Melanie Phillips writes:

What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?

Next week, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one? It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique. On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.

Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens. It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim.

[...]

Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews — the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it. In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence. Yet ‘progressive’ opinion not only denies both law and history but demands (as do the Palestinians) the ethnic cleansing of every last Jewish settler from a putative Palestinian state (just as half Israel’s population was created by Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Arab lands). So much for anti-racism.

[...]

[M]uch of the responsibility for these six decades of conflict lie with a Western world which, from 1921 onwards, has chosen to appease Arab violence while shedding crocodile tears over its Jewish victims. But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next. Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway. At least Israel knows it has to fight to survive. As a result, in 60 years’ time it will still be there. Can the same be said for Britain or Europe?

Today I learnt a new word: "transphobia". This means, I suppose, irrational fear or hatred of transsexuals, that is trans-myn and trans-wymyn. By definition, transphobia is perpetrated by wymyn-born-wymyn or men-born-of-wymyn.

I don't suffer from "transphobia". To me, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a phobia is that the object of fear or hatred should impinge on one's life. I have never, knowingly, met a trans-man or trans-womon. Of course, I may have met someone I thought was a man (mon?) or a womon, but who was really a trans-mon. (I believe the medical term for female to male sex change is "strapodictomy", but I may be wrong.)

Anyway, it seems that trans-womyn are competing with womyn-born-womyn to see who is the most offended. David Thompson reports:

A reader, R Sherman, highlighted the following comment, made in response to the MWMF’s attempt at conciliation.

What really makes me angry about this whole situation is non-trans people deciding what is and is not transphobia… The sentiment of this release is blatant transphobia, and the section calling it otherwise is just rhetoric. I don’t really believe that anyone has the right or ability to accurately gauge their own actions as phobic or not. The community being harmed is the only one with the perspective necessary to make that distinction. It is overstepping and disrespectful, to say the least, for the non-trans authors of this release to say that their policies are not transphobic and further to attempt to explain why.

[...]

And throughout the Farce of Marcotte™ similar sentiments were internalised and expressed, with one reader of Ms Marcotte’s website offering the following pearl of wisdom:

As a white woman, though, I’m not the one offended, so it’s not my call as to what an appropriate response is.

And thus any claim to moral agency is surrendered to those members of a favoured group who happen to be shouting loudest. But despite the howls of victimhood, which so define our age, it’s hard to excuse the opportunist denial of any objective criteria or coherent ethical rationale. Thus, injustice is defined, unilaterally, by feelings, or claims of feelings - and, of course, by leverage. Phobias, prejudice and oppression become whatever the Designated Victim Group, or its representative, says they are. And the basis for apology, compensation and flattery becomes whatever the Designated Victim Group says it is. The practical result of this is egomaniacal license and the politics of role-play.

Not to mention confusion.

Question for study and discussion: is Bill Wyman a man, a womon, a wymon, or a wymyn?

Answer: none of the above - he is "un rock star".

From Roger Kimball (emphasis added): 

Yes, really: Priya Venkatesan, who taught writing this year at Dartmouth College, sent around several emails to former students threatening to sue them under Title VII, the “anti-discrimination” portion of the 1964 Civil Rights act. “Dartlog,” the weblog of the invaluable Dartmouth Review, published the text of her email, which is a classic in the annals of politically correctness fatuousness.

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35 -0400 (EDT) From: Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU To: “WRIT.005.17.18-WI08″:;, Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU

Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society: I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws. The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

Priya

No thanks - I have other plans.

Whom? Whom shall go unmentioned? And this "professor" taught "writing"? Between you and I, her hypercorrection suggests she is not someone whom can be trusted. Kimball gives a sample of her "writing":

In many ways, social constructivism has been reframed as postmodernism, since both movements question the scientific realm’s theory of truth — that is, that scientific facts mirror an external reality which does indeed exist. However, this reframing is unnecessary, since clear distinctions exist between social constructivism and postmodernism. Through my experience in the laboratory, I have found that postmodernism offers a constructive critique of science in ways that social constructivism cannot, due to postmodernism’s emphasis on openly addressing the presupposed moral aims of science. In other words...

No other words, please. No other words whichsoever.

...for Ken Livingstone.

Only joking. It's May 1st, not April 1st. I'm off to ....

Vote for Boris!

Here's hoping Ken's share of the vote is MY NEWT.

by Rebecca Bynum

Willful Blindness
A Memoir Of The Jihad
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Encounter Books, 2008, 352 pp.

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11^th terror attacks, President Bush demanded the Taliban government of Afghanistan produce Osama bin Laden in order that he could be “brought to justice.” Bush threatened military invasion only if Bin Laden were not produced. Using the criminal justice system as a weapon of war was a continuation of U.S. policy already in place from our previous, quite limited dealing with Jihad, domestic and foreign, and apparently not about to be rethought. Islamic warfare has been waged against the infidel world since the beginning of Islam, even though at times that state of permanent war did not express itself in open warfare. We in the United States, sheltered by two oceans, two friendly neighbors, and our own great ignorance of history and of Islam were just beginning to take notice of Jihad, though without understanding what prompted it, or even calling it by its right name. The fact that Jihad is a struggle that is considered by Muslims a holy war, in order to spread Islam and insure its dominance, and that participation, direct or indirect, in this “struggle” is  a Muslim’s sacred duty to expand Islamic territorial sovereignty, was -- and still is -- lost on the President and his advisors. President Bush, following the lead of President Clinton, framed the conflict as one between our civilized justice system, deeply solicitous of individual rights, and a small band of criminal fanatics. This gross underestimation of jihad may prove to be one of the biggest mistakes in human history.  more...

by Jerry Gordon

For over a year, we have been waging a relentless, nearly solitary battle in apprising the Congress and the American public about a billion dollar boondoggle and scandal: the lack of credible Arabic translators for our national security and intelligence agencies. As a result hundreds have been killed in Iraq from infiltration of our military and civilian intelligence agencies by agents of Islamist terrorists. Our FBI and CIA have been infiltrated by Muslim linguists who have successfully evaded polygraph tests and been able to pass on vital information to terror groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah. Tens of thousands of documents, containing vital information on potential threats have gone untranslated in large measure because of bias in hiring practices against qualified Arabic, Farsi and Urdu speaking Christians, Jews and apostate Muslims. The result has been “chaos” according to a knowledgeable counter terrorism source. The problem is one of political correctness. Our government has been gulled by the argument that only Muslims can translate accurately their “holy language.”  This is pure taqiyyah or religious dissimulation sanctioned by Islam.  more...

by Ibn Warraq

Report On The Inarah Otzenhauzen Conference On
  “The Early History Of Islam And The Koran”
     March 13-16, 2008

The newly founded institute, Inârah Institute for Research of Early Islamic History and the Koran, in cooperation with the Religious Studies Department of the University of Saarlandes, Germany and the Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen, Germany held its first International Conference on the Origins of the Koran and Early Islamic History. Inarah consists of a group of German scholars inspired by the work of Christoph Luxenberg but disturbed by the fact Luxenberg's insights were not discussed by other Islamologists because of their implications for the traditional history of the Koran (now thought to be almost certainly false, and fabricated many years after the foundation of Islam). I think it would be fair to say that the idea for the German conference came naturally after the successful conference at the University of California-Davis in January, 2007 on Scripture and Skepticism organised by the Center for Inquiry, Transnational, and the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion [CSER], inspired, organised, and coordinated by Dr. Paul Kurtz and Dr. Joseph Hoffmann. Many of the founders of Inarah, the organisers of the German conference, participated in the Davis Conference, and finding the experience exhilarating, decided a similar conference devoted entirely to the Koran and Early Islam would be in order, a conference that would fearlessly examine the origins of the Koran wherever the empirical research might lead, hence the Otzenhausen Conference.  more...

by Norman Berdichevsky

For almost two centuries, the coffee-tea dichotomy has been one of the firmest markers of the cultural divide between Britain and America. Many Americans/Britons can recall the pride felt as children when their parents allowed them their first cup of coffee/tea. This continues to be a right of passage into adult society. British and American folkways have diverged for the last two-and-a-half centuries and are a major source of humo(u)r on both sides of the Atlantic. Differences in speech, spelling, social graces, wit, political systems, hobbies, class attitudes, popular tastes in fashion, driving and road design, sports, and eating and drinking habits have all come to embody reciprocal stereotypes. America's successful revolution against the British Crown affected social mores and none more dramatically than in the switch from tea to coffee. The Boston Tea Party and its aftermath accomplished one of the few major changes in the popular taste for the two daily hot beverages which have become consumer staples the world over.  more...

The Happy Couple pictured together at a "peace rally" in Whitechapel last weekend.
From The East London Advertiser.
Last Friday, the Labour candidate for Mayor said the Respect MP for Bethnal Green & Bow would be better than some of the "nonentities" currently sitting on the London Assembly and that he could work with him in a 'broad coalition' of the left.
And at Sunday's small rally in Altab Ali Park in Whitechapel, Livingstone said it would be "wonderful" if George was elected to keep out the BNP.
When the Advertiser later asked him if that meant he was officially endorsing Galloway for election, he said: "I want him on to keep the BNP out."

(Part I is here.)


This second essay in the series was going to address the concepts of liberty and freedom. I intend to examine those concepts in the near future but I have decided that this essay will deal with the one issue which I did not cover in the first essay, namely that I believe, and stated without justifying it, that in a democratic polity the final and ultimate authority and power must be vested in the body of the people. more...

by Bill Warner

The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History
By Andrew G. Bostom
Prometheus Books, 768 pp.

Andrew Bostom's new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, is an historic work. It is an encyclopedia of both the doctrine and practice of Islamic Jew hatred. Jew hatred is Bostom's usage and it is accurate. The word Semitic refers to the Semitic language group, which includes both Arabic and Hebrew. No one hates the Hebrew language; so the term, antisemitism is a misnomer. more...

by Norman Berdichevsky

by Ares Demertzis

Throughout history, every country has had an army; either its own, or a foreign one. 
                                                                                               -- Anonymous

From The Local, Sweden's English newspaper:

A 44-year-old man in western Sweden has been taken in hand by the local judiciary for masturbating in front of a female church minister.

"The playing of the merry organ..."

Aaron Klein has the goods on Obama's nuclear policy advisor Joseph Cirincione at WND. To be fair, I have also seen reports in which he denies he's part of Obama's campaign.

JERUSALEM – Israel should give up its nuclear weapons to ensure Iran halts its illicit nuclear program, argues an adviser on nuclear issues to Sen. Barack Obama.

Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, also previously dismissed reports Israel's Sept. 6 airstrike targeted a Syrian nuclear reactor as "nonsense" and called Damascus' nuclear program "miniscule."

Immediately following Israel's air raid, Cirincione listed "Israelis [who] want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria" as among those spreading rumors Syria was constructing a nuclear facility.

Cirincione was commenting on a Sept. 13 Washington Post story about possible links between Syria and North Korea.

His statements have been circulating around the blogosphere the past few days after the U.S. government last week released what it said was photographic evidence Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea.

"Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda," Cirincione wrote in September on the blog of Foreign Policy magazine.

"If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement," Cirincione wrote.

In a September interview with National Public Radio, Cirincione stated "certain hard-line Israelis who are aimed at preventing a U.S.-Syrian or an Israeli-Syrian dialogue" were using the Syrian nuclear story to affect talks with Damascus.

He called reports Israel struck a Syrian nuclear site "the most overblown story I've seen since before the buildup to the war in Iraq."

"There's precious little information available, but it hasn't stop people with political agendas from spinning it at such an absurd level as if these claims are facts," Cirincione said...

An article by Karen Arenson on an art project by Aliza Shvarts (from The New York Times of April 23, 2008):

"When an exhibition of art projects by Yale University seniors opened on Tuesday, one was missing: that of Aliza Shvarts, whose performance-art project reportedly involved artificially inseminating herself repeatedly and then self-aborting.

A description of the work last week in The Yale Daily News — which said it included videos of her miscarriages shown on a four-foot cube wrapped in plastic smeared with Vaseline and what Ms. Shvarts had described as her own blood — touched off a frenzy of horrified reaction.

But arts professors at universities around the country say they are no strangers to controversy. And they say that while freedom of expression is important in the academic world, so is providing guidance and setting limits.

“I’ve been through lots of very controversial student projects,” said Carol Becker, who recently left the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to become dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts. “Students, when they get caught in these situations, are usually unprepared for the consequences. They don’t know they are going to get this kind of reaction.”

Last week, Yale officials announced that Ms. Shvarts had admitted that her project, her senior thesis, was a fiction, and that she had neither inseminated herself nor self-aborted. But they said later that she had contradicted the denial. They said her project could not be shown unless she submitted an unambiguous written statement saying she did not inseminate herself or induce miscarriages.

On Tuesday, Gila Reinstein, a Yale spokeswoman, said Ms. Shvarts had not signed a statement. Ms. Shvarts has declined repeated requests for an interview.

In some cases, universities have not permitted questionable projects to go forward.

At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, for example, a student in 2003 submitted a proposal to record actors having sex in front of the class. Her professor initially approved the idea, and she found two willing actors. But when he alerted administrators, they squelched the idea, prompting cries of censorship.

Nor are unusual ideas limited to arts students. Lee M. Silver, a professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University, recalled an undergraduate student in evolutionary biology who after hearing lectures about the closeness of the species, proposed that she inseminate herself with sperm from a chimpanzee.

“I was flabbergasted,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “It was a thought experiment that I had talked about the night before to a bunch of students. It was an aside, a tangent. I never expected or thought anyone would pick up on that.”

He said he vetoed the idea and talked to the student about problems such a project would create.

“Twenty years ago, you could still do experiments on yourself,” said Dr. Silver, who has collaborated on a play about the episode with the playwright Jeremy Kareken. “But by the time I saw this student in 1994, science professors all knew that even an experiment on oneself had to be approved by our institutional review board. And it was very clear they would never approve.”

Helaine Klasky, Yale’s director of public affairs, said on Tuesday that the institutional review board looked at experiments, not art projects, and had found that Ms. Shvarts’s project did “not fall into their category.”

Dean Becker of Columbia recalled one student exhibition from her tenure at the Art Institute school that included a painting portraying the recently deceased Chicago mayor, Harold Washington, dressed in women’s lingerie. She said that some city aldermen came to the show to physically remove the painting, but then had to turn it over to the police, and later had to work out a settlement with the student for damaging his painting.

Should the school itself have removed the painting or tried to censor it?

“The faculty walked by in the morning, saw it, and said what a bad painting it was,” Dean Becker said. “Nobody realized how seriously people would take it or how upset they would be.”

Another student work at the Chicago school that set off alarms, she said, was an American flag spread on the floor. Thousands of people protested, she said.

Exactly what Ms. Shvarts’s actions were remains a mystery. In an opinion column on her project in the Yale newspaper on Friday, she spoke of the importance of “narrative.”

In an earlier article in the paper, she said she had cleared her project with her instructor and another person. Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, issued a statement on Monday that said there had been “serious errors of judgment on the part of two individuals,” and that “appropriate action has been taken.” But he did not say who the individuals were or what sanctions had been imposed.

Jeffrey Zuckerman, a Yale sophomore who was one of the few students at the senior art exhibition on Tuesday morning, said he had come as much out of curiosity about the controversy as about the art.

“I did want to see if there would be a lot of media crowd here,” he said. “But I do think that the other art here is worth looking at.”

Yale officials still held out the possibility on Tuesday that Ms. Shvarts might sign a statement, and that her work could join the exhibition before it closed on May 1. But Ms. Reinstein, the spokeswoman, said it would take a day to mount because a crane would be needed to hang the work from the ceiling."

Yale Art School is still living on a reputation that was made more than thirty years ago, by professors and students, and a program, that have little to do with what goes on, and who's on first, at Yale Art School today. About fifteen years ago, something happened. A palace coup? A new dean, determined to be with it? Whatever it was, all kinds of people left, or retired, or were fired, and their replacements seemed to be less interested in drawing and painting than in all the other stuff that "art" can be about these days. Conceptual art. Videos. Rube-Goldberg contraptions. Antebellum silhouuettes that make a statement about slavery, or racial stereotypes, or some goddam thing. And still the innocent young, in a country with half-a-million “artists" (and as many "writers"), and they continue, when admitted to Yale School of Art, to be thrilled, thrilled at what it must surely mean.

But if painting and drawing – not performance art, not conceptual art, not videos, but painting and drawing, are what you fuddiduddily think is what you need to learn, to take tuition in and to practice, you might try elsewhere.  Boston University. The Massachusettts College of Art. The Rhode Island School of Design. A summer painting program in Taos or something off the coast of Maine. Try this, try that. Go to an old-fashioned school where you are required to copy the masters, possibly in what is considered an American backwater, or in a country comically called “backward.” As for Yale Art School, the place where Aliza Shvartz has thrived, if you retain a mental image of a place where William Bailey, for example, once taught, you may be thinking of a place that does not exist. True,the name remains. That new dean, with a new broom, sweeping clean, apparently succeeded in his project, long ago, to remake the school. Yale has, apparently, gotten with the program. Aliza Shvarts is one result. She just happens to have a story written about her in the Times. There are many others.

The name  remains. And the prestige still clings, as it does with other academic institutions -- all those cock-crowing "world-class" universities --  just as light still arrives from an extinguished star. But it’s a different place from what it was, from what gave it that prestige. An old theme, the theme of the place that bears a venerable or hallowed name, but turns out to have little in common with the place you, as pilgrim or painter, had been seeking, had vainly sought:

Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh, peregrino!, y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas;

Though he gave his name, in Spanish, to the pince-nez, how clear-sighted he could be, when he felt like it, Don Francisco Quevedo y Villegas -- that's Quevedo to you, and to me.