American critics, beginning with the secretary of state, object to this goal of destroying Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. As The Washington Post explained in an editorial, we need the continued presence of “the leadership of the Palestinian Authority as well as its principal security services” because they have been “the only available instruments for stopping Palestinian terrorism.”
Good God. Instruments for stopping terrorism? They are instruments for aiding and abetting, equipping and financing, supporting and glorifying terrorism, which they call “martyrdom operations.” The question of capabilities is irrelevant. Of course they have the capability. But they have no intention of exercising it.
This is like arguing at the beginning of the Afghan war that we should not attack the Taliban because they were the only instrument in Afghanistan available for bringing al Qaeda to heel. Sure. But they were allied with al Qaeda, commingled with al Qaeda and shared al Qaeda’s objectives. They had no intention of ever stopping al Qaeda.
A Palestinian woman received a kidney donated by a Jewish victim of a suicide-bombing. Can anyone imagine the reverse occurring? A Jew receiving an organ from a Palestinian who was killed by Israelis?
Compare and contrast two cultures–one that celebrates murder and destruction, and another that offers life to its enemies, born from the deaths that they cause.
[Update at 2:45PM PST]
James Taranto, via Instantman, links to a WSJ article that’s almost the opposite.
However, it’s still not quite symmetrical–in both cases, it was the Israeli health-care system that was responsible. My point was that it would be hard to imagine a Palestinian state, at least one that in any way resembled the existing Palestinian Authority, doing such a thing.
My new Fox News column is up. It’s mostly recycled from here, but I do have some new stuff in the “Letters” section on my give and take with the creationists that I inadvertently brought out of the woodwork last week.
My new Fox News column is up. It’s mostly recycled from here, but I do have some new stuff in the “Letters” section on my give and take with the creationists that I inadvertently brought out of the woodwork last week.
My new Fox News column is up. It’s mostly recycled from here, but I do have some new stuff in the “Letters” section on my give and take with the creationists that I inadvertently brought out of the woodwork last week.
She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.
All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).
But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.
She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.
All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).
But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.
She’s just letting this Palestinian representative sit there and lie to her, and not challenging him. He says that it’s “nonsense” that they teach children to martyr themselves in the schools. He says that “no one” would support their childrens’ suicides.
All she would have had to do was to have some tape cued up of these lunatic Palestinian mothers bragging about how they wanted to send their sons off to die. Or some graphics of some texts from the madrassas. Or some tape of the Arafat praising the martyrs in Arabic (it would be effective with English subtitles, and he would have looked like a real ass trying to say that that wasn’t what Arafat was saying).
But no, she didn’t bother to prepare for this interview. I preferred the rotation that Fox had before Greta came aboard. It was inconsistent, but it wasn’t consistently incompetent.
Derek Lowe, over at the Lagniappe blog, has a nice little summary of the current state of medical science.
In the long run, I fully expect gene therapy and antisense to fix what can be fixed at the genomic level. Downstream, I think we’ll eventually get control of protein expression, which should take care of another huge swath of trouble. Small- molecule folks like me (or the next generation after me) will take care of the rest. And as we go after diseases, we’ll also be figuring out how to deal with the normal damage of aging. I don’t know how long the human life span can be extended, but I’m certain that we don’t have to live it in poor health. We may not know the exact mechanism of Alzheimer’s, for example, but we know that it’s the result of something going wrong, something that can be fixed. Damn it, show me something that can’t be fixed!
Me, too. People who believe that aging is inevitable, and that there’s some physical law that prevents us from preventing it, are living in some non-materialist otherworld. Our bodies have been designed to age by nature. We can redesign them, as long as we don’t deify “nature.”