Recently in Terrorism Category

I'm fascinated by the debate between Jonathan and Gail, as a relatively liberal and a relatively conservative supporter, respectively, of Israel. I appreciated Jonathan's rebuttal of the notion that a Jew who criticizes Israeli policy is anti-Semitic, and I'm curious if Gail understands his point of view.

I'm also curious to hear Gail's critique of this article in The Economist about "Israel's siege mentality," notably the passages below:

For anyone who cares about Israel, this tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions--about the blockade, about the Jewish state's increasing loneliness and the route to peace. A policy of trying to imprison the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged....

Israel is caught in a vicious circle. The more its hawks think the outside world will always hate it, the more it tends to shoot opponents first and ask questions later, and the more it finds that the world is indeed full of enemies....

None other than the head of Israel's Mossad, its foreign intelligence service, declared this week that America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset.

That has led to the charge by hawkish American Republicans, as well as many Israelis, that Mr Obama is bent on betraying Israel. In fact, he is motivated by a harder-nosed appreciation of the pros and cons of America's cosiness with Israel, and is thus all the keener to prod the Jewish state towards giving the Palestinians a fair deal. He has condemned the building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory more bluntly than his predecessors did, because he rightly thinks they make it harder to negotiate a peace deal. Mr Obama's greater sternness towards Israel is for the general good--including Israel's.

If the real issue is Israel's long-term survival and welfare as a Jewish democracy, how many schools of thought can there be on how to accomplish this....?

The late social critic Neil Postman said there are two kinds of people: Athenians and Visigoths. Athenians appreciate poetry and knowledge, Visigoths believe in mauling all competitors. The halls of power are often filled with Visigoths, while some of the great Athenians are found in the working class.

I'll apply that to our dealings with Iran. Visigoths like to portray rivals as Visigoths, in order to find an excuse to bomb them. Athenians by contrast, even when they fight, seek to empathize with their enemies.

For three decades, we have spoken daily in the West of attacking Iran. Some of their leaders have bloviated on occasion of desires to stick it to Israel, which leads to us speaking even more frequently and loudly about attacking Iran, which adds to their own bluster. Iran is surrounded by geopolitical threats. Yet when they respond with bluster, we heighten our desire to go Visigoth on them.

An Athenian reads the situation one way, a Visigoth another. Postman hoped there would be more Athenians among us than Visigoths. So do I.

I'm launching my new book about the so-called clash-of-civilizations Wednesday night at USC. Info on the event is here, and parking info is here. We'll have some copies of the book available for sale, and I'll be around to sign them after my chat with USC religious life dean Varun Soni. Come join us if you can!

My thanks for Mariel G. for running this new piece adapted from my new book.

As one of Gail's "two readers," I find her perceptions of Muslims to be very troubling in this post. No doubt the larger Muslim world has serious issues to work through. I can agree with people ranging from the conservative Bernard Lewis to the liberal Reza Aslan on this. But Gail goes as far as to take Nonia Darwish seriously in the contention that the Muslim world is actively attempting to, uh, infiltrate the West.

To a degree, every proselytizing religion intends to infiltrate the rest of the world. That's the definition of proselytizing. Gail, don't imagine that your evangelical pro-Israel allies don't want the empty churches in Tel Aviv to someday be filled with persons like yourself.

Nonie Darwish reminds me of the former nun, Karen Armstrong, who's become a vocal critic of Christianity and a strong apologist for Muslims. Armstrong criticizes the Judeo-Christian tradition for being too mean to idolaters, but passes over Muslims' intense anti-idolatry. She claims that Christians have sexual hang-ups and that Muslims don't, which seems a stretch. She claims that Islam is more inherently forgiving than Christianity.

Mostly, she seems to be an angry child still railing about the injustices of Daddy. So does Nonie Darwish. Do you really believe Darwish is brave? She's an opportunist, refusing to grow up, because attention and money incentivize her continued immaturity. Both Armstrong and Darwish serve the interests of demagogues who like stirring up action against whole civilizations, by claiming, "But they started it."

Regarding the dilemma of airport profiling, let me go back to a piece from the rival paper that I wrote back in 2002. With some qualifications, i still stand by the basic premise. But having been profiled up and down in Israel in 2006, I find that it's easy for profiling to become obnoxious, which is why I don't much want to go again to Israel anytime soon.

The '00s were the Decade of American Anxiety. Or, perhaps, the Decade of Denial.

This decade began with the popping of the tech bubble in the spring of 2000. Experts had been in denial about the economic laws of physics, claiming the Internet had created a business model in which profits or even income were irrelevant measures of success. Now reality, and anxiety, set in. Temporarily.

9/11 exposed how America wasn't immune to the chaotic effects of the very globalization we had unleashed on the rest of the planet. Yet the result of our awakened anxiety represented still more denial, believing as we did that a whack-a-mole foreign policy would make the rest of the world pay us proper tribute.

Meanwhile, we replaced the techiest bubble with the lowest-tech bubble, surmising that land can't disappear into the air the way bandwidth does. But again we denied the laws of physics, believing that economic productivity had less to do with building new things and more to do with refinancing our homes -- for a handsome profit -- every twenty minutes.

An economic panic nine years into the decade should have signaled that it's time to come to grips with our many hangovers. But once we became somewhat stable, it became time not for serious discussions about the nation we seek to be, but for tea parties and ridiculous mouth-to-ears combat. This hysterical form of pseudo-dialogue represents both our anxiety and our continuing denial that we must grow up.

Denial and anxiety, they placed their stamp on our decade -- and we have postponed resolution of such matters till the next decade. Stay tuned... as if we had a choice.

Oh well. Barack Obama may still end up being a great president, but he's struggling a bit. Earl is right that Afghanistan is the war he always wanted, and there should be no surprise there.

But the disappointment, for me, comes from two sources.

One involves how Obama is positively Bushy in his obliviousness about the roots of conflict -- and especially of the Hydra effect when fighting terrorists in a way that inflames people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who can't keep track of whether the enemy comes from within or from the West.

The other one involves how he doesn't keep track of price tags. I can't buy certain things I once planned to buy, because of fiscal realities. Washington rarely understands this when planning wars or domestic programs, whether a conservative Republican like Reagan or a liberal Democrat like Obama is in charge. Oh, for the balanced-budget days of Clinton...

Some have speculated that an upside of terrorist trials in New York is that the accused will lose their aura of super-villainy amidst the drudgery of the American judicial system. That is good both for Americans and for those who the terrorists seek to recruit. Their "cosmic war" would seem a good deal less glamorous.

But a friend offered me an intriguing insight into those Americans who decry the idea of terrorists being tried by our American justice system instead of secretive military tribunals: they trust the latter more than the former. They believe the former is more capricious and unreliable. They prefer the values of the military more than that of a jury of Americans. Given that our military is supposed to be giving their lives specifically to defend things such as our justice system, that's a bit ironic.

Read this. And weep for our nation. Set aside political correctness for just a moment and call this what it is: Terrorism. Cold, fowl terrorism.