The NY Times can't be serious about their policy suggestions for preventing Iran from joining the nuclear club.

The Iranian Nuclear Challenge

If international treaties to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons have any power, now is the time to flex it on Iran. Last week the United States, Europe, Russia and China jointly condemned Iran's refusal to explain how it got blueprints and equipment usable for making nuclear bomb fuel. That criticism must be followed up with concerted pressure to keep Iran from joining the growing list of states armed with nuclear weapons.

Flex a treaty? Concerted "pressure"? Is this a serious plan? How can they discuss Iran's nuclear capabilities without once mentioning the threat from a country that supports terrorism even more clearly than did Iraq?

China should order its companies not to cooperate with Iranian enrichment or bomb-making efforts, and should urge North Korea and Pakistan to impose similar bans.

And how should China "urge" these totally unstable countries with a history of trading in nuclear secrets from not doing business with one of their clients? And what if the Chinese are unsuccessful? No "Plan B" is offered from the Times.

The unhappy experience of Iraq showed that unilateral military action is not a very useful antiproliferation tool.

Since when does "unhappy" have anything to do with success? Due to our action in Iraq we KNOW that their country is WMD-free where it was uncertain before and we KNOW that their current leadership will not invade other countries or export nuclear technology and we EXPECT that the flourishing of democratic institutions will deprive them of the need for such technology.

Furthermore due to our action in Iraq, we KNOW that Libya has given up it's WMD plans and we KNOW that Dr. Khan of Pakistan has come clean about his dealings in nuclear technology and enlightened us on much of what was happening in that area in the recent past.

I'm sorry the Times is not happy about that, but I'm not sure how they can claim that Iraq is not a success on the antiproliferation front.

Fiddish has a link to a story about a treasure trove of pre-WWII Judaica buried by the Jews of Auschwitz of all places underneath their Great Synagogue. i wonder if there are any more hidden treasures like this throughout Europe?

Unearthed in Auschwitz

OSWIECIM, POLAND — A crew of Polish archeologists searching for a buried treasure at the former site of the Great Synagogue here struck gold Monday when they discovered a trove of artifacts, including three synagogue menorahs, a Chanukah menorah, the eternal light and several synagogue chandeliers.

The diggers were acting on evidence — unearthed in an incredible tale of luck and suspense — that in 1939, the local Jewish community had buried Torahs and other holy books and various artifacts in metal cases below the synagogue floor, just before the building was blown up by the Nazis. The archeological excavation started at the beginning of June in the once-vibrant Jewish town of Oswiecim, known popularly by its German name, Auschwitz. The town is adjacent to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex.

I know it goes without saying that the UN is anti-Semitic, but it never hurts to go through the reasons why every once in a while.

One Small Step - Is the U.N. finally ready to get serious about anti-Semitism?


This paragraph to me was the most poignant.

As Israelis are demonized at the U.N., so Palestinians and their cause are deified. Every year the U.N. marks Nov. 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People--the day the U.N. partitioned the British Palestine mandate and which Arabs often style as the onset of al nakba or the "catastrophe" of the creation of the state of Israel. In 2002, the anniversary of the vote that survivors of the concentration camps celebrated, was described by Secretary-General Annan as "a day of mourning and a day of grief."

Christopher Hitchens in Slate writes the longest and strongest piece that has ever, or will ever, be written against Michael Moore. I think we can now officially put this one to bed.

Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate writes the longest and strongest piece that has ever, or will ever, be written against Michael Moore. I think we can now officially put this one to bed.

Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

I agree whole-heartedly. Although I don't really think it would affect many votes. What I like is the forward-looking nature of the argument.

Cheney needs to step aside for good of Bush, party

I'm getting most of my stuff from Drudge today. I must be getting lazy.

The liberal left is acting like a police officer would at the scene of an accident - "nothing to look at here people, just keep moving...."

9/11 panel: New evidence on Iraq-Al-Qaida

The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.

John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."

The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders.

Considering the play that the "Bush lied" argument got on Page One the other day based on preliminary 9/11 Commission drafts, I'm surprised to see that neither the NY Times, Washington Post or CNN have this up on their websites.

Well, not really.

Actually, William Safire takes the Commission to task more succinctly and accurately than I ever could:

The Zelikow Report

Another big story on the war from the NY Times, but still a little confusing in it's details.

U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantánamo Detainees

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.

While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said. Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.

Here, as in many places, I think the Times is raising the bar for holding people from "people who would kill Americans" (not sufficient) to "people with information on an imminent 9/11 size attack" (in which case they still probably wouldn't agree with holding prisoners in this manner).

The article itself mentions that "officials...have been unable to get any information from at least 60 detainees". In my opinion, people held in this manner with nothing to hide would at least proclaim their innocence.

Also, when prisoners were released, "at least 5 of the 57 Afghan detainees released have returned to the battlefield as Taliban commanders or fighters. Some of the five have been involved in new attacks on Americans, officials in southern Afghanistan said, including a notorious Taliban commander, Mullah Shahzada, who was reportedly killed in a recent accident." If these people are Taliban commanders, past and present and are willing to kill Americans, how is this not "the worst of a bad lot" as the Times mockingly quotes Dick Cheney.

Finally, the report mentions a "26-year-old Saudi man who apparently tried unsuccessfully to enter the United States as the 20th hijacker in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001".

Personally, I'm pretty happy he showed up in Guantanamo.

I guess part of the question is how many innocent people could you morally round up and throw into prison if you thought that one would be as evil as to have taken part in September 11? The Times does not answer this question.

I can't call this a Jewish related blog without at least one Rebbe link today.

Lubavitchers Mark 10 Years Since Death of Revered Rabbi

If you don't believe me (given the right-wing leanings of this blog) that I've supported Bill Clinton in the past, feel free to look through my archives. In part, it's because he was a little bit more of a realist than the Bush-hating left wing of his party.

Clinton defends successor's push for war

Noting that Bush had to be "reeling" in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining "chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material."

"That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for," Clinton said in reference to Iraq and the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.

"So I thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, 'Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.' You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks," Clinton said.

If the Democrats couldn't win the 2000 election with a centrist Gore, ain't no way they are going to win with a leftist, flip-flopping Kerry.

Just wanted to show a little bit of confused/negative reporting on the large Iraqi oil pipeline that was blown up last Tuesday.

In the NY Times' initial reporting, it was said that shutdown was "expected to (last) about 10 days, costing the country up to $1 billion in revenue." The estimate came from a fellow journalist, "an authority on the Iraqi oil industry."

However, the same expert said that "production could be increased later to compensate for the shutdown once repairs are made."

In other words, there would be zero economic impact. But you'd have to read all the way to the bottom to see that.

Luckily, it only took 5 days to repair at least one of them, as reported in today's paper via the Associated Press - Repairs Completed On Iraq Oil Pipeline What's confusing is this information:

"Exports of up to 900,000 barrels a day were expected to resume later Sunday"

"Sabotage attacks damaged two pipelines that can carry over 1.5 million barrels a day"

"Only the smaller of the two southern lines has been repaired"

Simple math tells me that 1.5 million less 900 thousand is 600 thousand. How is it that the larger, unrepaired pipeline pumps less oil?

Also reported in the last 24 hours were these pieces:

Iraq Oil Pipeline Still Under Repair

Repairs to Sabotaged Pipeline Are Delayed

I'm soooooooooo confused my brain's exploding!

Apparently a small group of orthodox rabbis in the U.K. believe that popular orthodox singer Mordechai Ben David is not frum enough. They have sent out appeals to the Jewish community not to see hos concert because the music is "immoral" and "a negative influence on young people".

I'm not sure how this came to be a story importnat enough for a major newspaper, but as one of the concerts' organizers put it, "there's always going to be extremists in every community but 99.99 per cent find this type of thing enjoyable, entertaining and uplifting".

"These trouble-makers really believe they are doing God's will, as do suicide-bombers, to be quite frank."

Ouch.

Maureen O'Dowd, whose writing style I find difficult to read and whose opinions I always disagree with has a particularly Bush-hating entry in the Sunday Times.

Bill Clinton comes out and admits that he had his fling with Monica Lewinsky "because he could", the ultimate abuse of power. Then O'Dowd compares that to the War in Iraq. Actually, she determines that Bush's abuse of power is worse because of the Body Count.

Pardon me Ms. O'Dowd, but the Clinton body count is 3,000+ Americans who died while Clinton failed to respond with force after the first WTC bombing, the African embassies, the USS Cole attack, etc. I guess he thought his time was better spent chasing after interns.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but did Clinton get up in front of the United Nations and lay out his case for why Lewinsky should give him oral sex in the Oval Office and then have the Security Council pass resolutions in his favor? Did Clinton go before Congress to have them vote on his affair, or vote on an appropriations bill for books of poems and cigars? Nothing Bush did on Iraq was the least bit hidden from public view.

You can't even compare the two President's lies. Clinton lied about something he thought, and hoped, no one would ever find out about. President Bush "lied" while at the same time sending in inspection teams and liberating Iraqi voices who could speak against him if he were to be wrong. Nobody lies on purpose and then gives support to the people who can prove them wrong.

Thanks to Ariel Sharon and no thanks to just about every other politician and strategist in the rest of the world, the intifada is over. Or at least any possibility of success for the Palestinian side is over.

Calmer times in Israel? by Charles Krauthammer.

While no one was looking, something historic has happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.

For Israel, the victory is bitter. The last four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

That did not happen. Israel's economy was certainly wounded, but it is growing again. Tourism had dwindled to almost nothing at the height of the intifada, but tourists are returning. And the Israelis were never demoralized. They kept living their lives, the young people in particular returning to cafes and discos and buses just hours after a horrific bombing. Israelis turned out to be a lot tougher and braver than the Palestinians had imagined.

The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were 9 suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the last three months, there have been none.

Matt Lauer, of all people, takes it to Michael Moore without flinching.

Moore defends incendiary film

Lauer: "You accepted the Palm D'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. It's a huge honor, especially for a film like this. And you said, I think the quote was, ‘I did not set out to make a political film. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics.’"

Moore: "That's right. That's absolutely right."

Lauer: "I'm amazed you said it with a straight face."

By the way is "slime ball" two words as reported at the beginning of this story, or one word as in the original.

Among all the criticism of the White House regarding 9/11, I have yet to see the editorial or Op/Ed piece claiming that if Al Gore were President, all this never would have happened.

I wish the critics would get over themselves. We're all human beings, we can't plan for every event and sh*t happens. Even if someone had planned perfectly for the use of one hijacked plane as a missle, there could have been as many as ten. Then what? What if the planes' targets were closer to their take-off points and there couldn't be enough time to scramble F-16s regardless? Even the best laid plans can be circumvented depending on wholly unpredictable events.

There's a reason why no one can promise there won't be another terrorist attack no matter how we re-organize our defenses. It's because it's impossible as long as there are people willing to commit an attack. All we can do to try to dissuade the terrorists by killing as many of them as we can. The second someone picks up a rifle and swears their allegiance to Allah and shouts "death to the infidels", they are fair game. That certainly wasn't our policy before 9/11.

My mini-rant is over.

Just wanted to link to a couple of articles in today's local paper about Kosher stuff. One of the articles has to do with an Orthodox Rabbi who is trying to bring kosher meat processing to the Dallas area. I've actually met him and had lunch with him - he's a really nice guy and I wish him the best.

Making his mark
Rabbi Yaakov Rosenblatt is working to beef up kosher options for Jewish Texans

Degrees of keeping kosher

I still find it amazing that this is actually going forward. Sharon has gotten virtually zero credit outside of Israel for the disengagement plan and the sharp drop in suicide bombings and deaths on both sides.

Disengagement slated to begin in August

An updated schedule for the disengagement plan: settlers can begin to file for compensation in 10 days time. Voluntary evacuation to start in August; evacuation by force—in December.

Just more proof that the John Kerry (or Anybody But Bush) camp's largest supporters are not afraid of flat out lying to gain popular support. This time the non-partison Annenberg School of Communications takes on the latest commercial from Moveon.org

Anti-Bush Ad Overstates Case Against Halliburton

An ad that began airing June 15 portrays a white-coated White House waiter serving contracts and wads of cash, while an announcer says the Bush administration gave Halliburton no-bid contracts "on a silver platter" and that the company was "caught" overcharging by tens of millions of dollars.

But in fact, investigators from the General Accounting Office (GAO) found Halliburton's no-bid contracts to be legal and probably justified by the Pentagon's wartime needs. Furthermore, Pentagon auditors have yet to make any final determination of whether payment should be denied to Halliburton for gasoline or meals for troops. Those billing disputes are still being negotiated.

I'm assuming this guy worked in the same building that I was in at 388 Greenwich. He didn't even see the first plane go in like I did and he wanted compensation. What a wuss. I went back to work with the same 36th floor view of Ground Zero and had to listen to these huge BOOOOOOOMS every five minutes when the trucks full of scrap metal were dumped into the barges along the river. That and the frickin' helicopters full of VIPs that kept buzzing my building.

NO WORKER'S COMP FOR 9/11 GAWKER

A financial analyst who worked blocks away from Ground Zero on 9/11 and claimed he could not return to his job because of post-traumatic-stress disorder cannot collect workers' compensation, a state appeals court ruled yesterday.
The state Supreme Court Appellate Division unanimously ruled that Joseph Betro's problems did not arise from his job, noting that he voluntarily hung around to watch the tragedy unfolding.

Betro was working for Salomon Smith Barney, four blocks from the World Trade Center, when his building was evacuated after the terrorist attacks.