Sunday Reads: On General Sherman & the IDF, Saudi Arabia’s influence on ISIS, America’s ‘dirty wars’

US

According to Russell Crandall, America has been fighting 'dirty wars' since its inception –

America’s self-identity is that we are a reluctant nation when it comes to starting wars, but when forced we fight total wars regularly and successfully—and sometimes even leave behind the defeated societies better than they had been before… Yet despite our desire to fight the good fight against a foe who will play by our rules, America’s history is overwhelmingly one of fighting opaque and incomplete dirty wars—from the American Revolution through Afghanistan.

Victor Davis Hanson sees a resemblence between the war tactics of a controversial figure in American history and those used by the IDF in Gaza –

Sherman’s rhetoric was bellicose, indeed uncouth — even as he avoided killing as many southerners as he could. He left civilians as mad at their own leaders as at him. For all that and more, he remains a “terrorist,” while the bloodbaths at Cold Harbor and the Crater are not considered barbaric — and just as the world hates what the IDF did in Gaza far more than the abject butchery of the Islamic State, which at the same time was spreading savagery throughout Syria and Iraq, or than the Russians’ indiscriminate killing in Ukraine, or than what passes for an average day in the Congo.

Israel

Michael Eisenstadt and Rob Satloff summarize the conclusions of a discussion held by military experts on the possibility of disarming Hamas and creating a long-term cease fire –

Constraining the ability of Hamas et al. to fire rockets at Israel is therefore key to preventing another conflict that could cost numerous civilian lives and lay waste to infrastructure and lodging built with billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance. For the first time, key international actors — including the U.S. government and the European Union — are on record calling for the disarmament of Gaza as an essential precondition for averting another military confrontation and permitting the reconstruction of civilian infrastructure.

Or Kashti writes about a new anthropological study which examines the rising levels of racism among Israeli teens –

“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand,” a 10th-grade girl from a high school in the central part of the country says in abominable Hebrew. “I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that … their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.”

Middle East

According to Tom Holland, ISIS is destroying the biggest melting pot in history –

 As the fighters of the Islamic State drive from village to captured village in their looted humvees, they criss-cross what in ancient times was a veritable womb of gods. For millennia, the Fertile Crescent teemed with a bewildering variety of cults and religions. Back in the 3rd Christian century, a philosopher by the name of Bardaisan was so overwhelmed by the sheer array of beliefs to be found in Mesopotamia that he invoked it to disprove the doctrines of astrology. ‘It is not the stars that make people behave the way do but rather the diversity of their customs.’

Ed Hussein believes that the ISIS crisis would not have occurred without Saudi Arabia's long term support for Salafi hatred –

Unlike a majority of Sunnis, Salafis are evangelicals who wish to convert Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. The kingdom also grants compliant imams V.I.P. access for the annual hajj, and bankrolls ultraconservative Islamic organizations like the Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

Jewish World

James Kirchick writes an interesting piece on a heated Israel debate taking place in NY’s premier LGBT synagogue –

Listening to the complaints of some present and former congregants about Kleinbaum, the criticisms sounds familiar. “It’s about pushing a very particular form of political views on congregants and then choosing good, fair and honest people who are Jewishly educated and thoughtful about Israel and accusing them of being McCarthyites,” the former congregant, who has worked for prominent Jewish organizations, complained to me. It is the sort of grumbling that many Jews have about their rabbi’s politics (whether too right or too left), merely transposed onto a gay synagogue, with all of the pre-existing drama between lesbians and gay men. Appropriately, an old Jewish joke comes to mind: A Jew is found shipwrecked on a desert island. Over time, he built two synagogues for himself: The first in which he prayed, the second he refused to step foot in, even if you paid him. What the crisis at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah really shows is that gay Jews now have the luxury to kvetch about the same things as everyone else.

Does ‘Love thy neighbors as yourself’ apply to gentiles? Richard Elliott Friedman offers some interesting musings on the subject –

When the text already directs every Israelite to love aliens as oneself, what would be the point of saying to love only Israelites—in the very same chapter! Now my friend Jack Milgrom, of blessed memory, wrote that it is precisely because the love of the alien is specifically mentioned there that love of “neighbor” must mean only a fellow Israelite.