Another Reason For Israel to Beat Hezbollah

We’re all waiting around for Ehud Olmert to learn the ropes as a war-time Prime Minister of Israel. And vanquish Hezbollah.

But Charles Krauthammer reminds us that Israel has two reasons to nail down a decisive victory.

One is to ensure its own survival. The other concerns its relationship with the United States.

For decades there has been a debate in the United States over Israel's strategic value... whether, in the post-Sept. 11 world, Israel is a net asset or liability.

To put it another way, are we in the Middle East to safeguard oil supplies and defeat global Islamist terror, or are we there to defend Israel.

OK, we are there for all those things, but which is the tail and which is the dog? Hezbollah, continues Krauthammer is a major enemy of the United States, and Israel does us a huge favor by defeating it. But there is only a favor is they actually defeat it so that we can go ahead an rebuild Lebanon free of Hezbollah. But Olmert’s stumbling performance

has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well. That confidence -- and the relationship it reinforces -- is as important to Israel's survival as its own army. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue.

And that is a problem.

Now We Understand the 1930s

We all love to tut-tut about the appeasers of the 1930s. How could they have been so blind, we ask knowingly? Didn’t Hitler promise in Mein Kampf that he was going to off the Jews? Shouldn’t we have got the message on Kristallnacht when the Nazi thugs went around Germany trashing Jewish businesses? Austria? Czechoslovakia?

“Not any longer,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.

That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.

Just as in the 1930s the West deals piecemeal with Muslim grievances.

India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon.

So we try to understand the “freedom fighters” and their demand for “liberation.” Or at least, the folks whose meat and drink comes from identifying and appeasing oppressed communities demand that we do.

Perhaps we should view all this from a broader perspective, and realize that we cannot just mobilize the West into an all-out war against Islamism. There is, perhaps, a natural trajectory for a great global movement like Islamism and the response to it, just like it took about 150 years for the virus of socialism to take its course through the world. First it germinated in the intellectual salons of Europe, then metastatized into national politics. Then it became an epidemic as it ravaged whole nations and continents weakened by revolution and civil war.

Maybe the course of Islamism will be like that, a vast global conflict. Or maybe it is a paper tiger that will fizzle out in the sands of the Middle East.

The problem is that we don’t know. So we prefer to put off the hard decision, the moment when we have to get serious.

But that moment will surely come. Or will it?

Speaking Truth To Liberal Power

Talking-head Juan Williams is a reliable liberal voice on Fox News. David Fraser is a Briton who worked for decades as a probation officer. What do these two have in common?

The liberal intelligentsia doesn’t want to hear about their books.

Juan Williams has written Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, in which he takes up where Bill Cosby left off. He asks the question:

"Why are so many black Americans, people born inside the gates of American opportunity, still living as if they were locked out from all America has to offer?" His answers include the debacle of big-city politics under self-serving black politicians; reparations as "a divisive dead-end idea"; the parlous state of city schools "under the alliance between the civil rights leaders and the teachers' unions"; and the transformation of rap from "its willingness to confront establishment and stereotypes" to "America's late-night masturbatory fantasy."

But according to conservative radio talk-show host Michael Reagan the MSM is ignoring his book.

On my radio show the other night Juan told me how he has been silenced by the very liberals who have always clasped him to their bosoms.

When you write a book criticizing the liberal pieties, you get the silent treatment. Still, Williams’ book is at #156 today on the Amazon bestseller list.

Then there is British writer David Fraser. This probation officer’s book is called A Land Fit for Criminals: An Insider's View of Crime, Punishment and Justice in the UK. You would think that British publishers would be falling all over themselves to publish a book like that, considering that British crime is up over 2,000 percent in the last century. But no.

Sixty publishers rejected Fraser’s book. Then, according to Theodore Dalrymple, he got lucky.

The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant[.]

In his book, Fraser shows with facts and figures how the British government is utterly failing to control crime and criminals, and openly lying and covering up about it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters.

You wonder. Maybe the welfare state is further along to its collapse that we think, just because the depth of corruption and laxity gets slowly worse and worse with no attempt to correct its follies and its crimes. Governments generally do go this way, of course, until they are turned upside down by genuine reform or by something more radical.

Finally, A Brit Takes on the Israel Haters

Everyone has declared that actor Mel Gibson is a drunken anti-Semitic lout, after his little problem with the law last week.

But there are plenty of people who have been nipping at the same bottle, writes British politician and opinion writer Boris Johnson.

Come on, Blair! they write from their wisteria-clad redoubts... When are you all going to stop poodling and call a halt to Israeli murder?

Easy for you to say, he continues. They aren’t raining rockets on your leafy avenue.

This is a country responding, however incompetently, to direct aggression against its own people from a neighbouring failed state.

...
Whatever the hideous shambles of the past few days, it is still true, in principle, that when Israeli rockets kill civilians, they have missed their targets, and that when Hizbollah rockets kill civilians, they have scored a deliberate hit.

And that matters when you want to make an honest balance in the equation of moral equivalency.

Limbaugh Listeners No. 2 in News Knowledge

When the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its latest Survey Report on news consumption, entitled Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership, you couldn’t blame Rush Limbaugh for boosting it.

The Pew chappies rate Rush Limbaugh listeners most knowledgeable about news, right after readers of the Weekly Standard and The New Republic.

If you believe in Trust but Verify, here is the image direct from the Pew website.

So Rush Limbaugh listeners are not quite the yahoos that liberals imagine. As the Pew reports says:

Judged by their answers to three news knowledge questions, the most informed audiences belong to the political magazines, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the O'Reilly Factor, news magazines, and online news sources.

But here is a worrying fact. Women are underrepresented as consumers of hard news. This is clearly a consequence of our patriarchal society, all fair-minded people will agree. All over America. little girls are taught not to worry their little heads about hard news. As a result, women clearly gravitate to soft news and feature magazines for their news, as the Pew table shows.

Men dominate the audience not only for sports news but also for news about science and technology, business and finance, and international affairs.



But women greatly outnumber men among those who closely follow news about religion, health, and entertainment.

This is a national problem that has been too long ignored.

What's Next for Conservatives?

In the autumn of the Bush years, conservatives are asking what worked and what comes next. It is clear that compassionate conservatism was a mixed blessing. It obtained tactical successes in winning the support of women and Hispanics, but it released the brakes on federal spending.

And, Andrew E. Busch writes, in issues like education and prescription drugs it conceded massive increases in spending without a corresponding advance in choice and ownership. When Republicans relax their devotion to limited government, they lose. Busch proposes a reinvigorated platform that includes:
— holding the fiscal line on both taxes and spending;


— re-energizing a public philosophy of constitutionalism and limited government;


— supporting a measured cultural traditionalism;


— incrementally introducing mechanisms for greater choice and accountability into existing public programs;


— concerted campaigning in the black and Hispanic communities on the basis of moral and religious standards, as well as entrepreneurship;


— continuing to promote the vitality of civil society

Perhaps the most important area where conservatives can win the support of women, blacks, and Hispanics is in the reform of education. Education is very important to women, especially, and yet they typically do not look at education beyond the immediate necessity of finding the best available option or program for their children within the existing structure.

Recent research on child-raising has strongly suggested that parenting doesn’t make much difference. The two big factors affecting child outcomes are genes and peers. In other words, after selecting their mate, the next biggest decision a parent makes is to select their children’s peer group.

A child’s peer group is the neighborhood children and the children at school.

This means that school choice is a huge issue for parents. If they have no choice in selecting a school for their children then they have no power to select their child’s peer group, and no way to influence this important influence on their child’s life.

This is a way to get the support of women.

Conservatives must advance the idea that, given the vital importance of controling a child’s peer group, it is wrong for the government to take this freedom away from parents. It doesn’t matter whether the school is public, private, religious, or home-school. Parents must have the right to send their child to the school of their choice.

A Dictator Hands Over Power, For Now

So finally General Pinochet, after 47 years as dictator of Chile, yielded power to his ageing brother in the wake of emergency intestinal surgery. It’s true that he ruled with an iron fist, allowed conservative spokesmen, but at least he made Chile the economic powerhouse of South America, made individual Chileans prosperous with his radical pension reform, and exported its wine to all the world.

Oh dear. Wrong dictator! And of course, Gen. Pinochet didn’t rule for half a century. After the coup in which he ended the chaotic rule of Salvador Allende, he put Chile on the road to prosperity and returned it to democracy.

Unlike Fidel Castro. On Monday night, he handed over power, temporarily, to his brother Raúl, as he underwent intestinal surgery. And he put off his 80th birthday celebration till December.

But today, everyone will be delighted to hear, he is feeling better.

Oh yes, he did wonders with education and health care (but how good is that education and health care really? Has anyone ever checked it out?).
But overall, economic growth in Cuba is estimated at minus 0.5 percent per year since 1959. Not that anyone is allowed to do an independent audit of Cuba’s economy.

But the way to think of Cuba’s half-century under dictatorship is to imagine how it would have been reported by our objective MSM if, instead of the lefty hero Castro, it had been ruled by a right-wing thug.

Forget about the extenuating circumstances, the education, the health care, the charm of Old Havana. Dictatorship would have been dictatorship, fascism, red with the blood of its victims: journalists and political human rights activists.