Race baiters who shake down big businesses for cash and contributions
  
• Bus drivers who fail to show up for work and don’t get fired for six months.
  
• Government employees who don’t do any work, run businesses on the side, and get paid 50 percent more than folk doing the same work in the private sector.
  
• Liberal environmental activists who lie about the environment.
  
• Journalists who profess their objectivity while spouting Democratic Party talking points.
  

I don’t know about you, but if TV put out some shows about folks like that, I might even tune in now and again.

It happens that all the candidates for TV villainy above are real. Liberal professors really are full of hate. Government employees really do earn 50 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector. But what of that? What if they weren’t? If it makes a good story, who cares, as long as the profits roll in?

And, best of all, TV could get out of its rating slump with innovative, edgy story lines.

Why is it that liberals are grossly underrepresented in TV villainy?