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Ever since the 1940′s, the Arab world has made sure its refugees have remained a festering sore in the Middle East. Bernard Lewis has the history lesson.
… During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.
What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.
The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.
The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation. …
Claudia Rosett says there is an inconvenient truth for the UN. Their latest globalony scare shows up just as they need to climb down from their overblown AIDS rhetoric.
Just as Ban Ki-moon is warming up to climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,†with the UN describing as absolute and unequivocal the “dire report†of the UN’s IPCC (picked for the Nobel prize courtesy of the Norwegian parliament, whose wisdom, we must infer, is similarly absolute), along comes the news that — whoops! — the UN in its earlier apocalyptic warnings about another issue has, in the words of the Washington Post, “long over-estimated both the size and course†— in that case of the AIDS epidemic. …
The Captain noticed Richard Holbrooke auditioning for State by retailing some Balkan nonsense.
… Where to start with this litany of foolishness? First, Holbrooke leaves out a few little details about why the Bush administration didn’t make Kosovo its highest priority. In September 2001, we had this little incident with terrorists and a few airplanes that focused our attention elsewhere. We also had a military commitment that long preceded the Balkans that the UN couldn’t handle for twelve years, one that involved a lot more hot-war actions than the Balkans. The notion that Kosovo should have been a high priority between 2001-2006 is patently absurd, and Holbrooke shows intellectual dishonesty for not pointing out the valid reasons this got back-burnered. …
Adam Smith knew 250 years ago what modern science is just discovering about empathy.
Michael Barone says the 2008 race has a wide range of possibilities.
… What about the general election? Consider two poll results: When the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked voters which party they preferred to win the race for president, Democrats led 49 percent to 36 percent. When the FOX News poll asked which of two specific candidates would do the better job of protecting the country, Rudy Giuliani came out ahead of Hillary Clinton by 50 percent to 36 percent. Those numbers suggest to me that the range of possible outcomes in November 2008 is much wider than it was in November 2004.
What we have not seen yet is a debate between the two parties on ideas. The Democratic candidates have been busy pounding George W. Bush, who will not be on the ballot. The Republican candidates have been busy pounding Hillary Clinton, who may or may not be on the ballot. And candidates in each of the parties have gotten started pounding each other. These arguments are mostly about the past. We haven’t heard much yet about the future.
Ted Olson is the WSJ Weekend Interview. By James Taranto.
Rudy Giuliani doesn’t always follow Ted Olson’s advice. “I remember conversations with Rudy before he became mayor when he was thinking about running,” Mr. Olson says. “I was asking him, ‘Why in the world would you want to do this? A, you can’t get elected. You’re a Republican; it’s New York City. And B, there’s nothing that can be done about New York City. It’s too big; the problems are too deeply engrafted onto the city; the city’s in the grip of labor unions, crime, high taxes, heavy burdens. The city’s a terrible place, and it’s too big to govern.’ “
Just as Mr. Olson was sure Mr. Giuliani couldn’t get elected in New York because of his party, it has been a common assumption that the former mayor cannot win the Republican presidential nomination because of his liberal positions on social issues, particularly abortion and guns. Mr. Olson is one of the nation’s top conservative lawyers, having represented President-elect Bush in Bush v. Gore and served as Mr. Bush’s solicitor general. As chairman of Mr. Giuliani’s Justice Advisory Committee, he intends to help the candidate defy conventional wisdom again. …
Cafe Hayek starts an interesting thread on the globalization v. localization debate.
… Ironic, isn’t it, that “Progressives” advocate a return to the economic arrangements of the dark- and middle-ages?
Which led to a post by Coyote Blog.
… By the way, one reason this food-mile thing is not going away, no matter how stupid it is, has to do with the history of the global warming movement. Remember all those anti-globalization folks who rampaged in Seattle? Where did they all go? Well, they did not get sensible all of a sudden. They joined the environmental movement. One reason a core group of folks in the catastrophic man-made global warming camp react so poorly to any criticism of the science is that they need and want it to be true that man is causing catastrophic warming — anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists jumped into the global warming environmental movement, seeing in it a vehicle to achieve their aims of rolling back economic growth, global trade, and capitalism in general. Food miles appeals to their disdain for world trade, and global warming and carbon footprints are just a convenient excuse for trying to sell the concept to other people. …
And then to a post at American Thinker.
… Along those same lines comes this release out of Bali that the airport there is expecting so many private jets for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference that local officials will be making most attendees ferry their planes to four other airports in the region for parking as the local airport can only accommodate 15 planes. The closest airport to provide parking space for such jets is about 60 miles away, the furthest about 600. …