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Pickerhead was waiting for Spengler to weigh in on Israel’s Gaza incursion. Instead he takes a more global view by jumping off, as does Mark Steyn, on the death of Samuel Huntington.
… I submit that the basis for our great civilizations (Judeo-Christian, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox Christian, Islamic) is existential. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail.
Half of the world’s population now lives in three supra-ethnic states, that is, states in which citizenship has no ethnic connotation. These are China, India and the United States. The three great supra-ethnic states are internally stable and have little cause for conflict anywhere on their borders, let alone with each other. Empires have existed throughout recorded history, but always with fragile borders and mortal conflict with their rivals.
In addition to the 3 billion inhabitants of China, India and the United States, we may add nearly another billion people on China’s periphery whose prospects for peace and prosperity are robust thanks to the strength of the supra-ethnic states. This is a great turn for the better in the blood-soaked history of humankind. During the long darkness of prehistory, two-fifths of males could expect to die violently in every generation. War has overshadowed human society throughout all of history, but less so today than ever before. Most of humanity lives in states where each man may sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there is none to make him afraid. …
A Contentions post starts today’s items on Israel and Gaza.
… Hamas is getting a very harsh lesson — Israel doesn’t bluff. And it is getting it in the only language it has ever truly understood — blood and violence.
Will they actually learn from this lesson? I hope so, but sincerely doubt it. The best we can hope for is that they will be weakened to the point where they can’t attack Israel again for at least a little while.
Mark Steyn has Mid-East thoughts.
So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on Dec. 23 Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia – Islamic law – to the Palestinian territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.
The following day, Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha’s Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book “The Clash Of Civilizations,” professor Huntington argued that Western elites’ view of man as homo economicus was reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings.
Very few of us want to believe this thesis.
“The great majority of Palestinian people,” Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, “they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”
Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: “Do you think this or do you know this?”
“Well, I think I know it,” said Secretary Rice. …
Ed Morrissey spots a sign during Manhattan protests against Israel.
Jim Taranto explains Israel’s “knock on the roof” as the IDF calls with warnings.
LA Times Op-ed says the real enemy is Iran.
The images from the fighting in Gaza are harrowing but ultimately deceptive. They portray a mighty invading army, one equipped with F-16 jets that have bombed a civilian population defended by a few thousand fighters armed with primitive rockets. But widen the lens and the true nature of this conflict emerges. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran. And Israel’s current operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism.
Until now, the Iranian revolution has appeared unstoppable. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s ended with Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory. Iranian influence then spread to Saudi Arabia’s heavily Shiite and oil-rich Eastern province, and to Lebanon through Hezbollah. Since the fall of their long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein, Iranians have deeply infiltrated Iraq. Syria has been drawn into Iran’s sphere, and even the Sunni sheikdoms of the gulf now defer to Iran, dispatching foreign ministers to Tehran and defying international sanctions against it. Iran has co-opted Hamas, a Sunni organization closely linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state. But Iran’s boldest achievement has been to thwart world pressure and approach the nuclear threshold. Once fortified with nuclear weapons, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East would be complete.
All of which helps explain the public statements from moderate Arab leaders, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who have blamed the end of the tenuous Israel-Hamas cease-fire on Hamas. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has even called on the Arab world to stop using the U.N. as a forum for blaming Israel alone for the fighting, surely a first. Those leaders understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region’s takeover by radical Islam. …
Alan Dershowitz defends Israel’s warriors.
… While Israel installs warning systems and builds shelters, Hamas refuses to do so, precisely because it wants to maximise the number of Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by Israel’s military actions. Hamas knows from experience that even a small number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed inadvertently will result in bitter condemnation of Israel by many in the international community.
Israel understands this as well. It goes to great lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties – even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians. Until the world recognises that Hamas is committing three war crimes – targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member-state of the UN – and that Israel is acting in self-defence and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue.
Kim Strassel says now that Dems have to be grown-ups, the chance for card check legislation is looking dim.
Responsibility has a way of focusing the mind.
Take Mark Pryor, Democratic senator from Arkansas. In 2007, Mr. Pryor voted to move card check, Big Labor’s No. 1 priority. And why not? Mr. Pryor knew the GOP would block the bill, which gets rid of secret ballots in union elections. Besides, his support helped guarantee labor wouldn’t field a challenger to him in the primary.
Postelection, Mr. Pryor isn’t so committed. He’s indicated he wouldn’t co-sponsor the legislation again. He says he’d like to find common ground between labor and business. He is telling people the bill isn’t on a Senate fast-track, anyway. His business community, which has nimbly whipped up anti-card-check sentiment across his right-to-work state, is getting a more polite hearing.
It hasn’t been much noticed, but the political ground is already shifting under Big Labor’s card-check initiative. The unions poured unprecedented money and manpower into getting Democrats elected; their payoff was supposed to be a bill that would allow them to intimidate more workers into joining unions. The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama and an unfettered Democratic majority would write that check, lickety-split.
Instead, union leaders now say they are being told card check won’t happen soon. …