This sure looks like Israeli terrorism. There are evil fools on both sides, it appears (actually, this has been true for years).
(via Jeff Cooper).

I’ve talked endlessly about the need for a ‘moderate’ Palestinian politics to step forward in order to have any chance of meaningful peace, and my belief that there was a substantial number of people living on the West Bank and in Gaza that weren’t sold on the “Palestine from the river to the sea or Death” meme.
There have been some encouraging signs here and here. These are not conclusive, nor answers, but they are steps in what smells like a right direction.
Commenter Mostapha Sabet pointed this out:

Something that bothered me is how a lot of people sort of blew off the Fatah announcement. Saying things like, “Oh, well the Pals don’t consider settlers civilians” or “They only said they would stop attacks on civilians not all targets” without recognizing that this may be one small step in the right direction, but it’s a huge step in the quest for peace. Now there is a somewhat major group (and growing in relative strength as IDF wipes up Hamas) that might actually prove to be a voice of reason. Let’s hope it sticks.

I think this is critically important, and goes to my apology to Ziska, because it is incredibly hard to fight against and opponent and still maintain their humanity, but it is necessary because someday the fight will be over.
Aram Rubyan pointed out in a comment that I was wrong to apologize, inferring that humanizing the Palestinians was the wrong way to go.
I disagree. I think that Israel is right to use force to defend itself, and as long as the Palestinian leadership persists in propagating their evil “River To The Sea” fantasy, that defense will be fierce. And the people on the sharp end of the spear will doubtless have feelings and attitudes about their opponents which are not humane and charitable and warm.
Which is why it is important for the rest of us to do so. Because of our distance we can both fiercely defend Israel, as I have done – as far as words can go – and humanize and sympathize with the individual Palestinians who are trapped by bad leaders, evil allies, and damaged culture.
Someday, this fight will be over. All fights are.

I’ve been working on a post on the whole ‘wilding’ thing, and it just keeps on coming out badly. Maybe it’s just that I am friends with too many cops, and see the damage done to them – and to their ability to be what we want them to be – by the overt hostility coded in these articles. I want to write something thoughtful and evenhanded and my emotions keep getting in the way.
Here’s the objective point: First, there is error in any system, and our system of justice is no different. Some of the error is caused by bias, some by laziness, some by unavoidable chance, all of it is tragic. Every system of justice has the same problems, and has had them for as long as there have been systems of justice…or human systems of any kind. What is unique about ours is the very faith in its perfectability…in the attainability of a justice beyond that given through personal relationships, connections, clout, or bribery. On one hand this faith is misplaced…the reality is that we are nowhere close to there.
But on the other…on the other…the goal speaks to virtually everyone in our society. The shining, Platonic, unattainable ideal of perfect justice is one that we do believe in, and fight for, and the genius of our system is that it lets us do it, and harnesses our desire for it, and does so in the name of progress toward the unattainable perfection. It speaks to us, and we act on it.
I think that’s great, and that’s what I spoke to when I gave my opinion on this case.
I think that sets our system of justice apart from any other that I have read about.
I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for.
And what I don’t see in these rounds of endless criticism is a real belief in making the systems better; what I see is a wholesale rejection of the systems…the brutal cops, corrupt prosecutors, the enforcers of the intolerable status quo…that protect the middle-class critics, who seldom acknowledge the benefit of the protection they receive.
See, I believe that there are Really Bad People out there…and that there are many of us who given the right circumstance can be really Bad. The police and the folks in the criminal justice system deal with it every day, at its very bad worst.
We need them. It’s a crappy job done for little money and less respect. It has its own satisfactions, and the good cops I know live for them…for the times they can save someone, the times they can “hook up” a bad guy, the times they can bring some justice and order to an unjust and chaotic world.
I know the “choose” the job, but as a consumer of their services, I’ll tell you that we all have a vested interest in seeing them do as good a job as possible.
Some, very few of them are corrupt in meaningful ways (not talking about free donuts); some are racist, some cruel. But fewer today than ten years ago, and fewer still than fifty years ago.
Some of my employees do a bad job, too. Sometimes my sons do bad things. But I find that a blanket condemnation is seldom a good way to get good performance out of them; and if you want to deepen the “us v. them” chasm, the kind of criticism I’ve seen levied at the NYC folks seems like a pretty good shovel.
So I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to set out the logical social critique of the case and the arguments; I’ll work on it and try to do better.

He’s losing faith in the whole blogging thing, so go visit him and leave some intelligent comments.

I still can’t believe my dad can even log onto the internet, let alone have a friggin site……

William Burton hits another brilliant post out of the park. he expresses, in one post, the process that took me months to understand and realize; that while I didn’t like the Israeli policies, they never, ever, in any way, justified the current spate of suicide bombings.
Zika reminds me that the people on both sides are human, and they are. But some of them haven’t been acting that way. He also reminds me of the campaign of the Tamil Tigers, who also used suicide bombers…including those who assassinated an Indian P.M.
I’ll do some more research, but I’ll bet that the prime targets of the Tamils weren’t pizza parlors, but military bases and military and political figures.
Different game, Ziska…guerilla war, not terrorism.
The good news is that the Palestinian ‘moderate middle’ I looked for appears to be appearing. I’m sure it’s hard to give Sharon credit for anything, but it looks like something is working.

Ziska points out, in a comment below:

Actually, the point I was trying to make, and failed completely to make, was that you shifted gears between the Israeli individual and the Palestininan “they”.
You could have commemorated a Palestinian victim without even softening your opposition to what “they” are doing, simply by commemorating (for example) commemorating the 18-year-old woman who was recently killed by thei’m Palestinian Authority because her uncle (who was also lilled) had implicated her in Israeli intelligence work. Or you could have commemorated apolitical Palestinians who die because of the curfew.
So what we got from you was a humane comment about real people with real lives (Israeli) followed immediately by the same old objectifying talk about “they” (the Palestinians).

I was wrong, and will remember that.

Here’s a new-to-me blog with some sensible commentary on the Central Park case: Just One Minute; take a look. I’m working on a more philosophical piece, but having stayed up Really Late last night (the concert ended close to midnight and was an hour and a half away) and danced a little too hard, I’m taking some Motrin and going to bed. I wonder if the twenty-year olds have to do that…(not really)…
(Link from Instapundit.)

The family of a terror victim in Israel has asked bloggers aroundthe world to link to her memorial page. I’m honored to comply. Go to Remembering Shiri Negari, and be reminded that while we wave our hands and have high-level discussions about policy, real people with real lives bleed and die. It will give you perspective.
I do not doubt that there is real tragedy on the Palestinian side as well; when they stop trying to get my attention by killing Shiri’s, I’ll be happy to talk about it.
Link thanks to Ted Barlow.

Well, two of my favorite bloggers are having a dustup over fun, of all things. Instapundit and Ted Barlow are bickering over Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the idea that:

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ”One Less Car” T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

Instapundit gets all ironic about it:

This is funny, but it’s a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it’s cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people — I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?

and then Ted gets genuinely upset:

Glenn has fairly complained about liberals who look at the Right as if it’s always and everywhere Birmingham in 1963. Then he turns around and talks about the left as if it’s always and everywhere Berkeley in 1985.

Geez, guys, lighten up.
First, and foremost, am I the only one who caught a whiff of self-depreciating irony in Beam’s column? The last half of the paragraph above drives the skewer right home:

Who would you rather be? Goo-goo good guy Warren Tolman, painstakingly explaining his position on the School Building Assistance Program? Or Mitt Romney, who has his own, no-frills education plan: Send them to (private, tony) Belmont Hill! It worked for his kids – why won’t it work for everybody?

and does it in what I’d consider to be a pretty damn fair (hence pro-liberal way). I read Beam’s column as a mild satire, playing on the stereotype of the humorless, crunchy liberal while actually hammering home a few pretty good pro-liberal points – good government and building schools is a liberal program, sending your kids to tony private schools isn’t. Beam then goes on to throw a few well-placed elbows at the stereotype…including Taki as an example of the ‘fun-loving’ right.
The danger of daily punditry is that quick reads miss obvious things, and we’re all reading too damn quickly. I think that Beam’s column was a bit of pointed fluff, that Glenn picked up on it to beat one of his favorite dead horses, and that Ted rose to the bait like a trout.
Look, here’s the deal. There are a bunch of people in the world…on the left and right…who are pissy and unhappy by nature. They tend to become bad bureaucrats and bad pastors. Somehow, about the time George McGovern got nominated, they captured the levers of liberal power over here (I don’t know European political history well enough to know when it happened over there, but it did), and the ‘don’t play with scissors’ crowd became the vanguard of leftist thought.
Me, I’m a leftist; how are — government-sponsored health care, support for unions, a higher minimum wage, stronger environmental laws, a biiig gas tax, support for same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, strong public schools, support for a woman’s right to choose – as credentials? I do think we need to temper those with the understanding that Stalinist command-and-control aren’t always the best way to get there, and that the new information technologies and the social and management structures enabled by those technologies ought to change the tactics we use to get from here to there. And most of all, I think that we need to design these in a way that encourages responsibility and individual accountability.
But enough serious stuff; I’ve led a life with just too damn much fun; my sexual history would make Dawn blush; vodka, hell – I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the pharmacopoeia; I’ve seen U2 at the Roxy, Nureyev at the SF Opera House, the Beatles at the Bowl; dated centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; been married to two great women; held my sons when they were born, and spent their first night with them sleeping on my chest; driven away from my oldest son as he moved into his own home (but still took him to the drugstore to buy him condoms); sailed in through the Golden Gate at dawn; seen 145 on the speedometer of a motorcycle; spent the night with a dying friend; and seen the dawn just sitting and talking with the amazing friends I have made; and maybejusy maybe am lucky enough to have finally found the right woman for the rest of my life.
I’m off today to take my 15 year old to the ‘Inland Invasion’ punk show. I’ll be the 49-year old guy with glasses in the mosh pit.
So here’s the deal folks. I do think that the visible Left needs to connect with its joy, and its aggressiveness. We need leftwing Vodkapundits, and leftwing Rush Limbaughs…well, maybe not…and leftwing Instapundits, too. And we need the same things on the Right, and in the Radical Center and from the Libertarians, and the Vegitarian Unitarian Veterinarians, for that matter. I said something once on this blog a while ago:

Forgive me if this sounds sappy, but there are voices out there folks, a great chorus of different voices, and when you listen to the song we’re all singing…well, to me, the song sounds sort of like America.