Rants of the Week June29, 2010

 I start off this week with something nice, a victory in the protection of whales against hunting.  Please click and help out.


WHALES

We have some good news from AVAAZ about the IWC meeting.  This is usually on the rant blog, but I will put it on both this week and hope folks will come up with some cash for the cause.  of protection of whales.
The picture shows our petition being delivered to the Australian environment minister.
For the rest of the nice stuff go to Pollyanna

 GILAD SHALIT

This week the family of this unfortunate young soldier is marching to put pressure on a government that has let him suffer in Hamas captivity for four years.  This entire issue enraged me from the beginning and it is just getting worse.  At least, we see a public reaction, although it too will be used by cynical politicians to score their points.  The Interior Minister who is a member of the Seven Wise (Idiots) is protesting against himself.
The outrage begins with the capture itself.  The details of the bumbling incompetence of the army at the time have now been released to the press.  Inexperienced soldiers were left without command supervision, no one understood what was happening, typical  military idiocy..  Add to that the fact that there exists ground penetrating radar that would have detected the tunnel through which the Hamas fighters came.  The Army has long declined to use this technique, part of the same mentality that resisted replacing the horse with the tank and integrating the airplane into military applications during the early decades of the last century.  Norman Dixon in his book The Psychology of Military Incompetence (Basic, 1976) makes the point that
"bloody foolish" generals,  reach the higher ranks of the military hierarchy through excessive obedience and fear of failure-traits which serve them badly in dealing with the leadership of combat forces   In fact, it is not as simple as just idiocy, although in Israel, the filter that operates is the refusal of the best and the brightest to chose a military career.  For decades bright students have told me why they refused to sign on in the army, to a great extent because of the desire of the mediocrities in authority to get rid of them.  Generals may not all be stupid, but they suffer from personality flaws that make them function in a stupid and counterproductive manner.  It happens in other armies as well as ours.
and has also to do with the role of the media.

OK, so he was captured and the bargaining began.  We could have had him back several times, but the army/government always balked at the number and quality of the prisoners that Hamas demanded in return. Hamas itself is behaving like animals, denying Red Cross access, the works.  We in turn are punishing over a million people in Gaza who have no say in the matter.  For years, we implemented a brutal siege "for Gilad" and now it has been lifted because of the Flotilla debacle.   Does anyone understand the thinking behind all this zigzag  motion that goes nowhere?

The  march for Gilad has gotten off to a strong start and let us hope that it impacts the government somehow.  Sunday night on our way to the car after a concert, we saw a large group of people in a bar, watching a World Cup match between Argentina and Mexico.  They had an empty chair for Gilad.

GUSH SHALOM TAKES THE GOVERNMENT TO  COURT
Our friends in Gush Shalom have gone to court to protest the Mickey Mouse (excuse us Mickey) commission of inquiry .appointed to investigate the Aid Flotilla catastrophe.  I wish them luck but I do not put a lot of confidence in the ability and willingness of the High Court to intervene in what presumably is an executive branch matter.  Good luck Uri and Adam!!
Apparently it is working, the government asked for a ten day postponement and is reconsidering the authority of the commission.  Now Tirkel is supposedly asking for more authority, the army is still trying to stonewall.

THE JEWISH AGENCY
Some of you may recall that this august body tried some time ago to get Israelis in North America to phone a special number to report on Jews who were dating or had relationships with shiksas and shkotzim rahmana litzlan. It was lampooned heavily on YouTube and would have been funny if it had not been so pernicious--Grosse Brudder will look after you and keep you on the straight and narrow.  Now this totally superfluous body has come out with its new master plan for the Diaspora.  It is both pathetic and ridiculous

JUST A BIT OF FUN
A brave Israeli woman took three Palestinian teen age girls for a fun day in Tel Aviv.  They got past the border guards, everyone had a great time and then some "patriot" filed a complaint.  You would think that the nuclear bombs at Dimona had been stolen on behalf of  the Hizbollah.  In any case, it is a nice story despite the sour ending and I urge you to read and think about our country.
Here are some more  thoughts from the Druze poet  Salman Masalha about what we all need to face up to, Jews, Arabs, everyone--maybe the  insights of someone who is neither Jew nor Arab are the most relevant. I think he goes overboard in his critique of the Israeli medical mission to Haiti.  No Arab country bothered to help there.

Are we on the way to Fascism here?  An article in Yediot Ahronot  by Raanan Shaked explores the question.  We lack one component, the charismatic dictator, but we are working on it.  I submitted an op-ed to Haaretz on the subject, but did not even get a rejection.  

THOUGHTS ABOUT IRAN

Amitai Eztioni, the sociologist has written an interesting article about the options facing the world with respect to restraining Iran.  He published it in a journal called Military Review
A summary based on an interview with him can be found in Haaretz.

BDS?
I have vacillated for a long time whether BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) are a just, moral and yes, even effective, way of influencing the policies of our government with respect to the Occupation and the future of our coexistence with our Palestinian neighbors.  I am posting an argument by Rela Mazali in which she makes a compelling case for influencing public opinion by causing pain.  One might argue that it might just solidify the support of the public for the government and its intransigent  policies.  I would like to see some comments on this issue.

This blog is getting to be too long so I will send you off with a Below the Beltway commencement address from Gene.

 

Rants of the Week June 22, 2010

 Mondial Week

I have been told by some readers that although I can let Uri rant for me on the local issues, I should point out the global ones.

World Cup for Human Rights
While the teams fight it out, let us stand up for human rights.  Here are some actions for you:
Human Rights Defenders

I asked myself whether the World Cup tournament in South Africa is as useless and even pernicious for the ordinary people of South Africa as the 2008 Olympic Games were for the ordinary  people of China.  I did not have to look far for the answer as you can see from the Amnesty posts above.
Fair disclosure--I too sit in front of the screen with my beer and popcorn and help pour the $3 billion into the coffers of FIFA.  I honestly think that FIFA should pay attention to what happens to the people other than the rich and powerful in the host country.

Can we really wish Happy Birthday to Aung Sung Suu Kyi who turned 65 last Saturday.   She has been under house arrest in Burma for twenty years, ever since she and her party won an election.  The result was overturned in a military coup and the junta still rules.  For details.

 She has been incarcerated in the foulest of prisons and subjected to terrible abuse, but her courage has not flagged.




KYRGYSTAN AND ETHNIC CLEANSING 

This is a prime example of how the world is screwed up.  We see thousands being killed 
and hundreds of thousands becoming refugees and no one does anything. 
The fact that Hilary Clinton wrings her hands 

and the Russians do nothing helps not at all. 
When we ever learn from the past?

THE OIL IN THE GULF
I have been watching the sordid drama of how corporate greed can do untold harm.  A few weeks ago I reported sentences being passed on some of those responsible for the Bhorpal Union Carbide disaster of 1985.  Now I see BP et al wriggling out or at least trying to wriggle out of their responsibility for what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.  Katrina was a natural disaster but Bush handled it poorly.  This is man made and I hope Obama can do better.  Cheers for Tom Toles.

SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT IS COMING NOW
:
I am about to post a speech by a Spanish leftist journalist about the phony European left and the bashing of Israel and the United States that are fashionable among the liberal establishment.  I am doing this because of an incident that took place in an organization very dear to me, Amnesty International.  I have chaired the Israel section and now serve on the board.  Nonetheless, I am outraged by what the former interim secretary-general  Claudio Cordone
 did in actually stating that "defensive Jihad" in not antithetical to human rights.  This is part of a fundamental flaw in our movement and I take every opportunity to fight it.  Our movement has lined    itself up with a ridiculous body such as the UN Human Right Commission when it has been expedient.
The writer Salman Rushdie called this behavior moral bankruptcy
With that in mind I will now refer you to Pilar Rahola and what she has to say about a left that  fails to notice genocide in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Kyrgystan and a host of persecutions by the darlings of the left.  The unwillingness to hold Muslims and in particular Arabs to account is a very patronizing attitude that implies that they are irresponsible children.
Let me be clear--all who know me are aware of my opinion of the actions of our government, which also consists of a pack of immature idiots leading a brainwashed public.  To paraphrase Ben Gurion in 1939. we will fight the Occupation as if there were no hypocritical  antisemitic phony left and we will fight the antisemitic phony left as if there were no Occupation.

TRIALS AND TRIALS

I am going to bring up an issue that concerns how an army can deal with crimes by its soldiers.  Now the IDF is bringing charges against soldiers who allegedly killed two women with white flags during the Cast Lead operation.  I leave aside why it took so long to indict them.  I point out that we are still waiting for an indictment against the killers of Abir Aramin

 and against the officer who was filmed ordering a soldier to shoot a handcuffed and blindfolded prisoner.
In this contact, I bring up the story of a Canadian officer who is now on trial for killing a wounded Taliban prisoner in Afghanistan.  He claims it was a mercy killing and the trial goes on.
There is food for thought here.

NGO MONITOR is a self appointed right wing blog that deals primarily in defamation of human rights defenders.  I am pleased to link to a response by the New Israel Fund to its slanders.

NOW THE LOCAL STORY AND RANTS

Let me start with Gideon Levy on what it means to be an Israeli patriot.
I also want to bring you something from a 96 year old veteran of Israel's wars
who has had enough.
Listen to Dov Yirmiya
who says it right for all of us. We are watching the rise of fascism in our country, with school principals called to account for their opinions  and the Education Minister on the warpath against liberal academics
Obviously Voltaire was not in the curriculum wherever they went to school.  While I disagree with some of my colleagues on details of BSD, the  threats against the  life of Neve Gordon are unacceptable and must be laid at the door of right wing politicians.

Here is a statement from one of the principals:

How I was summoned to the Knesset / by Ram Cohen

 

On Monday, June 21, I am to appear before the Knesset Education Committee and the Minister of Education, Mr. Gideon Saar, following my unequivocal words to my students, condemning the 43 year-old occupation and rule over the life of the Palestinian people.

A school principal should have a clear and unequivocal moral position about any subject and issue on the agenda of Israeli society. A principal is not an educational clerk. A principal must have, for example, something to say about the deportation of the children of migrant workers, trafficking in women, the separation fence, the withdrawal from Gaza, minimum wage law, settlers attacking Palestinian villagers to exact a `price tag`, the removal of Arabs from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, the siege on Gaza, corruption in government, or the relations of religion and state.

Full text:  http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=40651 

  MISTER X  is a prisoner who disappeared as in old Argentina or the KGB days in the USSR.  The difference is that is happened here, in what was my country until the fascist/religious mafia stole it from me.  The story appeared briefly on the Yediot web site and then vanished and it would have gone to oblivion had not  Richard Silverstein blogged it and then the Dailly Telegraph
then brought it out.  I would like to see the local media show some courage, but they all crawl before the whip of the Shabak and its trained zoo of obedient judges.

RE JUDGES the Supreme Court finally got its cojones together (excuse the misplaced metaphor Chief Justice Dorit Beinish)

and sent some ultra-religious people to prison for violating a court order in a matter of school segregation.  Indeed, the court was right and since these parents do not wear uniforms with tons of brass on them, it was an easy call.  This same court when it asked a government lawyer who in the military was responsible for building a road in the West Bank to an illegal settlement received the answer "I do not know" and sat still for it.  Chief Justice  Beinish and her predecessors could have sent somebody in uniform to prison for contempt on countless occasions, but courage and integrity come out of the closet only when the victim is weak.  The same court ruled this week that paying support to yeshiva students and not to university students is unjust and unfair.  It only took the hard working court ten yours to reach this difficult decision.  Reports indicate that public faith in the judiciary is declining.  I wonder why?

I will close with  Uri Avineri and
Ira Chernus
and refer you to my other blog entitled Pollyanna 
for the cheerful stuff.

OK, I know that there must be some perverted soul who reads only the nasty blog (I know of a few nice people who read only the nice one), so I will give you here as well Gene Weingarten in
Below the Beltway
to keep you happy.

Rants of the Week June 15, 2010

This blog will be devoted to my rants and growls about  human rights, politics and the situation in this miserable little country of ours.  The nice stuff can be found in my parallel blog Pollyanna where you can read about science, music, art, literature and all the things that most of you like.  This blog will remain the domain of grumpy people like me and will be not much fun to read.  Let us start with a pleasant picture of someone we all love, our favorite Osama:

We understand from the BBC that his life was in danger from a true blue defender of the world who alas was picked up by the police in Pakistan. 
Better luck next time.

Actually, as I said last week, there are many people who can out-rant me at any time and I intend to use them for the local scene.  There are a few international human rights matters that I would like to bring up first.  One of them concerns Darfour where things continue to go downhill  Here in Israel, some of us are trying to help refugees from Darfour, but the general population and government are very racist.

There is a terrible ethnic cleansing and massacre going on in Kyrgystan with most victims Uzbeks.  No one seems interested enough to intervene although the US and Russia are sending troops to defend their air bases.  It seems that nothing was learned from WWII, the Holocaust, Rwanda you name it.  Get a view of our world:

Of course, bad news about human rights cannot skip our dear friends in China.  Yahoo! helped send a Chinese blogger to jail for a ten year term. and Microsoft is collaborating with  .censorship

Before getting on to the local nasty stuff, I would like all of you who can influence governments in the International Whaling Commission to please do something
to help Avaaz with the fight.

This week we were told that a commission of inquiry is being set up for the flotilla fiasco.  It is of course the sort of buffoonery that makes Israelis feel secure.  I am going to let Uri Avineri say it all
on this farce and give a list of the questions that should be asked.

Pollyanna does not rant--happy blog no matter what! June 8, 2010

 Cecilia Bartoli mezzo

                              Renee Fleming soprano
 













POLLYANNA
This week I am taking a leaf out of the book of Pollyanna.  For the unfamiliar, Polyanna is the 13 year old orphan heroine of a 1913 novel.  No matter how bad her situation, she always found something to be glad about.  The book along with its multiple sequels has remained a best seller and generations of children, especially girls, learned unrealistic optimism from it.  There will be no rants this week since Eldar, Levi, Burston and Harel can easily outrant me and have a platform in Haaretz.  This blog has eight acknowledged readers and maybe a few more hiding in the bushes.  Haaretz has a few more although I would hesitate to guess how many.  Certainly it has fewer than Yediot, Maariv and a few other rags.  I salute Richard Silverstein and leave Tikkun Olam in his capable hands for the nonce.  I would appreciate feedback about dropping the rants.


Indeed we would all like to escape the silly world in which people appoint their buddies to investigate them etc., but as the example of the great 20th century physicist James Franck shows, the little voice inside gets at us.  Franck shared the 1926 Nobel Prize for discovering the electron spin and laid the foundations for our understanding of molecules and their structure.  After participating in the Manhattan Project, he first tried to persuade the government to blow up a bomb as a demonstration instead of attacking Japan, , in which he failed.  He also failed to prevent the Cold War nuclear arms race.  
In February 1946 Franck wrote to Max Born, in English, about
his reluctance to become involved in political matters.

    I would be quite content . . . if only my conscience would
    not force me to take a stand on a few political issues. I
    hate to be involved in anything political; I hate
    publicity, but I just cannot retire into the ivory tower of
    free research and forget about the world. And, of course,
    at our age we are probably more pessimistic than the young
    people. Even I am not consistent in my pessimistic point of
    view, because I have an elementary joy in each new
    grandchild, and feel that whenever I have the opportunity I
    am a kind of professional grandfather.
 

THE GREAT DIVAS
Fair disclosure--I am a Renee Fleming and Cecilia Bartoli groupie as you can see above.  I have RF on DVD as Rusalka which is incredible, CB is well represented in my disk collection  and I follow both of them around on YouTube.
I am appending a review of RF's latest, a collection of rock songs called Dark Hope. I tried to buy it in Tel Aviv, but it has not yet come to Israel.   She can do anything.  CB has a new disk out dedicated to the memory of the castrati and their art. 
Imagine my delight when I discovered that they had appeared together at the Met in 1998 in Le Nozze di Figaro.  Enjoy as they compose a letter to the lecherous Count Almaviva.

 Some good news with justice done, 
There are at last some convictions in the Bhopal disaster, 25 years on.  For those who have forgotten what Union Carbide did to innocent people then, click here  15,000 people
died as a result of a chemical leak.
The lightness of the sentences shows--oops, almost a rant.
Negligent municipal officials in Cairo, Egypt
have been sentenced to prison for causing deaths in a rockslide.  Unsafe neighborhoods in the city are not to be targeted.
Turkish officials responsible for the death of  an activist under torture have also been convicted in a landmark case. 

SCIENCE

Recent advances in linguistics have led to the decipherment of the speech of young Klingons
Thanks to Phil Plait and the Bad Astronomy blog, right along side this one.

LIFE ELSEWHERE?
Astrobiologists have a tough field.  My friend Yuri says it is the only domain of science devoid of any subject matter.  That may be a bit cruel, but indeed there is more speculation in that area than in most.  It has been speculated that organisms with a methane metabolism might float around in the atmosphere of Titan 
and could be detected by  depletion of the hydrocarbons on which they live.  Recently there have been some observations and model results that point in such a direction and unfortunately the press has had a field day with the presumed discovery of extraterrestrial life.  Needless to say, there reports resembled reports of Mark Twain's death and NASA has made an effort to make sense out of the results and put things into perspective.  Please click.  
I have some doubts about the computer simulation, but people do take them seriously, sometimes too seriously. 

ORDER AND DISORDER IN NATURE



We are told that time flies like an arrow whereas fruit flies like a banana.  Sorry about that.  In any case, as I brought up last week and the week before, there are all kinds of problem related to the flight of time's arrow.  People are starting to ask what were once considered unacceptable or meaningless questions such as what preceded the Big Bang.  The word universe implied something unique, but now we hear  talk of multiverses.  Physics is getting messier all the time which is good for future employment of theorists.  Come and have a read.

Quantum mechanics leads to concepts quite foreign to our ordinary world.  The construction of a molecule larger than a virus can have strange results such as pointing in two directions at once, a molecular analog, if you will, of Schroedinger's famous cat  This can make for a considerable amount of disorientation.  It appears that Gene Weingarten can be equally  disoriented in the normal world.

Where do we start? World beyond ranting. June 1, 2010

This week I was planning a gentle blog, nice science and techonology, a quantum computer at the World Cup,  All these things are pushed aside of course in the wake of yesterday's fiasco.  Before I get into it, however, I do wish to mark the death of one of the people who represented a different Israel than the one we have today.
IN MEMORIAM ARYEH (LOVA) ELIAV 1920-2010

This week we lost a leader who was too principled to play the
political dirty games and despite his great achievements did
not really grasp the reins of power. We would have been much
better off if he had been leading us instead of the nincompoops
who have brought to where we are. He died at the age of 89. I
append a brief eulogy and biography.
those who read Hebrew I recommend his autobiography   Rings of Dawn



STATE PIRACY?  NO, JUST UTTER IDIOCY AND INCOMPETENCE, ALL AROUND

This week is dominated by the horrible incident at sea. The
fools on both sides led to the death of nine people and a
worldwide scandal. Indeed, instead of taking the intelligent
path of passive resistance, some of the people on board
attacked the boarding party with weapons, including possible,
small arms. The boarders had the right to defend themselves,
but not to go trigger-happy. The idiocy goes back to the high
command and the decision to send the boarding party in the
first place and then to fail to equip them with riot control
gear, such as batons and shields. One would expect that trained
commandos would be able to overcome such a mob without
resorting to lethal force. Certainly there is enough blame to
go around, as there usually is when Israelis and Palestinians
get at each other.

Yosefa and I heard the news in the morning, dropped our plans
for the day and headed off to Ashdod to join the demonstration
of the usual suspects of the left. We were over 100 people and
we held up signs for the European media on the beach.

The public will by and large buy the Army's version, relations
with Turkey will deteriorate further and the occupation and
siege will continue. As Bill Clinton said about the Irish, both
sides here are addicted to the conflict and would be lost
without it. I agree with the posting by J Street on the issue:
J street 

Of course the local comments and reactions are the most relevant.  Yossi Sarid
puts it in the right perspective that we have a coterie of seven idiots who run the country.  They  are not even an official cabinet body with decision making authority,.   The video footage
provides an idea of what went on,.
Uri Avineri, head of Gush Shalom, is convinced that the official
version put out by the Army is a tissue of lies.  Past experience reinforces this few, but for the sake of discussion let us assume that everything the Army says is true.  This absolves them of nothing.  It is clear that we had here a cycle of failures and displays of incompetence that compounded one another and led to the catastrophic result. 

1. The organizers of the flotilla must have planned an intelligent passive response to the inevitable boarding of the ships.  They failed to filter the people and groups on board and as a result a few fanatics managed to turn the entire enterprise  into a bloody calamity at the cost of nine lives.  We cannot absolve the leaders of the flotilla from accountability for what happend.
2. That having been said, the Israeli side had several reasonable options, all of which were rejected in favor of the default option of lethal force.  As David Grossman writes (not available in English for some reason)  the fanatics on board could rely on the Israeli military to respond in the only way they know, lethal force and the propaganda battle would be won.  The cost did not bother them, but it should bother us.

So what comes next?  The propaganda machines abroad and at home will blast away.  The world will fix the total blame on Israel as a knee jerk reaction since Muslims are never held accountable.   It is a very patronizing attitude, but it makes Europeans feel important and superior.  At home, the ranks will close and there will be no public acknowledgment of guilt or failure outside of one liberal newspaper and its columnists. and a few  bloggers who do not really count.  In English you can get Richard Silverstein but he blasts from abroad.  The left/peace-camp is still in tatters waiting for a leader to emerge.  In the meantime, the tribal campfire lights the darkness outside of which the evil ones prowl.   Anyone who talks about an  independent inquiry or heaven forbid an international investigation, Goldstone II, will be branded a traitor.


A FEW MORE PLEASANT THINGS

Mary Robertson went to Zimbabwe and came back with some encouraging news about women in that troubled country.  Right on Ms Robertson!!


Gene Weingarten introduces us to the world of googlenopes.
and for the really old timers amongst us, here are the unforgettable Abbott and Costello 
creating a new form of mathematics.

Of course, I promised you the quantum computer in the World Cup/South Africa