Faith

I support your right not to believe in G-d. I support every person's right to make their own decisions about religion: to believe in one God, or many, or none at all. To practice religion as a traditionalist, or as a liberal, or a reformer or a heretic or an apostate or an unbeliever. To embrace revelation or to reject it. To pray facing Jerusalem, or Calvary, or Mecca, or not to pray at all. To follow a single, absolute, fixed line of belief, or to change your mind a hundred times a day about what you believe and why you believe it (the latter is closer to my own faith). And I expect that you respect every other person's rights. A faith coerced is no faith at all; and a faith that justifies evil is an evil faith.

As a believer, I stand with the unbelievers.

Nick Cohen: Case Against Saddam Still Stands

Nick Cohen:

It's 10 years since the overthrow of Saddam and 25 since he ordered the Kurdish genocide. I can guarantee that you will not hear much about Saddam's atrocities in the coming weeks. As Bayan Rahman, the Kurdish ambassador to London, said to me: "Everyone wants to remember Fallujah and no one wants to remember Halabja." Nor, I think, will you hear about the least explored legacy of the war, which continues to exert a malign influence on "liberal" foreign policy.

Iraq shocked liberals into the notion that they should stay out of the affairs of others. Of itself, this need not have been such a momentous step. A little England or isolationist policy can be justified on many occasions. There are strong arguments against spilling blood and spending treasure in other people's conflicts. The best is that you may not understand the country you send troops to – as the Nato governments who sent troops to Iraq did not. But unless you are careful you are going to have difficulties supporting the victims of oppressive regimes if you devote your energies to find reasons to keep their oppressors in power. Go too far in a defence of the status quo and the idea soon occurs to you that an oppressive regime may not be so oppressive after all. ...

Peretz on New New Republic: 'I Don't Recognize Magazine I Used to Own. We Were Liberal But Not Narrowly Partisan' | NewsBusters

Peretz on New New Republic: 'I Don't Recognize Magazine I Used to Own. We Were Liberal But Not Narrowly Partisan' | NewsBusters

One does not simply walk into Fordow.

Sabotage! Key Iranian nuclear facility hit?

Geoffrey R. Stone: What Is a Liberal?

Geoffrey R. Stone: What Is a Liberal?

Shoot the NRA!

Via PowerLine, John Cobarruvias tweets: "Can we now shoot the NRA and everyone who defends them?"

Well, let's see. May you? Certainly, you have my permission. Can you? Well, you can certainly try.

Now let's think about this. The National Rifle Association and its supporters are, by definition, gun nuts. They are avid firearms enthusiasts who own and knowledgeably operate a wide variety of firearms.

So the plan is to shoot all of these people; using, presumably, guns. But what if the NRA do not agree to be shot? What if - heaven forfend - they shoot back? And that, alas, is the fatal flaw in the plan.

The Drain

Eric Allen Bell: The Drain

... The drain says that a killer and a rapist was the final prophet of "god". But that which is Infinite needs no such final spokesman. That which is Infinite, it thinks you, it breathes you. It needs no special vows, chants or hymns, as all of creation sings its praises. It is nameless and all names. You can hear it in every word and in the silences between each word. You can hear it in the sound of the breeze. You can find it looking out through your eyes.

The dark drain in the dry desert sucks in only those who seek to avoid knowing who and what they truly are. But if we remove the drain, if we were to blast it from the sky - would we remove also the condition in man which caused it to be built? To see the drain is to be free of it.

Republican Lesbians Come Out

New York Times:

In 1996, Kathryn Lehman was a soon-to-be married lawyer working for Republicans in the House of Representatives. One of her major accomplishments: helping to write the law that bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Today, Ms. Lehman, 53, no longer has a husband, and no longer identifies as straight. And she is a lobbyist for Freedom to Marry, which is devoted to overturning the very law she helped write, the Defense of Marriage Act.

But Ms. Lehman is still a fervent Republican.

“I’m trying to break the stereotype that all gays and lesbians, especially lesbians, are Democrats,” she said.

Although the Republican Party has long drawn gay men who believe in the party’s message of small government and a strong military, Republican lesbians are a rare political breed.

“Oh, we’re like unicorns,” said Erin Simpson, 51, who cites “personal liberty” as a fundamental value and teaches firearms safety in Tucson. ...

GOP and Demographics

D. G. Myers at Commentary:

If the Republicans are going to be the party of married churchgoers, though, they need to change their tune on two key issues. They must drop their opposition to same-sex marriage, and they must quit obsessing over illegal immigrants. These two issues alone are almost entirely responsible for the Republicans’ image and reputation as the party of old white men.

What conservatives do not seem to grasp is that same-sex marriage is not an issue for gays only, but also for the young, who support it overwhelmingly, without question. And if the GOP really is the party of marriage, shouldn’t it be in favor of extending the goods of marriage to as many as possible? If marriage is everything we conservatives say it is, why should we want to deny its moral benefits to gays? The point is to stand for marriage, for an institution that promotes human freedom, and not to barricade ourselves behind the status quo ante. That’s how the party of freedom becomes the party of reaction.

I'm old enough to remember when Commentary, under Norman Podhoretz, published some viciously homophobic stuff. Commentary changed for the better, because it needed to change. The Republican Party needs to change too.

Saudi Arabia: Keeping Women In Their Place

Radical Islam: Tracking system monitors Saudi women.

A new tracking device monitors the movements of Saudi women. Any cross-border move prompts an SMS message sent to the cell phone of the women’s “guardian.” That means that any Saudi woman who tries to leave the country will be immediately found out by the man assigned to “monitor” her.

The “service” was intended to be elective for the guardian, but a recent incident showed that all men are being alerted through the new e-passport system, even if a man’s wife is travelling by his side.

The new system was publicized on Twitter by Manal al-Sharif, a well-known women's right campaigner and political activist, who received a message from a couple as they were leaving Saudi Arabia at the Riyadh international airport and the husband received a text message saying that his wife was leaving the country. ...

Sunday Morning Roundup

Israel: After Iron Dome, Magic Wand.

In the wake of the great success of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which was able to intercept many of the rockets fired from Gaza at populated areas during Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel is now pushing ahead with the development of Magic Wand, which is supposed to be able to intercept short-range and medium-range rockets.

According to a report in the Boston Globe on Saturday, Israel will test the system in the Negev in the coming days. ...

Egyptian protesters torch Muslim Brotherhood offices.

As enraged demonstrators torched Muslim Brotherhood offices in several Egyptian cities, a defiant Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi defended his recent decree granting himself sweeping powers before a crowd of supporters outside the presidential palace in Cairo Friday.

"Political stability, social stability and economic stability are what I want and that is what I am working for," said Morsi. "I have always been, and still am, and will always be, God willing, with the pulse of the people, what the people want, with clear legitimacy" he said from a podium before thousands of supporters. ...

CSP: Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin discuss Islamic influence in US policy with Frank Gaffney. Video is 1h34m, at the link.

Bill Federer: Pilgrims faced Muslim terror too.

How to build a political social network. The key ideas:

User-generated opinions
Single units of opinion
User verification
Surfacing and sorting
Open, demographically indexed data

Read the article at the link.

Israeli Artists, Intellectuals Sign Petition Urging End to Nasty Stuff

'When I read a survey that claims that 84 percent of the Israeli public supports this violent and foolish campaign, I am happy that at least a few public figures are willing to stand up to this.'

84 percent of Israelis may support the campaign, but journalist Yuval Ben-Ami knows better. He, along with other brilliant military strategists such as celebrated playwright and author Yehoshua Sobol, award-winning writer and painter Yoram Kaniuk, internationally acclaimed author Amos Oz, filmmaker David Ofek, Batsheva Dance Company founder Ohad Naharin, have declared that

Our hearts are with you, residents of the South. It is the government’s duty to protect you, but its way is not our way.

Well, personally I'd go with the government's way, but that's just me. I'm not a writer, painter, choreographer, or filmmaker, so what do I know? Anyway, I salute these creative intellectuals for their enormous courage.

And by "enormous courage", I mean "unbearable arrogance".

For me, the really sad thing about something like this - and this is scarcely the first such instance - is that it devalues these artists' work for me. Amos Oz, what a writer - I'm reading "A Tale of Love and Darkness" now. No doubt these people imagine that their stature as artists lends greater weight to their political pronouncements. It doesn't. It only tells us that these people - who have built their reputations on their supposed understanding of life and human nature - aren't as wise as they imagine themselves to be.