Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Time after time, Israel strikes at civilian homes and civilian vehicles attempting to flee the besieged southern border zone, killing families without any military objective in sight.
In an extraordinary, and extraordinarily revealing comment, the Israeli Justice Minister, Haim Ramon, reportedly said, “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way [...]
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Filed under: Near East, foreign policy, politics
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, [...]
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Filed under: Near East, foreign policy, hegemonism, politics
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Andrea Kirk Assaf has a couple other posts worth looking at: she cites an article from Christianity Today by the dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary, Martin Accad, who makes an impassioned plea on behalf of the people of Lebanon and does not accept the easy justifications of any party to the conflict. She also [...]
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Filed under: Christianity, Near East, foreign policy, politics
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
I was talking today with a former U.S. diplomat and a Washington “insider” who made the following comment: “I’m beginning to suspect that the Israeli military has been ‘Americanized.’ They seem to repeating our mistakes in Iraq. Very discouraging for them and for us.” This is coming from someone who is a critic of the [...]
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Filed under: Near East, foreign policy, politics
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
This blindness on the part of “conservative” American Catholics is partly ignorance; even many of those who have heard the words Melkite and Maronite have no particular interest in trying to learn anything about either rite, must less trying to grapple with the history of these Christian populations or even being bothered to find out [...]
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Filed under: Christianity, Near East, foreign policy, politics, religion
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The newest issue of The American Conservative has brought together thirty short articles from a number of prominent, primarily traditional conservative and libertarian writers and scholars on whether the terms conservative and liberal and the modern Right/Left opposition have any meaning and, if they do have any meaning today, what that meaning might be. Rod Dreher has excerpted from a number [...]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
How, exactly, publicly humiliating Maliki and making him look like an American and Israeli stooge would enhance his “leadership” was never explained in the missive. But of course Reid’s letter wasn’t really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that’s George W. Bush’s problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and [...]
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Filed under: Near East, foreign policy, hegemonism, politics
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel “proportionate” attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.
Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly [...]
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Filed under: Near East, foreign policy, politics
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The Turkish military, for example, is a defender of Turkish liberalism – flawed though it may be — against the threats it faces from, among other things, democratic Islamic populism. ~Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg
The Turkish military is a defender of Kemalist secular republicanism, which is not necessarily anything like liberalism (in the Continental [...]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
By bombing all of Lebanon rather than merely the concentrated Hezbollah strongholds, Israel is putting extraordinary pressure on Lebanese society at points of extreme vulnerability. The delicate post-war democratic culture has been brutally replaced, overnight, with a culture of rage and terror and war. Lebanon isn’t Gaza, but nor is it Denmark.
Lebanese are temporarily more [...]
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Filed under: Near East, politics
