I was trawling the net last night and I came across this article on the rigours of British public boarding schools.

For anyone who has been there, its a great read:

British Public Schools

Posted by Guy Spier at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

This appears to be a powerful and moving admission of numerous errors from within Israels religous right-wing block. I've quoted from it below.

We tried to give new life to the Torah of Israel so it would suit the tasks of this generation, but the generation of rabbis that were born to us disappointed. Our Torah is not relevant to the real situation of the great majority of the Jewish people in this generation. Its language is cut off and its thoughts not directed to the simple and basic and existential troubles of our society.

The terrible truth is that this generation of rabbis created a fictitious agenda for us, one that scorns the issues of the simple Israeli man struggling to earn a livelihood, his identity and his dignity in a country still in its early stages of consolidation.

While we were busy with the Land of Israel and settling and fostering our ostensibly ideological identity, so isolated from those of other people, awful things took place. There are a million and a half impoverished people in Israeli society, and the overwhelming majority of them are not among our ranks.

We looked out for ourselves, did we not? The beautiful settlements we built, the huge and ostentatious houses in so many of them, we thought this was something we deserved by right. While our schools flourished – and we made sure our children received more and more hours of schooling – there was no one to look out for the other children.

We strengthened our own small and prestigious state religious schools and national haredi schools and neglected, even when we held the Education Ministry portfolio, all the other school systems. We acted like any self-interested sector, not as a worthy leadership.

We have no interest in the rights of workers, which are gradually being eroded – not of Jewish workers and certainly not of foreign workers; we have nothing to say about Israel being a world leader in the trading of women, and we of course have nothing to say about the Palestinian issue.

Except for a very few in our society, we don't even notice their existence. The Palestinians are invisible. They are a phenomenon of nature. We only see them when they strike at us.

And to all this it must be added that the institution closest to us, the one our people still control, the rabbinical courts, function like the legal system of a third world country, and we do almost nothing to change this disgrace.

The behavior of so many of us in the last few months shows that we have lost our wits. The hysterical demonstrations, the tacit consent to sending children to block roads and clash with security forces, all this attests to a deep sense of insult – as if society had betrayed us, the best of its sons.

And yes, many of us are indeed the best of its sons; but we betrayed society first. Innocently. Out of genuine idealism. But also out of arrogance. We disengaged first.

Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World

Posted by Guy Spier at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This photograph summarizes much of what I feel about the Gaza disengagement.

Chayyei Sarah

Posted by Guy Spier at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Borowitz is often very funny & right on the money. What is amazing is that most of the world is inclined to believe Iran's drivel regarding nuclear power.

Iran’s new president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, raised eyebrows in the international community today by claiming that his nation is building what he called “the most peaceful nuclear weapon ever.”

In a press briefing in Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinejad acknowledged for the first time that Iran was in fact building a nuclear weapon, but pooh-poohed any talk of Iran being a threat to its neighbors, telling reporters, “The nuclear bomb we are currently building is for display purposes only.”

The Borowitz Report .com

Posted by Guy Spier at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This is hilarious.

TigerHawk

I live in a New York apartment. I think for doing this to a car around 3 times a week.

Posted by Guy Spier at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I like Salman Rushdie's writings. This is a good piece that he wrote for the Washington Post.

When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had accepted his community's responsibility for outrages committed by its members. Instead of blaming U.S. foreign policy or "Islamophobia," Sacranie described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim community.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers. Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernized? That would make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they're just the "traditional" part of the problem.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501483_pf.html

The Right Time for An Islamic Reformation

By Salman Rushdie
Sunday, August 7, 2005; B07

When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had accepted his community's responsibility for outrages committed by its members. Instead of blaming U.S. foreign policy or "Islamophobia," Sacranie described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that "Death is perhaps too easy" for the author of "The Satanic Verses." Tony Blair's decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of "moderate," "traditional" Islam is either a sign of his government's penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair's options really are.

Sacranie is a strong advocate of Blair's much-criticized new religious-hatred bill, which will make it harder to criticize religion, and he actually expects the new law to outlaw references to Islamic terrorism. He said as recently as Jan. 13, "There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered [i.e., banned] by this provision." Two weeks later his organization boycotted a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in London commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.

The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Blair government's strategy of relying on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many whose views on women's rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views and who, in the case of the Muslim diaspora, are -- it has to be said -- in many ways at odds with the Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they live.

In Leeds, from which several of the London bombers came, many traditional Muslims lead inward-turned lives of near-segregation from the wider population. From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks.

The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.

It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement will require above all a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking. It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.

It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered the difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary because of its appeal to all those whom the new system disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless and, yes, the orphans.

Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the Nestorian Christians' desert versions of Bible stories that the Koran mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet's own experiences.

However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?

The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers. Will Sir Iqbal Sacranie and his ilk agree that Islam must be modernized? That would make them part of the solution. Otherwise, they're just the "traditional" part of the problem.

The writer is a novelist and essayist whose works include "The Satanic Verses."

Posted by Guy Spier at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I had lunch with an Israeli friend yesterday who told me he had no doubt that Israel's defense against terrorism emanating from the Gaza strip can only improve after the withdrawal from Gaza.

He may be right. But not if you read this article by Yuval Diskin from the shin bet, in makes some very worrying claims.

How Much Will Sharon Fork out for a Favorable Security Council Resolution?

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

August 7, 2005, 9:15 AM (GMT+02:00)

Yuval Diskin, only three months Shin Beit director


Sunday, August 7, the Israeli cabinet approves by a large majority the evacuation of the first three Israel locations in the Gaza Strip, Morag, Netzarim and Kfar Darom. Similar approvals will follow for the remaining eighteen.

But that does not make Sunday Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s big day.

The important date for him is Wednesday, August 10. He will then find out if his huge gamble in pushing ahead, through thick and thin, with Israel’s pull-out from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank, comes up trumps. He has staked painful concessions, national unity and personal credibility on winning a big prize, but clearly believes it is worth the candle. That prize is a US-British-French initiative for a UN Security Council resolution declaring the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip at an end. He is counting on this reward’s delivery as soon as he hands the territory to Palestinian sovereignty free of an Israeli presence.

For the prime minister, this prize would make all the setbacks and humiliations he has suffered in the last year or two since launching his unilateral disengagement plan worthwhile. His advisers tell him that he would emerge from the battle powerful enough to pick and choose the party he leads in the next general election and be assured of a third term as prime minister.

According to DEBKAfile’s Washington sources, Sharon has an American promise in his pocket for this step. British premier Tony Blair agreed to go along with the initiative after the Sharon government permitted the British secret service MI6 to set up situation rooms in Gaza, Rafah, the Erez Gaza-Israel border terminal, Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarm and Jericho. French president Jacques Chirac promised to join in during Sharon’s Paris visit last month.

However this coming Wednesday will determine whether Sharon’s gambit stands or falls.

It is then that the Middle East Quartet’s economic coordinator for the Gaza Strip, James Wolfensohn, is due to phone his principals - President George W. Bush, UN secretary Kofi Annan, Blair and Chirac - with his final report. He will say -

I have succeeded in my mission to guarantee the economic future of the Gaza Strip and its land link to the West Bank, or –

I have failed in my mission, because Ariel Sharon is being stubborn and holding up my efforts to assure the Gaza Strip’s economic wellbeing and its direct link to the West Bank.

The first message will prompt steps in Washington to prepare Sharon’s dream resolution for approval after the last Israeli soldier is withdrawn. But if Wolfenson announces failure, Sharon will have lost his gamble.

The prime minister has already paid a stiff price in concessions to make the coordinator’s task a success. He has foregone all forms of Israeli presence at the border crossings between Egypt and the Gaza Strip in favor of an international presence; cut to the bone Israeli inspections of traffic at the Gaza-Israel checkpoints; agreed to relegate to Egypt security control of the Philadelphi border strip and the smuggling routes from Sinai to the Gaza Strip, and given Egypt the license to deploy troops in northern Sinai. The Palestinians will be allowed to dig a deep water port in Gaza, at the expense of Israel’s naval control of the Mediterranean coast. Most significantly, the Palestinians will be granted a land corridor across Israel’s Negev for the passage of goods and people from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank across southern Israeli territory. The Palestinians will receive these benefits without relinquishing terrorism.

Sharon has even waived the driving motive behind the evacuation, its unilateral nature, which was meant in the first place to begin disengaging the state of Israel from the Palestinian encumbrance. In the event, Israel is bound to executing its pull-out down to the last soldier and civilian for a wholly undesirable outcome: instead of disengagement, Israel must resign itself to intensified connectivity between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

But there is till one Palestinian demand that Sharon has resisted so far, upon which the entire scheme stands or falls: the Palestinians are holding out for the Gaza-West Bank corridor to be free of Israeli searches or the right to unload freight and travelers that hazard its security. Wolfensohn goes along with the Palestinian contention that Israeli authority to conduct such searches would nullify their sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and therefore not terminate the Israeli occupation

On the other hand, Israel’s security chiefs, the Shin Beit’s Yuval Diskin and AMAN’s Maj-Gen. Aharon Zeevi, are aghast at prospect of forfeiting this vital anti-terror measure. Once the trucks are able to pass through this corridor without restrictive searches for terrorists and weapons, there will be nothing to stop Hamas, Jihad Islami, Hizballah and even al Qaeda from jumping aboard and reaching the West Bank, along with their dangerous weapons of war. The Qassam missiles which battered Sderot will be aimed at the cities of central Israel, whose proximity will provide a further incentive for the suicide bombers heading out of Gaza unrestricted to West Bank.

According to DEBKAfile’s security sources, Diskin warned Sharon over this weekend that to make the terror threat real, it is enough for the Palestinian convoys to transfer a few score terrorists carrying Qassam missile and mortar diagrams for construction in West Bank metal workshops. They could also manufacture the shaped bombs long familiar to Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip and now menacing US Marines in Iraq. Very soon, Palestinian terror will again shoot across into Israel’s heartland after years of supreme and costly efforts to hold it back.

Diskin’s warning was so ominous that he is believed to be weighing resignation rather than accepting the impossible responsibility for national security should the prime minister give way on this point.

For Sharon the dilemma is a tough one: give up on searches of Palestinian convoys transiting Israel and let Wolfensohn claim success? Or stand by a vital national security interest and give up on a UN Security Council resolution framing international recognition of his monumental achievement to hang on his wall?

Without the world’s blessing for ending the occupation of the Gaza Strip, the prime minister will have dragged the country through a wrenching pull-out, bisected it and saddled it with a huge, unaffordable outlay – and for what?

Much of this agony stems from the prime minister’s office’s mishandling of the Wolfensohn mission. Underestimating its importance - perhaps because of the emissary’s rumpled appearance and unpretentiousness - Sharon’s advisers shunted the contacts with him over to the Labor vice prime minister Shimon Peres and his close associate Haim Ramon, both of whom are totally committed to a policy of almost unlimited concessions to the Palestinians. The pair seized on the opportunity of using Wolfensohn to extort from Sharon unconsidered compromises. They also did their utmost to fill in the blanks left in the discredited 1993 Oslo Peace Framework accords by the Palestinian terror war.

They “forgot” for instance to brief the coordinator on the dangers to Israel’s security inherent in the concessions they advised him to squeeze out of Sharon.

Wolfensohn may have understood much of this without their briefing. On the other hand, his remit from from the US president was to negotiate a plan for the Gaza Strip/s economic recovery hinging on a corridor through southern Israel linking it to the West Bank. Concern for Israel’s security was not part of his brief. He naturally sought to bring his mission to a successful conclusion.

Sharon has a vested personal interest in the coordinator’s success. He may therefore part with the final concession of unsupervised Palestinian traffic to the West Bank, a break that even Yasser Arafat never dreamed of achieving when he went to war in 2000.

If he does, he will have set in motion the countdown for a fresh outburst of terrorist atrocities and barrages of missiles and mortars – directed this time not merely against the sparsely populated Negev but the heavily populated, dense commercial and industrial conurbations of central Israel: Tel Aviv, Netanya, Raanana, Kfar Saba, Petach Tikva, Rosh Ha’ayin, Hadera, Caesaria, Pardes Hanna, Afula, as well as the government seat in Jerusalem.,

Posted by Guy Spier at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I recently met with Naomi Blumenthal at the Israeli Knesset. Amongst other things, she is against dis-engagement from Gaza - as is Netanyahu.

Their problem with dis-engagement is that it makes the Gaza strip into a base for terrorists of all stripes - and endangers not just Israel, but the rest of the world as well.

The reason why I am still in favour of disengagement is that it takes away the occupation pretext. Israel will still have the power of deterrence. Rather than acting as a local police force, Israel will be able to retaliate with full military force if terror emanates from Gaza. The opposing view is expressed below by Yoram Ettinger - formerly Israel's Consul - General in Houston.

Undermining U.S. Interest
by Yoram Ettinger

The impact of Israel's "disengagement" (retreat) from terrorist strongholds in Gaza and Samaria would not be limited to Israel. "Disengagement" would undermine vital American interests in the Middle East and beyond.

"Disengagement" would be inconsistent with America's non-compromising war on Islamic terrorism. Retreat by Israel, the role model of countering terrorism, would reward and energize regional and global terrorism, including anti-American terror lords. "Disengagement" would bolster the Palestinian Authority, which has been the most sustained pro-Saddam, pro-Bin Laden, pro-Iran, pro-Russia, pro-North Korea, and pro-China regime in the Middle East. "Disengagement" would transfer control of Gaza air and sea ports to the Palestinian Authority. They could become a platform for Iranian, Russian, Chinese, North Korean intelligence and military personnel and equipment, at the expense of American posture in the eastern flank of the Mediterranean. "Disengagement" would upgrade the position of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has been the most lethal threat to the pro-American, feeble Hashemite regime in Jordan. "Disengagement" would re-engage the military forces of Egypt and Israel in a terror-ridden area. It would lead - inadvertently or intentionally - to diplomatic and possibly military confrontations, exacerbating regional instability, and sucking America into an unnecessary conflict between two of its allies.

"Disengagement" and American interests constitute an oxymoron, as evidenced also by recent precedents. The July 2000 Israeli "disengagement" from South Lebanon has propelled Hezbollah from a small local terrorist group to a prominent regional terrorist organization, haunting American GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 1994-98 series of "disengagements" from 85% of Gaza and 40% of the Judea and Samaria have created the largest terrorist base in the world, controlled by the PLO, the role model of hijacking, hate education, and international terrorism. It has caused the Hashemites to be sleepless in Amman, and it has provided a platform and a tailwind to Middle Eastern terrorists, including Palestinians fighting America in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The time to examine the impact of Israel's "disengagement" on vital American interests is before - and not after - its dire consequences fall upon American GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush has elucidated his opposition to the concept of "disengagement" (retreat) in his June 28, 2005, speech at Fort Bragg: "Terrorists believe [that] they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. ... There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. ..." Mr. Bush has presented a worldview that professes a comprehensive, devastating offensive on the terrorists' own ground. He aims to obliterate the political, financial, and operational infrastructure, while refusing to negotiate, appease, or retreat.

Mr. Bush has concluded the proper lessons from a series of American "disengagements," which emboldened Islamic terrorism. In 1979, America "disengaged" from Iran following the embassy takeover by terrorists. In 1983, America "disengaged" from Lebanon following the murder of 300 Americans by PLO and Syria-assisted Hezbollah terrorists. In 1993, America "disengaged" from Somalia, in reaction to the lynching of American Marines by Muslim terrorists.

These "disengagements" fueled anti-American terrorism, which intensified in 1993, 1995-96, 1998, 2000, and 2001 with the first attempt on the Twin Towers, the terror attacks on American GIs in Saudi Arabia, the explosions in the American embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania, the murder of 17 sailors on the USS Cole in Aden, and the terror blitz of September 11, 2001.

Mr. Bush is determined to avoid errors committed by former residents, who preferred "disengagement" from - rather than head on military
engagement with - terror regimes. They confined counter-terror to limited operations, and promoted negotiation and cease-fire with terrorist regimes. Their "disengagement" from a decisive battle against terrorism, facilitated the engagement of terrorists with the American mainland.

Since 1993, the Palestinian Authority has benefited from a sequence of American-encouraged Israeli "disengagements." Since 1993, America has been plagued by an unprecedented wave of Islamic terrorism, which has been energized by Israel's retreats in the face of Palestinian
terrorists. Would America encourage Israel to persist on "disengagements" (retreats), thus learning from history by repeating - rather than by avoiding - costly errors?

Ambassador Ettinger (ret.) is a former minister at Israel's embassy in Washington, and a former consul general of Israel in Houston.

Posted by Guy Spier at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ()