Bent Notes

Iran hangs an Israeli spy.

He’s going to push hard for pre-1967 borders.

Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post details what the uranium missing from Isfahan indicates about how far along Iran’s nuclear-bomb program is.  It’s too late for ecoonomic pressure, of either the governmental-sanctions kind or the capital-markets-disinvestment kind, to work.  Israel will have to bomb Natanz.

What this will do, says Glick, is buy the world a couple of years to get serious about the above measures, plus covert measures to undermine the mullahs’ regime.

Her column is one of those in which the last line is key to all that has come before.  She says, “Too bad Israel doesn’t have a  government.”

Israel releases nearly 200 more Palestinian prisoners, this time of the Fatah variety, and including Said al-Atba, who bombed a market in 1977.  (He would be this release’s equivalent of Samir Kunta, the child-skull-crusher who was part of the July release). 

Condi Rice says this is good because it’s “something that matters a lot to the Palestinians.”

Why are clarity and resolve so easily muddled in this world?  Why, in spite of irrefutable evidence that one is dealing with bad actors, does one yet again expect goodwill and civility out of them?  We’ve seen it in the utter failure to get Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear programs.  We’ve seen it in the tepid moral equivalency that characterizes the NATO statement about Russia’s war against Georgia.  Is it the high stakes involved?  Or is it some kind of bureaucratic mindset, along the lines of holding a meeting to discuss the household’s options when fire breaks out in the kitchen, a sense that anything can be solved in a conference setting?

This one, though - appeasing the thugs of Fatah and Hamas - is really puzzling, as it all occurs at such close range.  There are no oceans to cross.  In fact, prior to the enhanced security measures of the last few years, Israel got a very up-close-and-personal look at many of these vest-and-belt-attired “partners in the search for peace.”  They were infiltrating Israel proper and blowing up pizza parlors and bus stops with increasing regularity.

A complete recognition of evil entails acting on that recognition.  It means “co-existing” with those who embrace evil in an appropriate way.

It’s often pointed out that suicide is a serious transgression against God. Some argue that it’s on a par with murder.  That’s becasue one’s life is not one’s own.  One is granted stewardship over it by it Author.

Carelessness has suicidal overtones to it.  Certainly, recklessness does.  The interesting thing is that an overabundance of caution - known in its extreme form as cowardice - constitutes a type of recklessness.  In the case of dealing with evil, this is clearly so.  It’s a plain spiritual truth that you can’t interact with those given over to evil the way you can with normal people.  You invite your own demise.  Seen this way, the folly of negotiating with those known to hate you may qualify as sin.

In any event, it’s a dumb thing to do.  To return to my question about how resolve anc clarity get eroded, it may be that what happens is that the principle of habit comes into play.  Something done once becomes easier to do a second time, and then even easier subsequent times.

The real answer to this question would come from observation of more instances of it.  The problem with that is that we can’t afford any more of such data-gathering. 

Then again, maybe all 200 of these prisoners released by Israel today will go home to families, jobs and lives of productive civilization-building, and everything I’ve asserted here will be proven wrong.

Any bets?

Syria and Lebanon have normalized relations.  I guess that questions about all those assasinated Parliament members and cabint members will go unanswered.  So much for the Cedar Revolution. 

Are the people in Israel in a position to react to the strategic implications of this getting ready to do so?

Russia and Georgia have gone to war over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

I actually spent a week in this area some years back, in Sochi, A Russian Black Sea resort a few miles from the Georgian border.  Tea plantations on the terraced Caucasus hillsides.  Little stands on the beaches that sell fresh-picked cherries, of all  things.  Nice people, as I recall.  I don’t know enough about the ethnic balance ins South Ossetia to draw a conclusion as to whether it is more of a Georgian or Russian place, but it appears that Russia rolled its tanks and sent its fighter jets into an internal Georgian matter.  Since that’s the case, the UN Security Council will surely have to weigh in on the matter.

Then things get tricky. The EU and the civilized world generally is trying to display a unified front in the push to get new sanctions in place against Iran, and fast, and Russia has already trotted out the old “Why don’t we give them some more time” routine.

This whole area is also, let us not forget, where a whole lot of the world’s oil originates and makes its way into shipping lanes and ports.

I’ll bet there are some very interesting behind-the-scenes conversations going on among the visiting dignitaries in Beijing along about now.

Take a look at who was seated in the room with Ahmadineljad when he stated - can we call this their formal response to the EU deadline? - that Iran would continue uranium enrichment at ever-greater levels.  Would this be the same Bashar Assad of Syria who has supposedly been indicating he wants “peace’ with Israel? 

And meanwhile, Javier Solana and his band of EU clowns is still saying, “Well, we’re not married to an exact fourteen-day deadline, you understand.  We can give them a couple more days if needed on this highly sensitive matter.”

What I want to know is how this news item stacks up sequentially with the recent noises one hears about Ehud Olmert wanting to conclude such a “peace” deal with Syria - which, yes, involves giving up the Golan Heights - before he resigns, but more importantly, this rather noteworthy development.  Who offed Assad’s top advisor, and did Assad know about it before going to Tehran for the weekend?

Olmert to resign as PM in September. Now, if a critical mass of Israelis can be assembled to give that Kadima “centrism” nonsense the heave-ho, the West may have a real sign of encouragement.

McClatchey news service thinks child-skull-crusher Samir Kuntar is a swell guy to shoot the breeze with (and also thinks it’s fine to lie about the civilian-death figure in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war).

The much-ballyhooed sit-down between Undersecretary of State Wiliam Burns and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili was a dud from the get-go.  This whole line of effort is so stupid.  We’ve had three rounds of sanctions, numerous incentives packages and now a high-level meeting.  The upshot:  Iran has told the West, “Go pound sand.  We’re going to keep right on enriching uranium, and we still envision a world without that filthy Zionist regime or the Great Satan America.”

Our State Department is a very sick institution.  It lets North Korea make a mockery of the notion of honoring its deadline obligations  in the Six-Way Talks agreement, it sees a constructive partner for talks on a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians even when that partner, Mahmoud Abbas, sends “blessings” to the family of released child-killer Samir Kantar, and it keeps prattling on about what Iran needs to do to “avoid further isolation” and quit being “unhelpful.”

There is no such thing as a “way forward” in any of these situations.  It’s time - it was time three years ago - to quit talking to any of these enemies and instead demonstrate adherence to some principles, state clearly what will not be accepted and what we understand we may have to do and experience to to stop any crossing of that line.

Debbie Schlussel on Israel’s lopsided prisoner swap and the subsequent Hezbollah gloating.

Is this new Mediterranean Union a real breakthrough in mideast and southern European developments, and is Sarkozy some kind of paradigm-shifting visionary?

You do have to hand it to him.  He got Israel and Syria to sit at the same table and bandy about the term “normalization.”  The whole thing bears continued observation, and tempered optimism isn’t unwarranted.  Many questions have to be addressed, though.  Syria has much explaining to do in the mater of the string of Lebanese political assasinations over the past few years, as it does for the nuclear reactor it was building with North Korean help last year (and which Israel zapped).  And it’s still hard to see what kind of security guarantees it could give Israel that would be worth banking on should a transfer of Golan Heights possession proceed.

You do kind of have to wonder if this sudden flourishing of goodwill isn’t fueled by a motivation to be on the side with the most allies in the escalating tensions between the West (and much of the Arab world) and Iran.

The Freedom-Haters’ standard-bearer channels Senator Global Test.  Shoot off your mouth, find out another key constituency (or perceived constituency, which, in this case takes some perceiving, since we’re talking about the Israel-hating Abbas) didn’t care for what you said, and then backtrack.  Hope those with really big megaphones stay all over this.

 . . . and that’s saying something, as you know.  The point is that all “peace processes,” regardless of the Secretary of State or US President or UN official who spearheads it, are pointless.  The other side has no interest in Israel’s continued existence.

It’s here.

While W and Olmert were meeting in Jerusalem, Hamas was slamming a rocket into an Ashkelon shopping center, wounding at least 14.

Ahmadinejad says the “Zionist entity” is celebrating its 60th to whistle past the fact of its impending “annihilation.”

In a nice MSM touch of moral equivalence, AP sees fit to say that “threatening exchanges betwee Iran and Israel have intensified since 2005.”

Hizbollah is effectively in control of Beirut.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit is doing excellent work providing video and photos of streetfighting, as well as informative links.  Hizbollah is putting up posters of Syrian president Assad in areas it takes over.  Also, Iran is blaming “the Jews” for the whole thing.

The CIA has briefed Congress on the Syrian nuclear reactor that the Israelis zapped last September.  By now, you know that it was built with consultation and materials from North Korea.  It seems that some in the administration are concerned that this jeopardizes the “diplomatic process” in both northeast Asia and the Mideast.

Take a moment to fully let in the irony of a Republican Representative, Pete Hoekstra, holding the position that this situation proves the failure of this whole “diplomatic” track, and a Democrat such as Howard Berman supporting the administration’s quest for a “diplomatic” solution to all this.

And watch the linked interview with John Bolton.

We have most assuredly entered the age of post-non-proliferation, and that has strategic and, indeed, spiritual consequences.  There are consequences attendant to our insistence on seeing the potential for goodwill where none exists.

Ehud Olmert is officially using schedule issues as his excuse, but it’s pretty clear he’s snubbing the terror-loving, freedom-hating all-time worst US president and ex-president Jimmy Carter for going to Damascus to meet with the head of Hamas.

Iran, you may have heard by now, is firing up 6,000 centrifuges, certainly enough to make nukes.

Charles Krauthammer says that, since the W administration has utterly failed to stop Iran in its quest to get nukes, the next president is going to have to institute a deterrent policy, which Krauthammer calls the Holocaust Declaration.  Basically, it would assert that a nuclear atack on Israel would be regarded as the same thing as an attack on the US.  Krauthammer says the focus needs to be on Israel, because Iran isn’t capable of hitting a Western target any farther away.

It’s a sound policy, but he may want to rethink his formulation in light of this development.