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Tuesday, Apr 09, 2002

land rover

"This is the Age of Maps. Forget for a moment those 15th-century creations, with their romanticized sea monsters and crudely conceived land masses. More than 99 percent of all maps � ever � were made in the past century. Keep a sharp eye, and maps will start popping up on such things as cereal boxes, bus stops, emergency exits, and license plates."

blue jeans

"Levi Strauss & Co., the 149-year-old manufacturer of blue jeans, yesterday virtually abandoned its decades-long effort to keep an American icon from becoming just one more foreign import."

Monday, Apr 08, 2002

kabul spite

"KABUL, Afghanistan, April 7 � Victims of the bombing in Afghanistan handed in petitions from 400 families to the American Embassy here today, part of a growing movement to demand compensation from the United States for the loss of their families and homes."

the fixer

"In substance, "Sharon has not changed his position. What he is offering at the end of this is his original proposal of an interim peace agreement," Benn concludes. "In any case, he is not prepared to give Arafat any chance whatsoever. His characterizations of Arafat were unusually harsh in the Knesset speech."

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

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