The Washington Post takes a look at changes in the Arab and the Jewish vote.

Ira N. Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said that Jews are the most politicized ethnic group in the country. "Karl Rove has a Jewish strategy," Forman said. "It's largely about money -- but it goes way beyond that."

Democrats have a Jewish strategy, too, they say. For some candidates that has meant shaking the family tree. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) recently discovered he had Jewish grandparents. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark talks of his Jewish father. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean's wife and children are Jewish. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich's Jewish girlfriend brags that Kucinich is a vegan out of respect for her kosher dietary laws and knows the Passsover Seder by heart. But Lieberman, the only Jew in the race, has been disappointed by lackluster Jewish support, campaign workers said; many Jews, especially older, wealthier ones, feel the time is not right to have a Jew at the top of the ticket.

Lieberman shared a synagogue pew for 10 years with Richard Heideman, honorary president of B'nai B'rith International. "We know him. We love him. I respect him," Heideman said. Even so, Heideman, a lifelong Democrat, has decided to give money to Bush: "Things have changed in this country."

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune (registration required) discovers that in Illinois politics, the Republicans are nearly as corrupt as the Democrats, no small accomplishment.

The Illinois Republican Party once was a real political party. Then former Gov. Jim Thompson--a tax-and-spender of gargantuan appetite--took it over. The party lines blurred.

Thompson is the former Republican corruption-busting federal prosecutor. He's now the rainmaker for the law firm of Winston & Strawn. He held a fundraiser for [Democratic governor and Chicago machine stooge] Blagojevich and served on the governor's transition team.

Another pale-faced Klansman goes about taking shots at the colored folk for not thinking what their betters tell them to do.

UPDATE: Oops. My mistake. It wasn't a Klansman. It was a liberal Harvard boy. I guess it's okay then.

Nigeria, which is giving asylum to Charles Taylor, has told Interpol that it will ignore its arrest notice for Taylor.

Nigeria said on Thursday it would allow Taylor to stay.

"This is not an Interpol affair. The issue of Taylor is a political issue. President Obasanjo consulted very widely with the U.N. and other international agencies on the need to stop the bloodshed in Liberia before he took the decision on Taylor.

"We remain committed to keeping Taylor here on his own volition," the president's spokeswoman said.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to a debate on George Bush, run by the student version of the Law Society, and even promised to blog about it later. I didn't, except for a brief mention of the only amusing part of the debate, mostly because it was almost breathtakingly predictable. Charlie Wolf, a radio broadcaster, did his best representing Republicans Abroad, but Democrats Abroad went through a lot of trouble to find possibly the worst public speaker in the country. Think really bad stage fright. The audience had a few energetic sorts who were not lemmings, but for the most part they seemed like people who thought the Irish Times is a non-fiction paper.

Fast forward to this week, when I went to a panel discussion on Iraq on Tuesday night. This one lacked the requisite hysteria for these things, but I left early because I was falling asleep. There were three speakers. The historian gave a short Cliff Notes version of Iraqi history, followed by the usual bitching about unilateralism, defined as without the approval of France and Syria. Next up was a political scientist who did international relations and "peace studies". He read his comments slowly, pausing after every couple of sentences. At first I thought it was for some pointless dramatic effect, then I realized that he was continually losing his place. After a couple of minutes of this, my neighbor nudged me before I started snoring. Regular use of the word "hegemony" does that to me. But the grand finale was the retired British diplomat. Think every cruel parody of diplomats. He wasted no time telling us that the problems of Iraq were the result of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Why? He didn't say, except to say that it was necessary to get Israel to stop picking on the Palestinians, after which everybody in the Middle East would settle down. What about Chechnya and Kashmir? Oh, shush. I went to take a break from writing exams. A good decision. It made writing exams seem a lot more exciting.

My new rule is to catch debates on Iraq only at home on television. There at least I can fall asleep in peace.

Years ago, when I was in high school and college, I worked as a clerk at the big Walgreen's drug store in downtown Chicago, at the corner of State and Madison. It was not exactly a lot of fun, but it had its moments. At any time, the store had between four and six security guards on duty. These were not fat old men; they were young and fit, and armed to the teeth with clubs and guns. One day, a clerk called security on a guy for somewhat unsubtle shoplifting. The guard confronted the shoplifter as he was about to leave the store. The shoplifter was massive, well over six feet and at least 250 pounds, so he decided to take a swing at the guard. More guards came running, and it turned into a brawl. They kept hitting the guy with clubs, he would go down, and then get right back up again. Customers scattered, and since I was only about 20 feet or so away, I locked my cash register and ducked for cover, because I didn't know when guns might get drawn. As I said, fun stuff (although more civil than the academic racket).

The worst time of the year, though, was Christmas, partly because of the crowds, but also because of the Muzak. Most of the year, it was unrecognizable noise, and I quickly learned how to filter it out (a skill that has been handy at faculty meetings over the years). But at Christmas, it was recognizable carols, and I got sick of them. Thoroughly. Completely. To this day, my favorite Christmas carol is Tom Lehrer's ("on Christmas Day, you can't be sore, your fellow man you must adore, there's time to rob him all the more, the other three hundred and sixty four"). But still and all, this story from the Times is just plain stupid.

Shop assistants in Austria, citing the unbearable “psychological terror” of store muzak, are threatening to sue employers who do not moderate the playing of Christmas jingles. Gottfried Rieser, a spokesman for the Austrian shop workers’ union, said that music had to be limited to just a few hours, and then only in departments selling Christmas gifts, such was his members’ torment.

“Playing Christmas music such as Jingle Bells and Silent Night from early morning until late in the evening is psychological horror for shop workers,” Herr Rieser said. “It makes them aggressive, and often they develop an allergy to Christmas music.”

Usdaw, the British shopworkers’ union, said that it was encouraging shopworkers to play an “alternative Christmas carol collection” this year, as part of a campaign against violence against retail staff.

Bah and humbug. (I'm getting ready for the Christmas season.)

In the Guardian, Europhile Martin Jacques at least vaguely figures it out: Europe is rapidly becoming inconsequential.

Throughout the cold war, Europe was the centre of the world. The global fault line ran through the heart of Europe. In the face of the Soviet threat, the world's most powerful country, the United States, felt that it must act in concert with western Europe, in an organic alliance, the western alliance, that gave rise to the modern notion of "the west". The communist threat persuaded the US to subordinate, at least in part, its own identity and interests to that of "the west". The revolutions of 1989, which brought the cold war to an end and transformed the physiognomy of global politics, were exclusively European events. In reality, though, the cold war served to exaggerate Europe's true position in the world and mask its underlying decline; 1989 was the last time that Europe was the centre of global affairs. Ever since, its star has been on the wane. That fact alone is a portent of the world that is now slowly taking shape.
I suppose one could make the point in a slightly different way using the example of Paris. In the May events of 1968, it was de rigueur to look to Paris as the laboratory of the future, a city that had the capacity to reshape the world, a place where new ideas were born, new movements emerged and new possibilities defined. In 1968 Paris signified the morrow. Nobody would seriously think like that today. Similarly French academe - the grandes écoles, the Sorbonne - used to be regarded as one of the great intellectual hubs of the world. No more. These historic institutions have long since been usurped by the top American universities. I use Paris here only by way of illustration of a wider point about European decline; in the 60s, Paris was Europe's foremost city.

And with the rise of American unilateralism, Europe - at least the Franco-German part of it - will surely be propelled in the direction of acquiring a serious independent military capability.

And there is this:

But the decline of Europe is not to be measured solely in terms of its hugely diminished role and importance in the eyes of the US. For well over 30 years, the continent has accepted that it is America's economic inferior. Far more striking, but virtually unseen in terms of opinion formers and public alike, is the loss of Europe's position as the second most important economic region in the world. I am always struck by the way in which commentators and politicians like to boast that Britain is the fourth strongest economic power, as if this offers some kind of solace for our greatly reduced status in the world. Not for long it won't. In a year or two, Britain will be overtaken by China, as will Germany shortly afterwards and, a little way down the road, Japan.

I will not detain you here with a battery of statistics about China's rise; though given the extraordinary provincialism of our culture, we remain blissfully ignorant of the speed with which the world's most populous country - and, indeed, the surrounding region - is being transformed. The point is that within the next five years, east Asia will be home to the second and third most powerful economies in the world. The world's centre of gravity has already shifted to the Pacific, and east Asia has already displaced Europe as the second most powerful economic region.

It would help as well if he spared us the hysteria. For all the frequently huge failings of Europe, it remains the case that the flow of refugees is from Asia to Europe, not the other way around. The Irish government is in many ways corrupt, oppressive, and incompetent. But life in Ireland is more comfortable and safer for the bulk of its population than life in China, much less, say, Kenya. Europe's universities are in trouble. They have virtually no private sector competition. (Imagine how much worse Berkeley and UCLA would be if they did not have to pay attention to losing their best students to Stanford and CalTech. The University of Illinois at Chicago is a better university because it has to compete for the best students with Chicago and Northwestern, and for the middle students with Loyola and DePaul.) But for all their bureaucratic lethargy, Europe's universities are still a major export item. Chinese students come to Europe to get educated; European students go to China for "the experience".

Europe is in trouble, but Chinese growth is not the problem. European lethargy is.

Now I have a big gripe against Israel.

An Israeli cat has been banned from circulating freely in the stairwell of a suburban Tel Aviv apartment building, apparently because its jet black color was frightening the residents.

Kooshi, a 7-year-old mixed breed shorthair, has a midnight black coat and green sparkling eyes.

Its owners were told by municipal veterinarian Jonathan Even-Zor of Rishon Letzion they had to cradle the cat when descending the building's staircase - or risk having it impounded.

"This is a black cat that on its way downstairs occasionally passes through the legs of building residents, some of whom are afraid of the cat, quite possibly because of its black color," Even-Zor wrote to Dan and Ariel Morganstern.

"Even if this reaction is based on superstition, people who are afraid of the cat should not be forced to encounter it on the stairwell, particularly when the area is not illuminated," the letter said. It ordered the couple to carry the cat when walking down the stairs.

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Riva Mayer of the Cat Welfare Society said fear of black cats is pervasive in Israel.

In the course of interesting meditation on America and the world, Bret Stephens, editor of the Jerusalem Post (registration required), has a good word for Hugh Grant.

A proud British PM, the film [Love, Actually] tells us, would know the difference between friendship and servility. He would know that in a truly special relationship, one must also remain true to oneself. He would know, as the French do, that all love starts with self-love.

REFLECTING ON this very topic, the real Hugh Grant, in an interview last week with Agence-France Press, took a different view:

"Love," he said, means "loving someone no matter what their faults in a blind and unconditional way, such as the love Tony Blair has for George Bush." Except this rather brave definition applies neither to himself nor to Britons generally. For the British, love "has never been a top priority"; for Hugh Grant, "I have too much interest in myself."

Grant is being cheeky, but there's something refreshing about his self-confessed narcissism."I have always modeled myself on Caligula," he says. As if we ever doubted it. It would be nice to see more of his ilk – the Islington bien pensants, the Harold Pinters and Julian Barneses and Polly Toynbees – be so sincere.

Eugene Volokh noted that a leaked copy of the banned report on anti-Semitism is available here, but that he had not read it yet. Shame on him. It is only 87 pages, single spaced. In a law review, that would go under shorter articles. [I am kidding here, people.] For those of you with limited free time, today's Jerusalem Post (registration required) runs a few short excerpts.

In the Jerusalem Post (registration required), Calev Ben-David decides to compete with what has been humorous dubbed the Geneva Accord. (Okay, so the humor isn't intentional. It is still funny.)

I have a better idea. Each and every one of us must take matters into our his or her hands. It is now incumbent upon all Israelis (and Palestinians) to come up with their own, individualized, personal peace plan.

The first step in coming up with your peace plan is finding a proper name for it. I'm calling mine "The Monaco Accord."

Why Monaco? Well, there are reasons these agreements aren't called "The Poughkeepsie Proposal" or "The Ipswich Initiative." As you may have noticed, they're usually named after European cities that, like Oslo and Geneva, both convey an image of neutrality and are pleasant places to visit.

Obviously, since a big attraction of these initiatives is free flight tickets sponsored by the EU or other international bodies, you'll want the signing ceremony in a place with some tourist appeal. Monaco, which I've been dying to visit for years, certainly fits that bill. And since local political representation is de rigueur at these events, there's the added value of hanging out with princesses Caroline and Stephanie of Monaco, instead of the president of Bulgaria or whoever.
The next step in organizing your peace plan is finding an appropriate Palestinian to dialogue with. Unfortunately, all the moderate Palestinians (all three of them, to be exact) have already been booked by other Track II initiatives. In addition, I have to admit my personal contact with Palestinians is rather limited these days, especially since I was retired from IDF reserve duty.

After giving the matter careful consideration, I decided to choose as my negotiating partner the one Palestinian with whom I am in closest daily contact – Mussa, the street cleaner employed by the municipality who gives me a friendly greeting every morning on my way to work.

NOW I KNOW what you're thinking: What authority does Mussa have to negotiate for the future of the Palestinian state?

Well, since pretty much all the power lies in Yasser Arafat's grubby hands anyway, I don't see why Mussa has any less legitimacy to represent the Palestinians than the likes of Sari Nusseibeh or Yasser Abed Rabbo – or for that matter, why the Israeli side isn't better served by myself than a political loser like Yossi Beilin.

An utterly charming story from the Daily Telegraph (registration required):

A prison officer was sacked for making an allegedly insulting remark about Osama bin Laden two months after the September 11 attacks, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.

Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his "insensitive" comment about the world's most reviled terrorist.

The assistant governor at Blundeston Prison, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, gave him a ticking off at the time. But he was sacked after a six-month investigation.

Mr Rose, a former Coldstream Guardsman with a 21-year unblemished record in the Prison Service, is claiming unfair dismissal.

The Norwich hearing was told that on Nov 15, 2001, he threw some keys into a metal chute at the prison gatehouse. When someone said it sounded as if he had thrown them so hard that they were going through the tray at the bottom of the chute, Mr Rose said: "There's a photo of Osama bin Laden there."

Peter McKinnon, another prison officer, told him to be quiet because two Asian women wearing headscarves and an Asian man were at the window of the gatehouse.

The investigation never discovered whether the visitors heard the comment.

Andrew Rogers, the assistant governor, told the tribunal: "I am not sure whether Mr Rose saw the visitors.

"I took offence at the comment. If the visitors had heard the comment, they might have taken offence, too." When Mr Rose was carpeted the next day, he said it was only a throwaway remark. But a few days later, while he was off with a recurrence of a back injury he suffered when suppressing a violent inmate, the investigation was ordered.

When he returned after a fortnight, Jerry Knight, the prison governor, suspended him pending a formal inquiry.

He was sacked in May last year after a disciplinary hearing.

Mr Knight told the tribunal that the prison had a large Asian population, including many Muslims.

"On Sept 25, 2001, a staff notice was issued regarding the terrorist bombing of America, asking for staff to have continued sensitivity.

"I asked them to avoid inflaming the situation."

Prison officer Mark Ewels, who conducted the investigation, said he had not tried to track down the Asians to find out if they had heard the remark because he thought the issue was too sensitive to raise with them.

UPDATE: More from The Daily Ablution and Samizdata.

In the Guardian, Tristram Hunt wants a statue of Gandhi in Trafalgar Square:

a statesman renowned for peaceful politics surrounded by the advocates of military might; an advocate of active non-violence in a public square informally dedicated to civil disobedience

Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not—indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not—take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer’s GANDHI AND STALIN. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons, an Englishman who was a major figure in the founding of modern economic theory, wrote a book called The Coal Question. In it, he predicted that British industry depended on coal, and so would decline as coal supplies ran out. He made highly inaccurate predictions about coal use, substantially overestimating its use over the course of a century because he did not think about oil and natural gas. Jevons had the excuse of writing well before economists had devoted a lot of time and effort to making sense of natural resource depletion. So what is George Monbiot's excuse?

The Moonbat is at it again, saying that we are running out of oil. (Actually, he thinks this is a good thing, because otherwise we will all die of global warming.) He seems dimly to grasp that oil depletion would drive up its price.

The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day, after which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil will go through the roof.

Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run. There are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is likely to be anywhere near as cheap as crude is today.

Natural resource depletion is an interesting issue, but the Moonbat cannot manage to be serious about it. Instead, he wants to moan that his wisdom is unappreciated by the selfish, unwashed masses.

The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.

UPDATE: The Daily Ablution has more.

Joel Mowbray comes up with more depressing evidence that the State Department continues its policy of representing Saudi Arabia rather than the US.

The date was April 24, 2002. Standing on the runway at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas, the cadre of FBI agents, Secret Service, and Customs agents had just been informed by law enforcement officials that there was a “snag” with Crown Prince Abdullah’s oversized entourage, which was arriving with the prince for a visit to George W. Bush’s Western White House in Crawford, Texas.

The flight manifest of the eight-plane delegation accompanying the Saudi would-be king had a problem. Three, to be exact: one person on the list was wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities and two others were on a terrorist watch list.
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Details about what happened to the three men in the end are not entirely clear, and no one at State was willing to provide any facts about the incident. What is clear, though, is that the three didn’t get anywhere near Crawford, but were also spared the “embarrassment” of arrest. And the House of Saud was spared an “international incident.” That normally staid bureaucrats engaged in incredible acrobatics to bail out three guys who never should have been in the United States in the first place says a great deal about State’s “special relationship” with the Saudis.

While many critics of the repressive Saudi regime like to target President Bush and his oil ties as the culprit of the overly cozy relationship, the roots actually go much deeper. It’s the small favors that are done every day—decisions made far below the President’s pay grade—that truly define the relationship.

That is how you can have three Saudis get special protection, preventing the FBI from doing its job. That is also how you can have American children kidnapped from American parents and taken to the desert prison—and the State Department does nothing to help recover them.

Though it cannot be said that U.S. diplomats do favors for the Saudis in the hopes of lucrative payoffs later on, the Saudis reward those officials who were kind to them while working for the State Department. Scads of former State Department officials now either work directly for the Saudis or for organizations that take Saudi petrodollars.

The Saudis think it is money well spent. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador the United States, once said, “If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes recently suggested banning former diplomats from receiving Saudi cash, thereby hopefully lessening the pervasive Saudi influence. It’s by no means a panacea, but it seems as good as any place to start.