There is a constant refrain among the nay-sayers on Israel that Israel is constantly breaching the human rights of the Palestinians, and, incidentally, the worst breacher of human rights in the world. We know this is nonsense, even if there are aspects of Israeli government policy we wish they wouldn't carry out.
However, every now and then, a wonderful refutation comes along, and what follows is one of them. This is from the Elder of Ziyon blog (which is being guest-edited by Challah Hu Akbar [of "fresh baked middle east nonsense"] for the moment, because the elder's father has just died. I have already sent my condolences and my wishes for "a long life" via the comments thread on another item).
What this is is a pointer to an article entitled "Combating Terrorism With Intelligence: The Normative Debate in Israel" by Daphna Sharfman and Ephraim Kahana, and comes from the International Journal of Intelligence & Counterintelligence, Vol 25, Issue 3, 2012. The section that Challah highlights concerns the role of the Israeli judiciary in holding the intelligence services in check, in order to maintain democracy in Israel.
To put it simplistically, the judiciary sees it as their collective task (especially at the highest levels) to make sure that democracy isn't sacrificed to the needs of short-term security. I'll restrict myself to one, fairly length, quote, but urge you to read the whole item in the elder's blog: "the campaign [for security and against terrorism] must remain under democratic authorization and judicial review:
'Generals publicly question [judicial review's] effectiveness, pilots express moral and tactical qualms about certain operations, columnists insist these operations make Israel less, not more, secure, and so on, yet through it all Israeli democracy is surviving the ordeal'.
There are a number of quotes from the then(?) President of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, which are eye-opening as to the power of the Israeli judiciary to save Israel from itself. Actually, that's what all truly independent court systems do in all proper democracies. Which is why the authoritarians don't like them.
I haven't yet checked out access to the whole article (via the link Challah provides in the text). If I were you, I wouldn't bother with the comment: it appears to be an accidental republishing of the item which appears above this one in the column.
Six U.S.-allied Gulf Arab states demanded on Tuesday that Iran end what they called interference in the region, reiterating a long-held mistrust of their main rival. "The council expressed its rejection and condemnation of the continuing Iranian interference in the affairs of the Gulf Cooperation Council's states and called on Iran to stop these policies," the communique said.
Much of the time, especially with on-line newspapers, we find ourselves reading reheated stories (even if the "facts" are new). Thus, The Times of Israel, online edition, of 31 December 2912, has two old"new" stories: . The first is reporting a new opinion poll which claims that 67% of Israelis would accept a two-state solution, which, etc (you've read it all before); the second tells us (yet again) that as sanctions bite, Iran is edging towards negotiations...as journos have been saying for months now. Funny how nothing seems to change.
However, now and then, a genuinely new take on an old story emerges. One such appears in the 31 December 2012 edition of The Tablet. Here we have Suha Arafat, Yasser's widow, telling us that the Second Intifada was premeditated. What's new is not that it was premeditated - that story has been around for a decade or so - but who is telling it. Thus, Adam Chandler, the author of the article has this "In a surreal interview with Dubai TV (translated by MEMRI), Suha Arafat, the widow of Yasser Arafat, bluntly boasted that the Second Intifada had been entirely premeditated by her late husband." (At the end of The Tablet article is a link to the original JPost story, which includes the interview, with subtitles provided by MEMRI. Do follow this link as well.)
As I noted at the beginning, it's not that this story is in any way new, it isn't, but the teller of the story is a new source of confirmation of a decade old story.
Not that the anti-Zionists will take any notice (as Chandler implies in his lead-up to the link with Suha Arafat).
The information about the royal blood in Kerry's veins is not new, it was unearthed in 2004. Here comes the Russian Kommersant:
John Kerry has the noblest blood of all the American presidents. His ancestors include Czar Ivan the Terrible as well as Princes Dolgoruky and Obolensky.
They were too hasty in Kommersant, crowning Kerry at the time.
They also overlooked another, a more sinister connection:
Benedikt Kohn, the great-grandfather of Senator John Kerry, was born about 1824 in southern Moravia. Benedikt was successful as a master brewer of beer.
So, what do we have here? A descendant of one of the more choleric kings since Herod's times, carrying some Jewish blood (albeit filtered somewhat by being converted to Roman Catholicism).
Must know his beer, too.
Anyway, to dispel any doubts about the royal lineage, here is what modern forensic science came up with:
The article The Schoolmarms Tell the Terrorists to Play Nice by prof Barry Rubin is written with unusual for him harsh overtones. I can easily understand how the increasingly self-important buffoonish style of Tom Friedman could get up one's nose. It's enough to see that "Muslim Brotherhood needs to understand..." bit to understand how delusional the man has become. Well, he was moving in this direction all the time.
The Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said authorities recommended the 1.5 million truck drivers in the country keep records of how often they go to the restroom and how long they spend on the toilet, so they can accurately determine how much of their income should be written off when their taxes are calculated...
I am not sure I understand how sitting on the toilet allows one to write off one's income, but if I find a similar regulation in the local tax code... yeeehaw! - our income tax authority will be deep in er... debt, I can assure you.
The thesis seems to be conclusively proven by this:
Two Turkish men were hospitalized on arrival to Turkey after drinking camel's milk and urine while on an umrah visit, daily HĆ¼rriyet reported. The men believed the camel's milk and urine to be good for health, claiming it was written in a hadith. An imam, according to the Turkish men, also drank the milk and urine with them.
Imam, obviously, was protected by the power of his office (or even by a higher power).
The sentence that caught my attention in this article is at the end of the quote:
The official, described as having direct knowledge of an analysis done by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies of the Dec. 12 launch by the secretive Communist country, told CNN the United States and its allies were caught "off guard" even though U.S. and Japanese military vessels and missile defenses were in place to monitor it and to protect land, sea and space. "We had our dukes up, operationally, but we were caught off guard," the official was quoted as saying.
So, of course, I went googling for the "dukes". Now I know. These are the same dukes that CIA fellows can't find their backsides with. Without a manual, that is.
And this is the problem with the moral outrage of moral people who recoil at the killing. If their anger is devoid of context and forgetful of consequence, if it focuses on one side to a conflict without looking at the other, it uses only half the world to describe the whole.
