From an article in today's NYT about the first Israeli to fly aboard the space shuttle:

The delays gave Colonel Ramon more time to personalize his journey into space. While other Jews have gone on space flights, he is the first to request an all-kosher menu. (NASA found a supplier, and all the food in his sealed meal packs is kosher.)
Colonel Ramon describes himself as a secular Jew, but he said that in space he would try to observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, if it did not interfere with his duties. Shabbat, observed every seventh day, normally goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. This raised the question of when the day of observance occurred in orbit, since the shuttle circles Earth every 90 minutes. The astronaut consulted a group of rabbis, who developed a consensus that the day of rest should be observed based on times at his launching point, Cape Canaveral.
Before becoming an astronaut, Col. Ramon was part of the group of Israeli pilots who destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, thus preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Thomas Friedman makes many good points in his most recent column. I especially liked the following:

The Palestinians still act as if they believe they can get more out of Israel by making Israelis feel insecure rather than by making them feel secure. After a while, you can't call this a mistake. After a while, you have to ask whether it reflects a conviction that a thriving Jewish presence in the middle of the Islamic world is simply not acceptable to them.

Y' think? What gave it away?

More seriously, the Ari Shavit quote seems on-target as well:

"I compare it to open-heart surgery. Israelis know that if we don't do it, if we don't separate, we will die. But if we do it in a rushed or messy way, we will also die. So when Mitzna calls for separation, 70 percent of Israel agrees. But when he says he is ready to do it unilaterally, if necessary, or to negotiate with Arafat, or even to negotiate under fire while the Intifada goes on, most people refuse to go along. It feels wrong to them in their guts. So they want a left-wing surgery to be carried out by a right-wing doctor. The problem is, Sharon won't carry out that surgery. He is so committed to the settlements that he built, he appears to be paralyzed."

I have a problem with Friedman's usual conclusion, though:

But if there is no separation, by 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories. Then Israel will have three options: The Israelis will control this whole area by apartheid, or they will control it by expelling Palestinians, or they will grant Palestinians the right to vote and it will no longer be a Jewish state. Whichever way it goes, it will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

Friedman seems to be coming out in favor of unilateral separation as a last resort, even if the Palestinians won't make a reasonable agreement (hardly a crazy scenario). But won't that essentially entail some of the same things as Friedman's parade of horribles? Building and policing a really good border, keeping a seething Palestinian population out of Israel, etc. will entail some pretty nasty things - possibly including expelling some Palestinians from their current homes. Surely that would be seen, by Friedman as well as the rest of the world, as the equal of the "transfer" hatefully advocated by Israel's current extreme right-wingers. (I'm not getting into the question of whether expelling the Palestinians could conceivably be compatible with Israel's democratic character - just pointing out that "separating" doesn't make the question go away.)

Lee Harris has an excellent piece on how today's anti-American protestors pledge fealty to Marx bututterly misinterpret him:

Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology embodied in 9/11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to Marx's own celebrated trash bin of history. ...The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process--whatever these laws may be--must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read the whole thing.

I've been meaning to write about the NYT's most recent fatuous editorial on Israel for a while. It's not their most objectionable effort, and it concerns a British conference that is so forgettable that it never even got to the "news" stage (despite the best efforts of the Palestinian liars-du-jour).
What impressed me about this editorial is that it is so obviously taken from the "template" files. The template has the following structure:
1) The most recent terrorist atrocity deserves to be condemned,
2) Israel "has every right to respond swiftly and firmly to Palestinian terrorist outrages,"
but
3) Whatever response Israel is actually using at the moment is excessive and counterproductive, usually because
4) It threatens to undercut some initiative that promises to reduce violence, despite the failure of the last 47,000 inititatives to do so.
Examples of such promising initiatives and the Times' prescriptions thereof include the Saudi "peace plan" and a Beirut summit thereof. And as an illustration of points 1-3, you can't get much better than this high-minded editorial after the Passover Massacre and this hissy-fit thrown after Sharon refused to listen to instructions (extensively Fisked here).
As evidence that the editorial was from the NYT's form:
1) Look at the sentence in the last paragraph:
"Israel's military response to the latest twin suicide bombing, which killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, has so far been restrained." It seems tacked-on and completely out of place with the rest of the piece's tone.
2) The piece doesn't even mention a major reason the Israeli government prevented the Palestinians from attending the conference: the fact that the British government had announced its intentions to meet opposition candidate Amram Mitzna while snubbing current Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In other words, screwing the British was a feature, not a bug - it was a response to a British diplomatic snub.
It would have been completely defensible to editorialize against the Israeli government's motivations; it's not crazy to argue that the move was counterproductive. But the Times' editorial doesn't even mention the basis for the Israelis' actions! After all, it's not in the form.

Anyone who wonders why public-school systems in many American metropolitan areas are in such bad shape must read this article. And make sure you're sitting down.
(Link via the Corner.)

Several long posts have been eaten in the last week by ill-timed computer crashes. Is a jealous Blogger seeking revenge for my defection to Movable Type? This sounds like a plot for a really bad horror movie. Just to be safe, I'll keep the lights on when blogging for a while...