Samson Blinded

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Playing conflict by rules
2011-11-25 08:02:00
The most striking feature of the Israeli-Arab conflict is that it is impossible. Israel is simply too small to defend in modern mobile warfare. In 1948 that was less of an issue since we fought against Arab militia, but in 1967 and 1973 Israel was invaded by regular Arab armies. Even the most incapable, battered army can gather enough strength for the forty-mile advance that would allow Syria to wipe out the Jewish state. Lacking tanks and aircraft after the first battles, Syria could still march its 200,000-strong infantry and mammoth conscripted reserves into Israel, and no realistically available amount of Jewish firepower would have helped in a trench war. Hamas and Hezbollah can easily bring Jewish society to screams by consistent attacks at Israel’s soft underbelly, the foreign Jews. Daily stabbing of Jews throughout the world is a slam-dunk affair, and it wouldn’t even alienate European governments from the terrorists. Faced with such major unrest, the Europeans would...
More About: Conflict , Rules

Jews influence God
2011-11-22 08:26:00
Why presume that God is immutable, not susceptible to external influences? The Torah provides all the evidence to the contrary: he exhibits rage, hatred, sometimes forgiveness. Commentators loathe interpreting those statements literally, though they insist on literalism and hair-splitting in other cases. A king can become enraged at the lowliest slave. This example is said to be inapplicable to God, who is infinitely above humans, wherefore any human influence on him is negligible. In mathematical terms, the human effect on God is infinitely small. But we know from mathematics that infinitely small quantities still have the power to affect. Moreover, God is omniscient, and things that are negligibly small are not too small for him. Resorting again to mathematics, the product of infinitely large knowledge and infinitely small importance can be anything. Logically, there is no reason to rule out God’s mutability. Our best approximation for God’s qualitative difference from hum...
More About: Jews

Best choices are wrong
2011-11-18 08:14:00
The Israeli discussion about the advantages of a two-state solution is rather egocentric. In the short term, it is obviously better to give the Palestinians a state of their own so that we don’t have to police them. The ten-year truce offered by Hamas is preferable to a ten-year war. It all changes considerably when we expand our outlook to the mid-term. Think about policing the Arabs. If we don’t want that job we can just withdraw our forces from the area; Palestinian statehood is irrelevant. We police them now so that they don’t build up a significant militia and attack us later. How likely is it that they would do just that from the safety of their own state? Both Fatah and Hamas indeed aim to subvert Israel; otherwise, why a truce rather than peace? The bottom line is, can we choose convenient paths now which will disproportionally endanger our children later? The answer is far from straightforward. All societies are sufficiently immoral to risk their children before ri...
More About: Wrong

Forgiveness would be nice
2011-11-15 09:09:00
Christian forgiveness is generally a very nice attitude, at least in theory. It encourages the transgressor to repent and does not strain the moral conscience of his prosecutors. There is no evidence that harsh punishments are more effective than mild ones. Robbery exists in Saudi Arabia despite the cutting off of hands, and homosexuality exists in Iran despite executions. The threat of jail has failed to condition the Americans into so little a thing as abandoning marijuana. Punishments have only marginal utility. A society completely without punishments invites criminals, but beyond a certain low level, the increasing severity of punishments does not curb crime any better. Why is the Torah so different? Consider that most Christians practice forgiveness only in theory. They harbor a grudge against their neighbor when the law fails to rectify their grievances. The reason has to do with human mentality and the natural desire for revenge. It is futile to argue whether the desir...
More About: Nice , Forgiveness

Proselyte is not much of a Jew
2011-11-11 08:48:00
“Love ger for your were gerim in the land of Egypt.” A Ger is not, strictly speaking, a convert who is a Jew forever. A Ger accepts Jewish sovereignty, including religious legislation. He cannot worship foreign deities, or even God, out of the Temple. He accepts the law of the land, including the religious law. He can be considered practically Jewish. Likewise, Jews adhered to Egyptian religious practices while there. Recall that God tells Moses, “You fathers didn’t know me under this name.” They worshiped differently. It seems that they were uncircumcised because Joshua had to circumcise them before entering Canaan, and Moses’ son was originally uncircumcised. In Egypt, circumcision was reserved for priests. No doubt, Jews could not bring animal sacrifices because those animals were the Egyptian deities. Therefore the significance of Pesach sacrifice: we killed an Egyptian deity, and just couldn’t stay there. Deut14:21: sell unclean carri...

Why wait resurrection?
2011-11-08 08:34:00
The rabbinical changes to Judaism affected this life, but more importantly the next one. In Torah Judaism, there is no afterlife. At Saul’s behest, the witch “woke up” the spirit of Prophet Samuel, who was rather disconcerted by the intrusion. Afterlife reward and punishment is a rabbinical tool to keep the flock at bay. After the rabbis heaped a load of new rules on Jews, they needed to frighten the flock into compliance. That constituted a break with the Torah, which trusts humans to do good things on their own conscience. In order to teach resurrection, the rabbis read literally a poetic metaphor of God breathing life into dry bones. The scriptural basis for paradise is still slimmer: Moses is said to “join his forefathers” upon his death, which is again interpreted literally as them being alive in a sense. Rabbis insist vehemently that the Torah lacks poetry and that every statement is literally true, but interpret rather parabolically when they need to: thus, “an...

Liberalism removed from reality
2011-11-04 08:39:00
The history of American lobbying shows a curious tendency: liberals tend to operate on the federal rather than state level. School integration, pro-abortion, pornography, due process, expansive Fourteenth Amendment rights, and minimum wages—all went through federal rather than state courts. Certainly, there is a technical reason: liberals strive for sweeping judgments based on vague constitutional rights rather than addressing the issues narrowly. Also, there is the matter of convenience: winning a federal case substitutes for litigation in each of the states. More important is a reverse correlation between common sense and hierarchy: the further the bureaucrats are removed from their constituency, the more responsive are they to liberal demands. At the local level, voters are remarkably sensible. Despite immense brainwashing, voters defeated gay marriage even in ultra-left California. Since only a small proportion of residents attend local elections and vote on proposals, left-w...
More About: Reality , Liberalism

Sacrifice of our enemies
2011-11-04 08:13:00
The Orthodox criticism of Reform Judaism is misplaced. Honestly, the Reform “rabbis” can be accused of a single thing, atheism. They mold Judaism in their own image to suit their preconceived political and social views—and they don’t believe that there is God above to punish them for the perversion. The God of punishment and revenge, they don’t believe in him. Perhaps they believe in a Santa Claus who forgives them for the lack of faith. But Orthodox rabbis are in no position to criticize the reforms. The pharisaic rabbis instituted major changes in Judaism, compared to which the Reform’s reforms pale. Let us not argue here about the Oral Law, which is apparently unknown to the Temple priests. Even if Mishna is of divine origin, transmitted orally through centuries, the Gemara is unquestionably a product of learned discourse, and the subsequent halacha is a heap of man-made restrictions. Maybe one in a thousand of the Orthodox halachic rules is directly traceable to the...
More About: Enemies , Sacrifice

Danger of Muslim assimilation
2011-11-01 08:01:00
In an old TV debate with Rabbi Kahane, Ehud Olmert voiced a typical argument against his views: Israeli Arabs are too few to exercise their democratic rights. Thus, Israel can be Jewish and democratic as long as the major minority is unable to exercise its democratic rights. The dishonesty of such a position is not a problem per se since politics need not be honest (though we would expect better from leftist moralists). The problem is that such an approach is wrong on both counts: the resultant state is neither Jewish nor safe from democratic review by the minority. Western democracies think that they don’t risk much by professing liberalism. In the worst case scenario for Sweden, Muslim immigrants would grow numerous enough to vote the cross off its flag. No big deal; it is just a symbol, bereft of substance. The tacit assumption is that immigrants cannot change the country’s face because it has none. That is a rationalist fallacy: every country has its face, though it cannot ...
More About: Danger

Palestinian Israeli collaboration
2011-10-28 09:47:00
It reportedly took Ibrahim Pasha 90,000 casualties to subdue the Palestinian Arabs; at any rate, the number was large. The Egyptian commander dealt with major insurrections and committed considerable atrocities. When the Ottomans finally evicted his troops, he boasted that the Turks would call him back to deal with the unruly population. Ibrahim was proved wrong. The Ottomans acted slowly, over decades, but eventually prevailed without substantial bloodshed. They subverted the rule of village sheikhs with government-appointed mukhtars, bypassing the traditional power structures of Palestinian villages. The Ottomans bribed the notables with land grants, allowing them to title the unused lands, and lured the notables out of villages into the more controllable towns. Economic changes, breaking down the patriarchal Palestinian society for a citrus-oriented industrial-age economy, also contributed to the Ottoman victory. The Turks had a long time-horizon, and succeeded on the cheap. Isra...

Territorial compromise or forgiveness?
2011-10-25 07:58:00
As the territorial compromise became a common notion, its meaning came to be blurred. Jews are supposed to compromise on our holiest places: Hebron and the Temple Mount, and the core lands, Judea and Samaria. In return, the Arabs benevolently grant us the right to exist within our Auschwitz borders, besieged by Arabs from outside and swarmed by Arabs from within. That looks more like a capitulation than a compromise. Compromise is a weasel word: in effect, it means that a person cedes something to gain something more valuable for him, whether he eats his wife’s ugly breakfast for the sake of peace in the family or cedes land for peace. In theory, compromise is profitable. In Israel’s case, the compromise is a one-sided affair, essentially forgiveness. Israel gains nothing from the compromise but gives away a lot. She agrees to the 1948 territorial solution after the Arabs fought it in several wars and killed tens of thousands of Jews. Israel agrees to forgive the murder of thos...
More About: Forgiveness

How obscene is the peace process?
2011-10-21 07:49:00
“And if you disregard My laws… you will run when no one pursues you.” – Leviticus 26:15-17 I understand atheists; back in my childhood, I was one. I understand liberals, though am sorry for their perversion of the freedom doctrine. The Jews who swallow insults, however—I fail to understand them. I remember insults. If kosher laws were not a divine commandment, I would have observed them anyway because so many generations of Jews were persecuted for observing them. And I would keep the Sabbath because the Soviets forced us to work on that day. I would read the Torah because the Church kept burning it for centuries. So I could never understand the Jews who finish the Nazis work by intermarrying. Likewise in politics. A thousand practical and religious arguments can be advanced in favor of abandoning East Jerusalem to the Arabs. But no: after we wept with joy upon taking the city from them, how can we give away a single block? What kind of losers are Jews to a...
More About: Peace , Peace Process

On proper peacekeeping
2011-10-18 07:17:00
In our sorrowful time, language has become a casualty of leftist onslaught. Consider peacekeeping, which ranges from mere presence (as in the Sinai before 1967), to useless patrolling (as in Lebanon after 2006), to benevolent fighting against local militia (as in Somalia), to an actual war against a hostile regime (as in Trans-Nistria). No doubt the locals are confused, and they fight back. Few policies are inherently malicious. Most carry a kernel of goodness which is not allowed enough time to develop. The short time-horizon of democratically elected governments coupled with the typical impatience of consumerist societies produces horrible results. The consumers’ demand for “everything and now” is usually scaled down to “something now,” which correlates well with the government’s policies: do a little, then use media to exaggerate the achievements. Democracies hate when nothing happens. Peacekeeping is a very long, careful process, often without visible results. ...

The limits of democracy
2011-10-14 07:04:00
The United States is not a democracy at all: rather, it is a republic. The majority of its voters cannot rule to enslave the minority: democratic decision-making is relegated to mundane matters while the core values are closed to voting. Even if the majority of Americans were to vote tomorrow to amend the Bill of Rights with a clear permission of slavery and remove some of the most obvious protections against it, the Supreme Court would amass circumstantial legislation to overturn the citizens’ decision. And if it did not, then it would no longer be America as we know it. Not incidentally, communists changed the official names of the states they took over: a country with a drastically changed social order is no longer the same. The American values guarded by republicanism are far from universal or self-evident. So far are they from self-evident that a little more than a century ago slavery was rather popular, and only decades ago the blacks were discriminated against and women h...
More About: Democracy , Limits

A national way like any other
2011-10-11 09:38:00
I’m a racist of sorts: I believe that people are different and so are nations. Leftists proclaim universal equality—or rather, uniformity—for a reason: in order to apply their social theories on the international scale they need to presume the subjects similar. For the same policy to produce similar results, the input should be similar in each case. It is a morally soothing thing to apply one’s theories on a grand scale. But in order to project American-type democracy on Lebanon, ethnic-blindness on Israel, or liberalism on Palestine, their populations and situations must be presumed similar to the American. Never mind the professed policies exist only in academic minds even in America, where democracy, liberalism, and ethnic-blindness have their limits. But how can the nations be similar when there is so much diversity in the animal kingdom? We can presume that humans are more diverse than animals simply because humans have more behavioral alternatives. Proponents of nati...
More About: National

Democracy is not about majority
2011-10-07 09:20:00
Democracy is not a problem in itself. Democracy provides for a Jewish state just as it provides for an Arab or a Christian one—a state of hollow symbolism. Arabs can accept hollow Jewish symbolism, but not a real Jewish state. True values can only be forced by a minority upon the majority. As we see in the Bible, ancient Jews were massively idolatrous, yet the few—whether they were righteous kings, prophets, or Maccabean fundamentalists—forced them back into the fold. Democracy seeks a common denominator for the masses. States start around values, but democracy votes the values away like any other restrictions; people vote for the most simple, unrestricted, loose life. Democracy shows the entropy in social systems: eventually, such systems lose any distinguishing characteristics and descend into the morass of value-less homogeneity. This is not the typical homogeneity of a repressive regulatory society, but a uniformity of moral deprivation. Democracy plays a trick on peace-l...
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Separate them out
2011-10-04 09:00:00
“May Your enemies swiftly be cut down. May You uproot, crush, cast down and humble the kingdom of arrogance swiftly in our days.” – Amidah prayer Inherently insecure, Israelis look for protection and partners. They embraced the monster Stalin, who planned to murder all Soviet Jews in 1953. After a brief flirtation with France, Israelis turned to the United States for protection despite numerous and clear indications of their protector’s treacherousness: a weapons embargo in 1948, a threat to fight on Egypt’s side in 1956, the prohibition of a preemptive strike in 1967, the ban on destroying Egyptian army in 1973, protests against bombing the Osiraq reactor in 1981, a push for democratic elections in Lebanon and Palestine, barring Israel from an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, ad infinitum. Still more shamefully, Israelis seek support among Palestinian enemies. They look for Palestinian moderates, imagining a difference between Fayad and Haniye; bot...

Israelis of Exile mentality
2011-09-30 09:42:00
Undoing historical developments in a matter of decades is a leftist delusion. A familiar example is the assertion that somehow the face of war, prevalent for thousands of years, has changed since WWII…or Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or whatever was the latest atrocious war. Likewise, Jewish leftists want to imagine a new Jewish nation rising up in the colonized land of Israel, where tsabra Jews differ from their ghetto ancestors. Not in the least. The frightened Exile mentality didn’t go anywhere: from the mass grave-digging before our surprising victory in the war in 1967 to life in Sderot under fire. Jews take being murdered for granted, and submit to the governments complicit in their murder. Public mood swings from the desire to kill as many Palestinians as possible when military operations are successful to the desire to abandon them in their own state after major, if isolated, terrorist attacks. This is a typically Jewish bipolar disorder on a national scale. Besides history...

Why Torah speaks bad of Jews?
2011-09-27 09:32:00
It almost seems that the Torah was written by someone bent on depreciating Jews . They did not descend from firstborns, are weak, idolatrous, and quarrel continually. Cain, our progenitor, killed his brother Abel, the firstborn. Abraham, we surmise, was not a firstborn since he readily abandoned his father’s estate to go to Canaan: presumably, he was not an heir. Isaac and Jacob were secondary to their brothers Esau and Ishmael. Jewish patriarchs, heads of the tribes, were born in a curious order: the firstborn came from a slave girl while Joseph, Jacob’s most beloved son, was his youngest. On the maternal side, both Rivkah and Rachel weren’t the oldest children in their families. Abraham and Jacob had their first children by slave girls, which also seems to be the case for Isaac, who obviously had some relations before he married Rivkah, well into his adulthood. The Torah makes a point of the foremothers’ wrong behavior. Sarah’s name meant a shrew, and Rachel was an ...

Are you better than converts?
2011-09-20 09:42:00
It is curious to see the government blaming rabbis for a problem it created and maintains: the giyur, conversion. As recently as a hundred years ago, giyur was unheard of in Jewish communities: anyone who wished to take in a gentile or Muslim spouse just did so with very few formalities. Many countries prohibited conversion to Judaism, but intermarriages still happened and the rabbinical position was unequivocal: no long-term conversion is necessary. Indeed, a long-term conversion process would have been impossible: a Muslim bride cannot practice observing Jewish law for several years in her parents’ house, but also cannot move in with her Jewish groom until marriage. The Torah solved the issue of conversion with truly divine simplicity: conversion by settling. Everyone who lives in the Jewish state must observe Jewish laws. Whatever the immigrant’s beliefs are, he is only allowed to worship God. He must partake in Jewish wars, abstain from work on Shabbat, food on Yom Kippur,...
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Palestinian peasant war against Jews
2011-02-04 08:08:00
The West lacks first-hand knowledge of Palestinian society, but relies on local intellectuals. They inflate the problems beyond recognition. From Ancient Greece to Russia to America, poets have eloquently expressed nostalgia over the loss of patriarchal values while the general population happily switched to new lifestyles. Common people live “here and now,” but intelligentsia either look back or hope forward. Palestinian journalists and poets sing odes to the olives and villages of their forefathers allegedly expropriated by Zionists, but for majority of Palestinian Arabs that’s an irrelevant past—and life goes on. Arab throngs in refugee camps are the only exception because the past is their only connection to dignity. A rare nation is fervently religious. Arabs rally around Islam where it provides a communal identity, but religion plays otherwise little role in their lives. Palestinian Arabs were notoriously irreligious. Religious professionals from Hamas slowly turn the ...
More About: Jews

The Soviet Union and the Holocaust
2011-01-18 02:56:00
Victors write history, and so the Soviet Union did in relation to Germany. It’s not only that the Soviets displaced the blame for their own crimes, such as the Katyn massacre, onto the Germans. The Soviet Union is also largely responsible for the Holocaust . Mass murders do not fit in with the German law-and-order mentality; the Germans learned it from the Russians. Two years before the Nazis started loading Jews into cattle trains, Russian security forces did just that with Poles. Starting in the winter of 1940, close to 400,000 people were relocated from the Soviet-occupied regions of Poland. The Soviets gradually escalated mass violence, testing it meticulously. They tried work camps, which killed through cold and planned starvation; they also tried mass executions of loosely defined enemies of state, and ethnic relocation. Brought together, these three components paved the way to genocide. Other relocations were repressive but not genocidal. It was only the Poles whom the Sovie...

Peace cannot be a process
2011-01-14 02:53:00
One good thing Rabin did at Oslo was to mitigate the capitulation. Beilin originally worked out with Abu Mazen unconditional Israeli surrender to the PLO, but Rabin added into the subsequent accords a degree of gradual reciprocity. Netanyahu later claimed that as his own achievement. A reciprocal peace process only exists in the minds of its supporters. Why does any country agree to peace? Not because of goodwill, or there would have been no war in the first place. Rather, peace is a product of cost-benefit analysis: continued fighting is not worth the goal. If the fighting subsides, its new lower level may be perceived as corresponding to the goal. For example, most Israelis don’t want Judea and Samaria at the price of hundreds of terrorist attacks per year, but are fine with holding the territories if there is a single attack annually. Polls indicate spikes in popular support for ceding the territories after major terrorist attacks. The peace process cannot involve gradual pacif...
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Are Jews stupid?
2011-01-11 15:22:00
The news of the completion of Burj Dubai drove me mad. How come some Bedouins, forty years down from riding camels, have built yet another world wonder while we Israelis have…what? Oh, the mini-Israel exhibition, a piece of trash. The only building in the country worthy of mention is Yad Vashem, and even that is bizarrely small. Shall we have an industry besides the Holocaust industry? And no, Dubai’s great endeavors are not about oil wealth. The emirate pumps meager 80,000 bpd, an amount comparable to the Sinai oilfields, which Israel gave away to Egypt for a piece of paper titled “peace treaty.” And yes, Dubai is actually very smart to incur $80 billion in unserviceable debt, it is the investors who are stupid, and there is never lack of stupid investors. The people who invested for years in Bernie Madoff’s obviously fraudulent schemes are not in a position to preach business morality. Also consider that America built itself by milking European investors through stock m...
More About: Stupid , Jews

Apocalypse the next door
2011-01-07 15:16:00
Those who believe in the imminence of the apocalypse can now marshal considerable evidence: political, economic, demographic, moral, and military. Politically, the entire civilized (weapons-owning) world has embraced democracy, a completely unsupportable system of governance which interest groups are busy breaking apart. The situation is unprecedented: history has seen rulers go down, and even states, but never the entire political order. Something similar happened in Europe when the Roman Empire slowly succumbed to barbarians. Economically, the West has lost its work ethics. In America, speculation (which they call “financial services”) has replaced productive industries. In Europe, the four-day work-week and double-digit latent unemployment has become the norm. Everywhere, government debt and pension liabilities have soared to unrealistic levels. Demographically, the welfare state killed the nuclear family. People rely on the government rather than on their siblings to supp...
More About: Apocalypse , Next Door

The goodness of hatred
2011-01-04 02:49:00
Goodness is inherently soft. It tends to withdraw, give way to evil, and only try to insulate itself. Instead of condemning the government, many good rabbis thank God for allowing them to spend life with their books and students. Arabs and the ultra-left are encroaching: hostile Arabs move into our towns and force law-abiding Jews out, and ultra-leftists push into our consciousness with propaganda and lies. Passive resistance never works against determined enemies. Years ago, I would have said that good Jews can withdraw into closed neighborhoods and settlements and let their enemies ravage the country. This is no longer possible. Even settlements as secluded as Yitzhar and Kfar Tapuach are embroiled in trouble with Arabs incited by Jewish leftists, and both the military administration and the courts side with the Palestinians. The Supreme Court opened a way for Arabs to buy property in Jewish communities, and now even the isolated Jewish villages in Galilee are trying to fend off ...

Common warfare: back to terror
2010-12-31 15:13:00
Even as they condemn terrorism, nation states have embraced it. Attacking civilians is not a defining feature of terrorism: every war sees civilians targeted. The real criterion of terrorism is the attacker’s limited liability. The idea of terrorism is to hit and run. Normally, terrorists hide among civilians, but they can also find escape in mountains as the ancient Assassins did, or into jungles like the Vietnamese communists. But there is an often-overlooked option for limiting the attacker’s liability: if he is much stronger than his victim, the victim won’t dare to attack lest the fighting escalate. In that sense, the American wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are pure terrorism. That does not imply any moral judgment: I deeply respect Muslim terrorists and sided with the Americans in their Vietnamese debacle, though not in the senseless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. WWII was the last war between civilized countries; since then, they only embark on terrorist...
More About: Terror , Back , Common

From welfare to political defeat
2010-12-28 15:10:00
Providing education for the children of illegal immigrants is akin to allowing a bank robber to bequeath stolen money to his children because they did not participate in his robberies. Children of immigrants might not be criminals like their parents, but neither should they benefit from their parents’ crime. Immigrants come here because generations of law-abiding taxpayers have built public facilities, from roads to universities to welfare funds. They built them for their children and compatriots, not for Kenyans. The problem arose strictly because of government intervention in such matters as welfare and minimum wage: In a fully privatized, free society poor immigrants wouldn’t be able to survive for a week if housing and public appearance standards were enforced. Citizenship is a profitable franchise which must be sold by the government. Existing citizens who wish to emigrate must be able to sell their citizenship. Illegals immigrants commit theft by claiming residence...
More About: Political

Democracy is impossible
2010-12-24 15:06:00
Far from being a self-evident truth, democracy is a temporary aberration of political order. It became popular during the Renaissance, when intellectuals embraced everything classical, from art to political philosophy. Democracy no more represents the real political order of Ancient Greece than Athens of Milos resembles an average Athenian woman. By modern standards, Athenian democracy was quite a totalitarian regime: fiercely religious and closed to cultural innovations, it refused voting rights to immigrants and their descendants. Modern political theory applied democracy to nation states where all members (citizens) have equal claim to the country and therefore equal political rights. Nothing could be further from the classical system. Mere residence in a town-state for countless generations did not confer citizenship and the right to control the state and define its character. Only descendants of the original inhabitants had those rights. Classical democracy served to preserve...

Why not kill terrorists?
2010-12-21 15:03:00
What is the point of keeping Palestinian security terrorists in Israeli jails? Imprisonment serves three purposes: punishment, rehabilitation, and prevention. Vengeance is rarely thought of as an acceptable goal of incarceration. At any rate, a mass murder or an attempt thereof is hardly avenged by keeping the Arabs in comfortable conditions, supplied with satellite TV, halal food, cellular phones, largely unregulated visits, shopping, and even pocket money siphoned from the very taxpayers they tried to kill. The notion of reforming the terrorists presupposes that they are like common criminals. Wrong. They are good people with nationalist beliefs. They are good people in the same sense as Shlomo ben Yosef, Avraham Stern, Yitzhak Shamir, or Menahem Begin—our terrorists. They are good people in the same sense as the Allied bomber pilots who unleashed their deadly cargo on German towns. They fight for their political goals, and their enemies’ lives pale in comparison to those go...
More About: Terrorists