Sweden Confirms Its Neutrality Between Good And Evil

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The Swedes are throwing a hissy fit because the Israeli Ambassador, visiting a museum exhibit associated with a Swedish government-sponsored conference on genocide, took offense at a display of offensive “art” and literally pulled out its plug.

(The Israeli government says that the Swedes promised not to link the conference to the Arab-Israeli conflict — which, BTW, Reuters mislabels “the Middle East conflict.”)

Meanwhile, the “artist” — a lefty Israeli “peace” activist — said, essentially: Hey, what are you so upset about? It’s just an exhibit, we were trying to raise consciousness about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what about freedom of expression, etc., etc. And a representative of the Swedish government expressed outrage that the ambassador had the temerity to damage sacred art, etc., etc.

To the “artist” and the Swedish government, I say: fuck you. Yeah, the Israeli ambassador lost it, but you provoked him. He took the bait and now you get to tut-tut about his emotional reaction and make sanctimonious statements about “art.”

The message I get is that the Swedish government cares more about art exhibits and moral posturing than it does about the lives of Jews. Would the Swedish government tolerate, at an official conference, an “art exhibit” portraying Hitler sailing in a lake of Jewish blood? More to the point, would the Swedes tolerate an exhibit showing the Jewish mass murderer Baruch Goldstein sailing in a lake of Arab blood? Would they tolerate an exhibit that could be interpreted as insulting to Muslims or Arabs? To ask this question is to answer it.

Maybe I, like the Israeli ambassador, am overreacting, but my impression is that the ambassador isn’t the problem here.

UPDATE: I am happy to learn that the Israeli government is supporting the ambassador:

Sharon said he called Mazel Saturday night and thanked him for his stand against rising anti-Semitism. “We are witnessing a rise in anti-Semitism, and will increase our efforts to fight the phenomenon,” he reportedly told the cabinet.

Good. Let the bastards worry about offending Jews, for a change.

(Link: Yehudit)

UPDATE 2: Bjørn Stærk has a contrary view.

Human Ingenuity

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article addressing a problem I have worried over since September 2001; the vulnerability of cargo containers and the intermodal transit system to large scale catastrophic terrorism. Companies such as NaviTag and Savi have been working on “smart” cargo containers, steel boxes equipped with satellite tracking, two-way communication capabilities, and/or sensors to monitor temperature, shock, and radioactivity.

Within the article, someone who finds fault with the new technology is an official of Maersk, the biggest container company in the world, who says the technology “could send out false alerts, leading to costly shutdowns of terminals”. I wonder what would be more costly, several one-day terminal shutdowns, or the cleanup from a low-tech radioactive dirty bomb shoved into an unsecured container somewhere along the way?

Mark Steyn on the West’s Muslim Problem

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Right, as usual:

Fifteen years ago, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was declared and both his defenders and detractors managed to miss what the business was really about, the Times’s Clifford Longley nailed it very well. Surveying the threats from British Muslim groups, he wrote that certain Muslim beliefs “are not compatible with a plural society: Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organising society as a whole.”

Since then, societal organisation-wise, things seem to be going Islam’s way swimmingly – literally in the case of the French municipal pool which bowed to Muslim requests to institute single-sex bathing, but also in more important ways. Thus, I see the French interior minister flew to Egypt to seek the blessing for his new religious legislation of the big-time imam at the al-Azhar theological institute. Rather odd, don’t you think? After all, Egypt isn’t in the French interior. But, if Egypt doesn’t fall within the interior minister’s jurisdiction, France apparently falls within the imam’s.

And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying “Censorship!” if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don’t know about you, but this “multicultural Britain” business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.

The Struggle for Space

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As Jonathan kindly notes below, I’ve been space-blogging up a storm recently over on Arcturus, mainly because we’re in the busiest stretch of space news since the tragic events of last February. I feel that I owe Chicago Boyz some commentary of a less purely technical and more interdisciplinary nature.
(Besides, I know what they’re thinking: He seems like a pretty good guy, but did the Common Core really take? So I need to prove myself by talking about, y’know, humanities and stuff.)
Anyway, for the purposes of getting something out here for everybody to chew on, I’ve identified three conceptual difficulties that interested observers — mostly Americans, but plenty of foreigners as well — are experiencing as they hear the back-to-back news of varyingly successful ongoing activities in space and leaks of the Administration’s proposal for the next generation of space exploration.
I’m listing them in order of (my perception of) increasing difficulty, or decreasing tractability. The first is pretty much negotiable. The second is much more fundamental, but subject to melioration. The third, in combination with sufficiently powerful political institutions, could be a show-stopper, the more so since I can’t recall ever seeing it written about elsewhere — it’s an “unknown unknown.”

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