A JEW? WHO?
By James Taranto

Wall Street Journal
October 5, 2009

If reports about Ahmadinejad are accurate, Israel owes it to the
world to deal with the Iranian threat.

The United States of America is the most philo-Semitic country in
the world, yet it has never had a Jewish president. The Islamic
Republic of Iran is one of the world’s most anti-Semitic regimes,
yet it may have a Jewish president. London’s Daily Telegraph reports
on the surprising claim about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card
during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish
roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as
Sabourjian–a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed
its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after
his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s
birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour," the
name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the
list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry
of the Interior.

If true, doesn’t this strengthen the argument for Israeli military
action against the Iranian nuclear program? One could argue that the
Jews have some sort of collective responsibility to deal with a rogue
nation led by one of their own.

Meir Javedanfar argues in London’s Guardian that the claim is a myth,
and we must confess we are a bit skeptical. Sabourjian sounds like an
Armenian name to us. This revelation may end up complicating Tehran’s
relations with Ankara.

They Hate Us! They Really Hate Us!

"This is one decision Mr. Obama can’t blame on George W. Bush," noted a
Saturday Wall Street Journal editorial, "though no doubt at MSNBC they
will try." Not just at MSNBC! The Chicago Sun-Times reports that "some
Chicago officials" (along with some unofficials) are blaming Bush:

President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment ag d.

"There must be" resentment against America, the Rev. Jesse Jackson
said, near the stage where he had hoped to give a victory speech in
Daley Center Plaza. "The way we [refused to sign] the Kyoto Treaty, we
misled the world into Iraq. The world had a very bad taste in its mouth
about us. But there was such a turnaround after last November. The
world now feels better about America and about Americans. That’s why
I thought the president’s going was the deal-maker."

State Rep. Susana Mendoza (D-Chicago) said she saw firsthand the
resentment against America five years ago when she was in Rio de
Janeiro. "I feel in my gut that this vote today was political and
mean-spirited," she said.

"I travel a lot. . . . I thought we had really turned a corner with
the election of President Obama. People are so much more welcoming
of Americans now. But this isn’t the people of those countries. This
is the leaders still living with outdated impressions of Americans."

Hey Chicago, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the International
Olympic Committee just isn’t that into you? It’s not as though
the choices were to hold the games in the Windy City or cancel them
altogether. Maybe the IOC delegates chose Rio de Janeiro on the basis
of its merits as a venue. The notion that it must have been motivated
by hatred of America reflects a most unattractive combination of
arrogance and self-pity.

Sports of the Times The coverage of the Olympics fumble on the New York
Times editorial page has provided us with considerable amusement. A
Saturday editorial gently chided the administration:

As for why Mr. Obama went–especially if he wasn’t sure Chicago
would win–here are two possible explanations: One, Mr. Obama, and
his White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, another Chicagoan,
love a good competition; the other is that they have a tad too much
confidence in Mr. Obama’s hortatory powers.

We like having an articulate, fiercely competitive president,
especially one with such a strong moral compass. But guys, if l the
dice, next time make sure the stakes are worth it.

Twenty bucks says the Times does not come around to opposing a roll
of the dice when the stakes are one-sixth of the nation’s economy
and all of our lives.

The same day, the paper published an op-ed piece by John R. Miller of
the conservative Discovery Institute, titled "Nobody Likes Us? Who
Cares?" Although not specifically pegged to the Olympics, the piece
made an excellent point:

Which surveys should President Obama pay attention to–the ones that
suggest approval of his leadership or the more negative appraisals? The
answer is neither. His only concern should be whether favorable
public opinion abroad will help him achieve America’s own goals,
and there is little evidence that that is the case.

Rather, history suggests that there is only one sure way for President
Obama to ensure the popularity of the United States abroad: reduce
the power of the United States or simply don’t exercise it–either
militarily, economically or even diplomatically. The world simply
distrusts the big guy on the block, and the only way to address this is
to stop behaving like a superpower. A much better option, of course,
would be to pay less attention to foreign opinion surveys and more
to our own ideals and interests.

It might have been useful to the Times’s readers had the paper aired
this excellent argument back when George W. Bush was president.

Today former Enron adviser Paul Krugman weighs in, irate about
conservative schadenfreude over the Olympic slip-up:

"Cheers erupted" at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly
Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s
staff, with the headline "Obama loses! Obama loses!" Rush Limbaugh
declared himself "gleeful." "World Rejects Obama," gloated the Drudge
Report. And so on. . . .

The episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American
politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s
two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republi
might be good for the president, they’re against it–whether or not
it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee
was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of
spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters,
with potentially serious consequences.

So, in case you’re keeping score at home:

Rooting for terrorists who wantonly murder women and children to beat
America in a war: the highest form of patriotism.

Rooting for Rio to get the Olympics: treason.

The World’s Smallest Violin The Obama administration appears set to
renege on its promise to import terrorists from Guanantamo Bay to
the U.S. by January, but the Washington Post reports that may be good
news for one of the worst terrorists of all:

For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed
mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean
sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the
neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed can also use that time to visit a media room to watch movies
of his choice, read newspapers and books, or play handheld electronic
games. He and other detainees have access to elliptical machines and
stationary bikes.

At Guantanamo, such recreational activities interrupt an otherwise
bleak existence, according to a Pentagon report of conditions at Camp
7, which houses 16 high-value detainees. But even those privileges
may soon vanish.

The Justice Department has begun to hint in court filings that at
least some of the defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, case, as well
as other prominent suspects, will be transferred to federal custody
in the United States. While lawmakers and activist groups have been
consumed with a debate over such a move, little attention has been
paid to the conditions that Mohammed and other high-value detainees
would face in the United States.

And those conditions, it turns out, would be vastly more draconian
than they uantanamo Bay.

In the most plausible alternative, the supermax prison in Colorado,
Mohammad and his fellow terrorists "would be sealed off for 23 hours
a day in cells with four-inch-wide windows and concrete furniture,"
would be allowed to exercise in "a tiny yard"–alone–for the remaining
hour, and would "have little or no human contact except with prison
officials."

Despite these humanitarian concerns, this column favors keeping KSM
and other terrorists at Guantanamo until the end of al Qaeda’s war
against America, because their absence from U.S. soil limits their
ability to work mischief through the courts.

Obama’s ‘Policy Tempo’ Slate’s John Dickerson tries to put the best
face on President Obama’s apparent dithering over Afghanistan:

Obama was elected in part because he promised he would be a commander
who wouldn’t go rushing into deep and dangerous commitments. Officials
at the Pentagon and White House counsel that even at Obama’s
deliberative pace, he’ll still be moving faster than Bush did when he
made his "surge" decision in 2006. Plus, the public is not screaming
for more troops. In fact, if Obama does choose to send more troops,
he can point back to all the thoughtful meetings that went into
his decision.

>From Dickerson’s lips to God’s ears. But as he notes (Dickerson, not
God), the president’s "insistence on slow deliberations on Afghanistan
contrasts with the policy tempo on other fronts":

Obama has been a president of action. Economic collapse? Here’s a
government program to address it. Car companies failing? Here’s a
program to help them. Want the Olympics to come to your town? Obama
can help. . . . Even while policy was being debated, the message
always was: Action is coming.

Well, maybe not always. The Washington Post reports on another
foreign-policy decision that smacks of indecision:

In an attempt to gain favor with China, the United States pressured
Tibetan representatives to postpone a meeting between the Dalai Lama
and President Obama until after Obama’s summit with hi art, Hu Jintao,
scheduled for next month, according to diplomats, government officials
and other sources familiar with the talks.

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will
visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. . . .

U.S. officials also said they are not pulling punches with the
Chinese. They have, however, indicated that they want to try something
new on Tibet, figuring that the old policy–of meeting with the Dalai
Lama regularly and calling for substantive talks between China and
his representatives–had achieved little. American officials told
Tibetan representatives that "this president is not interested in
symbolism or photo ops but in deliverables," the Asian diplomat
said. "He wants something to come out of his efforts over Tibet,
rather than just checking a box."

If the president is "not interested in symbolism or photo-ops,"
he must find his job even more boring than the rest of us do!

Confirmed Bachelor Here’s one for the Great Moments in Euphemism
files. The Washington Post, in a profile of Virginia’s Democratic
nominee for governor, Creigh Deeds, describes the arguments for and
against Deeds’s reputed tendency to be for and against the same things
at various times:

To supporters, his capacity for change suggests the promise of his
leadership: that, never having been wed to ideology, he is capable of
responding even-handedly to the array of economic and social challenges
facing Virginia. To his skeptics, the trait merely evinces Deeds’s
habit of trying to appeal to different constituencies by saying "yes"
and "no" to the same question.

That "never having been wed" is a rich metaphor. Deeds is 51. Isn’t
it time someone made an honest woman of him?

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine No one wants to get cancer,
though we suppose some people want to live in the Canadian province
of Ontario. But if you do get cancer, you really don’t want to live
in Ontario. An editorial in Canada’s National Post explains why:

Opponents of the [U.S. h ic option maintain that Canadian-style health
care would entail rationing, caps on care, bureaucratic interference
in medical decision-making and even "death panels" deciding when the
ill become too expensive to save.

Most Canadians believe this is a gross exaggeration of reality. But
then how to characterize Ontario’s decision to cut off funding for
colorectal cancer patients taking a life-prolonging drug, in order
to save $9-million [about US$8.4 mllion] a year?

Andre Marin, the province’s plain-speaking ombudsman, said the decision
"verges on cruelty." Marin said the "arbitrary" limit on the number
of cycles of the drug Avastin that Ontario will fund forces patients
to pay out of their own pockets or abandon treatment.

Avastin does not cure cancer, but prolongs life when taken in
conjunction with chemotherapy treatment, adding, on average, nine
months of survival.

"For patients whose cancer has already metastasized, it stops their
tumours from growing and prolongs their lives, at least for a while. It
is, without exaggeration, their lifeline," Mr. Marin said.

It should be noted that the public option would not automatically
establish a Canadian-style health-insurance monopoly. But as we’ve
noted before, many public-option backers, including congressional
leaders and the secretary of health and human services, do favor such
a monopoly, known in wonkese as "single payer," and believe it would
be the inevitable result of the public option.

Bushism of the Day "I’ll tell you another thing about Glenn Beck. He
wouldn’t know the difference between a football, a bat and a hockey
court."–Democratic consultant James Carville, Oct. 5