Jeffrey Goldberg

A Goldblog reader writes:

You have to explain to me why the Zionists are so committed to picking a fight with Iran? What could possibly motivate Israel to kill Iranian nuclear scientists? It makes no sense, unless Israel is looking to start a war to extend its military domination of the Middle East (everyone knows Israel has the strongest military in the Middle East). So you'll have to explain this to me, please.

There seems to be an epidemic of thickness on this question. Let me be clear: Just because I think an attack on Iran's nuclear complex is a bad idea doesn't mean I think Iran poses no threat to Israel. Do you want to know why Israel is taking the actions it may be taking against Iran? Because Iran has been engaged in full-blown but subterranean war against Israel for almost three decades. The Iranian regime is committed to the physical elimination of Israel. That's right -- a member-state of the U.N. is advocating the complete destruction of another member-state. The Iranian leadership regularly uses Nazi-style rhetoric against Israel and Jews, frequently resorting to epidemiological metaphors -- Israel is a cancer, Israel is a tumor, language that smacks of Mein Kampf.

But more important than Iran's eliminationist rhetoric is Iran's actions: Iran is the prime sponsor of Hezbollah, an avowedly-antisemitic terrorist organization that seeks to kill Israeli civilians. Iran is also a prime supporter of Hamas, which also seeks out Israeli civilians to kill (and it even brags about the number of Israeli civilians it has murdered). Hezbollah and Hamas, just like Iran, seek the physical elimination of Israel. Their agenda isn't to create a Palestinian state in Gaza and on the West Bank; their agenda is to replace a Jewish state with an Arab-Muslim state. If you were an Israeli leader, and you understood that Iran works assiduously to murder your civilians, and to bring about an end to your people's collective existence, and then you learned that Iran may be trying to build a nuclear weapon, well, is it so unreasonable to think that Israel might choose to fight back?

Which brings me to another letter just received in the Goldblog inbox:

Why shouldn't Iran have a nuclear weapon? Israel has it. Why does Israel think it needs a nuclear weapon and Iran doesn't. Why should Israel have nukes in the first place?

This letter-writer, it seems to me, lacks imagination. Why shouldn't Iran have a nuclear weapon? Well, because it's an anti-democratic theocracy that menaces its neighbors, oppresses its own people, and calls for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state. It is profoundly anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Sunni. It is in the American national interest to see Iran denied nuclear weapons.  Nuclear weapons are dangerous. They are especially dangerous in the hands of totalitarian regimes, and so these regimes should be discouraged from acquiring them.

And why does Israel think it needs nuclear weapons in the first place? Well, Israel was founded shortly after one-third of the world's Jews were murdered in the Shoah. The Shoah, if nothing else, was an object lesson on the perils of defenselessness. Israel was, at independence, set upon by its neighbors. It continues to battle countries and organizations that seek its destruction. Here is a real failure of imagination: I'm not arguing that you have to endorse Israel's nuclearization, but if you can't understand this from Israel's perspective, then you're just not trying. By the way, I understand why Iran's unelected supreme leader might believe that nuclear weapons are in his country's best interests. I don't agree that he should have them, but I understand why he would want them.   

Yesterday, I posted a photo of what I thought was a scene from the Aspen Ideas Festival. My mistake: Mrs. Goldblog reminded me that this was a photo I took at our Passover seder last year. I guess I'm trying to block out memories of this unfortunate event: Ahmadinejad got drunk on Manischewitz and broke a soup bowl; Hassan Nasrallah refused to read the part of the Wicked Son; and Bashar al-Assad killed 17 of our guests. What a mess. 

I finally downloaded my photos from last summer's Aspen Ideas Festival. Here's one from my favorite dinner:

An Egyptian cleric calls on Iran and Pakistan to nuke the Jewish state:

It's groundhog day in Tehran. Another nuclear scientist, this one identified as Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who worked at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was killed when an explosive was attached to his car. Several questions arise:

1) Why aren't the Iranians attempting to kill Israeli defense officials? The answer, I believe, has more to do with Iranian technical limitations: Since the Iranian regime has no compunction about killing Israeli civilians (through its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas), I doubt it has reservations about attacking military or intelligence officials. Perhaps one thing holding back Iran, though, is fear that attacks on Israeli officials (or, even more consequentially, American officials -- though of course, Iran is already killing American soldiers in Afghanistan) would prompt an immediate Israeli strike on Natanz, before the regime is able to move its centrifuges to its underground facility at Fordow.

2) Does Israel, or whoever is assassinating Iranian scientists, believe that these killings will actually slow-down Iranian nuclear development? In other words, do the people behind the assassinations believe that Iranian nuclear knowledge is so concentrated in the minds of a few scientists that a limited series of assassinations can cripple the program? This doesn't seem likely, obviously.

3) Is the goal of the assassination program to convince Iranians nuclear scientists to seek other lines of work? This is also plausible, but not likely to work: I think the regime would take the Tony Soprano approach -- you can't resign from the Mafia -- and tell frightened scientists to get back to work, or suffer the consequences, or have their families suffer the consequences.

4) Why is Iran so incompetent at protecting its nuclear scientists? This is a perplexing issue.

5) Why is the Mossad, assuming this is the Mossad, so deft at assassinating people in Tehran? It's a very hard target, Iran, and the Mossad has on more than one occasion bungled assassinations in terrible ways (the attempted killing of the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan is only one case in point).
 
6) Another question, or something closer to an observation: If I were a member of the Iranian regime (and I'm not), I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation (not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West) and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible. Once I do that, I'm North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country.

Goldblog reader Larry Birnbaum writes, in reference to my Bloomberg View column this week (mentioned in this post):

I agree with you often; but you really are a terrible negotiator. The administration has made it amply clear, over several years, that the US prefers a negotiated resolution to end Iran's nuclear weapons program.  The Iranians know what the parameters of such a resolution would look like.  They have many channels for communicating a desire to reconsider their previous, multiple, decisions to forego serious negotiations.  Trying "one more time to reach out to the Iranian leadership in order to avoid a military confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program" would only change Iran's understanding of the situation in one way: it would reinforce the hand of those in the Iranian government who think we are bluffing.

This conflict can be ended at any time, by them.  But we all have to live with the fact that there may be no peaceful resolution, either because the Iranian government, for whatever reason, doesn't believe it's in their interests, or because they miscalculate.  Reaching out now can only increase the chances that they miscalculate.  So it seems to me pretty clear at this point the chances for a peaceful resolution are diminished, not enhanced, by further US squishiness.  The only way forward that has any chance of avoiding a war is to ramp up pressure maximally, and quickly, in order to remove ambiguity about our intentions.

In a related development, Eli Lake doesn't really believe I believe what I wrote: He tweets (@elilake) that "I feel like @Goldberg3000 doesn't really think a last chance outreach to the Mullahs will actually work here."

I believe that the Obama Administration should make a sincere effort to present to Iran an alternative path, but I think the chances are slight that Iran will go down the path.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I think it's important for the Obama Administration, despite the obvious electoral difficulties this might pose, to try one more time to reach out to the Iranian leadership in order to avoid a military confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program. Yes, the chances are slim that Iran would respond positively to the Administration's request for an unfettered dialogue that could lead to a) the end of Iran's diplomatic and economic isolation, and b) the end of Iran's nuclear program (or at least its military component).

An American attack on Iran could be disastrous. I'm not nearly so optimistic about its chances as is Matthew Kroenig, the Council on Foreign Relations nuclear expert whose recent, much-discussed, article in Foreign Affairs calls on the U.S. to attack Iran's nuclear sites. I'll look at the Kroenig piece later in some detail, but suffice it to say, as I write in my Bloomberg View column this week, that advocates of an attack on Iran today would be exchanging a theoretical nightmare -- an Iran with nukes -- for an actual nightmare, a potentially out-of-control conventional war raging across the Middle East that could cost the lives of thousands Iranians, Israelis, Gulf Arabs and even American servicemen. Now that sanctions seem to be biting -- in other words, now that Iran's leaders understand the President's seriousness on the issue -- the Iranians just might be willing to pay more attention to proposals about an alternative course. I recognize all the difficulties inherent in reaching out again to an Iranian leadership uninterested in American friendship. But the stakes are high enough to warrant another attempt. 

We received an unusual letter last week here at The Atlantic, from the Central California  Women's Facility in Chowchilla, one of the larger prisons in the California state system (and home to the state's death row for women). The letter concerned one of our subscribers, an inmate who was denied her copy of the December 2011 issue of the magazine (which featured an article about Pakistan written by Marc Ambinder and yours truly), because the cover image was of a member of the Taliban holding a rifle. Here is the letter, with the inmate's name blacked-out, along with the name of the prison official who wrote the letter, for reasons of privacy. We have confirmed the authenticity of the letter, and that the inmate in question, who is serving a 20-year-to-life sentence for 2nd-degree murder, is a subscriber (The Atlantic's readership ranges from the White House to the Big House, apparently):


Obviously, we found this decision very troubling -- we don't believe our article encouraged violence, and we certainly want to stick up for the rights of our readers. And it is my personal opinion that while prisons have an obvious, justifiable reason to keep written material that incites violence out of the hands of the people they incarcerate, prison censors should always err on the side of the free speech. So I wrote the following letter to the prison's warden, Deborah K. Johnson:

I am writing in reference to a decision by officials of the CCWF to deny Inmate REDACTED access to a copy of the December, 2011 issue of The Atlantic magazine, to which she subscribes. According to a communication from REDACTED the inmate did not receive her copy of The Atlantic because the publication included "material on the front cover that contained a picture depicting a male carrying an assault riffle [sic]."
 
I am writing on behalf of The Atlantic to appeal this decision. The Atlantic is a national magazine of ideas, news and opinion. It was founded over 150 years ago. The goal of our magazine is to provide its readers with responsible, deeply researched journalism about the pressing issues of the day. Writers published in The Atlantic include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Fallows. The cover story of the December 2011 issue, co-authored by me, concerns the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. The article posits that Pakistan should be a foremost foreign policy concern of the United States, in part because it sponsors and harbors anti-American terrorists. The picture on the cover, taken by one of America's most illustrious photographers, Lynsey Addario, is of a member of an anti-American terror group.
 
The photograph has great journalistic merit. It vividly illustrates the challenges American leaders face in Pakistan and the surrounding region. The photograph and story do not glorify violence in any way. Quite the opposite: We published the article, and the accompanying images, in order to highlight the dangers of violence of South Asia.

We believe that The Atlantic serves a valuable educational purpose for its readers, including REDACTED, and we would encourage you to rethink the decision to deny her access to our magazine. The denial letter states that "this is based on a violation of the California Code of Regulations, Section 3134.1 (d,e), which states in part, 'no warefare [sic] or weaponary [sic]." Could you please provide more information about this particular section of the California Code of Regulations? Thank you in advance for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Goldberg
National Correspondent
The Atlantic

As soon as we receive a response from the warden, we will share it with Atlantic readers.

I'm only vaguely aware of the existence of Katy Perry (though the junior Goldblogs have tried to raise my consciousness on the issue), and I was not heretofore aware of the existence of Katy Perry's father, but he sounds like a real shmendrick:

Keith Hudson told worshippers:
"You know how to make the Jew jealous? Have some money, honey. You go to LA and they own all the Rolex and diamond places. Walk down a part of LA where we live and it is so rich it smells. You ever smell rich? They are all Jews, hallelujah. Amen."

Hallelujah. To-do list for this week: Get one of those Jew Rolexes.

A scene from the Knesset: The back story is here. You won't need to understand Hebrew to understand the contours of the debate between an Arab-Israeli member of the Labor Party and a representative of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. Suffice it to say that after Anastasia Micheli threw water in Raleb Majadele's face, he had a pretty good comeback:
 

There is much I don't like about Rick Santorum's ideas, but the story of how he and his wife dealt with the tragic death of their baby is not something that bothers me. Pete Wehner has an appropriately indignant post, quoted below, about the attacks on Santorum over this issue (and he summarizes the sad story as well), but it strikes me as indecent to criticize the loving, if discomfiting, behavior of people who have just suffered the worst possible tragedy known to humankind. In in a different context (while discussing this column, about a father who made the ultimate sacrifice for his child), Pete pointed me to a quote from Euripides in which he described the death of a child as "the grief surpassing all."

Here's Pete on the dispiriting controversy:

First it was Alan Colmes; now it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who went on MSNBC to mock Rick Santorum for how he and his wife Karen dealt with the death of their son Gabriel. (A severe prenatal development led to his very early delivery, and Gabriel died two hours after his birth.)

"He's not a little weird, it's that he's really weird," Robinson said of Santorum. "And some of his positions he's taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put. Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It's a very weird story."

On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended. For example, here's the official page of the American Pregnancy Association (an association of health-care providers that treat pregnant women) about stillbirth. It recommends that parents spend time with the child, as the Santorums did, and the APA writes:

With the loss of your baby, your family members will also grieve. Your baby is someone's granddaughter, brother, cousin, nephew or sister. It is important for your family members to spend time with the baby. This will help them come to terms with their loss. If you have other children, it is very important to be honest with them about what has happened by using simple and honest explanations. It is your decision whether you would like the children to see the baby. Ask for a Child Life Specialist at the hospital; these are trained professionals who can help you prepare your children for the heartbreaking news, and prepare them to see the baby if you wish.

This is basically what the Santorum family did. They also had a funeral, which is often done in these kinds of situations. It seems to be enormously helpful to people in a moment of terrible pain. So Robinson, like Colmes, was speaking out of a seemingly bottomless well of ignorance.

I would also point out that Rick Santorum makes strange bedfellows -- Pete's sometime nemesis, Joe Klein, once wrote an incredibly moving story about the Santorum family. He makes reference to that piece in a blog post today. Suffice it to say that liberal Joe Klein didn't find Santorum "weird" for the way in which he mourned the death of his child.

UPDATE: People write in with the strangest observations and questions. The following e-mail is representative of a few that I have just received:

Answer this question honestly, Mr. Goldberg, are you freakish enough to bring a dead body home to house to sit with it and show it to your children? That's what Santorum did. I just don't believe you would do this. I think you're just too sympathetic to the anti-abortionists.

I have no idea what I would do if, God forbid, we found ourselves in the situation the Santorums found themselves in. It doesn't strike me as particularly odd that he would bring home the stillborn baby. In my tradition, the body of a loved one is never supposed to be left alone, from death until burial, so the idea that the body should be surrounded by loved ones, in the hospital, home, or funeral home, is not strange to me at all. I also have no idea what the grief would do to me (I never want to find out, obviously), and I think, as a matter of decency and humility, that people who have just lost a child should be given, simultaneously,  a wide berth and unjudgmental support.

Hussein Ibish takes issue with my taking issue of his assertion that Islamists are not necessarily on the rise across the Arab world (this discussion began with this Bloomberg View column). Here is Hussein:

I cannot share the conclusion of Goldberg and many others that these elections, and less still the overall trajectory of the Arab uprisings, suggests that the Arab people want "the path of Islam," whatever that might be, precisely. Let's begin with Egypt. Islamist parties did exceptionally well in the elections, but benefited enormously from a number of contingent factors: the bizarre Egyptian electoral law heavily favored them in a number of complex ways; the liberal opposition was divided and disorganized and barely campaigned at all; much of the liberals' energy was devoted to protests in the week leading up to the election; both the protests and the Army's violent response to them made the Muslim Brotherhood look, to many eyes, like the most responsible people in the country because they did not participate in the protests (officially), but strongly condemned the deadly crackdown, thereby offending almost no important constituency.

While Hussein, as ever, provides thoughtful and nuanced analysis, I have to -- at the risk of appearing overly reductionist analytically -- continue to make the obvious point that Arabs are voting, with eyes wide open, for Islamist parties. When they stop voting for Islamist parties, I'll revisit my preliminary conclusion that Islamism is on the rise.

It has been a New Year's resolution of mine to try to be optimistic about the Middle East. Don't ask me why -- maybe it's just my sunny disposition bursting through the gloom. But Goldblog deputy-editor-for-apocalypse-coverage Adam Chandler insists on darkness, so I'm letting him have at it:

The two-state remedy (one Israel and one Palestine) no longer seems fashionable to rhapsodize about. It's become its own bad movie franchise; there are no riffs or improvs left, at this point, it's just fatigue.The actors can't even deliver their lines convincingly.

Accordingly, the injection of binationalism into the conversation is only natural. The expanding settlements in the West Bank have blurred what was supposed to be the focus of the last twenty years--a Palestinian state, the conflict's end. Making matters worse, the settlements have also distanced Israel from some of its best supporters abroad (for example, those who are both critical and loving of Israel and those who feel pretty lukewarm about Armageddon).

On the other side, the fallout from Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (and Lebanon in 2000, if we're stacking-up bad things), upon which many hung their hopes for peace, put territorial compromise for many Israelis on rhetorical par with appeasement. Instead of bringing peace, the evacuation of Gaza gave rise to Hamas, brought about incessant rocket-fire onto Israeli towns, and begot a war so unspeakably dispiriting that no one bothers commemorating it (three years ago last week).

All of this, somberly mixed with Arafat's rejection of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Abu Mazen's non-rejection rejection of Ehud Olmert's offer in 2008, and the subsequent fracturing of the Palestinian leadership, has paralyzed the two-state camp.  

In Haaretz, the Israeli novelist/playwright A.B. Yehoshua published a sobering essay that grapples with the possibility that Israel will become a binational state. He isn't advocating for binationalism (he doesn't even seem bi-curious about it), but rather, he turns the mirror on a country that he feels should imagine what it might be a couple years down the line. Yehoshua, who has made a career of writing excellent fiction, is not so bold as to predict that binationalism is coming to the Levant tomorrow, but he does something that very few of the many who talk about a one-state reality do: he asks a reader to envision it:

Apart from the religious camp (owing to the structure of its religious identity), apart from the camp of the secular extremist right (owing to the violence of its fantasies), and apart from the post-Zionist left (owing to its humanitarian-cosmopolitan vision), all other political and ideological camps in Israel grasp and articulate the fact that a binational state in Eretz Israel is a dangerous and unfavorable possibility, both in the short term and (more particularly) in the long term.

Despite this fact, we stride, as though out of necessity, toward the establishment of a binational state, an entity which at some stages of Zionist history was viewed as a plausible possibility, and even as a laudable one in some circles.

Even if many of us believe that it is possible to prevent the creation of such a state through forceful political steps, there still remains an obligation to prepare for it, both intellectually and emotionally, just as we prepare for other states of emergency. The aim of such preparation is to guarantee that a binational state will not undermine Israel's democratic structure, and will not completely destroy the Jewish-Israeli collective identity that took shape over the past several decades.

Of course, if Israel were to become a binational state, it would cease to be the homeland that Yehoshua (who is a decade older than his country) and most Jews/Israelis sought in its founding and tending:

But for those who believed in and dreamed of an independent Jewish-Israeli identity which, for better or for worse, stands up to the test of dealing with a national-territorial reality entirely its own, a binational state represents a broken dream, a surefire source of demoralizing conflicts in the future, as was proven by the failure of binational experiments around the world that involved peoples who were closer to one another than are Jews and Palestinians in terms of religion, economics, values and history.

By bringing to mind more than just the contours of binationalism, by citing its historical legacy of failure, by describing its attractiveness to Palestinians as Zionism's kryptonite, by placing it within the existential hash marks of Israel's playing field, and by asking Israelis to imagine living inside of it, Yehoshua does a novelist's work and gives the problem its terrifying color.

Pat Robertson tells his viewers that God informed him who the next president of the United States will be, but he can't share this information because he's been told not to. Watching this video makes me think that one of the world's seven continents should be reserved for fundamentalists of all persuasions, and then cut off from the Internet. I'm not sure which continent deserves this affliction. Ordinarily I would say Antarctica, but all the associated hot air would melt the ice.

Clifford May reports on an unusual dinner he recently had with the historian, the diplomat and the spy. The consensus around the table seems to be that regime change, rather than bombing, would be the best course of action for the West in Iran:

The larger point is this: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. It is the regime that rules Iran, more than weapons or the facilities in which they are produced, that constitutes the real problem. From that it follows that changing the regime -- not destroying its hardware -- is the higher goal.

Ambassador Lubrani, who predicted Iran's 1979 revolution -- when then-president Jimmy Carter, among others, saw Iran as "an island of stability" -- believes regime change is a realistic goal. Indeed, he is convinced there will be another Iranian revolution and that it can come about sooner rather than later -- soon enough rather than too late.

In my Atlantic advice column, What's Your Problem?, I grapple with one of the more important issues facing humankind. Here is the letter that prompted the discussion:

Do you remember the scene in Meet the Parents in which Ben Stiller shocks Robert De Niro by telling him that "Puff, the Magic Dragon" is really about marijuana? Well, I'm that Robert De Niro character. For some reason, I don't get the hidden references of important songs. For instance, I was shocked to learn that the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" is about a vibrator. Could you tell me what else I'm missing in famous pop and rock songs?

B.F., Philadelphia, Pa.

My answer:

Dear B.F.,

You are missing quite a bit. While the lyrics of many songs are fairly straightforward--the AC/DC canon contains little in the way of ambiguity or poetic complexity, and 2Live Crew's "Me So Horny" is about a man who is, in fact, very horny--I myself am continually surprised to learn the hidden meanings embedded in other works. For instance: Bob Dylan's "Tambourine Man" is actually a Minnesota Vikings fight song. "Heart of Gold," by Neil Young, is about the boutique allure of midget porn. The entire Justin Bieber oeuvre concerns the secret shame of knowing that he is a terrible musician and, never theless, fabulously wealthy. Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" is about heroin. Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is about heroin. The Beatles' "Hey Jude" is about heroin. Lou Reed's "Heroin" is about cocaine. Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" is about the earned-income tax credit. If you play Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" backward, it asks you to subscribe to The Atlantic. The Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is about carbohydrates ("Here we are now/ with potatoes/ with a Mars bar/ and potatoes"). "Stairway to Heaven" is not about anything.

Hussein Ibish argues that a year into the Arab Revolt, or Arab Awakening, or the Arab Whatever, we don't know enough to say exactly what it means, or who has won:

Some commentators are trying to characterize in broad-brushstrokes what is taking place in Arab political culture. Some are identifying the main feature as a liberationist imperative that has gripped the Arab political imagination. Others warn that popular uprisings without clear aims will inevitably lead to the "victory" of Islamists. Others say we have entered into a period of protracted chaos that will be characterized by increasing violence and conflict within states and regionally.

Read his whole piece. It as, as usual, useful and erudite. For what it's worth, though, I think it's possible to declare a preliminary winner: The Islamist parties that have moved closer to power in Tunisia and Egypt (and will soon enough come to power in Syria). In a recent Bloomberg View column, I outlined some early conclusions:

The big news out of Cairo late this fall was not the Muslim Brotherhood's triumph in parliamentary elections, even though the Brotherhood-affiliated party took 37 percent of the popular vote. The main news was made by the more extreme Nour Party, which is affiliated with Egypt's Salafists. The Salafists, who believe that the world should be made over to look as it did during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, took almost 25 percent of the popular vote. In other words, the majority of voters in the Arab world's most populous country chose either a party whose motto is "Islam is the Solution" or a party that believes that medieval Arabia is an appropriate state model.

There have been two predictable Western responses to the rise of Islamism in Egypt and across the Arab world: panic and rationalization. Panic is self-explanatory: The Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical cousins are, generally speaking, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, hostile to Christians in their midst, and have a view of women that most Westerners find abhorrent. It is not difficult for creative minds to place the Muslim Brotherhood on a continuum that ends at al-Qaeda, even though al-Qaeda was created in part as a corrective to what Osama bin Laden & Co. viewed as the unforgivable moderation of the Brotherhood. The panic felt in some quarters is precisely what men such as Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and even the late-stage Muammar Qaddafi in Libya hoped to cultivate in their Western interlocutors.

The other predictable response among Westerners has been to rationalize the rise of Muslim fundamentalism by arguing that the Muslim Brothers and even the Salafists are not the bogeymen we think they are. Scratch a Muslim Brother, the argument goes, and you'll find the Middle Eastern analog of a European Christian Democrat. This argument elides the misogyny and anti- Semitism of Islamists, not to mention their embrace of various baroque and pathetic conspiracy theories, including the notion that the attacks of 9/11 were plotted by the Mossad or the CIA. On the other hand, the Egyptian Brothers no longer have to look to Iran to see how Islamists govern; they can look, and are looking, to Turkey, where the ruling AKP party has come closest to maintaining a commitment to traditional Islam without turning its back on the West or completely cutting off the oxygen to liberal-minded secularists.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

When the season finale of the Showtime thriller "Homeland" ran last month, it didn't just cap Claire Danes' triumphant return to series television -- it marked the latest milestone for a small country that lately has become an improbable player in Hollywood.

"Homeland," which broke Showtime's ratings record for a first-year series finale, is adapted from the Israeli show "Hatufim" (Prisoners of War). It's one of a host of U.S. programs that began life as a Hebrew-language series in this Mediterranean nation of only 8 million people. "Who's Still Standing?," the new NBC quiz program in which contestants answering incorrectly are dropped through a hole in the floor, is also an Israeli import. So is the former HBO scripted series "In Treatment," which starred Gabriel Byrne and ran for three seasons.

All very interesting, but just how improbable is it, that a hi-tech-saturated country populated almost entirely by Jews would find success in the entertainment business?

Iran is warning the U.S. not to return an aircraft carrier to the Gulf:

TEHRAN Jan 3 (Reuters) - Iran will take action if a U.S. aircraft carrier which left the area because of Iranian naval exercises returns to the Gulf, the state news agency quoted army chief Ataollah Salehi as saying on Tuesday.

"Iran will not repeat its warning ... the enemy's carrier has been moved to the Sea of Oman because of our drill. I recommend and emphasise to the American carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf," Salehi told IRNA.

"I advise, recommend and warn them (the Americans) over the return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in the habit of warning more than once," the semi-official Fars news agency quoted Salehi as saying.

One of the reasons I lean against the use of force against Iran over its nuclear program is that I think the regime in Tehran is more interested in self-preservation than some people think. Therefore, it seems highly unlikely that the Iranians would make threatening gestures at a U.S. aircraft carrier group simply because it entered the Gulf. That would just be batshit-crazy. There is, of course, a theory out there that the Iranians, for domestic reasons, are trying to provoke an Israeli, or an American attack. But until proven otherwise, I'm going to believe that these bellicose statements represent empty threats.

Periodically, people ask Goldblog, who plays the role of TSA Answer Man when my colleague James Fallows isn't playing TSA Answer Man, why the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia airport in New York is not equipped with the advanced scanners the TSA deploys at other, less sensitive airports. (Jack Shafer was the first one to point this out to me.) In my Bloomberg View column this week, I discover the answer:

The TSA deploys two types of advanced passenger- screening machines in U.S. airports: Millimeter-wave whole- body imagers and so-called backscatter X-ray devices, both of which can detect non-metallic objects under a person's clothing. These very expensive machines are crucial to the TSA's protocol, which is why it strikes me as strange that the security checkpoint at the Marine Air Terminal goes without one, and instead relies on an old-fashioned metal detector.
On busy days, more than a dozen flights are dispatched from the Marine Air Terminal to Washington's Reagan National Airport, which, as anyone who has flown there knows, is mere seconds by air from the White House and the U.S. Capitol (as well as TSA headquarters, it should be noted). Why would the federal government not equip this particular terminal with its most advanced machinery? The answer is both banal and telling.

Click here to read more.

By the way, Vanity Fair has an interesting piece now up about a visit to an airport with the security guru Bruce Schneier. I wish I had thought to do this!