Let's understand this, just for starters.

And I know that Nidal Malik Hasan was also crazy. But which suicide bomber, even one inspired by what the president continues to call the "Holy Koran," as if that nomenclature would moderate the hatred of America in the world of Islam, is not crazy? Stark raving crazy, in fact?

(Just like the assassination of Robert Kennedy, to begin at the beginning, was an act of jihad, as well. And Sirhan Sirhan was also nuts.)

Jihad aside, how could this deeply troubled man about whose troubles his superiors were fully aware, be permitted to serve as a psychiatrist among men and women who, like he himself, were about to be sent to war ... or were returning from war? And not just any war. But a war in the Muslim orbit and actually fighting Muslim men and, lest we forget, Muslim ideas.

Come to think of it, if you had just returned from duty in Afghanistan or Iraq and having troubles readjusting to home, wouldn't you be a little freaked out that your decommissioning shrink was wearing native Arab dress as Hasan often did at Fort Hood?

We are now about to enter a period of dissimulation. Ours is a culture very edgy about discussing such matters lest someone in the room be offended or that our conclusions turn out to be, well, very uncomfortable.

In the meantime, don't forget that Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 men and women, 12 of them U.S. soldiers, and wounded 28 others. This is, for wont of a better word, a massacre.

Frankly, I cannot imagine a more devastating reproach to the president and his presidency than this anguished cry from the streets of Tehran. Shame to Obama that the Iranian democrats should actually wonder: "which side are you on?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-yLLZ3JGfM

But, Mr. President, "which side are you really on?"

This morning, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Islamic regime's takeover of the U.S. embassy and kidnapping of embassy personnel for 444 days, your administration issued a mealy-mouthed statement asking that Tehran reconcile with us. What are the pre-conditions of such a reconciliation?

In any case, the clerical tyranny has already answered you. Just look to an article by Thomas Erdbrink and William Branigin in today's Washington Post. It has three headlines: "Iran's Khamenei rejects U.S. outreach." (This is the "Supreme Leader," not just Dr. A'jad.) "Obama efforts disdained." Can Iran make it any clearer? "Ayatollah says talks would be 'perverted'." The text is, actually, worse.

Watching the tube last night, I was astounded by how the Republicans behaved. It was as if they had won two U.S. Senate seats, not two State Houses where the Democrats had particularly unattractive candidates and where there were distinctive statewide issues. 

A real index to the future was in New York's 23rd Congressional district where the Republicans and the oh, so patriotic and reactionary right teamed up to run an ultra against a perfectly moderate Democrat. The Democrat won, the right lost in a race that daffy Wolf Blitzer called "too tight to call." 

This is an augury. The Republicans are now so isolated that they can't see what, in fact, isolated them in 2008. A clue: Only the nut-cases cottoned to Sarah Palin.

This coming Wednesday will be the 14th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at a Tel Aviv rally for the Oslo peace accords. Like the initial rally itself, the memorial--scheduled for Saturday, October 31, but postponed due to what turned out to be only light rains--was to be a highly charged political event. Except that in 1995, Israel was still stirred by hopes of bringing the decades of war with the Arabs to an end. Yet, at the same time, foreboding grew that these hopes themselves constituted a trap, a mortal trap. (I admit that, already in September 1993 during the ceremonial handshakes on the White House lawn from which Oslo emerged, I felt like a mourner at the wedding feast. And the fact is that I did not go, Al Gore's imprecations to the contrary. The New Republic editorial roughly reflected this disposition.) From the edges but mostly from the edges of the Israeli right this discord turned into hatred and vengeance. When Rabin was getting into his car to go home a young man, a self-designated emissary, calmly stepped from the crowd and shot two bullets from his Beretta semi-automatic pistol into the prime minister's body. Rabin was dead within 40 minutes.

I was in Israel, having dinner with friends at a Jerusalem restaurant, the night the assassination occurred. I remained for the funeral and stayed on for a few days thereafter to experience the aftermath. Israel went into spectral mourning, and even among the Zionist ultra-right there was some self-reproach. The left, although traumatized by the shooting of someone who was for them a very new and remote hero, did its utmost to get what it could politically from the murder. It is his killing that made him their lion.

Every year, when the yahrzeit of the killing comes around, the remaining faithful of Oslo, an ever-declining cohort, by now a pathetic cohort, tries to stir up the memories and the hopes. It is a forlorn venture. Almost nobody believes in "peace now" or, for that matter, in "peace soon." There may be a few handfuls who can still see "peace in our time." But that is not a politics; it is a disposition. Now this cosmic and concrete pessimism can change on a dime or on 10 agurot. Still, this is the public temper now and it has been the public temper for a long time.

I know that we don't (and we shouldn't) make our foreign policy by public opinion polls.  But, while 63 percent of Americans believe we should try negotiations (which, of course, we've been doing so ad nauseum that even Hillary Clinton has gotten impatient), 64 percent are quite sure they won't work.

So what do we do then?  Sixty-one percent say it is more important to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it requires military action.

The polling--done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press--reveals a profound skepticism of the likelihood that either negotiations or sanctions will work to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons.

I believe that if the administration continues with its self-deception there will emerge an unprecedented popular clamor for missiles and bombs, and the Obami will be left virtually alone with its illusions.
 

Michael Capuano is my congressman. He does not make me yearn for Joe Kennedy to return. That's the plus side.

He is now running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, that is, for Teddy's seat. He is not the favorite. But neither is my candidate, Alan Khazei, an honest-to-God community organizer who co-founded City Year. The favorite in the polls is the Massachusetts attorney general, Martha Coakley, who is long on seniority in public office and a woman with common sense, sound political judgment, true rather than hyperbolic liberal values. At the same time, Khazei would bring a seasoned but fresh look at the Commonwealth's politics in its interface with the national government. Sort of like Barney Frank. Khazei would also be a new kind of mind in the Senate.

Before he was elected to the House of Representatives, Capuano was mayor of Somerville, a town nearly as diverse, skin-wise, as the United Nations. Maybe that's where he got his yen for foreign policy.

And right now he is trying to separate himself and his colleagues on the House Sudan Caucus from the Obama administration's new policy and new top staffer aimed to stop the misery in Darfur. Separate himself at least for campaign reasons. A letter from Capuano appears in Friday's Boston Globe. Read it closely. It wants you to think that the Caucus has been in existence for a long time. It hasn't. It's been around maybe, two weeks.

But its distancing itself from the new policy and new aide, Scott Gration, is also so hedged and deferential that the letter actually asks for nothing. The Obami have been oozing themselves into an appeasement policy for Sudan for almost the entire time they've been in office. We've been commenting on this continually. Let's face facts: nobody in Washington really cares about dead black children and adults, especially those murdered and persecuted by Arabs. Not the black caucus, not even a black president. So why should Michael Capuano be held to a higher standard? But, then, why doesn't he stop pretending?

The theory of just war may go back to Augustine. But its modern herald is Michael Walzer, who in 1977 published his book Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books). Maybe you read it in a college course, as by now tens (and tens) of thousands of students have. Maybe you participated in a "just war" discussion, informed or uninformed, around a dinner table. In any case, it is one of the key controversies of the age and Walzer, who writes frequently for TNR, has stayed with the subject as more and more wars of terror break the rules and terrorists challenge their opponents' very right to do anything about it.

But it's not only terrorists who challenge these rights. More importantly, it's the self-appointed moralists in the institutions of the United Nations and the NGOs, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who are ready to condemn the disciplined and restrained response to haphazard war. On Tuesday, a factotum of the U.N. questioned the legality the American use of drones in pursuit of the Taliban. All this is done with full understanding that our targets never respect humane limitations on the practice of war. Never. Can you imagine Hamas laying down guide marks for what you may or may not do in an attack on Israel. In any case, they don't even make a pretense of doing so.

In an essay published during the spring, Walzer confronted the harsh criticisms of Israel in Gaza and the U.S. in Afghanistan using "just war" theory. The essay, titled "Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Non-State Wars," set about protecting the moral integrity of his argument of a quarter century ago and defending it against its abusers and distorters.

Read it, please.

And while we're into deep stuff, here's an alert. In the next print issue of The New Republic (and also online) we will be publishing an article by Moshe Halbertal, who has also written here previously, that confronts in a sober manner the Goldstone report. I believe this essay by Halbertal will be a turning point in the whole argument. Moshe is one of Israel's most learned philosophers and ethicists (forgive me, I hate the word), a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at N.Y.U. Law School.

Let me be clear: I don't doubt for a moment that Barack Obama genuinely believes that he can calm the roils that trouble the United States in its relationship with the Muslim world and the Arab orbit within it. The problem is, alas, that he hasn't a clue. Moreover, he hasn't had the chance to learn. And maybe--just maybe--he is not inclined to learn because in his generation wisdom doesn't come from study but from ideological narrative. George W. Bush had his own favorite narrative. It was hewn in Texas and polished, if it was polished at all, just before old Yale collapsed before William Sloane Coffin, if anyone still remembers his tortured and torturing soul.

Obama's narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion. But, frankly, there weren't many dreams from his father in Dreams From My Father. In fact, there were at least as many from his hippie white mother. So here is a very contemporary person. The two lines, though, do connect in his chosen life as it is retold and projected into the future. Here, his prominence in the deeply left-wing "community organizing" universe meets the do-not-ask-questions rules of the Chicago Democratic machine.

So, much as George Bush did not doubt, so President Obama does not doubt. He doesn't doubt himself and he doesn't doubt what he says. I made the comment the other day in another Spine with reference to Obama: narcissism is the most dangerous of sins...because it doesn't let the sinner recognize it in himself.

This is another chapter in the Madoff saga. As with most of my information on Wall Street chicanery and respectable thieving, this comes from my old friend Edward Jay Epstein, who knows more about the slippery things around us than anyone in my circle. By far. 

By Edward Jay Epstein

On Sunday, October 25th 2009, Jeffry Picower drowned in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach mansion, the victim of an apparent heart attack. His untimely death left in limbo, if not totally silenced, crucial questions about the role he played in what may be  the greatest disappearance act in the annals of financial history. Picower was the main (though not the only) conduit through which most of the stolen money in the Madoff Ponzi scheme was systematically siphoned out of the accounts of other investors. As Irving Picard, the court-appointed Trustee, notes in complaint, Picower got “either directly or through the entities he controlled, more than $7.2 billion of other investors’ money.” He did not get  this money by his good luck, fortunate timing, or random chance. He made regular quarterly withdrawals of the putative profits credited to his accounts. Nor did his profits proceed from his acumen at picking stocks since, as we know by now, all the profits Madoff reported were the result of his invention, not his trading. Picower, a long time associate of Madoff’s, had special access to Madoff’s operation. According to the Trustee’s complaint, he must have been aware that what was going on was highly-irregular since his accounts reported “profitable trading before they were opened or funded; execution of trading instructions that hadn’t yet been given; inexplicable changes in account positions; and--at Picower’s direction--the accomplishment of investment results over time periods that already had expired.” In other words, his trades were invented afterwards and back-dated. Unlike other investors, he was advised in advance of Madoff’s monthly profit “targets,” or the amounts with which Madoff planned to pad Picower’s accounts, and, through this knowledge, he or his assistant could request higher or lower “profits” for various accounts. Moreover, to amplify Picower’s fictional profits, Madoff extended him so much fictional credit that his accounts had, as the Trustee reports, a “negative net cash balance of approximately $6 billion at the time of Madoff’s arrest.” Picower even collaborated in his spectacular, if  fictitious, trading success by, as the Trustee notes in the complaint, as he had specifically directed such fictitious activity.” For example, at one point, he faxed Madoff back-dated letters to support fabricated trades. In some of the faked trades, Picower’s reported “profit”s ran as high as 550 percent. As a result, the Picower was able to withdraw over $2.4 billion just between 2002 and 2008.

Why were such staggering notional profits systematically credited to the Picower accounts? Unless Madoff was channeling a large part of the money he stole to Picower for reasons of friendship or charity, the multi-billion dollar skim must have been part of the scheme itself. If so, was Picower following Madoff’s instructions in re-depositing the $7.2 billion he withdrew? And, if this was part of the exit strategy– and all Ponzi schemes need an exit strategy-- where is that money today? Unfortunately, the answer to these crucial question may have died in the drowning pool along with Picower.

www.edwardjayepstein.com

The famous blogger Matthew Yglesias was mentioned twice in the last few days on TNR online, once by Jon Chait on the Plank, another time by me on the Spine. Both were occasioned by Yglesias' involvement with J Street.  

Chait's mention was perfectly straightforward. He described a little contretemps between himself and others in which, he wrote, Yglesias was more latitudinarian about the meaning of the phrase "pro-Israel." But, apparently, after hearing the others on the panel, the aging left-wing ideologue Phil Weiss and the barely pubescent Max Blumenthal, he came to Chait's conclusion that being "pro-Israel" had to have some normative content and context. I hope I have described this exchange accurately. In any case, you have Jon's words above. 

My reference was also straightforward...but a bit unfair, more than a bit. First of all, I lumped Yglesias together with Weiss and Spencer Ackerman. But Yglesias is not meshugah. And he's also not rabid. 

Second of all, I implied that Yglesias was an anti-Zionist. He made this point through Chait. I thought we should speak directly, and so we had a very civil conversation. Anyway, I think it was civil. He told me that he certainly was not anti-Zionist at all and that he, in fact, considered himself a Zionist, "a believer in the Jewish state in the Jewish national home." That's as clear a statement as I would expect from anyone.  

It leaves lots of room for disagreement. Yglesias made that point to me explicitly, a point with which I fully concur. Forgive the cliche: Zionism is a big open tent. It has only one condition and that is, "Ohevet Yisroel." Love for the people Israel.

You probably don't know who Rudolf Kasztner was. But, actually, I've know about him since I was a teenager. Was he a Jewish hero? Or was he a traitor to the Jews? I can still hear the familiar piercing locutions of my parents' bad marriage, fought out over politics, Jewish politics, daily, unrelenting, almost viperous.

My mother was for him, this Dr. Kasztner who in the late days of the Second World War, while 12,000 Hungarian Jews a day were being gassed almost rhythmically in the crematoria, bribed Nazi officers to release a train with some 1,600 otherwise also doomed men, women and children to their new destination: freedom. Actually, Switzerland.

My father thought Kasztner a recreant. To my father, the choice of "which Jews?" and "why?" were the questions that could never be put to rest. And, at our dinner table, they never were.

The rescue taunted the Jews of the West and of Palestine. If this one was feasible, why not others?

J Street is having an identity crisis right in front of the cameras. For a year and a half it's been trumpeting that it's both "pro-Israel" and "pro-peace." Actually, that's how I would characterize myself. I am for a two-state solution and always have been. I was for a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state" ever since I was a kid. That's ultimately what nearly every Israeli prime minister has been for, too. And that's what Israel has been trying in different ways and in different circumstances to negotiate. Like me, Golda Meir had very serious doubts about the viability of the Palestinians as a people. But she also did not want to govern them. Who, for that matter, would? Not even the Palestinians themselves. Which is why Yasir Arafat, having a Palestinian state handed to him on a plate by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, broke it in front of them and embarked on his disastrous "second intifada," now recalled as the heroic period of resistance. Some heroism, the terror they unleashed.

Anyway, since J Street was putting out its banners on the Jewish street, it defined itself as it had to: yes, "pro-Israel, pro-peace." But in a very palpable sense it was not pro-Israel in that it favored every cockamamie strategy and tactic, personality and group (and grouplet), slogan and world-view that put the Jewish homeland in peril. In the end, almost everyone came to realize that J Street would not and maybe could not be supportive of a Jewish homeland until every last Palestinian was satisfied.

Well, I have to hand it to them. In at least one segment of their operation, their university branch, they owned up. Their pretenses are gone. They were not pro-Israel at all, and they were dropping "pro-Israel" from their nomenclature entirely. In fact, it is now dropped and they are frantically trying to explain themselves to their fans.

One of their spokesmen said that they had basically to follow their followers. On their campuses, the split-offs from the split-offs will not tolerate the reality of Israel as the sine qua non of peace. OK. See how they fare. I know that there are, here and there, fistfuls of hold-outs against what probably is the greatest revolution of the twentieth century, the Zionist revolution, which transformed an entire people and built a commonwealth that is in a league with any in the West. Part of the Jewish revolution was the struggle against these recalcitrants, the most pathetic of whom were the German Marxists of the 30s, arguing with the Zionists who were trying to make a real life and not live by fatuous ideas.

But at least Walter Benjamin was a genius. J Street's philosophers are Spencer Ackerman, Matthew Yglesias and Philip Weiss. You can sample this kind of thinking on the web sites jews sans frontieres and other anti-Zionist blogs.

The circle jerk gets smaller and smaller.