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September 29, 2006
Karen is Royalty
On Shabbos evenings Karen often catches me up on important stories that I'm just too lazy to read by myself.
Last Friday night I was totally caught up in Jetta Carleton's brilliant one and only novel, The Moonflower Vine, one of the finest novels I have ever read, when Karen drew my attention to a truly momentous story in The Jewish Press.
"Jewish Descendants of King David to Meet in Jerusalem. Geneologists say that there are about 100 Jewish family names whose bearers are likely to be Jewish descendants of King David.
"Well over 1,000 Jews of royal descent, will participate in a reunion in Jerusalem next spring, May 28-30, 2007. This will also mark the official inauguration of the worlwide Davidic Dynasty Geneology Center and Museum in the Old City of Jerusalem."
For more information and if you want to put a "von" before your Jewish name, click here.
I have to admit, I am less than overwhelmed by this whacky story. I want to get back to my novel about three unmarried sisters in Southern Missouri during the 1920's. It's a bit like Pride and Prejudice--but in the American grain. This is a great American novel and I am completely transported to another time, another place, an utterly different mentality.
Then Karen starts reading the family names that are connected to the Davidic dynasty: The list seems to include every Jewish name in existence--except, naturally, mine: Adler. Fishel. Meisels. Posner. Singer. Twersky...
Singer?
"I am royalty, I am royalty." Karen giggles.
"Listen, do I call you M'Lady from now on or what?"
"Don't feel bad, Robert, you've obviously got seniority, your name is much older. Avrech, you are probably descended from Joseph."
Right. There you go. As Joseph was carried through Egypt, the Bible tells (Genesis, Mikeitz 41, 43) us: He [Pharaoh] also had him [Yosef] ride in his second royal chariot and they proclaimed before him: Avrech! Thus, he appointed him over all the land of Egypt.
Rashi, the great medieval commentator tells us that Avrech is a composite of two words: Av, father, to rach, which means tender in years. Thus, a father in wisdom but tender in years.
I continue reading "The Moonflower Vine." Jetta Carleton's prose is so precise, so dense that I can practically read the minds of the three sisters. Like Harper Lee, Carleton wrote only one book that is a masterpiece, but I'm afraid that no one has ever heard of "The Moonflower Vine."
Abruptly, Karen slaps her hand against the couch.
WHAP!
"What's wrong?" I ask, startled.
"Hey," Karen says cracking up, "I'm a JAP*."
Princess Karen and I wish all our Seraphic Friends a lovely and meaningful Shabbos and a G'mar Tov.
*Jewish American Princess
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:07 PM | Comments (18)
Democrats for Throat-Slitters
Yesterday, a majority of Senate Democrats voted against a measure on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects.
Only twelve Democrats crossed party lines to vote for the bill.
The position of the Democrats is clear. They see the war on terror as a conventional law enforcement matter, to be handled by the civil courts, with habeus corpus extended to non-citizens, to men who do not wear uniforms, men who do not wear dog-tags, men who do not have military serial numbers, men who are sworn to slaughter Jews and Christians, men who decapitate and slit the throats of their kidnapped victims.
The Republicans see the war on terror as a long struggle that will call for sacrifice and yes, ruthlessness.
The Democrats tell us that we are less safe since 9-11, yet the mainland has not been attacked in these five years so one can dismiss their charges as opportunistic political hyperbole.
Terrorism is here to stay, and like any evil it can only be stamped out when it is named, confronted and fought with unrelenting resolve.
The Republicans are by no means perfect. But at least they are willing to fight. Republicans understand that evil exists.
Democrats do not believe in evil, they believe in "seeking the root causes of terrorism," and inevitably the root cause, for the majority of Democrats, is American foreign policy.
Such a party cannot be trusted with national security.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)
Babiy Yar
"Yesterday in Kiev there was a commemoration at Babiy Yar, the infamous gorge in which tens of thousands of Ukraine’s Jews were murdered by the invading German army in 1941. (Later on in the occupation, Babi Yar was also used to massacre gypsies, other Ukrainians and Russian prisoners of war.) President Viktor Yuschenko and the presidents of Israel and Croatia all gathered for an event attended by thousands of Ukrainians. A quick taxi ride turned into an hour-long odyssey as traffic all over the city was at a standstill for hours as the scale of the commemoration was so huge."
To read the rest of this story, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:51 AM | Comments (2)
Breeding More Terrorists
The Democrats, cherry-picking form the NIE report, leaked by the ever reliably seditious NY Times, tell us over and over again that our presence in Iraq is creating more jihadists. I suppose the Democrats are saying that if we had not liberated Iraq from the Stalinist regime of Saddam Hussein, there would be far less jihadists.
This after 9-11.
But let's just say that there are more jihadists now. And that they are pouring into Iraq. Well, that's good. We've got them in one corner of the world where we can fight and annihilate them--and they are not in, say New York, Los Angeles, or Kansas.
But on a deeper lever, let me speak to this notion of us "creating terrorists."
This is a disgusting and sick ethical inversion. And it's the reason I despise most Liberals as moral fools.
By this very logic one would have to say that the existence of Israel has spawned the modern age of Arab terrorism, and all we have to do is abandon Israel, let genocide run its course, and then we will all sing Kumbaya with our peace loving jihadist brothers and sisters.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:08 AM | Comments (6)
September 28, 2006
Back to the Past
A wonderful site to explore: When These Streets Heard Yiddish.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:24 PM | Comments (4)
No Excuses for Terror
This You Tube Documentary is brought to you by British leftists who can no longer stand idly by and remain silent as their nihilistic comrades align themselves with the genocidal anti-Jewish jihadists.
Better do it fast. The last time this British journalist, David Aaronovitch, posted a video piece, You Tube removed it within several hours.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, Jeremiah.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:41 AM | Comments (9)
September 27, 2006
Free To Be A Muslim Jew-Killer
Ah, Islam, the religion that keeps on giving -- more and more Jew-hatred to the world.
For yet another example of the religion of peace grinnning and calling for the "beautiful murder" of Jews, please click here.
I Have a Dream
Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel, but that doesn't mean that this barbarian can't express his "I Have a Dream" vision.
Here in America too many sit passively and listen to groups like CAIR as they defend Jihadists , as they accuse us of being intolerant of Islam. Just look at this video as CAIR tramples on free speech, as CAIR brings America one step closer to Dhimmitude.
They claim that it is we who are the problem, that it is the democratic, truth-telling west, Jews and Christians, who are oppressing Muslims. In truth, they are on the march as tyrannical oppressors, abroad and here at home.
They are organized in an offensive attack of intimidation against the west, more specifically against Jews for we are an easy target; the first in society to be hated, the last to be defended. The left in America have already abandoned us via Israel. The Democratic Party is slowly but inexorably doing the same.
Unless good and honest people wake up and fight back--refuse to be intimidated by polite shadow Jihad groups -- it will soon be too late.
If your local TV station gives air time to CAIR or an organization like it--call and protest. Contact the advertisers and tell them that you will no longer buy their products.
Never forget that it was a lawsuit and siezure of property brought by Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, that bankrupted the Ku Klux Kan.
We should follow the same tactic against these jihadist groups. They are highly vulnerable.
This is a life and death struggle.
Your children and their children's existence is at stake.
These people want to enslave you.
When they say peace, they are speaking of jihad.
When they say love, they are speaking of hate.
And when they speak of tolerance, they are describing your prison.
Jihad vs. Amadeus
What you saw in those two appalling videos above are not isolated incidents, not cultural aberrations. Just look at this story from Germany where a Mozart opera has been cancelled because, gee, what a shock, Muslims have protested, their sensibilities have been offended.
Funny how selective is the Muslim sensibility. I do not recall one single public march or protest when two Fox journalists were kidnapped in Gaza, held for weeks, and then forced to publicly convert to the religion of peace.
Can you imagine if they had been made to convert to Christianity?
Consider Rosie O’Donnell, the great cultural crusader, who, on The View, said that radical Christianity is just as threatning as radical Islam.
Funny, I don't recall any Christian homicide bombers; nor do I know of any Christian schools or clerics who teach doctrines of murder, genocide and Jew-hatred. Gee, have any Seraphic Friends heard of Christians who practice honor killings?
I could go on and on, but really, why bother? Rosie and her truly mad fellow travelers have no interest in truth, merely in advancing their radical agenda of same-sex marriage, even at the cost of aligning themselves with Islam Nazis, an ideology that does not hesitate to have lesbians publicly tortured and murdered by the Islamic death sentence:stoning, preferably by very small stones.
Karen taped this little piece of intellectual madness for me. The audience applauded. And Rosie, a true Hollywood dim-wit, smirked at poor Elisabeth Hasselbeck -- and I felt like weeping, for Rosie is not alone in those who believe quite passionately and self-righteously in such absolute filth.
Long ago I learned that talent, great talent, is often given to very stupid, very shallow people.
Lying Low
Can you imagine if Jews had forced Muslims to convert to Judaism?
Forget for a moment that we are not allowed to proseletyze -- but just imagine. Pogroms, I assure you, would sweep the globe.
The NY Times would find said pogroms "regrettable, but under the circumstances, tragically comprehensible."
This, I guarantee.
The repulsive forced conversion in Gaza should have brought hundreds, no thousands of good and decent Muslims into the streets in protest.
Instead, there was a vast and terrifying silence.
I have heard it said that good and decent Muslims are afraid for their lives. Afraid of the jihadists, and so they lay low.
This is no argument.
This was settled before, during and after World War II when German citizens also fell back on indifference, on a vast genocidal silence, as their Jewish neighbors were murdered en masse.
Evil at the Core
And its root cause is not, as the NY Times naively insists, "poverty and lack of economic progress."
No, this Jew-hatred comes from where it has always come from: pure evil.
And this evil comes from the most "advanced" Arab society in the MIddle East, Egypt. A land that receives more American foreign aid than Israel.
Jew-hatred is everywhere in the Arab world; it is widely accepted, and it is taught in the religious madrassas. Imbided with mother's milk, this rabid Jew-hatred is endemic to the Muslim world, from Jakarta to Damascus it is unquestioned and usually state sponsored.
INTERPOLATION:
Several years ago, archeologists in Saudi Arabia made a startling discovery: ancient writing on several stone tablets in the limitless desert. The archeologists were electrified at what the tablets might mean.
They looked closer at the tablets and realized that the writing inscribed on the stone was... ancient Hebrew. They were, to put it mildly, hugely excited, but knowing their political and religious masters -- truly horrified, truly terrified.
When informed of the tablets, of the ancient and invaluable Hebrew inscriptions, The King of Saudi Arabia--I'm not making this up--ordered this archeological and historical treasure to be reburied under the dunes of the endless desert.
Forever.
Any hint of Jews, of Judaism, of true history, is simply unacceptable to these prehistoric barbarians.
This outrage was revealed by Sandra MacKey in her magnificent, ground breaking book: The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom.
This is still one of the best books about a dysfunctional country. Actually, Saudi Arabia is not a country, it's a corporation fully owned by a truly dysfunctional family. MacKey wrote this stunning book in secret, smuggled the manuscript out of the repressive kingdom at great peril to her life, and after it was published she was promptly barred from entering the kingdom ever again.
In fact, so accurate and scathing is her portrait of this mad, loopy, medieval and blood-drenched country (which, by the way, Ms. MacKey has great affection for) that the Ibn Saud Royal family has farbade her name ever to be spoken in their most royal presence. Now that's the kind of blurb money just cannot buy. But you Seraphic Reader should purchase this book, from its pages you will get a startling glimpse of the Islamic madness we are facing and fighting.
You will get a dose of true horror, something we all badly need for I fear too many of us are are still not prepared, even after 9-11, even after the daily homicide bombings in Iraq where women and children are the targets, yes, I fear that far too many of us still refuse to recognize the hot core of evil that is the Islamic enemy we are fighting.
END INTERPOLATION:
And it has absolutely nothing to do with to Palestinian Israeli conflict.
If you cling to that belief, you are, forgive me, if not delusional, a moron.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:38 AM | Comments (8)
Jerusalem 360°
This is a unique site. Jerusalem at night, Interactive 360° Panoramas.
The tour consists of several interactive panoramic images which can be controlled by clicking and dragging the mouse (within the image boundaries) or by using the buttons.
To begin your tour of the Old City of Jerusalem, click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:40 AM | Comments (3)
September 26, 2006
Bubba is Back!
Here he is, once again, angrily wagging his finger, running off at the mouth, practically foaming at the mouth, his Arkansas accent deepening along with his self-righteous wrath.
Bubba is back in all his glory.
What a delightful treat.
Bubba: the gift that keeps on giving.
And you just know that when The Finger starts waving, jabbing and wagging and Bubba all purple-faced can't stop talking for one single minute and he just flat-out starts making things up so fast that Fox journalist Chris Wallace can only sit there with a half smile on his face because he just knows that Bubba is digging himself a trench he's not gonna soon be able to crawl out of, well when this happens you just know that Bubba is back, and G-d love him, half of what he says ain't true -- and the other half are just plain lies.
"Well, it depends on what the definition of is... is."
Oh, the good ol' days.
I have to admit, I miss 'em. I miss Bubba. Let's face it, he's really amusing.
It's not often you have a genuine, pathological narcissist sitting in the White House, defacto, the most powerful man in the world.
Bubba's still ticked off about the ABC docudrama, The Path to 9-11. You see, to a true narcissist, and make no mistake about it, clinically Clinton fits the bill to a T, the movie is only about, well, Bubba and his administration.
It's not about the John O'Neill, the brave FBI agent who desperately and relentlessly battled OBL for so many years.
It's not about courageous CIA operatives who were out in the killing fields face-to-face with the Jihadist enemy.
It's not about the destructive political decisions made by the Church Committee that set up a wall between the FBI and the CIA that made it impossible to share vital intelligence.
It's not about the emasculation of the CIA by the Democrats, making it illegal to assasinate America's enemies.
And of course, it's most certainly not about the 3,000 men, women and children, innocents all, butchered on 9-11 by the Islamic Nazis.
Nope, myopic as always, Bubba can only see, well, Bubba.
For in the end, Bubba and his loyalists are fighting a savage but fruitless rear-guard action; an Orwellian attempt to manipulate history in their favor.
Using that infamous Southern charm, plus a strong dose of lies, and Soviet style intimidation, the former President is, make no mistake about it, headed for an ugly final reckoning, an historical crumbling: Bubba the Berlin Wall.
I feel your pain.
Translation: I feel what I feel like feeling when I feel like it -- so that it appears like true compassion.
Did I hear the former President correctly when he said that:
The far right accused him of "being obsessed with OBL."
Huh?
That his administration "contracted" to kill OBL?
Please, more details?
Bubba's defensive explosion is priceless.
Bubba accuses Wallace of "moving his bones" by asking a question, a question about the pusuit of OBL that includes President Bush.
Okay, I've read my Faulkner, my Carson McCullers, my William Styron, my Harper Lee, and perhaps the greatest Southern novelist of them all: Jetta Carleton, but I have never come across this particular southern ditty. So, if any Seraphic Friend can provide a translation, we would be e-tuhnally grateful.
Moving his bones?
Good grief, is this bad Mafia dialogue channeled through the back country roads of hillbilly Arkansas?
Eleven times, Bubba demands that we read Richard A. Clarke's book for the truth.
Uh, reality check, Bubba: Clarke's book is not the only word on the subject. And hardly the final word. Do check out Lawrence Wright's maginficent The Looming Tower. It's elegantly written, honest to all concerned, and serves no political master, least of all the author--which is more than can be said for Clarke's self-serving volume. And do take note that The Looming Tower is written by a New Yorker Magazine staff writer, hardly a member of the vast far right conspiracy you and Hillary seem convinced are out there to destroy your most harmonious partnership.
INTERPOLATION
I'm the only member of this far right conspiracy. I keep trying to recruit others into my clever but evil plot, but everyone turns me down. They tell me that conspiracies do not exist.
Little do they know...
Alone, but filled with iron resolve, I continue to weave my diabolical Seraphic Web.
END INTERPOLATION
Oh, and Clarke's book isn't even that complimentary to the Clinton administration. Clarke makes it clear that there is enough blame to go around.
Makes you wonder if Bubba even read the book.
And has Bubba now set a new precedent? Can President Bush now go on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and say something like:
"I'd like to put this interview in context. You are a radical secular, leftist network and as such all your questions are designed to sandbag me as opposed to the soft balls you lob at Third World Dictators you seem to adore. And you got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever."
Does this sound, um, acceptable?
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:44 AM | Comments (16)
Moral Confusion
"Take The New York Times editorial page, for example. It is written by people who condemn Pius for his alleged silence and now condemn Benedict for not being quiet. According to the Times, Benedict will only create more anti-Western Muslim violence. But that was exactly the excuse defenders of Pius XII so often offered for why Pius XII did not speak out more forcefully -- that he was afraid it would only engender more Nazi violence. Yet Pius's critics have (correctly) dismissed that excuse out of hand."
To read Dennis Prager's entire article, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2006
If I Forget Thee O' Jerusalem
Today is the Fast of Gedalia, that commemorates the killing of the Jewish governor of Judah, a critical event in the downfall of the First Commonwealth.
Here's a lovely video that expresses our love for Jerusalem, for Israel our Biblical homeland; and our love and unyielding devotion to Judiasm--our life's oxygen.
Hat Tip: One of Ariel's ZT'L best friends, Avi Stewart.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 04:01 PM | Comments (1)
Steven Vincent - Still in the Red Zone
Steven Vincent was a great and courageous American journalist who was tortured and murdered by Jihadists in Iraq.
Whereas mainstream journalists stayed tucked safely in the Green Zone and filed stories that were gathered and written by Iraqi stringers, Steven Vincent bravely went into the heart of the beast. He wanted to tell the truth. For this he paid with his life.
Journalists everywhere should remember Steven Vincent and hold him up as a shining example of a journalist who put truth above ideology.
Here is Kesher's extraordinary memorial to Steven, a blogblast that Seraphic Secret proudly took part in.
Seraphic Friend David Paulin writes a fine piece about the very short memory of the NY Times.
And a fine follow up article, Snubbed Again.
And here, Steven's widow, Lisa Ramaci writes to NY Times journalist Edward Wong, reminding Wong of Steven's life, work, and of his cruel death.
Dear Mr. Wong,
I am writing regarding your article, Iraq Stumbling in Bid to Purge Its Rogue Police, in Sunday's Times. I must say, although the article was extremely well-researched and written, I am both puzzled and dismayed by the fact that you did not bother to mention Steven's name in it. Given that he broke the story about the rising infiltration of the Basra police force by these rogue elements, and given that he literally gave his life for it, I would have thought a reference to him would not have been out of line, and would indeed have been a graceful and well-deserved tribute to his courage.
But for some reason the Times seems to have totally forgotten about Steven; it's as if he didn't exist, didn't write for them, didn't die as a direct result of an op-ed the paper published. I think now of the series of articles by Michael Moss and David Rohde that ran in May, beginning with Misjudgments Marred US Plans for Iraqi Police, and going on from there. Again, in those thousands of words, not one mention was made of Steven. Not since October 2005, in Kirk Semple's piece from Basra, has there been any real acknowledgment of him; the last time he was mentioned (in passing) in some Times article about Iraq, his name was misspelled. In Ali Fadhil's recent op-ed Iraq's Endangered Journalists, Fadhil actually had the audacity to claim that "foreign reporters have the advantage of being considered untouchable by the Iraqi police and security forces." Dear God, does no one remember history any more? He was only killed a year ago, not in the Mesozoic era!
Was it because he was only a freelancer? Do his kidnapping and murder not matter because he was not employed by some major media organization? Are the facts too unsavory? I can only ascribe this blanket silence of him and the circumstances of his death to those realities. But he was one of you, even if he did not get a steady paycheck, and for you all to close ranks and seemingly agree to pretend he never even existed is absolutely shameful. What would it have taken for you to make a brief reference to him and the circumstances of his death? How many words would it have added? Fadhil, Moss and Rohde never met him, so perhaps their omission is somewhat understandable, but you - you spent time with him, ate with him, talked with him. There is no way you could not remember Steven - he wasn't the kind of guy you can put out of your mind that easily.
You wrote in your lovely email below how much you admired him, but it seems you have forgotten how highly you lauded him one year ago, and now no longer even feel the need to mention his name. However, I take comfort in knowing there are people out there in the blog universe, people I have never even met, who admired Steven and who still do, and who are not afraid or unwilling to write about him despite his mere freelancer status. I refer you to the following sites:
Big Carnival
SeraphicPress
Keshertalk
where you will see that there are still those who feel it important to remind the world of Steven's life and death. I am sure you are a very nice guy - I was touched by the flowers you and Alan sent for the funeral, and took comfort in the words you wrote below - but am very sorry to say I no longer believe them the way I once did. And that is a real shame.
Sincerely,
Lisa Ramaci
As of this morning, Wong has not replied to Lisa's letter.
This is the letter Edward Wong, edwongnyt@yahoo.com, wrote to Lisa Ramaci after Steven Vincent was murdered.
Hi Lisa,
This is Edward Wong, writing from Baghdad. The day we learned of Steven's death, I left a message on a New York number that Steven had given me when I met him in Basra in June. We haven't spoken yet, but I'm just writing to let you know that my thoughts are with you and Steven's other friends and family
members on this weekend, the weekend of his wake and funeral. I know you've spoken with Alan Chin, and he's probably told you that Steven left a remarkable impression on the two of us. We spent many evenings with Steven in Basra, talking for hours over dinners in the Marbid Hotel about the war. I was struck by Steven's strong viewpoints, but most of all by his willingness to set his feet on the ground here and see what was really going on in Iraq. What he sacrificed for the story is a price that no journalist should ever have to pay. But in Basra, I saw a man who was truly determined to make a difference with his work, and that's one of the highest callings one can aspire to. He was fulfilling that in his final days, and nothing filled him with more excitement than communicating to the world what he was seeing with his own eyes. I know that that is small consolation for his loss, but it might provide a little comfort in the darkest moments.
Perhaps we'll meet when I'm back in New York this fall. Please take care.
Best,
Edward Wong
The New York Times
And here is Steven Vincent's blog from Iraq that was the basis for his fine book, In the Red Zone.
Steven's book is still the finest work I've read about Iraq. Don't miss it.
We sincerely hope that Lisa Ramaci will find some measure of comfort knowing that there are thousands of good people who care deeply about her husband's life, death and extraordinary legacy.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:34 AM | Comments (3)
September 22, 2006
Rosh Hashanah - 5767
The Yom Tovim, the High Holidays, are the most difficult times for us.
Ariel's absence, always a profound presence, sprouts anew; it grows with alarming speed, it widens, it mutates into an emotional wall that feels thoroughly physical, separating us from, well -- everyone but each other.
I can still hear my lone voice reciting the Kaddish on the Rosh Hashanah after Ariel was niftar. How was it that in such a large shul I was the only person saying Kaddish? Yet, there I stood, chanting in a broken and weak voice, alone in a room of over two hundred men and women, barely able to make it through the prayer. Each time I said the Kaddish, I could feel the tension in the room as people strained with me, willing me to somehow chant the words, somehow pull myself together and fulfill this wrenching obligation.
There were moments when I could not believe that it was my voice saying the Kaddish.
There were moments when I could not believe that I was me.
Unlike the other major Jewish holidays--the Yamim Noraim, The Days of Awe--do not mark national/agricultural events in the Jewish calendar.
Rosh Hashanah commemorates a universal event.
The world was created on Rosh Hashanah.
These days are purely religious, time set aside and dedicated to ponder and reaffirm G-d's role as Master of the Universe. We are affirming G-d's annointment as the sole Creator -- King of the Universe.
Our prayer emphasizes our short days on His earth.
Our prayer delves into self-examination.
Spirituality and holiness are pondered.
On Rosh Hashanah the Jew, through admission of sin, prayer, and acts of Teshuva, (good deeds) the Jew beseeches G-d to grant forgiveness. We believe that in His mercy, He will receive the truly penitent. We ask to be inscribed into the Book of Life.
We ask G-d to make his decisions based on his attributes of mercy, rather than inflexible din (law) as he forgave the Jews after the sin of the Golden Calf.
The Gates of Repentance are open until Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At this time, G-d's final decree is established:
"Who will live and who will die; who will be serene and who will be disturbed; who will be poor and who will be rich; who will be humbled and who will be exalted."
Karen and I wish you all a lovely and meaningful Shabbos and Shanah Tova Umituka.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 03:06 PM | Comments (6)
Grey Ghost
"John S. Mosby was a successful attorney, and with the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the 1st Virginia Cavalry. He quickly moved up through the ranks, and eventually raised his own partisan unit. At first a battalion, his prowess and charisma allowed him to recruit it up to a regiment. The regiment became known as the famed "Mosby Raiders".
"John Mosby was a key innovator in the tactics of Guerilla warfare. By 1863 his exploits were becoming legendary in the South, and viewed as a less than honorable way to fight by the North. Regardless of perspective he devised a new way of fighting by which a small agile force could harass and defeat a much larger force. In lightning fast raids, his raiders would move in and cut telegraph lines, ambush couriers or small parties, start fires, harass rail transport, and then disappear into the night. His quickness and stealth led to his now famous nickname, "The Grey Ghost".
For our Seraphic Picture of the week, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:48 PM | Comments (2)
Blaming the Jews
From You Tube, a pretty incredible piece of reportage from England about Islamic anti-Semitism. The ignorance, the lies, the pure evil depicted will want to make you, well, extend all rights of the Geneva Conventions to these wretched creatures.
Do not, under any circumstances, miss these videos.
Karen and I wish you all a lovely and meaningful Shabbos and Shanah Tova Umituka.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:31 PM | Comments (6)
The Plight of the Canary
Seraphic Friend "ShrinkWrapped" a psychiatrist, has written a brilliant analyisis of Jewish anti-Semitism--just in time for Rosh Hashanah.
"There are many reasons people have difficulty protecting themselves, ranging from confusion over what threatens them to uncertainty about what they are defending. At the moment, the West shows every indication of suffering from a wide range of ailments that interfere with its ability to defend itself."
To read the rest, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
The Democratic Party and Jews
"The Democratic Party has been a congenial political home for many American Jews since the era of FDR. The party welcomed them into its ranks (along with many blacks and urban dwellers) and its programs comported well with many values Jews cherish. The Party was also seen as one that had offered help to the doomed Jews of Europe, opposed prejudice, and supported the fledgling state of Israel from enemies that boasted of its plans to destroy the state.
"Conversely, the Republican Party was perceived to be a WASP enclave, isolationist in its outlook, and weak on support for Israel (though George C. Marshall under the Truman Administration advocated abandoning Israel to the tender mercies of its Arab neighbors).
"However, these views are now anachronistic and need to be revisited."
To read the rest of this important and timely article from The American Thinker, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 11:55 AM | Comments (2)
Intimidation
"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it'' is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.
To read the rest of Charles Krauthammer's splendid article, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
NY to Terrorists: Welcome!
By -- Fern Sidman
It has been an exciting week here in the Big Apple. In the spirit of freedom of speech, New York City was the site for the UN sponsored convocation of worldwide terrorists to espouse their demonic views. As we know, diplomatic immunity was granted to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinjehad and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
9/11 Remembrance
New York City had just concluded its remembrance of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that saw the destruction of the World Trade Center and the commemoration of close to 3,000 lives that were snuffed out on that day by the ilk of terrorists whose philosophy bears close resemblance to those who took the rostrum at the UN.
While attempting to tone down his usual incendiary rhetoric, Ahmadinejad took aim the United States for spearheading a campaign of international sanctions against Iran for its uranium enrichment program and its development of a nuclear arsenal. In a transcript of Ahmadinjehad's speech at the UN, published on the National Public Radio web site, he states:
"The Islamic Republic of Iran is a member of the IAEA and is committed to the NPT. All our nuclear activities are transparent, peaceful and under the watchful eyes of IAEA inspectors. Why then are there objections to our legally recognized rights? Which governments object to these rights? Governments that themselves benefit from nuclear energy and the fuel cycle. Some of them have abused nuclear technology for non-peaceful ends including the production of nuclear bombs, and some even have a bleak record of using them against humanity.
"Which organization or Council should address these injustices? Is the Security Council in a position to address them? Can it stop violations of the inalienable rights of countries? Can it prevent certain powers from impeding scientific progress of other countries?
"The abuse of the Security Council, as an instrument of threat and coercion, is indeed a source of grave concern.
"Some permanent members of the Security Council, even when they are themselves parties to international disputes, conveniently threaten others with the Security Council and declare, even before any decision by the Council, the condemnation of their opponents by the Council. The question is: what can justify such exploitation of the Security Council, and doesn't it erode the credibility and effectiveness of the Council? Can such behavior contribute to the ability of the Council to maintain security?"
Moreover, Ahmadinjehad states: "The question needs to be asked: if the Governments of the United States or the United Kingdom who are permanent members of the Security Council, commit aggression, occupation and violation of international law, which of the organs of the UN can take them to account? Can a Council in which they are privileged members address their violations? Has this ever happened? In fact, we have repeatedly seen the reverse. If they have differences with a nation or state, they drag it to the Security Council and as claimants, arrogate to themselves simultaneously the roles of prosecutor, judge and executioner. Is this a just order? Can there be a more vivid case of discrimination and more clear evidence of injustice?
"Regrettably, the persistence of some hegemonic powers in imposing their exclusionist policies on international decision making mechanisms, including the Security Council, has resulted in a growing mistrust in global public opinion, undermining the credibility and effectiveness of this most universal system of collective security."
In this clear reference to the United States as the chief opponent of nuclear development in Iran, Ahmadinjehad excoriates the United States for the development and use of nuclear weapons and refers to its support of other countries that have developed these weapons as well. It is time to make a clear distinction. While it is futile to debate the moral issue of nuclear weapon development, the United States and other countries that have this weaponry do not have the same track record of President Ahmadinjehad. He is a terrorist. His lexicon and vernacular are replete with promises to destroy the western world, and his most venomous words are aimed at his arch nemesis, Israel.
Bloody Record
Ahmadinjehad's track record deserves closer examination. According to journalist Joseph Farah in his report posted on September 20, 2006, on the World Net Daily web site, Ahmadinjehad's hands are not free of blood. He states the following facts concerning the terrorist past of the Iranian President:
* He has been identified by at least six U.S. hostages as a ringleader in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover.
* He has been identified by former Iranian President Bani Sadr as Ayatollah Khomeini's liaison with the hostage takers.
* He's been accused of the murder of Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna by officials in Austria who say they have compelling evidence and want an arrest warrant sworn for him
* As mayor of Tehran, he was one of the principal forces behind a campaign to recruit and train suicide bombers specifically to attack the U.S., Israel and Britain.
So much for the man who stands before the world at the United Nations and speaks of such lofty concepts of peace, justice, love and equality. He states: "Today, humanity passionately craves commitment to the Truth, devotion to God, quest for Justice and respect for the dignity of human beings. Rejection of domination and aggression, defense of the oppressed, and longing for peace constitute the legitimate demand of the peoples of the world, particularly the new generations and the spirited youth, who aspire a world free from decadence, aggression and injustice, and replete with love and compassion. The youth have a right to seek justice and the Truth; and they have a right to build their own future on the foundations of love, compassion and tranquility."
While these words play well in front of the cameras, they are in stark contrast to the normally jingoistic and hateful statements he had made in the last two years. His hatred for the western world, and the United States in particular is common knowledge. His demonization of the forces of democracy and justice are well known. His vituperative against all non-Muslims and the labeling of these people as satanic is the cornerstone of his agenda. The term "Islamofascist" has become a rather ubiquitous one as of late, as we hear President Bush make use of it on some occasions. If anyone in this world could be named as the international leader of this ominous movement and philosophy, Ahmadinejad would be the leading contender.
Referring to the United States in his speech at the UN, Ahmadinejad says: "Some occupy the homeland of others, thousands of kilometers away from their borders, interfere in their affairs and control their oil and other resources and strategic routes, while others are bombarded daily in their own homes; their children murdered in the streets and alleys of their own country and their homes reduced to rubble."
He also said, "Occupation of countries, including Iraq, has continued for the last three years. Not a day goes by without hundreds of people getting killed in cold blood. The occupiers are incapable of establishing security in Iraq."
Jews & Israel
Concerning Ahmadinejad's position on Israel and the Jews, it couldn't be clearer. Joseph Farah enumerates these words for us:
* Oct. 26, 2005: "There is no doubt that the new wave (of terrorist attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this disgraceful blot (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world. ... As the imam (Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic revolution) said, Israel must be wiped off the map. Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world."
* Dec. 8, 2005: "Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned. ... Let's assume what the Europeans say is true. ... Let's give some land to the Zionists in Europe or in Germany or Austria. They faced injustice in Europe, so why do the repercussions fall on the Palestinians?"
* Dec. 14, 2005: "Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets. If you (Europeans) committed this big crime, then why should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay the price? You have to pay the compensation yourself. This is our proposal: Give a part of your own land in Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to them so that the Jews can establish their country."
* Jan. 5, 2006: "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world, and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return. If we work on the basis of the Expectation of the Return [of the Mahdi], all the affairs of our nation will be streamlined and the administration of the country will become easier."
* Jan. 14, 2006: "They have created a myth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets."
* Feb. 11, 2006: "I ask everybody in the world not to let a group of Zionists who failed in Palestine to insult the prophet. Now in the West insulting the prophet is allowed, but questioning the Holocaust is considered a crime. We ask, why do you insult the prophet? The response is that it is a matter of freedom, while in fact they are hostages of the Zionists. And the people of the U.S. and Europe should pay a heavy price for becoming hostages to Zionists. We ask the West to remove what they created 60 years ago, and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them. Do the removal of Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations."
* April 14, 2006: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm. Believe that Palestine will be freed soon."
* July 15, 2006: "Their (Israel's) methods resemble Hitler's. When Hitler wanted to launch an attack, he came up with a pretext. Zionists say they are Hitler's victims, but they have the same nature as Hitler."
* Aug. 1, 2006: "They (Israelis) know no limitations or boundaries at all any more for killing people. Are these people still human beings or just a bunch of bloodthirsty savages? They have made all notorious criminals in the world get a good reputation again."
Ahmadinejad's words at the United Nations were not as candid as his aforementioned statements, however, without referring to Israel by name he said: "The roots of the Palestinian problem go back to the Second World War. Under the pretext of protecting some of the survivors of that War, the land of Palestine was occupied through war, aggression and the displacement of millions of its inhabitants; it was placed under the control of some of the War survivors, bringing even larger population groups from elsewhere in the world, who had not been even affected by the Second World War."
While Ahmadinejad reviles Israel, without even acknowledging its existence, he carefully omits mentioning the terrorist actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations. He is a clever terrorist who uses the power of words to change the victim into the aggressor and the aggressor into the victim. He chides the world for not condemning Israel and suggests that the UN is under the thumb of the United States, who is Israel's chief supporter.
He couches his rhetoric in palatable terms that can be embraced by the proponents of "peace" in the universe known as the academia and the media.
The Rally That Wasn't
In response to Ahmadinjehad's speech at the UN, over 30,000 people attended a protest rally opposite the UN organized by a multitude of Jewish organizations, ranging from the left wing Meretz party to the right wing Agudath Israel party. Speakers at the rally included Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippy Livni, US Ambassador John Bolton, New York State Governor George Pataki, Holocaust survivor and author Eli Wiesel and human rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz. According to a report from Arutz Sheva, "Also attending the rally and issuing emotional pleas for the release of their captive family members were Carmit Goldwasser, wife of Ehud Goldwasser, and Benny Regev, brother of Eldad Regev – both being held by Hezbullah after being abducted at the beginning of the recent war."
Little is gained in bemoaning the fact that rallies of this nature are totally ineffective. They receive very little or no media coverage and the placid and establishment nature of these rallies do not dissuade the likes of terrorists such as Ahmadinejad and his supporters. While it is commendable that people did take time out to attend this rally and to speak out against terrorism and in support of Israel's kidnapped soldiers, there is no ongoing campaign in the American Jewish community to dramatically spotlight the issues confronting the State of Israel and the Jewish people. There is no organization that has devised and is willing to implement a ceaseless and relentless effort to vociferously counter threats against world Jewry.
Thug #2
If this wasn't enough to digest for one day, the international body ostensibly dedicated to world peace, the United Nations also presented to the world, the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. As we know, Chavez is a key member of the troika of Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. He endorses the brutal and tyrannical regime of Fidel Castro and provides support and succor to Iranian interests.
When he took the stage, Mr. Chavez stunned delegates at the UN General Assembly by calling Mr. Bush "the devil himself" and saying he left the smell of sulfur hanging in the chamber from his appearance the previous day. He also said that Bush was trying to take over the whole world. According to a report by CBS News in New York, "At the start of his talk Wednesday, during which Chavez referred to President Bush as "the devil," Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people. "The people of the United States should read this ... instead of watching Superman movies," Chavez later told reporters. As of Thursday afternoon, "Hegemony or Survival," originally published in 2003, had jumped into the top 10 of Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com. Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, has ordered an additional paperback printing of 25,000 copies."
Chavez's views on Israel are in sync with that of his political partner, Ahmadinejad. His flagrant condemnations of Israel were fast and furious during the summer war in Lebanon and he was quick to recall his ambassadors in Israel. According to a news report of August 7, 2006 Chavez renewed his criticism of Israel's military offensive in Lebanon, calling it a "new Holocaust." Chavez's comments in his weekly radio and TV broadcast came three days after he said he was recalling Venezuela's top diplomat to Israel to express his government's indignation over Israeli attacks in Lebanon and its actions toward Palestinians. "Israel has gone mad," Chavez said.” They are massacring children, and no one knows how many are buried," he added, accusing Israel of being guilty of a "new Holocaust" and the "terrorist" U.S. government of complicity.
Tyrants at Columbia U. -- Duh!
And while we're on the topic of Jewish leftists, it would appear that Iranian President Ahmadinjehad will have further opportunity to espouse his anti-American and anti-Israel hatred. He has now been invited to spew forth his vitriolic views at Columbia University in New York City.
According to a report in the New York Sun, of September 21, 2006, it states: "Columbia University has invited the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to give a speech at the Morningside campus, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, announced late last night. Mr. Bollinger in a statement said he did not invite the president himself but learned yesterday that his university had extended the invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly.
It's not certain, however, that the president will attend a world leaders academic summit that is taking place at the school. Because of the short notice, Mr. Bollinger said he couldn't be sure that high-level security arrangements would be put in place in time. Columbia's offer to the president, a Holocaust denier with nuclear ambitions who was labeled by Israel's foreign minister yesterday as the greatest threat to the world's values, is sure to re-ignite protest at a campus that was rocked by a controversy over its anti-Israel professors less than two years ago.
Columbia's last-minute offer to Mr. Ahmadinejad was evidently made under secrecy and confusion. Last night, Columbia's vice president for public affairs, Susan Brown, denied that the invitation had been extended, saying it was "rumors, rumors, rumors." Mr. Bollinger released a statement about it just before midnight.
The report goes on to say that, "Although he said he strongly disagreed with Mr. Ahmadinejad's views, Mr. Bollinger said he would not stop him from speaking at the university's world leaders forum, which began this week and whose top-billed speakers had been the prime ministers of Croatia and Papua New Guinea.
"I happen to find many of President Ahmadinejad's stated beliefs to be repugnant, a view that I'm sure is widely shared within our university community," Mr. Bollinger said. "So whether or not all of the special arrangements needed for such a visit can be made in this unusually short period of time, I have no doubt that Columbia students and faculty would use an open exchange to challenge him sharply and are fully capable of reaching their own conclusions."
There is no question that Columbia University is a hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment. It has become the haven for various and sundry Jew haters and Israel bashers to promulgate their theories, all under the guise of freedom of speech and academic freedom. It has on its roster an entire panoply of anti-Israel professors. Columbia University has the dubious distinction of hosting an array of Jew haters, Holocaust denier and detractors of Israel. Several months ago notorious Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, Prof. Norman Finkelstein graced the university with his presence at the invitation of both Jewish leftists and Arab students.
P.S. Have a Great Rosh Hashanah
And there we have it. A neat, little recap of the day that the terrorists came to New York. As the hours approach before the onset of the Rosh Hashanah holiday, as we prepare ourselves for the day of judgment, we can only look to the Almighty G-d of Israel for protection during these most dangerous times. We beseech the Almighty to inscribe us in the Book of Life, as we attempt to make amends for past misdeeds and we chant our fervent supplications to G-d to give us the strength and temerity and wisdom to battle our enemies. We ask that He give us the opportunity to return to His Torah, as we gird our loins and prepare to defend our faith.
Now is the time to storm the gates of Heaven with our most fervent and heartfelt prayers. Now is time to glorify the name of the Creator of the Universe and to fulfill our mission in this world.
May this Rosh HaShana be the beginning of the era of redemption and may we merit to be the harbingers of the coming of our righteous Messiah speedily in our days.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:23 AM | Comments (3)
September 21, 2006
Thousands Rally for Israel
Atlas Shrugs has great coverage of the anti-Ahmadinejad, pro-Israel rally in New York. I searched in vain in the liberal press for mention of this huge rally. Nothing in the NY Times. Nothing in the LA Times.
Yet there were between thirty-five to forty-thousand people at the rally.
You would think that this is newsworthy.
But the liberal media, in their infinite wisdom, decided that this event did not happen. Why am I not surprised?
Meryl Yourish has a nice posting about the non-response of the press.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:09 PM | Comments (6)
Vermeer
If I could own any great painting in the world it would be any painting by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer. There is no artist whose work touches me as deeply. Each of his canvases contains worlds within worlds, true narratives -- yet at the core of each canvas there are elemental mysteries.
The subjects of his greatest paintings are portraits of women, and each woman is simply luminous as she withholds a central portion of her soul -- hiding a secret that we the viewer can only guess at.
Vermeer's technical mastery, his astonishing brushwork has never been equaled, and scholars still debate his use of the camera obscura.
His use of color is seemingly modest, yet when closely studied, quite astonishing. Proust, in his monumental million word novel, In Search of Lost Time, rhapsodizes over a tiny patch of yellow wall in Vermeer's "View of Delft."
Here is the best link I've found about Vermeer's work, where you can delve as deeply as you want into this greatest of masters small output of thirty-six works.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)
The Dysfunctional Thug from the Dysfunctional Country
"Hugo Chavez’s bizarre anti-American rant at the United Nations has got Americans asking, “What makes Chavez tick?”
"To understand him, stop thinking of oil-producing Venezuela as a Latin American country. Think of it as a dysfunctional Middle Eastern petro-state. Doing that is the key to understanding Chavez and Venezuela."
To read the rest of Seraphic Friend David Paulin's splendid analysis, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:59 AM | Comments (4)
September 20, 2006
When North Korea Falls
An extremely important article about the world's most repressive Stalinist style regime. A must read. RJA
The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China
The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.
Kim Jong Il’s succession was aided by the link that his father had established in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, starting in the late fourteenth century. Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” Lankov says.
Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge. And that may be reason to worry: totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes. The question that should be of greatest concern to the U.S. military in the Pacific—and the question that will likely determine the global balance of power in Asia for generations—is, What happens when North Korea collapses?
The Nightmare After Iraq
On the Korean peninsula, the Cold War has never ended. On the somber, seaweed-toned border dividing the two Koreas, amid the cries of egrets and Manchurian cranes, I observed South Korean soldiers standing frozen in tae kwon do ready positions, their fists clenched and forearms tightened, staring into the faces of their North Korean counterparts. Each side picks its tallest, most intimidating soldiers for the task (they are still short by American standards).
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, the South raised a 328-foot flagpole; the North responded with a 525-foot pole, then put a flag on it whose dry weight is 595 pounds. The North built a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom; the South built a three-story one. The North then added another story to its building. “The land of one-upmanship,” is how one U.S. Army sergeant describes the DMZ, or demilitarized zone. The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement about when to take a bathroom break, neither side budged. The meeting became known as the “Battle of the Bladders.”
In other divided countries of the twentieth century—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces of unity ultimately triumphed. But history suggests that unification does not happen through a calibrated political process in which the interests of all sides are respected. Rather, it tends to happen through a cataclysm of events that, piles of white papers and war-gaming exercises notwithstanding, catches experts by surprise.
Given that North Korea’s army of 1.2 million soldiers has been increasingly deployed toward the South Korean border, the Korean peninsula looms as potentially the next American military nightmare. In 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang near the DMZ; by 2003, more than 70 percent were. As the saying goes among American soldiers, “There is no peacetime in the ROK.” (ROK, pronounced “rock,” is militaryspeak for the Republic of Korea.) One has merely to observe the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at the U.S. Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, south of Seoul—which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq—to be aware of this. A marine in Okinawa told me, “North Korea is not some third-rate, Middle Eastern conventional army. These brainwashed Asians—as he crudely put it—”will stand and fight.” American soldiers in Korea refer to the fighting on the peninsula between 1950 and 1953 as “the first Korean War.” The implicit assumption is that there will be a second.
This helps explain why Korea may be the most dismal place in the world for U.S. troops to be deployed—worse, in some ways, than Iraq. While I traveled on the peninsula, numerous members of the combat-arms community, both air and infantry, told me that they would rather be in Iraq or Afghanistan than in Korea, which constitutes the worst of all military worlds. Soldiers and airmen often live on a grueling wartime schedule, with constant drills, and yet they also have to put up with the official folderol that is part of all peacetime bases—the saluting and inspections that fall by the wayside in war zones, where the only thing that matters is how well you fight. The weather on the peninsula is lousy, too: the winds charging down from Siberia make the winters unbearably frigid, and the monsoons coming off the Pacific Ocean make the summers hot and humid. The dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert doesn’t help.
The threat from north of the DMZ is formidable. North Korea boasts 100,000 well-trained special-operations forces and one of the world’s largest biological and chemical arsenals. It has stockpiles of anthrax, cholera, and plague, as well as eight industrial facilities for producing chemical agents—any of which could be launched at Seoul by the army’s conventional artillery. If the governing infrastructure in Pyongyang were to unravel, the result could be widespread lawlessness (compounded by the guerrilla mentality of the Kim Family Regime’s armed forces), as well as mass migration out of and within North Korea. In short, North Korea’s potential for anarchy is equal to that of Iraq, and the potential for the deployment of weapons of mass destruction—either during or after pre-collapse fighting—is far greater.
For a harbinger of the kind of chaos that looms on the peninsula consider Albania, which was for some years the most anarchic country in post-Communist Eastern Europe, save for war-torn Yugoslavia. On a visit to Albania before the Stalinist regime there finally collapsed, I saw vicious gangs of boys as young as eight harassing people. North Korea is reportedly plagued by the same phenomenon outside of its showcase capital. That may be an indication of what lies ahead. In fact, what terrifies South Koreans more than North Korean missiles is North Korean refugees pouring south. The Chinese, for their part, have nightmare visions of millions of North Korean refugees heading north over the Yalu River into Manchuria.
Obviously, it would be reckless not to worry about North Korea’s missile and WMD technologies. In August, there were reports yet again that Kim Jong Il was preparing an underground nuclear test. And the North test fired seven missiles in July. According to U.S. data, three of the missiles were Scud-Cs, and three were No-dong-As with ranges of 300 to 1,000 miles; all were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. (Whether North Korea has such warheads is not definitively known, but it is widely believed to have in the neighborhood of ten—and the KFR certainly has the materials and technological know-how to build them.) The third type of missile, a Taep’o-dong-2, has a range of 2,300 to 9,300 miles, which means it could conceivably hit the continental United States. Though the Taep’o-dong-2 failed after takeoff during the recent testing, it did so at the point of maximum dynamic pressure—the same point where the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and the moment when things are most likely to go wrong. So this is likely not an insoluble problem for the KFR.
The Seven Stages of Collapse
Kim Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it’s not North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it’s about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim.
To Kim’s sure dismay, the American response to his recent missile tests was a shrug. President George W. Bush dispatched Christopher Hill, his assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, to the region rather than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I was in South Korea during the missile firings, and there were few signs of alert on any of the U.S. bases in Korea. Pilots in several fighter squadrons were told not to drink too much on their days off, in case they had to be called in, but that was about the extent of it.
What should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim’s missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. “It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations,” Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Il’s responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. military’s, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis.
Fortunately, the demise of North Korea is more likely to be drawn out. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant and now a civilian area expert for the American military in South Korea, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North:
Phase One: resource depletion;
Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;
Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;
Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;
Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;
Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and
Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.
North Korea probably reached Phase Four in the mid-1990s, but was saved by subsidies from China and South Korea, as well as by famine aid from the United States. It has now gone back to Phase Three.
Kim Jong Il learned a powerful lesson by watching the fall of the Ceausescu Family Regime, in Romania: Take utter and complete control of the military. And so he has. The KFR now rules through the army. There have been only individual defections of North Korean soldiers to the South. Even small, unit-level defections—which would indicate that soldiers are talking to one another and are no longer afraid of exposure by comrades—have not yet occurred. One defector from the North’s special-operations forces told me that soldiers in the ranks are afraid to discuss politics with one another.
The North Korean People’s Army is simply too big to be kept happy and well fed, so the regime concentrates on keeping the elite units comfortable. The defector I spoke to—a scout swimmer—told me that while the special-operations forces live well, the extreme poverty of conventional soldiers would make their loyalty to Kim Jong Il in a difficult war questionable. Would they fight to defend the KFR if there were an unforeseen rebellion? The Romanian example suggests that it depends on the circumstances: when workers revolted in 1987 in Brasov, the Romanian military crushed them; when ethnic Hungarians did so two years later in Timisoara, the military deserted the regime.
How to Prevent Another Iraq
Stephen Bradner, a civilian expert on the region and an adviser to the military in South Korea, has thought a lot about the tactical and operational problems an unraveling North Korean state would present. So has Colonel Maxwell, the chief of staff of U.S. Special Operations in South Korea. “The regime in Pyongyang could collapse without necessarily its army corps and brigades collapsing,” Maxwell says. “So we might have to mount a relief operation at the same time that we’d be conducting combat ops. If there is anybody in the UN who thinks it will just be a matter of feeding people, they’re smoking dope.”
Maxwell has conducted similar operations before: he was the commander of a U.S. Army Special Forces battalion that landed on Basilan Island, in the southern Philippines, in early 2002, part of a mission that combined humanitarian assistance with counterinsurgency operations against Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group, two terrorist organizations. But the Korean peninsula presents a far vaster and more difficult challenge. “The situation in the North could become so messy and ambiguous,” Maxwell says, “that the collapse of the chain of command of the KFR could be more dangerous than the preservation of it, particularly when one considers control over WMD.”
In order to prevent a debacle of the sort that occurred in Iraq—but with potentially deadlier consequences, because of the free-floating WMD—a successful relief operation would require making contacts with KFR generals and various factions of the former North Korean military, who would be vying for control in different regions. If the generals were not absorbed into the operational command structure of the occupying force, Maxwell says, they might form the basis of an insurgency. The Chinese, who have connections inside the North Korean military, would be best positioned to make these contacts—but the role of U.S. Army Special Forces in this effort might be substantial. Green Berets and the CIA would be among the first in, much like in Afghanistan in 2001.
Obviously, the United States could not unilaterally insert troops into a dissolved North Korea. It would likely be a four-power intervention force—the United States, China, South Korea, and Russia—officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Japan would be kept out (though all parties would gladly accept Japanese money for the endeavor).
Although Japan’s proximity to the peninsula gives it the most to fear from reunification, Korean hatred of the Japanese makes participation of Japanese troops in an intervention force unlikely. Between 1910 and 1945, Japan brutally occupied not only Korea but parts of China too, and it defeated Russia on land and at sea in the early twentieth century. Tokyo may have more reason than any other government for wanting to put boots on the ground in a collapsed North Korea, but it won’t be able to, because both China and South Korea would fight tooth and nail to prevent it from doing so.
Whereas Japan’s strategic position would be dramatically weakened by a collapsed North Korean state, China would eventually benefit. A post-KFR Korean peninsula could be more or less under Seoul’s control—and China is now South Korea’s biggest trading partner. Driving along the coast, all I saw at South Korean ports were Chinese ships.
Other factors also work in Beijing’s favor. China harbors thousands of North Korean defectors that it would send back after a collapse, in order to build a favorable political base for China’s gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—the northeast Asian river valley where China, Russia, and North Korea intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific. De facto control of a future Tumen Prosperity Sphere would bolster China’s fiscal strength, helping it to do economic battle with the United States and Japan. If China’s troops could carve out a buffer zone in the part of North Korea near Manchuria—where China is now developing massive infrastructure projects, such as roads and ports—Beijing might then sanction the installation of an international coalition elsewhere in the North.
Russia’s weakness in the Far East is demonstrated by its failure to prevent the creeping demographic conquest of its eastern territories by ethnic Chinese. It will be truculent in guarding its interests on the Korean peninsula. And Russia does have a historical legacy here: North Korea was originally a Soviet creation and client state. Keeping Russian troops out of Korea would probably be more trouble for the other powers than letting some in.
Of course, South Korea would bear the brunt of the economic and social disruption in returning the peninsula to normalcy. No official will say this out loud, but South Korea—along with every other country in the region—has little interest in reunification, unless it were to happen gradually over years or decades. The best outcome would be a South Korean protectorate in much of the North, officially under an international trusteeship, that would keep the two Koreas functionally separate for a significant period of time. This would allow each country time to prepare for a unified Korean state, without the attendant chaos.
Following the Communist regime’s collapse, the early stabilization of the North could fall unofficially to the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) and U.S. Forces Korea (which is a semiautonomous subcommand of PACOM), also wearing blue UN helmets. But while the U.S. military would have operational responsibility, it would not have sole control. It would have to lead an unwieldy regional coalition that would need to deploy rapidly in order to stabilize the North and deliver humanitarian assistance. A successful relief operation in North Korea in the weeks following the regime’s collapse could mean the difference between anarchy and prosperity on the peninsula for years to come.
If North Korea Attacks
But what if rather than simply unraveling, the North launched a surprise attack on the South? This is probably less likely to happen now than it was, say, two decades ago, when Kim Il Sung commanded a stronger state and the South Korean armed forces were less mature. But Colonel Maxwell and others are preparing for this possibility.
Simply driving through Seoul, one of the world’s great and congested megacities, makes it clear that a conventional infantry attack on South Korea’s capital is something that not even a fool would contemplate. So if the North were to attack, it would likely resort instead to a low-grade demonstration of “shock and awe,” using its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple-rocket launchers to fire more than 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, where close to half the nation’s 49 million people live. The widespread havoc this would cause would be amplified by North Korean special-operations forces, which would infiltrate the South to sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. Meanwhile, the North Korean People’s Army would march on the city of Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from which it could cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east.
But this strategy would fail. While American A-10 Warthogs, F-16 Vipers, and other aircraft would destroy enemy missile batteries and kill many North Korean troops inside South Korea, submarine-launched missiles and B-2 Spirit bombers sent from Guam and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would take out strategic assets inside North Korea. In the meantime, the South Korean army would quickly occupy the transport hubs, while unleashing its own divisions and special-operations forces on the marauding People’s Army. The KFR knows this; thus any such invasion would have to be the act of a regime in the latter phases of disintegration. North Korea’s lone hope would be that the hourly carnage it could produce—in the time between the first artillery barrage on Seoul and the beginning of a robust military response by South Korea and the United States—would lead the South Korean left, abetted by the United Nations and elements of the global media, to cry out for diplomacy and a negotiated settlement as an alternative to violence.
And there is no question: the violence would be horrific. Iraq and Afghanistan would look clean by comparison. A South Korea filled with North Korean troops would be (in military parlance) a “target-rich environment,” in which the good guys and the bad guys would always be close to each other. “Gnarly chaos,” is how one F-16 Viper pilot described it to me. “The ultimate fog of war.” The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that exists between American pilots and South Korean JTACs, or Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. A-10 and F-16 pilots in South Korea have complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the instances of friendly-fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media undoubtedly would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival.
What Now, Lieutenant?
But middle and upper-middle levels of the American military worry less about an indiscriminate artillery attack on the South than about a very discriminate one. My sources feared that in the aftermath of the KFR’s missile launches in July, the Bush administration might actually have been foolish enough to react militarily—which might have been exactly what Kim Jong Il was hoping for, since it would have allowed him to achieve a primary strategic goal: splitting the alliance between South Korea and the United States. How would that happen? After the United States responded in a targeted fashion to the missile launches or some other future outrage, the North would initiate an intensive five- or ten- minute-long artillery barrage on Seoul, killing some Americans and South Koreans near Yongsan Garrison (”Dragon Mountain”), the American military’s Green Zone in the heart of the city. Then the North would simply stop. And after the shell fire halted, the proverbial question among American officers in a quandary would arise: What now, Lieutenant?
Politically speaking, we would be trumped. The South Korean left—which has been made powerful by an intrusively large American troop presence and by decades of manipulation by the North—would blame the United States for the carnage in Seoul, pointing out that it had been provoked by the Americans’ targeted strike against North Korea. The United Nations and the global media would subtly blame Washington for the crisis—and call not so subtly for peace talks. With that, the KFR would get a new lease on life, with more aid forthcoming from the international community to keep it afloat.
Which is why some of the military and civilian experts I spoke with argue for economic warfare against the North. Stop helping the regime with humanitarian aid, they say. The North Korean population has been on the brink of starvation for decades. The forests are denuded. People are eating tree bark. Stop prolonging the agony. Help the KFR collapse.
Of course, one problem with this strategy is that it could end up making North Korea’s direst military options more likely; as noted, regimes like this one, in the latter stages of collapse, are apt to behave irresponsibly, possibly resorting to WMD. Another problem is that we can’t do much to squeeze the North Koreans economically; it’s China, not the United States, that is really keeping the regime alive. The Chinese are already in the process of gaining operational control over anything in North Korea that has strategic economic and military value: mines, railways, and so on. Thus, any soft landing for the KFR would more likely be orchestrated by Beijing than by Washington, even though the Chinese might not mind saddling the Americans with the short-term military responsibility of stabilizing a collapsed North Korea.
After Reunification
I f the peninsula could be stabilized after the fall of the KFR, this Greater Korea would have an instant, undisputed enemy: Japan. Any Korean politician would be able to stand up in parliament and get political mileage out of an anti-Japanese tirade. The Japanese know this, and it’s helping fuel their remilitarization. (The Japanese navy, in particular, has been emphasizing the latest diesel submarines and Aegis destroyers.) In July, there was a saber-rattling contest between Tokyo and Seoul over disputed islets that South Koreans call Tokdo and the Japanese Takeshima, in what the Koreans refer to as the East Sea and the Japanese the Sea of Japan. Harsh words were exchanged after South Korea sent a survey ship to the area. The United States has a history of underestimating historical-ethnic disputes: in the 1980s, it paid insufficient attention to ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia; more recently, it mistakenly downplayed Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq. It should not make the same mistake in Asia.
Here it is useful to review Korean history. In the medieval era, the Koreans fought wars against Chinese dynasties like the Sui and the Tang. But later on, following the rise to power of Korea’s own Choson Dynasty, in 1392, Japan gradually caught up with China as Korea’s principal adversary. There was a brutal Japanese violation of the peninsula at the end of the sixteenth century, culminating in an orgy of rape and murder, and a savage occupation at the beginning of the twentieth, which ended only with the Soviet and American conquests. (The Japanese effect on the peninsula has not been all negative: South Koreans may have trouble admitting it, but Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century nearly doubled the life expectancy of the average Korean.)
Reunification would provide at least one benefit to Japan. As Park Syung Je, an analyst at the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, explained to me, a unified Greater Korea might serve to balance against an even more significant threat to Japan: a rising China. But this Greater Korea would still be a linchpin of China’s twenty-first-century Asian economic-prosperity sphere, a more benign version of Imperial Japan’s Co- Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s. America could be pushed to the margins. Although Korean businessmen would resist economic domination by China, lingering anti-Americanism in South Korea might outweigh that resistance—especially once the generation that still remembers the sacrifices of American servicemen during the 1950s disappears entirely. America’s large troop presence will have granted Korea a free society, just as a similar American presence helped to make Germany a free society. But younger generations of South Koreans may remember U.S. troops only negatively—and what is more indelibly inscribed in the Korean national memory is America’s support for the Japanese occupation of Korea following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905. (This was in exchange for Imperial Japan’s support of America’s occupation of the Philippines a few years earlier.)
Greater Korea’s troubled relationship with China may ultimately be determined by what America does, and specifically by the degree to which the United States can get Japan to recognize its war guilt. If Washington continues to maintain a military alliance with Tokyo without Japan’s publicly coming to terms with its past, Greater Korea will move psychologically toward China. President Bush’s recent love fest with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at Graceland may have played well in the United States, but it was seen as an insult in South Korea because of Koizumi’s earlier visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the Japanese war dead—including war criminals. If the United States continues to treat Japan as a golden stepchild, then China and its implicit ally, Greater Korea, will have a tense relationship with Japan and its implicit allies, the United States and India. But because of its own manifold business interests in China, America could only balance against China very delicately.
China Versus America
With so many complex and subtle interests to weigh here, what should the American strategy be over the long term? South Korean army Colonel Chung Kyung Yung, a professor at Seoul’s National Defense University, says that after the KFR collapses and the North is stabilized, the wisest thing for the United States to do would be to keep 10,000 troops or so on the peninsula. Such a contingent, he told me, would serve as a statement that the United States is not abandoning Korea to a militarily resurgent Japan. The best way to stabilize Asia, Chung emphasizes, would be to prevent Greater Korea—which would be fragile in the period after the North’s collapse—from becoming a source of contention between China and Japan. Peter Beck, the director of the International Crisis Group’s North East Asia Project, agrees. “Because the United States is the furthest away of all these powers,” he told me, “it should be perceived as the least dangerous—the one power without territorial ambitions.”
Unfortunately, South Korean politics might make it more difficult to keep American troops on the peninsula long term. Yes, it’s true that of the few prominent statues of foreigners in the country, two are of Americans (General Douglas MacArthur and General James Van Fleet, the father of the South Korean armed forces). And it is also true that, because of late-nineteenth-century missionary activity, American-style Protestantism is practically the dominant religion in South Korea. (If North Korea collapses, expect Christian evangelism to quickly replace the Communist regime’s Juche ethos of self-reliance: Pyongyang was once the “Jerusalem of Asia” for missionaries.) And yet despite all this, the South Koreans have largely convinced themselves that they need to be as worried about the Americans as they are about the Chinese—just as they have convinced themselves that they should be as afraid of the Japanese as they are of the North Koreans. The fact is that South Koreans may not want any American troops in their country.
Already the American air and ground troops who would defend the South if the KFR were to attack are facing increasing restrictions on their training, because of South Korean political pressures. The A-10 squadron that would be flying nonstop sorties near the DMZ in the event of a war had to train in Thailand this past winter, because of limitations Seoul placed on its flight patterns. This is all part of yet another frustration that U.S. troops in South Korea must endure: having to be on a war footing in order to defend a government that wants to be defended but publicly pretends otherwise.
The truth is, many South Koreans have an interest in the perpetuation of the Kim Family Regime, or something like it, since the KFR’s demise would usher in a period of economic sacrifice that nobody in South Korea is prepared for. A long-standing commitment by the American military has allowed the country to evolve into a materialistic society. Few South Koreans have any interest in the disruption the collapse of the KFR would produce.
Meanwhile, China’s infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing’s Korean cronies once the KFR unravels. This buffer state will be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny it will replace. So from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese look to be offering a better deal than the Americans, whose plan for a free and democratic unified peninsula would require South Korean taxpayers to pay much of the cost. The more that Washington thinks narrowly in terms of a democratic Korean peninsula, the more Beijing has the potential to lock the United States out of it. For there is a yawning distance between the Stalinist KFR tyranny and a stable, Western-style democracy: in between these extremes lie several categories of mixed regimes and benign dictatorships, any of which might offer the North Koreans far more stability as a transition mechanism than anything the United States might be able to provide. No one should forget that South Korea’s prosperity and state cohesion were achieved not under a purely democratic government but under Park Chung Hee’s benign dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s. Furthermore, North Koreans, who were never ruled by the British, have even less historical experience with democracy than Iraqis. Ultimately, victory on the Korean peninsula will go to the side with the most indirect and nuanced strategy.
The long-term success of America’s basic policy on the peninsula hinges on the willingness of South Koreans to make a significant sacrifice, at some point, for the sake of freedom in the North. But sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness—and it may turn out that the authoritarian Chinese understand the voters of South Korea’s free and democratic society better than we do. If that’s the case, there may never actually be a Greater Korea in the way that we imagine it. Rather, the North’s demise will be carefully managed by Beijing in such a way that the country will go from being a rogue nation to a de facto satellite of the Middle Kingdom—but one with sufficient contact with the South that the Korean yearning for a measure of reunification will be satisfied.
Keep in mind that Asia—largely because it is so economically dynamic—is politically and militarily volatile. Its alliance structures are not nearly as developed as those in Europe, which has NATO and the European Union. Conflicting nationalisms are expressed in Asia through more than just soccer games. Thus, the question of whether it’s to be the American or the Chinese vision of North Korea’s future that gets realized may hinge on political-military decisions made in the midst of an opaque and confusing crisis.
North Korea and the Future of Asia
Before I left Seoul, I met with a local military legend. Retired General Paik Sun Yup, now eighty-six years old, was the 1st Infantry Division commander during the Korean War and worked hand in hand with General MacArthur. When we spoke, Paik insisted that crisis-driven political-military decisions here will ultimately determine the balance of power throughout Asia, the most important region for the world’s economy. “This peninsula is the pivot,” he said.
When I reflected on Paik’s words later, it occurred to me that while the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America’s daunting, imperial-like burdens.
But South Korea also provides a lesson in what can be accomplished with patience and dogged persistence. The drive from the airport at Inchon to downtown Seoul goes through the heart of a former urban war zone. South Korea’s capital was taken and retaken four times in some of the most intense fighting of the Korean War. Korean men and women who lived through that time will always be grateful for what retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Killebrew has called American “stick-to-itiveness,” without which we would have little hope of remaining a great power.
In the heart of Seoul lies Yongsan Garrison, a leafy, fortified Little America, guarded and surrounded by high walls. Inside these 630 acres, which closely resemble the Panama Canal Zone before the Americans gave it up, are 8,000 American military and diplomatic personnel in manicured suburban homes surrounded by neatly clipped hedges and backyard barbecue grills. I drove by a high school, baseball and football fields, a driving range, a hospital, a massive commissary, a bowling alley, and restaurants. U.S. Forces Korea and its attendant bureaucracies are located in redbrick buildings that the Americans inherited in 1945 from the Japanese occupiers. Korea is so substantial a military commitment for us that it merits its own, semiautonomous subcommand of PACOM—just as Iraq, unofficially anyway, merits its own four-star subcommand of CENTCOM.
The United States hopes to complete a troop drawdown in South Korea in 2008. Having moved into Yongsan Garrison when Korea’s future seemed highly uncertain, American troops plan to give up this prime downtown real estate and relocate to Camp Humphreys, in Pyongtaek, thirty miles to the south. The number of ground troops will drop to 25,000, and will essentially comprise a skeleton of logistical support shops, which would be able to acquire muscles and tendons in the form of a large invasion force in the event of a war or a regime collapse that necessitated a military intervention.
Patience and dogged persistence are heroic attributes. But while military units can be expected to be heroic, one should not expect a home front to be forever so. And while in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.
Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 04:54 PM | Comments (4)
Serial No. 3817131
"Rachel Papo is an Israeli who was born in 1970 in Columbus, Ohio but was raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine-arts high-school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen she served in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer. These two intensive years of service inspired her current photographic project titled after her own number during service -- Serial No. 3817131.
"She earned a BFA in Fine Arts from Ohio State University in Columbus (1991-96), and an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2002-05).
"She began photographing Israeli female soldiers in the summer of 2004 as part of her masters thesis project. She continues to photograph in both Israel and New York, pursuing fine art photography and accepting commissioned projects. Her photographs are included in several public and private collections. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
"Rachel is represented by Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, where her first solo show was recently on display."
To view some Rachel's haunting photos, please click here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:46 AM | Comments (6)
Fear & Madness
Last night Karen told me that for the first time in her life she actually fears for the future of our children. I agreed with her.
After listening to the thug from Iran tell us that black is white and white is black, and then listening to the tyrants and appeasers in the UN applaud his double-talk, I literally felt sick. Many have said that this is 1938. But Hitler never addressed a UN.
This tyrant comes from an Islamic republic where if a woman is raped she stands a good chance of being stoned to death in public; an Islamic republic where liberal newspapers have been closed; an Islamic republic where television satellite dishes have been confiscated; an Islamic republic where religious minorities, especially Jews, are routinely persecuted; an Islamic republic where the jails are bursting with political and religious prisoners.
This liar who routinely denies the Holocaust, has the temerity to speak of justice, ethics, and common humanity. This fevered jihadist has perfected the use of Orwellian language.
In thinly veiled terms, the Iranian jihadist once again threatened the destruction of Israel, and no one, not one major newspaper takes him to task for his genocidal threats. No, liberal organs such as the NY Times are far too busy worrying about how terrorists and throat slitters are being treated and interrogated. Liberals are far too busy attacking President Bush -- for to attack true evil is beyond their moral compass.
Karen and I are afraid because the tyrants in the UN are labeled, "the international community" by liberals as if this automatically bestows upon them some divine legitimacy, when in fact most of these countries are nothing more than a collection of murdererous dictators and appeasers -- and this includes Russia, China, France and most of Europe.
This thug, this demagogue, this murderer, tyrant, anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, is an enemy of Western civilization and we in the West should have treated him as the Jihadist terrorist he is. Instead, he spoke on the same day as President Bush, from the very same platform, thereby boosting his status in the Muslim world, thus hammering another nail in our coffin.
This is madness.
If we cannot even recognize our enemies, how in G-d's name can we fight and defeat them?
P.S. It is time to move the UN to a country that truly represents the nations that sit in their chambers. My vote goes to Sudan. Let the UN representatives who so hate America live and work in an Islamic republic they so deeply yearn for.
Karen writes: The part you omitted from your quote was that the most dreadful aspect of my fear was that Israel would no longer protect us. I always felt that no matter what, that if anti-Semitism threatened our people again, we ultimately had a safe haven. But now it seems Israel does not protect its citizens. Their leaders have become shadow statesmen. Perhaps we used to be men without a country, now we are a country without men.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:48 AM | Comments (51)
September 19, 2006
Lawsuit Filed to Bankrupt Hamas
On the evening of March 28, 2002, a Hamas gunman, armed with
an automatic rifle, infiltrated the Gavish's house in the
community of Alon Moreh and opened fire on its inhabitants.
The terrorist immediately killed Rachel and David Gavish,
50, their son Avraham Gavish, 20, and Rachel's father
Yitzhak Kanner, 83 before being killed himself by neighbors.
The remaining six children, ages 15 to 22, managed to escape
out of a second floor window. Nitsana
Darshan-Leitner has filed suit againt Hamas in Jerusalem.
If she wins, Hamas will be bankrupt, and all the European
Union funds will go to the victims instead of the
terrorists. God bless her.
Let us all hope and pray that the Gavish children win this lawsuit, and financially gut Hamas. This will be some measure of justice. RJA
Gavish Family Acts to Seize Assets of Islamic Terror
Organization
An unprecedented motion to financially liquidate the Hamas
terrorist organization was filed this morning in the
Jerusalem District Court.
The liquidation motion, which was brought by the
six surviving children of Rachel and
David Gavish z"l, seeks to formally plunge the Islamic
terrorist organization into bankruptcy.
The Plaintiffs have requested a court order authorizing them
to assume control over any and all of Hamas' assets along with the
right to execute against them in order to satisfy a judgment
awarded to them early this year.
The liquidation proceeding has been filed on behalf of the
six Gavish children by Shurat HaDin director Nitsana
Darshan-Leitner.
On February 26, 2006, the Jerusalem District Court handed
down a judgment in favor of the Gavish family in the amount
of N.I.S. 92 million ($20 million U.S.). The historic
judgment marked the first time that Hamas was successfully
sued in an Israeli court.
The case arose from the brutal terrorist attack on the
Gavish family's home which left four members of the
household, including both parents, dead. On the evening of
March 28, 2002, a Hamas gunman, armed with an automatic
rifle, infiltrated the Gavish's house in the community of
Alon Moreh and opened fire on its inhabitants. The terrorist
immediately killed Rachel and David Gavish, 50, their son
Avraham Gavish, 20, and Rachel's father Yitzhak Kanner, 83
before being killed himself by neighbors. The remaining six
children, ages 15 to 22, managed to escape out of a second
floor window.
At trial, Darshan-Leitner urged the District Court to find
the Hamas organization liable for the four deaths and to
award the Gavish family an unprecedented "American-style"
judgment amount.
The Plaintiffs argued that there was no justification nor
mitigating circumstances that could rationalize this heinous
terrorist attack and that the Palestinian terrorist group
should not be provided any leniency by the court.
District Court Judge Aharon Farkash accepted the arguments
and his decision established an important legal precedent
-- the awarding of punitive damages against terrorist
defendants -- for other victims seeking justice against
Palestinian terrorists in the Israeli courts.
As the District Court wrote concerning its rationale for
awarding the Gavish family punitive damages: "With no need
to elaborate, I believe, that the current case is
appropriate for awarding punitive compensation against
the defendant. The sinful act of murder justifies such an award. It is a
terrorist action, which was done with intent and full
awareness to cause the death of the victims and the damage
to their families, since there is no other explanation for this act.
Behind the act is a pure hatred that brought about the death
of the decedents and a very difficult and traumatic
experience upon the plaintiffs -- their survivors."
According to attorney Darshan-Leitner: "Placing Palestinian
terrorist groups in bankruptcy will be a powerful new weapon
in the effort by terror victims to secure a measure of
justice and compensation for the criminal acts committed
against them.
"The liquidation motion seeks to enable the
Gavish children to seize any Hamas assets that can be
located and utilize them to satisfy the NIS 90 million
judgment they were awarded. The court appointed bankruptcy
trustee will have tremendous authority to investigate Hamas
and root out its assets which was not available to terror
victims on their own."
FOR MORE INFORMATION: 972-(0)3-736-1519
Email: info @israellawcenter.org
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)
Apache
Here's a great site that has thousands of great historical photos. I've narrowed it down to just a few of my favorite pictures of the Apache people. The spirit of Lozen, the Apache Maiden, hovers within every image.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:29 AM | Comments (3)
How the Left Enables Nuclear Proliferation
I once wrote wrote an essay about Murderous Peacenicks and how they have brought so much death and destruction to this world. Well, these peaceniks are still with us doing their terrible work. This fine essay from The American Thinker does a nice job of analysing their genocidal work. RJS
"Not everyone may remember that Ellsberg famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, thereby disastrously undermining US support for the Vietnam War, leading the US Congress to withdraw funding for the American effort to put the South in charge of its own fate. The upshot was the scene of chaos and panic while desperate Vietnamese clung to US helicopters lifting up from the roof of the US Embassy. Those Vietnamese had everything to fear from the victorious North, and if they were lucky they only ended up in vast Stalinist concentration camps along with hundreds of thousands of others.
"We do not know exactly how many people died by execution, starvation, forced labor, collectivization, and all the usual horrors of Communist revolutionary regimes. Pathetic news photos followed in the years afterwards, showing Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing Ho Chi Minh’s paradise in their thousands on frail craft and often drowning in their desperation to get away. Next door in Cambodia, Pol Pot began his genocidal massacres free from any possible American interference. The Americans were gone.
"In the upshot, Ellsberg was imminently responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Vietnam and Cambodia. On the American Left this not considered a crime against humanity. Ellsberg is a celebrity well within the mainstream of the Left. They may not say so out loud, but the bottom line is that they want more of the same."
To read the rest of this essay, please click here.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, David Paulin
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)
Iran and Israel
We must bear in mind that Iran's imperial ambitions are, at the moment, limitless, politically and religiously. It is all too easy to dismiss their leaders as madmen, as mad mullahs, but this would be a grave mistake. They are extremely clever and cruel tyrants who are determined to bring about the rise of Shia power in the region--and of course destroy the State of Israel, and Jews everywhere. RJA
"While Israel believes its war with Hezb’allah had reinvigorated its deterrence posture, an Iranian attack on Israel is now more likely than before.Two main reasons account for this forecast. First, Tehran must now realize that its strategy of relying on Hezb’allah as a stopgap deterrent to facilitate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has been wrecked. Israel’s forceful riposte indicated Hezb’allah’s vast arsenal of rockets was for naught deterrence-wise. The anomalous theory that a terror organization could provide a strategic umbrella to its sponsor has been debunked.
"Second, Tehran must be worried that in the war’s wake, the likelihood of an Israeli preemptive attack has gone up. During the war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that Israel’s robust reaction and the resilience of its rear under continued bombardment proved that the country was undeterable. The unmistakable implication was that Israel would revert to its once preferred preemptive strategy. Moreover, the war likely caused Israel to assess that the effort to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons must be expedited. Not only was the country reminded of its vulnerability to missile attacks, but the wholesale targeting of their population centers convinced Israelis that when Iran’s leaders speak of “wiping Israel off the map,” they actually mean it. Indeed, the more is the war perceived by Israelis as a failure the greater the alarm over Iran and the higher the probability that Israel would act soon to redress the Middle Eastern power balance in its favor. "
To read the rest of this analysis, please click here.
Hat Tip: Seraphic Friend, David Paulin
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)
Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
There are quite a few things I disagree with in this article. However, I am linking to it anyway because I believe its author, Sam Harris, a prominent Liberal, is saying things to his fellow liberals that need to be said. The question is: Will they hear what he is saying? RJA
"At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
"Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization."
To read Sam Harris' entire article, please click here.
Hat Tip, Seraphic Friend, David Paulin
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:57 AM | Comments (2)
September 18, 2006
Steven Vincent: Snubbed Again
"In the old Soviet Union, leaders who fell into disfavor with the Stalinist government invariably had their images air brushed out of official photos.
"And out of history.
"Something similar is going on at The New York Times in respect to Steven Vincent, the only American journalist to have been murdered in Iraq.
Read the rest of Seraphic Friend David Paulin's