The Weekend Web

Fresh off its failed attempt to negotiate a cease-fire with one terrorist group, Ehud Olmert’s cabinet voted today to swap prisoners with another. As part of the deal, Israel will offer Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar and an undisclosed number of other terrorists in exchange for idf soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who were abducted by Hezbollah two years ago and are presumed to be dead.

Kuntar, who was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison, sneaked into Israel with a group of terrorists in 1979, broke into an apartment in Naharia and proceeded to murder a Jewish family of four. Kuntar grabbed the father, Danny Haran, and his 4-year-old daughter and forced them outside, where he shot Danny in the head before bludgeoning his little girl to death with the butt of his rifle. During the horror, Danny’s wife managed to find a hiding place inside the house, along with their other child—a 2-year-old girl. But while hiding, in a panicked attempt to keep the little girl quiet by covering her mouth, the wife inadvertently suffocated the toddler.

Kuntar’s 30 years in prison have done little to reform the cold-blooded murderer. After Hezbollah’s co-founder, Imad Mughniyeh—who masterminded the 2006 cross-border raid that resulted in the abduction of Regev and Goldwasser—was assassinated in Syria three months ago, Kuntar wrote a letter of condolence to Hezbollah’s head, Hassan Nasrallah. “My oath and pledge is that my place will be at the battlefront, which is soaked in the sweat of your giving, and the blood of the most beloved among men [shahids], and that I shall continue down the path, until complete victory,” Kuntar wrote.

This week, Kuntar’s dream will become reality, as he resumes his profession of killing Israeli civilians. “It is impossible to know precisely how many Israelis will be killed in the future if the deals now on the table are approved,” Caroline Glick wrote in the Jerusalem Post on Friday.

But past experience shows that at a minimum, dozens of Israelis now innocently going about their business will be murdered by the terrorists Israel releases. And at a minimum, one or two Israelis will be abducted by Hamas or Hezbollah or one of their sister terror organizations. They will be abducted in Israel or while they are travelling abroad and they will be brought to Lebanon or Gaza and the cycle of blood extortion and psychological warfare will begin anew.

That’s what Israel has to look forward to. Kuntar, on the other hand, can look forward to a hero’s welcome in Lebanon.

Palestinians too are praising the baby-killer, as reported today by Palestinian Media Watch. Palestinian tv, which is controlled by Mahmoud Abbas, has honored Kuntar’s life as a terrorist by broadcasting a picture of him next to a map of Israel which is draped in a Palestinian flag. In recent months, Palestinian leaders have made some astonishingly unapologetic statements in support of Kuntar: “Samir Kuntar, the warrior from Lebanon”; “The Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership are standing behind you [Kuntar]”; and “[Kuntar], you are an inseparable part of the action to free our homeland.”

But once the Palestinians are given a state, we’re told, finally there will be peace in the Middle East.

In reality, the only hope for peace in the Middle East is for “a strong hand from someplace” to save us, as an American news weekly put it years ago. For more on the only solution to the Middle East crisis, read what we wrote two years ago.

One Deadly Wound

If a nuclear Iran is “intolerable,” as French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted before the Israeli Knesset last week, then world leaders have less than a year before having to tolerate the intolerable. In an interview with the Telegraph in London, an influential Israeli advisor and former head of Mossad “warned that Israel has 12 months in which to destroy Iran’s nuclear program or risk coming under nuclear attack itself.”

Earlier this month, Israel conducted a major warplane exercise over the Mediterranean Sea in preparation for a possible preemptive strike against Iran. Upon learning about the war games, the United Nations immediately sprung to action. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said, “There will be no point in my continuing my work if military force is used at present”—a threat some conservatives mockingly viewed as reason enough for striking.

But while the major media trumpeted ElBaradei’s resignation threat, it ignored comments he made in the same interview about how soon Iran could assemble a nuclear weapon. “Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has,” ElBaradei said in an interview translated by Memri, it would need “at least six months to one year” to develop a weapon.

Yesterday, the chief of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards told a hard-line conservative daily in Iran, “There is the possibility that by attacking Iranian nuclear sites the enemy wants to delay our nuclear activities, but any interruption would be very short since Iranian scientific ability is different from that of Syria and Iraq.”

He also warned Israel not to attack, saying the Jewish state was well within range of Iran’s missiles.

Today’s London Timesreports that Iran has indeed moved ballistic missiles into launch positions in preparation for a possible retaliatory strike against Israel. Israel’s nuclear plant in Dimona is apparently at the top of the list of possible targets.

The standoff between Israel and Iran will soon result in Israel making a desperate appeal to Europe for help, which is why the strengthening EU-Israel relationship is so prophetically significant.

Last week, we listened to a speech by Yonatan Peled, the new spokesperson at the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. While Peled acknowledged the numerous threats Israel faces—and at a time when its government is in shambles—he said the one thing Ehud Olmert’s administration is very proud of is Israel’s strengthening relationship with the European Union.

Earlier this month, the EU announced a significant upgrade in its relationship with Israel. “Today, we mark a new phase in the relationship between Israel and the EU,” said Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni after the EU-Israel Association Council meeting in Luxembourg. Slovenia’s Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, who chaired the meeting, declared: “The EU and Israel are elevating our relations to a new level of more intense, more fruitful, more influential cooperation.”

The prophetic significance of this alliance is revealed in Hosea 5:13: “When Ephraim [Britain] saw his sickness, and Judah [Israel] saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian [Germany], and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound.” The reason Israel makes this desperate plea for help to the German-led EU is because of a wound, which, as we have often explained, is the Arab-Israeli peace process.

In the same speech where he spoke of the intolerability of Iran entering the nuclear club, Sarkozy called on Israel to remove its settlers from West Bank territories and to expedite the formation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. “The time to make peace is now,” Sarkozy told the Knesset. “Israel’s security will not be truly assured until we see, at last, at its side an independent, modern, democratic and viable Palestinian state.”

Thus, even as Sarkozy vows to help Israel prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat, he simultaneously demands that Israel submit to intolerable, indefensible borders, with a truncated Jewish state surrounded by Iranian proxies on every side.

It’s an incurable wound that will result in Israel looking to Europe, of all places, for protection.

America’s Age of Boldness—Past

“America’s tradition of bold national projects has dwindled,” the Economist reports. “With the country’s infrastructure crumbling, it is time to revive it.”

The problem of America’s aging infrastructure—its roads, dams, bridges, railways and so on—is being compounded by the increased stress they are bearing in serving the needs of a growing population. Higher oil prices are driving increased demand for public transportation.

In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that $1.6 trillion was needed over five years to bring just the existing infrastructure into good repair. … If America does not act, says Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association (rpa), a body that plans for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, it will have the infrastructure of a third-world country within a few decades. …America has a grand tradition of national planning, from Thomas Jefferson’s vision for roads and canals in 1808, which influenced policy for the next century (and led to America’s first transcontinental railway) to Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal Highway-Aid Act of 1956, which created the interstate system. Such plans stand in stark contrast to the federal government’s strategy today.

The Economist piece quotes Daniel Burnham, “one of America’s great urban architects,” as encouraging the revival of great infrastructural projects: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

But is America up to the challenge? There’s evidence aplenty that the answer is a discouraging no.

Victor Davis Hanson took up this theme in an article published Thursday on Real Clear Politics, calling America today “The Can’t Do Society.”

Building things is a good indication of the relative confidence of a society. But the last American gasoline refinery was built almost three decades ago. As “cowards of our conscious,” we’ve come up with countless mitigating reasons not to build a new one.

This is only one of several examples of big projects that are mired in red tape: domestic oil drilling; the Freedom Tower in Manhattan; the fence along the Mexican border.

In contrast, in the midst of the Great Depression, our far poorer grandparents built the Empire State Building in 410 days—not a perfect design, but one good enough to withstand a fuel-laden World War ii-era bomber that once crashed into it.

Ponder Hanson’s cogent conclusions, and their relation to the post-American world we are entering:

The causes of this paralysis are clear. Action entails risks and consequences. Mere thinking doesn’t. In our litigious society, as soon as someone finally does something, someone else can become wealthy by finding some fault in it. Meanwhile a less fussy, more confident world abroad drills, and builds nuclear plants, refineries, dams and canals to feed and fuel millions who want what we take for granted.In our present comfort, Americans don’t seem to understand nature. We believe that our climate-controlled homes, comfortable offices and easy air and car travel are just like grass or trees; apparently they should sprout up on their own for our benefit.Americans also harp about the faults of prior generations. We would never make their blunders—even as we don’t seem to mind using the power plants, bridges and buildings that they handed down to us.Finally, high technology and the good life have turned us into utopian, fussy perfectionists. Anytime a sound proposal seems short of perfect, we consider it not good, rather than good enough.

The Hot-Button Issue

Thomas Friedman is betting on America’s decline as being the number-one topic this November. “I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November—whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue,” Friedman writes in today’s New York Times.

With significant increases in food and fuel costs and steep declines in housing values, Friedman may be right. Consumer debt, just since President Bush entered office in 2001, has nearly doubled from $8 trillion to $14 trillion. “We are a country in debt and in decline—not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline,” Friedman writes. “Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy—more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.”

North Korea Playing Cat and Mouse, Again

Times are changing in North Korea. Or so it appears. On Thursday, the rogue nuclear state submitted for review a 60-page detailed declaration of its nuclear program. In the report, said one U.S. national security advisor, the North Koreans essentially declared they are not “engaged in any enrichment program or any proliferation activities and … will not [be] in the future.”

Pyongyang demonstrated its repentance on Friday by demolishing an aging cooling tower at its main nuclear site, the Yongbyon nuclear facility. Beyond their incineration of the cooling tower (which would take about a month to rebuild) the North Koreans have reportedly shut down a plant that made fuel rods for its nuclear reactor, as well as a reprocessing plant where weapons-grade plutonium was extracted from spent rods.

North Korea’s repentance has been greeted with cautious optimism by the Bush administration, which responded by announcing it would lift some sanctions against North Korea, as well as remove the pariah state from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. But others are more skeptical.

“North Korea has a long history of pretending to co-operate on its nuclear weapons programs to win concessions from the West,” reported the National Post. “This is likely another such ploy.”

It’s not just North Korea’s tempestuous history of failed nuclear negotiations that is sowing the seeds of doubt in some people’s minds. Even its most recent gesture of repentance, the 60-page supposedly up-front and honest declaration of its nuclear activities, was cloaked in dishonesty. The Post continued (emphasis mine),

As might have been expected when dealing with the unreliable, unstable North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, the declaration—already six months past its due date—omits many of the most sought-after details of North Korea’s nuclear program. The report does not include information regarding the country’s nuclear arsenal or its uranium enrichment program. It also omits details about North Korea’s alleged involvement in the construction of a Syrian nuclear facility, destroyed by Israeli fighter jets last September.

Last November, North Korea was so committed to its nuclear ambitions it was prepared to endure the high risk of conspiring with Syria and Iran to stealthily construct a nuclear facility in northern Syria. Seven months later we’re supposed to believe those ambitions have been deflated to the point where North Korea is prepared to abandon more than two decades of nuclear activity. Call us pessimistic, but we need a little more convincing than that.

As the Post put it: “North Korea has been playing a game of cat-and-mouse over its nuclear program for more than a decade, lulling the U.S. and others into a false sense of security while building a deadly nuclear arsenal that threatens the security of South Korea and Japan as well as the West ….”

The Rule of Kindergarchy

Over-praised and selfish children are the new rulers of society according to the Times in London. A child’s self-esteem is now one of the few absolutes left in society. Certificates are awarded for “sitting nicely on the carpet.” The Football Association banned teams that included children under 8 from publishing their scores. Teachers will not correct their students’ spelling or writing mistakes. A Japanese school staged a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with no dwarfs and 25 Snow Whites. All this was done to preserve the children’s self-esteem. Children are no longer allowed to lose or make a mistake, and they have an inalienable right to play the leading role in their school play. As the Times writes, we now live in a “child-centered society,” a “kindergarchy—a new (affluent) world order in which children rule.”

The result hasn’t been good. “On a more sinister level,” the Times wrote, “the child-centered approach also seems to have contributed to a decline in standards of behavior in schools, with children ever more conscious of their ‘rights’ and teachers afraid to chastise unruly children for fear of being attacked or accused of assault.”

Youth violence in Britain, as well as other places around the world, is becoming a real problem. Britain is in the grips of a “desperate and awful” bout of knife crime, according to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, said Britain was in the grips of “a new form of barbarism.” Lennie James, a 42-year-old black actor raised in southwest London, blamed the problem on a selfish youth. “I blame you because as a generation you are selfish, self-centered and have little or no empathy for anyone but yourselves,” he said in an “open letter” to Britain’s youth published in last week’s Sunday Observer. “You are politically stunted and socially irresponsible.”

These are exactly the conditions the Prophet Isaiah described for the end-time descendants of ancient Israel: “And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient and the base against the honourable” (Isaiah 3:4-5).

For more on this subject, see our article “Overpraised Children.”

Church Within a Church

“The Anglican Church faces what is in effect a schism this weekend after the declaration last night of conservative evangelicals to create a ‘church within a church,’” writes the Times. “The new body, called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, will have its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges.”

The 300 bishops and archbishops wrote in the declaration: “We reject the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed.” They accused the leaders of the Episcopal Church of the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada of proclaiming a “false gospel.” The Times calls the declaration “the worst blow to church unity in the West since the Protestant reformation of the 16th century.”

Actually “this worst blow to church unity” is leading to a reversal of the Protestant Reformation. As more and more Anglicans realize they have more in common with the Catholic Church than their own church leaders, watch for them to move toward the papists. The traditional Anglican community, a group of churches with a worldwide membership approaching half a million people, is seeking reunification with Rome. It formed in 1990 from a dozen Anglican churches that broke away from the 80-million-strong Anglican Communion (of which the Church of England is the heart), mostly to protest the liberalism creeping into that organization.

According to this blog on telegraph.co.uk, some Anglican bishops are also considering defecting to Rome. Over here, read where Pope Benedict xvi has renewed his call for Christian unity with the 250-million-strong Orthodox Christians.

Elsewhere on the Web

Britain’s Office for National Statistics has released a statistical snapshot of the UK’s economy, revealing plenty of dangerous flaws. According to the Telegraph, “British households are now more indebted than those of any other major country in recorded history.” The ratio of debt to income, the article reports, is the highest among the world’s Group of Seven leading economies. “Economists warned that the combination of data, which also included news of the saving ratio dropping to the lowest level since 1959 and of household disposable incomes falling at the fastest rate since 1999, suggested Britain is heading for a sharper downturn than many had anticipated.”

Zimbabwe’s run-off election occurred Friday, but there was only one name on the ballot: incumbent Robert Mugabe. His opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out last Sunday after suffering violent attacks in the weeks leading up to the election.

A sign of the severity of the global food crisis: Famine in Ethiopia is getting so bad—and aid so scarce after a recent drought—that “there is only enough medicine and high-energy Plumpy’Nut peanut paste for the most severe cases,” the Christian Science Monitorreports. Aid workers have resorted to weighing the children and giving sustenance only to those who are sickest.

Historically, the United States Federal Reserve has underpinned America’s economic success, and provided the U.S. with the unmatched ability to influence, even dictate, foreign economies, including the global economy. But today, as this article in Germany’s Der Spiegel shows, the power of the Fed on the global economic stage is shrinking, and is coming under assault from all kinds of outside forces. “The United States Federal Reserve Bank, or Fed, seems as much a part of America as Coca-Cola or Pizza Hut. But at least one difference has become apparent in recent days. While the pizza chain and soft-drink maker are likely to expand their scope of influence in the age of globalization, the U.S. central bank is finding that its power is shrinking. No Fed chief in U.S. history has been forced to submit to the kind of humiliation that Ben Bernanke is facing.”

Oil prices are expected to rise to an astounding $170 a barrel before the end of the year, according to Bloomberg. opec President Chakib Khelil predicted in a phone interview that “oil prices are expected to reach $170 as demand for fuel is growing in the U.S. during the summer period and the dollar continues to weaken against the euro.”

And Finally …

As much as we want to gain wealth and status, these things do not really make us happy. In reality, happiness comes from giving. This article in the Times tells the story about John Wood, a man who had everything he wanted. He gave it all up, not out of a sense of obligation or guilt, but because he found he was far happier when he was involved in giving. “People said, ‘But you have everything. How can everything not be enough?’ I had to explain that I didn’t have everything—that what I had wasn’t making me happy,” he said.

Material things do not lead to happiness—the give way of life does. As the Apostle Paul told his fellow ministers from around Ephesus, “I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).