Bookworm Room

“Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” — C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Neither Data nor Mr. Spock, two relentlessly logical creations, could ever be liberals or Democrats or Progressives, or whatever the Hell else they’re calling themselves nowadays.  (For convenience, I’ll just lump them all together under the [...]

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We all know that Palestinians are victims, right?  That’s why they get a free pass for eating up billions of dollars in foreign aid without establishing viable communities, for launching tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, and for periodically boarding Israeli buses or entering Israeli restaurants to get an up-close-and-personal approach to [...]

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For anyone struggling to understand what has happened in the Middle East since the Oslo “Peace” Accord, I cannot recommend anything more highly than Evelyn Gordon’s Commentary magazine article, The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace.  The so-called peace process, by destroying Israel’s long-standing legal rights, caused her to lose focus and room to negotiate.  The [...]

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With every passing post, I am more impressed by Evelyn Gordon’s opinings about Israel.  Today’s post is another home run, this time showing, in clear language, that the Palestinian demand for a two-state solution is one more dangerous, expensive fraud, in an age of dangerous, expensive frauds.

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I think Obama has done a good thing for Israel.  With his abandonment of Israel, leaving Israel hanging out in the wind on her own, even the Israeli Left has been forced to face a reality they previously denied:  Palestinians are not partners in peace.  They are a force aimed at Israel’s total destruction and [...]

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This month marks the third anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s long imprisonment with the Palestinians who kidnapped him.  Although it doesn’t seem to show up in American press, German and Israeli outlets are reporting that the Germans (!?) have brokered a deal for his release.  Here’s Der Spiegel: Three years ago he was kidnapped by Hamas. [...]

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One thing I have to give credit to Barack Obama for being is a complete pragmatist, even if that pragmatism operates to the exclusion of moral decency.  Witness his decision to jettison Israel entirely (something Elliott Abrams explains carefully here) in order to placate the Muslim world.  Many think that Obama’s affinity for the Muslim [...]

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Here’s the beginning of the story about why $200 million in taxpayer money is being poured into the bottomless pit that is the Palestinian people (emphasis mine): The United States has transferred $200 million to the Palestinian government to help ease a growing budget deficit, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday. Palestinian [...]

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Israel stopped a contingent of Hamas supporters who tried to run a blockade bringing money and supplies into Gaza.  Cynthia McKinney figures prominently in their number: The Israeli navy intercepted a ship carrying foreign peace activists – including a San Rafael woman – trying to break a blockade of Gaza on Tuesday and forced it [...]

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Do you recall that, in France, Palestinians raided a grocery store and stripped the shelves of Israeli products, while store personnel and customers passively stood by and watched?  Flush with their success in France, Palestinians, and their friends, are planning on “de-shelving” Israeli products here at home, and they’ve selected Trader Joe’s as their target. [...]

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I commented on and graded Obama’s much heralded speech to the Muslim world, so I think it only fair to grade Bibi’s speech, which is directed to much the same audience (plus the western world, too).  As I did with Obama’s speech, I’m making me comments in real time, without having read ahead, so every [...]

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I haven’t seen the context in which Obama made the reported statement and, really, I don’t want to, because the AP report — which is a mere one sentence in length — seems to encapsulate everything we know about the man.  Here is the entire AP report: WASHINGTON (AP) – Obama to Israeli leader: capitalize [...]

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Rick Richman gives one of the most succinct explanations I’ve ever seen for the fallacy behind the Leftist desire to assign victim status to the Palestinians.

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Bruce Kesler put me wise to this article out of Israel (one pretty much ignored in the US press) about the way America (make that the State Department and the brain trust at the Ivy Leagues) spent twenty years consistently trying to undermine Israel.  And we wonder why the “peace talks” never worked.  Anyway, I [...]

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Hamas has been making much of its dead children.  It had a field day with photos of those children who died when the IDF shot shells into a “UN school.”  Most of the world (including, of course, a credulous and/or complicit media) managed to ignore the fact that it’s bizarre that, in the midst of [...]

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A local Marin woman hitched a ride with a peace group to stay with some Palestinians, and came back filled with useful information.  Anna Rogers found “shocking . . . how much Arab land has been taken over and how crazily restrictive it is for the Palestinians.”  That’s an interesting thing to say, of course, [...]

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I don’t have much time to write now, but I read a trio of stories at the Jerusalem Post that remind us why moral relativism regarding Israel is wrong.  Israel, for all her flaws, is a better, more moral country that the surrounding Arab nations, and that’s regardless of any of their virtues: Another Arab [...]

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Instead, Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, is a useless idiot — and I say this because, unlike the situation with the normal apologists for foul regimes, the obvious and known facts are so at variance with her pronouncements that no one can believe her. (Having said that, I know that Israel’s foes are comprised in [...]

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Aside from the fact that Israel faces existential destruction if she gives in to the “Let’s just share Israel between Palestians and Jews” attitude, she knows that she faces something equally bad:  the Muslim habit of destroying or desecrating Jewish religious symbols, something they did on a grand scale before the 1967 War liberated Jerusalem, [...]

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Sometimes, the bizarre nature of the Middle East defies description (all emphasis mine): Nine Palestinians were killed and dozens hurt in battles in Gaza City between forces of the rival Hamas and Fatah movements on Saturday, prompting Israel to open its border to fleeing Fatah members. The fighting, which lasted most of the day, was [...]

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This is not a picture in America, but the top two pictures in this story illustrate perfectly why it matters that a nation’s citizens — the vast majority of whom are law abiding — can bear arms. It is also interesting to note that, while the Beeb instantly tried to paint the Israelis as killers, [...]

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Honest Reporting captured the first spin that the BBC put on the terrible story of the latest massacre in Israel (a Palestinian versus Israelis, of course) — and, as always, it was Israel who was spun as the brutal aggressor.  Orwell clearly understood something in the British psyche when he wrote 1984 — or, more [...]

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Did you know that a rocket could break a truce?  I didn’t.  Being neither a scientist nor a weapons expert, nor a member of the MSM, I kind of thought that, absent human intervention, rockets would just lie around inert.  It’s just always seemed to me that, for a rocket to fly through the air [...]

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Richard Baehr initially supported Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw Israel from the Gaza Strip.  He now believes that the withdrawal was a terrible mistake, and carefully explains why.  As for me, I don’t think it was a mistake then.  I think it collapsed for a reason that could not be foreseen.  Let me explain. What [...]

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One of the things that has infuriated me for years in the roiling battle between Israel and her neighbors is Israel’s utter ineptitude at courting the media.  For decades, after ever single “event,” the Palestinians offered dozens of sympathetic people up for interviews with the MSM, while the Israelis offered terse, uninformative commentaries from tight [...]

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