Bookworm Room

Tweet Israel Matzav found a post in which two Arab-American women explain how horribly Israel treated them, when it questioned them at Ben Gurion and then deported them from Israel.  Interestingly, although the young women complain mightily about their treatment at Israel’s hands, they never do state explicitly that they harbor no ill-will towards that [...]

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Tweet You realize this means war! When I was growing up, we socialized with a lot of Arabs — from Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, etc.  I don’t know why that was possible back then — if we were anomalies or if, back in the 1970s, the hatreds of the Middle East hadn’t yet made it [...]

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Tweet Years ago, I read in an Efraim Karsh book something to the effect that the Arab honor culture is actually a shame culture.  That is, in America, honor is a personal standard, one by which we measure ourselves.  Arab honor, however, is a public face one presents to the world.  If something goes wrong, [...]

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Tweet Bill Whittle narrates this clear summation of 20th and 21st century relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  It does not reflect well on the Arabs:

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Tweet Once again, Israel is apparently blathering on about its willingness to agree to a two state solution.  This so irritates me.  There is already a two state solution.  It’s called Jordan, and has been Jordan since the 1920s.  What the loopy-loo wackos on the Left (and, increasingly, in the middle) don’t understand, is that [...]

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Tweet I’ve been reading two things that seem to twine together.  The first is the ongoing news out of Gaza, about Hamas continuously firing missiles into Israel (as well as into their own population).  Noah Pollak wrote a very good commentary in response to a question about why Hamas, through its outpost in Gaza, keeps [...]

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Tweet Ymarsakar brought to my attention a post I wrote over three years ago.  I’m reprinting a slightly edited version here, not just because I think it describes well the Arab psyche that drives so much of current international politics (and fears) today, but also because I think it does a good job of describing [...]

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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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Tweet David Suissa has created a series of ads to remind people of all the marvelous contributions Israel has made to the world during its short time as a country (and, impressively, a country perpetually under siege). I think it’s time to create some ads for the Muslim and Arab world too (click on thumbnails [...]

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Tweet Hamas never enters into truces with an eye to peace.  It enters into truces with an eye to getting its troops rested and rearmed before the next offensive.  Israel, equipped with knowledge of both core Islamic doctrine (hudna) and Hamas’ own past behavior, nevertheless keeps giving its opponent a breather, rather than keeping the [...]

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Tweet I’m a scientific ignoramus.  Although I’ve been skeptical of global warming from the start, my skepticism hasn’t been rooted in a sound grasp of facts and scientific principles.  Instead, it arises because of my source problems:  I deeply distrust the people touting climate change. From the moment Al Gore started mouthing off about it, [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has accused American Jews of McCarthyism for being critical of Israel’s critics. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The pattern, repeated over and over as we learn more about Obama’s advisers, is that one of them speaks fondly of the Palestinians or harshly of Israel, Jews [...]

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Tweet I’m beginning to think that incrementalism is one of the most dangerous things out there, whether it’s the way Obama leaks out the truth about his big lies or the way in which the jihadists keep asking for little things from us — no pigs, no dogs, no occupied territories.  As to that latter [...]

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Tweet The British press was rocked for a few minutes a couple of weeks ago by the story of an Iraqi girl whose father murdered her quite brutally because she’d fallen in love with a British soldier. (There was no hint, by the way, that she’d done anything about the love; it was an infatuation [...]

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Tweet We received in yesterday’s mail a warning (a very nice warning) that my 5th grader is struggling with geometry. As a former geometry struggler myself, I’m all sympathy. We did not get mad at her. What is infuriating, though, is her absolutely unwillingness to learn geometry. After 1.5 years in public schools, she believes [...]

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Tweet The accepted wisdom is that the intense hatred the Palestinians feel for Jews is a direct result of Jewish annexation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 War. Of course, as with most propaganda, this is false. Aside from conveniently ignoring the 1956 and 1948 Wars, not to mention the Koran itself, [...]

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