Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Protesters scuffle with supporters of Rabin’s assassin outside jail - Haaretz, November 4, 2007

Leftwing and rightwing activists scuffled Sunday outside the Rimonim Prison where the killer of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is slated to hold his son’s bris later in the day.

Members of the left-of-center Meretz party gathered outside the Rimonim penitentiary where YigalAmir is incarcerated for the 1994 shooting of Rabin to protest the court’s decision allowing him to hold the Jewish rite behind bars.

In response, rightwing extremists organized a counter-protest outside the jail’s gates.
“All these years they told us court decision should be respected, and here comes along decision that isn’t comfortable and they attack it,” said Itamar Ben Gvir, a rightwing extremist….

The birth of Amir’s son comes at a time of growing sympathy for commuting Amir’s sentence. Right-wing extremists and Amir’s family have launched a campaign to have him released from prison and a recent newspaper poll indicated about a quarter of Israelis, including almost half of religiously observant Jews, think Amir should be pardoned in 2015 after serving 20 years.

Gideon Levy, ANALYSIS: Rabin memorial offers pop stars and empty cliches - Haaretz, November 4, 2007

Banot Nechama, this year’s pop music discovery, was not there last year, but this year the group joined Aharon Barnea, Shimon Peres, Aviv Gefen, Achinoam Nini (”Noa”) and Sarit Haddad, these memorial rallies’ house bands. Last year the writer David Grossman, then a newly bereaved father, was at the podium, crying out against our hollow leaderships, and hearts were briefly stirred. Last year not a single speaker - neither the authors nor the the intellectuals - had anything meaningful to say at the hollow memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin, which resembled a late-summer Caesarea reunion of the legendary Israeli group Kaveret more than anything else.

The audience was, as always, the same: self-described Ashkenazi, secular, leftist and peace-loving. How good and pleasant it is to stand in the square once a year and feel a part of this warm family, with these excellent Hebrew songs in the background, with the last-minute decision to have the newly bereaved Hagashash Hahiver member Shaike Levy singing “Shir Hare’ut.”

For a moment last night, everyone awoke from a year-long coma: Peace Now, the Labor Party, Meretz, Hashomer Hatzair and the Noar Ha’oved youth movement with their blue shirts. Journalist Aharon Barnea once again put on the angry-prophet suit he wears once a year in early November: “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive,” he thundered, uttering the slogan that was once the province of Holocaust memorial assemblies.

The cliches washed over the square, the “hope,” the “legacy,” the “victory,” the “peace” - no one knows what they really mean.

Anthony Lewis, reviews Dead Certain by Robert Draper and The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith, New York Times, November 4, 2007

Three years after the American invasion of Iraq, after endless searches had found no sign of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush still believed that Saddam Hussein had had them. He expressed that conviction repeatedly to his chief of staff, Andrew Card, until Card left the White House in April 2006.

So writes Robert Draper in his unusual biography of George W. Bush. It is unusual because Draper, a national correspondent for GQ magazine, was given extraordinary access to this press-averse president and his aides, including six private meetings with Bush, surely in the belief that he would be a friendly biographer. Draper is friendly, at times admiring. But he also unhesitatingly supplies devastating evidence of the characteristics that have helped to produce the disasters of the Bush presidency.“Dead Certain,” the title, conveys one of those characteristics. Bush knows he is right. When facts turn out to get in the way, he brushes them off. When “Mission Accomplished” turned sour in Iraq, when various supposed bench marks of success did not stop the bloodshed, the president remained utterly confident of victory. He was sure, Draper writes, that “history would acquit him.”