A wonderful column today from the Times Online on why Israel should have no regard for world opinion:

So when Israel is urged to respect world opinion and put its faith in the international community the point is rather being missed. The very idea of Israel is a rejection of this option. Israel only exists because Jews do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion. Zionism, that word that is so abused, so reviled, is founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow the Jews will defend themselves and their fellow Jews from destruction. If world opinion was enough, there would be no Israel.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Also, for background on the entire conflict, one could do worse than to watch this online presentation.

Nice to see it somewhere:

For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.

Read Charles Krauthammer’s full column on the Gaza campaign.

Of all the odd places to find a discussion of U.S. aid to Israel, check out the Dilbert Blog.

As usual, one is hard-pressed to nail down where Scott Adams stands on the issue, but (also) as usual, he has a great way of approaching the question.

The post linked above is just one entry. Make sure to look up and down.

As is so often the case in all issues related to Israel, The New York Sun this weekend has some of the best commentary around. Specifically, on its op-ed page, columns by David Twersky and Hillel Halkin, both of whom I once had the pleasure of editing back in the day.

First, Twersky:

This is a great clarification. The scales
are off. Israel has no peace option with the Palestinians at this
juncture.

…

This
leaves Israel with fewer, though better clarified options. Essentially,
the dovish proposition that under the right circumstances a fullbore
peace treaty can be negotiated with the Palestinians lies in ruins, for
now no more useful than a Crusader castle. The major dispute among
Israelis will be between those in Kadima, arguing for a better
deployment vis-� -vis the impossible-to-deal-with Palestinians, and the
Likud, arguing for a stand-pat, change-is-weakness strategy.

There are those who want to point to this election as a repudiation of Bush’s democracy-promotion doctrine in the region. But perhaps the Hamas win is evidence for the other side — that shaking up the status quo is more of risk, but has far greater potential dividends than staying the course.

Halkin makes a similar point to Twersky’s, but takes it a step further:

For the last five years, since the outbreak
of the second intifada, Israel has been in an absurd position. On the
one hand, it has had to deal with a feeble Palestinian Authority that
encouraged or condoned terrorism, was unable to control its own
population, and could not possibly have kept any peace agreement it
might have signed.

…

But the mask is now off the
Palestinian Authority at last and the road map can be thrown into the
wastepaper basket — and with it, the 1993 Oslo Agreement and everything
that stemmed from it. There is no longer any reason, from their own
perspective, for Europe and the United States not to say openly: “Since
the Palestinian people has elected a leadership that no Israel
government can be expected to deal with, we will in the absence of a
better alternative support an Israeli withdrawal to the security fence
and recognize that fence as Israel’s de facto border.”

Such
international recognition is precisely what is needed to convince
Israelis that, despite the colossal political, emotional, and logistical
difficulties involved, such a step is worth taking. The time has come
for a deal between Israel and the world. Once it is made, Hamas can ask
for its commission.

The fact is that Israel is going to build its wall, and that will essentially be the border. There is no other option. In the best of faith, Israel does not have — and has never had — a negotiating partner. America has played an unfortunate role in prolonging a futile peace process. Now, we can correct that error by standing behind Israel in any decision it now takes as to how it wants to proceed.

How any U.S. or E.U. aid could keep flowing to the Palestinian Authority after this point is a mystery to me. And how anyone could object to the completion of the wall would be an equal mystery — if we did not already know the true agenda of those who would deny Israel peace.

“Palestinian boy’s organs donated to Israelis”
– CNN.com, November 7

Somehow, this seems like a bad idea to me. I could swear I’ve seen an anti-Semitic cartoon based on this premise.

“ingratiating, not intimidating”

“The perfect host, perfectly attired, right down to the opalescent links binding his French cuffs”

“a politically pugnacious professor”

“a metrosexual”

“his eyes telegraphing hurt and anger behind black-framed glasses”

“His demibeard is neatly sculptured”

“His Continental accent is more soothing than strident”

“single”

Profile of notorious anti-Semite or mash note to potential sexual partner?

Well, here’s a hint: It’s from The New York Times. It could be both!

DO NOT miss the editor’s note from The New York Times today, in which the paper admits that it got an early look at Columbia’s internal report on intimidation of students by pro-Palestinian professors, in its own words, “on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.”

Specifically, those “other interested parties” were the students who had brought the complaints — and whose complaints were whitewashed by the report.

This is a real humiliation for the Times, and a big victory for my friend and former colleague at The New York Sun, Jacob Gershman, who exposed the unethical Times “deal” the day after it occurred. (Jacob and the Sun are also the subjects of the Village Voice’s cover story this week, in which the lefty rag tries to cast aspersions on the Sun’s coverage of the Columbia affair. The impact of the Voice’s attack is lessened, however, by the fact that the Voice itself has taken largely the same view of the Columbia story in its coverage.)

Here’s the Times’ editor’s note in full:

A front-page article on Thursday described a report by a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors. The report found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic,” but it did say that one professor “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians.

The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.

Under The Times’s policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. The Times insisted, however, on getting a response from the professor accused of unacceptable behavior, and Columbia agreed.

Last Wednesday night, after the article had been published on The Times’s Web site, the reporter exchanged messages with one of the students who had lodged the original complaints. The student was expecting to read the report shortly. But because of the lateness of the hour, and concern about not having response from other interested parties, the reporter did not wait for a comment for later versions, including the printed one, after the student had read the report.

Without a response from the complainants, the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form. The response was included in an article on Friday.

Doesn’t make one trust anything the Times OR Columbia is saying about the university’s anti-Semitism problem, does it?

By the way, re: my recent Columbia column, it turns out I’m a rabid Zionist.

I picked up Zionist rabies in Israel a while back, I think. I was bitten by a rabid rabbi.

Watch as Columbia University takes the next step in whitewashing anti-Semitism in its Middle East studies department.

As always, Hillel Halkin has a thoughtful column on Israel and the Palestinian Arabs in The New York Sun:

A leadership headed by a man who calls the intimidating murder of two of his bodyguards “unintentional shooting in the air” is not going to be able to achieve either of these things. It will not have the will to impose law and order on gunmen and suicide bomb dispatchers within its own ranks, let alone on those belonging to opposition organizations like the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and it will not have the ability to renounce the extreme negotiating positions that the holders of the guns espouse.

Nor is it just the holders of the guns who espouse them. Much of the Palestinian street does, too. If the Palestinian Authority holds the democratic elections it has promised, not just to choose Arafat’s heir, but also to elect a new Palestinian Legislative Council, the current members of which have been serving since 1996, this will not be a body disposed to compromises with Israel.

Arafat’s legacy lives on in death — his own and those of his victims, both Israeli and Palestinian.

One major part of Yasser Arafat’s legacy, of course, is the legitimization of terrorism as a political tool — at least as far as Europe is concerned. Here, we have an interview with Hani Al-Hassan of the Fatah Central Committee, translated by the invaluable MEMRI TV Monitor Project:

In Fatah we have a rule: the armed struggle sows and the political struggle reaps. … We think that the current period is a phase of sowing, until we see results in the international position.

We see today that there is a change in the world. Europe has changed and its position has become more clearly in our favor. America is bogged down in Iraq and doesn’t know what to do.

…

Therefore, there are opportunities. We will see now whether the political situation allows us to reach political results and to bring about a change in our favor. Otherwise, we will go back to sowing.

Let’s be explicit here. European appeasement has cost — and will continue to cost in the foreseeable future — the lives of thousands of Jewish men, women and children.

There can be absolutely no debate as to who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, here. There’s no question as to who are the murderers and who are the victims. Yet the Europeans, having failed to complete the Holocaust — again, to be explicit, primarily in Germany and France — are continuing their war against the Jews by other means.

As I’ve said before, the appeasers should burn in hell. They are as guilty as the terrorists.

How touching:

The armed wing of Fatah on Thursday announced its decision to change its name from the Aksa Martyrs Brigades to the Brigades of Martyr Yasser Arafat.

Uh, guys… guys? Remember that guy who totally wasn’t a martyr? The one who stole all that money meant for the Palestinian people for himself? The guy who died in France, as opposed to, say, the West Bank?

Oh, yeah… That guy.

If Yasser Arafat really was a symbol for the dream of Palestinian statehood, well, then, I suppose that dream is about to be buried.

But, really, that’s not fair. What Arafat really was, was a symbol of the Arab world’s use of the Palestinian Arabs as a fundraising device and a weapon against the hated Jews. Arafat was a symbol of corruption, murder and a will toward genocide.

May he rot in hell.

I laughed until I stopped:

“The doctors are fighting for his life,” Palestinian envoy to France, Leila Shahid, said Wednesday afternoon. “They will continue until they succeed - or until they give up.”

Ugh.