Is Iran Asking For It?

With Israel blaming Iran for terrorists' murder of six Jews in Bulgaria today, Barack Obama will have a harder time managing the looming Israel-Iran crisis, Jeffrey Goldberg argues:

Prime Minister Netanyahu will be under extraordinary political pressure to retaliate in some serious way, and he will be under more pressure from himself than ever to deal with a regime he believes seeks the annihilation of six million Jews. As Amos Harel put it in Haaretz yesterday, the nuclear clock seems to be ticking more quickly than ever, and the "the key question will be whether...Netanyahu can fulfill his ideological and historical commitment to prevent what he describes as a potential second Holocaust."

I doubt Netanyahu will retaliate for the Bulgaria bombing by launching an immediate attack on Iran's nuclear sites. But there is a good chance he will launch attacks on Hezbollah targets and individuals, and possibly certain Iranian targets as well, and this sort of back-and-forth can only escalate tensions further, which could only bring us closer to an Israelii preemptive strike on Iran.

More Free Advice For Israel

Writing at The National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar applauds the Muslim Brotherhood's newly balanced stance toward the Palestinian parties and says it's time for Israel get over Hamas' support for terrorism:

In private discussion with the Israelis, the United States should point out that if Israel is genuinely interested in a peace settlement with the Palestinians, what the Egyptian Brotherhood is doing is as good as it gets, especially coming from the biggest political actor in the biggest Arab state. If the Israelis are not genuinely interest in a settlement, a negative posture toward the Egyptian initiative will serve only to underscore to the world Israel's responsibility for the impasse. And if Mr. Netanyahu raises issues of Hamas's past involvement in terrorism, he should be reminded that if the United States applied a once-a-terrorist-always-a-terrorist standard, it never would have had any dealings with some who have occupied the positions he does now of Israeli prime minister and leader of Likud.

An Afternoon In America

The 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan is in the middle of a construction site. You need reservations to visit; details here. Beyond the fences and security, it's spacious and quiet. Hallowed ground. People walk slowly and speak quietly. "It doesn't feel like New York," said my stepdaughter, Meaghan, who lives here. Friendly, otherwise inconspicuous volunteers step forward to offer tissues to those who are moved to tears or to assist with photography.

Sunken fountains ringed with the names of the fallen mark the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. The spaces will be encircled by the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and several other skyscrapers, each designed differently and spaced at odd intervals, like American irregulars standing guard. Their grandeur and diversity (and, one hopes, low occupancy rates) will affront the murderers.

One of their victims, Lisa Frost, an alumna of St. John's Episcopal School, had been graduated from Boston University in the spring of 2001. She was aboard United flight 175, which the terrorists flew into the south tower. Her name is on panel S-3. My wife Kathy found the name of William Wik, who married her high school friend Kathy Norton. William escaped from the south tower but died after reentering to help others get out. His name is on S-60.

I don't know if this little girl and her family were visiting the name of a family member or friend. The carved names invite touch. Sometimes, depending on how the wind blows around the plaza, the marble is dampened by mist from the thundering fountains.

The small temporary visitor center (a Sept. 11 museum will open later, in a building that looks like one of the towers knocked on its side) displays only two relatively small photos of the towers on fire. The first has the U.S. flag in the foreground. The spare text says the attacks were the work of the "radical Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda."

Wednesday was a cold, breezy day, and the flag over the memorial snapped smartly. The largest single contributor to the 9/11 Memorial is the Starr Foundation, controlled by Hank Greenberg, the former chairman and CEO of American International Group and the largest beneficiary of the former Nixon Center.

The spire of St. Paul's Chapel, where volunteers and clergy assisted rescue and recovery workers after the attacks, and the Freedom Tower, which looks like it's about two-thirds finished. St. Paul's is an institution of Trinity Episcopal Church, nearby at Wall St. and Broadway.

Near the memorial a passerby was having a spirited and friendly conversation with an Occupy Wall St. protestor. Someone had sent pizza for the demonstrators. Vigorous debate, openness of heart and mind, generosity of spirit. How American.

What We Did

The president began to tighten the noose around Osama bin Laden's neck in August. He managed the operation personally in a series of secret meetings. Nothing leaked. According to CNN, it was during last Friday's royal wedding that he gave the order for today's breathtaking raid. As he and his family were wandering around the Kennedy Space Center, young American volunteers under his command in Afghanistan were preparing to extend and flex the arm of justice.

Last week, it briefly appeared that Barack Obama had permitted Donald Trump a moment of parity by appearing in the White House to talk about his birth certificate as the bumptious tycoon gave a press conference in New Hampshire. How wrong I was. Tonight, as grateful crowds gathered at the White House and ground zero, as CNN replayed Obama's carefully nuanced address, words we'll remember every May Day for many years, Trump was starring with Meat Loaf on "Celebrity Apprentice."

Great live-blogging here by Andrew Sullivan.

Well done, Mr. President.

Al-Qaeda Tabula Rasa

CBS News:

An overwhelming number of Afghan men living in the region that is a major front in the U.S.-led war on the Taliban don't know anything about the terrorist attacks that brought international soldiers to Afghanistan, according to a report from an international policy think tank...

Reuters' Rotten Logic

Reuters on today's terrorist attack in Jerusalem:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike.

How could anyone write that sentence? Is the Palestinian National Authority at war with Israel? No: Its prime minister, Salam Fayyad, called it a terrorist attack, too. Doesn't that put the Palestinian imprimatur on "Israel's term"? Would Reuters have called an IRA bombing an "Irish strike" even though it was condemned by Ireland?
Hat tip to Jeffrey Goldberg

The Worst Airport Security, Except For The Others

Writing in the aftermath of the Moscow murders, Jeffrey Goldberg on one of the world's safest airports:

I think Ben-Gurion airport in Israel has a decent system. All people going to the airport -- in taxis, cars and buses -- have to pass through a checkpoint a couple of miles away from the main terminal. When you get to the main terminal, plainclothes security officers are everywhere, looking for suspicious behavior.

Yes, I know, having shepherded 28 fellow St. John's pilgrims through the process on Saturday evening. What's unique, at least in my experience, is that you go through security before you check in as well as after. Moments after we'd entered the terminal, each of us had been interviewed, out of the hearing of the others, and asked a series of questions about our luggage and whether we'd been given any gifts while in Israel.

After our bags were examined by a machine, most of us were sent to have at least one bag opened and inspected. When one of our pilgrims had made it all the way to the check-in desk, she casually asked me if it was okay that she had packed some items for another pilgrim who'd run out of space in her suitcase. We were evidently overheard by a plainclothes officer. A couple of seconds later, she was directed back to secondary, where she had to unpack her luggage item by item.

As I think everyone knows, the Ben Gurion system is based on profiling. Arab friends say it takes them at least two hours to clear security, every time. Sometimes they're subjected to strip searches. Absolutely nobody likes that. But everybody likes a safe airport. Not that it would ever fly politically (unless the U.S. suffers another catastrophic attack), but the Israeli approach at U.S. airports would cost the TSA up to $150 billion more a year.

One thing about Ben Gurion's system for checking people and their carry-on baggage: You don't have to shed shoes and belts or go through a body scan. Either the Israelis have cooler machines, or they're more casual at the second stage because of the thoroughness of the pre-check-in process.

Christian Heroes

Muslims offer themselves as human shields for Coptic Christians attending Christmas worship in Egypt.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Islamist Egypt

The murder of 21 Christians in Egypt in an al-Qaeda-style operation exposes a frightening political reality, Michael Slackman writes:

“If [President Hosni] Mubarak disappears tomorrow, you will have the Islamists as the strongest political force in the country,” said Mohammed Salmawy, head of the Arab Writers Union. “The political parties, even lumped together, do not have the power to take over, and you have the army, which will not allow the country to go into chaos. Worse yet, you might have military Islamic rule because there is no reason to suppose the army is any different than society.”

Jesus Weeps

Terrorists murder 38 during Christmas worship in the Philippines and Nigeria.

Killing Christians Wherever They Can Find Them

Al-Qaeda's campaign of religious cleansing in Iraq.

Bin Laden Alone

Peter Bergen argues that al-Qaeda is being strangled by its own fanaticism:

[T]he jihadist militants are incapable of turning themselves into a genuine mass political movement because their ideology prevents them from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in normal politics. Indeed, rather than cut deals with new friends, bin Laden has kept adding to his list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share his ultra-fundamentalist worldview. The enemies list grows and grows. Al-Qaeda has said it is opposed to all Middle Eastern regimes; the Shia; most Western countries; Jews and Christians; the governments of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia; most news organizations; most humanitarian organizations; and the United Nations. This is no way to increase market share.

The "Madness" Of War With Iran

Andrew Sullivan takes a hard line against the Saudis' proposed U.S. war against Iran:

The idea that the US should risk a tidal wave of Jihadist terror, a blow-up in Iraq, and a fatal p.r. blow in Afghanistan at the behest of the dictators and monarchs who funded Wahhabist terrorism and extremism for years is beyond absurd. It may make sense from an entirely myopic, short-term, Likudnik point of view. From any other perspective, it's madness.

What Price Security?

James Hanley on the TSA's patdowns. (For mature readers only, please.)

Forbidding Left Turns Would Save Lives, Too

Willing to do without the new airport security procedures? Fair enough. Without them, there may be a terrorist attack or two -- but hey, they'll kill way fewer people per year than auto accidents, writes Paul R. Pillar:

[H]ere's the best way to make sense of what TSA is doing, and of how and why the public is reacting the way it is. The brouhaha reflects our insistence on achieving absolute security against terrorist attacks, our quickness in spewing recriminations when absolute security is not achieved, and our refusal to face up to the difficult decisions of how much security to seek and at what cost.

Department Of It Goes With The Territory

The New York Times:

The plot unfolded in dramatic fashion on international television, with scenes of security teams surrounding cargo planes in several countries, military fighters accompanying a passenger plane into New York and a grim-faced president and his aides, many of whom had spent a sleepless night.

Poor dears. I bet the stewards brought milk and cookies!

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Yemen-based terrorists tried to send bombs to two synagogues in Chicago.

Their Cultural Loss Is Our Pain

Journalist ("The New Yorker") and screenwriter ("The Siege") Lawrence Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his book about al-Qaeda. When Terry Gross asked him the other day on her NPR program, "Fresh Air," what inspires men to be terrorists, he mentioned political repression, cultural and civic stagnation, and especially the medieval oppression of women:

[I]f you're going to try to pin down a single word about what is it that characterizes the drive into this kind of radical reaction, I think a word might be despair. Because there are many different rivers that lead into despair, you know, there's poverty. There's political repression. There's gender apartheid. You know, there's a sense of a cultural loss. There's religious fanaticism. All of these elements are present in many different Muslim countries in varying degree.

And, you know, the world is full of poor countries that don't produce terrorists. And the world is full of repressive governments that don't have violent insurgencies. But when you start mixing all these different elements together then you get a very combustible combination, and I think that's what you see in so many of these countries....

[E]ach of these countries is entirely different entities, so the mixture is different. In Saudi Arabia, you have practically no civil society at all. You know, there's nothing between the government and the mosque. It's just, you know, it's a very, very diminished sense of what you're - what's available for you to do in life. And certainly, the gender apartheid is a real problem.

You know, these young men are not socialized. They haven't grown up learning how to please girls, which is a lot of what civilization is, in my opinion. And this absence of contact with females is just a profoundly negative influence on the development of young male minds, in my opinion.

Dueling Hypocrisies

Charles M. Blow writes today:

I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.

He really doesn't find it curious. He's a smart guy, so he understands it completely. Reverse the polarities in his condemnation of hypocrisy -- challenge the Glenn Beck critics who aren't upset about the cultural center and mosque -- and you take in a category of liberal-minded people like Charles M. Blow and get yet another reminder of the persistent and sometimes exhausting divides over what's sacred in our civic life.

That's why the Constitution comes in so handy, preserving Beck's right to speak and Muslims' to worship where they choose. How upset people get about those freely exercised rights is a different question. I find I'm upset about neither. I'll add that I'm squishy on neither the threat of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism nor the saintly heroism of Dr. King.

What We Do Today And Tomorrow

This post originally appeared at The New Nixon on March 9, 2008 after a terrorist murdered eight students in the library of a yeshiva in Jerusalem. Much has happened since I wrote it, especially including the Gaza war. It was the era of another Israeli prime minister and U.S. president. But some things don't change, including the possibility that extremists will try to disrupt even the slim chances for a conclusive deal that most experts foresee as a new round of talks gets underway in Washington in early September. I took the photos, of Palestinian and Israeli schoolchildren in East and West Jerusalem, on my first pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2007.

At the Episcopal school where I pastor and teach, each spring the 5th graders grapple with these verses from the Hebrew Testament:

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” (Gen. 12:6-7)

This is before God gives his great patriarch the name Abraham, which happens in chapter 17 (remember, kids, that’s on the test). Abraham, from whom three billion Jews, Christians, and Muslims trace their theological lineage, is the first biblical figure whom a broad range of experts are willing to try to pinpoint in time. It’s thought he probably lived about 4,000 years ago, following the call of the most high God to travel from Ur of the Chaldeans (modern-day Iraq, where we’re at war today) to the promised land (ditto). My annual question to the fifth graders: Why would God give Canaan to Abram when there were people living there already? Did he love Abram’s people more? Most of the youngsters rule this out. Was he punishing the Canaanites? The Bible doesn’t say, so probably not. Is the answer even in the text? Each year a child looks between the lines and says what I hope she will say. I don’t actually know if it’s the right answer, thought I pray it is. She says, “God wanted them to share it.”

Not everyone reads this scripture like a Christian 5th grader in southern California who has no personal stake in the struggle between Israel and Palestinians and who mourns no victims of generations of terrorism and war. Secular Middle Easterners have little if any interest in anything ancient texts may teach about the present, seemingly intractable crisis. For others, the events of Abraham’s time are searingly relevant. Yaakov Shapira, chief rabbi of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem — where a 25-year-old Palestinian murdered eight students studying in the seminary’s library on Thursday, most of them teenagers — reached back to Genesis as he tried to make sense of what had happened:

The murderers are the Amalek of our day, coming to remind us that Amalek has not disappeared, just changed its appearance.

My 5th graders and other Bible readers first encounter the Amalekites in Genesis 14, which discloses that they are conquered by a coalition of kings who also defeat Sodom and imprison Abram’s nephew Lot. Abram defeats the kings to save Lot, but the Amalek emerge later in scripture as nomads who harrass the people of God during their flight from Egypt and are eventually wiped out by King David. For Rabbi Shapira, this ancient blood feud should directly inform a present-day political response. As the New York Times reported Saturday,

[Shapira] said that the gunman had made targets of “everyone living in the holy city of Jerusalem” and critized the [Ehud] Olmert government for its willingness to negotiate the return of some occupied land to the Palestinians. “The time has come for all of us to understand that an external struggle is raging, and an internal struggle, and everyone believes the hour has come for us to have a good leadership, a stronger leadership, a more believing leadership,” he said.

A more believing Israeli leadership would presumably accept that all of Israel’s enemies are animated by a hatred so deep and blinding that it has become part of their DNA. Some Israelis I’ve met do seem to believe as much, whether they take their cues from the Bible or not. Watching the coverage of the victims’s funerals, it is not hard to understand how they have come to believe as they do. Any person who murders children in a library is evil or insane. Family members of the murderer, Ala Abu Dhaim, say he was upset by the deaths of 126 Palestinians in Gaza last week. But even repeating that statement would seem to hint at a justification for the unjustifiable. Israel’s critics often posit a moral equivalency between casualties in its military operations and deaths from acts of terrorism. Their argument crumbles when one reads that Hamas has praised the murders even as Israel’s government grapples with both the moral and tactical challenges of launching attacks into Gaza where civilians might die. Hamas, of course, systematically puts its own people at risk, at the same time it implicitly acknowledges Israel’s superior if imperfect scruples, by locating military assets in civilian neighborhoods.

Hamas, however, is not the same as the Palestinian people. There are Israelis who can’t accept the distinction, just as there are Palestinians who are blind to the moral courage and vigor of Israelis who struggle to reconcile their entitlement to safety and security with their conception of justice in the form of some vision of a Palestinian nation next door. As dialog between Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has increased in recent months, and as the Bush Administration has dedicated its last year to moving the peace process forward, one has been waiting for Hamas and other extremists to disrupt the process, to do what they can to stifle and kill hopes for peace. That’s why it’s hard to believe that Ala Abu Dhaim acted alone. His operation fit perfectly into Hamas’s plan to promote chaos by provoking Israel and ultimately discrediting Abbas in the eyes of his people. It’s what violent extremists so often do — destroy hope by attacking the center and by exposing everyone residing there to the temptation of becoming violent extremists themselves in their grief, rage, and sheer frustration.

So how can the world’s responsible voices not join in support for Olmert and Abbas, Bush and Rice? How can we not keep faith with the hope that Israel and Palestine will someday live in peace, side by side? How do we keep extremists from wresting control of events from those who are committed to peace? Palestinians I know seem prepared for this work, their DNA notwithstanding, prepared to live into the truth that God wants them to share the Holy Land. Last summer I spent over a week in Al Abu Dhaim’s own east Jerusalem, albeit in the cloistered grounds of St. George’s Cathedral, seat of Jerusalem’s Episcopal bishop. Bright young Arab Palestinian Anglicans (better read that twice) working, studying, and worshiping at St. George’s reminded me of Cold War-era Muscovites in that they were capable of sitting up until after midnight one night after another talking about politics. Their brief against Israel is as heartfelt and seemingly cogent as Israelis’s against them. One is tempted to choose sides and then compelled not to, both by a newcomer’s humility as well as the feeling that Israelis and Palestinians could play they-did-it-first all the way back to Abram and the Amalekites without resolving anything. In the end, all that matters (this is admittedly a theological statement more than a sophisticated political position) is what we do today and tomorrow.