Obama and Israel’s 1967 Borders

For the second time in recent days, I find myself doing something I never thought I would do. President Obama’s speech on the Middle-East, or rather, the part on Israel, was misunderstood by commentators, including conservative commentators I esteem. Or else, they suspended judgment for the time being. First, let me protect myself from the pending accusation of being anti-Israel.

1 I would never vote for a US presidential candidate who did not declare loudly and clearly his support for the continued existence of Israel. I mean Israel as a Jewish state. I am not playing games. This commitment is more than most Jewish Americans can brag about. More than 7o% of them voted for Obama. It was hard not to know then that his “progressive” friends loathe Israel, that many are openly anti-Semitic. Support does not mean unconditional love. Ask my adult daughter.

2 Last week was one of the worst times I can remember to make any statement about Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Arab world is in turmoil. It’s not clear who the interlocutors are going to be one month from now. Who was he talking to? Obama made this speech either because his speeches are increasingly separated from reality or for devious electoral reasons that don’t make much sense.

3 The reconciliation between the PLO, that governs the West Bank, and Hamas, the de-facto and regularly elected power in the Gaza strip, makes any talks with Israel currently absurd. I wouldn’t negotiate a parking place with Hamas. The reason is not that the organization does not keep its word. The reason is that it often does. The Hamas Charter affirms clearly that the elimination of Israel, the state, is its goal. There is a link to the Hamas Charter on this blog. (Don’t try reading the whole thing; it’s horrible reading. The part about Israel – and Christians – is in the last three pages.) If and when Hamas renounces publicly this part of its charter, a giant step will have been taken and any Israeli government in place then will be embarrassed if it does not make a positive move.

4 In any discussion with the PLO, I would give it very little benefit of doubt. The reason is that it continues teaching children that murdering Jews is glorious. If you remember, only a couple of months ago, a brave, PLO-affiliated Palestinian fighter cut the throat of a six-month old Jewish “settler” in his sleep. The PLO government disavowed the crime. You can’t do that. You may not instruct your people ceaselessly that they have to kill their neighbors and not expect that some of them will go beyond the vaguely defined mission. Failing to treat Palestinian government agencies as fully responsible adults is bad for Israelis and it’s bad for Palestinians: You want your won state? You have to know that capital cities have been bombed for less than this.

Now Obama’s speech. He said that:

“ The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agrees swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” (Emphasis mine)

The Israelis, by and large, want to keep most of their settlements on the West Bank. Of special importance though are the largest, most densely populated settlements contiguous to Israel proper, around Jerusalem and north of the city. They consider those settlements not for negotiations. The scattered Jewish settlements deeper into he West Bank seem negotiable. Thus, they want to retain a narrow westernmost strip of the West Bank for economic, sentimental (“historical”), and military reasons. (Doubling the thin waist of the country designed in the 1947 UN plan.) Israelis are faced starkly with three possibilities: Keep the status quo forever and never enjoy any real peace of mind; rule over a hostile Palestinian population forever, turning the West Bank into a Bantustan (thus becoming the evil being of current Arab propaganda); negotiate a peace with the Palestinians that gives them most of what they want. There are several scenarios that correspond to the last possibility. The most credible is a final, irreversible land-swap. (A land swap could be accompanied by an agreement on a very light, trigger-wire-type, strictly military Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.) Here is how a land-swap scenario might go:

There is going to be a Palestinian state, one way or another, unless there is massive change in Jordan and the country absorbs the West Bank in a definitive manner. The Palestinians may or may not have been a nation in 1948. They are one now, pretty much the same way Jews were a nation in 1900. Having a common history, especially a painful one, and articulated aspirations to one’s own state, is enough to qualify anyone has a nation. The main reason they don’t have their own state now is their own collective political incompetence and corruption. Basically, the Palestinians don’t need Israel’s permission to proclaim a state. If they conduct clean elections, extend a big olive branch across the border, tell their Arab friends to butt out, and just affirm they have a state, what’s Israel going to do? I don’t even see that any UN permission is essential.

The Palestinians will want their state to be contiguous as President Obama so self-evidently stated. A people who has been subjected to the gross inconvenience and humiliation of numerous and frequent foreign police controls is not going to settle for a West Pakistan- East Pakistan solution. Just as self-evidently, they will want access to seaports (in Gaza) thus by-passing Israeli interference, a constant source of political pressure.

The solution, from a Palestinian standpoint, is obvious. It’s a land corridor between the two major Palestinian territories.

Now, consider the shortest distance between the southern part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian-owned and controlled corridor about six mile wide between these two areas would have the following features:

1 With a slightly larger area than Gaza, the corridor would have plenty of room for one or two Silicone Valleys or, more realistically, for thousands of truck farms. That’s in addition to a transportation corridor with a road and possibly, a rail line.

2 It would pose no real military threat to Israel under any conceivable conditions. A corridor ten miles wide would also not threaten Israel because of its vulnerability on both of its sides.

3 It would decrease Israel’s land area by a negligible amount (about 1.5% of its total land area).

The Golan Heights are another story altogether. Captured from Syria in 1967, they were annexed to Israel about thirty years ago. Besides many Israeli settlers, the area is thinly inhabited by Druse. The Druse have shown no sign of sharing in Palestinian nationalism. The only thing we know about them is that you don’ hear of them often and they seldom speak up. Many Druse from the Mandate area live in Israel and have Israeli citizenship. Some make a career in the Israeli Defence Force, where, I hear, they are much appreciated. It’s likely that the formerly Syrian Druse living in the Golan under Israeli administration are as well off as their cousins in Syria. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were better off, or even much better off.

If I were a government of Israel, I would never give up the Golan Heights to any Syrian government displaying any hostility to Israel. First reason: It’s the headwaters for much of the water the Israeli economy needs. It’s a designated spot for blackmail. Second, it’s a good place from which to hold downtown Damas under threat of shelling. It’s the key to the long de-facto state of peace between Israel and ever vituperative Syria. And, by the way, the Israeli annexation of the Heights after their military conquest is as legitimate as the US holding on to California, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona.

Sex: Real Dopes

The arrest of international banker Dominique Strauss Kahn on several charges amounting to sexual assault has occasioned more discussion of sex on the airwaves than I have heard for many years. Some of the statements I hear are absurd or annoying. Others are downright dishonest. I am trying to sort out the most salient points.

Warning: If you are prudish, don’t read what follows. If you are under fifteen, read at the risk of undermining your healthy sexual development.

First things first: A couple of days ago, the Spanish minister of economy and finance, I think, was one of many female commentators committing a deeply immoral amalgam. One the one hand, she said, there is the presumption of innocence, on the other hand, the charges are so serious, so awful. It’s common thinking in academia among bureaucrats in charge of hunting down sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and in the end, sex differences.

Here is a reminder, girls: The seriousness of an alleged crime, whatever great, has no influence on innocence. Those are separate things completely. Get this:

The person who is innocent of multiple murder is exactly as innocent as the person who is innocent of the charge of spitting on the sidewalk.

This goes to the heart of western civilization, I believe. It speaks to our concept of personal responsibility, of a long and proud tradition that rejects anything but well demonstrated individual guilt. Anyone who undermines this view of the world is a totalitarian. That kind of people deserve no more pity than the young Hitler would have deserved had we known what he was about.

Second topic: I heard the public conversation degenerate in a few days to the point where there appeared to be a consensus that men’s, or some men’s, sexual needs were simply irresistible. Such a belief, of course results in considering all male human beings, or many, as potential rapists. This near-consensus is achieved passively through an unspoken alliance between two repulsive groups: man-hating feminists and male low-lives. If you think I am insulting feminists gratuitously, think again. About twenty years ago, a celebrated feminist author argued in her bestseller that every heterosexual act involving penetration was rape. I have forgotten her name as it deserved to be but you can find it on Google. As for male lowlife, you know what I mean: Just think of all the movie stars and other men in position of influence who seek treatment for a “sexual addiction.” And, of course, I am sure pseudo-medical treatment is preferable to the risk of being subjected to the sexual attentions of the prison Aryan Brotherhood.

In reality, the myth of the irrepressible male libido is mostly useful in high-school. It helps randy boys give themselves an excuse for doing what they, the girls, want to do but know they ought not do. Personally, I think it has no basis in fact.

First, let me concede that I have no direct grasp of the male libido except my own. It’s also true that I may have been under-served by Mother Nature in this department and never noticed it. I will never know. I do know that I have never in my life heard men or boys refer to their uncontrollable sexual urges, not even jokingly. I have never even read about it in books or elsewhere. That’s on the one hand.

On the other hand, I have personally known several women who were always eager to do it any time, any place, even in public places. (One preferred public places.) I also note that in the folklore of most of the world, women are more likely to chide men for insufficiency than for excessive zeal, much less uncontrollable passion.

Now, let’s look at the mechanics (so to speak) of the topic. It’s likely that sexual tension builds up in men with steadily accumulating testosterone (also the main hormone that makes women horny). Even that is not inexorable. In my ship in the French Navy, after several weeks at sea, the boys did not begin checking each other out. Rather, they went quiescent in the absence of appropriate heterosexual stimuli. At any rate, Mother Nature has obligingly provided the mechanism of the nocturnal emission to release the tension efficiently, if not neatly. Moreover, although Mother Nature probably has a bias in favor of coming rather than going, it’s pretty indifferent about how and where it happens. Hands with opposable thumbs were designed to serve many purposes, bedsheets are OK, a favorite toy is also fine, even Grandma’s stockings. In short, ejaculation inside a woman has not particular merit from the narrow mechanical standpoint I just adopted. It only seems superior because of what goes on in our heads (and possibly because of pheromones, I suspect).

I am trying to tell you here that if any man attacks a woman sexually, he is not driven by an uncontrollable urge. More likely, he is scum who likes to exercise power over those weaker than himself because of the particular video installed in his brain.

I said that some of the media commentary occasioned by the Strauss Khan affair is dishonest and annoys me. Some lazy journalists quickly discovered sex scandals and near scandals in his past. Those were acts of successful seduction that were objectionable on grounds separate from our objections to violence. National cultural differences played a part, I think. Frenchmen and French women are widely adulterous. The educated classes are especially prone to adultery. They pride themselves on being free from the obscurantist, more or less religiously grounded prejudices of the peasantry. In France as elsewhere, the smell of power on a man acts as an aphrodisiac on many women. Powerful Frenchmen, who are mostly free from moral restraints, get a lot of tail, I would affirm if I were vulgar. Their amorous pursuits trigger few or not comments in France. The same actions make them vulnerable under the American-originated norms of international bureaucracies such as IMF. What I am telling you is that Mr Strauss-Khan’s previous actions in no way make the allegations of rape against him more credible.

And the commentators who confuse seduction and rape are plain stupid. The two are the opposite of each other. Seducers are vain; they want to be loved (or laid) for themselves. They don’t want to liberate their uncontrollable sex urge; they want to trigger uncontrollable sex urges in women. Got it?

PS    I am sorry if I caused pain to some younger female readers by destroying their illusions about the powerful nature of the male libido. I promise you will survive this revelation.

French Politician Arrested: My Suspicions

Update: July 2nd 2011: The judge freed Strauss Khan today pretty much at the request of the prosecution. It seems the alleged victim is not credible. Personally, I think something happened in that hotel room that is still going to ruin Strauss Khan’s political career. It was not something deserving 25 years in the slammer though.

Update: 5/18/11:      I heard legal experts on two different channels, Fox News and CNN, assert that there was no extradition treaty between France and the US. I think they are in error. Here is a link to a treaty ratified in 2002: http://www.peinedemort.org/document.php?choix=201

The French daily Le Figaro asserted today that the alleged victim of Mr Strauss Khan was six-foot tall.

 Original editorial, posted May 16 2011.

I am a conservative anti-statist (libertarian). I have disliked the French Left with special intensity for years because of its intellectual hypocrisy. On my radio show, on this blog, and in the coffee shops, I spend a good deal of my time ridiculing conspiracy theories from the Right as much as from the Left. Until yesterday, you could have bet that I would never get caught suggesting a conspiracy to down a prominent member of the French Socialist Party. Yet, the arrest of Dominique Strauss Khan , the International Monetary Fund chief, and the allegations that prompted it, stink like a herring two weeks out of water, I think. Here are the sources of my skepticism and some commentary.

Early reports were that Mr SK was charged with what is technically defined as “sodomy.” In the State of New York, that means one of two things. The same early reports suggested that he tried to force a 32-year old chambermaid to perform oral sex on his person. There was no mention of a weapon of any sort being brandished. To be starkly realistic, trying to force one’s penis into the mouth of a woman who has any teeth at all sounds extraordinarily dangerous. Even if he succeeded, what would stop her from inflicting severe mutilation on him?

Mr SK is a sixty-two year-old portly bureaucrat. How he could force anything on a normally healthy thirty-two year old woman is difficult to imagine unless she were very frail. But the work of a chambermaid is physically demanding. Frail women can’t do it unless they are unusually strong. Same problem. In the absence of an exercise in brute strength, it’s difficult to imagine what means of pressure he could have exercised to have his way with her. The only means I can think of is money, of course.

I don’t see the spontaneous sexual stamina in a man that age that would be necessary to assault a strange woman he was not even expecting. When I try to picture the scene of the old man jumping out of his bathroom naked, with sex on his mind, I see a cheap movie of demonic possession. The fact that Mr SK has a history of ordinary sexual indiscretions makes the scene even less credible. Powerful French politicians commonly wander. The rules are clear: They are supposed to get what they want by talking willing women into it. At worst, they pay prostitutes. French sexual culture has no tolerance for sexual assault. It’s viewed as a confession of un-manliness. The assault described in the press would be starkly out of character.

The report that New York police tracked Mr SK to an airliner minutes before it was due to take off is not completely incredible but it’s a little hard to take. That is, absent tips from a well-informed source about Mr SK’s whereabouts.

Mr SK’s arrest has transformed radically the forthcoming French presidential race. That’s true irrespective of the ultimate disposition of the charges. Here is why: The French electorate is largely tired of Pres, Sarkozy. His administration did not fulfill its economic promises and his personal behavior embarrasses many French people. Yet, the Socialist Party had not rid itself of the failure to be credible it earned over many years of rule. Mr KS was a Godsend because he was going to run as a Socialist who no one believes is a socialist. He is a professor of economics with a good record as a minister in two Socialist governments. If I lived in France, I wouldn’t have much of an objection to SK as President (largely, because, in the French context, one could do worse). Incidentally, there is a third party in the race, it’s a right-wing party whose sole platform seems to be that its followers don’t like immigrants. It has the potential to make the main race more complicated. I don’t think it can win the presidency.

Both President Sarkozy, and pallid rivals of Mr SK within the Socialist Party stand to gain ground by his elimination.

The alleged victim is from Guinea, the Wall Street Journal reports. Guinea is a former French colony. Guineans go to school in French. France never severed past colonial ties with its former colonies in Black Africa. Heads of services and retired heads of services in the French state bureaucratic class by the hundreds can generate thousands of small-time African agents. Among other things, the widespread desire of young Africans to live in France legally provides a myriad means of pressure on their relatives.

So, what am I suggesting?I don’t know exactly; it’s too early to tell. This story just does not hang together. You read it here first.

Osama, Obama: He is not really lying

The fact that the administration ‘s story about the death of Bin Laden keeps changing does not mean that it’s hiding anything. Liberals and progressives can’t think straight. That’s why they don’t get the simplest messages such as : “Don’t spend more than you have,” and “Don’t wait for the guy who keeps shouting he hates you to hit you, hit him first.”

Incidentally, the difference between liberals and progressives is that the former, by and large, would like what they affirm to be the truth. The latter don’t care because their end justifies the means. I asked one of my progressive Facebook “friends” last week whether he thought that 9/11 was an inside job. It’s a straight question. It should allow for a straight answer. He responded with a torrent of sentences, some about things I did not no know anything about. At the end, there was no answer to my question. His name is John Wolfe. Look him up for a sample of dissembling. I don’t mind give him the publicity for educational purposes.

LeftThought is so twisted, left-wingers often cannot espouse the logical consequences of their own assertions. Here is a current one. In World War Two, we killed about 500,00 uniformed Japanese soldiers to destroy the hideous hyena that was militaristic Japan. None of those soldiers received legal counsel, none had a fair trial. Most were conscripts. Many had not killed anyone. Mostly, their mistake is that they did not offer to surrender. Yet, when one man brags on the world media about killing thousands of Americans and thousands of others (many of them fellow-Muslims), when he proclaims loud and clear his intention to kill more, when he explicitly targets civilians and incites others to do the same, when he does all this under cover of darkness, out of uniform, outside the boundaries of a properly constituted army, a part of the American Left wants to extend him constitutional guarantees devised to protect the innocent.

When you point out the mental confusion inherent in such a stance, they never hold their ground. Quickly, they change the subject to the many crimes of America in general and of the Bush administration in particular. (Of course, current events in the broader Middle-East demonstrate with blinding clarity that G. W. Bush was right all along.) My main point here is that the problem we are facing with a big segment of the American Left is not this or that policy they favor but a cultural problem. They prize neither logic nor facts. Their overall understanding of the world is a mental health pathology.

Note that I have not said a thing about Democrats in general. The Democratic Party is comprised of several segments. These include most African-Americans, who would vote Democrat if Democratic Party leaders were lynching them. (Lest you think I am being gratuitously outrageous here, remember that they used to do exactly that.) Then, there are genetic Democrats, people who vote for the party because their grandfathers did. (Let’s be honest, there are genetic Republicans too.) Then, there are the many union rank-and-file who are simply voting their bread and butter. Many of them are normal on every other issue. They just have a blind spot when bread comes up, and another one for butter. Many are patriots nevertheless. Finally, there is the hard, collectivist left-wing that has been trying to capture the Democratic Party for forty years. That’s Obama’s Left. Those are his friends and his entourage. They are the bearers of the perverse culture I alluded to above. Our universities overflow with them (although most college professors are only knee-jerk liberals.)

I am perplexed by some of the commentaries I hear in the media about Bin Laden’s untimely demise. Even some conservative pundits use the word “assassination.”  Makes it sound nasty and it’s false. It was the killing of an enemy during an on-going war. Bin Laden never sued for peace; he had ten thousand opportunities to surrender. He might even have been able to negotiate his surrender. His choice! Wrong choice, or right choice, depending on what you want from life. Remember that the same thing happened to 500,000 Japanese soldiers. What’s the underlying thinking, I wonder. If you are famous, you shouldn’t just get killed?

I also keep hearing left-wing commentators allude darkly to the Geneva Conventions. I haven’t looked. I wonder if they say anything about someone not in a regularly constituted army acting on behalf of a state killing civilians on purpose while out of uniform. I don’t need to look. I am ready to bet that if there is any mention of such scum, the Conventions say: not covered.

Personally, I have only two comments. As I have said before, disposing of the body was a big mistake. They should have frozen it to answer ulterior questions. The White House is so silly, it probably really believed it showed Muslims respect by dumping it into the sea. In fact, Muslims religious authorities with no dog in that fight immediately commented that so-called “burial at sea” was completely disrespectful for Muslims who have died either on land or close to land. Some people manage to have their cake and eat it too. President Obama manages to have his soup of bitter herbs and to eat it to. All the same. He gave the order to pull the trigger. Not many on my side would have bet before-hand that he would do it. Give credit….

My second comment is that the SEALS who conducted the operation are even more disciplined than they are rumored to be. Me, I would not have resisted the temptation to shoot him in both knees and then, to gut-shoot him. It’s not fair how easily and how quickly Osama went.

Now, a sad commentary about the aftermath of the announcement of Bin Laden going on to his reward. I have written several times on this blog and I have said several times on my show that I have known Muslims all my life and that I have hardly ever met one I did not like. (My radio show “Facts Matter” is on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080 AM. It’s on every Sunday from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line.) These cordial relations are not enough to make me close my eyes or my ears. As always, I pay attention to what did not happen. All the heads of state and heads of government of Muslim nations made all the right noises after the death notice. However, my attentive monitoring of the media did not show me any popular celebration in the same countries, not one. Remember that Bin Laden and those he inspired have murdered many more Muslims than Americans non-Muslims. His being rub off the surface of the earth should be enough of a cause for celebration among Muslims. That it’s not requires an explanation

It seems to me inescapable that this absence reveals the following moral calculus among many Muslims, I think, perhaps among most Muslims: Killing Americans is a good thing. Killing Muslims is kind of acceptable if the killer killed enough Americans. Nobody is perfect! I hope I am wrong. I hope someone will show me in logical terms the absurdity of this analysis.

There is a good piece relevant to this discussion in the May 7/8 Wall Street Journal (p. c2) by Irshad Manji. Its title speaks for itself:  “Islam Needs Reformers,  Not Moderates.”

I don’t see why American Muslims who hate Islamist terrorism haven’t yet formed something like a league of  “Muslims Against Terrorism.” It would help dissipate the confusion of people like me if I am, in fact, confused.

I also keep hearing ad nauseum that the killing of Bin Laden is not going to stop terrorism. It gets repeated to the point that it sounds almost futile to have accomplished this long-sought goal. That’s stupid. Al Qaida is a classical charismatic movement. Its leader is an essential component even if he had become only a symbolic figure. The fact is that there have been Islamic fundamentalists for one hundred years. They did not get their act together to mass-murder infidels until the regretted Osama showed them the way.

One more thing: The media are irresponsible in their lack of fact- checking. They don’t even look at their own images. Bin Laden was not living in a “mansion.” He was living in a large, ugly concrete house such as there are thousands of in that part of the world, including India. And it wasn’t worth a million dollars. You could buy its neighbor for $100,000. It’s a small thing but it means that powerful news networks are not paying attention.

PS   Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. It’s official in most California schools, I believe. No one with whom I crossed paths in the two days preceding could tell me what the celebration celebrated. Anglos couldn’t, Mexican-Americans couldn’t, and Mexicans couldn’t. The latter were able to inform me of what it wasn’t, however: not Mexican Independence Day. I am the only one I know who knows, apparently. Read up on it. It’s a strange story.

Osama and Obama

I have already congratulated the president and the head of the CIA for the execution of Osama Bin Laden while he was resisting arrest ( Bye, Osama). Let me add that I am glad he chose the dangerous military method he chose. It was calculated to minimize collateral damage. It did not succeed completely. A woman, who may have been one of Obama’s wives, died serving as a human shield for one of his brave warriors. Given the esteem in which fundamentalist Muslims hold women’s lives, I am not surprised. Women caught in such circumstances are innocent by definition.

Update May 6th: It appears now the woman was not killed but wounded. (The story from the administration keeps changing.) The assertion that she was used a shield has not changed though. There is a possibility she is one of Obama’s wives. Nice all-around guy.

Now, I am puzzled again. “Buried at sea” ? Why would anyone do anything that stupid? One, the world, including me, wanted proof of his death beyond what the President and a handful of agents can affirm. A good picture worked for Che Guevara, it worked for that Columbian drug dealer, what was his name again? If the administration was too sensitive to incur the disapproval that met George W. Bush when he exhibited Saddam’s sons’ cadavers, he still shouldn’t have done it. That’s second: Bin Laden has family, a large family, in fact, most of whom are innocent. The president could have looked magnanimous by allowing a funeral. Funerals are for the living anyway; the dead don’t care. The concern voiced in some government circles that his grave would become a shrine is stupid. It shows again the administration’s parochial ignorance. Islam strictly forbids any cult of the dead including of reputed “saints.” While the interdiction is often violated in some Muslim lands, in North Africa, for example, fundamentalist Muslims are very unlikely to ignore it.

One more time, President Obama manages to sound fishy. I resist and usually combat views of the world based on wild conspirational ideas. The President’s own actions make the task difficult. One hundred years from now, there will be pseudo-scholars arguing about whether Obama was really killed on on May 1^st or 2^nd 2010. Someone will look for him in Argentina thirty years from now and beyond.

Now, I need to set the record straight again because I gather from what I hear on talk radio that many people have a bad memory. NATO invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to overthrow the Taliban religious dictatorial regime for refusing to turn over the mass terrorist Obama Bin Laden. (That the Taliban were in the habit of executing women on soccer stadiums at intermission only made the mission more attractive.) The fact that Obama finally met his fate does not mean that all his forgiven. We have to indicate strongly to everyone in the world that if you help those who kill Americans, there is a fair chance you will be in trouble for a long time to come. The fact that we are still failing to follow this sound policy with respect to the murderers in Syria, for example, does not make it any the less precious: “If you fuck with us, you should worry; you will never sleep soundly again.” The additional fact that some of our NATO allies are getting weak-kneed makes it even more imperative that we stick to this doctrine.

I don’t know what president Obama will do in this connection, the current military action in Afghanistan. It’s hard to tell because, in security matters, he rarely does what he says he will do, fortunately. Incidentally, if I were a left-winger of the peacenik persuasion, I would be livid at the man I elected: The president instituted a policy of massive assassination of suspected enemies, including in a country with which we are not at war. This policy caused the death of many innocent by-standers, there is no doubt of that. Yesterday, he executed a suspect without trial after locating him on the basis of information extracted from untried detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison established deliberately to avoid the judicial safeguards of the American legal system. Of course, it’s more than likely that the information was extracted with the help of water-boarding or other forms of “torture.” It’s even possible that the information providers spent some thought-provoking time under conditions of foreign rendition. The other possibility is that Khalid Sheik Mohamed and other high-placed Al Quaida members sang like two-bit pimps or car-thieves at a Bronx police station.

Those who deplore in any way the head killer’s execution are not our friends. They don’t mind the deliberate assassination of American civilians. They are not our friends, wherever they are, including right in this country.

The rotten, failed state of Pakistan, where most people hate America, has much egg on its face, of course. How could no one in government know? We are told we can’t make do without them. At some point, when a friend is eating your liver, you have to reconsider the relationship, whatever the cost. I am also wondering what we owe that opportunist cheat we set in power, President Karzai of Afghanistan.I don’t know why we have to squander our energies on state building among people who don’t want a state. It seems to me it would be easier to kill the Taliban and their local hosts. Hang for a lamb, hang for a sheep! They always have the option to surrender, after all. The way we treat our enemies, they will probably end up in Bermuda.

Bye, Osama

Osama bought the farm! It’s like bedding your old girlfriend for the first time at the tenth reunion: It’s sweet but it’s not what it could have been then!

And there goes the election, I am afraid. Fact is that it seems to be a Leon Panetta operation. President Obama chose him to head the CIA and allowed him to do his job. I had harsh words for Panetta, my near- neighbor, when he was appointed. I was at least partly wrong. Panetta also let the professionals in the CIA do their job. It wasn’t always obvious he would. If the first report is correct, there is additional aesthetic satisfaction in the fact the the terrorist poster-boy was killed in a firefight, more or less western-style. His death via a bomb would have provided far less satisfaction. Of course, don’t expect the worldwide violent jihad to stop. It will get worse before it gets better, I think.

There are commentaries in Al Jazeera in English protesting Bin Laden being buried at sea. I have not heard this anywhere else on English-language of French language media. It would be interesting and disappointing if it were true. (I am not saying it is.) We don’t need another presidentially engineered mystery.

A White President (with fewer mistakes, slightly revised)

The president, by his own actions, managed to get me interested in the birth issue. I wasn’t paying much attention until recently, for several reasons. First, I did not want to know the truth, if any, because of who is in his line of succession. Second, conservatives don’t need that kind of technical victory. We need a clear victory at the polls, one that carries a mandate. A demonstration of a violation of an fairly antiquated part of the Constitution would not carry a mandate. I think it’s antiquated because not many would object much to an amendment allowing a naturalized citizen to become president. Third, I thought, from the campaign onward, that President Obama was an impostor irrespective of the location of his birth. (More on this below.)

The president triggered my interest, of course, by releasing his “long” birth certificate. I was fascinated by the fact that he took this simple action two years late, and then, only when a rich and publicity-savvy man was nipping at his heels. What millions of rank-and-file doubters failed to do, a billionaire with a bouffant hairdo accomplished. How could I fail to become interested? Second, soon after the release of the document, technical analyses appeared on the Internet claiming to demonstrate that it was a fake. The demo I saw on YouTube today, for example, did not allege a subtle, accomplished forgery but a frankly artless fraud. I find it convincing but of course, the demonstration itself could be a forgery. I don’t have the knowledge to judge. I asked a friend of mine who is a good photographer, and a practical Photoshopper and, I suspect, a liberal. He did not have a clear-cut opinion.

Attempts to demonize the president have no traction. He is not the Devil, or even a minor demon, and he is not possessed by any demon. His policies and the lack thereof demonstrate common ignorance. I am familiar with this kind of ignorance because I was a university teacher for thirty years. There are the conventionally good students, 20% of the class if you are lucky. Those more or less do their assignments. Then you have the usually hopeless but sometimes improvisationally brilliant backbenchers. In between there are many students, today, probably a majority, who pretend to be getting an education. They thrive in most universities, even the pricey ones.  It’s been so for along time, certainly since the eighties. Such students will read the first chapter of the book, half of the second chapter and then, most of the last chapter right before the final exam. They come to class sometimes and borrow notes from their friends at other times. They end up less than completely ignorant of the subject matter. I would tell them to their faces, “Some of you are familiar with the tune but you don’t know the lyrics.” They would laugh knowingly and good-naturedly. “Busted but no big deal, right teach?”

Barack Obama is this familiar kind of impostor. He pretends to be President as those kids pretend to be students, with an intellectual baggage that is more than nothing but not enough to pass the exam without much guesswork. And that’s enough to explain his policies and to explain his absence of policies.

I say Barack Obama is an impostor for several reasons. The first reason concerns his African-ness. During the campaign, nearly all liberals, I would guess most centrists, and even quite a few conservatives became tickled like little girls at the prospect of an African-American President. Chris Mathew of MSNBC confessed on-air he had a tingle run down his leg a the thought. Two reasons for this. First, a large number of liberals experience identity envy. They find themselves boring. They would like to be something more interesting. Black, if possible, “part-Indian, “ anything, even “of French heritage” if need be. (I just had a farcical exchange on some else’s Facebook with a stranger who claimed such “French heritage.”) Second, whites in this country have a moral inheritance of shame regarding slavery, and later segregation, they have never dealt with completely. I argue about this with conservatives frequently. One of my friend affirms that hundreds of thousands of white Civil War dead should be enough. I don’t think so. It stopped the problem; it did not repair its consequences. Another essay, some day.

At any rate, there was the illusion that with an African-American in the White House, all would be forgiven, that the burden of collective guilt would vanish. The illusion was so strong that hardly anyone noticed when civil rights leaders and self-appointed African-American spokesmen like the talented extortionist Jessee Jackson muttered under their breath that Obama had no “slave blood” running in his veins. The comment should not be irrelevant for conservatives. We tend to believe in the primacy of the individual. When individuals are actively prevented from being individuals for a couple of centuries, we should not be surprised if the damage lasts in their descendants for more than a century. Recently, I heard someone, a conservative, compare his Irish immigrant ancestors’ plight to that of Africans brought here in chains. That’s stupid, of course, unless you choose not to think about it. African slaves were not immigrants.

Conservatives also typically think that good things -and therefore- bad things – come from families. If a group of people is prevented from forming normal families for several generations, we should not be surprised to find their current families defective. This, with all the devastating behavioral consequences conservative thinking itself would predict. That most African-Americans with slave ancestors are able to form normal families is what needs to be explained. It’s a serious project for the social sciences that has hardly been touched so far because those who should undertake it are wallowing in useless guilt (when they are not pretending to be somewhat black  themselves, or something else almost as interesting. Remember ex-Professor Ward Churchill?)

So, Barack Hussein Obama has no American slave blood in him and therefore, he could never have been a redeemer, even if he had tried. Instead, he is one of about half of Americans with African ancestors who are voluntary immigrants to this country or their descendants, same as General (ret.) Colin Powell, for example. Far from being a carrier of America’s real historical sins, Obama is a living testimony to how desirable, generous, and easy this society is. The miracle is not: “ I, a descendant of slaves could become President.” That’s an untested proposition. It’s that the son of a white hippie who consorted sexually with a drunken foreign exchange student could grow up with enough support to become a successful politician. That’s America’s greatness, worth celebrating.

Yet, Obama the man almost pulled off the imposture. Liberals still pretend not to notice that he is not an African-American, just an American of meaninglessly half-African parentage. Or else, they make themselves believe that the moral burden of American society is made up by half of the centuries of the procession of atrocities that was slavery plus one hundred years of legally enforced segregation, on the one hand, and by of half contemporary racism, on the other hand. That is laughable, of course. What anti-black racism, Barack Obama may have encountered growing up in white-minority Hawaii and in Indonesia, and even later at Harvard was more than compensated by lavish affirmative action programs. In fact, obviously based only on what I know of his life, if I had to bet, I would bet that Barack encountered not a single instance of anti-black racism. Instead, he grew up in a racially neutral world and in a world where institutional anti-racism reigned unchallenged. And that’s one of his problems, an acute personal problem for Barack, the man.

More surprising than the president’s discretion about his birth is the shroud around his undergraduate grades. As I never tire of saying: Who cares what grades he earned or did not earn, when he was twenty? At worst, he was a low-C student. That would have put him in the company of Georges W. Bush and of John Kerry, the Senator, both also graduates of Ivy League schools. It might even earn him the affection of the many former mediocre students among centrists, and even among conservatives: Well, that guy Obama is no elitist jerk. He is one of us. He had fun in college!

What Barack Obama’s grades would show if he ever unlocked them is that he was accepted at Harvard Law School as a pure affirmative action project, no ifs and buts. He was not rescued as an almost-OK applicant who needed a push of twenty or thirty qualifying points like so many other members of minorities. Incidentally, this conservative does not find the practice especially horrible because the admission process in any school of any university is so hap-hazard anyway. It’s not strictly merit-based, as many believe, because those who decide on such things don’t know how to put together a merit system. And yes, it’s possible that some unfamiliarity transpiring from the pages of minority applications trigger an unconscious negative bias in the decision makers that extra points make up for. Those who think the admission system of a particular school can be fair are just under-informed. The best that can be said is that admissions in American institutions of higher learning, considered together, give smart, hard-working people a fair chance. End of digression.

Barack Hussein Obama was admitted to Harvard Law School because of a brace of non-academic qualifications he had to offer. He was “well spoken and without a trace of Negro dialect” as his own Vice-President once famously declared. He was obviously not stupid, whatever his grades. He looked good. (He still does.) Anyone who does not think academics, and worse, academic bureaucrats, are not so frivolous as to take physical appearance under consideration has never eaves-dropped on an ordinary faculty-club conversation, by the way. He must have been interviewed and found to have good manners. (Thanks to his white, bank vice-president grandmother.) Even his exotic second name, “Hussein,” contributed a slight frisson to terminally bored admission officers. So here, was a catch: A handsome young man “of color” w ho could help fill the unspoken quota without the all-too-common disagreeable side-effects of admitting genuine African-Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Slave blood often does not provide good manners.)

Everyone could have kept a discreet silence about what was this tiny non-event for the eighties, the admission to the prestigious Harvard Law School of one Barack Hussein Obama with bad grades. After all, he kept his end of the bargain. He was admitted to practice before the Illinois Supreme Court not long after graduation. (An old friend of mine who is a lawyer and a left-liberal assures me that’s the same as “passing” the bar exam. I take his word for it.) I have little to say about Mr  Obama’s high positions in the student-run Harvard Law Review. Those were elective positions requiring no special talent and where any presentable student with a black face would have made a good candidate. (See above.) The fact is that he published not a single article under his own pen, not even with fellow-students as co-authors, as is the practice.

President Barack Obama’s grades are under lock and key because he is a special kind of impostor. He does not want to end his career as a successful black man helped by silly affirmative action as there are so many (many of whom, like general Powell, are publicly appreciative of the help they received). Mr Obama cannot admit to having been helped to overcome his garden-variety bad grades as an undergraduate through racial preference because he wants to be an upper-class white.

This speculation makes his other concealment, the one that was in the news recently, fall into place. He was indeed born in Hawaii but there is some small thing in his long birth certificate, perhaps a name, perhaps a single initial, perhaps his date of birth, that would help a curious researcher follow the red thread of affirmative action throughout his young life. And then, he couldn’t look in the eye his neighbors in the towns where his family goes on vacation to establish his place as a successful white man: Martha’s Vineyard, Marbella, etc.

If you think about it, this piece probably makes more sense than anything you have heard on the subject. If I say so myself!

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A White President

The president, by his own actions, managed to get me interested in the birth issue. I wasn’t paying much attention until recently, for several reasons. First, I did not want to know the truth, if any, because of who is in his line of succession. Second, conservatives don’t need that kind of technical victory. We need a clear victory at the polls, one that carries a mandate. A demonstration of a violation of an fairly antiquated part of the Constitution would not carry a mandate. I think it’s antiquated because not many would object much to an amendment allowing a naturalized citizen to become president. Third, I thought, from the campaign onward, that President Obama was an impostor irrespective of the location of his birth. (More on this below.)

The president triggered my interest, of course, by releasing his “long” birth certificate. I was fascinated by the fact that he took this simple action two years late, and then, only when a rich and publicity-savvy man was nipping at his heels. What millions of rank-and-file doubters failed to do, a billionaire with a bouffant hairdo accomplished. How could I fail to become interested? Second, soon after the release of the document, technical analyses appeared on the Internet claiming to demonstrate that it was a fake. The demo I saw on YouTube today, for example, did not allege a subtle, accomplished forgery but a frankly artless fraud. I find it convincing but of course, the demonstration itself could be a forgery. I don’t have the knowledge to judge. I asked a friend of mine who is a good photographer, and a practical Photoshopper and, I suspect, a liberal. He did not have a clear-cut opinion.

Attempts to demonize the president have no traction. He is not the Devil, or even a minor demon, and he is not possessed by any demon. His policies and the lack thereof demonstrate common ignorance. I am familiar with this kind of ignorance because I was a university teacher for thirty years. There are the conventionally good students, 20% of the class if you are lucky. Those more or less do their assignments. Then you have the usually hopeless but sometimes improvisationally brilliant backbenchers. In between there are many students, today, probably a majority, who pretend to be getting an education. They thrive in most universities, even the pricey ones.  It’s been so for along time, certainly since the eighties. Such students will read the first chapter of the book, half of the second chapter and then, most of the last chapter right before the final exam. They come to class sometimes and borrow notes from their friends at other times. They end up less than completely ignorant of the subject matter. I would tell them to their faces, “Some of you are familiar with the tune but you don’t know the lyrics.” They would laugh knowingly and good-naturedly. “Busted but no big deal, right teach?”

Barack Obama is this familiar kind of impostor. He pretends to be President as those kids pretend to be students, with an intellectual baggage that is more than nothing but not enough to pass the exam without much guesswork. And that’s enough to explain his policies and to explain his absence of policies.

I say Barack Obama is an impostor for several reasons. The first reason concerns his African-ness. During the campaign, nearly all liberals, I would guess most centrists, and even quite a few conservatives became tickled like little girls at the prospect of an African-American President. Chris Mathew of MSNBC confessed on-air he had a tingle run down his leg a the thought. Two reasons for this. First, a large number of liberals experience identity envy. They find themselves boring. They would like to be something more interesting. Black, if possible, “part-Indian, “ anything, even “of French heritage” if need be. (I just had a farcical exchange on some else’s Facebook with a stranger who claimed such “French heritage.”) Second, whites in this country have a moral inheritance of shame regarding slavery, and later segregation, they have never dealt with completely. I argue about this with conservatives frequently. One of my friend affirms that hundreds of thousands of white Civil War dead should be enough. I don’t think so. It stopped the problem; it did not repair its consequences. Another essay, some day.

At any rate, there was the illusion that with an African-American in the White House, all would be forgiven, that the burden of collective guilt would vanish. The illusion was so strong that hardly anyone noticed when civil rights leaders and self-appointed African-American spokesmen like the talented extortionist Jessee Jackson muttered under their breath that Obama had no “slave blood” running in his veins. The comment should not be irrelevant for conservatives. We tend to believe in the primacy of the individual. When individuals are actively prevented from being individuals for a couple of centuries, we should not be surprised if the damage lasts in their descendants for more than a century. Recently, I heard someone, a conservative, compare his Irish immigrant ancestors’ plight to that of Africans brought here in chains. That’s stupid, of course, unless you choose not to think about it. African slaves were not immigrants.

Conservatives also typically think that good things -and therefore- bad things – come from families. If a group of people is prevented from forming normal families for several generations, we should not be surprised to find their current families defective. This, with all the devastating behavioral consequences conservative thinking itself would predict. That most African-Americans with slave ancestors are able to form normal families is what needs to be explained. It’s a serious project for the social sciences that has hardly been touched so far because those who should undertake it are wallowing in useless guilt (when they are not pretending to be somewhat black  themselves, or something else almost as interesting. Remember ex-Professor Ward Churchill?)

So, Barack Hussein Obama has no American slave blood in him and therefore, he could never have been a redeemer, even if he had tried. Instead, he is one of about half of Americans with African ancestors who are voluntary immigrants to this country or their descendants, same as General (ret.) Colin Powell, for example. Far from being a carrier of America’s real historical sins, Obama is a living testimony to how desirable, generous, and easy this society is. The miracle is not: “ I, a descendant of slaves could become President.” That’s an untested proposition. It’s that the son of a white hippie who consorted sexually with a drunken foreign exchange student could grow up with enough support to become a successful politician. That’s America’s greatness, worth celebrating.

Yet, Obama the man almost pulled off the imposture. Liberals still pretend not to notice that he is not an African-American, just an American of meaninglessly half-African parentage. Or else, they make themselves believe that the moral burden of American society is made up by half of the centuries of the procession of atrocities that was slavery plus one hundred years of legally enforced segregation, on the one hand, and by of half contemporary racism, on the other hand. That is laughable, of course. What anti-black racism, Barack Obama may have encountered growing up in white-minority Hawaii and in Indonesia, and even later at Harvard was more than compensated by lavish affirmative action programs. In fact, obviously based only on what I know of his life, if I had to bet, I would bet that Barack encountered not a single instance of anti-black racism. Instead, he grew up in a racially neutral world and in a world where institutional anti-racism reigned unchallenged. And that’s one of his problems, an acute personal problem for Barack, the man.

More surprising than the president’s discretion about his birth is the shroud around his undergraduate grades. As I never tire of saying: Who cares what grades he earned or did not earn, when he was twenty? At worst, he was a low-C student. That would have put him in the company of Georges W. Bush and of John Kerry, the Senator, both also graduates of Ivy League schools. It might even earn him the affection of the many former mediocre students among centrists, and even among conservatives: Well, that guy Obama is no elitist jerk. He is one of us. He had fun in college!

What Barack Obama’s grades would show if he ever unlocked them is that he was accepted at Harvard Law School as a pure affirmative action project, no ifs and buts. He was not rescued as an almost-OK applicant who needed a push of twenty or thirty qualifying points like so many other members of minorities. Incidentally, this conservative does not find the practice especially horrible because the admission process in any school of any university is so hap-hazard anyway. It’s not strictly merit-based, as many believe, because those who decide on such things don’t know how to put together a merit system. And yes, it’s possible that some unfamiliarity transpiring from the pages of minority applications trigger an unconscious negative bias in the decision makers that extra points make up for. Those who think the admission system of a particular school can be fair are just under-informed. The best that can be said is that admissions in American institutions of higher learning, considered together, give smart, hard-working people a fair chance. End of digression.

Barack Hussein Obama was admitted to Harvard Law School because of a brace of non-academic qualifications he had to offer. He was “well spoken and without a trace of Negro dialect” as his own Vice-President once famously declared. He was obviously not stupid, whatever his grades. He looked good. (He still does.) Anyone who think academics, and worse, academic bureaucrats, are not so frivolous as to take physical appearance under consideration has never eaves-dropped on an ordinary faculty-club conversation, by the way. He must have been interviewed and found to have good manners. (Thanks to his white, bank vice-president grandmother.) Even his exotic second name, “Hussein,” contributed a slight frisson to terminally bored admission officers. So here, was a catch: A handsome young man “of color” w ho could help fill the unspoken quota without the all-too-common disagreeable side-effects of admitting genuine African-Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds. (Slave blood often does not provide good manners.)

Everyone could have kept a discreet silence about what was this tiny non-event for the eighties, the admission to the prestigious Harvard Law School of one Barack Hussein Obama with bad grades. After all, he kept his end of the bargain. He was admitted to practice before the Illinois Supreme Court not long after graduation. (An old friend of mine who is a lawyer and a left-liberal assures me that’s the same as “passing” the bar exam. I take his word for it.) I have little to say about Mr  Obama’s high positions in the student-run Harvard Law Review. Those were elective positions requiring no special talent and where any presentable student with a black face would have made a good candidate. (See above.) The fact is that he published not a single article under his own pen, not even with fellow-students as co-authors, as is the practice.

President Barack Obama’s grades are under lock and key because he is a special kind of impostor. He does not want to end his career as a successful black man helped by silly affirmative action as there are so many (many of whom, like general Powell, are publicly appreciative of the help they received). Mr Obama cannot admit to having been helped to overcome his garden-variety bad grades as an undergraduate through racial preference because he wants to be an upper-class white.

This speculation makes his other concealment, the one that was in the news recently, fall into place. He was indeed born in Hawaii but there is some small thing in his long birth certificate, perhaps a name, perhaps a single initial, perhaps his date of birth, that would help a curious researcher follow the red thread of affirmative action throughout his young life. And then, he couldn’t look in the eye his neighbors in the towns where his family goes on vacation to establish his place as a successful white man: Martha’s Vineyard, Marbella, etc.

If you think about it, this piece probably makes more sense than anything you have heard on the subject. If I say so myself!