The other day I was behind someone mailing something to Cambodia and the person was like 'do we ship to Cambodia even?' and it reminded me of when I had to explain to my local post office how to mail a package to Cambodia years ago so @bethanyshondark could have her Cheerios.
Postal employee: Sorry sir, we don't send mail to *squints* Cambodia.
Me: Do... do you think this is a made-up place?
Postal employee: Well, we have no way of sending them mail.
Me: This isn't a remote tribe in the Amazon, this is a country. Cambodians get mail too.
Postal employee: We've never sent mail there before.
Me: You sent mail there three weeks ago. Or did you just slather my letter in Elmer's glue and eat it?
Anyway the government is great I love the government.
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I reviewed Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's new book on the two-state solution for @thedispatch. Many thanks to the editors there, wonderful to work with. Some thoughts to follow:
1. I appreciate their honesty in moments when others would not be straight with the facts. For example, the chapter that seeks to challenge the CW on Camp David--that Arafat was at fault--ends up showing that the CW was right all along.
Agha and Malley acknowledge that Barak's offer was generous and the Israelis were flexible. That is their argument for absolving Arafat of some of the blame: they say that the Israelis were *so* flexible that Arafat assumed he could always say no and get better terms:
Last night's Hamasapalooza on 60 Minutes was intended as a shot across the bow of the SecState nominee. He should welcome the fight:
US diplomats who resign to run interference for the terror group currently holding Americans hostage are the most replaceable people on the planet. If it's Rubio vs. the Foggy Bottom-feeders, he should see it as an opportunity to fix the rot: commentary.org/seth-mandel/th…
They threw bottles at Jews, at Yale a girl was stabbed in the eye with a flag, several Israelis were assaulted in NYC.
Anyone who got suckered into thinking this was about free speech should acknowledge how wrong they were. As I wrote *four months ago*: commentary.org/seth-mandel/wh…
A father's note posted to instagram has made the rounds:
You can defend free speech without defending mob violence, so the fact that many of you have chosen to do both is quite telling. I don't care what you yell before or after you stab a girl in the eye with your palestine flag because she's wearing a Jewish necklace.
Some thoughts on the Matisyahu concert last night and seeing the full scene for myself:
~ There were two people whose presence I deeply appreciated. The first was the owner of the 930 Club. Matisyahu thanked him from the stage. He was there to show his support for the idea of free expression and the power of music. More like him please!
The second person--and I mean this 100% sincerely--was the will-call window worker who wore a brand new Palestinian flag hat. Instead of ditching work to sabotage the show as others elsewhere had done, he showed up to work, was polite and helpful while having his own protest.
This NYT piece by Lydia Polgreen accepts the lie of Jews as colonizers but argues it's best not to murder them anyway. Important to point out that this is what the world is used to: *letting* Jews live. Welcome to the future, where Jews don't need your permission.
The Polgreen piece represents a particular line of thought throughout history: if you ethnically cleanse your land of enough Jews, the Jews lose their inalienable human rights.
This is why the modern blood libel of decolonization caught on: it lets NYT columnists play God.
If you believe in decolonization, here's a simple test: No one on earth has a greater claim to indigeneity than the Jews of Hebron. (There's not even a close second.) So whatever you're comfortable with Jews doing to take back all of Hebron, you can advocate for elsewhere.
I accept Obama’s apology for his complicity in both Gaza and Dolan.
There's no excuse for what Hamas did. At the same time, on the other hand, ergo, vis a vis, concordantly, if there were an excuse for what Hamas did, this is what it might sound like, hypothetically, in a sense, as the crow flies, one could say, in effect