Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Huckabee’s NRA Speech, September 28, 2007

And somehow, by the grace of God, when I squeezed the trigger, my Weatherby .300 Mag, which has got to be the greatest gun, I think, ever made in the form of a rifle — for my sake in hunting, I’ve never squeezed the trigger and not gotten something — did its work, and somehow the angels took that bullet and went right to the antelope, and my hunt was over in a wonderful way.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

In the outpost of Shvut Ami, next door to Palestinian village of Funduq, settler youth plastered the walls of a building owned by a Palestinian family.

Isabel Kershner, Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements - New York Times, December 8, 2007

SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — For two months, Jewish youths have been renovating an old stone house on this muddy hilltop in the northern West Bank. The house is not theirs, however. It belongs to a Palestinian family. And their seizure of it along with the land around it for a new settlement outpost is a violation of Israeli law. The police have evicted the group five times but they keep coming back.

Yedidya Slonim, 16, one of the renovators here, who grew up in another West Bank settlement, Tzofim, said of the police: “We come back straight away, as soon as they’ve gone. They come every week for half a day. It doesn’t bother us so much.”

The cat-and-mouse contest here lays bare a key dilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Israel has pledged that it will permit no new settlements in the territory it has occupied since the 1967 war, no more expropriation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of unauthorized outposts — like this one — erected since March 2001, but it has never applied the muscle needed to do so.

“Shvut Ami is a chronicle of failure of law enforcement,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer who represents the Palestinian owners of the house on behalf of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer organization that fights for Palestinian rights. In this respect, he said, the area is “a jungle.”

Norman Podhoretz, Dark Suspicions about the NIE, Commentary » Blog Archive, December 3, 2007

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.

Ramon’s speech to the Israel Policy Forum, December 6, 2007

On December 3, Israel’s Vice Prime Minister, Haim Ramon addressed the Israel Policy Forum’s annual leadership event. The following is a summary of his remarks.

Exactly sixty years ago, a great leader named David Ben-Gurion decided to adopt the partition decision. The partition plan gave Israel 55 percent of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Jerusalem was not part of this Jewish state.

Still, Ben-Gurion decided that this was the golden opportunity that the Jewish people had been dreaming of for a generation—the creation of a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion decided, therefore, that the most important thing was not the size of this state but its substance.

Ben-Gurion declared independence even though the majority of his own party was against him. Ben-Gurion knew that the day that he declared the Jewish state, a war would start with all the Arab states. Still, Ben-Gurion understood that if he did not establish a Jewish state, its time might never come.

Sixty years later, the most important thing is to maintain Israel as Jewish and democratic. What was Ben-Gurion’s legacy? In 1950, he said in the Knesset that the Jewish people had to choose between the dream of greater Eretz Israel or the Jewish state, and that he preferred the Jewish state over the dream of the greater land of Israel.

That choice remains with us today. Therefore, we have to understand that the occupation is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. If we don’t bring an end to the occupation, the occupation will bring the end to the state of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.

This is not about conceding something to Palestinians. It is rather about trying to secure the Jewish state.

YouTube - Huckabee: Divine Providence Helps My Poll Numbers, December 4, 2007

STUDENT at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University: Recent polls show you surging… What do you attribute this surge to?

HUCKABEE: There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Students applaud–rapturously.) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well. That’s honestly why it’s happening. (More rapturous applause.)