drat fink

View current page
...more recent posts

Monday, Apr 08, 2002

american star power

"The debate that is missing in the US is not one between Americans who want Israel to survive and those-a marginal minority-who want Israel to be destroyed. The US should support Israel's right to exist within internationally-recognised borders and to defend itself against threats. What is needed is a debate between those who want to link US support for Israel to Israeli behaviour, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage. For the American Israel lobby, Tony Smith observes in his authoritative study, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Harvard), "to be a 'friend of Israel' or 'pro-Israel' apparently means something quite simple: that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbours and that the US should endorse these terms, whatever they may be."

Sunday, Apr 07, 2002

star power

"No, the greatest danger to the Jewish people is spiritual and ethical: that we will stand by quietly and passively as we watch the country that calls itself "the state of the Jewish people" act in ways that are cruel and oppressive toward an entire people whom it has occupied and denied self-determination for the past 35 years. In this last week, Israel's occupation has gone from obnoxious to criminal, and the people involved will be remembered in Jewish history as betrayers of the Jewish people and its highest moral and spiritual traditions. Jews did not climb out of the gas chambers of Europe to be oppressors of another people. The deepest values of our people have been shaped by the history of our own oppression; yet in the past weeks we've become brutalizers without constraints, without historical memory, without moral or spiritual moorings. Fifty years from now people will be studying this period and asking themselves: "How did people alive at this time allow themselves to go along passively with this terrible distortion in Jewish life?"

remaindered

electronic intifada

a drain on leadership

"So it's alarming that, in the "root cause" department, Bush is doing roughly what Sharon is doing: dodging the issue. Of course, both men talk the talk. Sharon acknowledges the Palestinians' aspirations of statehood�it's just that it's never a good time to actually discuss them. When the Arab states unveiled their peace proposal�a vague and imperfect idea, but a major step forward�Sharon changed the subject, using the Passover bombing as the occasion to launch his massive incursion. (This seems to have pleased the bombing's sponsor, Hamas, which shares Sharon's aversion to the Arabs' two-state solution). Bush, similarly, says we need to address the sources of Islamic discontent, including poverty; but when it came time to open American textile markets to Pakistan�which Gen. Musharraf had requested in exchange for his courageous alliance with America�Bush balked. (He did so for crass domestic political reasons, as Franklin Foer has shown in the New Republic.)"

starry eyed

"It has been a long time since Santayana's maxim about forgetting history and repeating history could be cited without irony. The sentence--which first appeared in 1905 in a chapter on "Reason and Common Sense" in Santayana's book The Life of Reason--has been so often and oppressively quoted that it has itself become the very symbol of clich�, the most common way of teaching a platitude by example. Those who do not remember Santayana's maxim, you might say, are condemned to repeat it. But there is at least one precinct of American life in which the famous admonition still has the power to sting: the American government, and particularly the institutions of American foreign policy."

shed your grace

understanding america

pass the peas

red hot jazz archive

Saturday, Apr 06, 2002

cloner

"ROME, Italy -- A maverick fertility specialist is reported to have claimed that a patient is pregnant with the world's first cloned baby."

(re)making it

"Mary Tyler Moore Reunion Leads TV Nostalgia Wave"

real player

"During the last year or so technological realism has claimed its greatest triumph yet, as three major game systems made their debuts. Lives there an 8 to 18-year-old � or an adult guiltily aspiring to that state of mind � who has not yet heard about the technological accomplishments of Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube? Elaborate textures and sounds make earlier games seem like playthings. The humble controller that once maneuvered a diminutive and plump plumber named Mario across a television screen, allowing him to jump, bop and run, has now been pumped up like Lara Croft's bodice; the bloated Xbox controller has eight buttons, two triggers, three toggling switches and untapped possibilities. And the promise and threat of these systems caused sales of video game systems and games to jump 42 percent last year to $9.4 billion."

older posts...