Totten: Go ahead and profile me
Michael Totten has spent extensive amounts of time in the Middle East, including sojourns in Lebanon and elsewhere, He says that Israelis get what airport security means:
- I don’t want to be profiled at the airport, but our airport security system is so half-baked and dysfunctional it may as well not even exist. So rather than doubling down on grandma and micromanaging everyone on the plane, we might want to pay as much attention to people as to their luggage, especially military-aged males who make unusual and suspicious-looking travel arrangements. That’s what the Israelis do. At Ben-Gurion Airport you don’t have to take off your shoes in the security line and you don’t have to stand in front of invasive and expensive body-scanning machines.
- Israeli security agents interview everyone, and they subject travelers who fit certain profiles to additional scrutiny. They take me aside every time, partly because of my gender and age but mostly because a huge percentage of my passport stamps are from countries with serious terrorist problems. They’ve asked if I’ve ever met with anyone in Hizbullah. I am not going to lie, especially not when the answer can be easily found using Google. They know I’ve met with Hizbullah. That’s why my luggage gets hand-searched one sock at a time while elderly tourists from Florida skate through. I don’t take it personally, and it makes a lot more sense than letting me skate through while grandma’s luggage is hand-searched instead.
- When I get on a plane in the U.S., I often breeze past women decades older than me while they’re being frisked. Almost every single person in line knows it’s ridiculous. We don’t say anything because it feels vaguely “fair.” Maybe it is, but it’s no way to catch terrorists.
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 3:54 PM | Stand For Israel
SFI explainer: Why does Israel make such a fuss over one soldier?
Not long ago, a friend of SFI’s–a committed Christian who is a great friend of Israel–asked a not-so-simple question. Why, he wanted to understand, would Israel consider swapping thousands of prisoners–many of whom have murdered Israelis and, if released, would certainly try again–for a single soldier?
The friend is a deeply compassionate and moral man, but logic, he said, dictated that such an exchange would simply not be in Israel’s interest. He said that he couldn’t even imagine the American army and American people allowing themselves to be held hostage as a nation the way Israelis do because of one soldier, let alone that the U.S. would free hundreds of terrorists who soldiers gave their lives to capture — all for one soldier. (And, especially, he said, since it’s a soldier being held and not a non-combatant.)
On many levels, of course, he’s right. It doesn’t make logical sense, but there are deep reasons–religious and cultural–why Israelis’ perspectives on this differ from Americans’. And while SFI is not about to tell the Israeli government and people what to do–or even come down on either side of the issue–it’s worth explaining a little why Israel has made such swaps in the past and why it looks pretty likely that they’ll close a deal with Hamas in the near future.
He’s not just a soldier
One of the first things to understand is that no soldier in the IDF can be seen a “just” a soldier: Israel’s army is not a voluntary force, and nearly all Israelis are drafted into compulsory service. Therefore, the idea that a soldier chose to put himself in harm’s way (albeit for the most of honorable of reasons) doesn’t really apply. Gilad Shalit could be each Israeli’s son or brother, husband or cousin.
Military service is seen as a responsibility that Israelis must bear for having a Jewish state, and Shalit (or Ehud Goldwasser, Ron Arad, or any other captured Israeli soldier) is carrying that responsibility for every Israeli (and every Jew, according to some). But, in the Jewish mind, it doesn’t end there — his fellow Israelis…
Read More » Comments (6) »Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 3:59 PM | Stand For Israel
Helping erase Biblical history
We could hardly say it better than Commentary’s incomparable Evelyn Gordon on the dust-up over building in the “settlement” of Jerusalem”:
… labeling half of Israel’s capital a “settlement,” as Jonathan has pointed out, may be hard to beat. But a New York Times report of a new book about the Temple Mount is definitely in the running. Seeking to give readers some background, the report offered the following gem: “The lack of archaeological evidence of the ancient temples has led many Palestinians to deny any real Jewish attachment or claim to the plateau.”
We’ll ignore the fact that the Second Temple is actually well-documented in extant writings from the period, and that several sections of the Temple compound’s outer walls, as described in these writings, have been uncovered (the Western Wall being one of them).
Instead, let’s discuss why there is a dearth of findings from the Temples themselves. (1) There happens to be a mosque on the exact site where, according to tradition, the Temples once stood. (2) Israel, contrary to Palestinian propaganda, is not out to “destroy al-Aqsa”; indeed, it scrupulously avoids any action that might endanger the mosque. (3) Israel is so deferential to Muslim sensibilities that, after capturing the Mount in 1967, it handed control of the site back to the Muslim waqf. Which brings us to (4): for all these reasons, Israel has never excavated the only place in the world where remnants of the Temple could possibly be found. Nor were any digs conducted there before 1967: al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock have stood undisturbed for hundreds of years. And yes, it is hard to produce archaeological evidence if you never even conduct a dig.
What is outrageous about this report is not just the way it abets Palestinian falsifications of history, though it certainly does that: since the reader isn’t told that this “lack of evidence” stems from the fact that nobody ever looked, he naturally assumes that archaeologists did, in fact, look and found nothing.
Even more outrageous, however, is the way Israel’s generosity is being used…
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 7:13 PM | Stand For Israel
Grief, horror: Reactions to Teitel show differences between Israel, her enemies
Rabbi’s Commentary: Here in Israel, the press is abuzz with news of the capture of “the Jewish terrorist”: Yaakov Teitel, an American immigrant , confessed to a string of attacks in Israel over the last twelve years. Among the crimes he admitted to are the murders of an Israeli Arab and a Palestinian in the southern West Bank; placing separate bombs that maimed the teen-aged son of a Messianic family, lightly wounded a anti-nationalist Israeli professor, and injured an Israeli Arab and damaged a monastery; as well as setting other bombs in Jerusalem neighborhoods and in a West Bank settlement that damaged property but caused no injuries.
These crimes are reprehensible and Israelis from all ends of the spectrum have rightfully condemned him and the acts he admitted to, without qualification. Israelis also are asking questions, though: They want to know how he was able to go undetected for so long, why no one ever reported him, how he was able to receive citizenship, and, of course, how a supposedly devout Jew could engage in such profoundly un-Jewish acts.
It is very telling that, among the condemnation and soul-searching, are comparisons between Teitel and the terrorist masterminds of organizations like Hamas: Israel’s leading daily, Ha’aretz, called Teitel “the Jewish counterpart of ‘The Engineer,’ Yehiya Ayyash.”
What a comparison.
Ayyash was a master bomb-maker who, in the mid 1990s, transformed the effectiveness of Hamas suicide bombing campaigns. He was personally responsible for the deaths of more than 125 Israelis and left more than 500 maimed before being killed in 1996 by a booby-trapped cellphone planted by the IDF. Arab newspapers mourned that “one of the nation’s most beloved and respected sons has left this world” and more than 100,000 Palestinians attended his funeral. He continues to be lionized by many Palestinian and Muslim leaders and Syrian TV even ran a mini-series memorializing his “life and work” during the Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.
The comparison shows the near-impossibility of there being a Jewish counterpart to Ayyash.
Though they’ve defended his right to be presumed innocent, not a single one of Teitel’s friends, family, neighbors,…
Read More » Comments (0) »Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:23 AM | Stand For Israel
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