That's Why They Call It Zionism

Speaking with U.S. Jewish leaders, Benyamin Netanyahu says Palestinians' recognition of Israel's Jewish identity is essential:

Netanyahu described Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as a key to peace. He said that when Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he’s willing to recognize Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinians and Palestinians can immigrate there, but not to Israel, which is the homeland of the Jews. Netanyahu also said that there was not space inside Israel for sub-homelands, saying Israel's non-Jewish minority (Israel's Arab population) has full equal rights but could no demand national rights of their own.

Appt Word

Awesome.

No Doubtless Not Much Longer

Gwen and the boys, the pride of Anaheim, are back in the studio -- though it's more complicated with kids at home.

Calm Iran

Foreign policy realist Josef Joffe lists all the problems that a deal between Israel and the Palestinians won't solve, beginning with Iran's bomb:

The nuclear program goes back to the Shah. Iran was then Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, and the last item on Reza Pahlavi’s far-flung agenda, if it was there at all, must have been Palestine. Today, Tehran is reaching for the bomb for the usual reasons: as deterrent, as badge of great-power status, as keystone of regional supremacy. Will the Khomeinists really ditch their nuclear venture once the Israeli oppressors have been driven from the Temple Mount, with its Al Aqsa Mosque? Of course not.

And yet it's refreshing (and reassuring) to read that Iran is rationally promoting its interests rather than engaging in a mad, apocalyptic, unstoppable anti-Jewish jihad. And if that's really the case, then the new Palestinian state would have the same interest as its neighbors in deterring Iranian aggression. If Iran's regime is rational, then it's prudent and helpful to add more coherence and leverage to the world's effort to slow its nuclear program -- which is why a peace deal would help after all.

Not everyone agrees Iran's regime is rational, of course.

Perhaps A Fad Premature

America's last -- or, at least, richest -- moderate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, stakes his reputation on good sense:

Mr. Bloomberg described the Tea Party movement as a fad, comparing it to the short-lived burst of support for Ross Perot in 1992. The mayor suggested that the fury it had unleashed was not a foundation for leadership.

“Look, people are angry,” he said. “Their anger is understandable. Washington isn’t working. Government seems to be paralyzed and unable to solve all of our problems.”

“Anger, however, is not a government strategy,” he said. “It’s not a way to govern.”

Mr. Bloomberg said he wanted to see more of the cooperation once displayed by Senators Orrin G. Hatch and Edward M. Kennedy.

He said that he would not have voted for either of them (“one because he’s too liberal for me, one because he’s too conservative for me”), but added, “These two guys who went into the Senate together and were the closest of personal friends for 40 years, they were everything that democracy says a senator should be.”

God Bless Us, Every Party

"The Economist" on how Republicans are on the verge of getting monopoly control over the issues of freedom and liberty, which they don't deserve except to the extent that Democrats aren't battling back. The headline, "The Conservatives Grab the Best Songs," reminded me of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" -- which, as long as you want God to bless other nations, too, and maybe change "men who died" to "people who died," is non-partisan, red-and-blue pitch perfect, even though Ronald Reagan got to it first for his 1984 reelection campaign.

When she was President Nixon's chief of staff in the 1990s, Kathy used to buzz colleagues on the intercom and play the song over their phones.

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.

Sunday Girls

Kathy and I have known Brenna Hayden since she was a baby in the arms of her parents, Bob and Kathe. I photographed them at today's St. John's Homecoming picnic as they participated in fellowship and a little friendly fundraising on behalf of Brenna's brother.

Seed Corn

All these weeks I thought "The Switch" was a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman and also, thanks to the fuss Bill O'Reilly kicked up, a paean to single motherhood. Instead, it's a vehicle for a touching love story between a father and son, Wally (played by Bateman) and Sebastian (the charming Thomas Robinson), who bond over their shared hypochondria and dad's suggestions for dealing with playground bullies.

Wally was abandoned by his own father and so has been unable to take an emotional stand, especially when it comes to admitting to Kassie (Aniston's character) that he loves her. But long before he realizes they're related, he finds Wally impossible to resist. The best scenes feature just the two of them. Sebastian inherited an adult dose of his father's anxiety but none of his timidity. An animal rights advocate, at nine he refuses to blow out the candles on his birthday cake unless a family friend agrees to adopt a three-legged dog from a local kill shelter. Drawn to Sebastian's gutsy little man, Wally finally discovers his inner one.

While Aniston's not incidental by any means, she's stationery. As with her and many of her leading men (such as those in "Along Came Polly," The Breakup," and "Love Happens"), she abides in sunny, grownup charm while Wally seeks after the wisdom and self-awareness to which men must attain in order to adore and serve her.

More or less in the middle of his heart's 13-year travail, he becomes Wally's father by substituting his sperm for Aniston's intended donor's. He obtains it while gazing at a picture of a prominent member of Richard Nixon's White House staff and indulging his imagination. The movie is at its most unrealistic when it begs us to believe that for the first nine years of Wally's life, he doesn't remember doing this. In equally lame scenes, he plants the seed (in the form of an incoherent drunken delusion) with his colleague and best friend, played by Jeff Goldbum, who conveniently helps him recover the memory years later. That's not to say that the gangly, off-beat Goldblum doesn't do a great job. Besides, he's rooting for Aniston the whole time -- and so are we, because that's what we do.

Nixon v. Anderson

Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz:

While detailing Nixon's utter obsession with [journalist Jack] Anderson -- to the point that 16 CIA operatives once kept him under surveillance and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy plotted to kill him -- [a new book] makes the case that each side employed equally ruthless methods against the other.