Israel At a Crossroads?

What is going on with Israel’s incursion into Lebanon? Are they making any progress?

Caroline Glick thinks that it is all smoke and mirrors. She writes that the Olmert government is set to accept the UN cease fire and an international force in southern Lebanon. It wants to preserve the idea that the international force can protect Israel, that the same concept can be used to get Israel out of the West Bank, and that a ground war is unnecessary.

Glick thinks that Israel is approaching a revolutionary moment for Israeli public opinion. She sees the situation as similar to the aftermath of the 1973 war when Israel was nearly defeated by Egypt. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan tried to blame the Israel Defense Force for the near debacle, but reserve IDF Captain Moti Ashkenazi launched a protest movement that succeeded in getting Meir and Dayan to resign. The movement led to the Likud victory in 1977.

There is a palpable sense in Israel that we are on the edge of a revolutionary moment. Our national leadership in the government, the IDF and the media has utterly failed us.



As we stand poised on the edge of an even larger war, the main question that hangs in the balance is what lessons the Israeli people will take from the current fiasco. Will we continue to believe their fictions, or will we find a way to abandon them and move on with leaders who understand that territory is vital, that the jihad is real, that Israel has a right to defensible borders, and that Israel is not to blame for our enemies' hatred?

There is a palpable feeling that the political sands are shifting, both in Israel and in the United States. It means, unfortunately, that life is going to be interesting.

The Last Gasp of the Real Ancient Regime

What do the terrorists want? It is still hard to understand the point of it as Hezbollah terrorists fight against a resolute Israeli nation defending its national state borders.

But back in the fall of 2005 Frederick Turner nailed it for us.

The terrorists are fighting to prevent modern democratic states from being born. They are not fighting oppressors, or representing an ethnic nation yearning to be free. Ordinary Iraqis have shown with their purple fingers what they want, and the Palestinians could do it tomorrow if they wanted. The suicide terrorists represent

the last gasp, historically, of the ancient system by which the huge majority of human beings were ruled since the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

And what they particularly want to stop is the “velvet revolution,” the peaceful revolutions we have seen all over the world since the fall of the old Soviet Union, the

nonviolent, non-ideological middle-class and skilled-worker mass movements have unseated tyrants and established democracies in an amazing range of countries[.]

That’s the way that most city people want to live and want to be governed. But the terrorists and the terror masters don’t want them to have that chance. Terror is the way that they force people back into their ethnic enclaves and the ancient culture of mistrust. It is the way that they strangle democracy in its cradle.

Turner’s idea also lets us see why the international left sympathizes, sometimes openly, with the terrorists. In their heart of hearts, the people of the left do not believe in democracy either. They only believe in a special kind of democracy, what they call “genuine democracy,” where everything is controlled by the political system. And that is not so far from the ancient system that the modern era is trying to uproot.

Forget the "Nutroots" Fantasy

Three months before an election that could be the toughest for Republicans since the Year of the Woman in 1992, too many conservatives are writing the Democrats off as “nutroots” or imagining that they are self-destructing.

Writes Dean Barnett on the Hugh Hewitt blog,

A rough conventional wisdom seems to be forming that if Ned Lamont wins tomorrow night, it will be disastrous for the Democratic Party.

He takes his cue from Lanny Davis who mourns that the supporters of Ned Lamont, the peace canididate running for the United States Senate seat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, are behaving like right-wing McCarthyites. And from Martin Peretz who mourns about the return of “peace” candidates of the kind that took the Democrats down to defeat in 1968 and 1972.

Then there is David Limbaugh who argues that even if Republicans are divided, the left is in worse shape.

This is dangerous stuff. The facts on the ground are that, to the average voter, it looks like things are going to hell in a handbasket. People are paying $3.00 per gallon for gasoline, and it happened on President Bush’s watch. The cheap ARM mortgages that people filled up on three years ago are exploding and it is happening on President Bush’s watch. And that is to say nothing about the “mess in Iraq” and the scary war between Hezbollah and Israel.

When the government appears to be losing control of events then it is time to vote for the other guys.

The Democrats are not going to implode, and the average voter is blissfully ignorant of the excesses of the left-wing “nutroots.” The polls show that about sixty percent of Americans think that Bush is doing a bad job, and nearly sixty percent think the economy is in the tank. And now the Prudoe oil field is falling apart.

The fact is that Republicans will be lucky to retain control of Congress this fall. Wishful thinking about Democratic implosion just makes the job harder.

Do People Need Religion To Make Babies?

Why has Europe stopped making babies, asks Frederick Turner?

Is it hardly due to pestilence or environmental degradation. It seems to be more a matter of active choice.

The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.



What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future.

...

One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.

Suppose that when you adopt a materialist worldview, thinking about humans just as special animals, you lose the idea of special meaning, a story about the beginning and the beyond, a promise of transcendental hope? That is what our modern elites are doing with their down-to-earth secular humanism and their existentialism—that every one should seek their own, authentic, path to truth, and avoid the “bad faith” of unquestioningly accepting other peoples’ opinions and ideas.

Suppose that if you hold such beliefs then you tend not to have children and people like you just fade away and disappear.

In that case, you would expect the world to be full of people with

some kind of elaborate, weird belief system involving spiritual beings, a big story or narrative about the world before they were born and the world after they die, and a code of behavior.

That code of behavior would govern everything from practical morals to the duty to the dead.

Frederick Turner has a new book coming out: Natural Religion. No doubt it explores these ideas in detail.

More Studies Say That Professors are Lefties

This isn’t news. But Critical Review has just published a couple of scholarly papers that find university professors to be overwhelmingly Democrat in political orientation.

In Faculty Partisan Affiliations in All Disciplines Christopher F. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein demonstrate that, yes, university faculty are overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat in partisan affiliation.

But the affiliation is not uniform. Liberal arts and humanities faculties are overwhelmingly left-wing. Business faculties are almost balanced in orientation. Democrat to Republican weighting ranges “from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1).”

It would be interesting to know how much the affiliation correlates with government grants. Sociology, for instance, is a discipline almost completely oriented towards government organization of society. Management is almost completely oriented towards business organization. You would expect sociologists to be oriented towards government spending, and business faculty less so.

In Professors and Their Politics Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern takes a look not at the party affiliation but the policy views of professors. They find that professors, both Democrat and Republican, “favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest.”

Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left-wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative.

Our environmental friends have something to say about this uniformity. It is dangerous for the planet. Diversity is essential for sustainability and indeed for simple survival. So when we see uniformity and monoculture our warning flags should be posted.

The question is whether the response to this unhealthy uniformity should be a frontal attack, as advocated by David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, or whether an indirect approach would be better.

We know from analysis of the business world that inward-looking institutions become, over time, extremely brittle and vulnerable to change. Their members start to extract more resources from the institution than is compatible with sustainable growth. Eventually, like the Soviet Union, they collapse without warning.

Of course universities (and indeed all the education system) operates not on a profitability model but a political support model. They attract resources not by offering a superior product and low prices but by a combination of cultural and political power. People are taught to revere educational institutions and to defer to the opinions of professors. And if you cross a college professor in the public square you find that he has ways of making life difficult for you.

The problem for the education establishment is that they are spending about seven percent of GDP, and most likely wasting about 3-4 percent. Eventually that is going to cause a problem. After all, we could use that money for something useful.

Suppose you are an earnest reformer, anxious to find money to fund your vision of a better world. As you cast your eyes around for funding, wouldn’t your gaze sooner or later come to rest upon the great special interest herds of cattle grazing in tax supported pastures and not yielding very much in the way of milk or of beef?

And wouldn’t you notice that the biggest herd of all, with the most meager yield, was the education herd?

Your Teen Daughter is On Her Way to Meet a Kid She Met Online...

Are you a mother worried about your daughter’s online chat activities? According to Mary Wakefield

Around 70 per cent of all British and American early teens have regular access to the web, says the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and of that 70 per cent, nearly 10 per cent admit to having happily trotted off, alone, to meet up with an unknown internet buddy.

Good luck to them. But suppose your daughter’s agreeable online buddy is a pedophile? How do you stop her from exploitation? One mother figured out how to knock some sense into her daughter.

The mother found out from snooping on her daughter’s email that her she was planning a forbidden rendezvous with a boy in another town. If he was a boy. So she got up a fake profile for herself on MySpace and introduced herself to her daughter. Pretty soon they were chatting about how dreadful her mother was. And pretty soon they had set up a meeting.

The reaction, when the daughter found her mother waiting for her, wasn't pretty. She was horrified, wouldn't speak for a week — but she cancelled her assignation with the boy.

Hey, it’s just a day in the life of a modern net-savvy mom.

The Moderate Muslims Meet in Denmark

Whatever happened to the moderate Muslims? That has been the refrain ever since 9/11. When President Bush spoke of Islam as a religion of peace it was presumably to encourage the moderate Muslims to come forward and declare themselves for democracy and capitalism.

Don’t look now, but the moderates have arrived. “Islam’s Moderates are On The March,” writes Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam Today.

There is reform in Pakistan. For 30 years Pakistan has jailed women for adultery under the so-called Hudood laws.

Thanks to a vocal, but religiously respectful, campaign by civil society groups, the influential Council for Islamic Ideology recently recommended reform. That move allowed President Musharraf to begin releasing some of the 1,300 women who were in jail awaiting trial.

The liberal Muslims have been meeting in Denmark. They even met with “Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands-Posten and publisher of the reviled cartoons.”

And here is what a few Muslims said at the conference.

Man from the Netherlands: “We, as Muslims, need to look in the mirror instead of blaming everybody else!”


Woman from Germany: “I don’t have an identity crisis. I’m Western and Muslim and grateful to be both.”

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. But you gotta say, it’s a start.