Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog

Do I think that the US and Israel will attack Iran before George Bush leaves office? Yes. Iran has become a thorn in too many sides. It meddles in the affairs of other countries. It is the only country bold enough to use the Holocaust as a card in its political feuds with Israel and the West.

Iran trains, funds and arms Hamas in Israel’s south and Hezbollah in Israel’s north. Understand. It is not just Israel and the US who have beef with Iran. Sunni and Christian Lebanese are none too happy about having a Persian trained Shia militia running wild across their country. While non-fundamentalist Palestinians are none too happy about having religious fanatics, trained, funded and armed by far away Iran, grind their earthly lives into a living hell. And then there are Iran’s neighbors, our petrol allies in the Gulf, from Arabia to the Emirates, Sunni and Arab, who fear and detest Shia Persian Iran even more than we or the Israelis.

So in the event of an attack, Iran will surely find itself alone, with no friends or sympathizers save leftist Americans and weak-willed Europeans. Iran chose this path of confrontation. It was not thrust on her. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how all this plays out.

Been meaning to blog from the AIPAC conference but most of what I wanted to articulate I’ve decided to self censor for security reasons. To the lady with purple hair who spent more time at the buffet than the caterers, Passover is the unleavened bread holiday, not the atonement one. Now you know why security cross checked your badge and why you were escorted out. Better luck next time fruits of Islam.

I am proud to announce that I recently accepted an offer from the McCain campaign to serve as “a Liaison with the Jewish community” and “foreign policy advisor”. Although I have in the past blamed the McCain campaign staff for dirty tricks against my candidate at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, I have come to recognize the importance of supporting John McCain at this crucial juncture in our country’s history. Israel is at risk. The dollar is at risk. The most cherished American symbol, the automobile, is at risk. So today more than ever before, let us unite for the common causes of liberty, of freedom, of family, of God. John McCain for President!

Okay. I’ve had a couple of drinks and I just saw something on TV that irked my goat. To those alter cocker Florida Jews who think “Barry” is a Jewish name while “Barak” is some scary boogie man name: “Barak” is the Hebrew word for thunder, you fools of life. I don’t know what you are. But you sure as hell ain’t Jews. I just returned from a trip to Israel where Jews wear on their skin the color of the desert, the sun. So, to Barry from Florida, stop being such a wuss.

Here’s a quick roundup on Obama News-for-Jews:

Advisor McPeak on NY and Miami

Sounds like Jeffrey Hart isn’t the only Obama friend who’s getting him in trouble (as we talked about a few days ago).

The Dartmouth Review responds. Turns out that “reformed” conservative, fomer Nixon speechwriter and now Obama supporter Jeffrey Hart (an “Obamacon”) was a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and wrote a long piece about it in the DR (or ‘TDR’ as apparently they like to call it). Don’t know why no one noticed it sooner.

It’s an odd piece, and I’m not entirely sure I get his point, but in addition to reminiscing about “Christian existentialist” Rosenstock-Huessy (who was born Jewish, converted to Christianity and fled the Nazis to Dartmouth) and his book The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, Hart has this to say about Jews:

I had come to Dartmouth from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which, though a public school, required an entrance exam. It was 85 percent Jewish and it seemed to me most of the students had their eyes on Harvard and usually its medical school. The intellectual culture was intense and exhilarating. The faculty to day [sic] would be university professors, but most were Jewish too, and excluded from the desirable. During the 1930s Harry Levin had trouble getting tenure at Harvard, so did Lionel Trilling at Columbia, because they were Jews…..

But where have all the Jews gone, now that Stuyvesant is mostly Asian? What about Harvard? What about medical school? Are the Jews settling for William and Mary? Rollins? Say it ain’t so.

Jeffrey, it ain’t so.

In any case, it’s now clear that Hart DID take classes from E R-H, though he apparently dropped out of Dartmouth and finished his degree at Columbia (because there were more Jewish professors there?).  I’ll leave it to others to decipher Hart.

As for Callahan, it’s still intriguing to think that the future King Abdullah II of Jordan spent his salad days kicking back with the Phi Delts singing “Louie, Louie” and smashing beer cans on his head. It’s no wonder he’s one of America’s biggest allies in the Middle East. And given that he’s surrounded by Iraq, Syria and Israel, I suspect there’s more than a few times that King Abdullah wishes he was back at Dartmouth. On the other hand, Abdullah’s mother was a secretarial assistant on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, so maybe he was just channeling Peter O’Toole.

Hats off to the Dartmouth Review for digging a little deeper. In today’s blog, A.S. Erickson writes:

I was reading through the preface of Prof. Hart’s Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe (published in 2001) when I came across this on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. This seems to corroborate the speculation that Rosenstock’s maxim about the Citizen was often repeated in class.

[Rosenstock] had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.

He would say, “History must be told.” He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

Good digging. But I’m afraid that since this was written in 2001 (after Hart wrote the 1996 piece), it stills begs a few questions:

• Does Hart spell E R-H’s name right in the book? We’re still - at best - left with a Dartmouth English professor who neither cites his sources, nor even spells the name of his subject correctly. If an Ivy League English prof. can’t check the spelling of one of his esteemed colleague’s names correctly, it begs the question about the value of a Dartmouth education.
• Was Hart actually a student of E R-H? (we know he taught at Dartmouth, but the DR says he and E R-H probably didn’t overlap). In and of itself, this doesn’t corroborate that the Citizen quote was widespread, only that Hart used it more than once. The trick is to find someone else who remembers the quote.
• If he wasn’t a student, what’s his original source for the ‘96 quote? The DR can just ask him.
• The DR now puts the blame squarely on Callahan and/or Birzin, suggesting that they copped from Hart. Fair enough, but then I ask again, why would the Callahan quote be such a personal one “from his father?” If a man lies so cavalierly about his own father, what else is he lying about? His own resume? His own trackrecord at Dartmouth? Do we really want this guy representing us at the State Department working in anti-terrorism? We’ve been asking around the National Security community, and indeed, Callahan has a stellar record protecting America (and yes, even contributing to Bush/Cheney in 2004). If Hollywood was to depict a handsome, daring, athletic, patriotic, articulate diplomat, they couldn’t do better than Callahan. To read the Birzin piece in particular, the guy is one part Tom Cruise and one part Matt Damon (minus, of course, the Sarah Silverman thing).
• ….But, what happened at the Phi Delt house? The Birzin profile spends considerable time talking about Callahan’s experience cleaning up his frat, Phi Delta Alpha (not to be confused with Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta Phi, the inspiration for the film Animal House):
  

  Just before he took the reins as president, Phi Delt was put on social probation by the administration for a series of behavioral incidents and infractions by its members. Callahan was faced with the difficult task of finding a way “to reconcile the house’s objectives with the legitimate concerns of the Administration.”

  What’s interesting is that the general dates of that time period coincide with Jordan’s then-Prince (now King) Abdullah hanging out at the frat:

  Royalty visited Phi Delt in the 1980s. Prince Abdullah of Jordan hung out at Phi Delt in 1983, while visiting close friend George ‘Gig’ Faux ’84.

  
  Best as we can tell, Callahan took over as Phi Delt president from Gig Faux the next year and had to clean up “the mess.” I have no reason to doubt Callahan’s loyalty to his country, but should a high-ranking State Department expert on counterterrorism be old frat buddies with the King of Jordan? As one of our strongest allies in the reason, maybe that’s a good thing. But it begs the further question of if the young Prince had anything to do with the “behavioral incidents” at the Phi Delt house and what exactly did Callahan do to “clean it up”?

• Has anyone tracked down Birzin, Callahan or Hart to get to the bottom of this?

(h/t to Eli and Marwan for digging up many of these links)

Internet connection is pretty slow where I am, but I thought I’d just hattip some of my colleagues’ blogs today:

Debbie Schlussel has an interesting piece about Israel striking an empty Hamas office. Debbie always has great insight into Israeli politics.

Althouse has a nice story comparing McCain and Obama’s (links to WashPo)

American Thinker on Obama’s interventionist theories.

Captain’s Quarters on an unexpected Bush supporter. I love the Captain.

McCain explains 100year linein Conservative Heritage Times

new on Mahmoud Abbas

Daniel Pipes on the Koran

LONG treatise on the peace process - you had me, then you lost me.

Updates on the campaign

Obama’s Old wine - I don’t buy this at all.

Navy Jihadist

Tribute to the great Buckley from LGF

Obama Pro-Palestinian

Criminal Negligence in Gaza - I disagree strongly with this

Smooth Stone story on Hamas

Michael’s on the road back, but wanted me to post some more links wrapping up Annapolis:

Carl in Israel has this disappointing, but perhaps not unexpected, news.

Links to: Debka - post Annapolis interviews.

Disapointment in Bush from the Right.

RedState Update analysis, likewise.

National Review…

Disappointment in Bush from the Left.

Disappointment…from the Vatican?

Disappointment…from Iowa?

And more disappointment from the Left

So ahead of me on line at Chick and Ruth’s is the foreign minister of Mauritania. Real impressed with himself. He’s with a young overweight woman, college age, naive, horny, American Jewish would be my guess, waiting for a table. She asks him something that I couldn’t make out, something along the lines of why Mauritinia was invited to an Israel-”Palestine” summit. He answers and I quote “In the Middle East we all love your Thanskgiving, the changing colors, the crisp fresh air, the turkey, pumpkin in all the foods. It’s nice for us.”

There you have it. Even dictators and tyrants with multiple wives and real torture chambers (not the joke waterboarding we do) can’t help but see the superiority of Western holidays and seasons. That’s why in the end, we always win, like the British before us. Christianity versus Islam, I’ll take trees and gifts over jihad and sexual repression any day.

A roundup of Annapolis links:

Blog responses from the Middle East (no one has much faith in it, suffice it to say)

h/t to Debbie Schlussel for alerting us to these interesting letters to the WSJ

Syria’s view of Annapolis

Stark statement from Boker Tov, Boulder

The German view from Der Spiegel

Frustration with Bush

my friends at the Council on Foreign Relations have their take on Annapolis

Commentary from Commentary

Traffic on the Beltway being what it is, I couldn’t make it back to the District for the Brookings event, but here’s a great excerpt: from Foreign Policy

Saeb Erekat, the veteran and colorful Palestinian negotiator, told a good joke at today’s Brookings event on Annapolis. It was his way of explaining why we need new negotiations after nearly two decades of failed diplomacy. I’m going to paraphrase it here:

An Israeli and a Palestinian are watching a Western. In the movie, a cowboy is riding bareback on a particularly wild horse. The Israeli, being aggressive, says to the Palestinian, “I’ll bet you 10 shekels he falls.” The Palestinian, being impulsive, replies immediately, “I’ll bet you he doesn’t.”

The cowboy falls, and the Palestinian forks over 10 shekels. The Israeli, feeling that famous Israeli guilt, refuses them. Then he admits, “I’ve seen this movie before.”

The Palestinian replies, “So have I. But I thought he would learn from his mistake.”

And more from “Palestine”

Nicely put.

A funny take from Israel