Pakistan’s largest city (and one of the largest in the Muslim world) exploded in riots this week following the murder of a leading politician, and the government has not yet brought it under control. This is a development of enormous significance; it is just this sort of prospective instability in Pakistan, one of the worst-composed countries in the history of Imperial cartography, that led the U.S. and other countries to tread lightly on Pakistan’s scandalous collaboration with the Taliban.

As I wrote in Asia Times Online July 25:

(more…)

Last night I joined my old friend and Bear, Stearns colleague Wayne Angell–a vice chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors two decades ago—on CNBC’s Kudlow Report. Wayne took issue with economists who fear deflation; I tend to share those fears, although for different reasons than the ones usually cited. For the past several years I have been warning that the unprecedented wave of aging in the industrial world will have gigantic effects on financial markets. In a nutshell, people approaching the cusp of retirement save a great deal, which is to say that they buy future goods (securities) rather than present goods. In the extreme case the price of present goods may fall.

In May 2008, just as the great financial crisis was getting underway, I warned that demographics were the driving force:

(more…)

Circular reasoning is the standard response to running in tight little circles, which ensues upon having one’s foot nailed to the floor. According to Bret Stephens’ column in today’s Wall Street Journal, we should employ circular reasoning to justify our present misery in Afghanistan, precisely because we have a foot nailed to the floor. Whether the nation-building exercise was a good idea or not is immaterial, Mr. Stephens argues, because we are in fact there:

This analysis might be somewhat more compelling if we were having an argument about whether to invade Afghanistan in the first place, as if history were a cassette we could rewind and re-record at will. (Now there’s a liberal fantasy.) We are in Afghanistan now. So the choices before us are not what we should have done in 2001, when most Americans—and almost all conservatives—demanded we take Kandahar the way Sherman took Atlanta. The question is what we do in 2010.

Not all conservatives (e.g., this writer) supported the exercise to begin with, but that is another matter. We cannot win the war because our putative ally Pakistan is stabbing us in the back, and Mr. Stephens therefore argues that we must remain in the war, because otherwise Pakistan will not take us seriously:

(more…)

Anne Rice has clarified her renunciation of Christianity, explaining, ”I didn’t anticipate in the beginning that US Catholic Bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage. That they were actually going to donate money to defeat the civil rights of homosexuals in the secular society. This is not something I ever foresaw.” Ms. Rice supports marriage between individuals of the same sex, provided, of course, that their blood types match.

Just in case we haven’t noticed, Pakistan’s president Zardari wants us to know that we are losing the war in Afghanistan. Reports the Daily Telegraph this morning:

Mr Zardari warned the international community that it had “lost the battle to win hearts and minds”.

In an interview with Le Monde, the French newspaper, on Tuesday Mr Zardari said the US and Nato-led coalition forces had “underestimated the situation on the ground” in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s war-torn western neighbour.

“I believe that the international community, which Pakistan belongs to, is in the process of losing the war against the Taliban,” he told the paper just hours before meeting Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, in Paris on Monday night.

“And that is, above all, because we have lost the battle for hearts and minds.”

He added, however, that he thought that while the Taliban had “no chance of regaining power, its “grip is strengthening”.

He ought to know, if anyone does. His military intelligence service plots daily with Pakistan to kill Americans and their allies, as we know from the Wikileaks dump of nearly 100,000 secret U.S. intelligence reports.

Supporters of the Afghan war despite the WIkileaks documents, which simply confirm what every observer in the region has known for years, argue in effect, “That was then, this is now.” That was the Obama administration’s response, as well as that of Reuel Marc Gerecht of the conservative Weekly Standard who now blogs at The New Republic. Wrote Gerecht July 27,

(more…)

Suppose the Catholic Church proposed to build a 13-story, 50,000 square-foot showpiece at Ground Zero? Or the 92nd St. Young Men’s Hebrew Association proposed to relocate its facility to the site of the attack on the Twin Towers? Or the Billy Graham Evangelical Association offered to construct a megachurch on the property? They wouldn’t, of course, because it is entirely inappropriate to assign a disproportionately prominent role for any religious denomination at the location of the most heinous foreign attack on American soil. The issue with the planned Muslim center at Ground Zero is not religious freedom, but favoritism towards Islam.

Liberals believe that if the West bends over backwards to be respectful towards Muslims, Muslims will cease to hate the West and stop killing Westerners. That is why New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and liberals everywhere support this grotesque accommodation to Muslim triumphalism.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has ignited a firestorm of attacks for its refusal to play along with this charade. Peter Beinart, the critic-du-jour of the Jewish establishment, complains that what the ADL really has demonstrated is indifference to the plight of Palestinians! Beinart complains today in the Daily Beast:

(more…)

Anne Rice posted this now-notorious comment on her Facebook page Wednesday:

I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

According to what we’ve heard, Rice’s post was heavily edited by her public relations team. The original reportedly went like this:

I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-vampire. I refuse to be anti-werewolf. I refuse to be anti-zombie. I refuse to be anti-ghoul. I refuse to be anti-porphyria. I refuse to belong to a religion whose cruciform symbol is used to terrorize creatures of the night. I refuse to belong to a religion that drives stakes through the hearts of beings with whom I consanguinate. I refuse to be anti-undead. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Every so often, Gallup and other polling companies go around the world asking the citizens of different lands how happy they are. Forbes’ website today published the most recent iteration of the “happiness” poll, in which the Scandinavians, as usual, came out on top. Also among the top eight were Australia, a country so rich that daily labor is considered a minor interruption of the primary occupation of hauling a barbecue and cooler to the beach, and Israel. The Aussies and Israelis are tied for number 8.

Of course, just what might constitute happiness can be culture-specific. Putting the Scandinavians (as well as the Dutch) at the top of the poll is somewhat counter-intuitive, for these are peoples who generally do not seem particularly cheerful.

Finland ranks second in happiness on the Gallup survey, although it has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, at 29 per 100,000 of population, putting it in fourteenth place. Denmark’s alcohol consumption puts in the top 10 at 11.7 liters of pure alcohol equivalent per capital per year; perhaps what makes Danes happy is that they like to drink and, given the country’s generous welfare state, have ample leisure to do so. Finns may feel happy because if things don’t work out they have the option of suicide.

Some years ago I constructed an alternative measure, based on objective variables rather than subject responses to pollsters. I plotted the fertility rate vs. the suicide rate, surmising that people who like having children and don’t like killing themselves must be happy.

The result was striking:

(more…)

If Pakistan’s intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning’s Asia Times Online, is everybody.

This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie’s 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran. They are all terrified of facing a failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous one.

As of 9:00 a.m., there was nary a mention of one of the year’s biggest news stories on either National Review or the Commentary magazine website. Perhaps that is because the new documents put as much egg on the face of the previous Republican administration as on the present Democratic one. “What elephant in the parlor?”, sadly, is not a full-credit answer.

Continue Reading at On the Square

Whew! I felt like I had just plunged head-first into 50-degree water after reading Angelo Codevilla’s magnificent essay in the American Spectator, America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution. Prof. Codevilla, who served in senior U.S. intelligence roles under President Reagan before moving to Boston University, long has been one of the clearest critics of the U.S. intelligence establishment and American foreign policy. But he surpasses himself in this “J’Accuse!” against what he calls the ruling class of the government-supported liberal elite. Reading it, one hears trumpets. It has to be read closely; Codevilla’s prose has not an ounce of fat.

Here are a few excerpts. ¡Viva la revolución!

(more…)

Tablet Magazine today publishes my essay on Israel’s improbable pre-eminence in classical music. There is something special–if you pardon the expression, inspired–about the way Israel’s musicians perform (and recreate) the great classical repertoire of the West. The essay contains numerous links to musical performances and interviews with the musicians. My conclusion:

Israel’s contribution to classical music, that most distinctly Western of art forms, has never been more visible. And Israelis take to classical music—the art form that most clearly creates a sense of the future—like no other people on earth, to the point that music has become part of Israel’s character, an embodiment of the national genius for balancing hope and fear.

First Things eaders may recall my essay “Sacred Music, Sacred Time” in the October 2009 issue of the magazine (sorry, the article is behind the subscriber firewall). My argument was that because music transforms our perception of time, and because our sense of mortality is bound up with temporality, music has a unique capacity to invoke a sense of the sacred. Along the lines of this analysis, I try in the present essay to explain what about the Israeli character produces so many extraordinary musicians:

(more…)

The Rabbinical Council of America, the main association of Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States, today issued a statement calling on American Jews to respect the outcome of the democratic process in the State of Israel regarding laws governing conversion to Judaism. Sponsored by the Yisrael Beitenu party, the new conversion law is intended to ease conversion for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who identify as Jews and Israelis but are not Jewish according to Halakha, or Jewish religious law.

Conversion to Judaism is unlike conversion to any other religion, for the premise of Judaism is God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendents. From the time of King David’s great-grandmother Ruth, Jews have accepted wholehearted converts. For Orthodox rabbis, conversion is a solemn matter, for it involves conferring God’s promise to the family of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs to an individual born outside it. It is not simply a matter of doctrinal assent but an adoption into the family of Abraham.

Michael Wyschogrod, the Orthodox theologian two of whose essays have appeared in First Things this year, argues that when a Gentile converts to Judaism, a miracle occurs: the convert becomes a descendent of Abraham and Sarah. Miracles, he adds, should not be an everyday ocurrence. Wyschogrod’s view is not universally accepted, but the Orthodox community is unanimous in its caution and seriousness regarding conversion.

The Reform and Conservative currents of American Judaism employ looser standards, especially in the case of a Gentile who wishes to marry a Jew in a Jewish service. Because the new Israeli legislation places responsibility for conversion with Israel’s chief rabbinate, which is Orthodox, Reform and Conservative organizations as well as mainstream Jewish organizations have opposed the Israeli Conversion Law, sometimes with bitter and inflammatory statements.

America’s Modern Orthodox rabbis, though, call on American Jews to respect Israel’s democratic process:

(more…)

The 500,000 temporary Census jobs that temporarily swelled the employment numbers are a minor distortion compared to a stealth government make-work program at least twice the size of the Census, uncovered by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin.

Priest and Arkin write in this morning’s edition:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

Someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Except it’s classified.

Is the Twilight series a faith-based paean to chastity? That is what author Stephanie Meyers claims. As Kathleen Gilbert notes,

Twilight author Stephenie Meyer is widely known to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), and openly acknowledges that her faith has had an impact on the books. “Unconsciously, I put a lot of my basic beliefs into the story,” she has said.

Hence, several of Twilight‘s LDS elements fall in line with a broadly Christian outlook, such as the emphasis on self-control and chastity until marriage, the centrality of the family, and the dignity of motherhood.

Meyer is a very sick puppy.

The literary tropes of sex and death in the Twilight series, it has to be said, are well worn, as worn as the ruts in the Roman roads that turned into the standard gauge for European railroads. They infest the folklore of Christian (and Jewish Europe) in the form of incubi, succubi, silkies, nixies, Wassermaenner, and fairies. Heinrich Heine’s poem “Begegnung” (Encounter) has the Water-man and the Nixie meet by accident at a village dance where both are Jonesing for youths and maidens to be lured to a watery death; the two spirits treat each other with cold professional courtesy. Every Gothic novel, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula most emphatically, revolves the theme. All literary pornography from the Marquis de Sade through the Story of O culminates in death, for that is what copulation for its own sake leaders us to.

(more…)

Col. Ralph Peters, the New York Post columnist and terrorism expert, warns of a new Muslim crusade against African Christians in an op-ed today. He writes, “The bombings that recently butchered World Cup fans in Uganda were just the latest in a long line of crazed attacks on African Christians by Islamist fanatics. In the central states of Nigeria—Africa’s most-populous country—religious pogroms and counter-pogroms between Muslims and Christians have become routine.”

As I wrote in this space last week, the Somali pirates are accumulating a war chest for massacres of African Christians. Western governments’ efforts to stop them are cosmetic, and the rules of engagement imposed on American forces in the region are almost as restrictive as those that apply to American policemen dealing with ordinary criminals. The defense ministries of the West, including the Pentagon, concede that it’s cheaper to pay off the pirates than to suppress them—cheaper, that is, in African lives.

This is shameful. The fact that many poor Somalis have turned to piracy does not justify a criminal activity in support of murderous terrorism. The way to stop piracy is to kill pirates. “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute” was America’s response to the Barbary pirates at the turn of the 19th century. Nothing less will do. Again, my proposal is to issue Letters of Marque to privateers. Gen. Petraeus knows how to recruit mercenaries; he hired 100,000 of them into the “Sunni Awakening” in Iraq. His talents are lost on Afghanistan. Assign him to clean up the Indian Ocean instead.

Two months after the event, the New York Times discovers that the Gaza flotilla intercepted by Israeli commandos last May is “tied to the elite of Turkey,” a conclusion that was obvious on the face of it from initial news reports. This occurred after the German government banned the Turkish “charity” IHH, which had sponsored the flotilla, on the grounds that it had channeled millions of dollars in supposed philanthropic contributions to fronts for Hamas, which both the U.S. and the European Community list as a terrorist organization.

According to a senior Turkish official close to the government [the Times writes], who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the issue, as many as 10 Parliament members from Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party were considering boarding the Mavi Marmara, the ship where the deadly raid occurred, but were warned off at the last minute by senior Foreign Ministry officials concerned that their presence might escalate tensions too much.

When leaders of the charity returned home after nine Turks died in the Israeli raid, they were warmly embraced by top Turkish officials, said Huseyin Oruc, deputy director of the charity, who was aboard the flotilla.

“When we flew back to Turkey, I was afraid we would be in trouble for what happened, but the first thing we saw when the plane’s door opened in Istanbul was Bulent Arinc, the deputy prime minister, in tears,” he said in an interview. “We have good coordination with Mr. Erdogan,” he added. “But I am not sure he is happy with us now.”

What has transpired during the past two months is this: The Obama administration has come to the rueful conclusion that the President’s public embrace of Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan as a principal ally in outreach to the Muslim world has backfired. In a June 24 essay for the Tablet, a Jewish-oriented webzine, I explained:

(more…)

Russia appears to be the only Christian country where artists face legal penalties for blasphemy. The curators of a recent exhibition featuring depictions of Jesus as Mickey Mouse and V.I. Lenin were convicted yesterday for “inciting religious hatred” at a 2007 exhibition. “The verdict in the highly publicized case appeared to satisfy no one, with the artistic community seeing it as an infringement on free speech, and Russian Orthodox believers, who had hoped for a prison sentence, saying the fines were too lenient,” the Moscow Times wrote July 13. The Russian website added:

The church appeared to share this sentiment. Tikhon Shevkunov, the secretary of the patriarch’s cultural council who is thought to be Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s personal priest, said he was disappointed with the “purely symbolical” fine.

But Russia’s chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, and ombudsman Vladimir Lukin spoke in support of the defendants. Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev also backed the curators last week, saying the exhibit merited public criticism but not criminal charges.

In other respects, Russia appears to be the most socially conservative country in Europe. Today’s New York Times complains about Russian prudishness, specifically about the hurdles facing the nascent sex industry. “Two decades after government-imposed prudishness ended with the Soviet collapse, Russians still shy away from embracing European-style sexual mores. Despite a burst of licentiousness in the early 1990s, when pornography and prostitution surged through the country, the sexual revolution has never really taken hold here,” the Times writes.

Under former Prime Minister (now President) Vladimir Putin, the Russian government revived the Kremlin’s traditional alliance with the Orthodox Church. The social consequences of three generations of Communist rule threaten to prove fatal: By 2000 Russia’s fertility had fallen to only 1.25 per female, one of the world’s lowest, and Russia’s population began declining. The United Nations Population Database estimates that fertility will have nudged up to 1.37 by 2010, still on track for rapid population decline. With constant fertility, Russia’s population will fall from a peak of 147 million in 2000 to only 105 million in 2050.

(more…)

An Associated Press report this morning cites documents in the Roman Polanski extradition case that put the blame for the scapegrace director’s free pass on the U.S. Department of Justice. According to AP,

The Swiss government asked the U.S. Justice Department to release sealed transcripts in the Roman Polanski case just days before a Los Angeles judge was told that the Swiss did not request that information, according to a letter from Swiss officials that points to apparent miscommunication in the case.

The officials said that the denial of access to the information was the key factor in the refusal to extradite the film maker to the U.S., according to the letter to the U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland.

A district attorney’s spokeswoman said their office was never notified of the Swiss request and did not know that the Justice Department had turned it down.

The letter dated Monday was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday night. It provided a time line of when the request was filed and when it was turned down. The letter blamed the denial of extradition solidly on the refusal by the Justice Department to show transcripts of testimony by the film director’s original prosecutor to Swiss officials.

“Since the additional documents requested were not transmitted in full, extradition of Roman Polanski to the United States of America is thus denied,” said the letter. Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said she had no comment on the matter.

Why did the DOJ refuse to provide documents to the Swiss in this high-profile case? It appears that Polanski’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, is a close friend of Eric Holder.

Holder is no stranger to extradition flubs. As President Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Holder recommended a pardon for the convicted fugitive Marc Rich, who cheated on his taxes to the extent of millions of dollars and was convicted on 65 counts of tax evasion.

Congressional investigators should subpoena Holder’s phone log and email to determine what communication he had with the Polanski legal team.

Western intelligence agencies have known for years, and the press has reported, that al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations such as Somalia’s Al-Shabab have trained and armed Somali pirates in return for a share of the proceeds of piracy. Canada’s National Post reported last Dec. 2:

The Somali militant group Al-Shabab has been arming and training pirates in exchange for a share of their spoils, says a newly released Canadian intelligence document. Al-Shabab has formed a “relationship of convenience” with one of the two main pirate networks operating off the Horn of Africa, the “Top Secret” intelligence assessment says.

The report describes an “Islamist extremism-piracy nexus” that involves Al-Shabab providing “weapons, combat training and local protection” to the Mudug pirates of southern Somalia.

In return, “elements of Al-Shabab continue to receive portions of the spoils from successful hijackings either in cash or seized weapons and materiel,” it says.

A suicide bombing for which al-Shabab took credit killed 76 people in Uganda last Sunday, in an apparent terror attack on Ugandan Christians by Islamic militants. Ugandan authorities yesterday said that they had thwarted another bombing attack.

Western nations and world shipping companies have a tacit policy of paying the pirates off rather than attempting to suppress them. I attended last November’s annual conference of the German Marshall Fund at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and reported:

(more…)

In 2008, 2.7 million Americans called themselves religiously Jewish, down from 3.1 million in 1990. Wouldn’t the central challenge of American Jewry be to encourage the broadest range of people (including the intermarried, like me) to identify as Jewish and to raise Jewish kids?

focused mostly on the plight of the Orthodox, more likely to be poor than Conservative or Reform Jews, and who, because of their strong commitment, often pay more. According to his calculations, an Orthodox Jewish family with three children could expect to spend between $50,000 and $110,000 a year on school fees, synagogue dues, summer camps, and kosher food. He argued that the fate of American Jewry rested on increased and enthusiastic support from philanthropists and activists to enable these families to live, as he would say, “Jewishly.”

The Orthodox seem to find the money. Among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi), to be sure, the quality of yeshiva education in secular subjects is notoriously poor, but that is a different matter.

Lightly-affiliated Jews, it appears, are less likely to pay for synagogue membership than observant Jews. Two thousand dollars is a lot to pay for Jews who might attend services on the High Holy Days, if at all. That leads to a vicious circle in declining congregations, where a smaller number of active congregants must absorb the fixed costs of operating a synagogue. Outreach surely is a good thing, and Jews surely should encourage the intermarried to raise Jewish children. But all the demographic evidence weighs against the notion that a superficial commitment to Judaism has much staying power.

Secretary of State Clinton’s tour of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus last week demarcated a catastrophe for American foreign policy that the mainstream media has not yet absorbed: the return of Russia to great power status. at the expense of the United States.

In the Georgian capital of Tblisi, Clinton denounced Russia’s military role in the Caucasus as an “invasion and occupation.” As M.K. Bhadrakumar wrote today in Asia Times Online, “This is the first time since the August 2008 conflict in the Caucasus that Washington has used the condemnatory expression.” Bhaddrakumar observes:

US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon said Clinton embarked on the tour “to reiterate and demonstrate” that the “better relationship with Russia does not come at the expense of our relationship with sovereign, independent countries that are near Russia.”

Second, as Clinton put it in the presence of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi, “With respect to Russia’s claims to any sphere of influence, the United States flatly rejects that. We are living in a time when independent sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions about organizations they wish to join, to make determinations that are in the best interests of their own people and how they see their own future.”

Clinton said that the US would continue to fund non-governmental organizations to promote democracy in the former Soviet Union, and the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a blistering denunciation of Clinton’s remarks, “which verge on interference in internal affairs.”

This caustic exchange should be read in light of the facts on the ground:

(more…)

Pakistan sees the dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as an opportunity to push the United States to adopt its approach to Afghanistan, namely to cut a deal with al-Qaeda elements and bring them into a “final settlement,” the New York Times reported this morning.

“Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that would give Pakistan important influence there but is likely to undermine United States interests,” the Times quoted Pakistani and American officials. “The dismissal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will almost certainly embolden the Pakistanis in their plan as they detect increasing American uncertainty, Pakistani officials said. The Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, preferred General McChrystal to his successor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom he considers more of a politician than a military strategist, said people who had spoken recently with General Kayani.”

Pakistani intelligence helped create the Taliban and has supported it throughout, as an instrument against India. Now Pakistan is proposing to “deliver” an al-Qaeda ally, the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which Pakistan has sheltered throughout.

(more…)

A new study shows a sharp increase in the Jewish fertility rate in Israel, concluding that “that the dire predictions of an Arab demographic takeover of Israel that have become ‘common knowledge’ are actually not true,” the Israel National News website reports today.

According to the news site, “For one thing, the fertility gap between Arab and Jewish women dropped from six births per woman in 1969 to 0.7 in 2009. At the same time, the proportion of Jewish births has grown from 69 percent of total births in 1995 to 75 percent in 2008. Secular women now give birth to an average of 2.6 babies, as opposed to their mothers, who bore only 2.1 children each. Over the past 15 years, the number of Arab births in Israel has remained more or less steady at around 39,000, while Jewish births grew over this period from 80,000 to 120,000.”

Ashkenazic Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews have a total fertility rate above 8.5.

The 2.6 fertility rate for secular Jewish women is by far the highest in the industrial world. The American fertility rate, skewed upwards by a high immigrant birth rate, is 2.1. The second-highest fertility rate is America’s at 2.05, although the 2.89 fertility rate for Hispanics is responsible for keeping America just at the replacement level.

Today’s edition of the Jewish webzine Tablet publishes my essay “Fantasia: Obama’s embrace of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan threatens both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

“Mickey Mouse must have felt a bit like this, midway through the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ episode of Fantasia. In the remake, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan plays the role of the runaway broom conjured up by President Barack Obama, who wanted a fresh set of allies to advance a 21st-century foreign policy that rejected U.S. hegemony. Now his inventions have taken on a life of their own, and the White House is awash in a flood of trouble,” I wrote.

The essay concludes: “After throwing Israel under the bus in order to bolster the Palestinian Authority, Obama has thrown the Palestinian Authority under the bus in order to placate Erdogan, who is riding a tide of popularity in the Muslim world thanks to his sponsorship of Hamas and its jihadist allies and has threatened to use the Turkish military to force the Israeli blockade. No part of mainstream American opinion can support this kind of open embrace of extremists; even the most fervent advocates of dialogue with Hamas cannot defend turning Gaza into an Iranian port. The president has outraged Jewish voters and has nothing to show for it. Erdogan is the runaway broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice. He cannot be appeased, for he has staked his political future as well as his country’s position in the world on the extremist card. Obama now searches in vain for the magic formula that will put the Turkish broom back in the closet. And the water keeps rising.”

J.W. Goethe’s 1797 verse adaptation of Lucian’s story of magic gone wrong in Philopseudes gave us the tale in its modern form, with the enchanted broom that refuses to stop bringing water. The formula uttered by the sorcerer to end the spell is a masterstroke of rhymed concision: Besen, Besen, seids gewesen! That is short for Besen, sei das gewesene, or, “Broom, be that which you were.” A team of philologists at the National Security Council is now attempting to translate this into Turkish.

The Britain-based Islamic satellite channel “Birds of Paradise,” which is aired in Gaza, offers a musical number in which children sing the following to a bouncy Middle Eastern tune:

“When we die as martyrs
We will go to heaven.
No, don’t say we are young,
This life has turned us into gorwnups
Without Palestine, what meaning is there to childhood?
Even if they give us the whole world
It won’t make us forget her, no no,
My country and my blood are for her sake.”

A male adult singer answers:

“Children, you have fulfilled your religious obligations
There is no God but Allah and the martyr is his favorite.
You have taught us the meaning of manhood.”

The channel’s founder, Khalid Maqdad, is a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian origin.