Read her thoughts & observations, here.
Annika has been a leader in support of Israel and against Swedish anti-Semitism. Link
Israel
Caroline Glick speaking about “The Israeli Solution†for the David Horowitz Freedom Center
Caroline Glick, spoke on June 11, 2014 at the Union League Club in Chicago.
Her columns for the Jerusalem post are here.
She is promoting her book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East
I find her argument entirely convincing.
A key piece of education for me was the Israeli birth rates versus Palestinian Arab birth rates. Israeli Jewish women are having more babies than anyone else in the developed world.
Here is a video of the same speech, given recently in Washington, DC.
Here is the Q&A from that event, which she says is even more important.
Quote of the evening: “The only thing in the Middle East that works is Israel.” Right.
Never Again
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
For background on the above link, see here (via The Optimistic Conservative).
Quote of the Day
What self-described realists misunderstand when they pursue their cost-benefit analysis without emotion or regard for principle is that friendship and trust have value. In one chapter of Dancing with the Devil
, I explore the history of intelligence politicization. Iraq may now be the marquee example upon which many progressives seize, but intelligence politicization occurred under every president dating back at least to Lyndon Johnson, if not before (the scope of my book was just the past half-century or so). Iraq intelligence was flawed, but the world will get over it, especially since it was consistent with the intelligence gathered by almost every other country and the United Nations. The betrayal of allies, however, is a permanent wound on America’s reputation that will not be easy to overcome.
This is a chronic problem. We were able to get away with being a fickle ally when we acted like a superpower. Our allies had no choice but to deal with us; our adversaries had to be cautious lest they provoke us. We betrayed Kurds, Iraqi Shiites and other groups without paying much of a long-term price. It was easy to be casual about our alliances. We could afford to see one-dimensional cynical calculations of national interest as realism.
But now that we behave like just another country we are beginning to pay more of a cost for our unreliability. Our design margin, in Wretchard’s phrase, has eroded. It is increasingly difficult for us to protect our remaining interests. The Obama foreign policy is an inverse force-multiplier.
Our geopolitical situation is going to deteriorate faster than most Americans expect.
Roots of the Western Hostility Toward Israel
…some thoughts from Brendan O’Neill:
‘The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad; the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary.’
This cuts to the heart of today’s fashionable disdain for little Israel. What many Westerners seem to find most nauseating is that Israel is cocky, confident and committed to preserving its national sovereign rights against all-comers. In short, it’s a lot like we used to be before relativism and anti-modernism. I think that Israel reminds us of our older selves, our pre-EU, pre-green days, when we, too, believed in borders, sovereignty, progress, growth.
Now that it’s de rigueur in the right-thinking sections of western society to be postnationalist and multicultural, to be fashionably uncertain about one’s national identity, the sight of a border-fortifying state offends and outrages us. In the words of George Gilder, author of The Israel Test
If Israel is unofficially being made into a pariah state, it isn’t because of its foreignness, or even necessarily its Jewishness, but rather because it is too western for our liking. We loathe it because we loathe ourselves.
Read the whole thing.
I have often observed that, in the United States, there is a very high overlap between the set of people who hate Israel and the set of people who spell “America” with a “k”.