The great discovery of religions: Be nice to others

In the debate that is currently being waged between accommodationists (those who believe that science and religion are compatible worldviews) and new/unapologetic atheists like me who argue that they are not, the accommodationists usually argue that each area of knowledge is separate and has revealed different truths that complement each other. But what are these great truths that religion has supposedly revealed? Here they are vague but recently the Dalai Lama wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled Many Faiths, One Truth where he takes a shot at addressing this. (Thanks to commenter Ross for bringing my attention to it.)
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Liberal democracy and religion-5: Israel’s bleak future as a democracy

The brutal behavior of the Israeli government in boarding an aid flotilla and killing some of the people on board and then justifying the action may have come as a shock to some but should not. For a long time, it has been clear that Israel is sliding further and further into becoming an authoritarian state based on religious orthodoxy that treats the Palestinians in the occupied territories with practices that strongly resemble the abhorrent apartheid policies that used to be practiced by South Africa.

Because of the rising influence of orthodox Jews, Israel has started making rules based purely on religion into laws that everyone, believers and non-believers alike, must follow. Recently Benjamin Netanyahu used the Bible to support his claim to be able to build in East Jerusalem.

Peter Beinart’s article describes how Israeli politics is moving farther and farther away from a liberal democracy.

Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.

The article goes on to say that the demographic trend of Israel’s Jewish population is going to make things even worse.

Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young.

While Israel still has a somewhat free press, there have been increasing efforts to suppress freedom of speech, going so far as to detain at the borders and then bar entry to the West Bank to Noam Chomsky when he had been invited to give a speech. The government even destroyed all copies of a newspaper that had an investigative report on the 2008 assault on Gaza. Uri Blau, the journalist who wrote it, even had to go into hiding, perhaps because it would have had stories like this one from a United Nations report:

Israeli ground troops ordered around 110 Palestinian civilians into a single home in Gaza City’s Zeitun neighborhood and ordered them to stay indoors on Sunday. On Monday morning, Israeli forces repeatedly shelled the building, killing at least 30 of the civilians inside. It then refused to allow ambulances to retrieve the dead and dying people for days.

What is going to happen is that as Israel comes more and more under the sway of its increasingly Orthodox religious right wing population, it will pursue even more racist policies towards the Palestinian people and become an even greater international pariah.

Instead of putting pressure on Israel to move in a more liberal democratic direction, the Israel lobby in the US actually encourages the authoritarian trend by trying to make sure that every politician in the US seeking high office swears unswerving loyalty to Israel. As a result, we have the executive and legislative branches willing to express support for almost any actions by Israel, even if it might harm the long-term strategic interests of the US. The way it manages to pull this off is by making it seem as if the interests of the US and Israel are identical. Glenn Greenwald recently highlighted New York senator Charles Shumer’s abhorrent views where he states that he supports the Israeli government’s view that the entire population of Gaza should be punished right up to the point of starvation. And the audience of Israel supporters in the US actually applauded him. Other US politicians and commentators have followed suit without any outcry at all, let alone at the level reserved for Helen Thomas when she said objectionable things about Israel.

In an interview, historian Tony Judt expresses his views on the long-term danger to Israel of depending on the unconditional support of the US and discusses how its current psyche of victimhood came into being.

In the case of both Israel and Iran, we see how easy it is for two countries that once showed promise of becoming liberal democracies to be steadily driven away from that under the sway of religious groups. As a result, the future of that volatile region looks exceedingly bleak.

If the appeal of religion is not nipped in the bud before religious groups can gain in strength, it seems like only a matter of time before those groups gain power and influence, with potentially disastrous results.

POST SCRIPT: Pandering to the Israel lobby

Each election season, we have the spectacle of politicians pandering away to Israel and the last presidential election was no exception, as this The Daily Show demonstrates.

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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For more on pandering to Israel, see clip here.

Liberal democracy and religion-4: The Iranian case study

Iran provides a good case study of how unstable liberal democracies can be when faced with concerted efforts by powerful forces determined to undermine them.

Americans were taken by shock when students occupied the US embassy in Teheran in 1979 and held embassy employees captive for 444 days. Ever since they have been bewildered by references of Iranians to the US as “The Great Satan” and have asked themselves the question “Why do they hate us?”
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Liberal democracy and religion-3: The European model

What is happening in Europe is an interesting example of the tension between religion and liberal democracy. The countries in western Europe are only nominally religious. As Dan Barker, co-chair of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said recently in a talk at CWRU, people in those countries usually enter a church only three times in their lives, and on two of those occasions they are carried in. It is surely no accident that these countries are also stable liberal democracies.

I think that a strong case can be made that lack of religious fervor is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for liberal democratic values to flourish. The US is perhaps the only country in which fairly strong religious beliefs co-exist with liberal democratic values and this is because of the existence of the first amendment to the constitution which has at least partly managed to keep any single religious group from imposing its will on everyone.
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Liberal democracy and religion-2: How to avoid conflict between the two

Based on the examples I gave yesterday, I would argue that religion and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. The reason is that democracy is a system of social organization that is based on rules that are arrived at either by consensus or by some democratic process. The ideals of liberalism are not given by god but have been arrived at over centuries by people trying to find the right balance between personal freedoms and the need for an orderly society. There is no higher authority for any law or constitution than the consent of the governed. If one wishes to change the laws, then one has to persuade ones fellow citizens of the benefits of the change and get them to agree in sufficient numbers.

The laws of religion, on the other hand, are supposedly given by god and usually written down once and for all in some text. They do not usually evolve with the times, except within limits. While there may be some flexibility in interpretation of these laws, they are non-negotiable in principle. The idea that there is a supreme, all-knowing power who knows best and lays down the rules pretty much eliminates the possibility of negotiations and compromise, a bulwark of the liberal democratic process.

Liberal democratic values can flourish only in those countries where religious beliefs are weak or non-existent. As long as religions and religious authorities are kept out of power, then democracy can exist. The problem of religion in liberal democracies is what to do when religious groups threaten to use the processes of democracy to take over the power of government and then impose their religious practices on everyone. When confronted with this possibility, you are forced into a choice between allowing undemocratic forces to exploit the democratic process to force everyone to live in a theocracy with its denial of basic freedoms of democracy, or using undemocratic means (such as banning religious parties) to prevent such a theocratic takeover. Neither of these outcomes is desirable since liberal democracy dies either way.

Is there a solution? I believe that the best thing to do is to not let religion gain a foothold in the first place. The only way to do so that is consistent with liberal democracy is to use our freedom of speech to show that religious beliefs are false, the idea of rights and values given by god makes no sense, and that no reasonable modern person should take religion seriously. If we can do that and make religion less appealing, then it becomes highly unlikely that religious political parties will ever gain power. After all, it is unlikely that any political party today that bases its platform on the sayings of Greek gods will win any elections because those gods have been discredited. It is not necessary to ban the worship of Greek gods or throw its believers in jail because believing in such gods is now seen as ridiculous.

This is where the current accommodationist policy of not criticizing religion, and even praising it for its supposed good qualities, shows its greatest weakness. It actually increases the likelihood of an eventual theocratic takeover by making religion seem like a good thing. What is worse, people bend over backwards to give religious special privileges that other groups don’t enjoy, such as tax-exempt status, and by pandering to religious leaders and practices, thus giving them greater credibility and actually enabling them to get even stronger. When we treat religious beliefs with reverence and act like religion is a force for good, we make political parties based on religion more likely to flourish and grow.

People who seek to avoid offending religious people by not criticizing their beliefs are thus in a bind. They cannot oppose religious political parties because of their religious basis since they claim that religion is a good thing. It is then hard to later turn around and oppose religious groups when they look likely to seize power and impose their religious rules on everyone.

Gideon Levy points out the dangers of increasing theocratization in Israel and of the special privileges that it currently gives to some religious groups, like being able to avoid serving in the military. He places the blame for this squarely on secular people who misguidedly treat religions as deserving of special treatment.

Orthodox society and its leadership should not be blamed for this. The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox have the right to do everything they can to impose their faith on the secular majority. It’s the secular who are to blame. Just as it’s not yeshiva students’ fault that they are not drafted, but rather the fault of the secular majority that allows this, so it is with the other aspects of our lives. We, the secular people, are to blame for all this. We’re the ones who give in.

Robert Fisk talks about the increasing influence of religious groups in Israel’s military.

Take Amos Harel’s devastating report in Haaretz which analyses the make-up of the Israeli army’s officer corps. In the past, many of them came from the leftist kibbutzim tradition, from greater Tel Aviv or from the coastal plain of Sharon. In 1990, only 2 per cent of army cadets were religious Orthodox Jews. Today the figure is 30 per cent. Six of the seven lieutenant-colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious. More than 50 per cent of local commanders are “national” religious in some infantry brigades.

There’s nothing wrong with being religious. But – although Harel does not make this point quite so strongly – many of the Orthodox are supporters of the colonisation of the West Bank and thus oppose a Palestinian state.

And the Orthodox colonists are the Israelis who most hate the Palestinians, who want to erase the chances of a Palestinian state as surely as some Hamas officials would like to erase Israel.

Fisk is wrong about one point, led astray by his own liberal democratic thinking. There is something wrong with being religious for the very reasons this series of posts makes and which he himself demonstrates in his article – religion and liberal democracy makes bad bedfellows.

This is why it is important in liberal democratic societies for us to prevent such scenarios from unfolding and the way to do that is to use the process of open discussion to show up religion for what it truly is, a waste of time and resources, a holdover of thinking from the dark ages, and a burden on society. If enough people can be persuaded that religious beliefs are useless and that those who hold them are as much holdovers from primitive thinking as astrologers and those who make decisions based on chicken entrails, then it is less likely that political parties based on them will ever be in a position to take over state power. And liberal democracy can be preserved by liberal democratic means.

Next: What is happening in Europe.

POST SCRIPT: Touchdown Jesus, R. I. P.

Why does god hate Jesus?

Liberal democracy and religion-1: Are they compatible?

I have argued repeatedly that science is incompatible with any religion, unless one claims that religion is nothing more than just a grouping of like-minded individuals who feel the need to engage in theological discussions and common rituals, similar to groupings of social and business clubs. As soon as you introduce a supernatural agency that is unconstrained by the laws of science that everything else operates under, you have abandoned the scientific worldview. So the answer to the question of whether religion is compatible with science is a simple ‘No’.
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The strange appeal of the Spelling Bee

My adopted hometown Cleveland has a serious self-esteem problem despite the fact that I have found it to be a nice place to live and raise a family and have been very happy here. Of course, it has many real problems that it shares with other mid-sized cities in the northeast, such as the poor economy, the effects of the housing crisis, schools in trouble, and declining population coupled with rising unemployment.
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Legality and morality

In this last post (I think) on the attack on the Gaza flotilla, I want to respond to a comment to a previous post in which Eric wondered why I was not paying more attention to the question of the legality of what happened with the blockade, the flotilla, and the attack on the Mavi Marmara, saying “I would think that the questions should start with legality, and if the laws don’t accurately reflect morals, maybe then they should shift to morality as we address the shortcomings in the law. But laws don’t originate in a vacuum. Moral questions often have many wrong answers and no right one, or vice versa. Legal questions may be (are) open to interpretation, but they (theoretically) have a right answer and a wrong one.”

Eric is right that legality may be easier to judge than morality, but this is true only when it comes to everyday life because there we have a commonly accepted legal framework and agreed-upon legal institutions to adjudicate cases, and the contesting parties agree to abide by the verdict and suffer any consequences.

But when it comes to actions by governments, the reverse is true and questions of morality are often far easier to determine than those of legality. The reason that you never get very far arguing on the basis of legality when criticizing governments is because they consider themselves to be supra-legal entities accountable to no one. It is only an impartial and international judicial hearing that can resolve issues involving governments, but both Israel and the US have ruled out even an impartial inquiry, let alone a trial before (say) the International Court of Justice. The US has even said that the ‘inquiry’ led by Israel would not allow the Israeli commandos to be questioned, making an even greater mockery of the process.

Furthermore, governments have the ability to make the law seem to justify anything that they do. Humorist Art Buchwald once wrote that the problem with the legal system is not incompetent lawyers but that we have too many competent lawyers.

A competent, first-class lawyer can tie a case up in knots, not only for the jury but for the judge as well. If you have two competent lawyers on opposite sides, a trial that should take three days could easily last six months. And there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it.

Peter Casey discusses the implications of this when it comes to high profile issues like the Gaza flotilla and how it is always possible to find people willing to argue legal points to a stand-off and then claim that the resulting inconclusiveness justifies the action.

What Buchwald was on to is the practice of “polishing the turd,” an indispensable art of the legal advocate. When two accomplished turd-polishers are pitted against one another, the jury – or the public – will not know what to believe. Further, when dealt a hand of bad facts by his client, an experienced and creative defense counsel will ply this skill by converting obvious and incriminating facts into an impossible puzzle of uncertainty.

In its many trials in the court of public opinion, Israel and its supporters have become adept at polishing turds. The process begins with asking and answering the question, “Did the law allow us to do this?” If the answer is “yes,” as it always will be, its critics are terrified of leaving that claim un-rebutted. And so, like moths to a flame, they respond. Once they do, the defenders of Israel’s actions are on safe ground. They don’t need to prove ironclad, irrefutable legal justification. All they need to do is persuade the target audiences that the law, the facts, or both are so complicated that anyone, especially in the heat of battle, could have made a mistake.

Take the case of the US government torturing people. Has consensus been reached that it is illegal? No, that ‘debate’ still goes on because Bush-Cheney could find lawyers like John Yoo and Alan Dershowitz to argue that torture is perfectly legal and then have that discussion drag on endlessly and inconclusively until people get sick of it and stop paying attention. In the same way, Obama has now got lawyers to say that it is perfectly legal for him to order the murder of anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world.

All governments claim that what they do is legal. It is precisely because governments have this sense that the law is whatever they say it is that lures them into ever more extreme actions which results in moral judgments being easier to make.

I am sure that the US could argue that invading Vietnam and killing half a million of Vietnamese and destroying that country was legal. Reagan would have argued that his invasion of the tiny nation of Grenada was legal. I am sure that Stalin felt that his orders to send people to the gulags where they died in huge numbers was legal. Slavery in the US was perfectly legal. It was even enshrined in the ultimate legal document of a country, its constitution. I am sure that Hitler’s lawyers argued that murdering Jews was perfectly legal according to German laws. I could go on and on with the list of all the appalling things that governments have done while arguing that they were legal.

But can anyone doubt that all these things were deeply immoral?

Frankly, I don’t give a damn if any of those actions were legal. They were horrific, morally repugnant, and deserve unreserved condemnation. It is for this reason that I come down especially hard on governments that act badly because the people harmed by them have no recourse except to appeal to world opinion or have a more powerful entity take their side. But that latter path is unlikely and even when successful can lead to wars, which often make things even worse. But in the case of the US, and also Israel as long as the US is its patron, even that option is ruled out for the people at the receiving end of their actions because no one has the power to force them to do the right thing. That is why they can, and do, act with impunity in world affairs, like rogue states.

In this particular case, I think the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza (which began long before the 2008 assault) is morally reprehensible. Israel is slowly but steadily starving the population of 1.5 million by allowing only one-fourth of the supplies it used to receive in 2007, even though even that amount was insufficient to adequately meet basic needs. In addition, the massive military assault in 2008 that destroyed a huge amount of its infrastructure such as fresh water supplies, electricity, and medical facilities means that Gaza requires even more supplies than normal in order to repair and replenish what was lost.

The Israeli siege is designed to collectively punish the entire population of Gaza, irrespective of whether they are aged or infants or sick, for electing Hamas as their government, by deliberately restricting food and other essential supplies to keep them in a state of semi-starvation and deprived of the essentials of life. This partial list of items that Israel has prevented from reaching Gazans, that includes flour, sugar, milk, diapers, toys, sweets, spices, toilet paper, diapers and baby wipes, feminine hygiene products, etc., has to be read to be believed to appreciate the sheer meanness, pettiness, and cruelty of the siege policy. The list reveals a deeply immoral mindset on the part of the Israeli government and makes abundantly clear that this policy was deliberately designed to humiliate Gazans and make their lives miserable by denying them the most basic of everyday items that we take for granted.

The policy decision to starve the Gazans was made at the highest levels in Israel and articulated in 2006 by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the then Prime Minister, who said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Is the use of such starvation tactics to punish a civilian population legal? Do we need to even have such a discussion? I don’t give a damn if it is legal or not. To me this is obviously a moral crime of the highest magnitude.

All this is taking place on top of the state of apartheid that Israel has imposed in the rest of the occupied territories, and its attempts to marginalize the Arabs who still live in Israel. Egypt is also part of this shameful blockade of Gaza and it is widely believed that it does so because it is a client state of the US, the second largest recipient of US aid (mostly military) after Israel, and helping Israel enforce the blockade on Gaza is part of the deal. Egypt has also become Israel’s client state by proxy through the US.

The US is the most powerful country in the world and is Israel’s protector and they feel that they are unaccountable to no one. Countries like North Korea and Iran may appear to be reckless and thumbing their nose at world opinion but they know that there are some lines they cannot cross because more powerful governments are able to do them serious harm. No such restraint exists with the US, or with Israel as long as the US unhesitatingly supports it. The only counterweight to lawless behavior by them is worldwide outrage.

That is why I support the efforts to end the siege of Gaza by those courageous people who went unarmed as part of the flotilla to dramatize the monstrous injustice that is being perpetrated. Was what they were doing illegal? Again, I don’t give a damn. I see the people in the flotilla as worthy successors to Gandhi and his followers who picked up salt (an acknowledged and deliberate illegal act) to dramatize the injustices they faced from the British. I see them, to pick something closer to home, as successors to the unarmed civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama in 1965 who were brutally beaten by the police on what has come to be known in the civil rights movement as Bloody Sunday. I see them as successors to the unarmed civil rights demonstrators who sat at lunch counters and in the front of buses and were attacked by Bull Connor’s police force using attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

I do not get deeply into the weeds of legal issues when it comes to governments because they will not agree on the legal principles to be used or submit themselves to courts and verdicts. They will instead use those interminable discussions to deflect attention away from the blatant immorality of their actions. What I do in such cases is comparative analyses, asking “what if…” questions, by switching the roles of parties. The role reversals do not always match up perfectly, but usually they are close enough that they reveal when people are taking a stand on a tribal basis (by twisting legal interpretations to make their own tribe appear to be in the right) and when they are doing so on the basis of some moral and legal principle applied even-handedly.

When, as was the case with the Gaza flotilla, large numbers of ordinary people from all over the world, with no particular ideological or religious or tribal allegiances, are willing to risk their personal safety to take action against a wrong that does not affect them personally but whose injustice they feel deeply, you know that you have an immoral policy on your hands.

Israel’s siege of Gaza and its apartheid policies in the West Bank are deeply immoral and any discussion of their legality should be seen for what it is, a side issue and a distraction.

The resistance on the Mavi Marmara

I had hoped to move on to other topics today but several commenters have raised some questions that I will respond to today and tomorrow. One is why some of the people in the Mavi Marmara resisted when those in the other boats, such as the Rachel Corrie, did not and were taken captive without violence. Thus, it is implied, the people who tried to repel the boarders were responsible for the ugly turn of events.
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When an American is not really an American

A truly astonishing feature of the non-reaction by the US government to the killing of an American by Israeli forces on the aid flotilla is how willing some people are to abandon their fellow citizens if the alternative is criticizing Israel’s actions. The latest example is the Republican Senate head John Cornyn defending the killing of Furkan Dogan.

Recall the situation when two unarmed Americans were detained by North Korea for crossing the border into their country or the efforts currently underway to get the release of three unarmed Americans who were arrested by Iran for crossing their border. Can you imagine the US reaction if any one of those people had been killed by the governments in the process of capture, despite the fact that they had committed an illegal act in crossing the border without permission? Would it have mattered at all if the North Koreans or Iranians had said they had been killed while resisting capture?

John Cole explains why the US seems so unconcerned by the death of one of their own, especially someone who was killed in such a brutal fashion as with four bullets to the head and one to the chest, which suggests an execution-style killing. He says that we now have two classes of people: “real Americans” and “not really Americans”.

What people don’t realize is just how nuanced America has become about citizenship.

When we decide if someone is a real American, worthy of all aspects of citizenship and defense by the government, we look at the totality of the situation. We look at what kind of citizen you are, what you believed in, what you were doing at the time you were shot four times in the head at close range by a foreign army as they stormed a ship in international waters, and a variety of other factors.
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Not only was [Dogan] not an American, but we should tinker with the Constitution so this never happens again. Now had his parents emigrated to a more American country when he was two, like, for example, Israel, then this story would be a lot different. But as it was, it is clear that he was not sufficiently American for our government to get upset about his death.

Second, you have to look at what Dogan believed in to establish his American credentials. He was against the Israeli blockade, and as we all know, there is nothing more un-American than opposing Israeli policy. Had he been doing something more real American, like delivering bibles to Iran or proselytizing in Yemen, then we could be outraged over his death. As it was, he had it coming.

Stephen Kinzer poses this question that starkly illustrates how isolated the US and Israel are in their view of the world:

Quick, name the rogue state in the Middle East. Hints: It has an active nuclear-weapons program but conducts it in secret; its security organs regularly kill perceived enemies of the state, both at home and abroad; its political process has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists who believe they are doing God’s will; its violent recklessness destabilizes the world’s most volatile region; and it seems as deaf to reason as it is impervious to pressure. Also: Its name begins with “I”.

How you answer this riddle depends in part on where you sit. From an American perspective, the obvious answer is Iran. Iran seems alone and friendless, a pariah in the world, and deservedly so given its long list of sins. In Washington’s view, Iran poses one of the major threats to global security.

Many people in the world, however, see Iran quite differently: as just another struggling country with valuable resources, no more or less threatening than any other, ruled by a regime that, while thuggish, wins grudging admiration for standing up to powerful bullies. They are angrier at Israel, which they see as violent, repressive and contemptuous of international law, but nonetheless endlessly coddled by the United States.

Kinzer says that there is so little to differentiate Israel from Iran that what is needed is for the US to treat both in identical fashion. Of course, that will never happen as long as the US government is subservient to Israeli interests. As Alexander Cockburn writes, the willingness of the American government and Congress and major media to sacrifice their own to appease Israel and its loyalists in the US has reached laughable levels.

As the TV networks here give unlimited airtime to its apologists, the message rolls out that Israel is permitted every illegal act in the lexicon of international law, from acts of violence against a civilian population (the people of Gaza, starved under permanent blockade) to piracy on the high seas and the lethal attacks by Israeli commandos on the relief flotilla. The guiding purpose in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be brainwashed into thinking Israel somehow has the right and the duty to act at will as the mad-dog of the planet.

The public White House response to Israel’s international piracy was comical in its wimpishness. “The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy,” deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton demurely declared in Chicago.

A friend of mine gave a good parody of the servile posture of the US government and press: “I think,” he wrote to me, “that matters are close to the point where if Hillary Clinton and a group of senior American officials were meeting the Israeli leaders for negotiations, and Netanyahu expressed his displeasure at the American positions by pulling out a gun and shooting her dead, then having the entire American delegation beaten to death by his security guards, there would probably be a small item buried in the next days’ American newspapers that due to conflict with the Israelis, Obama had decided to nominate a new Secretary of State.”

Black humor, no doubt. But it does raise the question of exactly what Israel can do to the US and still not face any repercussions.

POST SCRIPT: Five minutes with A. C. Grayling

The BBC has a series where they have rapid-fire five-minute conversations with people about the topics they are associated with. I found this one with philosopher A. C. Grayling to be terrific and only partly because his attitude to life seems almost identical to mine.

He looks like exactly the kind of person I would love to talk with over a cup of coffee.