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Our favorite Davids look at the Middle East today.
David Warren starts by giving us more of the picture related to the Israeli raid on the pretend humanitarian mission to Gaza.
…From start to finish this was a violent political stunt, designed to inflict as much harm as possible on Israel’s existential interests. To defend it requires obtuse hypocrisy.
Consider: the embargo on Gaza is not Israel’s alone. Egypt also enforces strict controls on what enters and leaves Gaza, and for the same obvious reason. The territory is controlled by Hamas, and they are trying to import lethal weaponry, from Iran and other rogue sources. But Egypt is conveniently left out of the propaganda picture. …
David Goldman (Spengler) looks at what this incident tells us about Israeli foreign policy and the intentions of the Turkish government.
Israel mishandled the Gaza “humanitarian aid” flotilla through extreme forbearance, and will suffer a marathon of tongue-clicking and hand-wringing by diplomatic hypocrites who know better. The Jewish state lost the propaganda battle the moment the floating time bomb disguised as a humanitarian mission sailed from Turkey. If Israel had denounced the matter as a provocation and withdrawn its ambassador from Turkey, warning that the object of the exercise was to provoke violence and open the way for weapons deliveries to Hamas, the outcome might have been quite different. …
…There is a curious symmetry between Israel’s reluctance to call out the Turks for their sponsorship of the provocation, and the seemingly explicable reluctance of the Israeli military to treat the threat with the seriousness it clearly deserved. The Israeli navy commandos walked into a trap for which they clearly were unprepared. …
…Evidently, Israel has trouble accepting the reality on the ground, just as other governments do. There is not going to be a peace negotiation, but rather a war, and that the war will be terrible and bloody. Israel has lost Turkey as an ally; the United States, for that matter, has lost Turkey as an ally, as the leaders of Ankara compete with the mullahs of Tehran for the leadership of Islamism. …
David Harsanyi makes a number of good points, including turning the tables on the MSM.
…Still, commentators like Alan Colmes opine: “To speak out against this despicable act isn’t to hate Israel, but rather to love it, and peace.”
So why don’t left-wing pundits love Turkey for a while? That nation, after all, not only instigated this event but is home to more than 25 million Kurds living in occupied territories. Kurds who deal with daily human rights abuses: torture, mass disappearances, assaults on their language and culture.
No emergency sessions at the United Nations for them. …
…And no U.S. administration is pressuring Turkey to give Kurds their own state. …
In the Enterprise Blog, Marc Thiessen comments on the job no one wants.
Little noticed before the holiday weekend was this piece in the Washington Post, where Obama administration officials bemoaned the fact that they can’t find anyone to accept the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). After floating the name of General James Clapper, the Obama administration is apparently looking elsewhere because of pressure from Capitol Hill to appoint a civilian. Problem? Apparently no qualified civilian intelligence experts are interested. The Post quotes an intelligence official saying, “Nobody who knows this stuff wants this job.”
Now why is that? Could it be the fact that the Obama administration has effectively declared war on the intelligence community—taking away the tools our intelligence professionals need to protect the country and then blaming them for their failure to anticipate and prevent plots like the Christmas Day and Times Square attacks? …
Theodore Dalrymple discusses how foreign aid can sustain a parasitic government class that has destroyed the economy and the wealth of the population. Below he discusses Julius Nyerere’s socialization of Tanzania.
…But Nyerere knew what to do for them. In 1967, he issued his famous Arusha Declaration, named for the town where he made it, committing Tanzania to socialism and vowing to end the exploitation of man by man that made some people rich and others poor. …So Tanzania nationalized the banks, appropriated commercial farms, took over all major industry, controlled prices, and put all export trade under the control of paragovernmental organizations.
…The predictable result of these efforts at preventing the exploitation of man by man was the collapse of production, pauperizing an already poor country. Tanzania went from being a significant exporter of agricultural produce to being utterly dependent on food imports, even for subsistence, in just a few years. …
…Thanks to foreign aid, a large bureaucracy grew up in Tanzania whose power, influence, and relative prosperity depended on its keeping the economy a genuine zero-sum game. A vicious circle had been created: the more impoverished the country, the greater the need for foreign aid; the greater the foreign aid, the more privileged the elite; the more privileged the elite, the greater the adherence to policies that resulted in poverty. Nyerere himself made the connection between privilege and ruinous policies perfectly clear after the International Monetary Fund suggested that Tanzania float its currency, the Tanzanian shilling, rather than maintain it at a ridiculously overvalued rate. “There would be rioting in the streets, and I would lose everything I have,” Nyerere said. …
Investor’s Business Daily editors remind us of the damage caused by the Clinton administration.
Statism: Like that of termites, the full damage from suit-and-tie radicals manifests years after their “reforms.” Only now, for example, are we seeing the devastation caused by the last Oval Office infestation.
Like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton also campaigned as a moderate. Once elected, however, he surrounded himself with some of the most radical leftists ever appointed to the Cabinet. (Many of them have re-enlisted with this administration.)
Behind the scenes, they worked furiously to undermine the system. And now, decades later, we’re seeing the results. Clinton’s policies — not just his unethical conduct — were recipes for disaster. …
John Stossel jumps into the fray regarding Rand Paul’s remarks on discrimination.
…It wasn’t free markets in the South that perpetuated racism. It was government colluding with private individuals (some in the KKK) to intimidate those who would have integrated.
It was private action that started challenging the racists, and it was succeeding — four years before the Civil Rights Act passed.
Government is a blunt instrument of violence that one day might do something you like but the next day will do something you abhor. Better to leave things to us — people — acting together privately.
Roger Simon posts on Joe McGinniss.
One thing you have to say for Joe McGinnis, he knows how to get himself some publicity for a book on the most over-exposed subject in America – Sarah Palin. Yawn, and triple yawn. …
…I write this, to be clear, as one of those, apparently rare, people who is mostly neutral on Palin. And rather bored with her (as I tend to be with many politicians who are so constantly in our faces, repeating the same ideas over and over). But her pathological enemies like McGinnis make me want to support her. McGinnis is manufacturing Palin supporters on a small level in much the way Obama, in a far larger and more important way, is manufacturing libertarians.