I’m posting this for two reasons: to practice embedding a youtube video into a post, and because Mark Steyn is brilliant here, as usual.
Mark Steyn on Multiculturalism
Jun 14 2008
WordPress at Dreamhost
Please bear with me as I get switched from Blogger to Dreamhost using WordPress.
UPDATE: For now, I’m accepting comment on how it looks, suggestions, insults, whatever.
Jun 11 2008
Going South
Things are going south down south of here.
The state department travel alert of about two months ago is chilling, especially in “summer vacation” time in Mexico.
Armed robberies and carjackings, apparently unconnected to the narcotics-related violence, have increased in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. Dozens of U.S. citizens were kidnapped and/or murdered in Tijuana in 2007. Public shootouts have occurred during daylight hours near shopping areas. [emphasis mine]
This is really encouraging. Although it may not be so different from Detroit, or Washington DC. Baghdad might actually be safer. Although perhaps I’m misjudging; maybe its just the excitement generated by those “after Cinco De Mayo” sales.
Criminals are armed with a wide array of sophisticated weapons. In some cases, assailants have worn full or partial police or military uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles. [emphasis mine]
Support your local fake police. And, of course, the fake troops.
Obviously, those gun control laws in Mexico are really working well. (Scroll to the 12th paragraph at this link.)
Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials, and journalists. However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region. [emphasis mine] In its effort to combat violence, the government of Mexico has deployed military troops in various parts of the country. U.S. citizens are urged to cooperate with official checkpoints when traveling on Mexican highways. [emphasis mine]
Let me see if I understand this. US citizens are routinely murdered or kidnapped. The bad guys sometimes wear official uniforms. But if someone in an official looking uniform tries to stop you at a “checkpoint” on the road, be sure to cooperate.
I suppose that makes sense, state department style.
Recent Mexican army and police force conflicts with heavily-armed narcotics cartels have escalated to levels equivalent to military small-unit combat and have included use of machine guns and fragmentation grenades. Confrontations have taken place in numerous towns and cities in northern Mexico, including Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California, and Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua. The situation in northern Mexico remains very fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements there cannot be predicted. [emphasis mine]
You mean they don’t have a schedule? What in the world is wrong with these citizens? Don’t they understand they’re supposed to announce public demonstrations of popular will? I’m just stunned that they would be so inconsiderate.
U.S. citizens are urged to be especially alert to safety and security concerns when visiting the border region. [emphasis mine] While Mexican citizens overwhelmingly are the victims of these crimes, this uncertain security situation poses risks for U.S. citizens [emphasis mine] as well. Thousands of U.S. citizens cross the border safely each day, exercising common-sense precautions such as visiting only legitimate business and tourist areas of border towns during daylight hours. It is strongly recommended that travelers avoid areas where prostitution and drug dealing occur.
Uh, not to be disrespectful, but…. we’re talking about MEXICO here. Where, exactly, is it that prostitution and drug dealing don’t occur? I’m sure there are such places. I’m also sure that no tourist is going to know where these things don’t happen, short of never leaving the hotel (although I understand a Mexican concierge will get you nearly anything), even though there will be places where they obviously do, and which wise tourists will avoid.
Criminals have followed and harassed U.S. citizens traveling in their vehicles, particularly in border areas including Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Tijuana. There is no evidence, however, that U.S. citizens are targeted because of their nationality. [emphasis mine]
Obviously, the people who wrote this howler think we’re so drowsy by now that we just aren’t paying attention. Exactly how many Swedes are driving US licensed automobiles into Mexico?
I have an idea. If you drive into Mexico, just don’t look American! Wear a turban. Wear a burka. Wear a skullcap. Wear a spiked Prussian helmet.
Whatever you do, wear armor.
Jun 10 2008
The Left at Christian Univs, part 3: Diversity
If you care to understand the development of diversity as an ideological, political enterprise in higher education, you need to read this book. 
Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter W. Wood, was published in 2003, in the same time frame as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger, preceding by just a bit the ruling that outlawed University of Michigan’s undergraduate racial quotas for failing to meet the test of being “narrowly tailored.”
It is essential reading for anyone, right or left, who wants to understand the development of the diversity initiatives that are so popular in colleges and universities, as well as certain non-profits, government agencies and even some businesses, especially large corporations. It is very scholarly, dense with references (they don’t get in the way of the narrative, but they provide sources for further study, or confirmation for doubters), historically grounded, yet highly readable and accessible to general readers. The author is a professor of anthropology, and former Associate Provost of Boston University. He’s seen academia from the classroom and the administration building.
Better reviews than I would be likely to write can be found here and here.
Why it matters
As I discussed in The Left at Christian Universities, part 2, a trend for Christian universities and colleges seems to be to move left by adopting essentially secular enterprises. Diversity, as understood for the last 30 years or so, is one of these, regardless of how we adorn it. In an upcoming post, I’ll very briefly review some that history. However, for the full story, from 19th century antecedents to 1970s court cases to 1990s academic dogma, this book is a goldmine.
UPDATE: Part 4 in this series here.
Jun 10 2008
lgf: 9/11 Truth Blogs, Marxists, and Terrorist Sympathizers Allowed to Remain at Official Obama Site
lgf: 9/11 Truth Blogs, Marxists, and Terrorist Sympathizers Allowed to Remain at Official Obama Site: “The Obama campaign has been doing a lot of cleaning up and sanitizing at my.barackobama.com.”
More at the link. This is a rookie mistake by Obama camp. But not one the main stream media are likely to hold them accountable for.
And in the meantime, it’s all we need to know about Obama’s fellow travelers, since these posts, now being removed are from authorized posters, not anonymous commenters.
Jun 09 2008
The Left at Christian Universities part 2
In The Left at Christian Universities part 1, I briefly introduced the observation that many Christian colleges and Universities seem to be moving gradually left. This seems especially true of those that:
1) experienced recent, fairly rapid growth
2) are trying to move up in rankings/ratings, such as in the US NEWS and WORLD REPORT
3) changed from a college to a university in the last 25 years or so (often a sign of the outworking of growth and ambition to be well-thought-of, and the reflection of that in marketing initiatives).
I suppose the first question is:
Why does it matter?
It matters because of what we’ve learned about the typical developmental trajectory of church-related colleges over the last 100-150 years.
Simply, colleges founded by churches rarely (if ever) become secular by moving to the right. (Perhaps you know of one that I don’t. If so, do you know of two? Three? There are a lot of examples the other way.) These institutions become secular by moving to the left (the Christian left) and then it seems to take a generation or so to gradually shed the Christian identity in all but name. One may conjecture about the reasons for this, and about just how the mechanisms work.
It seems critical that we examine the historical sources of the ideas that are represented in and by the Christian left and right. If an idea or perspective can be shown on historical grounds to have arisen from sources which are anti-Christian (something more than merely non-Christian), we are correct to look with great suspicion on its current manifestations, regardless of how much God-talk we surround it with. For example, rules of logic developed from the writings of Greek philosophers are merely non-Christian, not anti-Christian. On the other hand, we should be deeply suspicious of a teaching about the value of human persons that flows in a logical way from the assumption that we are mere meat machines, an anti-Christian perspective that cannot possible lead to sound moral judgments.
This is not a violation of the “all truth is God’s truth” principle. We are not talking about denying the validity of science, or the rules of logic, or the fundamental principles of economics (if we can agree on what they are), i.e., theologically neutral propositions flowing from “the general revelation”. We are talking about the danger in trying to harmonize the perspectives of people who were specifically anti-Christian with Biblical teaching; drawing their viewpoints, flowing from anti-Christian stands, into the church’s teaching, perhaps because these viewpoints sound caring, or objectively rational, or appeal to us emotionally in some way; and then wrapping the entire affair in judiciously selected Bible verses so we can assure ourselves of our continued piety, while experiencing a chilly frisson of self-congratulation at our open-mindedness.
How concerned should a Christian be when he finds himself agreeing on policy matters and social issues with well-known atheists? The answer, of course, is it depends. It depends on whether or not the particular matter of agreement flows from a commonly held perspective or understanding that is itself more or less theologically neutral. On the other hand, it should evoke great concern when a specific anti-Christian perspective, flowing in a consistent way from an anti-Christian worldview, becomes something we adopt as our own, having decorated it with hermeneutic distortion of Biblical texts.
The Christian left seems more likely to ally itself with initiatives and perspectives whose origin is outside the church. These include abortion “rights” (flowing from Margaret Sanger’s eugenics views, among other places), certain views of science’s role in life and faith (especially sympathy with the neo-Darwinian synthesis), diversity, multiculturalism, sympathy with socialistic approaches to social problems, anti-military perspectives (natural for Christians from the Anabaptist tradition, but not so much for others), modern environmentalism as a near religion in its own right, suspicion of the profit motive, class warfare, preoccupation with “social justice” (not the simple Biblical concern for the local poor), “borderless nations”, disdain for the USA (expressing itself in inappropriate moral equivalence arguments relating the USA, and sometimes our allies, to other nations), encouragement for gay marriage (more than civil unions with associated “couple” oriented privileges, which seems acceptable to many on the right), etc. The list could be longer, but the flavor is here.
This is not to say that all of the Christian left agrees with all of these things. And it seems possible for perhaps one of these perspectives to find root in an otherwise Christian right perspective, though it is uncommon. However, where half or more of these perspectives are present in an institution or person, it seems reasonable to affirm identification with the Christian left.
With one exception, what all of these have in common is their origins not merely in non-Christian thought, but frequently in explicitly anti-Christian thought. The exception is the specifically pacifistic Anabaptist tradition, which can encourage a thorough-going withdrawal from all civil participation that has any aspect of violence implied in its function, though this is not always completely practiced by current descendants of the Anabaptist tradition. A simple test for the “theological authenticity” of a pacifist is how willing they are for the political state to tax and redistribute to cure social problems. The threatened violence behind the power to tax is anathema to many true Anabaptists, but not to many members of the Christian left, whose concern is not primarily refraining from doing evil with violence, but with effecting specific “cures” for society’s ills, which they are only too happy to do with taxes paid by other people.
The trajectory
Christian institutions of higher education have a way of starting as small bible colleges that will fail in a decade or two if they don’t mind their onions and focus on their main mission. Then they get a little bigger, and start trying to do other things… which is fine, as long as they keep their eye on the ball. But at some point, they find that they really want to be thought well of in the eyes of the world (the marketing/message/branding thing… must get that USNEWS and World Report rating) and begin trying to arrange adequate resources and public image such that even if they failed to carry out their primary mission for 20-30 years (or CHANGED the mission, gradually and subtly), they’d still survive, and maybe even thrive. Here is how you know you’re there: when the university creates a separate PROGRAM dedicated to carrying out its current understanding of the original mission, and then advertises that it’s doing this. (Imagine Ford engaging in an advertising program to tell the world that it was now trying to make good cars….) On the surface, this looks good… but it’s in fact an acknowledgment of serious “mission creep”… and unfortunately, the fix, mandated to create objectively observable and measurable results (of something that was never meant to be so measured… “Exactly how attractive is the curve on that fender?”), is often just another kind of “mission creep”.
Upcoming posts
I’ll try to pursue each of the “Christian left” perspectives above, and review the historical roots of each. Keep in mind that I’m not an historian, I’m just a musician who reads a lot. I’ve been in Christian academia for a long time, and have had the privilege of talking, in depth, with fine educators of both the Christian left and Christian right perspective, though of course I identify more with the latter. I expect the theologians, philosophers, biologists, physicists, historians and social scientists to point out all the ways I’ve misused their disciplines. So be it. Some of them are “hoist on their own petard”, in that they have talked about interdisciplinary, integrative work so much that I have taken them seriously and am trying to do it.
The principles I’ll try to follow are simple. I’ll trace the antecedents of particular ideas that I have identified as being distinctively part of the Christian left. I’ll be trying to make the case that most of them are secular, that is, flowing not out of the gradual development of the historical Christian traditions, but rather appearing discontinuously from secular, frequently explicitly anti-Christian sources.
I’ll discuss the Biblical references that are made by the Christian left to support these perspectives, but I will do so in the context of the Bible overall, what is known historically about the context of the times (and sometimes what is different about the times in which we live), the teachings/behavior of the early church fathers, and the continuing tradition.
I’m not sure how long this will take…. I’ve done a lot of the reading I need to do, but there is, of course, no end to it. So hang with me as we go. Suggest a book if you wish.
The first one will be on the topic of diversity and multi-culturalism. Look for it soon, I hope.
UPDATE: Part 3 of this series here.
Jun 08 2008
Obama’s site gives Communists a voice
Commies and Socialists for Obama, STRAIGHT OFF HIS WEBSITE!: “Marxists/Communists/Socialists for the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. By no means is he a true Marxist, but under Karl Marx’s writings we are to support the party with the best interests of the mobilization of the proletariat. Though the Democratic Socialists of America or the Communist Patty of America may have more Socialististic values, it is pointless to vote for these candidates due to the fact that there is virutally no chance they will be elected on a National level. The members of this group are not Leninists, Stalinists, etc. and do not support or condone the actions of North Korea, China, Cuba or any other self-procalimed ‘Marxist States.’ They do not in anyway represent the Marxist philosophy nor do they represent Socialism/ Communsim. We support Barack Obama because he knows what is best for the people!”
You can’t make this stuff up. Some things are beyond parody. And, in another link from the same page:
Capitalism presents an interesting dilemma for the white, upper middle class male, a demographic that, unjustly, has been and continues to enjoy the ripest fruits of capitalism. On the one hand, a person like me (or anyone else who lives in the economically secure class of citizens of a capitalist nation, especially America) can sit back and enjoy and take advantage of the limitless opportunities afforded them. Thousands of universities, both domestic and international are within their grasp. After that, countless occupations with career paths that could lead them to even greater heights on the social ladder await.
But on the other hand, this education afforded them (hopefully) enlightens them to see the reality of the perverse economic system that got him or her to the position he now occupies. He sees a system that takes from those who have less and gives to those who have more. He sees a system that rewards unscrupulous rule-bending and breaking, a system that attacks the family, moral values, the environment, and even exploits every experience in life itself for money and profit. And while often isolated and removed from poverty and the uncertainty and paralyzing fear that accompanies it, the enlightened and idealistic youth knows it’s out there and wants that wrong righted. And so naturally, the youth attacks and turns against the system that caused the suffering to begin with.
It goes on to say, “Redistribution is not enough.” I’ll say: you have to have something to redistribute.
Change you can believe in.
hat tip: Little Green Footballs via Powerline
UPDATE: they will probably take the referenced pages down, just like they removed anti-Semitic materials that they had posted earlier (not just in comments, actually posted by Obama’s own people). The picture at the top was made as a screen capture from Obama’s site.
UPDATE: as predicted, the Obama campaign has removed the communist/socialist/marxist cheerleading page. Again, just to refocus: this was not something simply left as a comment by an anonymous net-lurker, it was an official post of the Obama campaign by an approved, authorized poster on the Obama website.
Jun 08 2008
Invisible Link
Today I sat in church with my 10 yr old daughter. Her mom is usually playing the piano, and so my daughter often sits between her grandmother and me. That way, we can both hear her sing. I don’t think the small vocalist knows that we sometimes just listen to her. She probably just thinks we’re tired by the second verse, if she thinks about it at all. Sometimes grandma and I make eye contact. We both know what we’re doing. We don’t talk about it.
Now, not to knock the sermon today; it was great, on Psalm 42. But attention can drift. I expect somebody dozed off during the Gettysburg address, or while Paul was waxing eloquent about unknown Gods. Especially while Paul was going on about unidentified deities. So my mind can wander now and then.
But partway through, I noticed an odd looking purple pen in my daughter’s hand. I don’t know where she got it.
She took my arm, and prepared to write something on it. I thought, oh great, now I’m going to have ink on my arm… But Dads will do anything for love of a child, pretty much, so I let her write. She seemed to write a short word, but apparently the pen wasn’t working… No ink, I supposed, or it was dried up or something.
I shrugged to her, and returned my attention to the sermon. She was doing something beside me, but I wasn’t paying lots of attention… Kids get squirmy in church sometimes, and she wasn’t making noise. Then she tapped my arm, until I looked down. She had turned on a small light on the end of the funny looking pen, and was shining it on my arm, the miracle of “black light”. In kid-scrawl letters, my forearm said, all in lowercase, “dad”.
Well.
I know this is probably silly, but the moment took on a luminescent meaning for me. There we were, father and daughter, bonded in many different ways, each partly defining ourselves in terms of the other. She was naming me for what I was to her, and applying the label… But only she could read it. And she wanted me to see the label, too. It was our secretly acknowledged non-secret.
Being metaphorically minded, I could not help but reflect on the invisible bonds in our lives. These chains bind us as surely as titanium steel twisted cable, as unexpectedly powerful as light-weight carbon fiber-reinforced Kevlar. We can stretch our bindings. But they’re still there, drawing us together.
As a father, I have tremendous freedom of action, befitting the responsibility that is mine. There are a thousand ways to be a good father, and about a million ways to be a bad one. It may be odd to say, and it is not usually expressed this way, but I am also her servant, working for her and for the One who put her in my charge, for a little while. Perhaps it is good for servants to wear invisible identification.
Her yoke is easy.
Jun 08 2008
Slow learners
Michael Ledeen speaks about the fact that we know an enormous amount now about the rise of totalitarian states in the 20th century, and about why the rest of the world failed for so long to do anything effective about them, and eventually accepted that the only way to deal with them was war. It is now widely understood, despite the occasional revisionist, that negotiations could never have produced any good result with Hitler, Mussolini, imperial Japan, or Stalin. He discusses how badly we misjudged them, how little we believed their publicly stated intentions, and how poorly we were served by our “reasonable” approach to them, and how many lives were lost to remedy that error.
By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.
Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes, from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis, who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of “politics,” intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.
Clearly, the explanations we gave for our failure to act in the last century were wrong. The rise of messianic mass movements is not new, and there is very little we do not know about them. Nor is there any excuse for us to be surprised at the success of evil leaders, even in countries with long histories and great cultural and political accomplishments. We know all about that. So we need to ask the old questions again. Why are we failing to see the mounting power of evil enemies? Why do we treat them as if they were normal political phenomena, as Western leaders do when they embrace negotiations as the best course of action?
No doubt there are many reasons. One is the deep-seated belief that all people are basically the same, and all are basically good. Most human history, above all the history of the last century, points in the opposite direction. But it is unpleasant to accept the fact that many people are evil, and entire cultures, even the finest, can fall prey to evil leaders and march in lockstep to their commands. Much of contemporary Western culture is deeply committed to a belief in the goodness of all mankind; we are reluctant to abandon that reassuring article of faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we prefer to pursue the path of reasonableness, even with enemies whose thoroughly unreasonable fanaticism is manifest.
This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means, short of a policy of national suicide, acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war. It means that, temporarily at least, we have to make sacrifices on many fronts: in the comforts of our lives, indeed in lives lost, in the domestic focus of our passions, careers derailed and personal freedoms subjected to unpleasant and even dangerous restrictions, and the diversion of wealth from self-satisfaction to the instruments of power. All of this is painful; even the contemplation of it hurts.
Then there is anti-Semitism. Old Jew-hating texts like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” now in Farsi and Arabic, are proliferating throughout the Middle East. Calls for the destruction of the Jews appear regularly on Iranian, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian television and are heard in European and American mosques. There is little if any condemnation from the West, and virtually no action against it, suggesting, at a minimum, a familiar Western indifference to the fate of the Jews.
Finally, there is the nature of our political system. None of the democracies adequately prepared for war before it was unleashed on them in the 1940s. None was prepared for the terror assault of the 21st century. The nature of Western politics makes it very difficult for national leaders, even those rare men and women who see what is happening and want to act, to take timely, prudent measures before war is upon them. Leaders like Winston Churchill are relegated to the opposition until the battle is unavoidable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight desperately to win Congressional approval for a national military draft a few months before Pearl Harbor.
Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.
Read the whole thing.
Jun 08 2008
Israel plays chicken
The Jerusalem Post carries an article describing the experience at a single checkpoint, even as Israel is removing checkpoints to ease the lives of Palestinians who need to move from the West Bank into and out of Israel. These are the checkpoints put up to stop terrorists, after repeated bombings and shootings by Palestinians crossing into Israel from the West Bank.
Cpl. Ron Bezalel of the military police’s Taoz Battalion told Army Radio that the youth had sent his bag through the checkpoint’s X-ray scanner. When the explosives were discovered, the troops on duty immediately implemented the protocol for stopping a terror suspect.
‘It’s routine to find bombs at this checkpoint… every day, we find knives and other weapons,’ Bezalel said.
The military said the Palestinian was most likely on his way to perpetrate an attack in an Israeli city. He was arrested and transferred to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) for interrogation.
Three weeks ago, another Palestinian carrying five pipe bombs, which he had attached and strapped to his chest in the manner of an explosives belt, was stopped at Hawara.
Earlier Sunday, the IDF announced that Israel had removed 10 roadblocks in southern Hebron.”
It’s worth reading the entire article. The short story is simple. Even as Israel is trying to strengthen Abbas with Palestinians, by making him appear partly responsible for Israel’s liberalization in the matter of checkpoints, Israelis know that the attempts to sneak terrorists into civilians areas will not stop. In essence, Israel is playing a game of chicken: will Hamas kill too many Israelis to make a more moderate approach possible?
They are literally betting the lives of Israelis that Abbas might be able to rein in Hamas’ worst activities, by trying to help Abbas with his own people.
I think it’s a forlorn hope. So do many Israelis.
Almagor, an organization representing terror victims and their families, responded to Sunday’s announcement in the form of an open letter to Barak written by Nahman Zoldan, the father of Ido Zoldan who was killed several months ago by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank.
“As someone who has lost a son near a road at the hands of Palestinian Authority members, I call on you to reconsider the decision and not to take at face value the Palestinian Authority’s promise that it will take care of our security for us.
“I issue this especially ahead of the coming holiday, when tens of thousands of Israelis use these roads on their way to Eilat, not knowing that these roads are now totally exposed to Palestinian movement,” Zoldan wrote in a statement issued by Almagor to the media.
Talks between Hamas and Fatah are producing essentially zero results. Why should they? Hamas has all the support it needs from bad actors outside Israel in terms of weapons (can anyone spell Iran? Syria? Al Qaeda?), and from sources that belie the Shia/Sunni divide that some in the West claim is strong enough to keep them from cooperating. Hamas protects its “brand” with Palestinians by acting as a humanitarian organization, and tries to prick western conscience with the needs of its people, while doing everything possible to make it unlikely that western aid will be given or deliverable. Hamas, despite being officially declared a terrorist organization by the UN, still has enormous sympathetic resonance with too many in the western media. They gain nothing by actually compromising on anything, now, and these pretend negotiations with Fatah are window-dressing. So they wait and see, knowing the short memory of the west, and the media in general, and knowing that surrogates in the west that pretend to be “moderate” are providing them public relations cover whenever possible, which is pretty often with a cooperative world media.
Look for upcoming elections in Israel to give a more definitive answer on how the Israeli people feel about removing the checkpoints. The main question is straightforward: will the first Israeli deaths from lifting the checkpoints come before or after the elections? As is so often the case, the election may turn more on emotional response to recent events than to sober historical judgment.
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