Selected Reading (08/11/09)

• It’s now just slightly less terrifying to be sick in America. Can’t imagine that the one Republican who voted for it is going to get many Christmas cards.
• The President seems to have thoroughly rejected my advice on Afghanistan.
• Paul Canning brings news about three gay teenagers on death row in Iran.
• Daniel Levy assesses the week from hell in the Middle East peace process.
• Gideon Levy accuses Netanyahu of being afraid & sowing fear.
• Moshe Halbertal, who helped write the Israeli army’s code of ethics, gives the Goldstone report a thorough going over. Like Andrew Sullivan, I thought this paragraph was significant:

Radical groups such as Hamas start their struggle with little support from their population, which tends to be more moderate. They increase their base of support cynically, by murdering Israeli civilians and thereby goading Israel into an overreaction (this is not to deny, of course, that Israel can choose not to overreact) in a way that ends up causing suffering to the Palestinian civilians among whom the militants take shelter. The death and the suffering of the civilian Palestinian population, in the short run, is a part of the Hamas strategy, since it increases the sympathy of the population with the movement’s aims. An Israeli overreaction also leads to the shattering of Israel’s moral legitimacy in its own struggle. In a democratic society with a citizen’s army, any erosion of the ethical foundation of its soldiers and its citizens is of immense political and strategic consequence.

• And, as a bit of light relief, it turns out that the MTV music awards were actually just an elaborate occult ritual. Well, it at least explains the existence of Lady GaGa…