just smoke the janjaweed, mon

Can anyone explain to me why the heck we haven't just gone in bombed the crap out of the janjaweed militias in Darfur yet?

It's a simple question. Why are we discussing potential airstrikes on Iran but none on the murdering children-mutilating rapist thug scum?

Related: What the United States can do to end the crisis in Sudan (audio from NPR.org)

Know Hope

Michael Totten, having spent several months traveling in Arab countries, arrived in Israel. While there he met Lisa Goldman, a journalist for the Guardian. I was especially struck by her comments thus:

Sometimes the Middle East feels like it’s drowning in bigotry, hate, and stupidity. But hate is not the only human emotion in that part of the world, even between Arabs and Jews.

Lisa is a liberal. Not the Bush-hating idiot variety, but the kind of brave person who continues to believe in the world no matter what kind of hell it throws at her. She spends a lot of time in the West Bank and Gaza even though the people who live in those places just replaced Yasser Arafat’s Fatah regime with Hamas.

“I have Palestinian friends who say things I don’t like at all,” she said. “They say they want to destroy Israel, that it has no right to exist.”

“How can you be friends with people like that?” I said.

“Because I know the difference between rhetoric and reality,” she said.

“Threats from the West Bank aren’t just rhetoric,” I said. “How many suicide bombings did you say you’ve seen?”

“These people will never hurt me,” she said. “They are my friends. They love me. And when I say love, I do not mean that lightly.”

I thought about that, and I thought about why someone might want to reach out and forge such seemingly-impossible friendships with people who declare themselves enemies. There’s a lot more behind it than a yearning for peace and the standard liberal can’t-we-all-just-get-along point of view. It strikes me, partly, as an emotional survival technique. I, for one, would not be able to tolerate living in Israel if I did not have Palestinian friends who could balance out the restless hate from some of the others. (I'd also like to have them as friends for the usual reasons, of course.)

“How can they be friends with you?” I said.

“That’s the real question, isn’t it?” she said.

As Lisa points out, propaganda requires dehumanization. But meeting another human being face to face makes people real. Part of the solution to the problem of hatred is fewer barriers to these basic human interactions, not more. Ultimately, Lisa and others like her are true heroes of a kind.

But what struck me even more was this basic expression of optimism in the form of recurring grafitti throughout Tel Aviv: Know Hope. There's a whole set on Flickr of these, and Michael has some good ones in his post as well. As he comments,

One of the most common spray-painted slogans in Tel Aviv says Know Hope. I don’t know who wrote it or why. Does it even matter? Israel is a stressful angst-inducing place. Not compared with Baghdad, for sure, but definitely compared with Egypt, Lebanon, and Northern Iraq. I felt better every time I saw it painted on walls. Know Hope. Those two simple words are so much more poignant in a place like Israel where the current (relative) lack of violence is almost certainly only a lull. Actual peace is well on the other side of the horizon.

Hope is precious and hard in Israel now. Hamas is taking over the reins of power in Palestine. The old Fatah regime was hideously corrupt and destructive. Some Palestinians, I am sure, voted for Hamas as a protest against Arafatism. Even so, terrorists officially rule the West Bank and Gaza with the consent of the governed.

And yet - and yet - the Israelis voted in a center-left government as a response. For a while there Israel wanted a man in power who was just a big fist. Until the second intifada broke out, Ariel Sharon - the Butcher of Beirut - was considered marginal and extreme by Israelis as well as by almost everyone else in the world. Yet they swung hard to the right and picked him to lead.

I wouldn’t say Israel has since swung hard to the left. But the Labor Party did receive one and a half times as many votes as Likud in the general election last month. Wielding a big fist no longer seems necessary whether it actually was in the first place or not. The intifada is more or less over. Brutal Israeli crackdowns in the territories are likewise more or less over. That may not be enough to feel hope, but it’s something.

Seeing Israel and Palestine for myself as they really are makes me slightly more hopeful than I was before I got there. The standard narrative of the conflict is a cartoon. Upon closer inspection, it’s a lot more complicated. And it’s a lot more interesting, too.

It may look like a never-ending and unresolvable death struggle with Arabs and Palestinians on one side, Israelis and Jews on the other. But people like Lisa and her Palestinian friends can’t be crudely reduced to that level. And we’re talking here about Palestinians who say they do want to destroy Israel, not just the liberals and the moderates who say they don't.

David Ben-Gurion

They don't make leaders in that mold anymore. I came across this amazing quote of his just now:

'I don't understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out... I'll be seventy years old soon... if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish State I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish State. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish State, and I would answer: fifty-fifty'. In conversation with Nahum Goldmann, in 1956; as quoted in The Jewish Paradox: A personal memoir (1978) by Nahum Goldmann

Quite a lot to unpack from that! There's genuine leadership for you. Accept your responsibilities, be unabashedly partisan in defense of your interests. That's your responsibility as a leader!

But the quote also demonstrates that Ben-Gurion was not a romanticist and he recognized that there was adequate justification for the existence of a Jewish homeland without denying the legitimacy of the grievances of those who were displaced to give it room to be birthed.

At some point in Israel's future, that moral balance must be redressed - but not now, while survival is at stake. I signed the Euston Manifesto below, but I qualify the two-state solution praised therein with the caveat that 1. the two-state solution is a temporary solution, and 2. if 50 years after a two-state solution is achieved, there is not a federalist solution, then the region will again be home to a cycle of violence for another thousand years. And in fact a successful andvibrant - and above all, free - Israel is a crucial component of a peaceful Middle East for the decades and centuries ahead. So work towards two states for now - but remember that all walls must eventually fall.

Jewishness, Democracy, and Greater Israel - pick any two.

Moussaoui

The man is playing theater. And he is depressingly smarter about it than we are. I can't believe how many pundits seem to hang on his every word, when the guy clearly is pulling things our of his arse left and right - solely to make a mockery of our justice system.

Dahlia Lithwick had some great analysis on him a while back, and it all holds true today. I doubt that this guy had anything to do with the terror plots at all - if he has any connection, is is to play a "media martyr" role. The propaganda value of his trial is immense.

We need to stop taking him seriously, and bar all media from covering the trial. He MUST still be tried under our court of laws - otherwise his critique that we have no justice will be made true. Try him, silently and quickly, and get it over with. IMHO the judge needs to be replaced as well for being too encouraging.

The Euston Manifesto

This is what I've been waiting for, for a long time.

Founded by Norm Geras and Nick Cohen, it is a new democratic progressive alliance - committed to intellectual freedom, human rights, and progressive principles. It is pro-freedom and pro-labor, pro-liberty and pro-human rights. It is the synthesis of being liberal and being libertarian.

It is the new American majority - it is Purple Politics. It is universal in a way that being just a Democrat or just a Republican can not be. It is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Here is the formal announcement:

Today, 13Apr06, we — bloggers, academics, campaigners, writers, scientists, journalists, citizens — launch the Euston Manifesto. With this document we hope to publicly assert our progressive, democratic, egalitarian, internationalist principles in the face of recent attacks upon them from the Right and, to our dismay, the Left.

Many of us are of the Left, but we come from across the range of political positions. We are not founding a political party. There were differences amongst us over Western military intervention in Iraq. Our declaration is not definitive, final, or perfect; it is, we hope, the beginning of a renewed debate, grounded in a common set of progressive values.

Sign me up. And you should sign up, too.

going broadband with EVDO

Now this is something to look forward to - EVDO-based routers:

Sprint and Linksys announced last week that the cellular service providers will be selling the EV-DO capable Linksys Wireless G Router for Mobile Broadband (WRT54G3G-NA) which will allow Sprint's Power Vision EV-DO cellular wireless internet access cards to operate with the router where Sprint cellular service is available.

EV-DO, or Evolution Data Only/Optimized, is a 3G cellular data technology part of the CDMA2000 wireless standard which allows subscribers to take their own internet hot spot wherever they go as long as they are within range of a cellular network and at broadband speeds comparable to 1.5Mb/sec speeds.

According to PCMagazine, Sprint will begin shipping the Linksys EV-DO capable routers during the second half of this year to accompany their mobile broadband service, however, the cellular provider currently offers EV-DO access cards for notebooks and tiered data plans between $39.99-$79.99/month depending on required usage. Verizon Wireless charges approximately $45 for existing data services that can burst around 1.5Mb/s in some cities right now.

This is welcome news because it will unify cell phone service, wireless internet connectivity on the road, and at home. With a EVDO router at home and an EVVDO card in my laptop, the coverage will be seamless. Assuming Sprint bundles it all together and I might even save money - and the best part is that there are no wires to run in the house. This will break the cable/DSL monopolies.

Michael Yon: back to war

Michael Yon is headed back to war - this time without the protection of the military. He has posted a travelouge while enroute via Bangkok and Dubai.

You may be surprised to learn that he does consider Iraq to be in a civil war. But to argue that the civil war was a result of the the American war is, in his view, an "illegal joining". Be sure to read his piece in full and reflect on the subtle, yet important shades he draws as he nears the battlefield once again.