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Obama Says Israel Was Right To Bomb Suspicious Syrian Site: Flip Flop Expected Shortly

From Nasdaq:

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that Israel was right to bomb a site in neighboring Syria last September which the U.S. and Israel suspected was a nuclear facility.

When asked if it was appropriate for Israel to take out the Al-Kibar site in a remote desert area of northeastern Syria, Obama said “Yes.”

“I think that there was sufficient evidence that they were developing a site using a nuclear…or using a blueprint that was similar to the North Korean model,” Obama told CBS News in an interview.

“The Israelis live in a very tough neighborhood where a lot of folks publicly proclaim Israel as an enemy and then act on those proclamations,” the Illinois senator said.

Washington claims Al-Kibar, razed to the ground by Israeli planes in September, was a nuclear facility built with North Korean help and close to becoming operational. It has provided intelligence and photographic evidence to support its claims.

As for Israel’s strategy towards Iran, Obama said he “will not hypothesize” on the possibility of an Israeli strike against Tehran and its nuclear facilities.

Tehran claims it is developing a nuclear energy program but Western nations including the U.S. and its European allies are convinced Tehran is trying to build an atomic bomb.

“I think Israel has a right to defend itself, but I will not speculate on the difficult judgments that they would have to make in a whole host of possible scenarios,” Obama said.

Obama was interviewed in Amman, Jordan, in the midst of his regional tour that saw him also visit Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel. He is due to visit Palestinian territories Wednesday before traveling to Europe.

Seal The Evil: Why Terrorist Homes Need To Be Destroyed

Terror against civilians must be rooted out. The war against terror needs to be prosecuted to the utmost. Let those who contemplate the most heinous of crimes against us know that their deeds will bring swift punishment upon them and those who have supported them. Let them think of the price that their families will pay for their terror. Let their neighbors know that they are not alone – we will protect them too from thugs who would destroy their lives.

Yesterday’s victims of terror do not seek revenge – only to spare other innocents from our horror. Only diligent deterrence, not misguided empathy, will ensure this.

From The Jerusalem Post:

As the latest act of brutal Jerusalem terror was yet again perpetrated by an east Jerusalem Arab, the question of punishment and possible deterrence is again being raised: Should terrorists’ homes be destroyed? David Forman recently disparaged the razing or sealing of terrorists’ families homes in an opinion piece in this paper (“An exercise in practical stupidity and moral idiocy”).

Unfortunately, his essay is as full of factual mistakes as it is of misguided moral thinking. Forman could not even get the terrorists’ Jerusalem neighborhoods right. He mistakenly wrote that both the Mercaz Harav murderer and the first bulldozer terrorist came from Sur Bahir. Actually, only the latter did; the former lived in Jebl Mukaber – a fact reported in scores of newspapers, The Jerusalem Post included.

Forman also claimed that the prime minister and defense minister had already decided to seal their homes – yet after Tuesday’s assault no such operative decision had been made by either the government or the Knesset – although many have expressed support of such deterrent action being taken and various legal options are still being considered. As of this writing (Thursday), both homes stand untouched.

While the first mistake indicates sheer laziness (or worse), the second is the type found in many anti-Israel writings – playing loose with facts so as to highlight alleged Israeli cruelty.

BEYOND THESE relatively simple errors lay ones even more insidious. Space does not permit me to disassemble all the fallacious points – so I will focus on one alone. Forman derides “administrative demolitions” of east Jerusalem dwellings in general as giving in to “emotion” and the “rule of the street” – that is, capitulation to Jewish public outrage at terror. However, the opposite is true. Administrative demolitions are exactly that, administrative actions taken to enforce building codes and the like. East Jerusalem is full of illegally built dwellings, dangerous homes with no permits. Their demolition upholds the rule of law, flouted by those like the Mercaz Harav murderer’s family who have illegally expanded their residences without any of the proper municipal permits.

And here lies the emptiness of Forman’s actual main point – that the destruction of terrorists’ homes is immoral. What Forman misses in his misplaced empathy for “the victim” is that abandoning the strict enforcement of the law – as in winking at east Jerusalem’s building infractions – places its residents at the mercy of the most vicious of its elements and strips from them any hope of the very normal life which he claims (and I hope) the majority desire. When criminals have no fear of justice, the just themselves live in fear.

IF THE government does not act with the utmost force against terrorists – those who incite to murder and, yes, even those who house them – it offers those east Jerusalem Arabs who wish us no harm no hope of living peacefully under the rule of law. Intimidated by criminals and villains, they themselves shudder at Israel’s hesitance to enforce the law. If one’s neighbors can build dangerous structures with no zoning control and redress is not to be had, to where can they turn for protection from terrorists’ plots and plans if the state abandons them to lawlessness? Deterring terror is part of defeating terror.

Despite Forman’s citation of an outdated IDF report, just yesterday Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Israel’s top antiterror agent, argued that home demolitions can and should be a part of our war against terror. If the government does not take action to dismantle the Palestinian incitement machine that preaches murder to tots and does not focus on law enforcement even in the Arab sector from whence these terrorists come, it abandons all of those who need the law’s protection.

Terror against civilians must be rooted out. The war against terror needs to be prosecuted to the utmost. Let those who contemplate the most heinous of crimes against us know that their deeds will bring swift punishment upon them and those who have supported them. Let them think of the price that their families will pay for their terror. Let their neighbors know that they are not alone – we will protect them too from thugs who would destroy their lives.

Yesterday’s victims of terror do not seek revenge – only to spare other innocents from our horror. Only diligent deterrence, not misguided empathy, will ensure this.

The writer is the father of Avraham David Moses, who was killed in the Mercaz Harav massacre.

Soledad O’Brien’s “Black In America”: CNN Fails Again

From The Chronicle Review:

Did anyone catch Soledad O’Brien’s special on CNN, “Black in America,” these past two evenings?

I watched it in a room full of academics, which probably explains why I was part of an audience that spent most of the night collectively (and very vocally) appalled by just about every single decision that the producers made: the spoken-word segues out of every single commercial break (delivered, it seems, from an indoor basketball court, no less); the under-reliance on black female talking heads as authoritative voices on the African-American experience; the too-easy partitioning of purportedly black men’s and black women’s social issues into separate broadcast nights.

Just to be fair, I should make sure to watch the entire broadcast again, but my initial expectations might have been too high, too unrealistic.

Did anyone else see it? If so, what did other folks think?

During the first night’s broadcast, Harvard economist Roland Fryer explained his oft-cited and controversial effort to incentivize academic achievement among young black kids by paying them cash to do their school work. The children and parents profiled in the piece touted the experiment’s positive impact on student performance. They believe that it has already begun to reap real benefits.

Detractors maintain that there is something short-sighted about reducing intellectual productivity to immediate monetary gain. What about teaching young people the benefits of deferred gratification? Might commoditizing test scores represent the ultimate vulgarization of public education? Do we really want an educational system that unabashedly promotes the entrenched legitimacy of materialism as a kind of normative good?

I have to admit that I find these critiques pretty compelling, even as I remember my stepfather’s monetary deal with me: a dollar bill for every 100 percent test score that I brought home from elementary school. Was that the reason why I made it out of the projects in Brooklyn and into the Ivy League? I don’t think so, but Fryer wants to prove me wrong.

The Muslim Guide to Piety

…I’m sure that there are plenty of American textbooks that contain insane, incorrect or otherwise unacceptable information. Saudi schoolbooks, however, are a special case. They are written and produced by the Saudi government and are distributed, free, to Saudi-sponsored Muslim schools as far afield as Lagos and Buenos Aires. This doesn’t mean every child who reads them will hate non-Muslims, but Americans are not the only ones who worry about the influence of these books: In Britain, a small political storm broke out last year when Saudi books calling on Muslims to kill all apostates were found in mosques there.

From AEI:

Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice exams, the bane of any fourth-grader’s existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report last week by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, it seems that the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education finds them useful, too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question from a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, “Monotheism and Jurisprudence,” in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish between “true” and “false” belief in God:

Q. “Is belief true in the following instances:

(a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.

(b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.

(c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.”

The correct answer, of course, is (c): According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn’t enough to simply worship God or just to love other believers; it is important to hate unbelievers, too. By the same token, (b) is wrong as well: Even a man who worships God cannot be said to have “true belief” if he also loves unbelievers.

“Unbelievers,” in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who attends Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught outright that “Jews and Christians are enemies of believers.” They will also be taught that Jews conspire to “gain sole control over the world,” that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.

These passages, it should be noted, are from new, “revised” Saudi textbooks, designed to be less harsh on the infidels. After an analysis of earlier textbooks caused an outcry in 2006, American diplomats approached their Saudi counterparts about modifying the more disturbing passages, and the Saudis agreed to conduct a “comprehensive revision . . . to weed out disparaging remarks toward religious groups.”

The promised revision–hailed at the time as a great diplomatic success–was supposed to be finished by the beginning of the 2008-09 school year and was accompanied by a Saudi public relations campaign. Among other things, the Saudis sponsored an interfaith dialogue this week, one that all participants hailed as a great breakthrough–despite the fact that the meetings took place in Spain, apparently because it would be too embarrassing for Saudi Arabia to host Christian and Jewish religious leaders on its own soil. But now the beginning of the 2008-09 school year is nearly upon us, the only textbook revisions have been superficial and the most disturbing part of the books’ message–that faithful Muslims should hate Jews and Christians–remains.

Normally, the contents of another country’s textbooks would be of no interest, and, indeed, I’m sure that there are plenty of American textbooks that contain insane, incorrect or otherwise unacceptable information. Saudi schoolbooks, however, are a special case. They are written and produced by the Saudi government and are distributed, free, to Saudi-sponsored Muslim schools as far afield as Lagos and Buenos Aires. This doesn’t mean every child who reads them will hate non-Muslims, but Americans are not the only ones who worry about the influence of these books: In Britain, a small political storm broke out last year when Saudi books calling on Muslims to kill all apostates were found in mosques there.

Still, even if U.S. diplomacy is a legitimate response to this peculiarly insidious form of propaganda, it clearly isn’t a sufficient response. Far more significant, and surely more effective, would be a unified response from the rest of the world’s Muslims, the vast majority of whom do not share Saudi views and occasionally say so. It would be useful, for us but especially for them, if they would say so more often and more loudly.

The United States, of course, is not a Muslim nation, and Americans cannot by themselves orchestrate a meaningful Muslim response to Saudi extremism. But we do have a large Muslim population, we do have friends in the moderate Muslim world and we do have some money–mostly wasted–to spend on public diplomacy. We also have two presidential candidates who are arguing hard about the best way to combat terrorism, the best way to deploy guns and aid, the best uses of American military power.

Here is a novel idea for both of them: Make sure that children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and in Islamic schools all around the world have decent fourth-grade textbooks. Help persuade the Muslim world to write and distribute them. It might save a lot of trouble a few years later on.

Gore’s Climate Claptrap: ‘dangerous nonsense;…obscures the critical questions that need to be carefully considered’

Gore claims that “the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.” Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth, and lying about it to the American people is no way to advance the public’s understanding of this difficult issue.

Here is a simple truth that everyone who actually cares about climate change should understand: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions costs money. Reducing them a lot will cost a lot of money. Drastically reducing them very quickly will cost vast amounts of money. And, no matter what we do, cutting them enough to stop warming without the cooperation of major developing economies such as China and India will be impossible.

From The AEI:

Al Gore continues to build a remarkably mixed legacy as the leader of the movement to combat global climate change. For many years, the climate debate focused primarily on the scientific questions; today, that controversy continues but it is increasingly marginal in political circles, where attention has turned to the far more difficult task of developing an effective policy response to warming.

Mr. Gore’s activism on the science of climate change has earned him the attention of the world; when he speaks, everyone listens. But what they hear from him on climate policy is sheer nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense; Gore deliberately obscures the critical questions that need to be carefully considered when crafting climate policy. Gore’s proposal to produce 100 percent of American electricity from renewable sources within a decade should be rejected–indeed, ridiculed–even by those who share Gore’s goal of combating climate change.

Almost no one believes Gore’s proposal is even technically feasible, much less economically realistic. This is the sort of goal that a politician plucks out of thin air just because it sounds bold; it has no bearing on reality whatsoever. Renewables produce roughly 2.3 percent of our power today; it may be possible to increase that number significantly, but the idea of generating all of America’s electricity with renewables within a decade is simply laughable. Underscoring the absurdity of this agenda is Gore’s silence on the one source of energy that realistically could quickly produce significant amounts of reliable, affordable, zero-emissions energy: nuclear.

Gore’s sympathizers might naturally argue that it makes sense to look at climate policy questions from the perspective of this idealistic goal–in other words, we need an absurdly ambitious goal in order to prompt more modest action. That is a charitable interpretation of Gore’s strategy–and unfortunately, one without foundation. Gore is not clarifying the choices we must make in crafting a realistic climate policy, he is obscuring them. Caught between Gore’s obfuscations and Bush’s inarticulate inaction, it is no wonder that Americans are confused about what a realistic climate policy might involve.

Gore claims that “the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.” Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth, and lying about it to the American people is no way to advance the public’s understanding of this difficult issue.

Here is a simple truth that everyone who actually cares about climate change should understand: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions costs money. Reducing them a lot will cost a lot of money. Drastically reducing them very quickly will cost vast amounts of money. And, no matter what we do, cutting them enough to stop warming without the cooperation of major developing economies such as China and India will be impossible. These facts do not mean that we should do nothing to cut emissions, by any means–but understanding these inconvenient truths must be the first step towards crafting a realistic climate policy.

Yes, there are opportunities for businesses and consumers to conserve energy or produce more of it from zero- or low-emission sources. Many creative people are pursuing these ideas, and as the cost of oil rises, more alternatives have become cost-effective. America, the world’s climate pariah, is actually doing quite well at finding these opportunities to cost-effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions–far better than the European countries that ratified Kyoto. Sensible government policies can certainly accelerate this process.

But the real challenge of climate change lies in the scale of the problem. It is relatively easy to make very modest reductions in emissions; in the short term, it is virtually impossible to cut them deeply enough and quickly enough to actually stop warming. We can save money and cut emissions by picking the low-hanging fruit–taking advantage of opportunities to eliminate waste and conserve energy. That is happening, and it will continue. But when that’s done, we will still need to climb the biggest tree imaginable and pick it clean if we want to curtail warming–and that is not going to be an economical proposition in the immediate future, no matter what Gore tells you. No government policy could make it so. Honesty about these costs is a prerequisite to any serious conversation about whether they are justified.

Gore promises that switching to renewable energy sources will save us from high energy prices–conveniently ignoring that renewables cost more than the high-carbon content fuels that Gore wants to eliminate. You don’t make energy cheaper by eliminating the most abundant and affordable sources of it. It is not possible to cut the cost of energy by shutting down every power plant in the country that runs on the cheapest, most abundant, domestically available fuel–coal (which generates 49 percent of our electric power)–as well as the second largest source of the same, natural gas (20 percent). Prematurely retiring more than $500 billion worth of energy infrastructure is not the key to renewed economic growth, to say the least. It couldn’t be done, but if it were attempted, it would cause economic ruin. If America thinks that this is really what climate policy demands–and what it promises–it may well decide it prefers the Bush approach after all. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what happened the last time that Gore controlled climate policy.

Democratically elected governments tend to focus on policies that provide short-term, tangible rewards. They are notoriously poor at confronting long-term problems such as the Social Security deficit. Drastic, rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will impose significant costs while producing no tangible rewards in the short term. To be effective, these policies must be maintained for many years. Voters may well elect representatives who will enact costly measures to cut emissions–but the chances of maintaining those policies for long in the face of rapidly escalating costs are virtually nonexistent. Even if Congress enacted Gore’s agenda, when the bills came due in a few years–at a time when China’s emissions will be experiencing double-digit annual growth with no end in sight–the backlash from voters would set the green movement back decades.

If we are to have any hope at all of crafting sensible climate policy in the coming years, we must at least learn from our worst mistakes, and have a healthy respect for the risks that poor policy may entail. An important new book from one of the nation’s foremost environmental economists, William Nordhaus, makes this abundantly clear. If we do nothing to halt it, global warming is likely to cause $23 trillion in damages by the end of the century. Sound policies to address it would be highly beneficial–generating as much as $3 trillion in net benefits–but poorly designed climate policies could be nearly as damaging as warming itself. Gore’s proposal to cut U.S. emissions by 90 percent by 2050, Nordhaus calculates, would have a net social cost of $21 trillion–the equivalent of taking $63,000 from every person in America. The danger that climate change poses is twofold, therefore: the risk of environmental damage, and the risk of economic disaster arising from poorly designed climate policies.

We hear frequently from environmental advocates that only greedy oil companies and cowardly politicians stand between us and a sound climate policy. That is a convenient story line–but it is far from true. Arguably, the single biggest obstacle to sound climate policy today is the nonsense that we hear from naïve advocates like Gore who refuse to even acknowledge the real-world complexities of the issue. The world has essentially wasted the last fifteen years pursuing Kyoto; we have almost nothing to show for it, and Gore to thank for that. Now, Gore asks Americans to believe that we can eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions virtually overnight and get rich at the same time. (Strangely enough, he asserts this while ignoring the fact that his own carbon footprint has been growing, not shrinking, despite his enormous wealth.) An honest environmental advocate would admit that rapid, large-scale emissions reductions will be very expensive; if we could agree on that basic fact, we could begin to analyze what approach to achieving those reductions might be most efficient and effective in the long run. That is a complicated and important question that serious scholars are working hard to answer. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an honest national conversation about it? It’s a shame Gore won’t be part of it.