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In the Spectator, UK, Melanie Griffiths posts a speech given by historian Andrew Roberts about the disappointing relationship the UK has had with Israel. He reviews the historical record and highlights a number of points where British support was nominal or nonexistent, and how this pattern continues.
It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of AIA (Anglo-Israel Association), and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths. …
…Because there are 22 ambassadors to Arab countries, and only one to Israel, it is perhaps natural that the FO (Foreign Office) should tend to be more pro-Arab than pro-Israeli. … Overall, however, such men are swimming against the tide of an FO assumption that Britain’s relations with Israel ought constantly to be subordinated to her relations with other Middle Eastern states, especially the oil-rich ones, however badly those states behave in terms of human rights abuses, the persecution of Christians, the oppression of women, medieval practices of punishment, and so on.
It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the FO thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans – twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?
Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently? …
…Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:
That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.
In the Corner, Daniel Foster posts on CBS’s report that Bin Laden’s successor was killed.
Reports about this have been floating around for a while but this is the first I’ve seen with a name — and that of a “natural successor to Bin Laden” to boot.
(CBS) A U.S. government official says a top al Qaeda operative has been killed in a drone attack in western Pakistan, and local media says that the strike killed al Qaeda’s number 3 in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.
The U.S. is still not confirming the report, CBS News has learned.
Abu Yahya al-Libi is the spiritual successor to Palestinian philosopher Abu Azzam – and the inspiration for much of Bin Laden’s beliefs, according to CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan. He is very powerful and believed by some to be the natural successor to Bin Laden.
Intelligence officials have confirmed that the pace of attacks by armed unmanned aerial vehicles has increased during the Obama administration.
As Jim Geraghty Tweeted: “If our drone killed an al-Qaeda bigwig DURING Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, it would be as cool as the closing scenes of The Godfather.”
Ariana Eunjung Cha, in WaPo, looks at the aging population in China. China instituted controls to decrease the population, and have ended up creating more issues for its society. Perhaps Thomas Friedman will lose his admiration for Chinese coercion. Remember this?: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”
…More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.
The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent. …
…Almost overnight, posters directing families to have only one child were replaced by copies of regulations detailing who would be eligible to have a second child and how to apply for a permit. …
“People in the West wrongly see the one-child policy as a rights issue,” said Yang, a construction engineer whose wife is seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child. “Yes, we are being robbed of the chance to have more than one child. But the problem is not just some policy. It is money.” …
…Wang, the human resources administrator, said she wants an only child because she was one herself: “We were at the center of our families and used to everyone taking care of us. We are not used to taking care of and don’t really want to take care of others.” …
Victor Davis Hanson reviews the disastrous first year of the Obami with a list of notorious actions. Here are some of the events that made his list.
The fight with the former CIA directors
Czars everywhere
Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” chauvinism
The demonization of the Town-Hallers
The Obama readjustment in the order of paying back car creditors
The Emanuel “never let a serious crisis go to waste” boast
The planned $9 trillion added to the national debt
New income tax rates; health care surcharge talk; and payroll tax caps to be lifted
Rahm Emanuel’s promised payback to those states that trash the stimulus
Voting present on the Iranian reformers in the street
Charles Krauthammer discusses the outrageous overreach of authority seen in the EPA’s recent announcement regarding carbon dioxide. There is more to the story than just the militant environmentalists totalitarian intentions; there is a power struggle between the legislative and executive branches.
…On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an “endangerment” to human health.
Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.
This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.
…Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats. …
John Podhoretz posts on Tiger’s troubles.
…The United States is an inscrutable place in many ways. We live in a country in which it is likely a sixth state out of the 50 is going to legalize gay marriage in the next few weeks. On television, practically every night, one show or other features a scene of two women kissing. We do not judge illegitimacy any longer. And so on. We lived through a scandal a decade ago in which we learned the president of the United States had basically seduced a 21 year-old employee in his service—and tens of millions of people hotly defended his and her right to privacy and condemned the notion that there was any public interest served in the exploration of the subject of his misconduct.
Yet now, as 2009 draws to a close, someone who is famous and rich because he is a brilliant player of a game—someone, moreover, who is unique among American celebrities in his manifest refusal to do anything to court or interest or woo the audience that is so fascinated by him—drives his car into a tree, and for nearly two weeks, we are overrun with the details of his personal indiscretions. It is fascinating. If ever there were a subject that is truly and completely and without question nobody’s business, it is this one. He did not violate a public trust, he broke no law, evidently, in his traffic accident, and no legal action has been taken in the case. These would all ordinarily be the triggers for a news story and its continuation. But it is open season on Tiger Woods. Let anyone say there might be a legitimate debate to be conducted on the redefinition of marriage, which is a public-policy issue involving pretty much everybody, and that is considered beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse by a great many people slobbering over the discovery of the latest IHOP waitress to have caught Woods’s fancy.
I hold no brief for Tiger Woods’s behavior, but it strikes me as among the least surprising revelations in the course of human history. It is America’s prurience on this matter in the midst of its own cultural confusion on matters sexual and marital that surprises and confounds.