Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Few western public officials understand the current geopolitical situation, and especially the rationale for promoting democracy in the Muslim world, as well as Sharansky does. Of those who do understand, I don’t think any can explain things as clearly as he can.
There’s a quite good interview with him now in the Jerusalem Post:
…because it increasingly seems that the first 3 digits must be one, nine, and three.
British film-maker Richard Littlejohn has released a documentary titled The War Against Britain’s Jews. Read this article, in which he talks about some of the things he has learned in his research.
I believe this program ran on Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday—don’t know if any reruns are planned.
Via Judith at History News Network.
Listening to the news about Gaza, Ignatieff’s
In such a terrorist cult, many praiseworthy moral virtues are inverted, so that they serve not life but death. Terrorist groups typically expropriate the virtues of the young–their courage, their headstrong disregard for consequences, their burning desire to establish their own significance–and use these to create an army of the doomed. In this way, violence becomes a career, a way of life that leads only to death. (131)
To meet its primary deterrence objective—deterrence of enemy first-strikes—Israel must seek and achieve a visible second-strike capability with the ability to target approximately 15 enemy cities. Ranges should encompass cities in Libya and Iran,with nuclear bomb yields at levels sufficient to fully compromise the aggressor’s viability as a functioning state. By utilizing counter-value-targeted warheads for maximum destruction, Israel could achieve the optimal deterrent effect, thereby neutralizing the overall asymmetry between any enemy state and the State of Israel. Enemy targets would be selected with the understanding that their destruction would promptly force the aggressor to cease all nuclear, biological, and/or chemical exchanges.
…
Israel’s Strategic Future is founded on the presumption that current threats of war, terrorism and genocide derive from a very clear “clash of civilizations,” and not merely from narrow geo-strategic differences. Both Israel and the United States are unambiguously in the cross-hairs of a worldwide Islamic “jihad” that is fundamentally cultural and theological in nature, and that will not concede an inch to the conventional norms of “coexistence” or “peaceful settlement.” This threat to unbelievers” is less than comforting to Jerusalem andWashington; however, it is a threat that must be acknowledged and dealt with intelligently.
“Israel’s Uncertain Strategic Future” by Louis René Beres (from Parameters)
For those who do not know about the history of the Russian radical movement I should explain that the title was not invented by Lenin. Very little was. This was the title given to an interminably long and boring novel by Chernyshevsky, which outlined in fictional form the ideas of radicalism. One of the great mysteries of the Russian soul is how a novel of such incredible turpitude should have become so popular in a country, which, at the time, boasted some of the greatest novelist in the world.