Happy New Year!
My predictions for 2007:
(1) While there will be a number of candidates announcing themselves for the presidency of the United States, nobody will be nominated. (That is more likely to happen in 2008.) We will hear much — perhaps far more than we want to — about these candidates, however.
(2) Things will get more unpleasant in Iraq. President Bush will insist, one way or another (and probably in different words), on "staying the course." He will probably dig out some more troops to send to Iraq; this may be known as "throwing good money after bad," but that has never stopped anyone from doing such things before. Iran will not be displeased.
(3) Speaking of Iran, they will not develop a nuclear weapon next year. They are apparently having problems with their petroleum-producing infrastructure, and their insistence that nuclear research occurs in their country simply for the purpose of producing power looks more reasonable every day.
(4) Global warming is going to continue. Predictions that we "only have about ten years to do something before it's too late" will start looking even more wildly optimistic than they do now.
(5) I can't predict what's going to happen with North Korea and nuclear weapons because I don't know what stand the U.S. is going to take on certain issues (such as money-laundering) that we consider peripheral and the North Koreans (with their sad excuse for an economy) consider central. If the United States were to demonstrate its power through a lack of fear to make occasional compromises, here and there, I suspect that we could reach some kind of agreement. Otherwise ...
(6) Osama bin Laden will produce at least one more videotape to show that he is still alive and kicking, though perhaps not very hard.
Much news last night and this morning about the hanging of Saddam Hussein.
Since I have, in the past, referred to the late Iraqi dictator as "an unhanged brigand," I should feel satisfied that I can now call him "a hanged brigand." And, to some extent, I do.
What leaves me unsatisfied is that there are other people with high death tolls wandering around out there loose and unhanged. Osama bin Laden springs immediately to mind, as do the Janjaweed Militias in Sudan. So, for that matter, does George W. Bush.
I saw in the paper the other day that President Bush now wants to put polar bears on the endangered species list, since degradation of their environment (= melting of the north polar icecap) is threatening their existence.
I saw on TV last night that one of the last six ice sheets in Canada — on Ellesmere Island — has collapsed into the sea.
But, of course, global warming remains a myth.
Another interesting letter to the Contra Costa Times, from one Bob Armstrong, who attempts to cast doubt on global warming (or at least human influence on it). Again, a couple of interesting and perhaps not totally relevant comments attempting to throw dust in the eyes of those who worry about such things. Armstrong wonders about the influence of buffalo herds prior to the 1880s on global warming — why wasn't there any global warming prior to that time? He also wonders, why, absent human influence, "... the ice caps on Mars are melting too."
These are, of course, questions far too easy to answer. The buffalo, who numbered some tens of millions or perhaps a hundred million or thereabouts, produced relatively little organically-generated methane and carbon dioxide compared to the some six and a half billion human beings who occupy the planet today. We may also consider the production of these gases from landfills (of which the buffalo had none) and fossil-fuel burning for industrial purposes (in which the buffalo did not engage). In other words, buffalo production of greenhouse gases was a drop in the bucket compared to what humans are producing today?
As to the Martian icecaps ... they melt (or, more properly, sublimate) because that's what they've always done, season by season, year by year. After all, the icecaps on Mars, last time I looked, seemed to be only inches thick, and consisted largely of carbon dioxide which condenses into solid form in the depths of the Martian winter and sublimates back into the Martian atmosphere at the height of the Martian summer (both of which seasons last almost twice as long as they do on Earth). There's no comparison with Earth's water ice caps, which sometimes reach depths of thousands of feet and were — at least until recently! — considered permanent features of the planet, at both poles.
Buffalo and Mars are red herrings, to be thrown into the discussion by people who have no better arguments.
Out here in the Bay Area of California, one of the recent bones of contention is a display of grave-markers set up on a privately owned hillside in the town of Lafayette, along with a hanging sign giving the number of U.S. soldiers who have died (through enemy action or otherwise, including suicide) in Iraq to date. There has been much discussion of the meaning of the site (is it a way of demonstrating support for our troops? or is it an anti-war protest by the left?), and it has even been vandalized at least once, an act well enough advertised to turn out the television cameras but, strangely, not the police, who might and should have had something to say about such an act on private property.
In today's (Christmas) edition of the Contra Costa Times, area resident Michael Taft writes, mainly:
... I do find it ironic that if these crosses were instead intended as a Christmas display, or to memorialize the million-plus babies who are aborted every year in the United States, the liberals (led by the ACLU) would have already sued the owner of the property to have them removed. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Reading this, I suddenly realized the fact that almost all arguments I see supporting the right-wing point of view in the end turn out to be misstatements of fact or simple unsupportable hypotheses. Taft's letter is no exception. Let's take a look at a couple of things wrong with it.
(1) "...these crosses..." Oops. Though the large majority of the grave markers in Lafayette are crosses, there are several Stars of David (representing Jewish servicemen) and at least one Crescent (representing, believe it or not, an Islamic serviceman).
(2) "...to memorialize the million-plus babies who are aborted every year..." As far as I know, of all the people who have expressed their outrage over this "new holocaust," not one has been outraged enough to establish an exhibit like this one. So any discussion starting from this point has to be considered purely hypothetical.
(3) "...intended as a Christmas display..." Again as far as I know, not one of the suits entered to force removal of strictly Christian emblems from public view related to such emblems on private land; they have had to do with such items displayed on publicly owned (including by people who are not Christians) property.
(4) "...the liberals (led by the ACLU) would have already sued the owner of the property to have them removed." Aside from the above, the reference to the ACLU shows that the letter's author knows nothing about the American Civil Liberties Union, which, as Michael Douglas's character in The American President points out, exists strictly and solely to defend the Bill of Rights, including "freedom of speech," which pretty obviously includes the right of a property owner to display Christmas emblems (1) or the grave markers of aborted fetuses on private land. Heck, the ACLU has even (probably over the preferences of most of its members) defended the right of self-styled Nazis to march in public places.
But on one thing I can (with a qualification) agree wholeheartedly with Taft. When it comes to arguments from the right, hypocrisy knows no bounds.
(1) For many years a gentleman with a large house and large front yard in largely liberal Kensington, in the hills north of Berkeley and in the area served by the Times, maintained a huge lighted Christmas display in his front yard during the month of December; the display disappeared with the man, but I understand that recently his successors have revived the custom. At no time were he or they ever sued by "the liberals" (led by the ACLU) to have the display removed. Nor, so far as I know, did the evil liberals (no doubt with the connivance of the ACLU) ever take matters into their own hands and vandalize the display, as happened, apparently from The Other Side, in Lafayette.
It now appears that four U.S. Marines will be tried for the killing of more than twenty Iraqi civilians (including women, children, and old men in wheelchairs) in Haditha last November.
What I don't understand is why these men are being tried by a U.S. military court and not by the Iraqi civilian courts. The crime, if crime it was — that remains to be proven — was carried out in Iraq, against Iraqi citizens. If elements of, let us say, the Chinese army in California were to kill a bunch of innocent San Franciscans, I feel fairly confident that we would insist that it was our right and responsibility to try them, here, not that of the Chinese army in China. Maybe it's my long-term exposure to the world of Esperanto, where Americans are no better (and no worse) than Hungarians, but it seems to me that, on the international scale, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
There's a similar asymmetry in the reaction of some members of Congress to the proposal, floated a few months ago by the Iraqi government, that, if it would end the insurgency, a general amnesty for those who had engaged in fatal actions might be issued. This, it seems, was (as far as those members of Congress were concerned) tolerable, when we are talking about the mass killing of Iraqi civilians by, e.g., car bombs (terrorism), but every insurgent guilty of the death of a U.S. serviceperson in Iraq must be brought to justice (not terrorism; the more usual term is "resistance"). To me, the fatal flaw in the proposal is just the opposite; those guilty of killing occupiers should be forgiven in a general post-insurgency amnesty (after all, we'd do the same thing here, under similar circumstances), but those who have engaged in genuine acts of terror should be excluded.
I was born and grew up in Oregon, so it seems a bit horrific to hear about the recent spate of wilderness tragedies that have hit the state. First there were James and Katie Kim and their two children, who evidently tried to take a short cut from Grants Pass to Gold Beach and ended up stuck in the southern Oregon wilderness. Eventually, Katie and the two girls were rescued; James, who after waiting a week for help decided to go for it himself, and died, apparently of exposure, deep in a river canyon. And now we have the three climbers who were stranded on Mt. Hood more than a week ago by howling winds and driving snow; one body has been brought out already, and while they're still using the word "rescue" a more realistic assessment suggests that "body retrieval" is the main purpose of the current exercise.
Mount Hood is, someone has said, the most-climbed mountain of its class in the world (though I would suspect that its trans-Pacific near-twin Fujiyama is in contention); my own father claimed to have bagged the Mount Hood summit fifty-three times in his life (mostly in the nineteen-thirties). People tend to forget that the mountain can be extremely dangerous, either because of environmental conditions or because of poorly-selected routes. The three climbers who disappeared evidently made bad choices in both categories; instead of taking off from Timberline Lodge and going up the well-traveled south side route past Crater Rock and up the Chute (which may have a different name these days) in fine, calm, sunny weather, they chose the technically difficult north side of the mountain in the face of one of a series of storms that have been battering the Pacific Northwest since the beginning of November. I hesitate to make the gratuitously cruel comment that they asked for what they got, but the thought is there.
About the James Kim situation, my wife and I had a little argument. She insists that James should have remained with his family, waiting for the rescue that eventually arrived. I replied that it's not a cut and dried situation. My wife and I are both getting on in years, and our children are all gone from home; if we were stuck in the same place today, we'd be together and alone, and indeed I would choose to remain with her, whatever might come of it. But thirty years ago, when we would have had two daughters with us in the car, after a week of waiting for rescue that never seemed to arrive I would have done exactly what James Kim did — try to get help for my wife and children, never mind the possible danger.
I recently posted a couple of entries about L. L. Zamenhof, the man who created the really marvelous language Esperanto. One of the popular myths about Zamenhof — often repeated by those who know nothing about him except that he invented Esperanto — is that he was a crazed idealist who sincerely believed that the ability to communicate could solve all the world's problems.
Zamenhof, of course, believed no such thing. Even in his home life he knew that communication does not solve all problems (he didn't get along all that well with his somewhat authoritarian father, after all). What he apparently did believe is that, if you have a difference of opinion, communication may not resolve that difference of opinion, but lack of communication definitely will not resolve it. In other words, you've got a better chance of coming out ahead if you're able and willing to talk. (For those familiar with mathematics, this is the fundamental difference between the sufficiency of a condition and the necessity of a condition.)
Fast forward to the year 2006 and President George W. Bush. Oh, I wish I were old enough to say to Bush: "I knew Zamenhof, and, Mister Bush, you are no Zamenhof." Bush is apparently not a great believer in communicating with those with whom he disagrees. The Iraq Study Group has recommended involving Syria and Iran in direct talks with the United States for the purpose of helping to stabilize Iraq and the Middle East. Whether or not you disagree with every piddling point of policy engaged in by those two countries (obviously, few Americans do), it's pretty obvious that both are playing and will play a major role in the Middle East, and that it would be to our advantage to try to convince them to adjust that role somewhat to fit our ideas a little better (and it might also be necessary for us to adjust those ideas a little bit to better fit ourselves to their ideas).
But President Bush apparently does not believe that countries such as Syria and Iran should do anything but kowtow to Western (read: U.S.) demands. Negotiation with them is not feasible. He considers them our enemies — and maybe they are; but has he never heard the old saw Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? It strikes me, as I'm sure it would have struck Zamenhof, that having the little bit of leverage provided by communication (negotiations) is a damned sight better than having the total lack of leverage provided by no communication.
Bring Syria and Iran to the table. Even if the discussion (as a third of a century ago) limits itself to arguing about the shape of the table, that's a step in the right direction. Silence is the wrong direction.
Like most of my fellow human beings, I have many gripes about the world as it is. One of mine has to do with Sunday morning political talk shows. I will be watching (let us say, as an example only) Meet the Press, and Tim Russert will ask Congressman Lautermauth of the House Foreign Relations Committee a question similar to the following:
"Congressman, do you believe we should maintain subsidies for milk to Iraqi schoolchildren?"
It's a simple enough question, and all Congressman Lautermauth needs to say is, for instance:
"Yes, Tim, I believe that we should."
Or, if he has no use for children, he might answer:
"No, Tim, I believe that we should relieve the American taxpayer of that unnecessary burden."
But Congressman Lautermauth (or whoever his incarnation is this week) will never, ever, ever, use the simple words "Yes" and "No." Instead, he will reply in the following vein:
"Tim, I'm not sure that the American people understand the current situation with respect to milk for school-age Iraqi children. The question can be argued either way. As I'm sure you're aware, a bipartisan study group headed by former Republicrat Senator Honk Foghorn has concluded ... on the other hand, recent media reports from Tikrit and Mosul suggest ..." Blah, blah, blah, until, five minutes later, Congressman Lautermauth ends his recitation without ever having said "Yes" or "No," but secure in his knowledge that we, the viewers, will have only the vaguest memory of what the original question was.
Like many others, I'm pleased to be made aware of the background to whatever is going on, whether in Oakland, California, or in Tehran, Iran. But I'd also like to know the answer to a simple "yes or no" question. And in my experience, Sunday morning is not a good time to expect such an answer. Hey, Tim, George, Chris, all you other guys — is there some way you could arrange for a straight answer, every once in a while? It would be a welcome change ...
Yesterday I posted an article about the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto. Among other things, I wrote:
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, is often described as "a Polish oculist". During most of his life he was, in fact, a Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist.
Yesterday marked another milestone — a negative one — in the history of Esperanto. Radio Polonia, Poland's main international radio outlet, after almost a half century of broadcasting in Esperanto cancelled its Esperanto broadcasts. The timing was perhaps a bit embarrassing, especially given Radio Polonia VP Jerzy Targalski's explanation:
If Poland should broadcast in Esperanto because we are proud of Zamenhof, Israel too should broadcast in Esperanto, because they too are certainly proud of their fellow Jew.
Perhaps they are; Israel has just published its first postage stamp in honor of Zamenhof. But it is worth remembering that Zamenhof spent his entire life in Poland (except for a year or so studying in Moscow, and a few trips abroad), never set foot in the Middle East, and during his youthful Zionist phase supported the "North American" option — the establishment of a new Jewish state somewhere in the American West — rather than the reestablishment of the state of Israel on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. In other words, Zamenhof, lifelong resident of the terrain now known as Poland, though he was proud of his Judaism, had no connection with the state of Israel. And, Targalski notwithstanding, what the state of Israel does or does not do should have no bearing on whether Poland continues to broadcast in Esperanto.
Maybe there were financial reasons for ending the broadcasts? According to one source, they cost 4,000 złoty per month. Yet this is really a pittance; the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which finances the station to the tune of nine and a half million złoty per year, wanted the transmissions to continue.
Maybe nobody listens? We can't tell how many people tune their radio sets to specific languages broadcast by Radio Polonia; maybe a hundred times as many people listen in, for example, Belorussian as in Esperanto. Yet for years now the reactions to broadcasts from the Esperanto section have surpassed those from any other section, including English and French (German occasionally seizes the palm from Esperanto), and this would suggest that the programs are popular.
Maybe Esperanto is just a hobbyist language and doesn't deserve its own radio broadcasts? Yet the language has brought money to Poland — six thousand people, with their pocketbooks, showed up in Warsaw for a week in 1987 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the language — a success the country would like to duplicate in 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Zamenhof's birth. And industry brought in by Esperanto is not unrepresented, e.g. by Japanese industrialist Etsui Miyoshi's factory to be located in Malbork. It's also interesting to note that Poland recently elected the continent's first active Esperanto-speaking Europarliamentarian, Mrs. Malgorzata Handzlik.
Perhaps the best argument for ending the daily broadcasts is simply that very few people listen to them as broadcasts; according to Targalski (and where he gets this figure I don't know, but it does not seem improbable) 92% of those listening to the Esperanto broadcasts get them over the internet, through on-demand streaming, rather than by tuning in their shortwave radio to a satellite emitter right at broadcast time. This almost makes sense; it is quite possible that the age of the international radio broadcast in general is coming to an end, replaced by an era of streaming and podcasts. It's how I listened to Radio Polonia; prior to its appearance on the net, I had never listened, nor could ever listen, to its Esperanto broadcasts (except for a short period in 1959 when I was living in Denmark). And there are indications that Radio Polonia is willing to compromise with its staff, its listeners and its own government at least to this degree: that in a few months broadcasts over the internet will be restored to the listening public. Let's hope that this is the case.
But whatever the result, the ethnicity of the creator of Zamenhof should have nothing to do with any decision to continue or cancel broadcasts in Esperanto. That Targalski has given it such a spin is a blot on the good name of Poland.
Today is L. L. Zamenhof's 147th birthday.
I remember Zamenhof's 100th birthday; it was on December 15, 1959. For those who don't know, Zamenhof was the man who created Esperanto. I've always dated my knowledge of the language from almost exactly two months before that 100th birthday because, though I'd been studying the language (off and on) for a couple of years, it was in October of 1959 that I first actually heard the language spoken (by a Japanese globetrotter, giving a half-hour talk at an evening meeting in Randers, Denmark) and was shocked to learn that I could understand everything he said, including one really bad pun. It took me a few more months to actually try to speak the language, but when I did, I carried on a 45-minute conversation, no problems. The only comparison I had for this was with my high-school Latin, which I never thoroughly understood, even when reading, and in which I was never taught to converse.
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, is often described as "a polish oculist". During most of his life he was, in fact, a Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist. But the inventor of Esperanto, when we date the language in his life span, was neither an oculist nor an ophthalmologist; he was a teen-age boy. Raised in an environment of extreme multiethnicism, in which language was perhaps the most obvious trait that distinguished group from group, he very early decided that a common language would contribute to a more peaceful world. When you live in an environment where pogroms are an annual affair, a more peaceful world is something to be desired.
Exposed to Latin and Greek in school, Zamenhof at first considered these dead, and therefore neutral, languages to be solutions to his problem. I don't know what disabused him, but I suspect that it was the process of actually learning these languages, which are not only complex but extremely complicated. Zamenhof then set out to devise his own language. Two fortuitous encounters with other languages (English for its simple grammar, Russian for its productive system of word-formation) showed him that the complications involved in the languages he knew were historical accidents, and could safely be ignored. By the time he was entering his twenties, Zamenhof was already testing his new language through translation and original writing. At age 27, in 1887, he published ... and the rest is history.
Nobody knows how many planned languages have been invented over the past century or so. Decades ago, the famous linguist Mario Pei pegged the number at around a thousand. A visit to the list at langmaker.com — which covers only the most recent years when such languages have been posted on the web — would suggest that the figure is well above this. But few have acquired communities of speakers; and all the speakers of all these languages, counted over the century or so just mentioned, come nowhere near, by orders of magnitude, the number of people who speak Esperanto today.
This weekend, groups of Esperanto speakers all over the world will be meeting at lunches and even banquets to celebrate Zamenhof's birthday. I'll be at one myself, at noon tomorrow. It is, after all, a birthday that deserves celebration.
It appears that Wal-Mart and some other chains have backslid this year, greeting visitors with "Merry Christmas" (as has been customary over the years) rather than "Happy Holidays" (as they did last year). The reversion to the old system seems to be blamed on a slight downturn in sales last year over the previous year. Either the people who run the stores find it more difficult to blame other reasons ("You didn't have exactly what I wanted in stock" or perhaps "I'm just being a little more careful about spending this year") or they are simply yielding to The War Against The War Against Christmas, which last year was personified by Fox News's Bill O'Reilly (who, I have heard, himself had all his private Christmas cards marked "Happy Holidays", as did the President).
Christmas is not the only holiday of the season, of course; even the most orthodox supporter of "real American culture" should recognize that Party Night, also known as New Year's Eve, comes within a week of Christmas (we shall ignore New Year's Day, when wiser heads are sleeping it off). As a religious holiday, it can be considered to take precedence over such neglectable same-season holidays as Hannukah, Kwanzaa and Yule/Solstice; but these days, it might be wise to pay attention to Three Kings' Day (which I think is the same as the Epiphany, which was once celebrated in Anglophone countries), which is very popular in Christian Latino culture — and, I might point out, if you too choose to celebrate it in lieu of Christmas, you can take advantage of all those nifty 40%-off after-Christmas sales and not have to pay full price for gifts for your kids.
A couple of side-notes on the season. The first is that a lady in Colorado chose to hang a Christmas wreath on her door formed in the shape of a traditional peace symbol. Her homeowners' association, encouraged by some fellow homeowners who had children serving in Iraq, as well as a few who had fallen for the old idea that the peace symbol is actually a Satanist emblem (1), threatened her with a $25 fine for every day she kept it up. Reaction from all over the country was strong, apparently not only from liberals but from genuine conservatives who believe in the quaint old idea of freedom of speech, and eventually the homeowners' association rescinded their threat and fine (and two of their officers quickly had their phones disconnected).
Second side-note. Roberta Stewart of Reno, Nevada, whose husband Patrick was killed in Afghanistan more than a year ago, finally got a religious emblem placed on her husband's grave yesterday, thanks to the Nevada Office of Veterans' Services, but apparently only under pressure from the state governor. Apparently Sgt. Patrick Stewart, like his wife, was a Wiccan. The U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs has, for a number of years now, been fighting, with one excuse after another, to prevent the grave markers of Wiccan servicemen buried by the government from having a Wiccan symbol (usually the pentacle, a five-pointed star within a circle (2)) placed on them; as far as I know, this is a first, though almost two thousand service people give their religion as Wicca. Mrs. Stewart will, I hope, be satisfied, though, given the circumstances, probably not happy.
(1) The peace symbol may, if one is somewhat myopic, be described as an "upside-down broken-armed cross." It is not, however, actually "upside-down", since, unlike the traditional Christian cross, it is equal-armed, and so cannot be considered either upside-down or rightside-up. Incidentally, back during the Vietnam war I once saw this myth perpetrated on an official Air Force detachment bulletin board — not in an official Air Force posting, but nobody tried to take it down, either, so the local powers-that-be at least gave it their unofficial blessing.
(2) The VA Department recognizes more than 30 such symbols, including more than a dozen for different types of Christian, and even one for atheists (of which, I have been told — apparently wrongly — there are none in foxholes). Why they are so reluctant to authorize a symbol for Wiccans is hard to determine.
I notice, from an article by Rob Hotakainen of McClatchy Newspapers, that newly-elected Minnesota representative Keith Ellison, the first Moslem in Congress, intends to take his oath of office on the Koran (now spelled "Quran", which is probably a more accurate rendition of the book's name), and that this is raising some hackles over on the right.
Radio talk-show host and columnist Dennis Prager reportedly wrote: "Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath. ... When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of Americans and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9/11."
Give me a break! From time immemorial, it has not been required to put your hand on the Bible before taking an oath. What is the use of swearing an oath based on a religion in which you don't believe? Are you then to feel bound for it? I certainly wouldn't! If the law required me to swear on the Bible (it doesn't!), I would consider that "under duress," and therefore not morally binding.
For that matter, what if your religious beliefs (like those of the Quakers) prevent you from swearing an oath at all? There's already a common alternative: the affirmation. I've done this myself, when being "sworn" onto a federal jury — no books involved, just your own promise that you will do what you're supposed to do. As law professor Eugene Volokh pointed out, according to Hotakainen's article, at least two American presidents — Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover — have taken the same route, rejecting the Bible in favor of an affirmation.
More to the point, apparently at least one American ambassador has already given his oath of office on the Quran, which means that Ellison is not even setting a precedent.
(Side note: Hotakainen's article does not point out that Dennis Prager may have his own axe to grind in the matter. His website suggests, though does not state, that he is Jewish — see his list of titles of twelve lecture cassettes, currently available for the low, low "holiday" price of $110.00; and while many, perhaps most, ordinary Jews in both the United States and Israel may feel little inherent antipathy to Moslems (whatever they may feel about many of the crimes perpetrated by a few in the name of Islam), this is usually less true over on the political right wing of American and Israeli Judaism. One on-line posting of the article in question is illustrated by a picture of (from the caption) "A Palestinian woman hold[ing] the Koran during a Hamas rally against Israeli troops operation [sic!] in northern Gaza strip November 3, 2006.")
(Additional note added later: Prager points out that Jewish office holders in the United States don't hesitate to take their oaths on the Bible. Are we to be surprised by this? Much of the Bible — most or all of the Old Testament — is identical with Judaism's holy texts; after all, Christianity started out as a Jewish reform movement, and it took Saul of Tarsus to expand its venue to the Gentiles. Even an extremely orthodox Jew should feel no problem in swearing an oath on the Bible; he need only ignore the cross on the cover and the last two or three hundred pages. The Koran, on the other hand, though it originated in the same cultural background as Judaism and Christianity, is quite a different book.)