Bookworm Room

Tweet I really shouldn’t pick on Tom Friedman.  If he was the average idiot holding forth in a bar or living room, I probably wouldn’t.  But this average idiot has a forum — the New York Times — that gives him license to spread his stupidity to a much wider audience than is made available [...]

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Tweet If you ever hear about the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement (BDS), do not fall for the advertised claims that it is about peace.  It is intended to destroy Israel and is actively hostile to any peace between the two peoples: Please watch this video and, if you are a friend of Israel, send it [...]

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Tweet Something is deeply wrong at the New York Times.  I think that, perhaps, someone sensible slipped into their offices in the dark of night and published Efraim Karsh’s op-ed about the Palestinians, and the way in which they’ve been puppets for the surrounding Arab states.  I’m sure whoever let that happen, if caught, will [...]

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Tweet I’m sorry I didn’t blog today.  I have a half finished post on my screen, but can’t seem to get it entirely finished.  Sometimes, when that happens, I just abandon the idea and move on to other things, but sometimes I just get mentally blocked up.  I seem to need to work this one [...]

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Tweet Although it’s been open for more than a year now, I went for the first time today to the newly rebuilt California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.  My visit there was an interesting contrast to my first visit, some years ago, to the newly rebuilt De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. [...]

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Tweet You recognize that quotation, right?  It’s one of Golda Meir’s most repeated sayings.  However, if you’ve been paying attention to the blogosphere lately, you’ll see that the Palestinians, with a lot of help from the Jordanians, are still raising their children to be cannon fodder.  Rick, at Brutally Honest, has my favorite post on [...]

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Tweet Tomorrow is the 4th anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping.  Think of that:  this young man has spent almost a fifth of his life held as a prisoner by Palestinian terrorists.  The Jewish Community Relations Council is asking people to send a message to Gilad in the hope that these words of hope, support, love [...]

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Tweet Justice Scalia states more eloquently than I ever could the difference between feelings and morality. [Sorry about this -- while I was in the midst of editing a longer, pre-existing post, Comcast service died completely and deleted everything I'd written after the above sentence.  Sigh.  Nine hours later, Comcast is back, but I have [...]

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Tweet “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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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.  [...]

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Tweet 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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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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. [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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: [...]

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Tweet 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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Tweet 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, [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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