Why doesn’t it surprise me that a senior editor for The New Republic has written a piece defending Israel’s incursions into Palestinian territory under the common rubric shared among Israel’s unconditional supporters that Palestinian terror does not arise from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians? They accuse their opponents of wishful thinking and oversimplification, but they’re doing exactly the same thing on the opposite side.

The common argument is that Palestinians simply hate the Israelis, and thus Israel has to crush them rather than working with them because the Palestinians engaging in terrorism aren’t going to change. To a certain extent, this analysis is spot on. There’s a substantial number of Palestinians who don’t want peace with Israel at all, they want Israel to disappear. Israel, on its own, will never be able to justify its existence to these people. However, this doesn’t leave us with any plausible exit strategy. Israel will never be able to round them all up, nor will it ever be able to disarm all of them. Sure, Israel can cause the frequency of terrorist attacks to fluctuate, but I’d like to think that we can hope for better than that.

What this analysis ignores is the social infrastructure that supports terrorism. Hamas and Islamic Jihad benefit greatly from the fact that there’s a large percentage of Palestinians that tacitly or actively support them, but who would be just as willing to live in peace (if not friendship) with Israel if there were something to gain by doing so. The fact that they undergo daily humiliations at the hands of Israelis (even if those humiliations are brought on by Palestinian terrorism) and the fact that they have no recourse under the law against mistreatment by Israel radicalizes the larger population and generally makes the occupied territories an ecosystem in which radical groups can prosper.

As long as Israel causes suffering for all of the Palestinians in the West Bank, or at least a huge chunk of them, they’re never going to see the more widespread support for radical groups erode. Israel’s goal should be to engineer a situation in which these radical groups are marginalized to the largest degree possible. For example, if Israel were to pull out the settlers and cut loose the occupied territories, the onus would truly be upon the Palestinians to rein in terrorists. Then the choice for the Palestinian leadership would be simple — enforce the laws and crack down on terror, or go to war with Israel. That’s a system of incentives and penalties that I think even the most jaded Palestinian could respect.

The idea of a rack mountable Mac has my heart aflutter. I don’t know what I’d do with one (as opposed to a plain old Linux box), but it seems very cool to me nonetheless.

ABC is sending Politically Incorrect to boot hill in favor of some sophomoric talk show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel of “The Man Show” fame. I generally found the guests on Politically Incorrect to be so stupid and annoying that I couldn’t bear to watch it very often, but overall I think it provided a somewhat accessible perspective on political views that are further outside the mainstream than you’ll get from watching the usual idiots on the 24 hour news networks. I have a feeling that I wasn’t in the show’s target audience anyway because I absolutely cannot bear to watch people argue with each other on television.

It sure looks like a State Department official told a big, fat lie when he accused Cuba of running a bio weapons program a few days ago. President Carter dismissed the claims yesterday during his visit to Cuba, and Colin Powell also left the guy hanging, basically saying that Cuba has the potential to have a bio weapons program, which is true of any country that does advanced biology research.

One thing that sort of chafes about all of the journalists who have jumped into the blogging thing with both feet is that they are woefully (and perhaps willfully) ignorant of the history of their forebearers. It’s as if there weren’t several years of heavy duty blogging (as we know it today) going on before they decided to invent this wonderful thing called blogging.

Josh Marshall, whose site I really appreciate, says “Who says there are no lefty blogs?” I hope nobody says that. Before 9/11, the whole weblog universe skewed heavily to the left. Granted, many of the leftish blogs were (and are) run by geeks who can’t stop themselves from commenting on current events, but when was it decided that in order to have a relevant blog you have to be part of the journalistic establishment?

CNet has an article on the state of the IM world. They report that interest in standards is falling as the market followers gain users. In the meantime, I’m running three IM clients at work and two at home. I wish that these losers would standardize so that I could just use the one with the best features (for my money, Yahoo).

Somehow I missed the news that the CIA took a pot shot at Afghan sleazeball Gulbuddin Hekmatyar last week. Hekmatyar was the guy who killed tens of thousands of Afghans with a rocket attack on Kabul back in 1994. It is interesting to me that we’re now moving beyond the original scope in Afghanistan to take on enemies of the interim regime of all kinds. Hekmatyar is a bad guy, but he’s not a Taliban or al-Qaeda figure. If he gets blown up by a CIA missile or gets gunned down in the street by one of the million or so people with a grudge against him, nobody is going to shed any tears, but isn’t trying to assassinate him scope creep for the US forces?

Mozilla 1.0 RC2 is out.

Keith Teare, the founder and CEO of RealNames, has posted a big whine to his Web site because Microsoft killed his company. Anyway, here’s the part that was most obviously problematic:

Indeed, I believe that innovation on the Internet can no longer be purely “standards driven”. This is because the scale of the internet makes it impossible to distribute standards without the support of applications. This fact places a new responsibility on the application – the responsibility for deciding what is and what is not a standard.

My friends, we’re dealing with a real idiot here. To provide details, innovation on the Internet was never standards driven. If you look at just about everything on the Internet that was really successful, it was driven by implementation rather than by the standards processes. Application developers have always had the responsibility of deciding where they will adhere to standards and where they will strike out on their own.

Is Fidel Castro going soft or what? I never thought I’d see him dressed like a banker.