Is this a clever ploy by the Wall Street Journal to make democrats look stupid? Whine, whine, whine. Mr. McGovern seems to be under the impression that we care about the minutiae of his luddite existence. Perhaps if somebody bought him a Palm Pilot he’d be on time. Is one of the perks of being a failed presidential candidate the civil right to have airline employees risk their job for you to do you a favor because you’re late and you’re insulting them? And is Mr. McGovern suggesting he is immune to traffic laws? I’m glad to see that every man is equal in the eyes of US airlines. It’s part of what makes the war on terrorism worth fighting.

A mere 37 days after my entirely facetious prediction, comes the headline: Ailing Man Sues Fast-Food Firms

Today’s Ha’aretz editorial calls the Gaza strike an act of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t agree, but only because I like to quibble semantically about the proper use of the term “terrorism”–the word should be used to describe acts that deliberately aim to inspire terror in a civilian population. Within this narrow definition, terrorism is what happened on Sept 11, and what Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Bridgade do when they send out a suicide bomber.

What Sharon is guilty of is pursuing a military objective with wanton disregard for civilian life. His mindset is the same mindset that allowed Hiroshima and Dresden. Of course, the Gaza strike is much smaller in scope, and if you don’t condemn Allied actions over Hiroshima and Dresden then you cannot condemn Sharon without being a hypocrite. But Hiroshima and Dresden had one thing going for them–they did shorten the war, whereas the Gaza strike will not.

The moral difference between terrorism and what Sharon ordered is small, though. If you know with certainty your actions will cause civilian casualties way out of proportion with any military or political objective, then intent is irrelevant. If you order a missile strike on a city block, civilian casualties are not a mistake.

Meanwhile, here is the ‘My country, right or wrong’ defense, in the Jerusalem Post. It’s written by Uri Dan, who also wrote the Bull’s Eye story for the New York Post. I don’t know about you, but I can’t really tell the difference between his op-ed pieces and his straightforward news reporting.

As usual, the details of what went wrong are messy.

Some warbloggers are curiously quiet amid the fallout of the Israeli strike in Gaza, which is being questioned by many Israelis. That’s probably because these warbloggers are intelligent enough to see a line being crossed, and if they can’t say anything good about it, choose not to say anything at all. Cowardly, perhaps, hypocritical, perhaps, but understandable.

But you can depend on the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto to defend the indefensible:

We suppose the White House has to distance itself from Israeli military action for diplomatic reasons, but if Americans knew Osama bin Laden was hiding in a particular house in Afghanistan or Pakistan, would we let him go rather than risk killing civilians?

That’s just a perverse argument, because the “risk” of killing civilians when you hit a city block with a missile is, of course, a 100% certainty. I wonder: if Osama Bin Laden were hiding out in the apartment next to James Taranto’s, and the US decides to take him out with a missile rather than let him go, would Mr. Taranto mind?

A better question to ask would have been, if Sharon had known that Salah Shehada was hiding out in a city block full of Israelis, would he have made the same decision? In other words, is a Palestinian 3-year old’s life worth less than an Israeli 3-year old’s? To Sharon, I have no doubt it is, even if he is not fully capable of articulating this to himself.

News reports raise an even more damning possibility: That the decision was made because Palestinian terror groups were on the verge of declaring an end to suicide attacks. To Sharon and his fellow hawks, this was the last chance to hit their number one enemy, before he became legitimized in the eyes of the US and EU by a political process, just like Arafat. And, their thinking went, if taking him out causes these groups to rescind their gesture of normalization, that’s just fine; they prefer fighting their adversary over negotiating. No wonder Sharon called the strikes a “great success”. The civilians? They were an afterthought. It may yet turn out to be Sharon’s political suicide.

Reuters:

Israeli Strike Kills 15, Including Hamas Commander

New York Times:

Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills a Hamas Leader and 14 Others

Washington Post:

Israeli Airstrike Kills 15

Ha’aretz:

100,000 attend funerals of 15 fatalies of Gaza missile strike

Jerusalem Post:

Hamas terror mastermind assassinated in air strike

Wall Street Journal:

Israeli Air Strike in Gaza Kills Top Hamas Militant

New York Post:

BULL’S-EYE

Paragraph in which civilian casualty toll is mentioned:

Reuters: Headline

NYT: Headline

WP: Headline

Ha’aretz: Headline

Jerusalem Post: 1

WSJ: 1

NYP: 8

Fatuity watch indeed: The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page blog Best of the Web Today, by James Taranto, took to task a piece by Nicholas Kristof on the New York Times Op-Ed page a few days ago for drawing an “absurd moral equivalence” between our own Christian bigots and Muslim bigots. According to the WSJ, when American bigots sound off, they are nobly exercising their freedom of speech, but when Muslim bigots do the same, they are Saudi operatives. All of them, apparently. Hence no moral equivalence between a Christian minister calling Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” and a Muslim Imam calling Christianity the same.

Bigots start by generalizing. All Muslims are evil. All Americans are warmongers. Such opinions attempt to sever any empathy for the “other,” but ends up denying individuals the responsibility for their actions. In this context, when Taranto defends his point by reminding us that the Sept 11 terrorism attacks were, after all, perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam, what he is in effect doing is shielding the individual responsibility of the terrorist with a mantle of presumed collective guilt on the part of Muslims. Not that he is a bigot, of course:

The Weyrich/Lind characterization of Islam as “a religion of war” is far from an accurate description of the whole of Islam, which like any major religion has many theological and cultural varieties. But to a considerable number of Muslims, theirs is a religion of war.

And where have the considerable number of Christian bigots gone, all of a sudden? Oh, right, they’re all individuals.

But the heights of disingenuousness are only reached when Taranto tells us:

Now, we’re with Kristof in finding most of these [anti-Muslim] statements disagreeable.

Which is why I’m sure he must have forgotten this piece on the WSJ opinion page nary 2 weeks ago. Chuck Colson, who brings prisoners to Jesus via his Prison Fellowship Ministries, seems peeved that Islam is making inroads onto his turf. His screed starts innocuously enough:

Islam, which offers brotherhood and solidarity, especially for people of color, is for the most part a law-abiding religion. But not always.

Soon enough, we get to the guts of his problem with Islam:

Those who take the Koran seriously are taught to hate the Christian and the Jew; lands taken from Islam must be recaptured.

…

It’s no accident that Islam’s influence is growing behind bars. The National Islamic Prison Foundation and a Muslim prison outreach program were organized specifically to convert American inmates to Islam.

You don’t say? Just like Prison Fellowship Ministries, only different? The gall of it.

I have no doubt many born-again prisoners take the bible seriously–as in seriously looking for a favorable parole board decision. For Chuck to even start having a case, he’d have to begin by showing recidivism rates for Christians are lower than those of Muslims. I’m willing to bet they’re not.

Ex-World Bank chief economist Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents is quite the flawed masterpiece. It’s too breezy in its outrage (it even uses excalamation marks to express mock horror!) and too personal in its attacks for the tome to stand as the authoritative indictment of the Washington Consensus; the prose skips about frantically like so many grasshoppers, and often the same points are repeated in consecutive chapters, in case we didn’t get it the first time. But what a plague it has unleashed! The last two chapters especially come together to deal a body blow to the IMF that would make any WWF smackdown come alive. The IMF has begun responding in kind–Charles, were you there at the book launch?

Most salient point to take away from Stiglitz’s invective is that gradualism is better than shock therapy, and that the IMF never understood this because they are either stupid or in bed with Wall Street (they get to choose). A dry, footnoted exposition of this argument would likely have convinced me more, but then again I probably never would have read that in the first place. Stiglitz accuses the IMF of mission creep from its original mandate–which was just to provide pooled liquidity to countries with temporary cash-flow problems in the absence of global governance–and here he is most convincing, in part because the argument is framed from the perspective that since the IMF is such a believer in free markets, it should have known better than try to outbluff those free markets when it repeatedly and disastrously insisted on defending overvalued currencies during both the East Asian and Russian crises.

But what’s with the title? Stiglitz is not against globalization, as the book’s name implies, but against how the globalization process has been managed by the IMF. By the last chapter I was convinced the book was originally supposed to have been called “Globalization with a Human Face” but that this would have made him sound like an apologist to the intended audience–the anti-globalization movement. Stiglitz is in fact performing an economic high-wire act–fiercely criticizing one pillar of the Washington Consensus, but doing so in the hope of shielding the other pillar, the World Bank.

Will he succeed? There is very little about the World Bank at all in this book, and it’s a conspicuous ommission that will surely invite scrutiny. This exchange has just begun, and the IMF isn’t taking the blows sitting down. But read the book and get front-row seats.

P.S: The Economist’s review of this book.

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