In one of his most important poems, “The Hollow Men” (1925), T.S. Eliot speculates on how the currently living are perceived by the departed – “those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom.” He reckoned corporeal mortals are remembered “if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.” Continue reading →

Poor Tzipi Livni – the burden of ministerial office can weigh heavy. It involves obligations that produce not a little unease. For instance, among the last follies ascribed to Ariel Sharon, just before his catastrophic stroke, was a promise to Vladimir Putin to hand over the Russian Compound’s famed Sergei Building (the sumptuous “Sergei Imperial Guest House”). It’s smack-dab in the very heart of Jerusalem – in the western part thereof, the one that lies within the Green Line, the one that ostensibly Israel may be allowed to keep after it relinquishes all it liberated in its 1967 war of self-defense (including Judaism’s Holiest of Holies). Continue reading →

Insightful Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman died in February 1989, more than four years before Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and their underhanded crew clandestinely negotiated the Oslo Accords and then dropped them on the heads of all unsuspecting Israelis, including their prime minister. Continue reading →

The Jewish state has already had several trial runs. The most noteworthy was in mythical Chelm, which was governed by its own inimitable system of logic.

So is New Chelm – aka Israel.

The original Chelm’s town fathers, for example, were intent on deploying a formidable security force to daunt evildoers like the pesky burglar who prowled the narrow alleys after dark. The burly constable they employed soon apprehended the miscreant and forced him to stand in the corner until all inspection rounds were completed. Continue reading →

I am convinced from the depth of my heart and to the best of my understanding that this disengagement will strengthen Israel in its hold of the areas essential to our existence and will earn us the blessings and esteem of those near and far, will lessen hate, will break boycotts and blockades and will move us forward on the road to peace with the Palestinians and the rest of our neighbors.

– Ariel Sharon, October 25, 2004 Continue reading →

In 18th-century Britain, it was customary to tie a string around a smoked fish – which in the curing process turned red in color and pungent in odor – and drag it through the woods to train hunting dogs to follow a trail. At a later stage, the red herring was used to deliberately confuse the hounds to test their ability to stick to their prey’s scent or to prolong the foxhunt. Continue reading →

He punctuated his carefully enunciated phrases with frequent throat-clearings, hemmed a lot and hawed even more, yet among all the hems and haws, Barack Obama told the truth, even if maybe not only and certainly not all of it. Nevertheless, it’s a sure bet to take him at his word when he declared that “if someone was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that.” Continue reading →

Preempting an opponent’s objection with an objection – thereby turning an argument on its head – is the bread-and-butter of polemics. The tactic is common everywhere – from ordinary conversation to the halls of academe and courtroom litigation. When used cunningly, counterarguments can become the demagogue’s most invaluable of tools, used to sway the intellectually indolent and apply populist pressure. Continue reading →

How ironic that the one peeve which impelled Labor to foment a coalition crisis early this week had nothing to do with the government’s chronic ineptitude – not with its mismanaged war or with the corruption endemic in its ranks. What finally got Ehud Barak’s goat was the fact that his man didn’t get control of the clout-laden Knesset Finance Committee. Continue reading →

When US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was here last and reproved us with a sanctimonious schoolmarm’s sternness, she pro-forma professed to genuinely believe that Jews unlawfully seized “Arab Jerusalem.” To facilitate Washington’s self-serving cockamamie “two-state vision,” it’s therefore incumbent upon Jewish trespassers to renounce what isn’t theirs, and certainly not construct more housing for more unwanted Jews. Continue reading →