By now, most people sophisticated enough in the Blogosphere to have found this site will know the base facts about the SFSU flap.

It’s not all that different than the situation on many campuses: on one side, a core population of actively identified Jewish students, and other supporters of Israel’s existence (and, to a greater or lesser extent, defense policies); on the other a population of active Islamicists, as well as those who oppose Israel either in its existence as a Jewish state, or in its defense and foreign policies. But events at SFSU not only effect real people, but provide a good case study for what is going on at the other campuses.
Now, I’m not on the ground in San Francisco, and I’ll defer a little bit to some folks who have first-hand experience of the events there. But there are a few things that are incontrovertible and clear:

The pro-Israel/pro-Jewish side seems to be taking all or a vast majority of the physical damage;
The acknowledged racist comments are all coming from the pro-Palestinian side;
The powers that be are taking a “children, children, you shouldn’t both be fighting” moral equivalence stance. They have turned three students over to the District Attorney’s office for possible prosecution – two pro-Palestinian and one pro-Israel.

I haven’t reviewed the videotapes, and I’m not a police officer. But I’ve read the comments on the SFSU website, and on its face, this can’t help but leave the impression that the appearance of evenhandedness matters more than the truth.

And that’s just wrong.

Look, there are real arguments to make about what to do about the parts of Palestine that weren’t made part of Israel; there are arguments to make about what to do about the Palestinian Arabs who left Israel and who live with their descendants in the well-financed squalor of refugee camps.

And when pro-Palestinian students actively condemn violence and intimidation, instead of seeing them as “the legitimate political tools of the oppressed”, we can have those discussions.

When the windows of pro-Arab student groups are broken, and when libels against all Arabs are an official part of Jewish student’s political oratory, there will be moral equivalence.

I can’t for a minute imagine African-American or Latino students tolerating this kind of racist nonsense for a minute. They wouldn’t be begging the school administration to enforce the laws, the school administration would be calling out the riot squads to protect themselves and the window-breaking libelers, not to protect those libeled.

(This is a thought experiment meant to show how absurd the current situation is, I’m not suggesting that Jewish thugs are the solution.)

But there is an measurable difference between heated political expression and the politics of violence and intimidation. And it is in the nature of politics in our relatively free nation that it must be free from intimidation and violence; the other side – and there is an other side – sees intimidation and violence as everyday political tools. And, frighteningly, they are extending the kind of politics that we see on the ground in Arafat-controlled Palestine and bringing a kind of ‘lite’ version of it here.

The President of SFSU, Robert Corrigan, has convened a task force. As much as I hate to make Star Wars references – you’ll recall that’s what the Chancellor did when he couldn’t take action on the invasion of Naboo. And you’ll remember where that got him.

At the very least, people who are concerned should make sure he knows the whole world is watching, as we used to say.

More later today, including a discussion of why the ‘Days of Rage’ back in the late 60’s/70’s were different than what we are seeing here (hint: they didn’t identify and actively condemn a minority group).

Winds of Change has an index of other bloggers’ comments on this issue.

Well, Instapundit referred me to this – Victor Davis Hanson on Memorial Day in National Review Online, in which he poignantly reflects on his namesake and relative who died in the Battle for Okinawa.
And it turns out that he was raised in Kingsburg, CA, about 62 miles as the crow flies from Ponderosa, CA, on Route 190, where (I’m pretty sure that was the town…I’m looking at a crumpled map and it’s late) we saw the cemetary. And somehow reading his column, I felt an even stronger sense of connection to the old man selling paper poppies who told me about the chili cookoff and suggested we ride past the town cemetary. I’m glad we did, and sorry we missed the cookoff. I make pretty good chili – I’ve won a few cookoffs myself – but I’d bet I could have learned something.

Chris Bertram just paid off my ad. Wow, that felt good.
978 motorcycle miles this weekend, only about 85 of them on freeways. The edges of the tires are nicely worn, and everyone came home in one piece. Stopped at a small-town cemetary, all decorated in flags, and discovered that we had just missed the chili-cookoff conducted by local veterans, benefiting the local school.
Small-town America may have its own problems, but it produces a bunch of really really good people.

Well, we’re off to the Sierra to terrorize the locals on the motorcycle for Memorial Day. I had realized that I’ve been writing a lot about being a liberal, and not much about being armed, so here’s the beginning of something (have to go adjust the preload on the rear suspension…) about guns. Back Tuesday with more.
SHOOTING AND MINDFULNESS
I just realized that there have been a bunch of posts about politics and liberalness, and hardly anything gun-related at all. And I have to uphold the blog title, or it’s just posturing, after all.
So I’m trying to teach the SO (Significant Other) how to shoot; in part because it’s something I do and she wants to be able to participate (and doubtless, to quote Uncle Duke, my personal role model, to be able to “return fire”), and also because I’m trying to get my idea of mindfulness across to her.
In her case, it is in part because she is working to become a good motorcyclist, and riding successfully – which to say surviving – riding motorcycles calls for a number of skills, but first of all calm awareness, or what the Eastern meditative religions call mindfulness.

Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for Sati is ‘bare attention’. It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.
from Mindfulness in Plain English

I call it simply “the art of doing what you’re doing”. Most of us spend all our time thinking about all the stuff our minds consume…what I’ll put into the blog tomorrow, my Visa bill, what I’ll say at the meeting tomorrow, what was said at the meeting yesterday…and while our minds run with all this activity, they are only loosely tethered to what we are doing. While we’re talking on the cell phone, we aren’t doing a very good job of driving. In “The Empty Mirror”, a great book about Zen studies, the abbot accuses the Western student of being loosely tethered, of “brushing his teeth while pissing, which means you do a bad job of brushing your teeth and a bad job of pissing”.
For me at least, I find that shooting – particularly the kind of dynamic shooting involved in tactical or combat shooting – requires that kind of mindfulness.
Guns are heavy in the hand. They should be. Part of this is mechanical, the physical weight of the mechanism needed to contain the explosive power of the cartridges. And a part of it is the psychic weight of knowing this is a real weapon, and that you are suddenly both at risk and responsible.

Winds of Change leads with a cogent argument on why there will not be a nuclear exchange in South Asia in the immediate future.
Even Global News Network, the leading cause of sleeplessness in the Blogverse, is suggesting that the actors involved are getting some sense scared into them.
What an interesting year we are living in…

CNN.com – Fire at Israeli Embassy in Paris – May 23, 2002
I’ll repeat myself:
BOYCOTT FRANCE?? MAIS OUAIS!!

Bush Fled ‘Harm’s Way’ With 9/11 Flights
Excuse me?? I don’t recall that Ike hit Omaha Beach with the first wave either. In modern warfare, preventing “decapitation” — the loss of senior commanders — is considered a basic truism of warfighting. Our leaders aren’t tribal warriors, deciding matters in personal combat.
(Although I will admit that is sometimes a favorite fantasy).
The article isn’t as bad as the headline, but geez, people, could we show any more bias?
“COWARDLY PREZ FLEES, LEAVES WIFE TO FACE TERRORISTS ALONE!!”

Chris Bertram, who writes better than I do and appears to have a whole lot more time (hey, out in Blogland, how do you guys do it?), discusses Sullivan’s comments on social stratification and the consequences of the kind of insane inequality (which I am trying to label as SkyBox-ing) prevalent in America and Europe.
Part of his comments:

Andrew Sullivan is busy writing about the ‘overclass’, the super-rich. Of course, Sullivan being Sullivan he’s moved to assert that the vast inequalities that obtain in the world are inevitable, good and deserved. Of course, not all of his fellow conservatives are as sure as he is, Kevin Phillips is worried that you can’t sustain a genuine republic with the sort of inequality that obtains in America (and even in Britain today). And that’s an old worry, one that Montesquieu and Rousseau both articulated. If the public power, that should belong to everyone, is in fact at the behest of those whose wealth allows them to escape the problems of their compatriots, then alienation and cynicism will increasingly erode commitment to the political order. In the absence of a sense that citizens share one another’s fate then a republican or liberal polity will increasingly given way to a Hobbesian system where social peace is only maintained by changing the payoffs facing wrongdoers. (And my saying, yesterday, that retribution for crime in the UK should be swifter and more certain is a recognition that alienation here has become quite advanced.)

If you look at the “must-read” section below, you’ll see two books on legitimacy; you might guess that it’s an important topic to me.
It ought to be one to all of us. On a basic level, it implies that the allegiance and obedience the citizen offers to the state is earned and freely given from a core belief that the demands made are “legitimate”; that they serve some common interest in which the individual participates.
Look, you can’t have enough traffic police to enforce the laws everywhere. So obedience to traffic rules comes from two sources: First, a sense of “correctness”; a belief that the rules make sense, that we all benefit from the rule being followed, and that others will also follow the rule; Second, fear of punishment, either through direct consequences (an accident) or through the actions of other citizens or agents of the state (being threatened by someone you cut off, or being cited and fined by a police officer).
It ought to be obvious that the first source works better than the second. It works all the time, regardless of the state of enforcement; it is internalized so that each driver can freely respond to current situations. I’ll argue that it is morally better, as well, because it treats each driver as a responsible actor, rather than just a subject for enforcement.
But the first source depends on something which is in ever-shorter supply; a sense of the legitimacy of the rules, and a sense that one is connected to the others who are also bound by those rules. So why not run red lights?
Habermas and Schaar each have a different vision of why legitimacy is in short supply; they are rich and difficult to summarize, so I won’t right now. To those, I will add the simple fact of inequality as it exists today (and here I’ll poach from Montesquieu as noted by Bertram, above).
I’m talking about a level of ‘Gilded Age’ inequality that gives us Lizzie Grubman and all she represents, a sense of separation, entitlement, and inheritance which is mirrored by the people who read about her and are convinced that modern American society is structured for people like her, and not people like them.
The kind of separation between people in the SkyBoxes and the rest in the cheap seats.
And the consequence isn’t just bad views or a mild sense of disengagement between classes. It is a profound corrosion of the relations that tie society together, as those in the SkyBox decide that they are above the law, and those in the nosebleed section see no reason to obey, as the law does nothing for them.
So as the light turns yellow, they just gun it, and the rest of us just have to be very, very careful because we are the ones they hit.

You have to read this (by Ramachandra Guha from Granta, courtesy of Will Warren)
Unremitting Verse

From the Downtown News Online Archives

Much like the Bush Administration’s response to the Enron fiasco, Davis supporters insist that the governor’s appetite for campaign contributions only affects politics, not policy. Yet, in 2001, a $115,000 donation from a development company led to approval of a hotly contested reservoir project in the Sacramento Delta. The governor’s office successfully killed a bill that would have protected bank depositor privacy after top-drawer financial firms poured over a half million into the Davis campaign. Late last year, Davis refused to support a key teachers union bill after the group rebuffed his repeated demands for a $1 million campaign contribution.

I’m saddened that no one on the Democratic side of the aisle has the nerve to stand up to this. I’m even more saddened that the statewide media have laid down their Good Government ideals enough to give Davis a free ride on this.
Out of this kind of insane corruption, one hopes, comes reform.